At that moment, on the shattered battlefield a thousand meters away, Akira's senjutsu clone was still locked in a final, earth-shaking struggle with Kiei.
The mountains had long since ceased to resemble mountains.
What had once been a volcanic basin ringed by jagged black cliffs was now nothing but a ruined wasteland of broken stone, collapsed ridges, and bottomless craters. Molten rock surged through newly torn fissures in the earth, spilling like rivers of fire. Every shockwave from the clash sent curtains of magma and pulverized stone roaring skyward.
The air itself seemed unable to bear the weight of that battle.
Kiei, having devoured the souls of his own clan and forced the Reaper's power into his body, had already cast away any resemblance to an ordinary shinobi. His flesh flickered between solidity and translucence. Black sigils crawled across his skin like living curses. The skull-bead necklace at his throat gave off a faint, ghastly light, and in his hand, the Reaper's long blade hissed with a chill that seemed to slice through the very soul.
Across from him stood Akira's clone, still wrapped in that vast, suffocating senjutsu pressure.
The clone's body was no ordinary shadow construct. It was a fully stabilized entity formed from ultra-dense senjutsu chakra. Purple-gold arcs of lightning coiled around it like dragons. Its expression remained calm, almost bored, as if this apocalyptic fight were little more than a warm-up.
That calm nearly drove Kiei mad.
He had burned his body, his chakra, his spirit, even his clan's dead, yet he still could not put down a single clone.
"A clone... just a clone...!"
Kiei's face twisted violently. His eyes were bloodshot, his voice ragged with fury.
"I gave up everything! I fed my soul to the abyss! I offered the clan's future on the altar of the dead! How can I still be losing to a clone?!"
The clone said nothing.
Its indifference was worse than mockery.
Kiei's breathing became more and more ragged. The force sustaining his overclocked body was beginning to fail. The Reaper's borrowed power was terrifying, but it came with a brutal cost. The body that had been forcibly elevated beyond its limits was already beginning to crack under the strain.
Blood seeped from the corners of his eyes.
His fingers trembled.
And yet the madness in his face only deepened.
If he was going to die, then he would drag this monster down with him.
Kiei suddenly slammed the butt of the Reaper's blade into the broken ground.
"Come out!"
The earth split open.
From the fractures below, countless black spiritual chains burst forth like swarms of venomous serpents, lashing across the battlefield toward Akira's clone. Every chain carried dense soul-corrupting power. Even before they touched the ground, the surrounding rock blackened and withered, as though life itself had been drained out of it.
"Forbidden Art: Gravebinding Cataclysm!"
The chains came from all directions, turning the entire battlefield into a death cage.
At the same instant, Kiei blurred and vanished.
He was not using ordinary speed.
He had shifted into that half-spiritual state again, discarding much of his bodily weight while preserving just enough substance to wield the Reaper's blade. His figure became ghostlike, impossible to track by conventional sight, flitting between the storms of debris and flame like a malevolent specter.
But Akira's clone merely lifted its eyes.
The purple-gold ripples of senjutsu perception expanded outward in silence.
The clone stepped once.
Just once.
All the incoming chains froze for a fraction of a heartbeat, as though they had crashed into an invisible wall.
Then the clone's right hand flashed up.
"Senjutsu Art: Thunder Vein Collapse."
From its palm, a web of impossibly fine lightning threads erupted outward, not in straight bolts, but in branching, pulse-like currents that spread through the battlefield like a living nervous system. Each thread struck a spiritual chain dead-on, and the moment they made contact, the chains convulsed violently.
The reason was simple.
Ordinary chakra could be contaminated by Kiei's soul arts.
Natural energy could not.
Under the crushing purity of senjutsu lightning, the black chains exploded one after another in showers of ash and shattered spirit-matter. The entire battlefield lit up in an instant, as though a violet sun had burst to life amid the ruins.
Kiei reappeared above the clone's head, roaring as he brought down the Reaper's blade.
"Die!"
The blade tore through the air with a scream.
That strike no longer targeted flesh.
It targeted existence.
Even a Kage-class shinobi would have had their spirit split apart by that one swing.
But Akira's clone finally moved for real.
Its left foot twisted.
Its torso shifted half an inch.
The Reaper's blade missed Akira's neck by a hair and carved a wound in empty air, slicing open a black crack in space that devoured a nearby ridge behind them.
Before Kiei could recover, the clone's elbow slammed into his ribs.
Crack!
The sound was sickening.
Several ribs caved in on the spot.
Kiei coughed and spun away, but the clone was already there, following through like a bolt of judgment.
A knee to the spine.
A palm strike to the sternum.
A backhand across the jaw.
Every blow landed with monstrous force. Every strike was infused with high-density senjutsu chakra, which not only battered Kiei's physical body but shook the souls fused inside him. The countless absorbed spirits that gave him strength now became liabilities. Each impact stirred them into violent instability.
Kiei's body lurched backward.
His skin split.
Dark soul-light leaked from the cracks in his flesh.
Still, he refused to fall.
With a feral snarl, he bit down on his own tongue and spat a mouthful of blood across the Reaper's blade.
The blade trembled.
The vast phantom behind him grew clearer.
Two skeletal arms emerged from the haze and gripped Kiei's shoulders from behind like a true grim reaper descending into the mortal world.
For an instant, the pressure in the area multiplied.
Even the magma below recoiled.
The clone narrowed its eyes slightly.
Now that was finally worth noticing.
Kiei threw his head back and screamed, every vein in his body bulging.
"Take him!"
The Reaper phantom opened its mouth.
What emerged was not sound, but a wave of dead stillness.
Where it passed, everything stopped.
Flowing lava slowed.
Falling ash hung suspended.
Even the crackle of lightning seemed muted.
This was no longer simple soul pressure. It was a localized death-domain, a field that attempted to drag everything inside into the same stagnant state as the underworld.
Akira's clone's movements slowed by a fraction.
That fraction was enough.
Kiei appeared in front of him in a blur, both hands on the blade, driving the Reaper's weapon straight toward the clone's heart.
The blade struck.
For the first time all battle, it pierced.
The tip sank through the clone's chest.
Kiei's face twisted into savage delight.
"I got you!"
But the next moment, his expression froze.
No blood.
No collapse.
No dispersal.
The clone looked down at the blade lodged in its chest, then back up at Kiei with an almost pitying gaze.
"You finally landed one."
Before Kiei could process the meaning of those words, the clone's entire body lit up from within.
It was not dying.
It was charging.
The senjutsu chakra that made up its body surged inward instead of spilling out, compressing toward the wound Kiei had made. The Reaper's blade, rather than disrupting the clone's structure, had given Akira's clone something far more useful:
a fixed point.
A conduit.
A direct line into Kiei.
Kiei's delight vanished.
"No...!"
The clone placed one hand on the blade still embedded in its chest and smiled faintly.
"Thanks."
Then it spoke in a quiet voice.
"Senjutsu Art: Heavenly Prison Descent."
The world went white.
A pillar of purple-gold lightning descended from the clouds above like the wrath of a god.
No, "lightning" was too weak a word.
It was a judgment spear.
It hit the Reaper's blade first, turning the weapon into a channel. From there, the energy blasted directly through Kiei's arms, into his body, and then through the phantom grim form looming behind him.
The scream that followed was no longer human.
Kiei's body arched violently as every absorbed soul inside him was illuminated at once. The hidden black masses writhing in his chest and spine became visible through his skin for a moment, like prisoners trapped inside glass. Then the senjutsu current detonated through them all.
His body blew apart from within.
One arm vanished.
Half his torso burst open.
The skull-bead necklace at his throat exploded into powder.
Behind him, the Reaper phantom staggered, its outline flickering as though the very ritual sustaining it had been struck at the root.
But Kiei still did not die.
That was what made him so monstrous.
Or perhaps, what made his clan so foul.
What remained of his body rose again, held together by madness and hate. His lower half dragged uselessly through the rubble, but his upper body still gripped the blade. His ruined face split into a ghastly grin.
"So what if I die?"
His voice was wet and broken, but full of delirious triumph.
"If I can cut you down here... if I can drag that body of yours into death with me... then the clan still wins!"
He raised his left hand.
All across the battlefield, the remnants of the shattered skeleton army began to tremble.
Every scrap of bone, every leftover soul fragment, every shred of spiritual residue from the ritual surged toward Kiei like black smoke caught in a storm.
He was going to do it again.
Not restore himself.
Fuse everything into one final strike.
Even Akira's clone went silent for a heartbeat.
Then, at last, it abandoned the measured pace of battle.
The clone lifted its right hand.
Far overhead, storm clouds that had already been scorched and churned by the previous fighting began to rotate.
The clone no longer bothered conserving power.
Natural energy flooded in from the sky, the earth, the molten veins below, from every direction at once. The clone became the center of a vast celestial vortex. Lightning began to gather behind it, not in threads now, but in oceans.
Kiei sensed it and looked up.
For the first time in this entire battle, true fear appeared in his eyes.
The clone spoke softly.
"Enough."
Behind it, space cracked.
From that fracture emerged the colossal upper body of the Lightning Titan once more.
Not as a full manifestation this time.
This form was denser.
Smaller.
More compressed.
And therefore even more terrifying.
It rose behind Akira's clone like a divine executioner. Its prison-cloth armor blazed with flowing script made of living lightning. Three giant thunder-serpents coiled around its arms. In its hand, instead of a blade or shield, it held a massive javelin formed from condensed lightning and senjutsu chakra.
The pressure alone flattened everything within hundreds of meters.
Kiei tried to force the gathering souls into his body faster, screaming as he reached the end of his life and his will.
"Move! MOVE!"
He hurled himself forward, turning into a streak of black-red ruin, dragging all the dead with him in a final murderous rush.
Akira's clone did not retreat.
The Lightning Titan drew back its arm.
For a suspended instant, the battlefield fell perfectly silent.
Then the javelin flew.
"Sky-Sunderer."
The world split open.
The javelin crossed the battlefield in less than a blink, leaving behind a straight line of annihilation. Mountains, magma, smoke, soul residue, spiritual chains, even the air itself seemed parted by its passage.
It struck Kiei head-on.
There was no explosion at first.
Only stillness.
Kiei's body stopped in midair, frozen around the point of impact.
His face still held that expression of desperate, hateful refusal.
Then cracks spread through him.
Across his flesh.
Across the black soul-matter.
Across the Reaper's lingering power.
Across every spirit he had devoured.
And then, with a sound like a world collapsing, all of it disintegrated together.
Not shattered.
Not blown apart.
Erased.
Kiei vanished.
The final mass of fused dead that made up his strength vanished with him.
Even the lingering Reaper projection lost its anchor and dissolved into the empty dark with a warped, voiceless shriek.
A heartbeat later, the delayed detonation arrived.
The line where the javelin had passed erupted into a sky-reaching pillar of lightning. The surrounding mountains folded inward. The magma sea was punched open. The battlefield sank under the force, leaving behind a canyon of fused black glass and smoking stone.
By the time the blast winds reached the distant peak where Akira's true body stood, Kiei was already gone from the world.
Completely.
Thoroughly.
Without even ashes left to bury.
Only then did Akira, still standing beside the recovering Kurenai and Anko, narrow his eyes slightly.
Once Akira confirmed that Kiei had been completely destroyed, his gaze sharpened slightly.
Far away, his clone dispersed into white smoke.
With the jutsu released, the imposing Lightning Titan broke apart as well.
It scattered into countless sparks of lightning, drifting like fireflies before fading between space and earth. The sight was breathtaking.
Akira turned around, his tone as calm as if he were speaking about the weather.
"Mission complete. That lightning titan wasn't some creature. It was just a ninjutsu."
In truth, that thing had been nothing more than a mass of high-density chakra with its own awareness.
Kurenai and Anko stared at Akira as if he were an alien, disbelief written all over their faces. "That was just a ninjutsu?"
"But it looked alive. It was even roaring!"
Anko's eyes were wide. She simply could not accept that explanation.
Akira only smiled faintly and offered no further clarification. There was no point explaining a battle at that level. They would not really grasp it anyway.
Anko, being broad-minded by nature, quickly let it go and suddenly blurted, "Oh, right! You used Sage Mode back there, didn't you? Was that because of senjutsu? My God, that was insane!"
"And that Kiei... was he even human? Just look at what's left out there!"
She pointed toward the wasteland ahead. For thousands of meters in every direction, not a blade of grass remained. There was not a single intact hill in sight. The ground was pocked with craters as though a meteor shower had blasted through.
Akira remained as steady as ever. "His power had already gone beyond Kage level. On top of that, he offered himself up to the Reaper. If the borrowed strength hadn't come with a time limit, I probably would've had to drag it out much longer."
Anko froze after hearing that. "Be... beyond Kage level?!"
Before Akira could answer, Kurenai spoke in a low voice. "Actually, I felt it the moment we started fighting him. He was far stronger than an ordinary Kage-class shinobi. At the very least... I think even Tsunade-hime might not have matched his raw destructive power."
"And after we blacked out, he must have absorbed even more power from his clan. His strength definitely surged again. Reaching beyond Kage level would make sense."
"Especially after he resorted to sacrificing his own soul through a forbidden jutsu."
"That kind of power is almost impossible to measure."
"Just look at the battlefield. The level of that fight was completely beyond anything we could imagine."
"Akira, just how terrifying is your strength now? And another thing... you were clearly here treating us the whole time, so how were you also fighting him over there for that long?"
Kurenai asked two questions in one breath, but Akira only answered the second.
"Oh, I left a clone over there to keep him company."
The moment those words left his mouth, Anko turned to stone. She stared at him blankly. "A... a clone?"
"You've got to be kidding me."
Akira shrugged and did not deny it. He only gave her a meaningful smile.
Kurenai thought it through for a moment, then came to the same conclusion. "That's right. Akira really was here treating us the whole time. He couldn't have been in two places at once. So it had to be a clone fighting."
Anko finally understood, but her eyes widened even further. "So you're saying you used one clone to beat Kiei, a man stronger than Kage level, into dust?"
If a mere clone could unleash that kind of apocalyptic destruction, she could no longer imagine how terrifying Akira's true body would be if he fought seriously. Enough to destroy the world?
Akira clapped his hands once, snapping them out of their shock. "Alright, enough standing around in a daze. The mission's finished. We should head back."
Kurenai looked at Akira, her face turning red all over again. Akira had saved their lives, yes, but... he had still seen everything. And he had seen it very clearly.
Akira was no longer some boy. He was a grown man in every sense. The thought left Kurenai so embarrassed she felt like she could dig a house into the ground with her toes.
Anko, on the other hand, seemed as carefree as ever and barely minded. She was single, she and Akira were close, and she trusted his character. As far as she was concerned, he probably had not been entertaining any improper thoughts about her body anyway.
On that point, Anko was right. At the time, Akira's mind had been entirely focused on keeping them alive. He had not had room in his head for anything else.
Not that either woman lacked charm, but to Akira, it was only that. Compared to Tsunade, they simply did not hit the same. In his eyes, Tsunade was the finest luxury ride in the entire shinobi world. No one else really compared.
That was not even the main reason, though. The main reason was professional discipline. At the time, he had simply acted as a healer doing what needed to be done.
Anko not caring was her business. Kurenai was different. She had someone in her life. After being seen so thoroughly by Akira, she could not shake the feeling that she had somehow wronged Asuma.
She and Asuma had not even reached that point yet...
And now, somehow, Akira had seen everything first.
She knew rationally that it had been unavoidable, that it had been done to save her life, but facts were facts. Standing in front of Akira now, she could not help feeling awkward from head to toe.
Just as the three of them were about to leave, Kurenai suddenly stopped and stared straight at Akira. "Akira... you didn't see anything just now, right?"
Hope filled her eyes. More than anything, she wanted to hear him deny it. Even if it was just to spare her feelings.
Beside her, Anko gave a wicked grin and deliberately puffed out her chest. "Come on, Akira. Be honest. How's my figure?"
She knew him too well, and somewhere in her heart she liked him a little. Rather than blaming him, she chose to tease him instead.
Akira frowned. He knew Kurenai was thin-skinned and did not want her carrying that burden around in her head.
So he put on a serious face and lied smoothly. "No. I worked blind. Didn't see a thing."
Kurenai let out a long breath of relief and shot him a grateful look. "Thank you."
Anko curled her lip, then laughed and let the matter drop without pressing the embarrassing question any further.
The three of them did not waste time on the road. They traveled at full speed, and after more than a day of hard marching, they finally returned to Konoha, dusty and worn.
Yet the moment they entered the village, before Akira had even had time to sit down, he was hit with explosive news:
Gaara had been kidnapped by the Akatsuki.
Inside the Hokage's office, the atmosphere was heavy.
Tsunade let out a weary sigh and rubbed at her temples. "Looks like the Akatsuki have finally gone all in."
Akira walked to the window and looked out at the village beyond. At the moment, only he and Tsunade were in the office.
He asked in a calm voice, "Still moving in pairs? The Akatsuki always operate two at a time."
The truth was, Tsunade herself had only a hazy picture of what had happened over in Sunagakure. All she knew was that the Akatsuki had made their move, and when they did, they came out swinging. They had snatched the Kazekage himself in one strike.
For the leader of a great shinobi village to be captured alive on his own turf was a humiliation beyond words.
Then again, considering Sunagakure's miserable luck throughout its history, it was not exactly the first time something like this had happened.