A ring of that corrupt energy erupted from Kushina's body in a visible, expanding shockwave. It didn't roar; it hissed, a sound of pure energy scorching the air itself. The ground beneath her feet didn't crack—it fractured in a star-shaped pattern, fissures racing outward and vomiting up dust and stone.
From the ridge, Sama froze. The physical pressure of the chakra hit her like a fist to the chest, driving the air from her lungs in a painful whoosh. It wasn't just heavy; it was poisonous, carrying a weight of centuries of hatred and confinement. Her knees buckled.
A blur of yellow resolved into Minato, instant and silent as a thought, between the escalating epicentre and Renjiro. His face, usually a mask of serene focus, was set in grim lines.
In one fluid motion, he flung a ring of complex suppression tags into the air around Kushina. They ignited mid-flight, creating a shimmering, geometric lattice of light.
Simultaneously, three Hiraishin kunai thudded into the earth at triangular points, their markers flaring as he attempted to box the erupting chakra within a defined spatial prison.
But his sharp blue eyes saw the truth instantly, and a grimace of understanding twisted his lips. This wasn't an escape event. Kurama wasn't trying to break the seal. The fox was pushing forward from inside, flooding Kushina's own systems, usurping the chakra she was already expending. It was a hostile takeover of her own power.
"Kushina—" Minato's voice was a blade of calm cutting through the maelstrom, "—focus on me. Look at me!"
Her eyes, flickering with bestial red, rolled toward him, but there was no recognition, only a turbulent struggle. She couldn't focus. The internal war consumed all.
Seeing Minato's intervention, Renjiro acted. The towering Green Susanoo shifted, one massive arm swinging down not to strike, but to act as a physical shield between the orange chakra and the ridge. At the same time, his silver Adamantine Chains shot from the Susanoo's form, aiming not to bind Kushina's raging chains, but to coil gently around her torso and limbs, seeking to physically stabilise her body and perhaps give her a tangible anchor to cling to.
It was a perfect, instinctual pincer manoeuvre: Minato with spatial and sealing suppression from the outside, Renjiro with physical stabilisation and shielding.
But it failed.
Kushina's chains, now dripping with corrosive orange chakra, were no longer mere tools. They were extensions of Kurama's will. When Renjiro's silver chains made contact, the fox's chakra didn't resist them—it hijacked them.
The orange energy surged along the connection, a violent, invasive feedback that overrode Renjiro's chakra through sheer, overwhelming density. His chains didn't stabilise her; they became live wires pumping Kurama's defiance back toward him.
Her own chains, sensing the contact, didn't retreat. They attacked his chains directly, orange against silver, with a sound like grinding industrial saws. The transferred strain reverberated through the Susanoo. A network of cracks, glowing with sickly orange light, spread across two of its massive ribs with a sickening crack.
Sama, now on one knee, gasped. The failure wasn't just tactical; it felt existential. The pressure wasn't just physical; it was the pressure of time running out. They were losing seconds with every heartbeat, and each second brought the catastrophe closer.
Inside the shuddering skull of the Susanoo, Renjiro's world narrowed to pain and perception. Blood, hot and thick, welled from the corners of his eyes, tracing crimson lines down his cheeks—the price of the Mangekyō pushed beyond its limits. His vision tunnelled, the edges darkening, but at the centre, through the shared chakra feedback and his own doujutsu, he sensed Kurama clearly for the first time.
It wasn't mindless fury. It was a vast, ancient, and profoundly defiant consciousness. Kurama was no longer merely reacting to the stress of the fight or Kushina's strong emotions. He was choosing this. Seizing an opportunity to press against the walls, to remind them all of what lay beneath the surface. The realisation was a cold spike of clarity amidst the agony.
Renjiro raised his head, blood dripping from his chin onto the Susanoo's internal chakra floor. He didn't have the breath for lengthy explanations. He shouted, pouring every ounce of his will into a single, directed thought, his voice tearing from his throat, raw and certain:
"MINATO—I CAN CALM HER."
Minato, mid-motion as he recalculated a seal, went perfectly still. His eyes met Renjiro's bleeding gaze through the Susanoo's visor. He saw no desperation, only a terrifying certainty. He asked no questions. There was no time for doubt.
A single, sharp nod.
Minato's strategy flipped instantly. He stopped trying to suppress. He began to redirect. In a flash of yellow, he teleported, using a Hiraishin marker on one of his own fallen suppression tags.
He didn't move Kushina far—just a few meters, but it was a shift in the geometric centre of the conflict. As he reappeared beside her, his hands moved in a blur, not to seal, but to create a momentary, spatial shear using the Hiraishin's inherent properties—a brief, localised severance of the chakra field around her. It wasn't containment. It was a breath. A fractional second of distorted space meant to disrupt Kurama's surge and give Kushina's buried consciousness a flicker of clarity, a handhold.
It was the opening Renjiro needed.
The Green Susanoo did not advance. It knelt. The motion was not one of weakness, but of profound, concentrated focus. As its massive knee hit the devastated earth with a thud that sent a final tremor through the battlefield, a sensory collapse occurred.
Sound faded, not into silence, but into a muffled, cotton-wool distance. Colour drained from the world, leaving everything in shades of grey and stark, bleeding crimson. The howling chakra winds seemed to slow, their violence becoming a suspended, shimmering haze. At the heart of this surreal stillness, within the kneeling giant's visor, Renjiro's bloodied Mangekyō blazed. He locked eyes not just with Kushina's flickering, pain-filled gaze, but through her, with the ancient, burning consciousness fighting to be seen.
"Kōkai no Kagami." (Mirror of Regret).
He did not cast the genjutsu at Kurama. He cast it around the fox's perception, using the sliver of Kushina's own awareness as a lens.
Within the shared, hallucinatory space, Kurama's raging chakra avatar froze. It was not sealed. It was perceptually trapped. Endless chains materialised in the void of the illusion. But they did not bind his limbs or coil around his tails. They bound his attention. Each chain was a memory of confinement, an echo of a seal, a moment of human betrayal.
They formed a perfect, maddening, recursive lattice that led the eye and the mind in circles, offering no focal point, no outlet for rage, no direction for defiance.
It was a prison not of walls, but of perspective. A stillness, profound and absolute, of the kind he had not experienced since his creation—a stillness that spoke not of peace, but of inescapable, eternal null.
Kurama snarled, a psychic roar that shook the foundations of the genjutsu. He fought, not with chakra, but with the sheer weight of his will, trying to shatter the mirrors of his own reflection. But the genjutsu did not overpower him. It reframed him. It forced his boundless anger to gaze upon the infinite, meaningless patterns of its own captivity. He could not orient himself. For a moment, the push forward ceased, not from weakness, but from utter, disoriented futility.
***
The backlash was immediate and catastrophic.
Renjiro screamed. It was a sound of pure, psychic rupture. Torrents of blood poured from both eyes, streaming down his face in twin rivers of scarlet.
A visible shockwave, silent and grey, detonated outward from the Susanoo, not of force, but of unravelling mental energy. The great green construct flickered violently, like a guttering candle, its form dissolving at the edges before solidifying once more, barely held together by the last shreds of his will.
The collateral effect was total. The genjutsu, woven with such desperate, unfocused power, had leaked.
Kushina's eyes rolled back in her head, the orange chakra snuffing out instantly as her body went limp, collapsing into the torn earth where she stood.
Sama, on the ridge, let out a soft sigh as if punched in the soul, and slumped sideways, unconscious.
Minato, his mind a fortress of precision, was nonetheless caught on the edge of the psychic detonation. His eyes widened in shock at the unfamiliar, overwhelming sensory distortion, and his knees gave way. He hit the ground a moment after his sister, his hand still outstretched toward Kushina.
The battlefield was left in a stunned, silent stillness. The only sounds were the settling of dust and the faint, ragged, wet breathing coming from within the kneeling, cracked Susanoo.
Then, that too ceased as Renjiro's eyes closed, the last of his strength spent. The emerald giant dissolved into a shower of fading green sparks, revealing his collapsed form amidst the ruins.