Uchiha Fugaku's hands completed twelve complex hand seals in an instant, moving so fast they left a series of afterimages in the air.
"Fire Release: Great Fire Annihilation!"
Fugaku drew in a sharp breath, his chest visibly swelling to an enormous size, then expelled a massive volume of chakra mixed with air and blasted it forward.
BOOM!
The great flames swept forward like a scorching tidal wave!
The fire rose over ten meters high, its width covering half the training grounds, and wherever it passed, the solid earth was instantly scorched to black glass as the air was warped by the extreme heat and let out a tortured shriek.
The watching clan members stumbled backward in alarm, for even at a distance of over a hundred meters the wall of scorching heat still seared their cheeks.
This was the power of the Uchiha clan head.
Fire Release standing at the very apex of the shinobi world!
Faced with this terrifying jutsu capable of destroying an entire army, Shinsuke finally drew his hands out of his pockets.
His hand seals were faster than Uchiha Fugaku's.
"Fire Release: Great Fire Annihilation."
Shinsuke spoke the same technique name as Fugaku in a quiet voice.
A flame that was denser, deeper in color, and nearly a dark crimson erupted from Shinsuke's mouth.
The two streams of fire collided head-on at the center of the training grounds.
There was no violent explosion as anyone might have expected.
Shinsuke's dark crimson flames effortlessly tore through Fugaku's tidal wave of fire, splitting it cleanly in two.
The twin torrents of flame roared past either side of Shinsuke's body and slammed heavily into the distant walls of the training grounds, leaving two bottomless scorched imprints behind.
The entire grounds fell dead silent.
The same jutsu had produced completely different results.
This was no longer a gap in technique.
This was an absolute crushing difference in chakra nature and in the tier of raw power itself.
Fugaku's pupils contracted sharply to the size of pinpoints.
He could not understand why Shinsuke's flames possessed such terrifying penetrating force and temperature.
"Again."
Shinsuke's voice rang out, and this time he made the first move.
Shinsuke's hands flew through seals at a fluid, dazzling speed.
"Fire Release: Dragon Flame Chant!"
A roar erupted as several ferocious dragon heads screamed forth from Shinsuke's mouth, each formed of intensely compressed dark crimson fire and carrying a terrifying heat capable of incinerating all things, and they lunged at Uchiha Fugaku from different angles.
What tremendous power.
Fugaku's expression changed drastically.
He felt an enormous threat bearing down on him.
Uchiha Fugaku pushed decades of battle instinct to the absolute limit, his body twisting and dodging continuously.
BOOM! BOOM! CRASH!
The dragon flame heads grazed past his body and slammed heavily into the ground behind Uchiha Fugaku.
A rapid series of explosions rang out and several bottomless craters appeared before every onlooker, the craters connecting to one another and turning more than half the training grounds into a scorched wasteland.
"Shinsuke!"
"HMMM!"
Uchiha Fugaku let out a great shout as the Mangekyō in his eyes spun at blinding speed, and a vast, overwhelming dōjutsu force instantly swept across the entire training grounds.
Before Shinsuke's eyes, the entire world suddenly warped and collapsed.
The training grounds vanished.
The surrounding clan members vanished.
The sky and the earth both shattered into countless broken shards and then reassembled in a sea of chaos.
Genjutsu: Mirror Flower!
This was Uchiha Fugaku's Mangekyō dōjutsu ability.
It was a supreme genjutsu capable of creating illusions nearly indistinguishable from reality, completely distorting the opponent's five senses and toying with their perception of the world around them.
Before Shinsuke's eyes, hundreds upon thousands of Uchiha Fugakus appeared.
Every expression, every breath, every trace of chakra flow among them was completely identical, with no way to tell the real from the false.
"BOOM!"
Countless "Fugakus" formed seals simultaneously, and a blinding storm of shuriken and fireballs swept in from every direction, sealing off every possible avenue of escape for Shinsuke.
Shinsuke stood perfectly still.
The shuriken capable of shredding steel passed through him the instant they touched his body, like phantoms cast into water, slipping through without a sound.
Blazing fireballs swallowed him whole, yet failed to singe so much as a corner of his clothing.
Fugaku's voice seemed to come from all directions at once.
"Before these eyes of mine, reality and illusion are defined by my will."
"I can reverse the damage I receive into mere illusion."
"And I can turn the illusions you perceive into real, physical pain!"
As the words faded, the most convincingly real "Fugaku" appeared soundlessly behind Shinsuke, kunai in hand, and drove it hard toward the center of his back.
Within the genjutsu world, Shinsuke did not even turn around to face the strike aimed at his back.
"Is that all?"
"Fugaku, the breadth of your ambition, the scale of your vision, ends right here."
The next second, the Mangekyō in Shinsuke's eyes turned.
"HMMM!"
A power more vast, more immense than Fugaku's dōjutsu force, carrying with it a faint sense of something fundamental and absolute, surged skyward.
Left Eye: Temporal Reversion!
Time, in that instant, seemed to have its rewind button pressed.
The kunai stabbing toward Shinsuke's back froze abruptly when it was still one centimeter from his skin, and then began to retreat in a deeply unsettling manner.
The ambushing "Fugaku" flew backward, his body beyond his own control.
The sky-filling fireballs and shuriken all rolled back in reverse, dissolving back into chakra and dissipating into the air.
"This is impossible!"
Fugaku cried out in fury as he felt the control he held over this world being forcibly and violently stripped away by a power he could not resist.
"Your Mangekyō sees only a past that has long since decayed."
Shinsuke's voice echoed throughout the entire genjutsu world, carrying a faint trace of amusement.
"But what my eyes see is a future that is destined to unfold."
"Now, the game is over."
Crack, crack.
The genjutsu world Fugaku took such pride in, Mirror Flower, let out a wail under the strain of this force, like a true mirror being shattered, splintering and spreading with fractures that appeared from nowhere and raced outward in every direction.
In the end, it burst apart completely.