Renjiro's Green Susanoo asserted itself—not rising slowly, but unfolding into existence. A towering, humanoid skeleton of condensed chakra, fifteen meters tall, its bones shimmering with viridescent energy, a faint, ghostly echo of flesh and armour hinting at its form. In one skeletal fist, it gripped a long, straight bo staff of the same vibrant power. It was a monument to controlled devastation.
Kushina did not rush him. She took a single, deliberate step back, her eyes wide, not with fear, but with analytical awe. The wind from the Susanoo's manifestation whipped her red hair into a frenzy. A low whistle escaped her lips.
"So that's the thing you weren't using," she murmured, her voice carrying easily through the thrumming air. "The reports didn't do it justice."
Her hands flashed through seals. "Kongō Fusa: Shiten Kōsoku!"(Adamantine Chains: Four-Point Anchor Formation).
Her golden chains, thicker and more numerous than before, did not shoot toward Renjiro or the Susanoo's body. Instead, they speared into the earth at the four cardinal points around the giant.
The chains did not attempt to bind the massive chakra construct. They glowed with intense sealing formulae, and the space between them thickened, becoming a zone of dense, anchored reality. The intent was clear: not to shatter the Susanoo—a feat she knew would be catastrophically costly—but to deny it freedom of movement. It was a cage for the space it occupied, turning the fight from a brawl into a brutal pressure test.
On the ridge, Sama's eyes widened in understanding. "She's not trying to break it… she's treating it like a tailed beast. Containing it."
Inside the skull-like helm of the Susanoo, Renjiro felt the pressure instantly.
It was like wading through deepening water that threatened to become cement. He could feel the anchored space resisting the Susanoo's every potential shift.
Instead of brute-forcing against it—a chakra drain he couldn't afford with the Gates still screaming in his veins—he countered with control. He focused inward, circulating the Susanoo's own immense chakra. He vented excess pressure through fine, controlled jets of wind-natured energy from the construct's joints, stabilising its posture. He directed fire-natured chakra to circulate along the ribs, reinforcing structural integrity with a circulating, glowing heat.
Then, from the Susanoo's back, his own silver Adamantine Chains erupted, not to challenge Kushina's anchors directly, but to work in tandem with the Susanoo's massive bo staff. The silver chains, thinner and more numerous, wove around the golden anchors not to break them, but to subtly alter their angles, to find the points of least resistance in the sealed space.
The bo staff pressed against the invisible barrier, not with a shove, but with a probing, grinding force, seeking a leverage point.
Kushina, her senses extended through her chains, felt the shift. Her eyes narrowed.
"Clever brat. He's reinforcing it from the inside… and unpicking the lock." With a grunt of effort, she poured more chakra into her anchors, the golden chains glowing white-hot.
The sealed space shuddered, but Renjiro's combined pressure—internal stabilisation and external, precise interference—found its moment. With a sound like a mountain sighing, the Susanoo took a single, ground-crushing step forward, breaking free of the containment zone. The anchored space snapped back with a BOOM that left a perfect, square imprint of compressed earth behind it.
Now on the offensive, the Susanoo moved. One massive arm swept forward, its silver chains lashing out like a dozen gigantic, razor-tipped whips. The other arm brought the bo staff around in a devastating, horizontal sweep aimed at Kushina's level, forcing her to defend against two attacks of vastly different scales and speeds simultaneously.
Kushina's response was an escalation of a different kind. She didn't reach for the fox's chakra. She drew deeper from the vast, bottomless well that was herself. Her crimson chakra aura, already visible, didn't expand. It intensified, deepening to a bloody scarlet.
The chains themselves glowed brighter, hotter, and they thickened, each link becoming as substantial as a temple column. She didn't create more of them; she made the existing ones denser, heavier, more potent.
"Kongō Fusa: Yokuatsu no Ami!" (Adamantine Chains: Suppression Weave).
Her chains, now monstrously thick, didn't try to bind the entire Susanoo. Instead, they shot forth and partially wrapped around its wrists and the ankle of its advancing leg. They didn't hold it still—that was impossible. Their purpose was to force constant, exhausting resistance.
Every movement the Susanoo made now had to tear against the unimaginable tensile strength of Kushina's reinforced chains. The fight had distilled into its purest form: the Susanoo's structural stability versus Kushina's sheer, inhuman endurance.
On the ridge, Minato was no longer leaning casually. He was standing straight, every muscle taut, his brilliant blue eyes missing nothing. The academic fascination was gone, replaced by the focused readiness of a man who knew the precipice when he saw it.
And Kushina saw it too. As she strained, her feet planted deep in trenches of her own making, a critical psychological pivot occurred. She realised, with crystal clarity, that this was her current limit without tapping into Kurama's power.
To push further, to try and actually overpower the Susanoo, would require the fox's cooperation. That would shatter the rules of the spar and risk everything. She stopped not because she was losing, but because she understood the cost. A strained, breathless, but genuine laugh burst from her.
"You know," she called out, her voice echoing within the roaring chakra maelstrom, "this ends badly for both of us, right? I can't put you down without… and you can't keep this up forever!"
It was a declaration of a stalemate, a warrior's offer to step back from the brink. But in the moment of that realisation, as her will briefly shifted from fight to contain, something shifted inside her.
The deep red chakra around Kushina flickered, then thickened, taking on a viscous, orange hue at its core. It did not flare outward in a rage. It turned inward, a pressure cooker sealing itself. Kushina's triumphant grin vanished.
Her eyes flew wide, with internal shock. A choked gasp escaped her. The chakra around her was no longer just an extension of her will; it had a different, older, angrier consciousness behind it.
Kurama was no longer merely lending power. It was pushing.
On the ridge, Minato's hand twitched, a kunai appearing in his grip from pure reflex. It wasn't a threat. It was the ready stance of a man prepared to use the Flying Thunder God to intervene between two forces of nature.
"Don't—" Kushina gritted out, her voice cracking with strain as she fought the surge from within. She clutched at her stomach, her knuckles white. "Don't you dare—"
The Nine-Tails did not roar. It didn't need to. It simply leaned against the fragile walls of its prison. The environmental effects were instantaneous and terrifying. Kushina's chains, still wrapped around the Susanoo's limbs, suddenly tightened with vicious, autonomous force, digging into the chakra construct with a sound like grinding boulders.
The ground around her buckled upward, not from her stance, but from the raw, leaking chakra boiling out of her. The air began to howl, a keening wind born of pure, malevolent energy.
This was no longer a sparring escalation. This was a breach.
Inside the Susanoo, Renjiro realised it first. It wasn't the spike in power that alerted him; his Mangekyō was already tracking astronomical chakra levels.
It was the loss of direction. A fraction of a second before, Kushina's chakra had been a raging but directed river, powering her chains with precise intent. Now, that river had broken its banks. The orange-hued energy seeping from her was chaotic, lashing, hungry. It was no longer aligned with her will. It was overriding it.
'She's losing the internal struggle,' the thought cleaved through his battle focus.
'If this continues, she won't stop. The fight won't end with a yield or a pin. It will only end when something is broken.'
The loss of control manifested utterly. Kushina's chains, now tinged with corrosive orange chakra, surged with renewed, vicious force without any command from her. Their intent shifted palpably. They were no longer trying to restrain or test.
They were trying to break.
One chain, thicker than a tree trunk and sizzling with hostile energy, tore free from its grip on the Susanoo's wrist and, instead of pulling, coiled and slammed like a battering ram against the construct's ribcage. The sound was a deafening, sickening "CRUNCH" of stressed chakra. A web of fractures spiderwebbed across three glowing ribs.
Kushina gasped, a sound of both physical pain and profound violation. Her eyes flashed with the vertical-slit, bloody crimson of the fox's influence. For one horrifying moment, she was not alone in her own face. A snarl that was not hers twisted her lips.
Kurama pressed forward. Not enough to break free. Not enough to form a cloak or tails. But enough. Enough to usurp control of the power she had been wielding. Enough to turn their measured, cathartic spar into a potential tragedy.