Standing atop a treetop, Akira looked down at the Nine-Tails from above, his tone calm and final, like a sentence being passed.
"Warm-up's over. That's all you've got. Now get back in your cage."
The Nine-Tails bristled in fury, every hair standing on end as it began gathering chakra again.
"Insolent brat! You can redirect one, but can you redirect ten? My chakra is endless. I'll blast you into dust!"
As the Nine-Tails prepared to start firing continuously, Kakashi and the others felt their hearts leap into their throats all over again.
Akira, however, had no interest in wasting more words on it. He simply brought his hands together sharply.
"If you won't listen standing up, then you can listen while pinned to the ground. Sage Art: Gracious Deity Gates!"
The moment the words left his mouth, Akira entered Sage Mode. Strange orange markings appeared at the corners of his eyes.
Kakashi let out another startled breath.
"That's... senjutsu?!"
At that instant, the surrounding natural energy rushed toward Akira's body like a storm gone mad.
To the eyes of the Sharingan and the Byakugan, the amount of chakra inside him surged explosively. The scale of it was so terrifying that it actually surpassed even the Nine-Tails.
Neji was so shocked he could barely speak.
"Wh-what kind of monster is this? His chakra is actually greater than the Nine-Tails'? And he's still continuously absorbing energy from the outside? Isn't that basically an infinite chakra pool?!"
Before the Nine-Tails could even react, a dreadful roar suddenly came from the sky above.
Then, out of the sky, more than a dozen colossal red torii gates came crashing down with the force to suppress everything beneath them.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Each gate landed with perfect precision, pinning a crucial part of the Nine-Tails' body in place, locking down its head and all nine tails to the earth.
The Nine-Tails struggled violently, only to realize that the strength in its body was being drawn away by those towering wooden gates.
It looked up in horror.
"This... this is the First Hokage's sealing jutsu?! You can even use Wood Style?!"
"Damn you! Let me go!"
Now the Nine-Tails was truly panicking.
This was a divine technique specifically designed to suppress Tailed Beasts. Back then it had beaten all the fight out of it, and after that, Uzumaki Mito had locked it up for life.
Akira gave it no chance to breathe.
In a flash, he appeared atop the Nine-Tails' enormous nose and flew through another string of hand seals.
"Eight Trigrams Seal: Reinforcement!"
Before the Nine-Tails could even spit out another curse, a force of sealing chakra exploded outward, violently dragging its immense chakra back into Naruto's body.
And while he was at it, Akira added one more lock to the seal Minato Namikaze had originally left behind, cutting off the fox's route to escape.
In truth, Akira had never intended to lock the Nine-Tails away completely. He deliberately left a narrow opening, because in the future Naruto still had to learn to tame and command that violent chakra for himself.
The mountain-sized fox, which moments ago had loomed like a disaster in the flesh, now deflated as though someone had pierced a giant balloon.
In no time at all, all that crimson, violent presence had shrunk back down into Naruto's comparatively tiny body.
Now Naruto lay collapsed beneath the huge Gracious Deity gates, motionless.
His whole body was burned so badly there wasn't a single patch of skin left untouched. Just looking at him made people wince.
His breathing was so faint it came and went like a thread ready to snap.
Kakashi was beyond alarmed. He blurred forward in a Body Flicker and landed beside Akira, staring at him with his one exposed eye full of shock and confusion.
"Akira, that jutsu just now..."
Akira tilted his head and gave Kakashi a calm sideways glance. After a brief pause, he casually offered an explanation he clearly invented on the spot.
"Oh, that? I found it in the old Senju estate. It said it was one of the First Hokage's sealing secret arts."
Kakashi still had doubts, but he nodded anyway. He was too sharp not to understand that Akira simply didn't want outsiders knowing he could use Wood Style-level power.
Looking up at the towering red gates still pressing down on the battlefield, Kakashi swallowed and said hoarsely, "I really didn't expect someone your age to master a legendary jutsu like that. And senjutsu too. You really are a monster."
Akira didn't respond.
He simply waved a hand, and the massive torii gates hanging in the air dissolved into drifting particles of light and vanished.
Then he walked to Naruto's side, crouched down, and let soft green chakra gather around his hands.
He began healing the battered boy with the Healing Jutsu.
The moment he started, the sheer depth of Akira's medical skill left everyone around him stunned.
Under the glow of that green chakra, the blackened skin on Naruto's body began to scab over, peel away, and regrow healthy new flesh at a speed visible to the naked eye.
By now Sakura had finally snapped back to herself. She hurried over, dropped to her knees opposite Akira, and lit both hands with chakra as well, joining him in treating Naruto.
And there, clearly visible on Naruto's stomach, were the marks of the reinforced Eight Trigrams Seal Akira had just applied.
As she sent chakra into Naruto's body, Sakura couldn't stop herself from looking up, her eyes carrying a kind of reverence she had never shown before.
"Akira... what you did just now... was unbelievable."
Akira's face remained calm, and his hands stayed as steady as if he were doing delicate carving work.
"Hokage-hime told me to keep all of you alive and get the mission done. So even if I had to risk everything, I wasn't going to let that mission fail."