A sudden rush of memories flooded Akira's mind as Clone One disbanded. The clone had managed to verify four Chakra Sealing Bowls in the Academy district—all of them successfully brimming with compressed Kyūbi chakra—before a massive wave of heat and flying debris from the Nine-Tails' rampage vaporized the shadow clone on the spot.
Akira sighed softly, shaking his head. No point sending another clone into the frontlines.
Redirecting his path, Akira dashed across the rooftops toward the sectors further away from the beast's direct trajectory. His steps brought him to the edge of the Uchiha district. Because the Uchiha clan lived near the central area of the village, their neighborhood had borne the brunt of the Nine-Tails' sudden, explosive appearance.
Smoke billowed through the shattered streets. As Akira paused on a stone ledge, his eyes caught a lone figure moving aimlessly down an empty, ruined alleyway—a young girl roughly his age, crying hysterically as she called out for her parents.
CRACK!
High above, a massive stone boulder, dislodged by a thrashing tail, came crashing down directly toward her.
Without a second thought, Akira executed a lightning-fast Body Flicker Technique. A faint blur crossed the street, and in the fraction of a second before the stone pulverized the pavement, Akira scooped up the girl and leapt backward, landing smoothly on a nearby porch.
Looking back, he felt a cold chill run down his spine. The sheer scale of destruction the Nine-Tails had wrought in under ten minutes was terrifying.
"Hey! Over here, quickly!" a crisp, urgent voice called out from behind.
Akira spun around. Standing under the shadow of a partially collapsed doorway was a young boy holding an infant wrapped tightly in blankets, beckoning them into the covered hallway.
Akira instantly recognized the pair: Uchiha Itachi and his baby brother, Sasuke.
Why is he out in the open? Akira thought, startled.
Before he could process the meeting, a small voice spoke up from his arms. "C-Can you put me down now?"
Akira looked down into his arms. The girl he had saved had a cute face, tears still brimming in her eyes, and the red fan crest of the Uchiha clan emblazoned on her high-collared shirt.
He immediately set her down and kept his voice neutral. "Follow him and find a safe shelter."
Before Itachi could ask any questions, Akira vanished into thin air, leaving behind only a faint gust of wind.
Sprinting through the shadows of an adjacent alley, Akira internally cursed his carelessness. I should have worn a mask for the main body too! I only prepared masks for the clones since their missions were risky... I never expected to bump directly into Fugaku's eldest son. He couldn't help but grumble at the Uchiha Clan Leader for leaving his young children unattended in the middle of a warzone.
Back near the alley, the young girl looked at Itachi, her eyes wide. "Itachi... do you know who that was?"
Itachi's face was deathly serious as he adjusted his grip on baby Sasuke. "I don't know... but he had the Byakugan. He's a Hyūga. We need to reach the evacuation shelters immediately, Izumi."
Uchiha Izumi nodded quickly, looking toward the alley where Akira had disappeared. "He looked the same age as us. Shouldn't we have asked him to come with us?"
"He left in a hurry," Itachi replied firmly, taking her hand. "We move now."
As they hurried toward the underground shelters, Itachi's mind raced. What was a Hyūga boy doing alone in the Uchiha district? And to execute a Body Flicker at that speed... at our age?
Beside him, Izumi kept her eyes on the path, her mind quietly occupied by the image of the quiet boy who had pulled her from the jaws of death.
KABOOM!
A blinding crimson light illuminated the night sky. Akira paused atop a broken roof, looking up in absolute awe as the Nine-Tails compressed a staggering amount of black and red chakra into a colossal sphere in front of its maw—a Tailed Beast Bomb.
Shit... the raw power of a Tailed Beast is absurd, Akira thought, his teeth gritting. The sheer volume of chakra is beyond comprehension.
He quickly dropped into a secluded, ruined building for cover.
The Tailed Beast Bomb launched with a deafening roar, disintegrating everything in its path as it soared toward the Hokage Monument. But right before impact, a massive seal formula flared across the sky, and the destructive sphere vanished into thin air, detonating miles away in the distant mountains.
Space-Time Ninjutsu... The Fourth Hokage has stepped onto the battlefield, Akira realized. This crisis will be over soon.
As he caught his breath in the quiet ruins of the collapsed house, a faint, ragged gasp reached his ears.
"H-Help... someone... please..."
Akira instantly turned and activated his Byakugan. Veins bulged around his eyes as his vision penetrated the fallen timber and stone. Underneath the heavy main beam, two bodies were trapped.
He moved swiftly, throwing aside heavy wooden beams and shattering stone slabs with precise chakra-infused palm strikes.
Within moments, the two victims came into view—an Uchiha couple. The woman was unconscious, buried under lighter thatch, with no severe injuries beyond a head contusion.
The man, however, was pinned under the entire weight of the main pillar. His body below the waist was utterly crushed, blood pooling heavily beneath him.
What made Akira freeze in complete shock, however, was the man's eyes.
Spinning wildly in his bloodshot, pale face was not a standard three-tomoe Sharingan... but a terrifying, intricate pattern featuring six distinct tomoe linked like a wheel within the crimson irises.
The dying Uchiha, pale as a sheet and clutching his unconscious wife's hand, looked up at Akira with desperate, trembling eyes.
"Please..." the man coughed, blood spilling over his lips as he begged. "Save my wife..."
Akira snapped back to reality. He quickly reached down, carefully pulling the woman out from the debris. After examining her pulse, Akira spoke urgently. "Your wife is safe! She only sustained a minor concussion—"
Akira stopped mid-sentence.
The dying man let out one final, agonizing breath as his hand fell limply to the rubble. As life drained from his body, the six-tomoe wheel pattern slowly closed and dissolved, reverting into a normal Sharingan bathed in a faint, residual red glow before going completely still.
The man was dead.