"This is an emergency situation. Let me explain what we're facing."
Minato's shadow clone cast a quick glance toward the God Tree, noting with growing alarm how much taller the massive entity had grown since their battle began. The ancient trunk now stretched toward the heavens with obvious purpose, its crown reaching ever closer to the pale moon that hung like a cosmic eye in the darkening sky.
With practiced efficiency born of countless briefings in crisis situations, the clone began conveying the crucial information he had received from the Sage of Six Paths to Naruto. The intelligence was complex and far-reaching, touching on cosmic forces and divine interventions that challenged conventional understanding of the ninja world.
Meanwhile, his second clone had already reached Sasuke's position within the Perfect Susanoo, prepared to deliver the same critical intelligence to the Uchiha prodigy.
BOOM!
Even as these explanations unfolded, the area surrounding the main battlefield began to experience violent geological upheaval. The ground cracked and buckled under supernatural pressure as thick tree trunks burst forth from the earth itself, spreading outward like the tentacles of some primordial beast awakening from eons of slumber.
The God Tree's hunger was no longer satisfied with simply drawing chakra from the planet's natural energy reserves. Its sensory capabilities had detected something far more appetizing—the concentrated life force of the Allied Shinobi Forces that were approaching the battlefield in waves of reinforcements.
Because several divisions of the coalition army were already dangerously close to the expanding zone of influence, they found themselves directly in the path of this supernatural assault.
At the closest point of approach, Shikaku Nara and the other joint headquarters staff suddenly heard a rumbling sound emerging from the forest around them. The very trees they had been using for cover began to transform, their branches moving with obvious intelligence as they reached toward the ninja with predatory intent.
The sight was both beautiful and terrifying—nature itself animated by cosmic will, every leaf and root working in perfect coordination to achieve a single, deadly purpose.
Apparently, the God Tree had evolved beyond its initial function of simply extracting chakra from terrestrial sources. The concentrated energy signatures of living ninja represented a far more efficient means of gathering the power it needed to complete its growth toward the moon.
"Retreat immediately!"
Shikaku's command rang out with the absolute authority of someone who had survived countless battles through superior tactical awareness. His analytical mind had processed the threat in seconds, recognizing that conventional combat doctrine was utterly inadequate for dealing with an enemy that could turn the environment itself into a weapon.
Ahhh!
But even his quick thinking couldn't save everyone. Some ninja whose reflexes were slower, whose experience was insufficient to immediately recognize the nature of the supernatural threat, found themselves caught by the animated branches of the God Tree. The results were both swift and horrifying.
Their bodies began to visibly deflate, flesh and muscle losing definition at a rate that could be observed with the naked eye. Years of training, decades of accumulated strength and skill, were being drained away in moments as the tree fed upon their very essence.
"Their chakra is being completely absorbed!" Suzuka Hatake's voice carried the shock of someone witnessing the impossible made manifest. These weren't simply techniques that drained energy—this was something that consumed the fundamental life force that defined a person's existence.
"Is that the God Tree that Minato mentioned in his intelligence briefings?"
Shikaku raised his eyes toward the distant mountains, where the massive entity stood silhouetted against the moonlight like some nightmare vision from the world's earliest mythology. The scale of the thing was almost incomprehensible—a single tree that dwarfed mountains, whose presence seemed to warp the very air around it.
Minato had shared the intelligence gathered from the Sage of Six Paths' stone tablets with only a select few individuals within Konoha's leadership structure. Shikaku was among that trusted circle, and his tactical mind immediately began connecting the current crisis to the fragmentary information they had previously received.
Although his distance from the main battlefield prevented him from obtaining real-time updates on the fighting, he could still make immediate tactical assessments based on available evidence and established patterns.
"Notify all coalition units immediately—turn around and do not attempt to provide reinforcement!"
The order went against every instinct that had been drilled into him through decades of military service. In normal circumstances, the appearance of such a threat would demand massive coordinated response, overwhelming force applied with decisive timing.
But these were not normal circumstances.
The branches of the God Tree possessed the ability to absorb chakra directly from living beings—the most fundamentally lethal capability imaginable when facing ninja, whose entire combat doctrine was built around chakra manipulation. If the coalition forces continued their approach, they would likely become food for the entity long before they could contribute meaningfully to the battle.
On the main battlefield, the confrontation between divine and mortal power reached new levels of intensity.
Whoosh!
The Truth-Seeking Orbs behind Madara began to flow around his staff like liquid mercury, their shapes shifting and transforming as they responded to his will. The dark spheres could become anything he required—weapons, shields, tools of creation or destruction—limited only by his imagination and the cosmic principles that governed their existence.
He materialized in front of Minato with speed that seemed to bypass the normal limitations of space and time, his enhanced form covering the distance between them in less than a heartbeat. The staff in his hands descended toward his target with the force and authority of divine judgment.
This was the full speed of Madara Uchiha after achieving his transformation into a Ten-Tails Jinchuriki!
"Incredible speed!"
Minato's enhanced perception, honed through years of combat against impossibly fast opponents, struggled to track the approach of Madara's attack. Throughout his entire career, no enemy had ever possessed reaction speed superior to his own—that advantage had been his defining characteristic, the foundation upon which his legendary reputation was built.
Once an opponent's nervous system was overwhelmed by superior speed, the initiative in battle was permanently lost. Every exchange would become reactive rather than proactive, every technique a desperate attempt to survive rather than a calculated move toward victory.
But even as Madara's cosmic speed threatened to end their confrontation in a single devastating blow, subtle changes were occurring within Minato's enhanced physiology.
Thin threads of energy, darker than midnight and more refined than anything normally achievable through conventional chakra manipulation, began to spread throughout his nervous system. These tendrils of pure Yin Release moved with surgical precision, targeting specific nerve clusters and synaptic pathways with the kind of biological knowledge that transcended normal medical understanding.
The power of Yang could create life itself, breathing consciousness into inanimate matter and healing wounds that should have been fatal. But the power of Yin was the energy that could create forms—the ability to impose will upon reality, to reshape the fundamental structure of existence according to conscious desire.
The Yin and Yang forces within Minato's body were far from equal in strength. His soul power, developed to levels that impressed even the Sage of Six Paths, could generate Yin energy that vastly exceeded his Yang capabilities. This spiritual strength, refined through experiences that no other human had ever undergone, provided him with options that conventional ninja could never access.
He could use Yin Release to literally restructure the nervous system within his own body.
If his reaction speed had previously been limited by the biological constraints of human neurology, then surpassing those limitations required transcending human biology itself. By rewriting the very architecture of his nervous system, by creating neural pathways that operated according to enhanced principles, he could achieve response times that defied natural law.
In this way, Minato's legendary speed could be improved even further!
With his previous capabilities, the best he could have managed was using the Flying Thunder God technique to escape before Madara's attack could connect. The gap in raw speed would have made any other response impossible.
But now, as the Truth-Seeking staff enlarged rapidly in his vision, as his body reached what should have been the absolute limit of human reaction time, something extraordinary occurred.
Minato moved.
Not with the desperate lunge of someone barely avoiding death, not with the awkward scramble of someone caught off-guard by superior speed. He shifted to the side with fluid grace, creating space with surgical precision so that Madara's attack passed harmlessly through the air he had occupied moments before.
"You can actually match my speed?"
The shock in Madara's voice was audible and profound. His enhanced perception, elevated to cosmic levels by his transformation, had detected the nature of the changes occurring within Minato's nervous system. What he was witnessing should have been impossible—a mortal human rewriting his own biology in real-time to compete with divine capabilities.
In the next instant, Minato pivoted with impossible smoothness, appearing behind Madara's position and launching a counterattack with the devastating efficiency that had made him the most feared shinobi of his generation.
The time frame was so compressed that there was no opportunity to form complex techniques or gather elaborate chakra constructs. But this simple punch carried within it the concentrated power of senjutsu enhancement combined with the reality-affecting properties of Yin-Yang Release.
Madara spun with supernatural grace, bringing his staff into a diagonal defensive position that intercepted Minato's strike with perfect timing.
BOOM!
The collision between enhanced fist and cosmic weapon created a thunderclap that could be heard for miles. The ground beneath both combatants simply ceased to exist, vaporized by forces that treated solid matter as a minor inconvenience. What remained was a crater with a diameter of dozens of meters, its edges still glowing with residual energy from the impact.
Madara's ancient eyes studied Minato with the intensity of someone trying to solve a puzzle that challenged his fundamental understanding of reality. His enhanced vision, capable of perceiving details that existed beyond normal dimensions, analyzed the structural changes that had occurred within his opponent's body.
The entire nervous system had been rebuilt according to enhanced specifications. Neural pathways now operated with efficiency that transcended biological limitations, synaptic responses occurring at speeds that defied conventional understanding of human physiology.
"Yin Release..." Madara's mental voice carried a mixture of recognition and grudging respect.
After becoming the Ten-Tails Jinchuriki, his own body had undergone transformations that elevated him far beyond normal human limitations. That supernatural enhancement was the only reason he could contain and channel the cosmic power of the Ten-Tails without being destroyed by it.
But Minato's strength hadn't increased at all in terms of raw power output. What had changed was his body's structural efficiency and his sudden mastery of Yin-Yang Release energies. He had achieved cosmic-level capabilities using only his own spiritual resources, amplifying his natural abilities through techniques that Madara himself had not yet mastered.
Even for someone who had spent decades pursuing the ultimate power, even for someone who had achieved transformation into a divine being, this represented an accomplishment that demanded recognition.
From long ago until this moment, Madara had intended to eliminate Minato multiple times. Each attempt had been thwarted by unexpected developments, by innovations that seemed to emerge from nowhere to shift the balance of their confrontation.
If not for the overwhelming chakra advantage provided by the Ten-Tails' power, if they were fighting under equal conditions, Madara wasn't certain he could defeat an opponent who had mastered Yin-Yang Release to this degree.
The Truth-Seeking Orb material wrapped around his staff shifted configuration once again, suddenly extending into a blade-like form that stabbed toward Minato with the speed of thought made manifest.
Minato leaned back with fluid grace, his enhanced nervous system allowing him to perceive and respond to attacks that moved at cosmic velocity. His body bent at angles that should have been humanly impossible, avoiding the strike by margins measured in millimeters.
At the same moment, another Truth-Seeking Orb materialized in front of Madara's free hand, its shape flowing into a second blade that thrust toward Minato from a different angle. The coordinated assault was designed to overwhelm even enhanced reflexes through sheer tactical complexity.
But Minato's movements had transcended normal limitations. He leaped with perfect timing, his body forming a straight line that temporarily positioned him beyond the reach of both attacks. Even while airborne, his hands moved with impossible speed, forming seals that should have required solid footing to execute properly.
"Sage Art: Flying Thunder God Stage Three!"
Swish! Swish! Swish!
A brilliant rain of chakra light erupted from Minato's back, each mote a potential anchor point for his space-time technique. The density of markers was unprecedented, turning the air itself into a three-dimensional network of spatial possibilities.
Swish!
As Madara's attacks adjusted to track his aerial position, Minato had already repositioned himself among the cloud of chakra markers he had just created. His body trembled slightly as he used natural energy to create invisible platforms in the air, generating leverage points that allowed him to change direction with impossible precision.
Through this supernatural maneuvering, he managed to weave between Madara's coordinated attacks, avoiding techniques that should have been unavoidable through a combination of enhanced reflexes and spatial manipulation that defied conventional understanding.
At this moment, both Minato and Madara possessed reaction speeds and movement capabilities that existed on roughly the same level. Minato couldn't engage in direct combat where raw power would determine the outcome, but he could match his opponent's speed and tactical flexibility well enough to avoid being overwhelmed.
Even with the cosmic power of the Ten-Tails at his disposal, even with divine enhancements that elevated him beyond mortal limitations, Madara found that simple chakra superiority was insufficient to achieve decisive victory if his opponent could match his speed and anticipate his strategies.
After all, before he was known by any other title, before he became associated with terms like "God of Shinobi" or "legendary warrior," the name that Minato Namikaze had first earned in foreign countries was a simpler one—the Yellow Flash of Konoha!