Meanwhile, the repulsive potential energy from all other C-H pairs (Figure ) shows a different behavior, with a minimum around RC=-2.5 (before the TS) followed by a gradual increase as the reaction progresses toward products. This analysis demonstrates that while the transferring hydride contributes significantly to the artificial stabilization at the TS, the surrounding C-H interactions also play an important role in DFTB3's deficient description of the reaction energetics. The minimum in Figure before the TS indicates that during the approach of the reactants numerous C-H pairs throughout the system shift into the attractive region of the RPF, further contributing to the incorrect stabilization. These findings support our strategy of modifying specific regions of both C-H and C-C repulsive potentials functions to the C-H RPF's, the energy difference between the enolate intermediate and the reactant still deviated significantly from the reference M06-2X value (Figure ). Thus, we turned our focus to adjusting the C-C repulsive potential to achieve this effect. We added LCHFs on the C-C pair RPFs testing different combination of LCHFs for C-H RPF's that best reproduced the activation barrier. Figure shows the C-C RPF (curve in green) and its step-wise modified versions as CC_X (with X=1,3,5,7,9; see Table for more details).