Akira stared down at the deceased Uchiha, his gaze lingering on the residual red glow fading from the man's eyes. Opportunity had presented itself in the middle of tragedy, and he couldn't afford to hesitate.
A six-tomoe Monkeykill Sharingan... I can't leave a legendary ocular secret like this to be salvaged by Root or buried under clan rubble.
Reaching into his pouch, he pulled out a blank storage scroll. With practiced, swift motions, he unrolled the parchment, channeled his chakra, and sealed the Uchiha man's entire body cleanly inside.
He then turned to the unconscious woman. Checking her breathing once more to ensure she was stable, he carefully carried her out of the ruins and laid her down beneath a covered stone overhang near a heavily trafficked evacuation path. She would be found safely by Konoha's medical corps within minutes.
Looking up through the billowing smoke, Akira watched as the monstrous form of the Nine-Tails vanished from the village perimeter, suppressed and sealed away by the Fourth Hokage. The destructive rampage had finally quieted down, leaving the village in a heavy, ringing silence.
Sensing the shift in momentum across the battlefield, Akira executed a rapid Body Flicker, ghosting through the shadowed alleys and rushing back toward the Hyūga compound.
Upon arriving at his home, he immediately flared his Byakugan, scanning a full three hundred sixty degrees around his property. Seeing no signs of Anbu observers or clan guards nearby, he let out a long, quiet sigh of relief and stepped inside.
POOF!
Before he could even sit down, a sudden, violent rush of memories slammed into his mind—the memory stream of Clone Two returning after its dispelling.
Akira gritted his teeth, suppressing the sharp, throbbing headache that came with digesting hours of high-stress tactical information in an instant. Without wasting a second, he fought through the mental fatigue, formed a quick sequence of hand signs, and slammed his palm onto the floor.
Summoning Technique!
With a heavy puff of white smoke, a massive scroll—nearly as tall as Akira himself—materialized on the wooden floorboards.
The summoning consumed every last drop of his remaining chakra pool. Breathing heavily and dripping with sweat, Akira used the absolute last shreds of his physical stamina to drag both the massive scroll and the smaller body storage scroll into his hidden underground inheritance room.
Once the vault door sealed behind him, Akira collapsed back-first onto his living room sofa, closing his eyes to rest as the full sequence of Clone Two's covert operation unfolded behind his eyes...
[Clone Two's Memory Stream]
Exploiting the utter chaos gripping the village during the Nine-Tails' assault, Clone Two—disguised in non-descript clothes and a plain porcelain fox mask—had made a beeline for the hidden drainage conduits deep beneath Konoha.
Using the detailed underground map left behind by his father, Clone Two slipped into the secret subterranean network that led directly into the heart of Root, Danzō Shimura's black-ops organization.
The facility ran deep beneath the village sewers, cold, damp, and lit only by flickering seals.
As Clone Two moved through the dark stone corridors, he placed timed explosive tags along structural support pillars every dozen steps. Even with the Byakugan mapping out enemy locations ahead, the sheer concentration of Root operatives meant an encounter was inevitable.
Clang!
A pair of masked Root guards dropped from the ceiling. Without engaging in a drawn-out fight, Clone Two immediately detonated the paper bombs behind him, blowing apart the main entry tunnel and bringing down tons of rock to sever the passage and distract incoming reinforcements.
Dashing deeper into the facility, Clone Two reached Danzō's private, restricted vault.
Here, his Byakugan hit a wall. The entire vault structure was coated in dense, specialized concealment array seals designed specifically to jam chakra perception and x-ray vision.
Instead of searching blindly, Clone Two marched directly up to a massive central stone pillar that anchored the room's barrier flow. Coating his fingertips in an extremely condensed, razor-sharp blade of pure chakra, he delivered a lightning-fast strike across the key sealing nodes etched into the stone.
Crack!
The chakra flow within the pillar disrupted instantly, shattering the barrier array. With a quiet grinding sound, a hidden mechanical compartment inside the pillar slid open, revealing three distinct storage rows.
Clone Two's eyes narrowed behind his mask.
The top row held over ten sealed glass jars suspended in green preservative fluid—each jar containing a preserved pair of Sharingan.
Without pausing to inspect them, Clone Two unslung the massive storage scroll from his back, unrolled it, and rapidly sealed every single jar into the parchment matrix.
The second row contained more preserved eyes alongside large, sealed glass tubes containing pulsating lumps of pale white flesh. Channeling chakra into his eyes to pierce the glass, Clone Two detected a staggering, overwhelming volume of life energy and raw chakra within the tissue.
Hashirama's cells...
With a sweep of his hand, he sealed the tubes into the scroll as well.
The final row was lined with rare jutsu scrolls, fraudulent financial documents, and high-level blackmail materials targeting influential figures throughout the village and major clans. Clone Two scooped up the entire stash, sweeping them into the final compartment of the massive scroll.
The entire vault raid had taken less than two minutes, but Root's reaction speed was terrifying.
Step. Step. Step.
Before Clone Two could turn around, seven elite Root operatives wearing blank Anbu masks dropped from the shadows, blocking the vault exit with drawn blades.
"Drop the scroll and surrender immediately," the squad leader ordered, his voice devoid of any emotion.
Behind his fox mask, Clone Two simply smirked.
He casually let go of the massive sealing scroll, letting it fall off the edge of the stone walkway toward the dark abyss below. As the scroll plunged, Clone Two looked the Root leader dead in the eye, raised his hand, and flipped the entire squad the middle finger.
BOOM!
The remaining paper bombs lined across Clone Two's body detonated simultaneously, collapsing the bridge and reducing the clone to smoke while blowing out the vault structure.
One of the Root Anbu dove off the falling rubble, reaching out a hand in a desperate bid to catch the falling scroll before it hit the sewer water below. But just as his fingers grazed the leather wrapping, a blue sealing formula flared across the scroll's surface—and it vanished into thin air, reverse-summoned back to Akira's main body.
The Root squad leader landed on a ledge above the smoke, his cold composure finally cracking as he roared at his surviving men.
"Quickly! Scan the entire perimeter! Find the intruder and notify Lord Danzō immediately!"
Back on his sofa, Akira lay still with his eyes closed, breathing slowly as his body steadily recovered from total chakra depletion. A small, satisfied smile played on his lips in the dark.
The gamble had paid off beyond his wildest expectations.