A while earlier, on the forested ridge outside Konoha's outer barrier, Hiruzen Sarutobi clashed with Kanae Hyūga.
The trees didn't survive the first ten seconds of this clash, and there was barely anything left in the vicinity since.
Hiruzen's chakra flared, the kind of pressure only a man who mastered every nature transformation could generate.
Fire, water, wind, earth, lightning, and even some yin and yang all rippled off him in shifting waves, depending on the jutsu.
Clones already covered the field, dozens of them, each preparing something different.
The ground behind him split as Enma expanded into a staff large enough to shatter boulders.
Large and small shuriken multiplied into swarms mid-air through shadow shuriken clone.
Combinations of elemental attacks laced together without any delay in waves.
His chakra was constantly replenished by that beacon on their side, high above the battlefield.
Tobirama had also prepared several new chakra-storage seals for him before the fighting began, inventions he had finished only recently.
And floating near his shoulder was also the one thing Kanae had never expected to see:
The faint, grim outline of the Reaper.
"Repeat Dead Demon Consuming Seal."
A pale sacrificial soul, taken from the stored soul-pool Tobirama had probably invented recently, flickered in the reaper's grasp.
He could use the jutsu again. And again. Without dying.
It turned every exchange into a potential death sentence.
Kanae stood across from him, breathing steadily.
Her Byakugan was already fully open — but not the normal form.
Not anymore.
Her sclera looked sharper and brighter than ever, faint specks of light shimmering across them.
These weren't merely eyes that saw.
They influenced reality themselves.
Her field of vision twisted around Hiruzen's clones, dissecting every elemental thread in the air.
Her palms flexed once, releasing a subtle trail of faintly white particles that clung to the air like floating dust.
A volley of mixed elemental blasts roared toward her again.
Fire encased in wind, lightning dividing inside the earth, water splitting into dozens of compressed bullets.
Kanae stepped in.
Her chakra flared.
Rotation burst out of her body, but not the usual kind.
Her evolved Byakugan warped the chakra shell, shaping it into a wider, sharper sphere.
The attacks didn't just deflect; they bent unnaturally, cracking apart under the pressure and reinvigorating it, the pure essence of using enemy force against them.
She slipped out of it and thrust her palm forward.
Vacuum Palm, expanded far beyond normal limits, tore across the ground with a sharp, buzzing sound and obliterated three shadow clones instantly on their own.
Hiruzen leapt high, weaving signs.
However, Frost Chakra stung at the air.
Kanae's fingers tingled.
Lightning threaded with wind gathered along her joints; combined, the Frost Release she had finally perfected.
She struck once.
A cold pressure pulsed forward.
A small patch of the forest flash-froze into white stone.
Hiruzen's real body dodged at the last instant.
His cloak froze and cracked off his arm.
Yet his arm still felt slightly numb, and he could only imagine how brittle and fragile it would have become if the hit had landed cleanly.
His eyes narrowed.
So that was the long-lost Frost Release.
This was an advanced nature transformation that created and manipulated the cold.
The antithesis of Scorch.
It was able to lower the temperature of anything it interacted with to extreme degrees, whether that's the air, the earth, non-living objects, or living creatures.
Kanae wasn't done.
She shot forward, palms glowing with twisted chakra: parasitic yang overgrowth that forced enemy cells to mutate uncontrollably, and fine-tuned yin chakra that turned her strikes into pseudo-genjutsu shockwaves delivered physically through nerve paths.
Each strike was lethal.
Even Hiruzen felt it thanks to his experience.
Enma expanded his body to block her first wave.
Her palm pierced straight through, cracking his hardened form after freezing it easily.
Another strike skillfully froze and shattered the clone hiding behind him at the same time.
But Hiruzen reacted instantly, not too fazed about what happened to Enma now that she decided to go all out like that.
Instead, his own Reaper's arm extended.
He knew that he couldn't wait to become a frozen statue or get even slightly hit with anything else potent that she had in her arsenal.
She didn't even need that much chakra to kill someone like him, he felt. She was very dangerous and could swiftly kill you.
Kanae's eyes then widened, and she slipped backward immediately, a chunk of her rotation severed by the invisible death-grab.
If that had touched her for even a moment…
She also didn't dwell on it.
However, Hiruzen didn't let up.
Another five simultaneously cast jutsu rained down — earth spears, wind bullets, a wall of flame, water torpedoes, and lightning streams.
Kanae slid through gaps, her Byakugan reading everything in microscopic detail.
But Hiruzen forced her into a trap.
Shadow shuriken clone multiplied into a cloud.
A fireball burst in their center.
Wind blades shot through the smoke.
The Reaper's arm reached again.
Kanae twisted.
Her evolved Byakugan focused.
She thrust her palm upward.
Eighty Gods Vacuum Fists erupted.
It was a concept Ryusie taught her just recently, too.
Dozens of gigantic chakra palms roared to life, smashing through the elemental barrage and dispersing the Reaper's grasp for a moment.
The shockwave blew the clones apart.
Hiruzen finally looked truly serious.
He flicked blood from his fingers.
The Reaper began descending.
He intended to use the Dead Demon Consuming Seal for real — on her — without killing himself.
Kanae's heartbeat spiked.
She couldn't outrun it forever.
It was time.
She placed her fingers on the seal tattoo Ryusei had given her, the one based on Ashina's newest, highest-level fuinjutsu for drawing in natural energy for his external use, through his chains, but she used it in a completely different way, internally.
Instead, natural energy funneled into her body like a tidal wave.
Her Byakugan flared violently, microscopic vision seeing every molecule of nature chakra invading her coils.
She had seconds at most before it became lethal.
She didn't try to balance it.
She did what the technique was designed for.
She knew she lacked the chakra and physical makeup to ever become a full Sage Mode user, and she understood how dangerous it would be to try.
She didn't need it anyway.
If she absorbed natural energy for only a moment and expelled it instantly through rotation principles, it became a devastating white flash, an ultimate technique Ryusei first described to her, and one she had tested, refined, and mastered over the last few weeks.
Her perfected, evolved Byakugan, the best internal-vision dojutsu in the world, tracked every shift inside her body.
Even a millisecond of imbalance could have caused her own organs to rupture.
So she spun, releasing a far more potent Rotation than anything she had ever produced before in any battle.
Chakra erupted around her.
It was also a near-instantaneous impact.
Her ultimate technique awakened.
Not to mention that she gave as much chakra as possible to finish him fast during this shock.
Sage Art: Frosted Heavenly Rotation.
Fifty meters of land around her turned white in a single pulse.
For an instant, it felt as if time itself froze.
The rotation erupted outward, but this time it carried compressed natural energy, parasitic yang overgrowth, and frost release woven directly into its core.
A perfectly layered storm.
First came the raw senjutsu rupture, a shock that tore through everything in its radius.
Then the freezing force followed, locking space and matter in an instant.
Last came the mutating chakra backlash, programmed to detonate inside the target and finish whatever survived the first two waves.
It was a threefold kill method.
If the first strike didn't destroy the enemy, the freezing would immobilize them.
If they resisted that, the internal backlash would cripple what remained.
This was already her third and perfected version of the technique.
Even the senjutsu rotation alone would have overwhelmed most shinobi.
Adding frost release turned them into brittle statues.
Adding parasitic yang meant anything left inside them ruptured from within.
Nothing short of a monster could survive it.
Hiruzen reacted a heartbeat too late.
The Reaper's hand reached forward, but the rotation warped its spiritual chakra arm as well, surprisingly, freezing it mid-motion as well.
The explosion swallowed Hiruzen.
Frost ripped through his limbs of what was left.
Yang overgrowth invaded his organs.
The natural energy surge crushed the remaining sacrificial souls, cutting off the Dead Demon Seal entirely.
Hiruzen's eyes widened.
His chest cracked.
The frost crept over him.
And in the final moment, he never expected to die like this, by one of Ryusei's 'minions', even.
His body shattered.
And the great Third Hokage fell.
Kanae stumbled out of the fading rotation, panting.
Frost still clung to her shoulders.
Her sleeves were torn.
Her eyes glowed with unstable senjutsu residue before slowly dimming.
She exhaled once.
Then turned toward the larger battlefield.
She sensed Kiyomi and Nagato.
She sensed Hiashi's overwhelming output.
She sensed Ryusei above, burning through mountains of chakra to keep that otherworldly monster from collapsing the sky on them all.
She stepped forward, steady.
And began running to reinforce them.
One of Ryusei's clones eventually silently materialized beside her, placing a hand on her back to refill her chakra while praising her in his usual dry tone.
He understood better than anyone that natural energy alone wasn't enough for that technique; you still had to fuel and balance it with your own chakra.
And Kanae had pushed hers to the absolute limit for that attack.
However, he didn't mind pouring chakra back into her; to him, her reserves were 'a drop in an ocean', barely noticeable.
If anything, it was a good 'return on investment' now.
The majority of his chakra was actually being burned, shielding the battlefield from Ashura's constant interference anyway.
The clone glanced toward Hiashi's distant aura, then back at Kanae.
"Make him burn through more of that power," he said quietly. "Force him to draw deeper. The more he uses it, the easier it is for me to track the source. And if my other clone finds it…"
His eyes narrowed slightly.
"…You all take the chance to kill him. A moment of disturbance is all we need. But, still be extremely careful in regards to him."
Kanae's expression didn't change, but a sharp glint lit her eyes.
"That won't be a problem," she said. "Side Branch blood doesn't get many chances like this."
She looked toward Hiashi in the distance again with her Byakugan, the excitement slipping into her voice.
"I'll enjoy every second of it."
"After all, every sickness starts somewhere. In our clan, it starts at the head. I'll remove it."
Ryusei's clone nodded, feeling a bit more at ease knowing Kanae would also be pressuring Hiashi there as well.
As for the previous death of the Third Hokage, he felt nothing at all.
The man who once pressured him so much was now so far beneath him it was like they no longer lived in the same world.
His fastest death of anyone wasn't surprising to Ryusei.
After all, he wasn't Tobirama, Hashirama, or even Minato.
He was the weakest Hokage in every sense that mattered.
It was inevitable. And Kanae alone, trained by him, had been more than enough to finish him.