No matter how far Sakura let her imagination run, she never would have guessed that the person who held Akira's heart was Tsunade.
Watching Sakura struggle so hard she looked ready to pull her own hair out, Akira decided not to drag things on. He smiled and said, "All right, stop guessing. Go home and rest. I should head back too."
Sakura had a whole pile of things she had wanted to say to him, but after learning that his heart already belonged to someone, those words felt trapped in her throat.
She watched Akira's figure slowly disappear into the night, then leaned weakly against the wall and looked up at the cold moon above.
Her chest felt tight, and she wanted to cry.
Bringing Sasuke back had once been her obsession because of Team Seven's bond. But with Akira, Sakura could clearly feel that something inside her had changed without her noticing.
At first, it had been trust in a reliable teammate.
Now, it had turned into a bitter, aching kind of affection.
But no matter how hard Sakura thought about it, she could not figure out who had stolen Akira's heart if it was not Hinata or Ino.
Did Akira have some hidden confidante inside the village that no one knew about?
Counting it out, the girls his age in Konoha who had always been close to him were only those two. They had been around him constantly back at the Academy.
If it was neither of them, then who could it be?
Back at the Senju compound, the bedroom was softly lit.
Akira sat on the edge of the bed, brows slightly furrowed, as if thinking about something.
Naruto's own chakra reserves, impressive as they were, naturally could not compare to the Nine-Tails, which was practically a mass of chakra given form. If one really examined it, Naruto relied mostly on the Eight Trigrams Seal Minato had placed on him years ago, along with the later repairs and reinforcements added to it.
In simple terms, it was a matter of using precision rather than brute force. A smaller amount of chakra was used to guide, suppress, and lock away the Nine-Tails' vast ocean of power.
That was basic sealing logic.
Back when Akira only had a shallow understanding of ninjutsu, he had really believed Naruto was some bottomless chakra monster who could wrestle the strongest Tailed Beast head-on.
If that were true, the Nine-Tails' title as the greatest mass of chakra among the Tailed Beasts would have been a joke.
After all, that giant fox was second only to the Ten-Tails. If any human child could casually match it in raw quantity, where would the dignity of the Tailed Beasts go?
Only after Akira fully understood ninjutsu as a system did he finally see the truth. The so-called enormous portion of Naruto's chakra that seemed to vanish had mostly gone into maintaining the seal.
To an ordinary ninja, that amount was astronomical.
But compared to the Nine-Tails' near-limitless sea of chakra, it was like comparing a ditch to a great river.
The Nine-Tails, on the other hand, had lived for thousands of years and seen every kind of storm imaginable, yet Akira had genuinely frightened it this time.
That tremor from deep within its soul was stronger than what it had felt when Hashirama Senju once held it down like a helpless animal.
Back then, Hashirama's chakra reserves had indeed been abnormal, but compared to this half of the Nine-Tails, he had only been somewhat greater.
At most, he had held a clear edge.
But this monster named Akira was different. The chakra contained inside his physical body alone had already climbed to more than four times the Nine-Tails' current amount, and it was faintly pushing toward five times.
Five times the Nine-Tails.
What kind of concept was that?
At that point, it was basically like having a living, complete Ten-Tails standing there.
If Akira really reached that level, his raw chakra alone could surpass Kaguya Otsutsuki. It was absurd beyond reason.
After all, even after Kaguya ate the chakra fruit, she was still only borrowing part of the Divine Tree's power.
Only when she fully merged with the Ten-Tails did her chakra volume truly approach that level.
But Akira's terrifying mass of energy, equivalent to stacking five complete Nine-Tails together, was already entering territory beyond the Ten-Tails.
An energy reaction on that scale was enough to make anyone's scalp go numb. If Akira wanted, he could almost cross the boundary of ordinary mortals in an instant and step straight into the realm of the Six Paths.
He might even end up stronger than Kaguya in direct combat.
To be fair, the Sage of Six Paths, Hagoromo, was not actually stronger than his mother in raw power. He had won because he joined forces with Hamura and used Yin-Yang Release, a power especially suited to sealing Kaguya.
It was a perfect counter.
Pure attribute advantage.
If it had been a direct contest of strength, either Hagoromo or Hamura alone would have been crushed by Kaguya.
So if Akira's chakra truly crossed the threshold of five Nine-Tails, surpassing Kaguya would no longer be empty talk.
What made it even more unsettling was that this guy did not just have a bottomless chakra pool. His battle instincts and ability to analyze jutsu were also at the top of the ninja world.
Inside the mental space, Naruto sat cross-legged and stared at the giant fox behind the bars, confused.
"Hey, why do you always act so nervous whenever Akira comes up? Have some pride, will you?"
The Nine-Tails rested its enormous head on its front paws and did not even lift its eyelids.
"Is that fear? That is respect for reality. That brat is unnatural. Looking across the entire ninja world, there's no one who can handle him. Even if I gave you every bit of power I have, you'd still get flattened."
Naruto scratched the back of his head and laughed. "I'm not planning to fight Akira anyway. I know myself. I definitely can't beat him."
The Nine-Tails snorted and stopped bothering with the idiot.
Still, Naruto was worried about Sora.
He turned toward Akira, anxiety clear in his eyes. "Sora... he won't really lose control, will he?"
Akira stood with his hands behind his back in front of the large window, his gaze seeming to pierce several kilometers of distance as he locked onto a restless surge of energy far away.
The feeling was too clear.
It was like a stone dropped into a still lake, sending ripples of chakra spreading outward in rings.
The chakra inside Sora was like a powder keg with a lit fuse. It was expanding wildly, unstable to the extreme. Clearly, the false Nine-Tails chakra inside him was starting to act up.
"The situation isn't good," Akira said. "The chakra inside him is already a mess. He'll probably lose control soon. Fortunately, Captain Yamato is already on his way."
Yamato might not always seem reliable, but his Wood Style really did suppress Tailed Beast chakra. The only question was whether he could hold the situation together without the special sealing tags Akira had prepared.
The moment Naruto heard that, he could not sit still. He turned toward Tsunade behind the desk.
"Granny Tsunade, I'm worried. I want to go see what's happening!"
Tsunade frowned, weighing the risks. In the end, she sighed.
"Fine. You can go. But don't act recklessly, and keep your distance from him if he loses control."
Naruto nodded hard, his expression more serious than if he were taking an oath.