"Shit!"
The word wasn't spoken; it detonated in Renjiro's mind, a primal detonation of pure, cold dread. One moment, Killer Bee was a contained, albeit furious, whirlwind of orange chakra. The next, he changed.
The air east of the main battlefield screamed. Not with sound, but with pressure, a suffocating, oily wave of malevolent energy that slammed into Tenjin like a physical wall, making the giant eagle lurch violently in the sky with a startled "SKREEE!"
Below, the orange chakra cloaking Bee didn't just flare; it erupted, expanding exponentially, darkening to the colour of congealed blood, shot through with streaks of corrosive black. It ceased to be a cloak and became a shape – a monstrous, unstable silhouette coalescing around the Jinchuriki.
The outline was terrifyingly familiar: the distinct, hammer-shaped head of the Eight-Tails, Gyuki, complete with curved horns that pulsed with volatile energy, forming a jagged crown above the barely discernible human form writhing within.
Eyes, not Bee's, but vast, pupil-less pits of molten crimson rage, burned within the chakra skull.
"ROOOOOAAAAAARRR!"
A guttural, subsonic vibrated through the earth and air, shaking Renjiro's bones even hundreds of feet up.
'Too far. Gyuki's bleeding through! Why are Kumo's jinchuriki's always this intense' Renjiro's thoughts raced, panic a cold serpent coiling in his gut.
His Sharingan spun frantically, tracking the unstable, swelling mass of hatred below. The carefully maintained distance, the hit-and-run tactics – they were meaningless now. This was a force of nature, not a fighter.
"Tenjin! Go higher!" Renjiro barked, hands already flashing through seals. He couldn't run, not with Shiba's forces vulnerable miles west. He had to contain it.
"SCHLINK-CLANG-KKKKKKK!"
Gleaming chains, thicker and brighter than before, surged from Renjiro and erupted from the earth beneath the transforming monstrosity. They whipped through the air, seeking purchase, aiming to bind limbs, constrict the swelling chakra mass, to pin the beast before it fully manifested.
They never reached their target. Inches from the roiling blood-black chakra, the chains simply… dissolved.
Not shattered, not repelled, but dissolved, consumed like paper tossed into a blast furnace.
"HISSSSSS-SPUTTER!"
The intense, corrosive energy radiating from the pseudo-Gyuki head vaporized the pure chakra constructs before they could fully form. Renjiro felt the backlash like a physical blow to his chakra system, a searing jolt that made him gasp.
'Impossible! The density… it's cutting through the chains' inherent suppression!'
The monstrous head tilted upwards, those burning crimson pits fixing on Tenjin. A guttural growl, devoid of rhyme or reason, rumbled forth. Then, it moved. Not with Bee's controlled agility, but with terrifying, lurching speed.
A massive, semi-formed chakra tail, thick as an ancient tree trunk and crackling with black energy, lashed upwards like a whip made of hatred.
Tenjin banked hard, Renjiro clinging on, feathers ruffling violently. The tail missed the eagle's body by inches, but the sheer pressure wave and the corrosive energy washing off it scored deep, smoking gashes along Tenjin's left wingtip and flank.
The eagle shrieked in pain and fury "SKRAAAAAWWW!"
A sound Renjiro had never heard from his stoic companion. Molten drops of chakra sizzled on the scorched feathers.
'Damn it!' Renjiro thought as he unleashed a desperate attack,
"Katon: Gōkakyū no Jutsu!"
"WHOOSH-BOOM!"
The fireball struck the chakra mass dead centre, only to be absorbed like a drop of water into a tar pit, fueling the darkness within.
'I'd take the bad rapping over this any day!'
Panic threatened to choke him as another chakra limb, this one a crude, clawed fist, smashed the rocky outcrop where Tenjin had been hovering milliseconds before, pulverizing it into dust.
Renjiro danced a deadly ballet on Tenjin's back, the giant eagle straining with injured wings to stay airborne, dodging lashing tails and grasping claws formed of pure malice. Each near-miss sent waves of corrosive energy washing over them, searing Renjiro's skin even through his flak jacket, making Tenjin shudder.
'I can't hold him like this! Not without…' The forbidden thought surfaced, cold and desperate.
'The Mangekyō… Susano'o… I could cage him. Crush him. But the cost… the attention… Danzō, the Council, the other villages… they can't know. Not yet.'
Revealing that power would paint a target on his back far larger than any he already carried. It wasn't just about winning this battle; it was about surviving the political fallout. But survival now was looking increasingly unlikely.
'No choice,' Renjiro thought, the decision crystallizing in a moment of pure, survivalist terror.
'Just a flicker. Just enough to ease the pressure.'
He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second. When they snapped open, the Sharingan's tomoe was gone. In their place burned the intricate, terrifying pattern of his Mangekyō Sharingan. The world sharpened, slowed, but also gained a horrifying, bloody hue.
This time, when the chains erupted they were different. Wreathed not in silver-white light, but in eerie, flickering green fire.
The flames didn't burn bright; they burned cold and silent, clinging to the chains like spectral moss.
The chains struck the roiling chakra mass surrounding the pseudo-Gyuki head. This time, they didn't dissolve. The green fire hissed and spat violently where it met the corrosive Eight-Tails chakra.
It wasn't a contest of force; it was consumption. The green flames burned bits of the dense chakra itself, devouring it like acid eating through cloth. Where the fire-wreathed chains touched the dark energy, it sizzled, blackened, and retreated.
A sound ripped from the monstrous form – not a roar, but a shriek of pure, unadulterated agony.
"GYAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!"
It was a sound that transcended species, a raw scrape of pain echoing from the depths of the beast and the trapped Jinchuriki within. The forming Tailed Beast Bomb flickered and destabilized. The lashing limbs recoiled violently from the burning chains, the corrosive chakra recoiling as if scalded.
Miles away, amidst the brutal melee that had resumed after each side realized that pausing in battle was an opening for their enemies, Ayy had just shattered an Earth Wall with a lightning-coated fist when the agonized shriek tore across the battlefield.
He froze, mid-swing, his head snapping eastward. Every instinct screamed.
'Bee!'
He saw it, his little brother, trapped and screaming within that monstrous chakra. The carefully maintained control slipping, the beast taking over, and now… burning. Renjiro was doing something to him. Something that caused that sound. The strategic imperative of crushing Konoha vanished, replaced by a single, primal drive: 'Save Bee.
"MOVE!" Ayy bellowed, not at the enemy, but at the Kumo shinobi near him. His lightning cloak flared violently, throwing back Konoha attackers like ragdolls.
He didn't fight through them; he became a thunderbolt incarnate. He flickered, not with shunshin speed, but with pure, chakra-ignited velocity, a blue-white streak tearing a path through the chaotic battlefield. Konoha shinobi barely registered the blur before being blasted aside by the concussive wake. He didn't engage, didn't deviate. He was a missile locked onto the source of his brother's pain, miles of shattered landscape vanishing beneath him in heartbeats.
====
Renjiro gasped, blood trickling from his left eye, the strain of controlling both the chains and the flames immense. The green fire burned, forcing the monstrous chakra mass back, creating a temporary barrier of agony. But he could feel Gyuki's rage intensifying through the pain, the beast's consciousness fighting the searing intrusion. It wasn't contained; it was enraged and cornered. Tenjin, bleeding and labouring, struggled to maintain altitude above the maelstrom.
'Just a few more seconds…' Renjiro thought desperately, pouring more chakra into the burning chains.
He never saw the attack coming from the west. His senses, overwhelmed by the malevolent chakra before him and the strain of the Mangekyō, missed the blue-white comet streaking across the lower sky.
Ayy arrived. He didn't land. He didn't announce himself. Seeing the crimson-haired Uzumaki high above on the injured eagle, seeing the green fire burning his brother, unleashed a fury colder and more focused than any he'd shown on the main battlefield.
His hand snapped up, lightning not just coating it, but forging it. Raw Raiton chakra compressed into a physical, crackling spear of pure annihilation, longer than a man was tall, humming with the promise of oblivion.
"RAITON: RAIJIN'S WRATH!" (Lightning Release: Wrath of the Thunder God)
The name was a guttural snarl. He hurled the lightning spear not at Renjiro, but at the giant eagle's already injured wing. It wasn't a bolt; it was a beam.
"RRRRRRIIIIIP-ZZZZZZZZZT-BOOM!"
Tenjin screamed. "SKREEEEEEEEE-AAAAAAGH!"
It was a sound of purest agony and terror. The lightning spear struck true, piercing through the already wounded wing joint, exploding out the other side in a shower of scorched feathers, burning blood, and shattered bone. The impact was catastrophic. Tenjin's wing folded instantly, useless. His strangled cry cut off as his massive body pitched violently sideways, plummeting from the sky like a felled mountain.
Renjiro, caught utterly off-guard, felt the world lurch. He lost his footing, the burning chains vanishing as his concentration shattered. He had a horrifying glimpse of Ayy's furious, lightning-wreathed form standing amidst the rocks below, then of the rapidly approaching ground, and finally, of the enraged, burning pseudo-Gyuki head turning its molten gaze upwards, no longer contained, as he and his faithful summon spiralled down into the hellscape below. The sky, his vantage point, his advantage – gone. He was falling, and the beast was waiting.
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