To swing the momentum sharply back to their side, Ashura finally acted.
He released a vast surge of Yang chakra that rippled across the entire battlefield below from his own ocean-like vitality.
"Vital Breath Mandala!"
A radiant golden pressure burst from him, washing over every Konoha-aligned fighter.
Their wounds and micro tears tightened.
Their breathing steadied.
Their muscles hardened.
Stamina refilled in seconds.
And before Ryusei could counter, Ashura layered a second technique over it.
"Yang Severance Technique!"
Dozens of perfect wood clones burst from his back like living pillars, each diving and flying into different pockets of battle.
Their palms glowed with the same golden light, but this time siphoning life force directly from Ryusei's support clones and allies, gradually weakening them, and then feeding it all straight back into Ashura's network.
A perfect support stack of his own.
But he wasn't done.
Ashura's hands flew through a short series of seals, each one older than any jutsu known in this era.
The ground below rumbled as pure Shinju essence erupted outward, ancient, primordial wood release far denser and more voracious than anything Hashirama had ever produced.
Massive branches, latticed with natural energy, unfurled across the battlefield.
They didn't just restrain, they drained chakra on touch, absorbing and converting it back into Ashura's central core.
Ryusei felt the pull immediately.
He had no choice.
He pushed a colossal wave of his own chakra downward, remotely flooding his previously summoned clones with new reserves.
Through Slug Sage transmission, the energy slipped effortlessly into them, reinforcing their bodies before Ashura's wood could crush them, to help his own allies on time.
Below, the battlefield shifted violently again, two overwhelming support systems now colliding head-on.
Ashura amplifying his side with divine Yang.
Ryusei sustained his forces with slug-born regeneration, adaptability, and a remote chakra flow that eclipsed anything Ashura could mechanically transfer anywhere.
For a moment, neither side gained ground.
However, taking on the samurai–monk formations while countering Ashura's colossal wood constructs, at the same time, forced Ryusei into a brutal rhythm.
His remote chakra transmission cut directly into Ashura's own sweeping Yang influence, keeping his allies alive and the battlefield stable, but the drain on Ryusei was immense.
At least the monks and samurai were no longer overwhelming his forces; that danger was finally contained. But the price was steep.
Ryusei's reserves were bleeding out at a frightening pace.
He was spending far more than Ashura to reach the current balance, and he knew it.
Therefore, if this dragged on, he'd be the one to collapse first.
So, he could only hope his main clone outside of Konoha would locate that Hyūga energy vessel soon, the one he was sensing, the one Hiashi was already drawing on below.
If the clone found it in time…
If it absorbed that power, or more, and returned… by teleporting here directly.
Then the tide could completely shift, and Ryusei could potentially finish everything here.
But if it came even a minute too late—
It would be over as it stood currently.
There was no other way to bridge the gap.
Ryusei hadn't expected Konoha's side to be this strong.
Even Hiruzen and Jiraiya felt noticeably stronger than before, for some reason.
The enemy had clearly come prepared at their absolute peak, unlike before.
They had been sharpening themselves in silence ever since that last clash.
But at least for the moment, both sides' support evened out perfectly.
Ashura's amplification and the formations backed by Hagoromo and Tobirama were neutralized, letting Ryusei's group finally move without being strangled so quickly, without even a chance to fight back for long.
And the frontline spiraled deeper into chaos. However, the battle continued in the sky.
Minato, alongside his kunai and a few occasional shadow clones of his own, also kept using Ashura's most stable, levitating, perfect wood clones as dynamic aerial anchors, flickering between them with Flying Thunder God.
Each time Minato reappeared, Ryusei and his near-invisible clones shattered the wooden platforms beneath him with bursts of quake-laced Thunder Release pressure bubbles, that hybrid fire-lightning nature crackling with raw vibration, or with sweeping waves of Erosion Release that dissolved Ashura's constructs to sludge. Minato was forced to constantly teleport again and again, never staying grounded for more than a heartbeat.
Minato eventually countered with Flying Thunder God - Second Step, a few times, trying to slip behind Ryusei for kill angles, but Ryusei forced him back every time with boiling-pressure fist bursts that rippled the air, very dangerous in his current Seventh Gate.
Ashura supported Minato with airborne wooden constructs, dense and reinforced, rising beneath him as instant landing points and pivot platforms.
Others twisted into long and large sinuous shapes, lashing out like fully living serpents, trying to bind and crush Ryusei with brute, god-tree force.
Between the two of them, their teleportation rhythm tightened into a deadly mesh.
But then it happened. Minato flickered toward one of his marked spots, and Ryusei suddenly appeared there first somehow.
Minato's eyes widened. A fragment-clone, a tiny piece of that slug-linked network, had been hidden there from the very start… serving as Ryusei's own unseen variant of the Flying Raijin. None of them had realized his new form allowed him to use it this way.
Before Minato could even process it, Ryusei's fist was already coming for his throat precisely, life and death converging in one blow.
A pulse of ancient, overwhelming Yang chakra slammed into Minato from afar.
Ashura, who picked up on it and acted also near instantly from some distance.
That force surged through Minato in an instant, reinforcing him, wrapping his flesh in a layer of Ashura's dense healing factor, almost as potent as Ashura's own, before molding it into hardened God-Tree like living wood for durability. It held just long enough to keep him alive as the shockwave from Ryusei's incoming strike tore through the air toward him.
Minato used that fragile moment to escape, teleporting again, only to reappear on yet another spot Ryusei had already seeded with a hidden fragment.
Another hidden clone. Another anchor.
Minato's stomach dropped. Ryusei had outplayed his entire network. He had no choice.
Without a heartbeat of delay, driven by reflex, on time this time, he unleashed Flying Thunder God: Guiding Thunder, flinging the whole marked area aside in a distorted surge before Ryusei could reach it again.
Ashura's voice cut sharply across the battlefield. "Stay near me from now on."
Minato gritted his teeth, nodded, and fell into formation beside his main body.
The battle continued again.
However, after a while, Ryusei clicked his tongue; his traps were not working at all.
'Tch… too slippery, and the other one can tank anything.'
They had been clashing for a while now.
He had torn Ashura apart more than once already, landing blows that should have crippled anyone else, but Ashura simply regenerated, his chakra barely dipping.
Therefore, Ryusei tried to shift his attacking focus only to Minato next, using surprise and tactics to try and eliminate the weaker variable first.
But Minato's Sage Mode reflexes were far sharper than expected, and his Flying Raijin usage was beyond anything Ryusei had accounted for.
And then there was Ashura again, somehow projecting his own healing Shinju essence outward through some strange Yang transmission, reinforcing Minato again and again.
In this configuration, Ryusei couldn't find a clean breaking point. Not yet, at least.
So he slowly settled for the next-best path. Keep them both busy long enough.
And not make it even more difficult for his very pressured allies below currently.
Long enough for Madara to arrive and throw the entire battlefield and Konoha into chaos.
Or long enough for his clone to return with some kind of game-changing power from "Hamura's side" of things.
If and when either of those two happened, the entire situation would quickly shift.
And then he could look to reverse this near-impossible situation for him and everyone.
However… it was easier said than done.
Minato wasn't throwing around the simple Rasengan anymore.
The basic version, pure shape manipulation of basic chakra condensed into a rotating, potent sphere, was now the least of Ryusei's concerns.
For some reason, Minato carried an entire arsenal of multiple rare advanced Rasengan variants that simply shouldn't exist yet, or if ever, especially not by him, if it followed the original trajectory.
Ryusei immediately guessed it had something to do with either that oversized frog or that wrinkled old man Hagoromo, directly "stolen" from the future timeline.
Someone had clearly given Minato visions of techniques decades before Naruto or Boruto would ever invent them, and more.
And Minato used all of them with Sage Mode infusion power, making all of the technically senjutsu attacks.
A Water Rasengan, shaped like a spiraling whirlpool, cutting and crushing through the air with hydraulic force.
A Vanishing Rasengan, laced with lightning, disappearing mid-flight, reappearing only at the moment of impact.
A proper Rasenshuriken in even a throwable variant, compact but lethal, each throw splitting into countless razor-fine wind threads.
An Ōdama Rasengan, dense enough to warp the air around it.
And one Ryusei saw for the first time, a strange Lotus Rasengan, whose petals separated mid-throw, each mini-sphere detonating in cascading bursts.
Minato fought like a Rasengan hydra, never running out, never slowing down, Ashura's vast chakra pouring into him from afar.
All the while, Ashura added pressure from above and below, bombarding Ryusei with those monstrous Wood Release constructs… and even hurling Dust Release in wide arcs, something Ryusei suspected Hagoromo had conveniently loaded into Ashura from the Pure Land as well at some unknown point.
Even with his upgrades, Ryusei couldn't afford to clash head-on with every one of these at once. So he answered with his own surprising versions.
Before, he had never cared much about Rasengan theory, unlike those cliché transmigrators obsessed with it, until a few months ago.
Preparing for this battle, imagining exactly what Minato would throw at him today, for months, he finally, accidentally, revisited the concept.
Shape transformation convenient base. Efficiency. Minimal cost for maximal effect.
It was his mistake to forget about it until now for so long.
However, with his brain, his talent, and his chakra control, creating new versions to "catch up" hadn't taken long once he realised it.
Therefore, he weaved between Minato's barrage now, forming his own spinning spheres with sharp, calculated ease:
Erosion Rasengan — Earth, Wind, and Water fused into a grinding vortex that aged anything it touched, turning terrain to dust as if decades passed in seconds.
And Ryusei used it instantly, ramming it into one incoming Water Rasengan.
The two spheres collided, Minato's broke apart in a spray of vapor, while Ryusei's eroded the surrounding air pressure itself before carving a path straight through one of Ashura's descending wood constructs, reducing it to gray dust in an instant.
Slug Sage Rasengan — semi-liquid, forming around natural energy and moisture, absorbing attacks on contact before converting it and detonating in a burst of healing acid. Life for allies, dissolution for enemies.
Ryusei leaned into Minato's next throw, a Rasenshuriken variant, letting the spinning wind threads sink into the sphere.
The Rasengan absorbed them, swallowed them, then detonated outward in a healing-acid burst.
In the distance below, his allies caught the healing wave, the monks and samurai caught the corrosive edge, and Ashura's wooden serpent twisted apart under the sizzling counterpulse.
Chakra Leech Rasengan — powered by his newly mastered Yin–Yang principles, thanks to that Chinoike ritual and Indra's stolen body infused with their bodies.
Instead of exploding, it simply stole chakra, feeding it straight back into him.
Ryusei slammed it straight into Minato's Vanishing Rasengan as soon as it reappeared.
Instead of exploding, the Leech sphere drank the entire attack, siphoning the stored chakra and pouring it back into Ryusei's reserves.
The flow reinvigorated him, letting him blur upward in the same motion and intercept another one of Ashura's aerial attempts.
And finally — his rarest, most dangerous Rasengan creation, incorporating some jutsu shiki as well.
Abyss Rasengan — a miniature void, a collapsing sphere of Yin–Yang and senjutsu that devoured force, light, and matter before winking out.
Ryusei didn't hesitate. When Ashura hurled an enormous Shinju-infused titan of living wood from above, Ryusei thrust the Abyss into its core.
The world dimmed for an instant.
The titan folded inward as if crushed by invisible gravity, vanished entirely, and the sphere collapsed onto itself with a low, muted implosion.
He could barely use it; the cost was brutal.
But today, even the impossible needed to stay on the table.
Each technique answered one threat, countered another, and forced the sky itself into chaos.
Minato unleashed another cascade of swirling attacks, and Ashura's wood barrage closed in from behind.
Ryusei spun, Rasengan meeting Rasengan, each sphere twisting, grinding, or swallowing the other.
All while Ryusei's basic Slug Sage maneuvering — liquefying, scattering force, slipping between pressure waves, reforming midair — filled every gap between strikes, keeping him completely untouchable.
The air tore apart. The sky shook.
Ashura descended again.
Minato flickered again.
Ryusei's Rasengan met theirs in a storm of grinding, dissolving, consuming spheres.
The battle continued for a while again.
And still, none of them could overwhelm the other.
However, at some point, Ryusei's spine strangely tightened all of a sudden.
All at once, an overwhelming sense of danger crashed over him, for real, for the first time in this battle, his old instincts picking up.
Space itself rippled behind him, a distortion far more subtle and far faster than any of Minato's previous Flying Raijin jumps.
For a split second, it felt as if Minato hadn't teleported…
But cut straight through space to appear there.
A technique beyond Flying Raijin.
Something deliberately hidden there.
Something likely prepared.
Ryusei's instincts screamed.
He braced for the worst for some reason.