The moment the recursion ended, the skies above Konoha flickered with remnants of shattered code. Residual fragments rained down like digital snow, harmless to most—but not to him.
Naruto stood beneath the Hokage Monument, staring up at the words seared into its surface.
Catch up to yourself. Before you forget who you really are.
A warning. Or a challenge.
The silence in the village didn't last.
Shikamaru appeared first, flanked by ANBU units with new-tech chakra suppressors. His voice was cautious, but not surprised. "You look like hell."
Naruto gave a tired smirk. "You should see the other guy. He's wearing my regrets."
Shikamaru gestured toward the Hokage Tower. "Tsunade's on her way. We've got thirty-six memory conflicts in civilian sectors and over a hundred timeline splits in active ninja files. Some of our Chūnin remember dying last week. Others remember getting promoted yesterday."
"The recursion corrupted deeper than I thought," Naruto muttered.
Shikamaru tilted his head. "So why did it collapse when you walked in?"
Before Naruto could answer, the sky pulsed again—this time from outside the village.
Kai stepped out of a dimensional fold, blood running down her sleeve.
"We have a problem," she said. "Uchiha territory's destabilizing."
Naruto's blood ran cold.
"Which Uchiha?"
"All of them."
A rift opened midair, raw and unstable.
From it emerged a lone figure, hair spiked back, red eyes burning with rotating tomoes and something else. Sasuke stepped through the fold like a shadow walking out of a mirror.
But it wasn't his Sasuke.
Not entirely.
"Yo," the newcomer said with a smirk. "You broke your toy, Naruto."
Naruto tensed. "You're not from this timeline."
"Neither are you anymore."
This Sasuke wore a coat stitched with seals from the Realm of Forgotten Flame, a place that hadn't existed since before the original Throne fractured.
Kai scanned him. "He's coded in double parity. Multiverse bleed."
Naruto stepped forward. "Why are you here?"
"To warn you. And stop you. Maybe both."
The sky cracked again.
And another Sasuke landed on a nearby rooftop—this one younger, eyes not yet mangekyō, radiating raw fury. He looked confused, as if yanked mid-mission. "What the hell is this place?"
Another fold opened.
A third Sasuke emerged, older, scarred, eyes glowing with Eternal Mangekyō and something even deeper—something ancient.
He didn't speak.
He just stared at Naruto.
One by one, Uchihas from different timelines stepped through.
Each one a different version.
Some bore the mark of Itachi.
Some had the Rinnegan.
One had no eyes at all, just voids filled with lightning.
Shikamaru's voice cracked in Naruto's ear. "What the actual hell are we seeing?"
Naruto's voice was grim. "Uchiha Divergence."
"Explain."
"They were all connected by one thing—me. In every version of the loop, I altered the Uchiha fate. This is the feedback. The system doesn't know which one is canon anymore."
Kai's eyes narrowed. "So it's trying to stabilize… by converging them all?"
"Or letting them kill each other off until one remains," Naruto muttered.
The scarred Sasuke—the one with the oldest chakra—spoke.
"I don't want to fight you."
"Good," Naruto said. "I've had enough of fighting ghosts."
"But if you are the Thronebreaker," he continued, "then you've already failed once. You think breaking the recursion is progress, but it's a trap layered in reverse logic. The more you fix, the more it resists."
Naruto's fists clenched.
"You're not here to warn me," he said. "You're here to stop me from going further."
The older Sasuke nodded. "Because going further… means erasing us."
The younger Sasukes, unaware but angered by the implication, drew their weapons.
Kai whispered, "We're not ready for this many Uchiha."
Naruto didn't move.
"I'm not here to erase anyone," he said. "But I am done letting the code choose for us."
And then the battle erupted.
—
The sky fractured as timelines overlapped.
Chidori crackled from three directions. Naruto ducked one and flipped over another. Kai deployed chakra snares, warping the momentum of two attackers mid-air. One Sasuke switched to Genjutsu, but Naruto's Recode shield shimmered in response, breaking the illusion.
The ground split open.
A younger Sasuke, panicked and filled with rage, clashed with a version of himself that wielded black flames — Amaterasu spiked into a spear. They didn't even see Naruto anymore. Each one believed he was the original.
Naruto spun in midair, intercepting both with a shadow-fused Rasengan.
He didn't want to kill them.
But the system might not give him a choice.
Kai threw a distortion blade that locked two Sasukes into a temporary loop—fighting each other endlessly for sixty seconds. But that was all the time they had.
The oldest Sasuke stepped into the chaos and activated a forbidden seal.
Time slowed.
And then stopped.
Only Naruto and the older Sasuke moved.
In this locked frame, Naruto finally asked the real question.
"Who's writing the recursion?"
The older Sasuke didn't answer with words.
He opened his coat.
Inside, sealed within his chest cavity, was a scroll — marked with the sigil of the Original Scribe.
Naruto's eyes widened.
"You…"
"I remember everything," the older Sasuke said. "Every divergence. Every death. Every sacrifice. We tried it your way. Now we try mine."
He offered Naruto the scroll.
But Kai broke through the stasis first, hurling a timebreaker kunai into the space between them.
Everything shattered again.
They were back in real time.
But now only three Sasukes remained. The rest… gone. Dispersed or reintegrated.
Naruto stared at the scroll clutched in the elder's hand.
This wasn't just a multiverse fracture.
It was an editorial war.
Someone—or something—was trying to edit reality and choose which versions of people survived.
And Sasuke… might be part of the authorship now.