Especially after Sakura learned that Akira had needed only a few days to master Tsunade's most guarded medical techniques, including S-rank forbidden arts like the Strength of a Hundred Seal and the Mitotic Regeneration, her confidence nearly collapsed.
That despair clung to her like a shadow.
Akira was like a towering mountain whose peak vanished beyond the clouds.
And Tsunade, full of expectation, was pointing at that mountain and telling Sakura to climb it, to surpass it.
That was not setting a goal.
That was torture.
Hinata, on the other hand, did not have so many complicated thoughts. She simply smiled quietly, her gentle gaze following Akira the entire time. As long as he was happy, the world seemed bright to her.
Beside her, Ino clenched her fists, staring at Akira with a complicated expression.
"This guy is getting more ridiculous by the day. The gap between us keeps getting wider. Even Forehead has been training like she's possessed lately. Looks like I can't slack off anymore either."
Even if Ino pushed herself to the limit, though, the best she could probably become was an elite support ninja.
After all, the Yamanaka clan's secret jutsus naturally leaned in that direction.
Of course, support-type shinobi were far from unimportant. On the contrary, in Konoha's strategic system, people like that were as rare as pandas.
It was the same principle as medical ninja. On the battlefield, they were priceless.
Because they were so irreplaceable, and because there were so few of them.
By comparison, combat-focused shinobi who charged into the front lines were actually easier to train.
The moment Akira stepped out of the Hokage Tower, his brows suddenly knitted together.
A sharp, piercing pain flared deep inside his eye sockets.
Since his transmigration, this was the first time he had ever encountered something this strange.
Sakura had just gathered the courage to chase after him, thinking of inviting him to a meal to get closer to him, when her vision blurred.
Akira clutched his eyes and vanished in an instant.
Sakura happened to witness the whole thing and muttered in alarm, "What happened to Akira? Why was he holding his eyes like he was in pain?"
She was not the only one who noticed something was wrong.
At that very moment, Tsunade stood before the floor-to-ceiling window of the Hokage's office, and her heart gave a sudden, violent jolt.
Her brows furrowed as a thought flashed through her mind like lightning.
"Damn it. Don't tell me something's gone wrong with his Sharingan."
For someone as strong as Akira, losing composure in the middle of the street while clutching his eyes was absolutely impossible.
Not to mention that, for one brief instant, his face had gone as pale as paper.
The moment that thought crossed her mind, Tsunade could no longer sit still. She rushed toward Akira's home in a blur.
Halfway there, she happened to run into Sakura, who looked just as anxious.
Sakura looked up. "Sensei?"
Tsunade came to a stop and asked in a low voice, "You're going to find Akira too?"
Sakura quickly nodded. "Yes. I saw him holding his eyes and leaving with the Body Flicker. It looked like something serious had happened."
"I sensed it too. But don't follow me. I'll handle it."
As soon as Tsunade finished speaking, Sakura stubbornly shook her head.
"Sensei, I'm worried about him too. I want to see what happened."
Tsunade hesitated for a moment. She did trust this disciple of hers, so she did not insist.
"Fine. We'll check his house first."
Sakura nodded hard and hurried after her.
The teacher and student rushed to Akira's home. But when they pushed open the door, the house was cold and empty. There was no sign that he had returned.
A flash of realization crossed Tsunade's mind.
"He must have gone to the back mountain!"
"This really is bad."
Sakura's heart rose into her throat. In her mind, Akira had always been as strong as a god. She had never seen him in such a shaken state before.
Before Tsunade could even finish speaking, she turned and rushed toward Akira's private training ground in the back mountains.
Sakura gritted her teeth and followed, but once Tsunade went all out, her speed was like lightning. Sakura could only trail far behind.
At that moment, Tsunade was burning with worry. Her mind was filled with nothing but Akira's safety. She had no room left to care whether her disciple could keep up.
In the back mountains of Konoha, a waterfall thundered.
At Akira's usual training ground, an invisible barrier had already sealed off the surrounding area completely.
Akira stared hard at the reflection of his eyes in the water.
Crackle!
The sealing formula over his eyes unraveled.
His clear black pupils instantly turned crimson. A complex and eerie Mangekyō pattern slowly surfaced, then began spinning wildly.
In the next instant, arcs of purple-gold lightning erupted from his eyes like wild serpents, rampaging through the cavern.
Akira's eyeballs trembled violently. The purple-gold lightning surged through his chakra pathways and spread across his entire body, wrapping him in a cloak of thunder.
He endured the agony, his brows twisting tight.
"What the hell is going on? Since when does the Mangekyō Sharingan have this kind of side effect?"
He still could not understand the exact cause.
But he could clearly sense that his ocular power was pouring outward at a terrifying speed.
What was strange was that the power inside him was not drying up. Instead, through this violent release, it was becoming denser, purer, and heavier.
Buzz!
Lightning exploded around Akira. The air filled with the acrid smell of burning.
If he had not laid down a high-level barrier in advance, the disturbance here would probably have alarmed half of Konoha by now.
The pain continued to intensify.
Purple-gold lightning clung to his body like a curse, instantly turning the grass beneath his feet to ash.
The hard stone ground cracked inch by inch, spreading out in a web of fractures.
But at the same time, his ocular power was climbing at an almost suffocating rate.
The contrast was so strange that even Akira himself was startled.
Tsunade finally arrived at the clearing after racing all the way there. Her eyes swept over the area, but she did not see a single person.
Sakura arrived behind her, panting heavily. She moved beside Tsunade and asked curiously, "Sensei, Akira isn't here?"
Tsunade's brows were tightly locked. Her lips pressed into a thin line.
"That's impossible. He must be here. His chakra traces are still in this place… Wait. A barrier!"
Tsunade suddenly realized it.
Akira had placed an extremely advanced concealment barrier here.
Without another word, her hands flashed through seals.
"Barrier Release!"
The moment she tore open a gap in the barrier, a torrent of devastating energy roared out like a broken dam.
Boom!
Before Tsunade could even see what was happening inside, that overwhelming power slammed straight into her.
It was so fast it nearly surpassed reflex itself.
In that instant, Tsunade instinctively stepped forward and shielded Sakura behind her.
The two of them were blasted hundreds of meters away like kites with their strings cut.
Where the barrier had been, the ground looked as if it had been carved open by a giant plow.
A terrifying trench stretched for hundreds of meters, more than a dozen meters wide.
Towering trees along its path were instantly pulverized, leaving not even splinters behind.
Smoke and dust swallowed the sky.
Hundreds of meters away, Tsunade staggered to her feet in a sorry state. A thin line of blood seeped from the corner of her mouth. Behind her, the force of the impact had shoved earth into a mound dozens of meters high.
She clutched her chest. The diamond mark on her forehead blazed with light as the Strength of a Hundred Seal activated instantly.
The fine wounds covering her body began healing at a speed visible to the naked eye.
Sakura, protected behind Tsunade, had fortunately escaped the worst of it and suffered no serious injury.
She scrambled up in shock. Seeing the blood at the corner of Tsunade's mouth, her voice trembled.
"Sensei! Are you all right?"
Tsunade waved it off.
"I won't die! Something serious has definitely happened to Akira. I have to get over there!"
With that, she did not even bother dusting herself off. She rushed madly toward the center of that violent energy.
At the heart of the barrier, Akira was enduring the torment of purple lightning tempering his body.
The Mangekyō Sharingan in his eyes had already spun to an extreme speed. At last, the pattern slowly fused into a purple-gold point, with circles of mysterious ripples spreading around it.
The surrounding lightning began to be devoured by those eyes like water vanishing into a whirlpool.
At the same time, Akira's chakra reserves began to rise in a completely unreasonable surge.
Originally, his chakra volume had only been slightly above the Nine-Tails.
Now it was skyrocketing, charging straight toward three times that amount.
That level was horrifying beyond belief.
Only now did Akira finally understand what was happening, and he could not help cursing.
"Damn it. So the Sharingan is evolving. But does it really need to make this much of a scene?"
He had never imagined that the Sharingan's next stage would cause such an earth-shaking disturbance.
In truth, this was only happening because his situation was unique.
His body did not naturally carry pure Ōtsutsuki bloodline traits. For these eyes to skip past the Eternal Mangekyō and leap directly toward the Rinnegan was essentially a forced evolution that defied normal rules.
This evolution carried a powerful instinct to grow stronger.
His body itself was driving the Sharingan toward its ultimate form.
On top of that, the ocular power he had accumulated before this was far too vast, several times greater than even Uchiha Madara at his peak.
A quantitative change had triggered a qualitative transformation.
That was what caused today's runaway eruption.