The eight chakra tails behind Minato had dwindled to four. It was clear how much chakra he had burned through using Shadow Clones and Flying Thunder God to travel around.
Minato didn't have the Nine-Tails inside him. He had simply used the Eight Trigrams Seal to collect the chakra Kushina had deliberately leaked into his own body.
These rootless Nine-Tails Chakra reserves would be gone once he used them up. To replenish them, he would have to spend a great deal of time carefully "drawing" chakra out of Kushina again.
After all, like Mito Uzumaki, Kushina took a suppress-and-contain approach to the Nine-Tails. She wasn't a Perfect Jinchuriki, so she couldn't freely "lend" her power the way "Golden Naruto" would later.
When Kushina was nearing childbirth, the Great Toad Sage had proposed a plan to Minato: split the Nine-Tails in two and seal it, claiming this was the only path to peace.
At first, Minato had been deeply shocked by the suggestion. With no outside enemy interfering, neither he nor Kushina would have agreed to seal the Nine-Tails inside their son.
Besides, his conventional Sealing Techniques alone wouldn't have been enough to divide the Nine-Tails into Yin and Yang halves.
It was only after Jiraiya and Sage Fukasaku advised them, and the Great Toad Sage revealed some hidden methods, that Minato and Kushina agreed to the plan.
As it turned out, the Great Toad Sage's prophecy had been entirely correct.
There truly was a hidden force in the Ninja World coveting the Tailed Beasts, and Konoha's enemies had grown tremendously powerful.
And the most troublesome of them all was Souya of Sunagakure, standing right before him.
Minato had already used every means he could think of to increase his strength.
But even with the Nine-Tails Chakra, Minato still wasn't confident