The fight began in an instant.
Hiashi didn't charge.
He didn't need to.
One gesture of his palm, and the air around Kimimaro buckled.
A crushing, gravity-like pressure detonated outward again, slamming into Kimimaro's bone armor with the force of a falling mountain.
The White Bastion Frame screeched, spiderweb cracks racing across its surface before the Yang Seal flared on his forehead, two dark red dots bursting into branching black lines again, and the armor regenerated mid-impact.
Another shockwave hit.
Then another.
Hiashi was refusing close combat entirely, due to the danger of his kekkei genkai, bombarding him from a distance with invisible pressure blasts that bent space around his palms.
It wasn't Gentle Fist.
It wasn't Kaiten.
It was something older, drawn straight from that white chakra engine he was siphoning power from.
Kimimaro's feet slid trenches through the destroyed Uchiha courtyard as he stabilized himself.
He fired back.
Bone spears.
Willow arcs.
Falling Branches, both Larch and Willow variants shredding the air in converging paths.
Endless Finger Drilling Bullets erupting from his hands like a storm of white needles.
But Hiashi floated.
Effortlessly.
He drifted backward on a cushion of that pale-white chakra, like a man carried by invisible tides.
Every projectile bent or crumpled under those bursts of pressure before reaching him.
His expression was cold, furious, and calculating.
He didn't want the bones near him.
Kimimaro noted it.
"So you learned quickly," he murmured, more amused than upset.
Hiashi ignored him.
Yet, his mind raced even as he kept the pressure flooding forward.
'What is his lineage…?'
White hair.
That monstrous physique rivaling Senju and Uzumaki vitality.
Bone manipulation on a level no medical text had ever recorded.
How could someone of his pedigree not know of a clan capable of this?
His Byakugan tightened, focusing deeper, past muscle and chakra flow, tracing the structure of Kimimaro's bones, the regenerative patterns, the foreign Yang-infused seal pulsing at his forehead.
And then it struck him.
A memory surfaced.
A half-forgotten passage from one of the oldest Hyūga manuscripts, a speculative genealogy tracing the origins of the Byakugan lineage.
The Hyūga.
The moon clan.
And… a rumored third offshoot.
A clan that wielded bones as weapons, whose strongest members could manipulate their own skeletons with supernatural precision.
A clan that had withered long before the Warring States era, swallowed by obscurity and isolation.
His monstrous physique, his devastating bone-release…
Hiashi's face tightened as the truth snapped together.
"So," he muttered under his breath, fury simmering beneath realization.
"That clan… really existed."
Kimimaro tilted his head, amused.
"Cousins, then," he said dryly. "Though I doubt your records kept the name correct."
He didn't mention Kaguya.
Hiashi didn't know the root of the lineage.
Better to let the misunderstanding live.
"Is that why you targeted the Byakugan?" he demanded. "To reclaim some shared heritage? To steal what was never yours?"
Kimimaro let out a quiet, almost amused breath.
"Yes. And because men have always loved one thing above all else. Power."
Hiashi's rage spiked, but beneath the fury a colder thought slid in like a knife.
If this boy truly descended from that forgotten branch…
If he had mastered it to this degree…
No wonder he broke the vault.
No wonder he stole ten Byakugan under their noses.
No wonder even the main branch elites fell like children.
Hiashi's aura surged again.
That white chakra wrapped around him like armor, swirling in a cyclone.
It wasn't Tenseigan, not truly.
Kimimaro could see the flaws clearly now, but it resembled it.
The pseudo-Tenseigan mode granted by the clan's ancient energy vessel.
Not true gravity manipulation, but a pressure field using particulate chakra flows.
And it pushed Hiashi's power into a realm Kimimaro quickly classified:
'Quasi–Six Paths' - currently.
Because it was still climbing.
But not a full 'god-tier' for now.
But undeniably beyond ordinary Kage already.
The only reason Konoha wasn't being obliterated by shockwaves was that Hiashi was focusing every ounce of his power on Kimimaro alone, and he even had to hold back a little, which was a blessing for Kimimaro.
Kimimaro surged forward, trying to bulldoze through with reinforced bone layers, Yang Seal support, and armor plates shifting to absorb pressure.
Hiashi didn't allow even a meter of closeness.
Another invisible hammer smashed into him, cracking bone plating, sending rings of pressure exploding through the courtyard.
Kimimaro's armor shattered, reformed, shattered again.
He slid back, boots gouging lines through the stone.
Hiashi hovered above him, white aura blazing.
The clash reignited instantly.
Kimimaro soon hurled Blooming Lances one after another, bone comets screaming through the air in calculated arcs.
Each one probed for a weak point in Hiashi's shifting white aura, but the patriarch glided through the air like a pale phantom, bending that pressure-field around himself with effortless, levitating precision.
Hiashi countered by twisting space again, collapsing invisible weight onto Kimimaro from impossible angles.
The ground cratered beneath him each time, his bone armor groaning, reforming, cracking, and reforming again.
But something strange was happening.
The longer the fight dragged on, the more Kimimaro felt… sharper. Clearer.
As if the new Byakugan chakra pathways in his head were not merely integrating but activating something dormant in him.
A vibration inside his tenketsu.
A tremor in his marrow.
A quiet hum in his soul.
"Could it be…?" he thought, pulse steady even as another pressure blast flung debris around him.
"Now that Kaguya and Hyūga blood mingle in one frame… am I already shifting toward something closer to an Ōtsutsuki form?"
He didn't gain the Tenseigan.
Not at this point.
But power didn't always appear as a burst.
Sometimes it appeared as efficiency.
Suddenly, the Dance of the Seedling Fern erupted with twice the density.
Towering bone peaks tore from the earth like spears meant to puncture the sky.
They snapped toward Hiashi with terrifying reach, nearly clipping his ankle as he leapt back mid-air.
Kimimaro vaulted between them, weaving effortlessly through the growing forest of lethal pillars.
His control had doubled.
His speed sharpened.
His kekkei genkai wasn't merely stronger; it was refined, operating with a precision he had never achieved before.
He could feel it.
A new threshold.
A foot in the Quasi–Six Paths realm.
Hiashi felt it too.
Even through the blinding fury and the white mantle of ancient power, something like unease flickered across the patriarch's face as one of the immense bone spires grazed his barrier.
For the first time, Hiashi Hyūga felt pressure.
And Kimimaro felt opportunity.
He inhaled, bones humming, marrow vibrating like a tuning fork struck by fate itself.
"Then let's see," he murmured, voice low, "whose heritage reaches higher."
His hands slammed into the ground.
The Seedling Fern answered.
But not in its normal form.
The entire bone forest convulsed upward, converging, spiraling, merging, knotting together with unnatural elegance.
A colossal skeletal titan rose from the cracked earth of the abandoned Uchiha district.
A throne of bone formed inside its ribcage.
And Kimimaro stepped into it.
The marrow accepted him.
Chakra threaded through bone.
His Byakugan flared white.
"Dance of the White Sovereign."
The titan roared without lungs.
Hiashi hovered mid-air, aura blazing, shock and disgust twisting across his face.
"You dare summon such a blasphemy on Uchiha ground—!"
Kimimaro didn't let him finish.
The White Sovereign lunged, an avalanche of bone and killing intent, towers of skeletal limbs crashing forward, spikes extending like lances from its elbows and shoulders.
Hiashi's expression hardened.
"So be it."
His palms spread.
And the white aura around him condensed.
Spun.
Tightened into two colossal serpentine currents of chakra, pure pale energy braided with black control seals, swirling like twin celestial rivers.
The sound was like mountains grinding.
"Gentle Fist: Twin Void Dragons."
They formed instantly.
They formed instantly.
Two massive dragon-shaped constructs, long and elegant, white bodies marked with dark flowing patterns, eyes glowing with pure Byakugan light.
Their bodies were fluid, like chakra made flesh and wind, but their strike radiated the force of collapsing stars.
"They drain chakra…"
Hiashi's voice was cold.
"And they devour impurity."
The first dragon dove.
The White Sovereign swung a bone pillar the width of a tree trunk.
Impact.
The bone cracked instantly.
Not shattered, emptied.
The chakra inside it was vacuumed out, devoured in a single heartbeat, causing the limb to collapse into dust.
Kimimaro's eyes narrowed.
So that was it.
They didn't just steal chakra.
In his case, they stole structure.
The second dragon struck diagonally, ripping through several of the sovereign's rib-spikes in a single sweeping bite, stripping their chakra and causing them to collapse like rotten branches.