"H-Hiro… is dead?!"
"Yes… Hiro is gone," Minato confirmed.
The words did not echo. They simply were, a final, unalterable fact that dropped into the centre of the room with the weight of a mountain.
For Renjiro, the world did not so much shatter as it solidified, becoming a prison of absolute, unbearable truth. The confirmation from Minato's lips was the lock clicking shut.
His mind, usually a fortress of layered plans and cold analysis, simply shut down. Thoughts didn't scatter; they ceased. The carefully maintained architecture of his consciousness—the compartment for duty, the vault for grief, the engine room for ambition—went dark and silent. A void, cold and airless, opened up where his sense of self had been.
He tried to speak. His lips parted, his throat worked. Questions—'Who? Why? When? How?'—bubbled up from some primal, broken place, but they dissolved into nothing before they could reach his tongue.
No sound emerged. His mouth moved in a silent, agonised pantomime of inquiry. His eyes, wide and unblinking, saw Minato and Kushina not as people but as blurred shapes at the end of a very long, dark tunnel. The coherent part of him, the part that could form sentences and process information, had been excised.
Then, his body followed his mind into collapse. A violent tremor ran through his legs, a final, failed signal from a brain that had lost all command. His knees buckled, not in a slow swoon, but with the sudden, total failure of a marionette with its strings cut. He dropped straight down.
"Renjiro!" Kushina cried, lunging forward. Her hands shot out, but she was a fraction of a second too late. He hit the wooden floorboards with a heavy, sickening thud, the sound of dead weight meeting unyielding material. He didn't try to catch himself; he simply lay there, crumpled, one arm pinned awkwardly beneath him.
Kushina whirled on Minato, her violet eyes blazing with a protective fury. "Why would you say it like that?!" she shouted, her voice cracking. "Just blurting it out!"
Minato, his face pale with dawning remorse, held up his hands. "Kushina, I… I thought he already knew! Everyone in the command structure knew by last night. I assumed, with how close they were…" His defence died in his throat under the sheer, withering heat of her gaze. It was a look that promised a conversation later, one that would not be pleasant.
But the immediate crisis was just beginning.
A sound began in the centre of the room, a low, sub-audio hum that vibrated up through the floorboards into the soles of their feet. Then it rose in pitch and volume, becoming a sharp, discordant whine—the sound of chakra tearing itself apart from the inside.
Renjiro's body, still prone on the floor, became the epicentre. Visible waves of distorted air, tinged with the deep indigo and violent crimson of chakra in catastrophic conflict, erupted from him. They weren't controlled releases; they were spasms—jagged, violent spikes of raw power that lashed out like psychic whips. A scroll on a shelf spontaneously ignited with a whump. A hairline crack shot up the clay wall with a sound like splitting ice.
"His chakra!" Minato barked, already moving.
Kushina was faster. With a thought, chains of brilliant, shimmering golden light erupted from her back—the Adamantine Chains. They didn't spear outward, but instead wove themselves with breathtaking speed around Renjiro's form, enclosing the maelstrom in a near invincible barrier. The chains thrummed with immense power as the first wave of wild chakra slammed into them.
"Minato, reinforce it!" she grunted, the strain immediate in her voice.
Minato's hands were already a blur. He slapped a series of high-level stabilisation seals onto the floor around Kushina's chain-dome.
They glowed with a steady, blue-white light, anchoring the space and dampening the vibrational energy. He then placed his palms against the chains themselves, channelling his own vast, calm chakra into the structure, reinforcing Kushina's will with his own formidable control. The barrier solidified, becoming a cage of light containing a storm.
"Renjiro! Listen to me! You have to control yourself!" Kushina shouted through the barrier, her voice muffled by the roaring energy.
"Renjiro, breathe! You're going to hurt yourself!" Minato added, his tone commanding yet edged with alarm.
But Renjiro did not hear them. He was elsewhere. He had pushed himself up to his hands and knees, but his head hung low, his hair obscuring his face. His body trembled not with sobs, but with the convulsive surges of escaping chakra. His eyes, visible in glimpses, were utterly vacant.
The vibrant crimson of the Sharingan was still present, but it was a dead light, like embers in ash. Tears streamed down his cheeks in a continuous, silent river, dripping onto the wood below with soft patter-patter sounds that were absurdly gentle against the chaos he was unleashing. He was utterly unresponsive, a conduit for pure, undiluted anguish.
To understand this collapse was to trace three years of calculated ruin. Renjiro had not had a single day of true rest since the outbreak of the Great War. He had been a high-value asset, constantly deployed from the Lightning Country border to covert ops in the Land of Rivers, from intelligence extraction to rear-guard annihilation.
Mission after mission, ambush after counter-ambush, the pressure never ceased. His healing could mend torn muscles and shattered bones overnight, but it was useless against the slow, cumulative poison of mental and emotional fatigue. There was no jutsu to heal a soul worn thin by constant vigilance, by the weight of command, by the sight of too many familiar faces turning cold.
His brief, imposed blindness had been a physical respite, but it had forged a prison of profound emotional isolation. Cut off from the world of light and human connection, forced to perceive everything through the sterile medium of chakra, he had been alone with his thoughts in the dark. The pressure, the guilt of survival, the strategic nightmares—they had festered, with no outlet, no comforting touch, no shared glance to break the cycle.
Renjiro had functioned, brilliantly even, but on a foundation of discipline that was cracking under the strain of sheer, unsustainable exhaustion. He was a glass vessel, filled to the brim with stress, survivor's guilt, and lonely duty, and the news of Hiro's death was the stone that finally shattered him.
Inside the barrier, the storm intensified. Renjiro's chakra wasn't just leaking; it was geysering. The indigo-crimson spikes grew denser, pounding against Kushina's chains like a battering ram. The Adamantine Chains, which could bind a tailed beast, began to vibrate with a worrying, high-frequency hum. Thin, hairline fractures of light appeared in the golden structure, healing instantly only to be struck again.
Kushina's eyes widened, not just with effort, but with genuine, profound shock. Sweat beaded on her forehead.
"His chakra…" she gasped, strain tightening her voice. "Minato, this pressure…! Was it always this potent?"
It felt less like containing a boy and more like trying to hold back a tidal wave with a net. The sheer, dense, violent volume of power erupting from him was orders of magnitude beyond what she had sensed even minutes before during the eye regeneration.
Minato, reinforcing the seals with grim focus, nodded tightly. "He's always been powerful, but this… this is a reservoir I didn't fully comprehend. He's not directing it. It's just… erupting."
It was then, as they poured their combined strength into containing the cataclysm, that Minato's sharp eyes caught a new, dreadful detail. He stiffened, his blood running cold.
"Kushina…" he said, his voice low and urgent, cutting through the roar of the chakra. "Look."
Kushina followed his gaze. Renjiro had raised his head slightly, the vacant, tear-streaked face now fully visible in the chaotic light of the barrier. The silent tears still fell, tracing glistening paths through the dust and sweat on his skin.
But they were no longer clear.
Mingling with the saline, welling from the very corners of his Sharingan eyes, was a thicker, darker fluid. It seeped out, following the tear-tracks, painting crimson streaks down his pale cheeks.
Renjiro was weeping tears of blood.
=====
Bless me with your powerful Power Stones.
Your Reviews and Comments about my work are welcomed
If you can, then please support me on Patreon.
Link - www.patreon.com/SideCharacter
You Can read more chapters ahead on Patreon