Proof of Oneself

Hiashi tells Boruto that a truly awakened Byakugan will surface in the heat of combat even without conscious control, and that both he and Hanabi would recognise it at once. Hanabi steps in for her aging father, and Boruto eagerly accepts the match while Himawari and Naruto look on. He tries masking a strike with shadow clones and a flash bomb, then swarms Hanabi with clones, but she scatters them using her Eight Trigrams Palms Revolving Heaven. No trace of the dojutsu appears, though Hanabi assures him it may still emerge.

The family stays the night at the Hyuga home. Over dinner Naruto confides that he feels no letdown, proud that his son fought so hard to back up his claim, and Hiashi asks to be kept informed about Himawari, whose own Byakugan has lain dormant since it first showed. Hanabi, alone with Boruto, senses that something genuine must have happened for him to insist so stubbornly.

Wandering out at night, Boruto runs into Sarada and glimpses a man overtaken by the shadowy spectre only he can perceive. He trails the figure to the Academy and recognises the actor who plays Kagemasa, now considerably heavier, who lashes out over a remark about his weight. Sarada intervenes, and the pair defeat the possessed man with movie catchphrases and a trick in which Boruto transforms into a giant shuriken, watching the shadow scatter afterward. The next day he tells Mitsuki and Shikadai that the label on his eye no longer matters; he simply intends to prove it is real.

Trivia points out that the shuriken-and-transformation ploy echoes the maneuver Naruto and Sasuke once pulled against Zabuza, with the children mirroring their parents' roles on the matching episode number of each series. The material was originally meant to be a single episode, but Kishimoto's detailed revisions expanded the script enough to split it in two. It aired in Japan on 31 May 2017 and in English on 1 December 2018.