The earth didn't just break; it shattered.
From the mud of the Naka River, great spires of wood erupted with the velocity of ballista bolts. They weren't trees. They were living spears, their tips hardened into a diamond-like lattice of cellulose and chakra. Hashirama wasn't just growing wood; he was weaponizing the very concept of life.
I dived.
I didn't move randomly. My Sharingan was overclocked to its maximum threshold, mapping the tectonic stress-points in the soil. I could see where the roots were gathering energy before they breached the surface. I moved in a jagged, staccato pattern—two steps left, a slide, a mid-air twist.
The wood tore through the space I had occupied a millisecond before. The sound was a relentless thrum-thrum-thrum, the vibrations so intense they threatened to liquefy my internal organs.
Status Check:
Heart Rate: 192 BPM.
Adrenaline Levels: Critical.
Neurological Feedback: 88% (Approaching permanent synaptic damage).
"Madara!" I shouted, my voice barely audible over the roar of the rising forest. "The center! He is anchoring the system to the bedrock! We need a thermal spike at the root-node!"
Madara was already moving. He was a blur of blue and red, his own Sharingan a twin-fire in the darkness of the closing canopy. He understood. He didn't ask for the math; he felt the intent.
"Fire Release: Great Fireball - Concentration Variance!" Madara roared.
He didn't aim for the trees. He aimed for the ground at Hashirama's feet. A lance of white-hot flame hit the mud, turning it into glass instantly.
The thermal shock was enough. The roots, sensitive to the sudden temperature gradient of three thousand degrees Celsius, recoiled. The advance slowed for a heartbeat.
That heartbeat was all I needed.
I reached the "root-node"—the point where Hashirama's chakra was most concentrated. I didn't use a sword. I used a Resonance Spanner.
I had spent the last three months building this device from salvaged iron and wire. It was a simple rod, but it was designed to vibrate at the natural frequency of "Wood Style" chakra—a frequency I had carefully mapped during the river skirmish.
I slammed the rod into the base of a rising oak spire.
I pulsed my entire remaining chakra pool into the rod.
Vrrr-ack-SHATTER!
The resonance didn't just break the tree. it traveled through the entire interconnected root system. The "Deep Forest Emergence" didn't just stop; it vibrated itself into splinters. Millions of wood shards exploded outward, a cloud of lethal shrapnel that forced even Hashirama to retreat.
The forest collapsed. The "divine gift" was turned into a pile of sawdust and broken dreams.
I fell to my knees, my vision blurring. Blood was leaking from my right eye—a warm, metallic trickle that stained my cheek. My brain felt like it had been scrubbed with sandpaper.
System Log: Data Saturation Reached. Neural Pathway Re-routing...
I looked up. Through the haze of my failing sight, I saw Hashirama standing amidst the sawdust. He wasn't angry anymore. He was horrified. He looked at his hands, then at me, then at the carnage around him.
"This isn't war," Hashirama whispered. "This is... a machine. You are turning our lives into a machine."
I didn't answer him. I couldn't.
Inside my head, something clicked. A technical "shink."
The two tomoe in my right eye drifted toward the center, merging and splitting in a pattern that defied the standard Uchiha progression. It wasn't the "Curse of Hatred" that awakened it. It wasn't the loss of a loved one.
It was the sheer, overwhelming pressure of the data.
I had processed so much of the world's technical errors that my brain had finally built a superior processor to handle the throughput.
Right Eye: Mature Sharingan - Three Tomoe.
Processing Window: +300ms.
Data Acquisition Speed: 4.5 GB/s (Simulated).
I stood up, wiping the blood from my eye. The battle was winding down. The Senju, their vanguard shattered by the collapse of the forest, were retreating across the river. Tajima was shouting orders, reclaiming the ground.
Madara walked over to me, his breathing heavy. He looked at my eye, his own spinning in shock.
"Three tomoe," Madara said, his voice hushed. "At seven years old. Kaito... how much did you have to hate them to awaken that?"
I looked at him, then at the dead Senju in the mud, then at the fading emerald of the forest.
"I don't hate them, Madara-sama," I said, my voice as cold and flat as a winter's dawn. "I just found a more efficient way to process the variables."
Madara looked at me then, and for the first time, I saw a flicker of fear in his eyes.
Good. Fear was a Manageable Variable.
System Log: Level 2 Optimization Complete. Objective: Survive the Verdant Singularity - Success. Relationship Variable (Madara): Complicated. Relationship Variable (Hashirama): Tagged as Primary System Threat.
The Warring States Era was just beginning. And I was finally starting to like the frame-data.