Chapter 306 - 306: Madara Carves Through Konoha’s Hope

Meanwhile, around Konoha, the battle around Hiashi had turned into a full-scale siege.

Nagato anchored the center with his natural-energy Rinnegan, Kiyomi's black Susanoo hammered him from above, Ashina's sealing chains circled for openings, and Renjiro, Kanae, Pakura, and Tsunade crashed in from every angle they could find.

But the more pressure they applied, the worse Hiashi became.

Forced back again and again, he was left with only one option: pull even harder on the Hyūga energy vessel far outside the village. Each surge twisted him further.

His chakra cloak ballooned outward until it no longer resembled a human aura.

White, flame-like chakra poured off him in sheets, rising higher than the rooftops.

Black markings crawled across his skin and outer cloak like cracks in hot metal.

His Byakugan glowed so intensely that it was hard to look directly at it.

Hiashi's size increased, too.

Not physically at first, but then his frame began to expand under the pressure, driven by the excess energy he couldn't contain.

His limbs stretched, and his spine thickened with reinforced chakra channels, forming a silhouette that looked more like a monster than a clan head.

Every breath he took distorted the air.

Each step shook the ground.

And every time they struck him, the vessel answered with another pulse of power, feeding him more white fire than his body was ever meant to handle.

Kanae stared at him with a tight jaw. "That's not Hiashi anymore," she said.

Ashina's eyes narrowed. "No. That's the vessel using him."

Nagato adjusted his stance, feeling the storm of chakra pushing outward in waves.

"If he pulls any more, the vessel will start burning itself."

Kiyomi's Susanoo raised both hammers. "Then we end it before that happens."

Hiashi roared, the sound warped and hollow, and the white fire around him surged again.

He had also lost the majority of his sanity.

The fight was about to shift into something even worse.

The last distorted energy beam Hiashi fired from his mouth tore through the air like a white-hot lance.

It would have leveled an entire island if Nagato hadn't moved instantly, using the last parts of his chakra.

Natural energy flooded into his hands and shaped itself outward.

Sage Art: Twin Reflecting Palms.

Two enormous translucent palms formed behind him, each one molded from concentrated natural energy, their outlines shimmering like heated glass.

Nagato clapped his own hands together, and the giant constructs mirrored the motion.

The palms slammed shut on the incoming beam, catching it between them with a deep, vibrating shock.

The chakra inside the beam writhed, destabilizing.

Nagato didn't let it go.

He compressed the attack between the palms, forcing natural energy into it, folding its power inward, and then snapping the palms open to release it like a slingshot.

The beam fired back toward Hiashi, now twice as dense, twice as fast, and twisted with natural energy that didn't belong to him.

Hiashi staggered under the impact, white flames rippling violently across his distorted frame.

...

Since Madara decided he had seen enough, he kept advancing toward Kushina, the Susanoo enclosing him the entire time like a moving shadow.

The resistance was delaying him, but not stopping him, and time was the only resource he had no interest in wasting.

Kushina reacted again, golden-black chains exploding from her back, dozens of them whipping forward to clamp around the Susanoo's legs and lock it in place. Madara gave them a single glance and a comment. "Excessive effort."

The Susanoo shifted its footing, lifting one colossal leg with a fluid motion.

The first cluster of chains shot under its heel and missed completely.

The second wave angled upward, aiming for the knees—

Madara raised one hand.

Shinra Tensei.

A sharp, focused blast, not wide, not village-shattering, just a clean, controlled repulsion, fired downward along the Susanoo's thigh.

The chains collided with the repulsive force and were blown sideways, scattering across the broken street in a shower of sparks.

Tobirama and his three Shadow Clones moved the instant Kushina's chains were redirected.

Their fingers blurred through seals, four elements surging at once.

Gale Release followed, a compressed wind vortex that snapped upward and locked onto the armor's center mass, threatening to shear away its balance.

Abyss Release rose next, a crushing surge of electrified dark water exploding from beneath, trying to clamp the Susanoo's legs and drown its motion in raw pressure.

Frostfire Release lashed across the Susanoo's flank in a spiraling jet, freezing and igniting the chakra plating at the same time, forcing rapid expansion and contraction.

Spectral Release ignited around real Tobirama's arm, forming a translucent, vibrating lance of phased chakra.

He aimed straight for Madara's chest inside it.

The spectral lance cut through solid matter, slipping past the Susanoo's outer plating as if it were fog, trying to phase directly into the torso where Madara stood protected.

Tobirama had no illusions; only an attack that bypassed the armor entirely had any chance of forcing Madara to guard seriously.

However, before any of the four elements struck, Madara's reaction unfolded in a clean, deadly sequence.

The compressed Gale Release vortex slammed toward the Susanoo's torso—

Madara flicked two fingers.

A sudden Shinra Tensei burst outward from inside the armor, dispersing the wind vortex in a single, violent shockwave.

The attack broke apart midair like shredded mist.

The Abyss Release explosion of electrified dark water surged up next—

Wood thorns erupted instantly from beneath the Susanoo's feet.

A Wood Release: Pillar Grove burst upward, splitting the water mass and redirecting it around the Susanoo's legs before it could clamp down.

The construct didn't even lose its balance.

The spiraling Frostfire jet wrapped around the Susanoo's flank—

Madara didn't trust the armor to handle that kind of thermal whiplash alone.

A shadow clone burst into existence beside him inside the ribcage, slipped through the opening plates, and leapt outward.

As it emerged, a partial Susanoo arm formed around its own body.

In one clean punch, the clone swept the blade across the Frostfire stream.

The mixed jet split instantly, snapped apart by the impact, and scattered into harmless shards of heat and ice as the clone's Susanoo force erased the technique.

Then came the real 'threat'.

Tobirama's Spectral Release lance.

A phased strike, aimed straight for Madara himself.

Madara's eye narrowed the moment the spectral blade slipped cleanly through the Susanoo's armor and entered the inner chamber, angling for his heart.

He didn't use Limbo.

He saved it deliberately.

Instead, he raised one hand calmly.

Preta Path activated.

A dense, spiraling pull of chakra absorption wrapped around his palm, forming a spherical vacuum of hungry energy.

The moment the spectral lance touched that pull, its phased structure warped, then collapsed, its very nature eaten away by the absorption field.

The technique dissolved in an instant, shredded into raw chakra, and drunk into Madara's hand like water down a drain.

Tobirama's eyes widened a fraction.

Madara met his gaze through the Susanoo's chest cavity.

"You think I would allow such a predictable line of attack?" he said, voice level,

With the attack erased, he took another step forward, unhurried and absolute, closing the distance to Kushina as if nothing had happened.

Might Duy roared back into the fray, another Hirudora detonating toward Madara like a compressed storm.

Madara's expression tightened with irritation.

He lifted one hand.

Chibaku Tensei flared.

A newborn black core snapped into existence above Duy's head, its gravity crushing down in an instant.

The Seven-Gate aura buckled as Duy was yanked off the ground, body dragged upward and pinned against the forming sphere, muscles straining violently as he tried to tear free.

Madara watched him struggle, unimpressed.

"You carry another man's essence inside you," he said coldly. "How distasteful."

Madara advanced again.

Tobirama reappeared beside Kushina, kunai in his hand, sensing exactly what Madara intended.

Madara didn't rush.

His Susanoo's massive twin-bladed katanas swung down in a crossing arc, the force behind them enough to split a street in half.

Tobirama had no choice but to teleport again or be crushed on the spot.

Tobirama blinked behind Kushina—

Madara struck.

One motion.

One chain of perfect, predatory decisions.

First: Banshō Ten'in, not on Tobirama—but on Kushina.

A sudden, precise gravitational pull yanked her forward a half-step.

Just a half-step.

Enough to break her stance.

Tobirama moved instantly, grabbing her shoulder to counter the force—

Madara used that.

Second: Shinra Tensei, but narrow, condensed into a focused cone.

He blasted Tobirama alone.

The Hokage vanished backward in a blur, smashing into an abandoned home's wall.

He flickered back again soon, rebalancing, but further opening was made for Madara to get even closer to Kushina.

Kushina's chains also erupted at this time.

However, Madara expected them at this point and selected a perfect response.

Third: Came the strongest version of the Deep Forest Emergence, erupting from the ground in a violent surge of roots with his full chakra.

Madara wasn't trying to overpower the chains. He was breaking their alignment first, then forcing both techniques to cancel each other out.

The roots twisted upward in spirals and split the terrain beneath her feet, shifting the angles of her attacks just enough that the chains struck off-trajectory, colliding with the wood growth instead of locking around him.

The moment they clashed, both forces began absorbing and bleeding chakra from each other, Kushina's sealing force draining the wood, and the wood siphoning her chakra back through the contact points.

In seconds, the entire exchange destabilized, both techniques neutralizing each other in a messy, grinding stalemate.

Madara didn't waste even a fraction of a second. Her guard was broken.

Madara left one shadow clone inside the Susanoo to continue operating it and deflecting incoming attacks.

His real body phased out of the ribcage in a blur of chakra, cloak rippling as he touched the ground silently.

Tobirama was already there, just a few meters from Kushina, Flying Raijin mark flickering under his feet.

Kushina was struggling to retract her chains because Madara's most powerful Deep Forest Emergence was still stubbornly coiling around them.

She had to tear through living wood with every movement.

She was distracted.

Exactly as Madara wanted.

This was the moment he switched to true precision.

His Rinnegan spun once.

And both of his true, long-lost Mangekyō abilities activated.