The battlefield lay frozen in an eerie, post-cataclysmic stillness. Dust hung in the air like suspended ash, unmoving in the absence of wind or chakra turbulence.
At the centre of the devastation, Renjiro lay where he had fallen, unconscious, twin trails of dried and fresh blood painting stark lines from his eyes down his temples, a grotesque testament to the cost of his intervention.
Around him, the other three lay similarly still—not peacefully, but arrested. Minato, face down, one hand still outstretched. Sama, curled on her side. Kushina, flat on her back, her expression locked in a silent scream. The physical chaos had ended, its thunderous roars replaced by a silence so profound it felt like a physical pressure on the eardrums.
Within that silence, the true war had begun. Not of chakra or fists, but of memory and remorse.
***
There was no transition. One moment, Minato was falling. Next, he was in motion. Not on a battlefield, but within the Hiraishin's shimmering, golden conduit space—a dimension of pure potential and connection he alone navigated.
Yellow flashes strobed around him, endless, dizzying. With each flash, a destination whispered: 'Kumo border. Stone outpost. Village square. Hospital roof.' A cacophony of spectral, echoing cries for help accompanied each point of light, a choir of Konoha's needs. His mind, the perfect navigational instrument, mapped them all instantaneously.
But none of the voices were Obito's or that of his squads.
Then, he heard it. Distant. Fading. "Sensei…!"
His body reacted before thought. He teleported, the world resolving not into the sunny Rock Country gorge of memory, but into a dim, rocky cavern. The scene was not of impact, but of aftermath.
Obito lay half-crushed under a slab of stone that had already done its work. Not dying, but already gone, his one visible eye glazed, his breath a wet, shallow rattle. Rin's sobs were muffled, as if heard through thick glass. Minato stood there, a kunai in his hand, utterly useless. He hadn't failed to save him. He had simply not been there. The distinction was a surgical knife, cutting deeper than any failure of skill or speed. He was the fastest man alive, and he had arrived too late.
The illusion did not loop the moment of impact. It looped the aftermath.
Yellow flash. The cavern again. Obito, already crushed. The wet rattle. Rin's distorted cry. Yellow flash. Again. Obito, gone. Again. Each time, he stood paralysed, the distance between his arrival and Obito's final moment an unbridgeable chasm of seconds he could not rewind.
The psychological pressure built not as a wave, but as a creeping frost. Minato began moving faster within the illusion, teleporting between the flashing points before the cries fully formed, marking non-existent coordinates, trying to pre-empt the call. The genjutsu, Kōkai no Kagami, responded by expanding. More cries. More emergencies—a child falling from a tree in Training Ground 3, a chunin team ambushed in the Land of Rivers, a fire in the merchant district. It gave him infinite speed, infinite destinations, and the crushing, mathematical certainty that with infinite need, even infinite speed meant being absent from an infinite number of points. He could not be everywhere. The illusion made sure he felt the weight of every single place he was not.
Finally, he stopped. He stood in the non-space, the silent flashes continuing around him. The illusion did not attack. It waited. This regret was not about a lack of action, but about the inability to accept the limits of action itself. The realisation was hollow, quiet, and infinitely heavy. He had never forgiven himself for being human, for not being a fundamental force of the universe. The Mirror of Regret showed him not his failure, but the impossible standard he held against his own soul.
***
For Kushina, there was no conduit space. There was home. The salt-tinged air of Uzushiogakure filled her lungs, the sounds of bustling wharves and clanging forges a symphony she hadn't heard in decades. The spiral towers stood proud against a blue sky, unbroken. Her mother was hanging laundry on a line, smiling. Her father was showing her little brother the basics of a whirlpool seal, his hands steady and patient. Peace. Wholeness.
Then the questions began, not as accusations, but as gentle, confused inquiries from the faces she loved.
"Kushina? Why did you leave us?" her mother asked, tilting her head.
"We could have used your strength here," her father said, not looking up from the seal.
"No, I didn't—I was sent—" she tried to explain, but the words turned to ash.
The sky didn't darken. The first tower simply unwound, its stones spiralling apart silently into dust. Then the next. It was a slow, meticulous dismantling. She roared, her crimson chakra bursting forth, chains erupting to lash at the dissolving buildings. But her chains passed through them like smoke. She was a ghost here. The more she fought, the slower the destruction became.
The genjutsu forced her to witness every single stone crumbling, every face fading into nothingness with a look of gentle confusion. She was not subjected to the terror of the attack, but to the prolonged, helpless shame of the survivor, forced to watch the death of what she loved in agonising detail, unable to look away or change a single moment.
***
Sama found herself in a sun-dappled clearing, the one where she and Hiro used to steal moments away from Hatake clan duties. He was there, whole and smiling, polishing a kunai.
"Think you'll ever beat me in a match, Sama?" he teased, his eyes crinkling.
"In your dreams," she shot back, the old, familiar warmth flooding her.
Then, mid-laugh, he began to fade. Not violently, but softly, like a morning mist burning off. She reached for him, but her hand passed through his shoulder.
He reset, back to polishing the kunai. "Think you'll ever beat me?" The loop began again. Each cycle, she tried to say the things she'd held back—the depth of her respect, the quiet worries she had for his recklessness, the simple "thank you" for his constant presence. But the words stuck in her throat, or came out as the same old banter.
The illusion never showed her his death. It showed her the living, breathing space between them that she had left unfilled with the words that mattered. With each reset, the weight of those unsaid words grew heavier, a profound, quiet grief for a conversation that would now never happen.
***
For Kurama, the experience was not of chains or rage. The vast, hate-filled consciousness found itself small. He was fox-kit size, curled in a place of warm, dappled light. Before him sat the Sage of Six Paths, Hagoromo, his features kind and ancient, a hand resting gently on Kurama's small head. The Sage spoke of purpose, of balance, of being part of something greater. His voice was a low, resonant vibration of pure creation. Then, as was the way of things, the Sage stood. He smiled down at his creation. And he left.
The illusion did not attack. It did not restrain. It simply replayed the moment of being left. The absence that followed was not the violent imprisonment by humans, but the first, fundamental abandonment by the only being who had ever been a father. Kurama's monumental will, a force that could shatter mountains, had nothing to push against.
There was no enemy here, only the empty space where a god had been. His defiance had no direction. His rage no focus. The Mirror of Regret disoriented him not by force, but by presenting a sorrow so old and deep it predated his hatred, leaving him psychologically unmoored.
***
The genjutsu Kōkai no Kagami was adaptive. It was a mirror, not a hammer. For Minato, who sought to solve and outthink, it intensified the loops, overwhelming his logic with infinite variables.
For Kushina, who met force with greater force, it slowed time, making her resistance the engine of her torment. For Sama, who tended to soften and deny painful truths, it increased the emotional weight, making denial impossible.
For Kurama, whose very essence was defiance, it offered nothing to defy, only a stillness that echoed his primordial loneliness.
In the real world, Renjiro's breath grew shallower. The genjutsu was self-sustaining, a psychic reaction that fed on the unresolved emotions it reflected, but it was not infinite. Its power was tied to the flickering candle of his own consciousness, which was guttering out, drained by the monumental effort of casting it and the physical backlash.
Kurama felt the shift first. The pervasive, reflective stillness of the Sage's absence began to blur at the edges, losing its coherence. The pressure, so ancient and personal, eased by a fraction. With a silent, internal snarl that was more relief than rage, the Nine-Tails pulled his awareness back, retreating into the deeper, fortified layers of the seal, cutting off the flow of chakra that had been usurped by the illusion.
The collapse of the genjutsu was not a shattering, but a fading. One by one, the personal hellscapes dissolved like ink in water.
Kushina awoke first. A violent gasp tore through her as she jackknifed into a sitting position. Tears, hot and unchecked, streamed down her face, not of pain, but of a grief so fresh it felt like her village had fallen yesterday. Inside, Kurama was a sullen, quiet presence, locked down tight. The fight was gone from him, replaced by a weary, simmering silence.
Sama came to next, a soft whimper escaping her. She pushed herself up, trembling, her eyes wide and lost, scanning the devastated field as if looking for a ghost that had just been speaking to her.
Minato was last. He simply opened his eyes, staring at the cracked earth an inch from his face. He did not move. His expression was wiped clean, the usual gentle composure replaced by a blankness that was more disturbing than any pain.
He had seen the mathematics of his own guilt solved to an infinite decimal, and the answer had been a hollow zero.
No one spoke. The only sounds were Kushina's ragged breathing and the distant call of a lone bird returning to the shattered forest.
Their eyes, one by one, drifted to the centre. To Renjiro.
His fingers twitched first. Then a low groan escaped his blood-caked lips. He stirred, pushing himself up onto his elbows with a struggle that spoke of utter exhaustion. He lifted a trembling hand, rubbed clumsily at the sticky, closed lids of his eyes, and let out a weary, resigned sigh that carried across the silent clearing.
"Shit," he muttered, his voice hoarse and flat. "I'm blind again."
=====
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