The air around the battlefield had already been stripped raw by everything that had happened before. Dust hung heavy and coarse; the broken ground ran in jagged scars for yards in every direction.
But even that ruined plain could not hide the next escalation — the moment Might Guy bent himself over the last limits of humanity and pushed through another gate.
He did not launch himself with words or fanfare. He moved like a human furnace: muscle, breath, intent.
When the Sixth Gate had opened, steam rose from his skin in a visible sheet and his aura hummed with heat.
The Morning Peacock — Asakujaku that followed was not a single blow but a battering sequence, a barrage of punches delivered with such velocity and concentration that the air itself flamed and snapped where his fists had been.
Guy's arms became a living chain of thunder. Each punch was a small impact that together became a hurricane.
The sound of his strikes was metallic, too fast to separate into individual cracks; it was a long, running report of blows that left the earth trembling beneath them.
The punches ignited the humidity in the air for a moment, a brief hiss of heat and light that vanished as quickly as it appeared.
Where those fists passed, dust rose in simultaneous geysers and the ground took new clefts.
Indra met it calmly. His Sharingan tracked the motions as if replaying them before they finished.
When the Morning Peacock arrived he did not brace and hold — he read the rhythm, took the minimal angles necessary to redirect energy, and let Guy's own commitment be the source of any return he needed.
Palms deflected, elbows absorbed, knees angled to collapse momentum into the earth rather than into his ribs.
Each counter was split-second efficient; he never wasted motion and he never offered a truly open target.
But the Morning Peacock did what it was supposed to: it forced Indra to move.
The barrage pushed him back step by step, and where before his poise had been cool and unbothered, the physical effort began to show — a tighter jaw, a blink more frequent, a breath drawn a touch longer.
Observers who knew nothing of the exact mechanics nonetheless read the strain.
Kakashi, still recovering from his earlier duel, felt the heat rise to his face; even he could sense the degree of exertion Guy poured into every series of blows.
Among the watching crowd, sets of eyes changed. The Uchiha who had gathered at Setsuna's summon shifted their weight.
Setsuna and Toru felt them stirring and hushed the clan; the elders' voices dropped into imperatives. "Quiet," Toru murmured, and the clan yielded, not out of fear but reverence — to learn, to witness, to record what Indra did under pressure.
Kurenai, Samui, Uzuki Yugao and the other women who had come with Setsuna held one another's hands in small, taut knots of nerves.
Kurenai's forehead creased with anxiety until Setsuna turned to her and gave the quietest of reassurances. She still watched with the small hope in her face that married nerves to faith.
The Morning Peacock's final pulses — an extended combo variant Guy used twice during the exchange — finished in a resounding ring.
Dust and pieces of fractured ground still fell in sparks as the cloud thinned, and the field revealed the result: Indra was standing.
He was breathing more visibly than moments before; a ghost of perspiration dampened his hairline; his clothes were smeared with the grit of the crater they'd carved.
Yet he was upright, and upright meant he had not broken.
That was a very different thing than winning, and everyone present read the gulf between the two.
Guy did not allow a pause. He used the recovery split between the assaults to adjust his stance, pupils fixed with a feral glee that made even the stoic flinch.
He had not come to trade blows for show — he had come to test himself against this specific, unblinking calm.
He wanted to see whether the fire of his youth, when pushed to the edge, could crack a composure like Indra's.
Then he changed the attack profile. The wind around him coagulated and then slammed outward as Guy pushed through into the Seventh Gate — the Daytime Tiger, Hirudora.
The technique was not a rain of hands now but a single monstrous pressure wave shaped, in the show of the gate, like a living tiger of compressed air.
It moved with the intent of a beast: a shape of annihilating pressure that struck as an organized front rather than as scattered impacts.
The first shockwave hit the air like a wall; the second dug at the earth; the third reshaped the contours of the crater where they fought.
Indra's muscles tightened to accept that pressure. He planted his feet deeper and sought purchase in the broken ground.
Every step he took to anchor his weight was counterbalanced by the tiger-shaped wave that sought to flatten him.
When the Hirudora arrived in full, the force lifted stones and turned them to projectiles. The sound was not merely loud; it was a suffocation of noise, a pressure that pushed at listeners' chests.
The effect on the immediate surroundings was obvious — small fires of friction, the air shimmering like heat.
In the crowd, Samui's jaw tightened, and Uzuki's hand crept toward her sword's hilt though she did not draw it. Kurenai's face betrayed the morphing of hope into a quieter, sharper fear.
Guy's Seventh Gate attack had a theatrical cruelty. He shaped and timed the pressure so it enveloped then collapsed inward upon itself; its intent was to melt rhythm into submission.
For as long as that pressure built and contracted, Indra's defenses were not merely struck — they were tested.
The Uchiha clan craned forward; the shared movement of their contracting chests was visible behind the wall of crimson irises.
Hiashi Hyuga and Hinata watched the exchange from the Hyuga compound vantage, their faces hardening; even Hiashi's controlled composure permitted a tightening around his mouthline.
When the initial Hirudora blast ended, Indra did not fall. But he was breathing now with a guttural sound, and for the first time in a while the edge of fatigue showed. Hiruzen, watching, straightened slightly.
The Hokage had watched long enough to know the meaning of physical exhaustion in a fight like that: it tilts victory's balance.
He let out a breath he had been holding, and a small, human hope breathed with him. "Perhaps," he thought aloud to himself, "Guy can tear an opening."
Kakashi's eye, bleeding from strain but painfully bright with attention, registered the panting as everyone else did.
He had said little since the combat had escalated, but the relief he felt at the sight of Guy's progression toward the seventh gate was real.
The ANBU's masks hid nothing; their shoulders rose and fell in small unison at the hard push Guy had achieved. Danzo watched too, but not with relief. His lip curled in a different calculation entirely.
He saw the wear on Indra and the cost Guy was paying, and his mind did what it always did when he saw opportunity: count, wait, plan.
The confrontation at the close of the Daytime Tiger left the scene raw. Dust hung like ash and there was a hush that felt like a held breath across watchers.
The Uchiha were quieter now, faces unsoftened, realizing that their prodigy had been touched — physically — by a force to which they had not yet adapted their answers.
Setsuna and Toru monitored them with a low priestly sternness: watch, learn, do not intervene.
They wanted the young and capable to see not only the power but the technique of surviving it.
Then, as the fighters circled again, Guy's voice tore through the charged air. He was already deciding to press. He would not stop at the seventh gate.
He had promised himself no half measures. The final hour, the eighth gate, loomed on the horizon like a hard edge — and the crowd—Kakashi, Hiruzen, ANBU, the Hyuga, the Uchiha, Kurenai and the women who had gathered with Setsuna—felt the intelligent dread that a next step could be a last.
Guy did not make a melodramatic speech. He only drew himself in, breath snapping, and pushed onward from the Seventh into something rarer and more dangerous.
The Seventh Gate had already shown what a tiger-shaped shockwave could do; the Eighth Gate would not be shaped; it would be substance: the assault of forms that broke rules.
Before the Eighth itself, Guy broadened the assault pattern. He detonated Asakujaku again — the extended Morning Peacock variant, this time buffered by the subsequent momentum from Hirudora's air-pressure displacements.
The flurry became a more complex cadence: strike–retract–strike again with variations in winged arcs and palm angles that made the air itself seem to catch and burn.
These were not random emphases; they were calculated increments intended to force Indra's timing into a microscopic mismatch. For a time, Guy's fists were a gale and a furnace at once.
Indra met the renewed Asakujaku with the same level-headedness he always showed, but now his timing had to be thinner, more honed. He intercepted, slipped, redirected; he slid his foot under a kick to collapse the arc into the dirt rather than into his hip.
He rode the momentum of returning punches off center and used the excess to pivot into counters: a short palm into Guy's ribs, a knee that checked the rise of Guy's thigh.
Those counters landed, and the battlefield took note; physical returns from Indra stung Guy enough to keep him from settling into one tempo.
But they were not enough to stop Guy's heart. Guy wanted the fight to move forward; every missed wound was an invitation.
When Guy moved to the Seventh Gate's deeper application, the form of attack changed.
The air-pressure tiger became less a shape and more a sustained wave of compressive violence that could push a body entirely out of its current locus.
Each crest of that wave slammed into Indra's chest as if the world had become a single hand closing.
Indra's breath shortened; for the first time in a string of fights he let out an audible panting that cut the hush of watching faces.
That sound was a small punctuation — confirmation that the Daytime Tiger had landed deeper than anything before.
Across the field, Hiruzen's shoulders sagged with a small, human hope because he recognized the physiological truth: panting meant energy debt.
Kakashi, clenching his hand around the fabric at his side, felt that same pulse of hope.
It ran through the ANBU ranks and into the Hyuga compound where Hiashi and Hinata watched with hard faces.
Hiashi's expression, tight and almost bitter, could not hide the calculation that moved behind his eyes: this could be the moment that rebalanced everything — but at what cost?
Guy did not relent. He amplified the pressure of the Hirudora by using the openings he'd carved out with the Morning Peacock and by changing their vectors quickly — compressing then dispersing then compressing again.
He hit, backed away, and struck from another angle. That pattern demanded both reflex and reserve from Indra.
When Indra tried to use a sudden counterstrike — a palm into Guy's chest meant to throw the momentum — Guy used the pain to fuel a spear of speed, a sequence of moves that carried the fighting body forward like a ram.
It was the kind of body-on-body calculus that requires more than a perfect mind: it requires a body willing to suffer.
It was in that juncture, with the Seventh Gate still howling and the Sixth's peacocks still smoking, that Guy made the decision to go beyond. He gave himself a look that had nothing theatrical in it — only a clean, resolute acceptance.
He was a man who had lived by the edge of defeat and was willing to step beyond it. That acceptance is what the Eighth Gate demanded.
The Eighth Gate opened in two named motions that arrived like the closing of a book. First came Sekizō — the Evening Elephant, an assault of five consecutive shockwave punches.
Each blow in Sekizō is more than a strike; it is a rhythmic crescendo: wave one compresses, wave two doubles the compression, wave three piles force on the path, the fourth wedges into the space between muscle and bone, and the fifth intends to convert that pressure into structural collapse.
The feel of Sekizō is of escalating, mechanical inevitability. Each successive concussion is heavier. Each one strips away defenses that cling to the bone.
Guy's entire torso flexed as he delivered Sekizō. The air around his fists turned into pressure fields that slid out and crashed back like hammers.
Indra felt these blows as something different from the rest — not merely kinetic assaults but a skilled engineering of force aimed, in five distinct pulses, at the same locus.
Indra responded the only way he had: by letting the first two pulses carry him into a roll, by tightening his center to survive the third, by daring a counter during the brief microgap between the fourth's arrival and the fifth's intent.
He answered that microgap with a palm strike aimed up into Guy's sternum — a small response, measured, that bought him a breath. He was forced to use breath as a resource rather than a given, and that was a battlefield concession.
When the Sekizō sequence finished, the ground between them bore a concussive signature: six shallow craters aligned like the points of a compass.
Dust blew inward and then outward as wind corrected to vacuum. Indra stood again, but his chest rose and fell hard; sweat poured, not just from exertion but from the internal cost of recalibration.
The watchers felt it — the Uchiha faces, usually composed, darkened.
Setsuna and Toru watched the youth before them with an expression part-pride, part-sober analysis: this was a lesson to be carved in bone.
Kurenai looked away for a second, then back; she could not help herself.
There was no time for a full pause. Guy had only one named move left if he intended to use the full lethal theology of the Eight Gates: Yagai — Night Guy.
It is the one that, in the legends and in the whispered lore among shinobi, was a death note: a single, straight-line, body-breaking kick that bends space with its force.
To prepare for it is to empty every reservoir. To receive it, unless one had the absolute countermeasure, is to accept ruin.
Guy's muscles knotted to generate it. The hairs on his forearms and on the exposed parts of his legs stood as tiny needles; his whole figure drew into a single launching point.
He stepped for the Dynamic Entry and the world collapsed into the axis of the strike.
His face was not celebratory; it was simply fixed, the look of a man who had decided the only acceptable outcome was to throw everything he had at one moment and see whether fate would take it back.
At the edge of the field, Hiruzen's face tightened until creases of worry dug into his brow.
He thought of the Shiki Fūjin he had still refused to use, of sacrifices postponed for the weight of another day.
He watched Guy's body bend and the crowd inhaled like a single organism. Kakashi's visible eye reddened at the edges; the ANBU moved as if on a bell, their sensors taut.
Indra watched, sharingan spinning, pupils widened with a rare flash of respect and something else — a hint of calculation.
The boy who had been so steady all along had a moment's expression like a mirror for Guy: not shock, not fear, but rather the clarity of seeing a man resolve to go beyond death's edge.
Hiashi stood in the Hyuga compound and did not move. His face had gone taut and hard. Hinata, beside him, felt the blood in her own head like a drum of fear and devotion.
The thought of a single kick bending space itself — the thought of the man who would throw it — made her fingers press into the hem of her robe until her knuckles whitened.
Then Guy launched. The first motion of his approach bent the air into a plane; the second coiled his body like a spring. He committed everything into the axis.
He was already the Night Guy long before Yagai's name fully meant anything to any eye present.
Guy's leg had just left the ground, a single clean line toward Indra. The world seemed to narrow into that arc. Dust, watchers, the bloody field, the Uchiha's staring red irises — all of it focused into the single possibility of one kick that could end everything.
No one moved now because the next motion would demand whether the world still had a champion who could take it.
The chapter ended there: Guy airborne, the Eighth Gate unleashed, and the whole of Konoha — Hokage, Uchiha, Hyuga, ANBU, Kakashi, the women who had gathered, and Danzo in the dark — held on the thin, unbearable line between a single blow and whatever came after.
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End of Chapter
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