Moment of Awakening

Naruto presses his fight against Fūka, opening a cut on her arm with a kunai, yet her Colour Course Change technique appears to mend every wound. She jolts him with a Lightning Rod and moves for the kill, only to eat a pair of Rasengan from two shadow clones. The blast seems to wreck her, but a withered Fūka endures and restores her youthful form once more. After a clone slices her hair, she flies into a rage, wiping the double out with Rock Pillar Spears and summoning a flood through her Stormy Blockade. The torrent scatters the remaining clones, leaving the true Naruto to dodge her attacks.

Naruto reasons that Fūka must be swapping between separate bodies, each holding a different chakra nature, which explains the shift from lightning to earth and her apparent healing. When she kisses him to drain his wind chakra and claim his body, he notices she guards her hair far more fiercely than her flesh. Seizing that weakness, he tears her hair loose, exposing the soul-holding lock, and destroys it with a Rasengan to end her. At the power station Asuma cuts free of the Thunder Binding and mortally wounds Kitane. On the village outskirts, Furido tells Sora how the Fourth Hokage sealed the Nine-Tails into an infant, then reveals that a fragment of that chakra was later sealed into Sora himself, making him a pseudo-jinchūriki, and uses Five Elements Unseal to draw the fox power out.

The episode is part of the anime original Twelve Guardian Ninja arc in Naruto Shippuden. It aired in Japan on July 31, 2008, and in English on February 16, 2011. Both Naruto and Asuma, alarmed at the fox chakra rising above the trees, turn toward Sora as the installment ends. The opening theme is Blue Bird and the ending theme is Broken Youth.