Pre-Chapter A/N: Here we go with another chapter, coming in right on time. Next three chapters on my patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)— same username as here and link in bio.
I was sitting on Minato's back as he groaned beneath me. Kushina and Mikoto were doing the same not too far from me, and around us were four lumps of cloth with seal tags around them where I had sealed Mikoto's Edo Tensei puppets. I looked at the three of them, activating my Byakugan for a second, and sighed. I'd probably gone further than intended. Mikoto had a broken femur and Minato had three broken ribs, a dislocated shoulder and an almost-crushed windpipe from when I'd caught him with a punch to the throat.
Next time, it probably would be better to teach him to be more careful about his vitals with gentler methods. All Kushina's wounds had healed seconds after they were inflicted, so with her I had been even less delicate. I could see the damage I'd done to her from looking at her chakra capacity. She had embers left.
"So, that was fun," I said, getting even louder groans before I rose from my seat. Clones rose from the ground and began seeing to Mikoto and Minato while I stretched my hand out for Kushina. She groaned again but still reached out to take it. I pulled her onto her feet. This wasn't the first time we were training like this.
I'd unlocked Six Paths Sage Mode two months ago, and I made sure we met every other day for one of these spars. Their teamwork got sharper with each experience; Minato got quicker, both with his own sage mode and his Flying Raijin; Mikoto got better at controlling the reanimated Kage and taking advantage of their abilities; and Kushina and Gyuki managed the focused tailed beast state better and better. Now, she was able to maintain it for long enough that just waiting her out no longer seemed a viable option. Now you had to actually beat her into exhaustion.
The weakness with the focused tailed beast state was that it met each bit of tailed beast chakra with human chakra to create this concentrated form of chakra that was neither wholly human nor wholly tailed beast. That meant that each unit of chakra she spent was doubled in essence—one unit from her and one unit from Gyuki. She had a lot of it, but when I was in Six Paths Sage Mode, she was the only one that could even come close to keeping up with me physically, and so she led the charge more often than not to give Mikoto's reanimated Kage space to attack and create an opening for Minato to land the finishing blow.
It would be enough to kill an Otsutsuki General. It had to be. We'd done everything we could. Trained everything that we could to the end and then pushed further and further. I hadn't seen my fiancée in months as she pushed for sage mode in the hopes of narrowing the gap between her and those that would come for us. I spent more time in this training ground than I did at home these days. Konoha had been left to a clone, and the same was true of most of my social obligations.
"Okay, you can let yourselves out whenever you're ready. Get some rest," I told them after my clones finished healing them. I reached for Kushina's shoulder and left a squeeze as I walked to another end of the training ground.
Six Paths Sage Mode, I thought with a chuckle. It was the only name I could come up with at the time, freshly high off waking up and being... more. But I could see now, after months, that I didn't have it. Six Paths Senjutsu was something only Hagoromo or the Ten Tails could bestow. How did I know that? I didn't have truth-seeking balls. Naruto had gained them naturally on being gifted the power, and both Obito and Madara had awakened them on becoming jinchuriki for the Ten Tails. I didn't have them, and months on, I still didn't have them.
I had the improved chakra potency, the understanding of all chakra, the sensing ability and range, the otherworldly physical prowess, but no truth-seeking balls. So I had something like Six Paths Senjutsu on a discount. It was still massive, don't get me wrong. I would wipe the floor with me from three months ago even if he'd come at me with everything he had, but Ishiguri could say the same. And Ishiguri had admitted by his deeds that he was no match for the Otsutsuki royalty. So I had to get even stronger.
I flared my chakra, forming nine clones around me. Each of them began to mold chakra. The Cero I'd shown off in that first spar against my team was just the beginning. I was working to bring all the techniques I'd known about from other universes that I hadn't been able to accomplish with my old understanding of chakra. Today, we were working on the Spirit Bomb.
The Spirit Bomb in Dragon Ball was an attack made by borrowing the ki of other beings. The equivalent to that would be taking the chakra of others in my surroundings, but that hadn't worked in all my attempts from the last week. We were switching tracks now. Nature energy. It was everywhere, and bountiful in most places. My version of Six Paths Senjutsu made me all the more sensitive to it, and I could gather it much quicker than before. So if I took nature energy and then, instead of mixing it with my chakra to form senjutsu chakra, I could control it directly to form an attack of pure nature energy. Would the Rinnegan be able to absorb something that was pure nature energy rather than chakra? Who knows. It was worth exploring at the very least, so my clones took their stances and began to work.
I formed another nine clones for the next bit of training. While Group 1 worked on the Spirit Bomb, this group would work on something less complicated... slightly.
Remember what I said about truth-seeking balls? Nothing I did could force them into being. I'd put weeks' worth of time with a set of clones into it, and no matter what they tried, there was no way to create them. But that did not mean that there were no other advantages to be gained from this form. The enhanced ability to manipulate my chakra essentially made it as if I had an affinity for the five regular elements and two non-elemental ones (yin and yang). It was on those two that we would focus now.
Yin-Yang Release, not the truth-seeking balls themselves, was what nullified opposing ninjutsu. So if I learned Yin-Yang Release, I would be able to create a jutsu that nullified another person's jutsu. At least that was the hope, and that was what these clones got up to. I walked away from those two groups and formed another set of nine clones.
This set was focused on different things: one was trying to recreate kekkei genkai using my understanding of all base elements, another was testing out what certain elements could do when combined with the Rasengan, and the rest were working on new techniques of their own. Done with that, I squatted down and began to meditate.
"Kurama?" I called.
"Coming," he said, and his chakra began to leak from his seal into my system. I took hold of it and combined it with Six Paths Sage Mode. It was harder now. Much harder. It felt like my chakra network was setting itself on fire from trying to contain both this more potent sage chakra and Kurama's tailed beast chakra at the same time. I could hold it for maybe ten seconds before the pain grew too much and I had to let go of it. Then I had to wait for twenty to thirty minutes to heal and feel better, and then I would try it again.
From the outside looking in, it might have seemed like a waste of time, but when I had first started trying this, it had been flat-out impossible. And then it had only been bearable for a single second before it felt like I was doing permanent damage to my system. Now, ten seconds might not have been a lot, but it was progress. And the longer I managed to hold it for, the more potential I had for being able to use it in combat. And I was sure it was worth it. I hadn't tested the mode out in combat, but even within myself I could feel my power rise to a level that blew either of those states out of the water.
Why did I struggle with it when Naruto had done it so seamlessly? For that, I had one idea. It was because he was Ninja Jesus. Being a reincarnation of Asura meant that he had a natural talent and capacity for both sage and Six Paths chakra that blew mine out of the water. And then there was the level of compatibility he had with Kurama.
Even as friendly as the two of us were, there were just some things that Kurama and I would never be able to manage. Our compatibility when it came to the fundamental essence of our chakra just didn't allow for it. There was a reason Kushina had been the initial planned host. Compared to her, I was a middling host at best. And then there was Naruto. Naruto, who was the reincarnation of the son of the man who had the full Ten Tails sealed within him. Naruto, who had grown in the womb of Kurama's jinchuriki and then had the tailed beast sealed in him on the same day he'd been born.
If there was such a thing as a perfect tailed beast host, then it was him. Not to talk of how Minato's masterpiece of a seal in that world had dripped Nine Tails chakra into him from the day the seal was made to ensure that his own chakra network was forced to adjust and adapt to it. I knew there was no point in comparing myself to Naruto. No matter how much I trained and practiced, it would never be enough for me to confidently say I was stronger than the reincarnation of Ninja Jesus. But then I could see that as a good thing. Because Naruto was coming. Wait. Was he?
I tilted my head around to look at Minato, who had returned to the training ground after dropping off his teammates and was now working on his Flying Raijin. He hadn't been on any dates with Kushina that I knew of. And I hadn't seen any signs of a crush there. Fuck. Did I butterfly Naruto out of existence? No way. No fucking way. It was impossible. But then wasn't it canon that he had pined over Kushina from a young age? I hadn't seen any pining take place. Maybe they were hiding it from me. It had to be that. They were either already in love or would fall into it soon enough. Ninja Jesus would come, and I could leave all the problems to him and Minato and piss off to retirement. What would I do in retirement? No idea yet.
My body felt good enough again to try with Kurama's chakra, and so I began pulling it in, feeling like I was holding on to molten lava with my bare hands all the while. And at ten and a half seconds by my count, the chakra slipped away, my body not able to take any more. Progress, at least.
--- ---KARATACHI YAGURA (ONE WEEK LATER)
"Pull on Isobu-san's chakra like this, ahhh. And then let your own chakra mix with his like this, uhhhh. Then it has to feel perfectly balanced, hmmm," the strange red-haired woman explained with a mixture of words and grunting.
"Do you understand?" she asked after she noticed him staring. He shook his head.
She facepalmed, and he wondered if he shouldn't be the one frustrated here. He had defected from Kiri to learn under the Butcher of Iwa, not to meet this woman who was most assuredly insane.
"Just call up your tailed beast; let me see what you guys can do together," she said, and this bit he could understand well enough. He felt within him for that valve that connected him to Sanbi. It was like plumbing. Cold water and hot. His body had regular cold water in it, and when he opened up that valve, Isobu's hot water would flow into his body and mix with it.
He did so, easing it just a bit, and felt his back begin to bend as the tails sprouted out from his tailbone. The red aura that tinged all his vision a grimy orange followed shortly after, and he stood there. He didn't need to look at his body. He knew the red aura would have spread around his whole body now and that it would be enhancing everything that made him him.
Hozuki-sensei had said it was supposed to come with a loss of control, but Yagura didn't really feel that. For him, it was much as if the Three Tails, the one that this woman called Isobu, was asleep all the time and just gave Yagura full access to his chakra. He did not know if that would remain the case if he ever tried for a full manifestation, but for now he didn't need to find out.
"Can you move like that?" the woman asked, shouting now for some reason. She might have been stupid. Red hair meant she was one of those Uzumaki, and the Butcher trusted her enough to give him over to her, but that did not necessarily mean she wasn't stupid. So he decided to test it. He pushed off the ground, not giving her any warning, and stretched out his palm, ready to encase her in coral.
If he showed the Butcher that he needed to pay personal attention to him, then he would come himself and that would be it. In a matter of seconds, he was right in front of her, and she hadn't even managed to move in that time. Shock, most likely. Fearing a jinchuriki made sense. He was about to touch her when the world spun. He couldn't breathe, his head was pounding. Everything hurt. What happened?
It took longer than he would have liked for him to open his eyes. He was partially buried in the ground, and his chest had been caved in. That explained the breathing issues. He pulled himself out of the ground, leveraging Sanbi's chakra to do so. What happened? When he looked at the Uzumaki woman, he got his answer. She looked just the same, but those eyes were a bright red, and her hair rose behind her just slightly. And then there was the chakra. It was thick, potent, and most importantly, there was just so much of it. Jinchuriki. She was gazing down at him like he was dirt beneath her boot, and she was right. So he did the only thing he could. He fell to his knees and pressed his head against the ground.
"Teach me, Sensei."
XXXX-- REIJI UZUMAKI
Mito's boy never fucking listened. It was the Senju blood in him. Or maybe the Hyuga blood. Those self-pretentious pricks never did like being told what to do. Despite all Reiji's assurances that he did not need to be here, he had come all the same. Worse even, he'd come in person. Reiji spread the Mind's Eye of the Kagura out and could feel his chakra in thirty-eight different places within the village behind them. Shadow clones and Hiraishin. Bad tools in the hands of a boy who would never just sit still.
"Hokage-sama." He bowed, even as he could hear some of his students begin to whisper and point.
"Reiji-san. Thank you for having me," he said, and he paid the uproar his presence caused no attention. It would have been better, Reiji felt, if he at least noticed just what his presence did. But he never did.
He never noticed that mistakes were 75% more frequent when he was in the R&D chamber than when he was not. He never noticed how the eyes of every young woman—and some of the men—followed his every move when he was in range. Those Hyuga looks and chakra that felt like the Sun itself were a dangerous combination that distracted all of Reiji's workers when he needed them focused.
"It's no problem," he said out loud, even if it very much was a problem.
"Are we ready to begin?" Mito's boy asked, turning those pale, pupilless eyes to him.
"Yes, yes." He coughed. "Kaneru, bring forth the Javelin," he said, turning to the young boy who had been rescued from Iwa, only to find him staring at Mito's boy with nothing but hatred in his gaze. Reiji would even have preferred a crush to this silly hatred that would land the boy nowhere but an unmarked grave with all his potential.
"Shoto, handle it, please," he said, turning to the boy by Kaneru's side. The teenager nodded and wheeled forward the Javelin. It was made of chakra metal, a cylinder that was about the length of one man standing on another's shoulders. It was placed on a fortified wooden platform with two wheels on either side, and a set of controls at the butt's end. It came forward, and Reiji directed him to begin.
Chakra was pushed into the weapon; it whirled to life, humming away, and then in a matter of seconds, a spear of pure chakra steel shot into the air, forming an arc before hitting the ground. It then pulsed, and then the entire space around it exploded, the explosion large enough that it kicked up dust that reached them even here. The dummy targets that had been placed around the area were gone. Nothing remained of them.
"That was about equivalent to the yield of, what? A hundred explosive tags?" Mito's boy asked, his voice cutting through the silence. Reiji nodded.
"Brilliant. If possible, let's go a bit bigger, though? Just a bit. Maybe a thousand? I trust you to handle it," he said, hand reaching out to tap Reiji's shoulder twice, and then he was gone.
A/N: Otsutsuki in the chapter after the one after this one, yeah? I promise. Next chapter comes on here by Wednesday night next week (taking a small break as a new story comes up on Sunday). Next three chapters up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) (same username as here and link in bio), you can support me there and read them early.