The crimson streaks were not a trick of the chaotic, pulsing light within the barrier. They were stark, vivid, and horrifyingly literal. Kushina's breath hitched.
The thick, viscous red tears welling from the very corners of his Sharingan eyes and flowing in rivulets that dripped from his jaw with soft, terrible plips onto the floorboards below. The sight bypassed her rational mind and struck directly at her core, a primal alarm.
'What is this?'
Her thoughts raced, a frantic triage of dread. 'Did news of Hiro's death trigger some kind of dormant backlash in his chakra system? A physical manifestation of grief? Or… is it a side effect of the regeneration he went through a few minutes ago? Did my chakra infusion, the forced cycles, destabilise something fundamental?'
The possibilities were all bad. She knew of no Sharingan phenomenon that produced bloody tears outside of extreme overuse, and Renjiro's eyes were freshly grown, untouched by battle. This was something new, something wrong.
Before she could voice any of these terrors, the scene descended from horror into nightmare.
A sound emerged from Renjiro's slumped form, a low, guttural vibration that was less a growl and more the sound of earth tearing apart. It was utterly inhuman.
Then, as if the internal pain had become an external entity he could attack, his hands flew to his face. They were not the precise, chakra-guided instruments of a surgeon, but the frantic, clawing hooks of a trapped animal. His fingers, nails sharp and desperate, scraped violently across his own eyelids.
"Scritch-scratch-thud."
The sound was obscene. He tore at the delicate skin, smearing the bloody tears into a macabre warpaint across his cheeks and brow. Bright red lines of broken skin appeared beneath his nails. He seemed intent on gouging the very eyes out of his skull, as if by destroying the organs that had witnessed this new, unbearable world, he could unsee the truth they had revealed.
"RENJIRO, NO!" Kushina screamed, her voice raw with panic. The Adamantine Chains wavered as her concentration shattered.
Minato was already moving, the Yellow Flash blurring into action. He bypassed the barrier's weakest point.
But they were both too late.
Just as Minato's hand reached to seize Renjiro's wrist, and as Kushina dissolved a section of the chains to lunge inside, the violent energy animating Renjiro vanished.
The clawing hands fell limp, dropping to his sides. The roaring geyser of chakra cut off as if a valve had been slammed shut. The inhuman growl ended in a choked gasp. His body folded in on itself, collapsing backwards onto the floor in a boneless heap, silent and still. The only movement was the slow, dark seep of blood from the fresh scratches on his face and the eerie, still-wet trails from his eyes.
The sudden silence was louder than the storm had been. Minato and Kushina froze over his prone form, their own breathing harsh in the quiet. They exchanged a look that held volumes of confusion, fear, and helplessness. No explanation fit. No training had covered this.
Wordlessly, they fell into a practised routine. Kushina knelt, her fingers going to Renjiro's throat, feeling for the steady, too-slow beat of his pulse. She peeled back an eyelid—the Sharingan had deactivated, leaving only the clouded, unfocused grey of unconsciousness.
=====
Consciousness returned not as a sunrise, but as a slow, painful seepage into awareness. The first thing Renjiro registered was a profound, deep-body soreness, as if every muscle had been stretched on a rack and then pummeled.
A heavy, leaden weight seemed to press down on his limbs. He was lying on something soft—a futon—in a room that smelled faintly of tatami, herbal salve, and the distinct, clean scent that was uniquely Kushina's home.
He tried to lift his head. A stabbing, ice-pick pain lanced through his temples, forcing a low groan from his lips and making him collapse back onto the pillow. The movement stirred up the dust of memory, and it all came crashing back in a suffocating wave.
'Obito. Dead. Missing.'
'Hiro.'
'Gone.'
The grief didn't return as a sharp stab this time; it settled over him like a soaked, heavy blanket, cold and inescapable. It was a fact, a new and terrible axis his world now turned on. He lay there, eyes closed, allowing the weight of it to press him into the mattress, analysing the devastation with a detachment that felt like his last defence.
Why did it shatter him so completely? Sure, Hiro Hatake wasn't just another comrade. They had been placed on the same genin team a lifetime ago: himself, Hiro, and Aiko, under the weary but kind tutelage of Riku Senju.
Aiko had pursued medical ninjutsu with a single-minded passion; their paths had diverged amicably but definitively. Riku-sensei, a distant cousin of the main Senju line, had faded into administrative obscurity after their promotion, the bond of sensei and student fading into polite respect.
But Hiro… Hiro had remained.
Through the awkward chunin years and the first lethal missions, Hiro had been a constant. He was the brother Renjiro had chosen in this life, one of the vanishingly few people he had allowed behind the walls of strategy and secret history.
He had never had many real friends. He hadn't wanted them. They were vulnerabilities, points of emotional leverage. But Hiro had simply… insisted. And in a moment of catastrophic weakness, Renjiro had admitted to himself that he cared. That admission now felt like a fatal error.
The pain that had overwhelmed him… its scale was familiar. It echoed only one other cataclysm in his memory: the day Uzushiogakure fell. The day his second life had awakened with his Sharingan in this new, brutal world.
The grief for a lost homeland and a slaughtered clan. For Hiro to trigger a reaction of similar magnitude… it spoke to a connection far deeper than he had ever consciously acknowledged.
It also confused him.
What, exactly, had happened in that moment of collapse? It felt less like an emotional breakdown and more like a… systemic failure.
The soft shush of a sliding screen broke his grim reverie. A familiar, vibrant chakra signature approached, tempered now with caution and concern.
"Renjiro…?" Kushina's voice was soft, tentative. She stepped into the dim room, a silhouette against the lighter hallway. "Are you okay?"
He opened his eyes, wincing at the dull throb behind them. He looked at his right hand, clenching it into a fist, feeling the residual tremor in his muscles. His voice, when it came, was a dry, cracked whisper.
"I… don't know."
He turned his head slowly, the movement less painful now, to look at her. Her vivid red hair was tied back simply, her face etched with worry that she was trying hard to mask. The sight of her, solid and real, anchored him slightly. The question he had to ask felt like pulling a knife from his own chest.
"Kushina…" he began, the name of his friend sticking in his throat. "What happened to Hiro?"
But Kushina didn't answer. She had frozen in place, just a few feet from the futon. Her violet eyes were wide, locked on his face, all the carefully maintained concern wiped away by pure, unadulterated shock. Her lips parted slightly.
"Your eyes…" she breathed, the words barely audible.
Renjiro blinked, confused. "What about my eyes?" His hand instinctively rose to touch his face, his fingers brushing the tender, scabbed-over scratches from his own nails. Had he damaged them during his frenzy?
Kushina took a half-step closer, leaning in, her gaze piercing. "Your Mangekyō…" she whispered, as if speaking too loudly might break a spell.
A cold spike of shame and understanding shot through Renjiro. Of course. The emotional tsunami, the grief for his brother-in-arms—it was the perfect catalyst. He had activated his Mangekyō Sharingan again, probably in his unconscious state. He must have been projecting its pattern. He began to form an apology.
"I must have activated it by acci—"
The sentence died in his throat.
The air left his lungs. The dull throb in his head became a silent, screaming siren.
A fundamental, impossible truth crashed into him with the force of the landslide that had supposedly killed Obito.
'The eyes I have right now…'
They were the eyes he had regenerated just hours ago in this very house, under Kushina's supervision. The third pair.
'These eyes should NOT have a Mangekyō.'
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