He forced himself backward with a violent burst of natural energy, Frogburst Step detonating beneath his feet and launching him clear before she could finish the sequence.
It was an advanced senjutsu refinement of Frog Kata that Jiraiya had only mastered recently.
It didn't rely on muscle-driven speed or chakra pushed through the body like the Body Flicker.
Instead, he detonated tightly controlled bursts of natural energy beneath his feet, letting the world shove him aside rather than moving through it himself.
The result was brutal acceleration, sudden lateral shifts, and broken trajectories mid-motion.
To the eye, he simply vanished and reappeared at wrong angles.
To chakra sensing, there was nothing clean to follow, only brief disturbances that collapsed the moment they formed.
Perfect for evasion.
Perfect for repositioning.
And dangerously demanding.
Each use required an exact balance.
Too much force, and Sage Mode destabilized.
Too little, and the step failed outright.
Jiraiya landed hard, chest heaving.
"That's…" he breathed, steadying himself, "not Eight Triagrams Gentle Fist."
Emi tilted her head. "It is."
She vanished again.
Afterimages peeled off her movement, light bending oddly around her silhouette.
Jiraiya tracked with Sage sensing instead of sight this time, eyes narrowing as he filtered the real from the false.
Ionized air.
Mirages that weren't illusions.
"Tch."
He and the two elders unleashed an oil, flame, and wind instant combo in a sweeping arc, not to strike her, but to turn the space itself into a wall of fire, a burning perimeter meant to keep her at bay rather than bring her down.
The firestorm roared outward, pressure and heat swallowing the street.
Emi didn't push through it.
She went around.
The air snapped as she redirected herself mid-leap, Charge Step kicking her sideways and down, slipping under the edge of the inferno as her polarity field flared just long enough to shear away the heat.
She landed inside his range again.
Jiraiya slammed his hands down.
The ground gave way beneath her feet, mud surging up in a violent bloom, grasping, constricting, trying to drown her momentum all at once.
She answered with scale.
The polarity field expanded beyond her body.
It felt like something that shouldn't have been possible.
For the first time, thanks to her unlocked nature release, a Hyūga had torn Rotation loose from their own body, peeling it away through sheer vector control and hurling it outward as an independent phenomenon, no longer bound to their center but still obeying their will partially.
A rotating storm of charged wind erupted outward, unstable, howling, ripping debris and weapons from the ground as electromagnetic turbulence swallowed the street. Metal screamed. Breath vanished.
Chakra flows stuttered across the zone as the air itself turned hostile.
Polarity Release: Magnetic Cyclone.
Jiraiya leapt back on instinct, the edge of the storm chewing at his cloak as he cleared its pull.
"Tch," he clicked, eyes sharp. "You trying to mill the whole street into paste?"
"Only what's in front of me," she answered evenly.
He didn't bother replying.
He slammed his palm into the ground.
Natural energy flooded outward, sinking deep, and the street answered him.
Mud surged up in a roaring wall, dense and heavy, veins of senjutsu running through it as it rose to full height in an instant.
The barrier didn't just block the oncoming force; it slowly drank it, absorbing pressure and dispersing momentum through the living earth that kept rebuilding itself as fast as it was torn apart.
Jiraiya settled behind it, breath steady, chakra stabilizing.
Just then, several of his shadow clones burst into existence around her, not from stealth, but openly, deliberately, as she was still maintaining the Magnetic Cyclone at full output.
Each clone drove natural energy inward, hands already spinning chakra.
In an instant, a colossal Sage Art: Massive Rasengan took shape, swollen with senjutsu, large enough to dwarf rooftops, its pressure crushing the air flat around it.
Jiraiya never tried to hide the move.
He knew better than to attempt an ambush against perfect Byakugan vision.
This wasn't about surprise.
It was about weight.
About forcing her to spend again.
Emi felt the scale immediately and adjusted without hesitation.
Closing distance wasn't an option.
Dodging wasn't enough.
So she rotated.
However, that much force was beyond what even her standard Current Veil could safely absorb.
So she escalated.
The compressed veil unfolded into its enhanced form, polarity layers stacking and reversing in rapid succession as she committed fully to the technique instead of letting it run passively.
Polarity Rotation: Reverse Current Field
Fully ignited.
This wasn't a barrier.
It was a directional rejection zone.
Rotation flared outward in layered polarity bands, wind and lightning folding into each other as force vectors inverted mid-approach.
The Rasengan struck the field and twisted.
Its momentum reversed, senjutsu pressure feeding back into itself, the mass destabilizing as the rotation refused to accept the force and instead returned it.
The Rasengan detonated outward, not into her, but away, the recoil blasting clones apart and carving a violent trench through the street behind them.
Emi remained at the center, stance unbroken, rotation tightening again as the field collapsed back into its compressed, predatory veil.
Not a wall.
A refusal.
Jiraiya watched the aftermath in silence, cloak snapping in the fading shockwave.
"…Yeah," he muttered. "That figures."
The air around him thickened instead.
"Then try this," he said.
He rushed at her again.
But obviously not straight.
He understood his own advantage perfectly.
The baseline every Sage Mode sharpened speed to a razor's edge, tightened reflexes until thought and motion blurred together, and deepened endurance and durability far beyond human limits. The body itself became a weapon calibrated by nature, every movement guided and reinforced by living energy.
On top of that, his Toad Sage Mode wrapped his body in overwhelming physical reinforcement, not just raw strength but the invisible extension of Frog Kata, a translucent mantle of natural energy that turned near-misses into solid blows.
To anyone without senjutsu training, it was invisible.
To those who knew, it was flawless taijutsu, an art said to leave no opening in attack or defense.
And yet, against her, it was poison.
Every benefit of Sage Mode came with a cost, a body pushed into constant, delicate balance by natural energy.
That same balance was exactly what her techniques preyed on.
Polarity didn't need to overpower him. It only needed to disrupt him.
A misaligned current. A reversed flow.
One mistake, and Sage Mode wouldn't just collapse, it would rebound, turning his own natural energy inward and petrifying him on the spot.
The only reason it hadn't happened already was the two toads fused into his chakra network, constantly offloading excess strain, smoothing turbulence before it could cascade into full-on disaster.
Up close, Frog Kata was worse than useless.
She didn't need to see the strikes. She didn't need to outmuscle them. With Hyūga precision and polarity control, she could likely feel the vector of her own force coat shifting before his attack landed, twist it, redirect it, and feed it back into his own system. What was meant to extend his reach only gave her more leverage to destabilize him with natural energy.
In close combat, Sage Mode wasn't his edge anymore.
It was a loaded blade pointed at his own throat.
That was why she pressed forward relentlessly, never allowing space to settle between them, and why he answered by denying it at every turn, saturating the battlefield with costly, wide-area techniques, deliberately steering the fight into a contest of chakra reserves instead of a collision of bodies, precision, and timing.
Therefore, angles broke as Frogburst Step detonated again and again, Jiraiya ricocheting through space faster than ordinary sight could follow, attacks lashing out between long-range bursts, hair, oil, fire, wind, earth, and even water, pressure stacking into a relentless assault meant to overwhelm her control.
Emi gave ground, one step, then another, Rotation compressing instinctively into a tight Current Veil.
Projectiles curved away from her, detonated short, or were torn loose and hurled back along broken vectors.
Still, the pressure piled on.
Bit by bit, it gnawed at her reserves.
Jiraiya's strategy was working.
But he wasn't untouched.
Not even close.
Every time she slipped through the curtain of his ninjutsu barrages, every time she forced her way into striking range, the margin vanished.
One clean sequence. One uninterrupted touch.
One slight tilt of the moment, one lapse in balance or timing.
Or one moment where fortune, just once, fell into her hand.
That was all it would take.
Sage Mode or not, he hovered constantly on the edge of being ended outright.
And he knew it.
That knowledge kept him moving.
Kept his chakra burning, when he also couldn't afford it forever.
Time stretched.
Her pool thinned.
His balance frayed.
The battlefield settled into a brutal truth.
It was no longer about advantage.
It was about which limit broke first.