Around six months passed.
By now, Fugaku's days had long settled into a routine that would have looked unpleasant to almost anyone else.
He woke at dawn like usual.
But today, he had finished his physical training early.
"Early" meaning sometime in the afternoon.
Today was his day off from the Police, so he did not even need to leave a clone behind at the station to maintain appearances.
Fugaku stood alone beneath the patriarch's estate, inside one of the old underground training chambers reserved for the family line.
It was an ideal place for this particular training.
The chamber had been reinforced long before Fugaku was born, its walls layered with heat-resistant stone, old sealing work, replaceable target plates, and ventilation shafts designed to carry away smoke and dangerous chakra residue.
That made sense.
Plasma Release was effectively a hijutsu of their direct family line.
Takehito had trained here.
His grandfather had trained here.
And now Fugaku did too.
He held a kunai loosely in his right hand.
Purple light crawled over the blade.
Not ordinary Lightning Release.
The chakra clung more tightly than lightning normally would, wrapping the metal in a thin violet layer that shimmered between flame and electricity.
Fugaku adjusted the ratio.
More Fire.
Too unstable.
He corrected it immediately.
The violet edge narrowed.
"Better."
He stepped toward one of the reinforced targets and slashed.
The kunai crossed the metal plate almost effortlessly.
A thin glowing line appeared across it.
Then the upper section slid sideways and struck the floor.
Fugaku looked at the cut.
Clean.
Very little wasted energy around the impact point.
That was what he wanted.
His father had always preferred a sword as the medium for Plasma Release.
Reasonable.
Longer edge, greater reach, more chakra could be layered along it, and the weapon itself provided much more room for maintaining a stable transformation.
Fugaku had deliberately chosen kunai instead.
He had no intention of becoming dependent on a sword.
The kunai was transitional.
Eventually, he wanted to remove the weapon entirely.
Something closer to Chidori and Chidori Stream in principle.
His own hand becoming the medium.
Perhaps his forearm.
Eventually, perhaps, even more than that.
Not to the ridiculous extent of those walking mountains of muscle called Raikage, but the principle was the same.
They had already proven that Lightning Release could be used that way.
Unfortunately, Plasma Release made ordinary Chidori look almost sensible.
Lightning chakra against one's own flesh was already dangerous.
Adding the Fire component and maintaining ionized plasma directly against skin, muscle, nerves, and chakra pathways was an excellent way to discover how quickly an Uchiha could cook his own arm.
Even with the control he possessed now, Fugaku considered it very stupid.
So he would wait.
Once his medical ninjutsu reached the level he wanted and his body possessed sufficiently powerful regeneration, the calculation would change.
That path also happened to fit extremely well with both of his Mangekyō abilities.
Almost suspiciously well.
Fugaku already had a rough idea of how far he wanted to take it, and, more importantly, where he might learn the outline of how.
From a certain walking treasure trove of a kunoichi.
In more ways than one.
However, knowing the destination was unfortunately not the same thing as being capable of teleporting there.
Moreover, the original Fugaku had known practically nothing about medical ninjutsu beyond ordinary battlefield first aid.
Automatic regeneration?
Cellular reconstruction?
Maintaining combat performance while the body repaired itself?
Those were several mountains away.
So for now, kunai.
Fugaku flicked his wrist.
The plasma around the weapon compressed.
Then he threw.
The kunai crossed the chamber.
A violet streak followed it.
Just before impact, Fugaku released the shaped chakra riding along the weapon.
"Plasma Release: Violet Lance."
The narrow bolt struck the next target.
There was no great explosion.
That was the point.
The plasma punched through the reinforced plate, bored into the stone behind it, and left a glowing hole scarcely wider than two fingers.
Fugaku smiled.
That technique had become one of his favorites.
Fire Release wanted to spread.
Violet Lance did the opposite.
Heat.
Electrical force.
Chakra.
Then send it through one small point.
Against ordinary armor or Earth Release defenses, it was vicious.
Against a person, Fugaku doubted there would be much left to treat.
He retrieved another kunai from the nearby rack.
A thin violet layer formed over its edge again.
"Burning Edge."
This one had come much more naturally.
The weapon itself stabilized the technique, and Fugaku's Mangekyo Sharingan made precise manipulation almost embarrassingly easy compared to what Takehito had described from his own youth.
Fugaku moved through several short combinations.
Slash.
Reverse grip.
Step inside.
Thrust.
Turn.
Another slash.
The targets had been designed specifically for this kind of abuse.
Some were metal.
Some stone.
Some were layered with chakra-conductive material to imitate defensive techniques.
Burning Edge cut through most of them without difficulty.
That was why Fugaku increasingly liked the idea of close combat.
People obsessed over distance because shinobi combat was dangerous.
Understandable.
But the Sharingan became more oppressive the closer the opponent was.
Every twitch became information.
Every weight shift became warning.
Every mistake became immediate.
And if every movement of Fugaku's hand carried something capable of cutting through armor and cooking flesh at the same time...
Well.
Distance was not always safety.
He stepped back.
Three kunai flew from his hand in quick succession.
Each embedded itself in a different section of the training area.
Fugaku formed the necessary chakra pattern.
Small violet points ignited around the weapons.
"Plasma Release: Violet Web."
An arc snapped between the first and second kunai.
Then another between the second and third.
For a fraction of a second, a triangular web of violent purple light occupied the space between them.
A training dummy caught inside jerked as several arcs tore across its torso.
Then the technique disappeared.
Fugaku frowned.
"Still too short."
Useful, though.
Especially with wire.
Or against opponents forced into a particular movement path.
Sharingan prediction made that sort of trap considerably nastier than it looked on paper.
He had been experimenting with placing the plasma nodes through kunai precisely because creating them directly on arbitrary surfaces was still slower than he liked.
Weapons gave structure.
Structure made everything easier.
For now.
Fugaku recovered one of the kunai and moved to the longer section of the chamber.
This time, he layered considerably more chakra over it.
The violet glow became brighter.
Almost white near the edge.
He slashed horizontally.
"Plasma Release: Branching Arc."
The main discharge tore across the room and struck the first conductive target.
Then split.
One arc jumped left.
Another upward.
A third snapped toward a nearby plate.
The chamber flashed violet.
Fugaku watched the paths carefully with his Sharingan.
Not homing.
That distinction mattered.
The technique followed favorable conductive paths and chakra gradients.
Fugaku could influence the initial direction and arrangement of targets, but pretending the arcs intelligently chased enemies would be nonsense.
The Sharingan solved much of that problem anyway.
Why make an attack home when you could predict where someone was about to move?
That was one lesson the Uchiha bloodline kept teaching him.
Accuracy often replaced complexity.
He released the technique.
A thin trail of smoke rose from the targets.
Six months.
Takehito had hidden his reaction badly the first time Fugaku demonstrated several of the techniques consecutively.
For a man who ordinarily treated facial expressions like classified information, his father's brief stare had been deeply satisfying.
Fugaku had learned in months what Takehito had expected to take years.
Mangekyō-enhanced control helped.
So did the strange improvement to his cognition and spiritual power.
So did Shadow Clone training.
And, Fugaku grudgingly admitted, so did Takehito's notes.
The old man had been very thorough and improved the ancestral method considerably himself.
There was one more technique Fugaku had recently managed.
He put the kunai away.
A breath.
Fire and Lightning chakra mixed differently this time, shaped inside rather than around a weapon.
Fugaku inhaled.
Then released.
"Plasma Release: Violet Torrent."
A narrow stream of purple-white plasma shot from his mouth.
It looked nothing like a Great Fireball.
No broad roaring mass.
No expanding wall of flame.
More like an enormous cutting torch.
The stream struck a thick stone slab and carved into it, the surface glowing almost immediately.
Fugaku swept his head slightly.
The beam followed.
A molten line appeared across the slab.
Then Fugaku stopped.
Steam-like heat distortion filled the air in front of him.
He exhaled slowly.
"That one still eats too much chakra."
Better than two months ago, though.
Much better.
At this point, there were only two advanced parts of Plasma Release left that Fugaku felt like he had not yet completed.
The first was the highest-tier jutsu his father had.
The truly destructive techniques.
A-rank or S-rank applications where Takehito stopped treating plasma as a precision weapon and started using quantities large enough to erase sections of a battlefield.
That was what made him the 'Quasi-Kage'.
Fugaku could understand the principles.
He could probably force out crude versions.
That was not the same thing as mastering them.
Even if he had considerably more chakra reserves and potency than his father now.
The second interested him far more.
And this was a direction Fugaku had "come up" with entirely on his own.
At least in his own mind first.
Using Plasma Release on the body itself.
Something conceptually closer to the Lightning Release Chakra Mode, except combining the explosive physical enhancement of Lightning with the heat and destructive contact of plasma.
That was where Fugaku increasingly suspected his own path lay.
Close combat.
Not because he lacked ranged options.
He already had excellent ninjutsu, genjutsu, shurikenjutsu, and now Plasma Release.
His eventual Mangekyō abilities would add far worse things like the legendary Susanoo.
But several pieces kept pointing in the same direction.
His unusual physical gifts.
The hidden potential of the Inner Gates.
Medical ninjutsu.
Creation Rebirth, eventually.
Plasma enhancement.
And, most importantly, the actual nature of his two Mangekyō abilities.
Those eyes practically begged him to build a body capable of surviving close-range insanity.
Fugaku stared at his hand.
"If I can combine all of that..."
Perhaps even other techniques he had not even considered yet.
He smiled faintly.
Most powerful shinobi seemed to eventually become artillery pieces.
Large ninjutsu.
Larger summons.
Even larger chakra avatars.
Fugaku had nothing against any of that.
He fully intended to have his own.
But perhaps that obsession created a blind spot.
People prepared themselves to fight enormous techniques.
They prepared to dodge firestorms when fighting an Uchiha.
Break genjutsu.
Counter Susanoo.
What happened when the Uchiha inside the Susanoo decided the giant chakra warrior was only the second problem?
Fugaku picked up another kunai.
"Later."
He was getting ahead of himself again.
For now, he still needed a piece of metal between the plasma and his own fingers.
That was usually a good sign that challenging the Raikage to a fistfight remained somewhat premature.