In no time at all, the terrifying lava had swallowed the entire Valley of the End. The flowing river turned into dark-red magma, blistering and swelling, bubbling and exploding with wet, guttural pops.
Pillars of lava rose without warning one after another, and the air itself warped under the brutal heat.
Even Hiruzen and the others didn't dare get close to the battlefield now. Only Hyuga Hiashi—floating in midair within that layer of Tenseigan chakra armor—could avoid the violently surging magma around him.
"So this is the power of Lava Release…"
"If I hadn't gained this eye, your Lava Release really would have posed quite a threat to me."
"And a power that can reshape the landscape in an instant is especially unfriendly to the Hyuga."
Hiashi's eyes remained closed, the blood in his empty sockets already dried, yet a faint mocking curve lingered on his lips. He was mocking Uchiha Chizumi for wasting chakra for no reason.
What Hiashi didn't know was that as the magma vaporized water, the Water Covenant ensured Chizumi never lacked chakra in the first place.
RUMBLE—!!!
Faced with Hiashi's mockery, Uchiha Chizumi said nothing.
From start to finish, his face remained as calm and unreadable as still water.
But the lava lake began to churn. And as it churned, giant figures wrapped in molten rock staggered to their feet one after another.
Within moments, dozens of lava giants had risen. They didn't need to do much at all. Their mere existence shook everything around them, turning them into pure engines of destruction.
One after another, the lava giants reached out toward Hiashi. They moved with eerie flexibility, almost as if each one were being guided by its own will, trying to drag the floating Hiashi down into the magma below.
And in truth, they weren't lifeless constructs at all. Under the power of Yin–Yang Release, these lava giants possessed basic instinct. You could even say they were a special kind of living construct.
A special construct… just like Black Zetsu.
At this point, Black Zetsu's status was really starting to plummet. Especially now that Uchiha Chizumi had begun mastering Yin–Yang Release, he was almost at the point where the things Chizumi casually created on a whim could sit at the same table as Black Zetsu.
Facing the reaching hands of dozens of lava giants, Hiashi felt deeply wary, even though they weren't using any additional ninjutsu.
He had a faint premonition—or rather, the Tenseigan was giving him one.
If those lava giants managed to drag him into the magma, then in only a few breaths, he'd become part of it.
"Maybe with Lava Release alone, Chizumi is already on the same level as Grandpa…"
The one truly shocked by all this was Tsunade.
She had seen Uchiha Chizumi fight before—back in Tanzaku Town, and in Konoha too—but the Chizumi of those days was nowhere near this level.
Without even using hand seals, he was playing with Lava Release like it was second nature. At this point, Tsunade was starting to suspect that even the Four-Tails might not be as skilled at controlling Lava Release as Chizumi.
"…Sigh."
Unlike Tsunade, the Third Hokage could only let out a deep sigh in his heart.
Shimura Danzo and Koharu always said he was too soft, too indecisive. Well, they weren't soft or indecisive—and now both of them had gone one after another to the Pure Land. Only he, the supposedly indecisive one, had survived to this point.
"I think I finally understand how the other Kage of the First Hokage's era must have felt…"
As Hiruzen sighed inwardly, he found himself unexpectedly sympathizing with the founding Kage of the other great villages.
For everyone else, sharing an era with someone like this… what else could it be but tragedy?
"Old man… if Uchiha Chizumi ever came to Mount Myoboku and turned the whole place into a sea of lava…"
Shima and Fukasaku were whispering to each other now. This was the first time they had personally witnessed Uchiha Chizumi's true power, and to put it plainly, he had scared them a little.
With power like this—no hand seals, instant terrain reshaping—both of them were starting to wonder if they might have offended him somewhere along the line.
And as for Hiashi, the man actually facing Uchiha Chizumi, things were not going well for him at all.
He kept climbing higher and higher, and in only a short span of time had already risen nearly a thousand meters into the sky.
But those dozens of lava giants began merging together, forming a far larger molten behemoth.
Hiashi had considered using the Tenseigan to destroy it, but his control over the Tenseigan behind him simply wasn't good enough. At best, he could barely bring out the power of Silver Wheel Reincarnation Explosion.
And even then, Hiashi could see clearly that as long as the lava lake below remained, the molten beast standing atop it would never collapse.
He had also tried attacking Uchiha Chizumi directly. In fact, he had already used Silver Wheel Reincarnation Explosion against him.
But around Uchiha Chizumi's body was a layer of Susanoo.
The power of Silver Wheel Reincarnation Explosion was immense. With that power alone, Hiashi could probably sweep across most of the shinobi world.
But Uchiha Chizumi's Susanoo was the real manifestation of an Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan.
And more than that, Chizumi's Eternal Mangekyo had already begun showing the first signs of evolving toward the Rinnegan.
Bluntly speaking, in terms of eye power alone, Hiashi borrowing the Tenseigan's power and Chizumi wielding that Eternal Mangekyo were essentially evenly matched.
"Rotation!!!"
Blue light erupted from Hiashi's body. With the Tenseigan's power behind it, his Rotation seemed utterly transformed. A massive pale-blue sphere of chakra rose around him.
In an instant, Hiashi himself became a gigantic, rapidly spinning ball of blue light.
From a distance, it looked as though an enormous pale-blue sun had appeared in the sky above the Valley of the End.
But this pale-blue sun gave off neither warmth nor light. It simply spun in the heavens, and with every turn, the airflow twisted, the wind howled, and the atmosphere itself seemed to steam and boil.
For dozens of miles around, violent winds swept outward. Even Hiruzen and the others, who were already standing far away, had trouble keeping their footing against the hurricane unleashed by that Tenseigan-enhanced Rotation.
"The power of Rotation… it's this great?"
Hiruzen stared at Hiashi in the sky in disbelief.
It wasn't as though he'd never seen the Hyuga clan's Rotation before. Hiashi had fought on battlefields in the past. Hiruzen knew perfectly well what Rotation was supposed to look like.
But now you were telling him—
that this was Rotation?
~~~
Thank you for reading!