In the small courtyard of the Hyuga estate, Hinata sat quietly at her desk.
She was staying home today. She'd said she'd wait in case anyone came with questions—and she'd meant it. Which left her, for once, with an actual stretch of uninterrupted time.
She wasn't wasting it. She was using it to refine the training manual. Whatever the circumstances behind the South Dipper Seven Sacred Fists' creation, the results had made its value self-evident.
Not that the underlying principle was complicated. It was almost insultingly simple:
Toughened body built through brutal conditioning + Sacred Fist Gauntlets that convert chakra directly into nature transformation + basic taijutsu forms that any trained fighter could reproduce = South Dipper Seven Sacred Fists.
In other words: it was just Nintaijutsu that let you attach chakra nature transformation to physical strikes, with the help of specialized equipment. That was it.
Complexity: near zero. All hardware requirements. Perfect for wealthy, committed simpletons with more money than raw talent—as long as they stayed the course long enough to assemble the gear, anyone could learn it.
It was, Hinata reflected with some satisfaction, basically a pay-to-win game. Didn't matter how terrible your technique was or how foggy your strategic thinking. As long as you kept putting in money and grind time, you'd eventually roll over those so-called "geniuses" who had raw ability but couldn't afford the gear.
In some respects, this made it the most satisfying—and the most guaranteed—path to power available.
Train technique for a month and have no idea whether you've gotten stronger. Equip a full gear set, crank up the attribute values—and the improvement was right there in front of you, plain as daylight.
"Heh heh heh~~ I do love a shortcut."
Hinata let out a string of self-satisfied, vaguely sinister chuckles, picked up the completed scroll, and nodded at herself. Next training phase—no question.
The South Dipper Flame-Slaying Fist's destructive power had been proven on Mizuki. Without holding back, Mizuki hadn't survived a single exchange. If she hadn't reined in the chakra on her arm at the last second, she might have cooked his skull through.
"Attack power is at baseline. Which means it's time to go after the other attributes."
Coming from someone with years of arcade fighting game experience, Hinata knew perfectly well that raw damage didn't decide fights. Every end-stage boss in every arcade game had the highest attack stat in the entire roster—and they still died to player characters with far weaker numbers.
By arcade game logic, the two factors that mattered beyond attack power were: precision, and combos.
Precision was self-explanatory. In the shinobi world, the most universally applicable and hardest-to-counter technique was the Body Replacement—one of the Three Academy Basics. Simple seals, almost no cast time, nearly impossible to interrupt. Instant self-relocation, perfect escape from incoming damage, repositioning for a better counterattack. An experienced chūnin like Mizuki, if he hadn't been so arrogant, could have replaced himself, created distance, and worn her down with shuriken and jutsu combinations at range. No guaranteed winner in that scenario.
Strip it down: nearly every shinobi was a glass cannon—low HP, high damage, high evasion. No defensive technique and a full combo put anyone on the ground. Even someone like Uchiha Madara—take away his jutsu, have him stand there and take a Genin's kunai through the chest, and he'd die.
So how to deliver precision strikes that bypassed an opponent's defenses before they could Body Replace—that was already a fight-deciding calculation.
Then there were combos.
The word was stylized, but the practical meaning was simple: a continuous attack chain that kept an opponent too busy defending to find an opening, until a gap appeared and they fell.
For a chain to flow, rhythm was everything.
The human body had its own natural mechanics. Rhythm, in fighting, meant leveraging those mechanics—connecting muscle movements in their most efficient sequence. After a right straight jab, the arm was fully extended. To follow with another right straight, the arm had to retract first—wasted motion, dead time. The correct rhythm was to ride the retraction force into an elbow strike. That was the natural next beat.
Add body rotation, forward stepping, torso coordination for power generation—obvious enough.
The real constraint: to run a smooth chain, you had to govern every fraction of force with precision. Too much power in the jab and the retraction was slower—bad elbow follow-up. Too little and the jab accomplished nothing.
And for shinobi, who had chakra as an internal power source governing fine body control, rhythm essentially equated to chakra control.
She'd gone all the way around and come back to chakra control.
Hinata set down her conclusion with a faint, rueful shrug. The overall attribute system really was a closed bucket—reinforce any stave and the weakest one still determined the water level. She'd prioritized raw attack power, but there was no getting around it. Control had to follow.
Precision, she wasn't worried about. The Byakugan was a three-hundred-sixty-degree telescopic radar with near-kilometric range—any target within that radius was accounted for, and she could read weak points in a defender's chakra distribution in real time.
But the flow of combos couldn't be skipped. Against targets at Naruto's current level, brute force was fine. Opponents would only keep scaling up—and none of them would be obliging enough to stand there like Mizuki while she hit them.
The canonical series had two techniques for this. Kakashi's tree-walking exercise. Ebisu's water-surface walk. And for that matter—the higher the rank of jutsu, the greater the chakra control required; this was a foundational attribute that paid off for a shinobi's entire career, with no downside to improving it whatsoever. Setting aside the question of how quickly either canonical method might show results, the real problem was that neither could connect neatly to the Sacred Fist training framework she was building.
Which meant...
Hinata's gaze drifted. Her mouth curved—not into warmth, but into the particular smile she reserved for ideas she liked more than she should admit.
She already had a clear enough picture of how to fold chakra control training into the Sacred Fist system. And naturally, it would cover the training methods for the other two idiots as well.
She finished all three scrolls and bundled them together, satisfied. She was going to bring them to Sasuke and Naruto—she was curious to see how they'd take to this new approach.
But as she moved to leave her room, a voice came from directly behind her.
"Hinata."
One word. Flat delivery. And underneath the flatness, an authority so ingrained it had become part of the atmosphere. Before Hinata had consciously registered it, she'd already turned around—and found herself looking at the tall figure filling the doorway.
Hiashi had been standing there for some time. As the undisputed premier shinobi of the Hyuga Clan, masking his presence from Hinata required no effort at all. That silence had given him time to study his eldest daughter—the one he'd stopped paying real attention to long ago. What he saw now was different. Not just the clothes or the expression. Something deeper. A sharpness in the quality of her presence, like something had been replaced with something harder.
"Ah—"
Hinata's face went through a brief, awkward recalibration before she dropped her gaze. When she finally spoke, the word came out stilted. "...Father."
Hiashi's brow contracted slightly. He was not a man who had ever felt confident about being a good father. So he simply said: "Come with me."
Hinata's eyes tightened for a fraction of a second—but a moment's calculation told her what this was about. The Third Hokage would have summoned Hiashi; the Mizuki incident was no small matter. And she'd made a mistake last night—let herself go and knocked Mizuki down alone rather than leaving it for Sasuke or Naruto. In retrospect: a poor call.
But there were no second chances, and she wasn't about to flinch. She fell into step behind Hiashi without a word.
He led her to the estate courtyard, then turned.
"Show me. The technique you used on Mizuki last night."
"Yes, Father."
No preamble, no excess exchange. Hinata pulled on the gauntlets and opened her Byakugan. Across from her, Hiashi lowered into a ready stance—one hand raised, Byakugan open. Neither of them hesitated.
"I'm coming, Father."
Hinata settled into her stance. Fire ignited in her right hand. Hiashi raised an eyebrow. "Don't hold back."
She looked at him—and something unwanted happened. Fragments of the original Hinata's memories came up without asking: childhood sparring sessions in this same courtyard, the shape of Hiashi's raised hand, his patient correction of her form. She clenched her jaw against them and swung.
Crack!!
A sharp, muffled impact rang through the courtyard. The punch Hinata had driven with full force was caught in one hand—Hiashi hadn't moved an inch. She stepped back in silence and lowered her head.
Hiashi held his right hand still for a moment, then turned and walked out of the courtyard, back straight, steps unhurried. He'd gotten the answer he came for.
At the corridor's turn, he paused—and spoke without looking back.
"You're still far from enough. Keep training."
"Yes."
Hinata held her bow until his footsteps faded. Then she straightened with a thoroughly displeased expression. She'd known the gap between herself and a real jōnin was vast—but she hadn't expected Hiashi himself to feel uncrossable. Conclusion: she needed to get stronger, and faster.
She went back inside, picked up her scrolls, and left the Hyuga estate by the rooftops.
Back inside the estate, Hiashi watched her go through his Byakugan—and only once she'd cleared the grounds did he raise his right hand.
This time, his expression was something else entirely.
Hiashi's palm wasn't unmarked. Far from it. His right hand bore a mottled, angry red flush across the skin, blisters rising at the center—a textbook mild burn.
For a man of Hiashi's caliber, this was staggering. He'd spent decades conditioning his palms to the point where even gripping a live coal bare-handed wouldn't necessarily break the skin—and that was before accounting for the chakra he threaded through every surface of his body as a constant default. Active chakra reinforcement in the palm was not something he thought about; it simply was. An accidental house fire wouldn't have done this.
And yet Hinata's punch—raw striking force and chakra output that were both well within child's play for Hiashi—had somehow burned straight through that reinforced chakra as though it weren't there and left marks on his skin. A surface wound, nothing more. But a surface wound that should not have been possible.
Hiashi hadn't taken a strike during a taijutsu exchange in over ten years. And this one had come from the daughter he'd long since given up on.
He pressed his hand closed and considered that for a moment. Then he reached back and pulled the call cord for the household.
A branch-house Hyuga shinobi appeared immediately and waited.
Hiashi gave his order without ceremony.
"Find out what the eldest daughter has been doing lately. I want a full report."