Evening in Konoha was peaceful.
A dusky veil blanketed the village like a grey overcoat thrown over its buildings. On the cliffs above, the four Hokage faces carved into the stone gazed silently upon the land below—like skeletal giants watching over a world brimming with undercurrents.
In the center of a quiet courtyard, Hyuga Unkawa stood motionless, eyes shut, dressed in a crisp white training uniform.
Suspended in midair around him were jagged remnants of wooden stakes, held aloft by a series of mechanical riggings. Every broken shard pointed directly at him—sharp, menacing, and unforgiving.
After a long silence, Unkawa released a thin cord in his hand.
Whizz! WHIZZ!
In an instant, the mechanisms triggered with a chorus of clicks, followed by the sharp howling of objects cutting through the air. A storm of sharpened wooden stakes descended on him like a deadly rain.
And yet—he moved.
His body vanished in a flicker, leaving behind nothing but a faint afterimage and the echo of rushing wind. Instead of retreating, he charged straight into the incoming barrage.
Though the projectiles came at him from every angle with ruthless precision, in his perception, their trajectories and timing were laid bare—like watching slow-motion.
WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!
Unlike the choreographed sparring match with Hyuga Aoi earlier, Unkawa's palms were now enveloped in blue chakra, arms swinging in fierce arcs. Each strike carried the weight of crushing wind pressure.
Stakes exploded midair, disintegrating into clouds of splinters that erupted around his body. He seemed to dance within the fog like a ghost in a storm—untouchable and deadly.
If Might Guy had seen this scene, his youth-filled blood would probably have boiled over.
Because although Unkawa was clearly using Gentle Fist, there was a ferocity to it—a righteous, domineering force that blended Gentle Fist precision with Strong Fist explosiveness.
CRACK!
Two particularly large wooden stakes, bristling with barbed tips, hurtled toward him from opposite angles.
Their velocity was visible to the naked eye, a sign of the terrifying kinetic force behind them—more than enough to punch through flesh and bone.
Unkawa didn't budge. Eyes still closed, the corners of his lips lifted into a smirk. His palms clenched into fists, chakra humming like a charging engine.
"Void Strike!"
He struck.
There was no subtlety to it—just raw, focused destruction. The surrounding dust erupted outward, his chakra condensing into an invisible force and launching from his fists like a cannon blast.
BOOM! BOOM!
Before the twin stakes could even enter a three-meter radius around him, they were reduced to nothing more than mist—a burst of microscopic debris hanging in the air like shattered fog. The stakes had imploded from within, detonated by the sheer force of impact.
These weren't just any wooden training posts—they were crafted from a special, highly resilient wood meant to endure even the Hyuga Clan's Eight Trigrams One Hundred Twenty-Eight Palms technique. Yet now, they'd been obliterated without a single touch.
If those fists had landed on a person instead of wood…
"Well then," Unkawa opened his eyes, glancing at the floating system panel before him. He grinned. "Finally got myself a long-range and heavy-strike taijutsu. No more awkward Gentle Fist-ing against Susano'o or tailed beasts."
[Taijutsu: Gentle Fist – Eight Trigrams Thirty-Two Palms (C-Rank), Eight Gates – Gate of Life (Forbidden), Gentle Fist – Phantom Blow (B-Rank), Void Strike (A-Rank)]
Void Strike (A-Rank): Concentrates massive chakra into a single point of the body. Through the fusion of Gentle and Strong Fist principles, the chakra is released in a penetrating burst, capable of rupturing enemies from the inside out—regardless of their external durability.
Like the Rasengan, this jutsu is nature-neutral and does not require hand seals. It can incorporate chakra nature transformations—Wind, Fire, Lightning, Earth, or Water—making it highly versatile with an extremely high potential ceiling.
"An A-Rank difficulty, huh…" Unkawa rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
Many people treated chakra like mana in video games—use it when you need it, store it when you don't.
But in truth, outside of Yin Seal users or Jinchuriki, chakra couldn't be stored indefinitely. It gradually dissipates over time.
Every use of chakra required it to be freshly refined from a combination of physical and spiritual energy. If your refining speed couldn't keep up with its natural decay rate, well—congrats, you officially suck as a ninja. This was one of the major dividing lines between amateurs and actual powerhouses.
Take Kakashi, for example. He was always stingy with chakra usage because half of what he refined went to feeding that gluttonous Sharingan.
Even Naruto, pre-Nine-Tails-bonding, had to use shadow clones to prep chakra and gather natural energy ahead of time for Sage Mode. Jiraiya, too, needed two toads on his shoulders just to stay balanced in it.
So once you could refine chakra faster than it decayed, the next limit was how much your body could actually hold—your chakra capacity, which determined how big and flashy your jutsu could be.
Consider the case of Edo Tensei reanimations: technically infinite chakra, right? Then why couldn't all of them spam massive area-of-effect jutsu like Madara?
Because only Madara's special-made zombie body could contain that much chakra to begin with. That's why his Great Fire Annihilation, a B-rank fire jutsu, required an entire army of Mist ninjas working together to put it out with water walls.
Same principle applied to the final battle between Naruto and Sasuke. Even though Sasuke had the Rinnegan, he still needed to steal the chakra of the other eight Tailed Beasts just to keep up in a drawn-out slugfest.
So yeah—chakra refining speed, and chakra capacity. Those are the two biggest power bottlenecks for any ninja.
The first can be trained.
The second? That's just genetics, baby.
And the thing that determines both is the chakra pathway system—a network of meridians and 361 chakra points spread throughout the body, like blood vessels but for energy.
If most people's chakra pathways were babbling brooks, Hyuga Unkawa's were raging rivers. In that regard, he even outclassed Naruto's famed Uzumaki lineage.
The system rated Void Strike as A-rank likely because he was using his body's full potential—outrageously fast chakra refining, absurd storage capacity, and top-tier control.
"Huh... I wonder if Kaguya Ōtsutsuki's 'Eighty Gods Vacuum Attack' is built on a similar principle," he mused aloud. "Though, with her god-tier body, that technique was probably just her version of casually throwing bricks at people."
With that, Unkawa pulled himself out of his thoughts and glanced around the wrecked courtyard.
After a brief pause, he decided against cleaning up. With a stretch and a yawn, he turned and walked back into the house.
After all, he'd spent the entire morning enduring Might Guy's high-intensity training and the afternoon exhausting himself developing new techniques. All he wanted now was a hot shower, a warm futon, and maybe a nap long enough to reset his chakra soul.
But he hadn't been inside long when a figure appeared outside the gate.
The newcomer froze at the sight of the carnage. The courtyard was a disaster zone—wood chips and smashed posts everywhere, the grass scarred and cratered, and more than one stake still stained with blood.
What… happened here?
Frowning deeply, the visitor stepped silently into the yard and approached the front door.
After a few seconds of stillness, he reached for the handle.
BANG!
The door suddenly exploded open from the inside, hitting with a thunderous force. The shockwave blasted into the man's palm, as if trying to either crush him or invade his body through sheer willpower.
"Hmm?"
He blinked, a bit stunned. His hand instinctively pressed against the doorframe, releasing Gentle Fist chakra to neutralize the impact. The two opposing forces dispersed in a wave—canceling each other out like water meeting water.
Inside, Unkawa had stopped mid-stride—clearly sensing who it was.
Click.
The door opened fully.
And standing there, framed by the fading twilight, was a man whose presence made Unkawa momentarily stiffen.
"…Lord Hizashi?"