Chapter 265: Resolved to Hand the Nine-Tails to Madara
Onoki had no choice but to accept Ritsu's explanation. Believe it or not, it didn't matter — he had nothing to argue from. If Iwagakure had been strong, he could have pushed back, demanded more, spoken with some edge to his voice. But the village was at its lowest point in decades, its losses staggering, and standing in front of a Konoha that had never stopped being strong, he had no ground to stand on.
So he swallowed it. Tatsuhata was simply that difficult to put down. That was the story. He would live with it.
He did suspect, somewhere in the back of his mind, that Ritsu might be engineering all of this deliberately — letting Madara bleed the four great villages dry while Konoha watched from a comfortable distance. But suspicion wasn't evidence. He couldn't prove a thing. And even if he could, who exactly was he going to bring it to? In a world where Konoha was the strongest power alive, Konoha was the authority. There was no court above it.
Onoki held his tongue and said nothing more.
He had swallowed his pride in front of Madara once before. He knew how this felt. Konoha's strength was simply the kind of thing that left a person with no good options.
Ritsu didn't stay in Iwagakure. With both the Four-Tails and Five-Tails gone, there was nothing left here worth his attention. He had no interest in standing around watching Rock ninja clear rubble, however impressive their earth-working techniques happened to be.
The Heavenly Transfer activated. A column of white light shot skyward, and he was gone.
An instant later, Konoha.
White light descended. Ritsu landed cleanly on the rooftop of the Hokage Building.
Five minutes after that, he was in the large conference room.
He looked around the table at the assembled faces and spoke without preamble. "I'm sorry to report that I wasn't able to stop him this time either. The Four-Tails and Five-Tails jinchuriki are both in Madara's hands."
The Konoha ninja in the room absorbed this with varying degrees of composure. Yagura, seated among them as a guest, went visibly pale. "Both of them? How do Rock ninja manage to lose two jinchuriki at once?"
It was not a polite thing to say.
But there were no Rock ninja in the room to take offense, and no one at the table particularly felt like defending them. The general consensus, unspoken but obvious, was that Yagura had a point.
The blame, clearly, did not fall on Ritsu. It fell on Iwagakure's inability to hold the line long enough to matter.
Ritsu looked at Yagura and let out a slow, tired sigh. "Madara came prepared. I gave everything I had, but the Rock ninja's defensive line collapsed faster than I expected. They were overrun before I could turn the fight around." He shook his head and left it there.
Yagura's expression had gone past pale into something harder and colder. He wasn't thinking about the Rock ninja. He was thinking about the Six-Tails, currently back in the Mist with a village that no longer had its Mizukage present to defend it.
He rose from his seat. "I need to go home."
Ritsu nodded. "Go whenever you're ready, Mizukage. And if Madara shows up — send word immediately. I'll be there."
"Understood. Thank you."
Yagura said it through a tight jaw, gave a short nod, and walked out. There was nothing left for him in Konoha. Whatever the Leaf Village intended to do about Madara was their problem to manage. What he needed to do now was think about how to minimize the damage his village was about to take — because deep down, whatever he'd said about the Rock ninja being useless, he had never actually believed it. The Rock ninja had simply run into something no village in the world was built to stop.
He had seen what had come ashore at Shiya Harbor. When those reanimated Shadows had appeared, his first thought had been that it was over. Ritsu had proven him wrong on that occasion, but Madara had proven himself craftier than expected in the same breath.
Yagura walked out carrying a stomach full of worry, and the room was left to Konoha.
After a silence that stretched past twenty seconds, Nara Shikaku spoke. "Hokage. Given everything we've seen — is Madara collecting all nine Tailed Beasts something we can realistically stop at this point?"
Ritsu didn't answer immediately. He looked around the table once, then nodded. "No. In my judgment, it can't be stopped. Madara is a different problem from Tatsuhata — smarter, more patient, and considerably harder to corner. I'm confident I can beat him in a direct fight. The problem is that he has no intention of giving me that fight."
"We still have the Nine-Tails jinchuriki," Hiruko said. "Couldn't we use Naruto as leverage? Force Madara into the open?"
Ritsu shook his head. "The risk to Naruto is too high. Even accounting for everything I'm capable of, I can't guarantee he survives if we put him in the middle of a confrontation at that scale. I'm not willing to do that to him."
Inuzuka Jaw was nodding before Ritsu finished speaking. "Same. We don't gamble with Naruto."
The Fourth Hokage had personally supported Jaw's appointment to his current position. That wasn't something he forgot. And beyond politics, the boy was Minato's son.
"Agreed." Fugaku's voice was quiet but firm. His reasons were his own — the Uchiha clan's current standing in Konoha owed more to Minato than to any other single factor, and Minato's wife had been close with his own. Beyond that, Naruto and his youngest, Sasuke, were practically inseparable. He wasn't going to sit silent while someone proposed using that child as bait.
Hiruko exhaled slowly. He wasn't unsympathetic to Naruto. He never had been. But as the Hokage's closest advisor, he felt the weight of the alternative pressing down on him. Letting Madara complete his collection — actually allowing that to happen — carried its own category of risk, and the uncertainty of what came after sat badly with him.
The intelligence they'd extracted from Tatsuhata's mind suggested that even with all nine Tailed Beasts in hand, the Moon's Eye Plan wasn't something Madara could execute immediately. But plans changed. Information got withheld. What if Madara had kept something back even from Tatsuhata?
Akimichi Torikaze sat beside him, equally uneasy, and for the moment equally quiet.
Ritsu looked at Hiruko. "Teacher. I think you're being too optimistic about this."
Hiruko raised an eyebrow.
"You're assuming that if we hold the Nine-Tails, Madara will feel compelled to come after it and walk into a fight with me. But what if he doesn't? What if he sidesteps me entirely and goes after the civilians in the village instead?"
Hiruko went still.
A few seconds passed.
"He wouldn't go that far," he said slowly. But even as he said it, he heard the uncertainty in his own voice.
"Madara is not a predictable man. Everything we've seen from him says he's willing to do whatever the plan requires. I'm not willing to bet on where his limits are — because honestly, I don't know where they are. And I don't want to find out the hard way."
Hiruko opened his mouth, then closed it again.
He sat with that for a moment, and he didn't like what he found. The reasoning behind his position had been built, without him fully realizing it, on an assumed floor — an unspoken belief that Madara was ruthless but not indiscriminate, that he wouldn't harm ordinary villagers who had nothing to do with the Tailed Beasts. Was that actually true? Could he say that with any confidence?
He couldn't.
He sighed, long and heavy. "Alright, Ritsu. We'll do it your way." He had no better answer ready, and the situation wasn't going to wait around while he found one. A bad plan was still better than standing still.
Torikaze looked like he wanted to say something, but after a glance around the room he stayed quiet.
"Don't worry." Ritsu's voice was level and certain. "Madara's plan is not going to succeed."
And with that, the room was unified.
The decision moved quickly after that. The Nine-Tails extraction was formally scheduled and the public announcement went out within days: the Fifth Hokage intended to release the Nine-Tails to an uninhabited island far from the Land of Fire.
The reaction was immediate and loud. Supporters and opponents both made themselves heard, and the debate in the village streets was intense enough to rattle windows. But the leadership had already closed ranks, and no amount of public argument was going to reverse a decision made at that level. More to the point, a meaningful portion of the village actually welcomed it. The Nine-Tails had always been a source of unease, a sleeping disaster kept behind a human seal, and for many ordinary people the prospect of putting it somewhere far away and empty was not a threat — it was a relief.
The extraction hadn't happened yet when the Mist was hit.
Madara moved on the Six-Tails without warning. The Mist ninja casualties were minimal — they had barely organized any real defense, and Madara had no interest in lingering once he had what he came for. He was gone the moment the jinchuriki was secured, unwilling to spend any extra time in a place where Ritsu might appear at any second.
Whether this looked like the Mist had simply stepped aside was a question people asked quietly. Yagura had been ruling for nearly a decade, though, and he had the standing and the disposition to keep the unrest from boiling over.
Shortly after, Takigakure — a village so small it was easy to forget it existed — announced that its Seven-Tails jinchuriki had also been taken.
Seven of nine.
The atmosphere across the ninja world shifted into something tight and airless. Only the Eight-Tails and Nine-Tails remained outside Madara's reach. If those two fell as well, if the Moon's Eye Plan actually reached completion, the consequences would reach every living person regardless of which village they called home.
The Fire Daimyo sent a personal envoy to the Hokage Building with a respectful but urgent request: please, Fifth Hokage, reconsider the island plan. This was not the moment. The Nine-Tails should remain where it could be protected and leveraged, at least until the threat of Madara and his scheme had been dealt with.
Ritsu didn't give the envoy a reply worth remembering.
He had made his decision. He was going to hand the Nine-Tails to Madara. He was going to help Madara complete the Moon's Eye Plan. He was going to help Black Zetsu do whatever it was Black Zetsu truly wanted at the end of all of this.
Thirty-seven days had passed since Shiya Harbor.
Deep inside a hollowed mountain somewhere in the Land of Lightning, Black Zetsu was struggling to stay still.
Today was the day.
Orochimaru had been building toward this for six years, and the cultivation period for his so-called perfect vessel was finally ending. If everything held, if the artificial body performed as designed, Madara could achieve true resurrection before the day was out.
Once Madara was truly alive again — not reanimated, not housed in a borrowed decaying shell, but genuinely restored to life — the Moon's Eye Plan would have no remaining obstacles.
If Nagato handling the Rinnegan had been like handing a loaded weapon to someone who had never trained with one, then Madara reclaiming it would be like returning a sword to the hand that had forged it. Ritsu would not be a match for what Madara became with that eye in his head. The gap between them would be absolute.
Black Zetsu swayed where it stood, unable to stop moving, restless in the way that a pitcher plant sways in a light wind — small, constant, involuntary.
Reanimated Madara stood with his arms folded, perfectly motionless, like a statue someone had left in the middle of the chamber. He had been waiting a long time for this. Ten more minutes was nothing.
"Is it ready?" he asked.
"Ten minutes," Orochimaru said, not looking away from the cultivation tank. "The process is nearly complete."
His crimson eyes were fixed on the figure suspended in the liquid behind the glass. Whatever composed his expression, it was closer to reverence than anything else.
This artificial human was the culmination of six years of work. Everything he had learned from studying the Rinnegan, every dead end and breakthrough, every subject he had pushed to their limit — it had all fed into what was floating in that tank.
If the body inside could successfully activate the Outer Path: Samsara of Heavenly Life Technique, it would mean something far beyond completing Madara's resurrection. It would mean his understanding had reached a level where he could begin applying that knowledge to himself. Changes that moved him closer to what he had always wanted. True immortality, not approximation.
He could wait ten minutes.
The tank opened. The cultivation fluid poured out in a rush, spreading across the floor, and the figure standing inside it did not stagger or reach for support. It simply stood, steady, and slowly opened its eyes. Those eyes found Orochimaru and held his gaze with a look that carried nothing behind it — no warmth, no curiosity, nothing at all.
"You know what needs to be done, Number One?"
"Yes." The voice was flat and even. "I need the Rinnegan transplanted before I can attempt the Outer Path technique."
Orochimaru's gaze lit up.
"Number Zero."
The door opened and another figure walked in.
The two were identical in every physical detail save one. Number Zero had eyes of pale violet ringed with concentric circles. Number One's eyes were flat black.