He looked...
He looked like Nawaki. Not in the face, but in that same youthful energy, that same confident smile always hanging at the corner of his mouth.
For a brief instant, Tsunade was dazed. She just stared at Roy blankly.
"Lady Tsunade..." Shizune coughed lightly, her gaze following Tsunade's and landing on Roy.
The boy was clearly only eight or nine years old. His expression was calm, his eyes steady. Yet the moment he stepped out of the light, Shizune's fine brows jumped, and she immediately thought of Jiraiya's prized student, the Hokage's favored grand-student, the one Hiruzen was always praising—
Minato Namikaze.
Space-time ninjutsu?
Wasn't that something only Minato knew?
As Tsunade's assistant—and also the "caretaker" Hiruzen had assigned to look after her—Shizune was close enough to official channels that she was naturally more sensitive to news like this.
Prompted by her reminder, Tsunade murmured, "You're not Nawaki..."
Both of them had confidence. Both of them smiled a lot. But...
Nawaki's confidence came from his family, from his surname, from his grandfather Senju Hashirama, while...
the Uchiha boy in front of her, the one named Ren, was completely different.
As Tsunade narrowed her eyes, her instincts screamed one thing at her—
this boy's confidence came from absolute faith in his own strength.
Nawaki...?
The moment Tsunade softly said that name, a face immediately surfaced in Roy's mind: kind, cheerful, always smiling. He wore a blue Hokage forehead protector. He was Hashirama Senju's grandson and Tsunade's younger brother. Unfortunately, like Tsunade's former lover Dan Kato, he had died young on the battlefield.
A pitiful figure, really...
Roy took the tea Fugaku handed him and drank a mouthful without commenting.
By the time Tsunade fully came back to herself, her eyes were burning as she stared at him.
"Ren, I need you to hit me with everything you've got."
Roy lifted a brow, surprised. Then he glanced sideways at Shizune.
Shizune sat properly on her knees behind Tsunade, expressionless, clearly long since used to her boss suddenly doing things like this.
Roy's face returned to normal. He genuinely hadn't expected someone to come knocking on his door begging to get punched. Without making it obvious, he turned his head and exchanged a look with Fugaku.
Fugaku's expression stayed grave. He picked up the teapot and refilled the empty cup in front of Tsunade.
"Lady Tsunade, whatever you want to see, just let Ren show you."
Tsunade seemed to have spent too much time around rough men in gambling dens and taverns. The moment that blunt, straightforward side of her surfaced, she rolled up her sleeves like she was about to shake dice and grinned.
"You think he can actually hurt me?"
Her eyes blazed with confidence.
"There's no substitute for feeling it myself. Once someone hits me, my body remembers how strong it was."
Of course, what mattered even more was this...
She wanted to see whether the boy had the signature trait of the Senju clan—
that monstrous strength.
Wood Release was not a bloodline limit every member of the Senju clan could awaken. On the contrary, what they more often inherited from Asura was the Sage Body—abundant life force, rapid recovery, and massive chakra reserves.
Leaving aside the Yin Seal and the Hundred Healings Technique Tsunade had invented herself, she firmly believed there was no clearer way to measure a person's vitality and chakra reserves than through monstrous strength.
As for Wood Release...
that was a different matter entirely, something on the level of chakra nature transformation.
A breeze drifted in.
The living room immediately fell into a short, heavy silence.
Only Mikoto, still in the kitchen and waving her spatula around without paying attention to the outside world, and Itachi, peeking through the sliding door, kept looking back and forth between Tsunade and Roy, clearly thinking hard.
Steam curled lazily up from the teacups on the tatami.
After a full minute or two of silence, Fugaku finally looked at Roy with a dark expression and said, "Since Lady Tsunade insists, Ren, go ahead."
"Full strength?"
Tsunade answered without hesitation. "Full strength."
Roy nodded. Then, like a whale swallowing water, he tipped his head back and drained the last of the tea in one go.
The next moment, he looked at Tsunade.
With a soft flare, two suns lit up inside his pupils. One glance from the Eye of Truth pierced straight through Tsunade's body like twin blades of light, making her body stiffen and instinctively tense.
[Name: Tsunade]
[Class: Ninja]
[Constitution: B]
[Manifest Chakra: B (700,000/1,000,000)]
[Latent Chakra: B+ (570,000/1,000,000)]
[Rating: B]
[Note: Kage-level strength]
Roy narrowed his eyes.
At once, he saw a huge mass of chakra inside Tsunade's body, bound tightly by several sealing chains.
So that was it.
Those chains had to be the Yin Seal she created herself.
The boy's gaze was too hot, too sharp. It settled over Tsunade like a physical thing.
No one else noticed, but Tsunade herself felt like she had been stripped naked, seen through inside and out. She tried to keep her face calm, but inside, waves were already crashing.
What sharp eyes this child has...
As the two blazing suns slowly rose higher within Roy's pupils, Tsunade forced herself to stay steady and snapped, "Come on!"
Roy slowly rolled up his sleeves. He wasn't in any hurry. He just smiled faintly.
"This is my home. It's not the place for a fight. Lady Tsunade, why don't we change locations?"
Before Tsunade could react, a streak of crimson suddenly surged up from the depths of Roy's eyes. Three black tomoe, linked together like blades, began revolving into a nebula around those two glaring suns inside his pupils.
In that instant, even Fugaku—who had been sitting calmly and drinking tea—changed expression in shock and shot to his feet.
"The Mangekyō Sharingan?!"
"Ren, you awakened the Mangekyō?!"
One tomoe, two tomoe, three tomoe...
And above the three-tomoe Sharingan—
the Mangekyō.
Peeking through the sliding door, Itachi was startled by Fugaku's sudden reaction. He unconsciously recalled the things Roy had once told him about the Sharingan's development and training. His eyes widened as he stared at Roy.
Those eyes—with a blood-red base and a slowly rotating nebula layered over it—seemed, for an instant, to suck in not only him, but all the light in the room.
"Nii-san..."
The little boy's voice came out in an excited, reverent whisper.
Tsunade and Shizune exchanged a glance, both briefly speechless.
At this point, there was hardly any need to test him further.
If he had already awakened the Mangekyō, who would still dare question whether he was truly an Uchiha?
He wasn't just an Uchiha—
he was a prodigy among them.
As the Mangekyō Sharingan slowly turned, an invisible pressure settled over everyone, making it hard to breathe. That oppressive force of his ocular power sank deep into the bones, and in an instant the living room seemed to drop into a freezing, lightless hell.
Roy turned to Fugaku and smiled.
"I had a feeling before. Didn't expect that after one nap, it would just open on its own."
The boy showed a row of white teeth, then looked back at Tsunade.
"Father, just wait a moment. Our guest comes first. Let me grant the guest's wish before anything else."
Buzz—
Genjutsu activated.
Now that the Mangekyō Sharingan was enhancing him, ordinary genjutsu required nothing more than a thought from Roy to cast.
In fact, unlike Tsukuyomi, he no longer even needed the other person to make direct eye contact with his Sharingan.
And then—
In the instant Fugaku, Tsunade, and Shizune blinked, the lines of the living room dissolved beneath their feet. In their place rose a wide stretch of green grass and a dense, thriving forest, unfolding before their eyes.
Itachi's small body jolted. His palm suddenly felt cold as the sliding door vanished. Looking around, he realized in shock...
he was standing in the southern forest training ground, where he usually trained with Nii-san and Shisui.
One step, and heaven and earth had changed.
Their feet landed lightly on the ground.
Shizune looked around at the wilderness, and if she hadn't known for certain this was genjutsu, she would have believed she had truly been teleported to the real southern forest. Her gaze settled back on Roy, full of awe.
What an absurdly powerful genjutsu. It feels completely real.
Caw—
A crow flapped into the sky, scattering a black feather behind it.
Fugaku reached out and caught the feather in his hand, feeling it carefully.
No mistake.
This was not a fluctuation that an ordinary Sharingan genjutsu could create.
That ocular power was so strong it wasn't just deceiving his eyes—it was deceiving his will itself.
Fugaku glanced sideways at Tsunade.
The woman, one of the legendary Sannin, still hadn't lost any of the heat in her gaze. Staring at Roy, she slowly clenched her fist.
Crack crack crack—
Her knuckles ground against each other with sharp, grinding pops.
Tsunade wore a tea-green haori trimmed in black over a loose sleeveless kimono-style top, with a black sash cinched around her narrow waist. Then she stomped one foot heavily onto the ground.
The training field visibly shook.
From the point beneath her feet, cracks spread outward like a spiderweb.
Come.
She didn't say it aloud, but that one simple motion said everything. It embodied the beauty of raw strength.
Roy's dark hair swayed in the wind. He had just finished allocating his points, and his hands had been itching to move ever since. In his mind, he treated this as a warm-up before tomorrow's fight with his father.
He raised his hand and clenched it into a fist.
With three thousand points of constitution behind it—
boom!
Ren erupted, scorching the air and rolling toward Tsunade like a towering sea of heat.
Then, with a sharp pop, Roy crushed the air in his palm and stepped forward, walking straight through that blazing wave. In the blink of an eye, he was in front of Tsunade, and he drove a vicious straight punch at her chest.
The air collapsed with a hiss.
The punch arrived before the sound did.
The force of the fist hit her head-on. Tsunade didn't need to think about it. One look was enough.
Roy possessed monstrous strength no weaker than her own.
But you're an Uchiha.
Not a Senju.
So why...
why are you more like a Senju than I am? More than Nawaki ever was?
Her thoughts turned chaotic.
Yet even so, she moved after him and still arrived first. Her own chakra-wrapped fist shot out, perfectly timed, and smashed directly into Roy's incoming punch.
Boom!
A thunderous explosion rang out.
Chakra and aura burst outward at once, forming a circular shockwave that blasted Shizune, Fugaku, and even the peeking Itachi backward.
The little boy was sent flying outright. Only by barely catching a sturdy branch in midair was he able to stop himself from tumbling into an embarrassing heap.
"Father, who won?!" Itachi shouted.
At that moment, a tall figure dropped down beside him, stern-faced, and placed a steadying hand on his shoulder to help him stay upright.
The shockwave was too strong. Itachi could barely force his eyes open. He couldn't see clearly at all, nowhere near as well as Fugaku could with the Sharingan active.
Fugaku stared in silence for a long moment, then slowly shook his head, only to nod immediately after.
"Neither of them won," he said in a low voice. "And neither of them was going all out."
On another tree, where she had landed while avoiding the shockwave, Shizune frowned deeply, disbelief flashing in her eyes.
She had followed Tsunade for decades. She had always been fiercely loyal, and she believed no one understood Tsunade better than she did.
But now, staring at the center of the training field, at the boy who had exchanged fists with Tsunade without giving ground at all, she had no choice but to admit it.
This was the first time she had ever seen someone clash head-on with Lady Tsunade and not get pounded straight into the dirt with a single blow.
Lady Tsunade didn't even intend to counterattack at first...
She must have sensed danger. That was the only reason she struck back.
In other words...
that alone proved that this child truly did possess monstrous strength—and a bloodline—not inferior to the Senju.
Pop—
Fist against fist.
Aura against chakra.
The circular shockwave made the chakra around them tremble violently, and the stalemate finally pushed the genjutsu to the edge of collapse.
Through the contact of their fists, Roy noticed that Tsunade withdrew first of her own accord.
He immediately pulled back as well, reversing the genjutsu world with his ocular power into aura and drawing it back into himself.
Then—
Caw!
Another crow cried out.
The genjutsu space shattered.
The familiar living room returned to view.
Fugaku, Tsunade, Shizune, and Itachi all felt their vision blur. When they opened their eyes again, the first thing they did was look at Roy.
The boy was smiling faintly. The crimson in his eyes had already faded, leaving only clarity behind. Just like before, he was sitting cross-legged on the tatami. Lazily, he stretched and asked Tsunade,
"Are you satisfied now, Lady Tsunade?"
"If there's nothing else, I'm going to wash up."
Tsunade sat there in silence, her blonde twin ponytails hanging down her back as she stared deeply at him.
Then, without a word, she reached up, tore the green pendant from around her neck, and tossed it to Roy.
"Take it."
Whoosh—
The pendant traced a clean arc through the air and Roy caught it with one hand.
The instant it touched his palm, his brow tightened.
Inside it, he felt an enormous mass of chakra—no weaker than the gigantic amount he had seen sealed inside Tsunade's body and built up over decades.
[Detection... "Foreign Nen"... [Monster Index] opened...]
[Monster: "Foreign Nen," source... unknown strong individual...]
[Method of infusion: using a keepsake as a medium, can be directly absorbed to increase "Nen quantity"...]
[Note: due to partial incompleteness in the aura, conversion efficiency is approximately 80% of "Life Energy"...]
The panel prompt sounded slowly in Roy's mind as the pendant settled into his hand.
Feeling the weight of it, Roy looked up and stared deeply at Tsunade. He was just about to say something—
when suddenly, his spiritual sense flared.
Somewhere in the unseen, he felt a gaze.
It seemed to look through history itself, through life and death and endless rebirth, carrying limitless age and sorrow. It broke through the shackles of chakra and slowly settled onto him.
Roy abruptly raised his head.
His awareness sank inward.
With a single thought, Targeted Tracking activated.
And what he saw—
was a pair of Rinnegan eyes.
~~~
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