Konoha was burning.
It wasn't just the timber and paper of the buildings; the very air seemed to be on fire. The Nine-Tailed Fox's chakra was corrosive—a red, boiling miasma that stripped the paint from walls and made the skin of nearby shinobi itch with phantom burns.
Ren Yamanaka stood on the roof of a shattered tea shop, panting behind his porcelain mask. Around him, the village's elite Jonin were throwing everything they had at the beast. Fireballs, mud dragons, wind blades—they all shattered harmlessly against the Fox's fur or were swept away by a casual flick of its massive tails.
It was like throwing pebbles at a hurricane.
"It's not working," Ren whispered, his voice tinny in his own ears. "Physical attacks are irrelevant against a mass of living chakra."
Inside the Vault of his mind, the Council was frantic.
Goro: Look at that density! My walls would be tissue paper. Isamu: Its chakra volume is infinite. We cannot drain it. If you try to eat it, you will explode. Tactician: Direct confrontation yields a 100% mortality rate. Recommend retreat to perimeter. Ryuichi: Look at its eyes! The Sharingan pattern is stabilizing. The control is external, but the rage is internal. The beast is a slave to its own hatred.
Ren watched the Fox. It opened its maw, gathering positive and negative chakra. A purple sphere began to form—a Tailed Beast Ball. If that fired, the village center would be a crater.
"I need to stall it," Ren calculated. "Just for a few minutes. Until Minato returns. Until the Sealing Corps can set up."
He didn't care about saving every life. He had accepted the role of the cold pragmatist. But if Konoha fell, his base of operations fell. His cover fell. His future as Hokage fell.
"And," Ren thought, watching the civilians screaming in the distance, "I need them to see me saving them."
It was cynical. It was political. But it was also necessary.
"Council," Ren commanded, his mental voice booming in the library. "Prepare for full synchronization. We are going to execute a Class-S Mind Body Disturbance."
Are you insane? The Puppet Master screeched. That mind is a nuclear reactor of hate! It will dissolve your ego in seconds!
"We don't need to control it," Ren said, gripping his tantō just to feel the cold steel grounding him. "We just need to jam the signal. We need to be the static in the radio."
He looked down. A few streets away, he saw a familiar figure fighting a small fire near the shelter. It was Sora Inuzuka. She wasn't fleeing. She was ushering children into the bunker, swinging a shovel at falling debris.
She is weak, Ren thought. But she is still standing.
"If she can stand," Ren muttered, "then I can scream."
He put his hands together. The Tiger seal.
"Art of the Chimera: Mental Fortification."
Ren gathered the combined mental energy of the twenty-six souls in his head. He wove them together into a spear of pure will.
He leaped.
—————
The Dive
Ren didn't attack the Fox's body. He landed on its snout.
For a split second, he was a gnat on the nose of a dragon. The Fox's giant red eye focused on him. The Killing Intent was a physical weight, pressing him down, trying to crush his lungs.
Ren stared back with his mismatched eyes—the White and the Red.
"Mind Body Disturbance Technique!"
He didn't just project his own chakra. He projected the screaming.
CONNECT.
The world vanished.
Ren wasn't in Konoha anymore. He was in a sewer. But it wasn't the ordered, metaphorical sewer that Naruto would one day visit. This was a sewer in the middle of an earthquake.
The water was boiling blood. The walls were made of gnashing teeth. The air roared with a hatred so pure, so ancient, that it felt like being flayed alive.
"WHO DARES?"
The voice wasn't a sound. It was an impact.
Ren's mental avatar—a glowing figure of white light—was slammed against a wall of darkness.
Kurama, the Nine-Tails, towered over him. He was a mountain of malice, chained by glowing red shackles (the external Sharingan control). He thrashed against them, and every movement sent waves of pain through Ren's connection.
"A human?" Kurama growled, leaning down. His breath smelled of centuries of resentment. "A tiny, fragile insect. You come into my mind? Into the furnace?"
"I am not just a human," Ren shouted, his avatar expanding, drawing on the Council's strength. "I am the Legion!"
Behind Ren's avatar, the twenty-six ghosts appeared. Goro, Ryuichi, the Mist Assassin, the Tactician… they stood shoulder to shoulder, forming a phalanx.
"Ghosts?" Kurama laughed. The sound shattered the spectral floor. "You are a graveyard. A thief who eats the scraps of the dead. You think your little collection of souls can stand against ME?"
The Fox swiped.
It wasn't a physical claw. It was a wave of pure emotion. Hatred.
It washed over Ren.
It felt like burning. Ren felt every slight he had ever suffered. The bullying at the academy. The fear of being a battery. The disdain of the Hyuga. The rejection of Kaito.
The hatred amplified it all. It told him to let go. To destroy everything. To burn the village himself.
Let go, the Hatred whispered. You hate them too. You know you do. They made you a monster.
Ren's avatar began to flicker. His edges dissolved.
Alert! The Tactician's voice cut through the static. Ego integrity at 40%. We are dissolving!
It's too strong! Ryuichi screamed, clutching his head. The Uchiha hate… it feeds him! We can't fight fire with fire!
Ren fell to his knees in the mindscape. The hatred was seductive. It was easy. If he just gave in, he would be powerful. He wouldn't have to be careful anymore.
"Yes," Kurama purred. "Break. Join the ocean. Be nothing."
Ren looked at his hands. They were turning into smoke. He was forgetting his name again.
Who am I? I am Ren… no, I am Goro… no, I am…
He looked for an anchor. He looked for the Memory Palace. But the library was shaking, books falling from the shelves, burning in the Fox's fire.
He needed something the Council didn't have.
He needed something illogical. Something human.
He thought of Sora.
He remembered her slap.
"Pain is proof that I loved him!"
Ren gasped. The pain. Not the hatred. The pain of loss. The pain of connection.
The Council saw power as the ultimate goal. They saw emotions as weakness. That's why they were struggling against Kurama—because Kurama was a being of pure emotion, and they were trying to fight him with logic and ambition.
You can't out-hate the Fox, Ren realized. And you can't out-think a storm.
But you can endure it.
Ren anchored himself to that single memory. The sting on his cheek. The look in Sora's eyes—fierce, broken, but alive.
"I endure," Ren whispered.
His avatar solidified. The light turned from white to a deep, resonant teal.
"I am Ren Yamanaka," he stated. "And I have walked through twenty-six hells to get here. Yours is just bigger."
Ren stood up. He signaled the Council.
"Directives update!" Ren shouted. "Stop fighting the current! Use the flow! Redirect the hatred into the mental maze!"
The Tactician understood immediately. A diversion. We don't block; we channel.
The Council shifted formation. Instead of a wall, they became a series of canals. They took the waves of Kurama's rage and funneled them into the infinite corridors of Ren's Memory Palace.
The hatred flooded the library, washing through the aisles, but the structure held. It was designed to hold madness.
Ren looked up at the Fox.
"You are strong," Ren said. "But you are stupid. You let your emotions become shackles. If you controlled your hate instead of letting it control you, no Uchiha eye could enslave you."
Kurama roared, furious at the lecture from an insect. "SILENCE!"
The Fox gathered a massive mental Tailed Beast Ball. It was aiming to wipe Ren's consciousness from existence.
Calculated time to impact: 30 seconds, the Tactician warned. We cannot survive a direct hit.
"We don't need to survive forever," Ren said, sweating in the real world. "Just 30 seconds."
In the real world, the Nine-Tails froze. Its physical body went rigid as Ren jammed its synapses. The massive Beast Ball it had been charging dissipated into smoke.
The villagers watching gasped.
"It stopped!" someone shouted. "The Fox stopped!"
"Look!" another pointed. "On its nose! It's Captain Chimera!"
Ren stood on the snout, vibrating with the effort. Blood poured from his nose, soaking his mask. His chakra was flaring visibly—a chaotic storm of colors fighting the red aura of the beast.
He held the connection.
10 seconds. Kurama's mental ball was forming.
20 seconds. The Council was screaming.
25 seconds. Ren's vision was going black.
And then, a flash of yellow light.
Minato Namikaze appeared in the sky above the village. He held a giant toad, Gamabunta.
"Ren!" Minato's voice cut through the chaos. "Clear out!"
Ren heard it.
"Disengage!" Ren ordered the Council.
He broke the connection.
The backlash was instant. Ren was flung backward off the Fox's nose as if shot from a cannon. He crashed through three terracotta roofs before skidding to a halt in a pile of debris.
The Fox, freed from the mental jam, roared and lunged… straight into Minato's teleportation barrier.
FLASH.
The beast vanished, teleported away from the village by the Fourth Hokage.
Silence fell over the center of Konoha.
Ren lay in the rubble. His mask was cracked in half. His body felt like it had been put through a meat grinder.
He stared up at the empty sky where the Fox had been.
Inside his head, the Council was silent. They were shaken. They had seen true power, power that made their petty ninjutsu look like parlor tricks.
Goro: We… we survived. Isamu: It was immense. We are nothing compared to that. Tactician: Incorrect. Individually, we are nothing. Collectively… we held a god for 30 seconds.
Ren coughed, tasting blood. He pulled the broken mask from his face.
"We held it," Ren whispered. "And the village saw."
He tried to stand, but his legs failed him. He collapsed back into the dust.
A medical-nin rushed over.
"Captain! Are you alright?"
Ren looked at the medic. He forced a smile. A hero's smile.
"Just… tired," Ren rasped. "Is the village safe?"
"Yes! Lord Fourth took the beast away! You bought him the time!"
Ren closed his eyes.
He had won. He had played the hero.
But as darkness took him, the Tactician whispered a final, chilling lesson in the back of his mind.
Lesson learned, Chairman. Individual power is irrelevant against a force of nature. But influence… influence can move mountains.
The Fox is enslaved by hate. The village is enslaved by fear.
If we want to rule… we must not be the hate. We must be the cage.
Ren drifted into unconsciousness, his mind already plotting the next move. The war for the soul of the village had just begun.
End of Chapter 15.