"If this keeps up, defeat is only a matter of time…"
Using the Tenseigan's vision to watch Uchiha Chizumi's armored wood giant taking shape in the distance, Hyuga Hiashi felt nothing but heaviness in his heart.
He had originally believed that with the Tenseigan in his possession, even Uchiha Chizumi would be no match for him.
Reality had slapped him hard.
The Tenseigan's innate abilities couldn't break through Chizumi's Susanoo defense at all. Only his own improvised Tenseigan Rotation had managed to open up the battle.
But Uchiha Chizumi was far stronger than he had imagined. The Tenseigan Rotation possessed overwhelming destructive power and incredible defense, yet from start to finish, Hiashi still hadn't been able to touch Chizumi himself.
"It's not that the Tenseigan is weak. It's that Uchiha Chizumi is absurdly strong."
Hiashi sighed inwardly, then forcibly cast aside all distracting thoughts as the enormous armored wood giant began attacking him again.
He had to try again. One more time. He had to reach Uchiha Chizumi.
After all, most of the Hyuga clan's techniques required close combat. As long as Hiashi could break through Chizumi's defenses, he had absolute confidence he could take him down in a short time.
And if even that failed, then the only thing left would be to take the Hyuga main family elders and flee.
"Rotation! Eight Trigrams Vacuum Palm!"
As Hiashi gave a sharp cry, the already nearly indestructible blue sphere around him suddenly began releasing pale-blue vacuum shockwaves.
At a glance, those shockwaves didn't look much different from the Hyuga clan's normal Eight Trigrams Vacuum Palm.
But whenever one of those Vacuum Palm shockwaves struck the ground or a boulder, it blasted out a terrifying crater.
Even so, Uchiha Chizumi hardly reacted at all.
The dignified wood giant was wrapped in wood dragons, while a pale-purple Susanoo armored it, placing a vajra-like staff in its hands.
And when the incoming Eight Trigrams Vacuum Palm shockwaves struck the armored wood giant, they did no more than ripple its surface slightly. They couldn't even break the outermost layer of its armor.
Then, the giant armored wood giant lifted its vajra and moved with utterly unbelievable speed.
By all logic, something that huge should have been slowed by its own mass.
But the armored wood giant Chizumi had created moved like a collapsing mountain or a crashing sea.
That extreme shift from stillness to motion created a pressure too immense to describe, an impact too overwhelming to compare.
The pale-blue sphere, which had seemed nearly indestructible, was launched away in an instant by the vajra in the armored wood giant's hands.
And then an even more horrifying sight followed.
The armored wood giant moved with the agility of a shinobi.
To Hiruzen and the others watching from afar, it was just a blur—then, the next moment, Uchiha Chizumi had already appeared in front of the pale-blue sphere again and smashed it from another angle.
High above, the mountain-sized armored wood giant raced through the sky.
It had no ability to fly.
Yet by using the force of each strike against Tenseigan Rotation, Uchiha Chizumi somehow managed to keep it suspended in the air for an extended time.
Inside the Tenseigan Rotation, Hyuga Hiashi was completely stunned by the relentless barrage. Through the Tenseigan's vision, he could see the scenery around him changing constantly, and at the same time, the Tenseigan's chakra was being consumed at a terrifying rate.
He tried to gather the strength to strike back, but the armored wood giant was simply too nimble. Each time it hammered his Rotation with the vajra, it had already moved somewhere else by the next instant.
And with every blow, the strain of maintaining Tenseigan Rotation grew heavier and heavier on Hiashi.
Farther away, Jiraiya, Tsunade, Hiruzen, and the Anbu could only stare in utter shock.
The booming sound rolling across the sky seemed almost like heaven itself roaring, like thunder splitting the clouds.
But anyone with functioning eyes could see what it really was.
It was the sound of Uchiha Chizumi's armored wood giant pounding against Tenseigan Rotation.
For a moment, the sight was so surreal it almost looked like some primordial thunder god was beating his own heavenly drum.
And Hyuga Hiashi was that drum.
As time passed, and the thunderous impacts grew faster and more urgent, Hiashi finally realized what was wrong.
He could see it clearly.
The vajra in Uchiha Chizumi's hands was striking the same point on the Rotation over and over again.
Every time the vajra struck, part of it naturally wore away. But Chizumi's ocular power restored it almost instantly.
Hundreds of blows. Then thousands more.
Even his Tenseigan Rotation was beginning to fail.
Or rather, it was only a hair's breadth away from collapsing.
"Black Zetsu, that guy is about to lose!"
"Uchiha Chizumi is terrifying. Are we really supposed to fight someone like that?"
White Zetsu and Black Zetsu emerged atop a tree, watching the battle in the sky from afar. For the first time, White Zetsu realized that battle itself could actually have a kind of strange beauty.
The gigantic armored wood giant pushed both size and speed to their absolute limit.
Every landing point was impossibly precise, so precise it was almost as if it were using the Tenseigan Rotation as a stepping stone to dance a divine dance across the sky.
And those booming impacts no longer sounded like combat at all—they had become heavenly music accompanying the dance of a god.
"He never truly mastered the Tenseigan's power."
"And he only has one Tenseigan…"
Even as Black Zetsu marveled at the armored wood giant under Chizumi's control, he also noticed that the giant Tenseigan behind Hiashi had begun to show itself clearly. Hiashi's Rotation was running out of power, and both Hiashi and the Tenseigan were beginning to re-emerge.
"I think I've figured out where this Tenseigan came from."
Black Zetsu muttered quietly.
As the blue chakra around Hiashi grew thinner and thinner, a heavy greed filled Black Zetsu's gaze when he looked at the Tenseigan.
At this point, he no longer cared whether Hiashi lived or died.
All he could see now was that giant Tenseigan.
He wanted to take it.
As long as he could seize that Tenseigan, then even if every other plan failed, he could still just wait a few more years and, when the time was right, directly unleash the giant Tenseigan's power.
"Hummm…"
High in the sky, with a soft trembling sound, the blue sphere of Tenseigan Rotation shattered completely.
And the instant it broke apart, the vajra in the armored wood giant's hand smashed down hard onto Hyuga Hiashi once again.