He drove forward on all fours, charging toward the mother tree at the center of the hollow.
Almost simultaneously, the ancient trees' roots burst out of the ground and coiled around the attacking vines.
Vines and roots tangled together, tearing at and eroding one another. A passage briefly opened before Naruto.
He sprinted down it.
Vines struck from every direction, but the roots blocked them all. The occasional straggler hit Naruto's Chakra Cloak and was instantly burned to ash.
In thirty seconds, he reached the mother tree.
Fifty meters tall, the mother tree loomed before him like a mountain. Up close, the flower bud in its crown looked more like an enormous heart, slowly beating.
Naruto leaped up, running along the trunk toward the bud.
The bud seemed to sense the threat. The cracks across its surface suddenly widened, and dark red light gushed out like blood.
The light was intensely corrosive. The instant it touched Naruto's Chakra Cloak, the cloak began to sizzle and give off black smoke.
"Hold on!" the Nine-Tails roared.
Naruto gritted his teeth and poured more chakra into the cloak, resisting the red light's corrosion.
He climbed into the crown and reached the bud.
The cracks in the Hell Butterfly seal on its surface had widened so far that it could shatter at any moment.
Dark red energy seeped through the cracks, forming tiny hands that tried to tear them wider.
Naruto reached out and pressed his hand against the seal.
He did not know how to repair it, but he knew what he had to do-pour everything he had, his chakra, his reiatsu, his will, into the seal to fill those cracks.
Red chakra, blue reiatsu, and golden will blended together, surging into the seal.
The cracks stopped widening.
As though they had encountered