Chapter 266: Outer Path — Samsara of Heavenly Life Technique
Number One extended a hand and pressed his fingers into Number Zero's eye socket, extracting the Rinnegan without ceremony. Number Zero stood exactly where he was and made no move to resist, still as a mannequin.
Number One then pressed his fingers into his own eye socket and removed his own eyes. He placed the Rinnegan into the empty space left behind. The moment the eyes settled in, something shifted — the chakra he had been carrying in quiet equilibrium surged outward like a wave against a wall, searching for boundaries it hadn't had before.
Thin lines of blood traced down from his eye sockets.
He blinked once, hard. Then he wiped the blood from his face with the back of his hand and looked at Orochimaru.
"I should be capable of using the Outer Path: Samsara of Heavenly Life Technique. But I need time to adjust."
"Then adjust." Orochimaru's smile hadn't moved. "That's all you need to do right now."
Number One nodded. He didn't move to find somewhere more comfortable, didn't seem to notice or care that he was still unclothed. He simply sat down cross-legged on the platform where he stood, closed his eyes, and turned his attention inward toward the new power behind them.
This was what Orochimaru had made. A mind without feeling. Thought without preference. It would obey any instruction given to it completely, without hesitation — including an order to end its own life.
"How long will it take?" Madara asked.
Orochimaru didn't turn around. His three-tomoe Sharingan was fixed on the inside of Number One's skull, watching the chakra move. "I don't know."
"You don't know."
"I don't have enough data to make an estimate. I can't tell you how long adaptation will take for a vessel I've never built before."
Madara's gaze shifted sideways to Black Zetsu.
The thought crossed his mind — perhaps Black Zetsu could apply the same kind of forced control it used through Sharingan domination, compelling Number One to use the technique before adaptation was complete.
Black Zetsu noticed the look and said nothing, waiting.
Madara considered it for a moment, then let it go. The technique's success wasn't just a matter of will — it depended on whether the vessel itself had the capacity to execute it. If Number One's body wasn't ready, no amount of external compulsion would change that. Black Zetsu's control couldn't conjure capability where the substrate didn't support it.
Besides, the arrangement with Orochimaru was working. There was no reason to introduce friction.
"Make it fast," Madara said. "I'm running out of patience."
"You won't have to wait long." Orochimaru finally glanced back. "And you'd be better off spending that patience somewhere useful. Eight-Tails and Nine-Tails are still out there."
"Eight-Tails won't be a problem. The Cloud ninja won't give me any real trouble." A pause. "As for the Nine-Tails — Konoha is planning to release it."
Orochimaru blinked. "What?"
He had been absorbed in the artificial vessel for the past several weeks and hadn't paid close attention to what was happening in the outside world. Release the Nine-Tails. What did that even mean? It made the Nine-Tails sound like some kind of exotic animal being returned to the wild.
He gave Madara a puzzled look. "Konoha is going to release it? What does that mean exactly — they're giving up on stopping you?"
"According to what White Zetsu has gathered, the Nine-Tails jinchuriki has a particular status that makes him untouchable. They're concerned that if they use him as a piece in a fight against me, he might not survive it. So they've decided to release the Nine-Tails rather than risk getting him killed."
"Namikaze Naruto. The Fourth Hokage's son." Orochimaru turned the information over slowly. "They'd give up the Nine-Tails to protect one child?" His tone was almost appreciative. "It's almost touching. But." His eyes narrowed. "One person's life against the survival of the village? That kind of trade doesn't add up. Something is wrong here."
Madara's arms folded across his chest. "I agree. Something is off. But whatever Konoha is planning, I only need to wait. Once your vessel gives me my true resurrection, it won't matter what they're planning. Nothing will."
The certainty in his voice was absolute. As though his return to life were the answer to every question, the resolution of every variable.
Orochimaru said nothing to that, and his expression remained composed. But privately, he wasn't so sure. The Fifth Hokage was not a quantity that could be dismissed even after Madara's resurrection — that much he had decided for himself, based on everything he'd witnessed. He had no intention of interfering with the resurrection. He simply didn't think it would go as cleanly as Madara seemed to expect.
He kept that opinion to himself and returned his attention to Number One.
Ritsu, meanwhile, knew none of Madara's specific plans. He only knew his own.
He led a group of several dozen ninja out of Konoha and across the Land of Fire to the eastern coast, where they boarded a ship to a small uninhabited island not far offshore. There, he broke the seals on Naruto and released the Nine-Tails.
The Nine-Tails, newly free, immediately attempted to vent some of its considerable grievances on the nearest available humans.
Ritsu hit it twice.
The Nine-Tails lay on the ground for some time after that, unable to quite recover its bearings, watching the group of green-vested humans walk back down to the shore and sail away.
It had barely begun to gather itself when a figure appeared on the island.
Every hair on the Nine-Tails stood on end.
Madara.
It let out a sound that was somewhere between a roar and a shriek.
Madara looked at it with something close to genuine surprise. "They actually released you." He frowned slowly, turning the information over. "What on earth is that Fifth Hokage thinking?"
The Nine-Tails gathered chakra and launched a Tailed Beast Ball.
Madara glanced at it. The Nine-Tails' furious eyes flashed crimson, and its entire body locked in place like a statue toppling mid-fall, frozen solid before the attack could leave its mouth.
A moment later, Black Zetsu eased up from the ground nearby.
"Anything suspicious?" Madara asked.
"Nothing. Everything checks out."
"Nothing." Madara's frown deepened slightly. "How interesting."
He stood there for a moment, genuinely uncertain. He didn't believe Konoha would simply let the Nine-Tails go without some angle being played. But he couldn't find it. He couldn't see what the trap was, or where the hook had been buried. And he was still not fully resurrected — still operating in a body borrowed from a dead vessel, still not everything he intended to be.
If there was a move he hadn't seen, it might actually cost him.
He looked at the Nine-Tails, fully in his grip now.
Then he reached into his robe and produced the Shukaku vessel, and began the sealing.
Whatever Konoha was planning, he would take the Nine-Tails first and puzzle it out afterward. He trusted that Konoha hadn't been clever enough to set a trap he couldn't recognize once he was looking for it.
The sealing proceeded without interruption. No Konoha ninja appeared. No hidden technique activated. The island stayed empty and quiet all the way to the end.
Madara stood with the sealed vessel in his hands and looked around at the open water.
He still couldn't work it out.
He left the island, returned to the base in the Land of Lightning, and went to find Orochimaru.
Orochimaru looked at the vessel before he looked at Madara's face. "You got the Nine-Tails."
"Did you expect otherwise?"
"Actually, yes." Orochimaru's curiosity surfaced without any effort to disguise it. "Konoha really did give it up. That is genuinely fascinating. I keep trying to imagine what they're actually after."
Madara's expression was not warm. "Orochimaru. How is your toy coming along? Twenty days have passed. Don't tell me there's still nothing."
"Of course not." Orochimaru waved it away. "Number One has mastered the technique. We've just been waiting for you to come back." He tilted his head slightly. "Honestly, I expected this trip to end with you walking into whatever trap Konoha laid and not returning. But it seems my prediction was wrong again."
He finished with a small, almost regretful sigh.
Madara's expression darkened considerably.
"Are you looking to end our arrangement?"
"Not at all." Orochimaru met those red eyes without flinching, his smile easy and unhurried. "If you hadn't come back, I'd have simply found a different research subject. But you did come back, so the resurrection happens as planned. That's all."
He turned and called over his shoulder: "Number One. Come here."
Several seconds passed. Then Number One walked in from an adjoining room, dressed now in a plain white garment, his expression completely empty. The pale violet Rinnegan rested in his eye sockets, looking out at Orochimaru with something that resembled attention but carried no feeling beneath it.
"What are your instructions, Lord Orochimaru."
"Use the technique on him." Orochimaru pointed at Madara.
"Understood."
Number One turned without hesitation, squared himself to face Madara, and began forming hand seals. His chakra responded and began moving toward the Rinnegan in his eyes.
Outer Path: Samsara of Heavenly Life Technique.
Number One's chakra broke loose and flooded toward those pale violet eyes like water through a shattered dam. His presence dropped sharply, breath by breath, a flame being drawn down to its last reserve.
Across from him, Madara's aura climbed.
The faint grey cracks that had traced across his skin since the reanimation — the unmistakable mark of a body pulled back from death rather than lived in — began to fade. The pallor of the reanimated flesh warmed into living color, white deepening to the flush of blood moving through healthy tissue.
"Finally."
The word came out low, almost quiet. Then Madara's face broke into something vast and unrestrained, a grin that had nothing careful in it. "Finally, I can fight properly. There is absolutely nothing like a living body. Nothing."
His laughter rang out through the base.
Orochimaru's composure left him.
In that instant, everything he thought he understood about the situation rearranged itself. What was standing in that room now was not the Madara he had been working alongside for months. The threat he felt from it was immediate and physical, a pressure against his skin that his body understood before his mind caught up.
For a fraction of a second, he found himself genuinely asking the question he had set aside:
Could Ritsu actually fight this?
Madara stepped forward and lifted Number One off the ground by the front of his garment. Number One hung limp, the life already gone from him, spent entirely on the technique. Madara pressed two fingers to each eye socket and extracted the Rinnegan, then placed both eyes into his own.
The room became heavier.
Orochimaru noticed he had taken a small step back without deciding to.
He was not a man who frightened easily, and he recognized that about himself. The fact that he was experiencing something close to it right now said something he didn't entirely want to sit with.
Madara rolled his neck. The sound of it carried through the quiet room. His grin hadn't moved — couldn't seem to move — and he turned those pale violet ringed eyes toward Orochimaru.
They looked at each other for three full seconds.
Orochimaru's smile became something held in place rather than felt.
"I'll overlook the nonsense you said earlier," Madara said at last, "out of respect for the work you've done. Now — prepare yourself for the Infinite Tsukuyomi." His voice was unhurried, almost generous. "A new world is on its way. I am going to end this thousand years of war and suffering with my own hands. Every person alive will finally receive the life they were meant to have."
He turned and walked out.
Orochimaru stood where he was for a long time. His crimson eyes followed Madara's back until it disappeared into the dark of the corridor beyond the door.
He didn't speak.
Chapter 267: Limbo — Border Jail
A heavy mood had settled over the entire ninja world.
Madara hung over every village like a stormfront that refused to pass — nine Tailed Beasts collected, the Eight-Tails taken from the Cloud Village by force, and Konoha choosing to simply release the Nine-Tails rather than defend it. The growing fear was hard to push down: was the Moon's Eye Plan actually close to completion? If it worked, if Madara cast the Infinite Tsukuyomi over the entire world, humanity would be buried in an eternal illusion. The species might not survive it at all.
In that atmosphere, Cloud Village envoys rode hard in every direction. The Fourth Raikage called for a Five Kage Summit, and every shadow responded. Ritsu made a convincing show of responding with enthusiasm.
He arrived at the samurai fortress in the Land of Iron with Hatake Kakashi and Nohara Rin at his side. The other four Kage were already seated in the conference room when he walked in — the Fourth Raikage, the Third Tsuchikage, the Fifth Kazekage, and the Fourth Mizukage, all of them wearing expressions that could have been cut from the same stone.
"You're late." A's voice was flat and unhappy. His body bore several jagged, centipede-like scars that hadn't been there before, and the skin of his face had taken on a dark, bruised quality that spoke to significant pain recently endured. Madara's assault on the Cloud Village had taken the Eight-Tails and left the Fourth Raikage considerably worse for the experience. The only reason A was still alive was that killing had never been part of Madara's agenda.
Ritsu glanced around the table without hurrying. "What's the rush? We're all just sitting here staring at each other anyway."
A's jaw tightened. "Madara is a Konoha missing-nin. That makes this Konoha's problem to answer for."
He looked around at the other three Kage, clearly hoping for backup.
Onoki's eyes were half-closed, the old man looking faintly as though he might be asleep. Yagura had turned his head slightly, avoiding A's gaze. Pakura was studying the grain pattern in the table in front of her as if it contained some important secret.
A felt the room's chill.
These cowards. Not one of them willing to stand behind him.
Ritsu settled into his seat and spread his hands. "Raikage, settle down. I'm not saying Konoha is washing its hands of this. I'm saying we haven't been able to stop him. Madara is simply beyond our reach right now."
A held his silence for two seconds. The absence of support from the others had cooled the heat in his head, and he thought more carefully before continuing. "No reach or not, we have to find a way. If we keep letting this go on, Madara is actually going to finish his Moon's Eye Plan, and then we'll all be spending our lives in some pleasant little dream world."
The sarcasm at the end was impossible to miss. It was also impossible to deny.
"Hokage." Onoki's voice was measured. "What is the current status of your Nine-Tails?"
"Already released," Ritsu said, without any particular hesitation. "After the release, we sent people back to the island to check. The Nine-Tails was gone. Based on the traces of battle left at the scene, it appears Madara captured it."
Yagura's composure broke. "What? Madara already has all nine?"
He wasn't alone. Every face at the table shifted.
They had all assumed Konoha wouldn't truly give up the Nine-Tails so easily. The most common working theory had been a trap — some arrangement by which Konoha would use the Nine-Tails as bait and coordinate a five-village ambush to finally corner Madara. They had been quietly preparing to propose exactly that kind of joint operation.
And now they were being told it was already over.
Pakura looked directly at Ritsu. "Are you telling us Konoha had no plan at all? The Moon's Eye Plan isn't going to skip over Konoha just because you handed Madara what he wanted."
She didn't believe it. Her eyes said as much.
Ritsu smiled slightly. "My plan is actually straightforward. Madara has spent years dodging me while he collected the Tailed Beasts — never giving me the direct fight I'd need to actually end this. So I stopped chasing him. I'm waiting for him to collect everything and move to execute the final stage. That's when he'll have to come out into the open, and that's when I take him."
Silence.
Everyone at the table was staring at him.
That's a plan?
A's face went through several expressions before settling. "You genuinely think that works? What if Madara can complete the Moon's Eye Plan in minutes? Your entire strategy depends on the final stage taking a long time — how confident are you in that assumption?"
"Completely." Ritsu folded his hands on the table. "Don't forget — the intelligence you all have access to came from us. Our information is considerably more detailed than yours. Completing the Moon's Eye Plan isn't something Madara can do in a moment. He needs to first restore the Ten-Tails — the Divine Tree — to its true form, and then use the moon as a medium to cast the Infinite Tsukuyomi. That is a complex process. It takes time."
He continued: "And I have the Heavenly Transfer Technique. The moment Madara revives the Divine Tree and reveals his location, I can be there instantly."
He said it all with complete conviction.
Every word of it was a lie.
In the world he remembered, the process had taken as long as it did because Madara had lacked the complete chakra of both the Nine-Tails and Eight-Tails. With all nine Tailed Beasts intact and fully his, the revival of the Divine Tree and the activation of the Infinite Tsukuyomi might take minutes. Not days.
But the four Kage had no way to know that. Their intelligence had gaps, and the one gap that mattered most was this one. More fundamentally, not one of them had entertained the possibility that the Fifth Hokage of Konoha might actually want Madara to succeed. The idea was too far outside anything they could construct from the information they had.
So they believed him.
Not that their belief changed anything. On the board that was the ninja world, they were pieces — somewhat larger pieces than most, but pieces nonetheless.
"Is there truly nothing we can contribute?" Pakura said, her eyes sincere. "Madara is the ninja world's enemy. The Sand Village is not strong right now, but we're willing to fight. Whatever we can offer, we'll give it."
The words found something real in the room.
"The same from the Rock Village." Onoki's voice carried genuine weight, even through the bitterness in it.
Yagura nodded sharply.
Before Ritsu could answer, the room changed.
Every person at the table felt it at once — a chakra presence to the east, arriving so suddenly and so vast that the air itself seemed to shift under it. Not one of them was a sensor-type ninja, but none of that mattered. The chakra was so enormous it didn't require specialized sensitivity to perceive. It simply pressed against the skin like a second atmosphere.
No one spoke immediately.
They were all fast thinkers. Against the backdrop of what Ritsu had just described, the answer assembled itself without much effort.
They moved together to the corridor windows. The Land of Iron lay under its permanent snow, the plains stretching out to the horizon under a sky that had already dimmed toward evening. Nothing was visible except white and grey and the last pale light of day.
"That was fast." Yagura's voice was very quiet.
Pakura had gone pale. "Is it starting now?"
Onoki's brow was a single deep furrow.
A's fists had closed at his sides.
Ritsu stood among them and allowed himself a moment of genuine surprise. He had expected Madara to need more time before moving — the reanimated body was not suited to wielding the Rinnegan, and without a resurrection Madara wouldn't have been able to begin. The chakra in the east meant Madara was already alive again.
Orochimaru. It had to be.
With Nagato dead and Tatsuhata gone, Madara had no obvious remaining piece that could cast the Outer Path technique. But Orochimaru — the closest thing the ninja world had produced to a genuine scientist in a thousand years — had apparently found a way through a wall that should have been solid.
A turned toward Ritsu. That single movement brought every eye in the corridor to the same point.
Behind Ritsu, Kakashi and Rin were watching him with barely contained worry.
Ritsu smiled. "Everyone relax. I'll be right back."
He formed a hand seal. The Heavenly Transfer activated. White light erupted through the corridor window in front of him, the glass shattering outward, and then he was gone. Howling wind and snow poured in through the broken frame.
Nobody moved away from it. They stood crowded at the window, letting the cold air work on their thoughts.
"Should we do something?" Pakura asked.
Onoki glanced at her. The look was not unkind, but it wasn't gentle either. "What exactly would you suggest, Kazekage? By the time any of us reaches that battlefield, it will be over. If the Hokage wins, our arrival means nothing. If he loses, our arrival means the same."
He didn't exempt himself from that assessment.
Nobody argued with it, because it was true.
"I wish sensei were still here."
Rin's voice was barely audible.
A heard it anyway. He said nothing, but the same thought moved through him unbidden — the Fourth Hokage, alive, with the Flying Thunder God at his disposal. There was a world where Minato could have deployed every person in this corridor to the battlefield in the span of a breath.
But the Fourth Hokage was dead. And both the Second Hokage and the Fourth Hokage's souls were under Madara's Reanimation Jutsu — locked away where Konoha couldn't reach them regardless of what it was willing to sacrifice. Even if someone cast Reanimation Jutsu at any cost, it couldn't free souls already bound to another caster.
All they had was the Fifth Hokage.
He had better be enough.
In the mountains of southern Land of Lightning, near the border with the Land of Frost, something enormous was moving.
The Ten-Tails stood taller than the mountain peaks around it. Its ten tails moved with the lazy ease of something that had never needed to be careful, and each slow sweep brought mountains down — peaks crumbling, the earth beneath them splitting into deep black fissures that ran for hundreds of meters. The chakra that had been taken from it piece by piece over years had been returned in full, and the Divine Tree's mood, if it could be called that, was something between fury and elation.
Madara stood on a peak not far away and felt its excitement. His mouth curved without his full permission.
The Moon's Eye Plan was almost complete.
All that remained was waiting for the moon to rise — the Infinite Tsukuyomi needed the moon as its medium. The wait would not be boring. Someone worth fighting had already appeared nearby.
"Hyuga clan's White Yaksha." Madara turned. Ritsu stood twenty meters away, watching the Ten-Tails with something close to admiration. Madara's smile sharpened into something with edges. "You took longer to arrive than I expected."
"Did you practice that line?" Ritsu replied, unhurried. "Tatsuhata asked me the same thing. I didn't feel like answering it then either."
His eyes remained on the Ten-Tails.
"Impressive nerve," Madara said. "After Hashirama, no one has said something like that to my face and walked away from it."
The next instant, Ritsu's body snapped backward in a sharp arch, folding like something struck hard from an unexpected angle. Then invisible fists began landing on him in rapid succession, hitting him from multiple directions at once.
Completely without effect.
Four golden chains exploded from his back and shot outward in different directions, wrapping around four separate shapes that had no visible form. The chains pulled taut, and the struggling of those four silhouettes was unmistakable even to eyes that couldn't see them.
The composure left Madara's face entirely.
His expression became something careful and serious that it hadn't been a moment ago.
"Hyuga Ritsu. You can see my shadows."
He studied Ritsu with full attention now, trying to identify the mechanism. The life force emanating from the young Hokage was staggering — the kind of thing that didn't have a natural category.
"Is that supposed to be difficult?" Ritsu said, still smiling.
His Byakugan had been refined over years by the constant flow of life energy through it, pushed to a purity that defied ordinary comparison. And behind his brow, the third eye remained. Perceiving Madara's Limbo shadows was not a feat that required particular effort.
Madara was quiet for a moment. "I'll admit it — I underestimated you. Even my Limbo: Border Jail doesn't hide from you." A pause. "Were you holding something back the last time we fought?"
His brow furrowed slowly. He was beginning to suspect he didn't fully understand what he was looking at.
"That's not really the point right now," Ritsu said. He made no move to press the advantage — didn't follow the capture of the four Limbo shadows with any attack. He simply stood where he was, hands relaxed at his sides, his expression genuinely easy. "Instead of getting caught up in details like this, I think you should focus on absorbing the Divine Tree. Then wait for the moon to rise and cast the Infinite Tsukuyomi."
The silence that followed was a particular kind.
Madara's expression had gone very dark.
"The insolence of you," he said at last.
Chapter 268: Ten-Tails Jinchuriki
Madara's killing intent had nowhere else to go.
The failure of Limbo hadn't shaken him. Whatever Ritsu was hiding, however deep that particular trick ran, it didn't change the fundamental arithmetic. Ritsu was a formidable opponent — the most formidable Madara had faced since Hashirama, without question. But formidable was not unbeatable. Full commitment would be enough.
Ninja Art: Heavenly Ruin Stars.
The sky above them changed. An enormous mass tore through the clouds, trailing fire from the friction of its descent, the sound of the air splitting ahead of it rolling across the mountains like thunder.
Ritsu looked up at it without moving.
This was expected. Breaking through Limbo hadn't been enough to extinguish Madara's confidence — the gap between them still needed to be made undeniably clear, and that required going further.
His chakra broke loose like a river through a shattered dam.
Sage Art: Wood Style: True Several Thousand Hands.
The earth cracked. A colossal wooden figure erupted from the ground, rising over a hundred meters, and from its back extended ring after ring of arms — thousands of them, fanning outward in great circular tiers, the whole structure standing on the mountain landscape like something immovable had always been there and the world had simply forgotten it.
This was Senju Hashirama's ultimate technique. The man had left behind no training notes for it, no written method. Ritsu had reconstructed it from memory alone, and he was confident that what he had built was at least as powerful as the original — if not more so.
It was also only the opening move.
He stood atop the wooden giant's head and kept feeding it chakra as the meteor closed the distance above them. A dozen of the enormous arms came to life, chakra pouring into each massive palm and taking shape.
Sage Art: Wind Style: Rasenshuriken.
The technique itself wasn't new — it was simply the fusion of sage chakra with the Wind Style: Rasenshuriken, pushed to a scale that the original's creator had never attempted. The destructive ceiling was in a different category.
Twelve enormous Rasenshuriken launched skyward simultaneously.
The sound of the collision reached the ground before anything else — a noise so large it was felt as much as heard. The meteor came apart. Chunks of every size rained down across the mountains below, collapsing peaks and flattening forests, punching craters into the valley floors.
At the same moment, the Ten-Tails swung toward the Wood Human.
It could feel the chakra concentrated in that giant frame and in the figure at its crown — more chakra than the creature had encountered in a very long time, and it wanted it. The attack came with everything the beast had.
The Wood Human had a thousand arms.
Sage Art: Supreme Buddha Formation. Every arm lifted and came down on the Ten-Tails at once. The beast thrashed, all ten tails whipping with desperate force, and still it was pressed flat against the mountain range and held there, unable to throw the weight off.
Madara said nothing for a moment.
The Ten-Tails was... struggling.
Which wasn't a question of the beast's power. The Ten-Tails was a vessel of incomprehensible strength. But its original form was the Divine Tree — a plant — and unlike the nine Tailed Beasts, which carried Madara's own fragmented chakra and possessed genuine intelligence, the Ten-Tails operated on pure instinct. It had access to overwhelming force and no ability to translate that force into effective combat. The two things didn't connect.
Even so.
What Ritsu was showing him right now was genuinely comparable to Hashirama at his peak.
No. Past his peak.
A second later, Madara's azure Complete Body Susanoo rose into being — two swords in its hands, full armor plating across every surface, a pair of massive wings spreading behind it. Another towering shape against the sky, matching the Wood Human in scale.
Ritsu clicked his tongue quietly.
Madara's stubbornness was genuinely inconvenient. The sensible move would be to absorb the Ten-Tails, cast the Infinite Tsukuyomi, and let the plan play out — at which point Ritsu could step in, deal with the aftermath, and get what he'd been building toward for years. Why suffer through a pointless fight first?
But if Madara wanted to take the hard way, Ritsu wasn't going to stop him from taking it.
Sage Art: Dance of the Seedling Fern.
Enormous white bones erupted from the earth across the entire valley floor, driving upward through the Ten-Tails' body from dozens of angles simultaneously, pinning the beast between the mountains like nails through wood. The Ten-Tails could thrash all it wanted. It wasn't going anywhere.
The Wood Human turned. A hundred arms drew back and unleashed a hundred simultaneous Sage Art: Nine Aspects Rotation Kill strikes directly into the Complete Body Susanoo's chest.
The crack of it echoed across the mountain range.
Fracture lines spread across every surface of Susanoo's armor, dense as shattered glass. The structure held — barely — and both swords came sweeping down in return, each one carrying enough force to cut a mountain peak clean in half.
They didn't cut the Wood Human in half.
Columns of Shikotsumyaku bone, as thick as ancient trees, had grown from the wooden frame and met the blades head-on, grinding the force of the strikes down to nothing.
Madara had come out of that exchange worse than Ritsu.
His expression had gone flat.
Susanoo's cracked armor began knitting itself back together as chakra flowed into the damage, and the moment it was stable, the great wings beat once and drove Madara backward, opening distance between them.
He needed to think.
Close combat against Ritsu was a losing proposition. He knew that now. He had other techniques in reserve, but an honest accounting told him that none of them exceeded what he'd already deployed — not Limbo, not the meteor strike, not the Complete Body Susanoo. If those three hadn't solved it, the rest wouldn't either.
A war of attrition was worse. Ritsu's chakra reserves were on the same scale as the Ten-Tails itself. If they ground each other down, it wouldn't be Ritsu who ran dry first.
The Wood Human had gone still as well.
Ritsu watched him from above, making no move forward. His purpose here wasn't to batter Madara into unconsciousness — it was to make the reality between them undeniable. Even with his true body restored, even with the Rinnegan returned to his own eyes, Madara was still not Ritsu's equal in this fight.
There was only one path forward for Madara now. He needed the Ten-Tails inside him.
Over the past six years, Ritsu had not wasted a single day. His Rinnegan techniques — unique to him, derived from the eye between his brows — had been working continuously against the barrier between Physical Regeneration Level 5 and Level 6. His strength had kept climbing in that time without pause. This was why he could stand in front of Madara today without concern.
Madara had reached the same conclusion. He could feel it clearly now — the gap between them, and the direction it ran. Not him above and Ritsu below. The other way.
His gaze shifted to the Ten-Tails, enormous and immobilized, studded with white bones.
Complete Body Susanoo moved toward it.
Ritsu's lip turned slightly at one corner. He stood on the Wood Human's head and stayed where he was. The Wood Human stayed where it was. They both watched Madara cross the distance to the Ten-Tails.
Six Paths: Ten-Tails Coffin Seal.
The Ten-Tails stopped struggling. Its vast body began flowing inward, drawn into Madara the way water is drawn down a drain, all that rampaging presence collapsing toward a single point until nothing was left.
Then Madara's aura began to climb.
Complete Body Susanoo dissolved around him. He didn't fall. He rose — hovering in the air without any visible support, his black hair fading to white, chakra weaving itself into a white coat across his body with black magatama patterns running through it like embroidery. His hands and feet had gone jet black. Nine black Truth-Seeking Balls arranged themselves in orbit behind him, and in his right hand materialized a long Six Paths Staff.
Ten-Tails Jinchuriki Mode.
Power on a scale he hadn't felt since before his death moved through every part of him. Madara's face, for a moment, showed nothing but pure intoxication.
Then the laughter came.
It rang out across the ruined mountains, unrestrained and enormous, filling the empty air between the peaks.
Ritsu watched it happen and found himself in a genuinely good mood. The classic Uchiha madman laugh. More importantly — absorbing the Ten-Tails had transformed Madara's durability into something else entirely. Before this, hitting him had been satisfying but limited. Now Ritsu could actually let himself go.
He was still looking forward to it when Madara came at him.
The Ten-Tails jinchuriki crossed the distance fast, Six Paths Staff in hand, killing intent blazing from his eyes. "Letting me absorb the Ten-Tails, Hyuga brat — that is absolutely the greatest mistake you've made."
"Is it."
The flatness of Ritsu's response was apparently infuriating.
"Arrogant little fool." Madara leveled the Six Paths Staff. "I'll show you exactly how wide this gap has become."
Sage Art: Yin Style — Lightning Wave.
He opened both hands and let it out. What emerged from his palms was purple lightning that spread in branching arcs like the root system of some vast tree, crackling and expanding as it came.
This was a technique he had arrived at naturally after the Ten-Tails merged with him — the absorption had brought understanding with it, instinctive and complete. The technique used natural energy directly, which was why he'd named it a sage art; in essence it wasn't meaningfully different from the sage techniques of the ninja world, just sourced differently. Its destructive ceiling was straightforward: a Tailed Beast struck by this technique would be rendered temporarily dead, reviving only after the energy dissipated.
It just needed a target.
Sage Art: Void Severance.
Ritsu raised one hand.
The chakra that condensed in front of him looked thin — almost translucent — but it stopped the lightning cold. The barrier held without flexing, absorbing every branching arc and dissipating it without visible effort.
This was a technique Ritsu had built over years using the puppet master's Mechanical Light Shield as a structural foundation, layering the principles of every defensive jutsu he had studied until something new had emerged from the combination.
Madara's expression curdled.
Even the Ten-Tails hadn't been enough.
He gripped the Six Paths Staff and swung it in a broad arc, and as he did, the nine black Truth-Seeking Balls peeled away from orbit and shot toward Ritsu in a spread.
The Truth-Seeking Balls were constructed from all seven chakra natures simultaneously, bound together by Yin-Yang Release into something that caused irreversible damage. Reanimated bodies struck by them were permanently fixed in whatever state the impact left them — the healing factor that made the Reanimation Jutsu difficult to destroy simply didn't apply. Madara had decided this was the tool that would solve the problem of Hyuga Ritsu.
Sage Art: Adamantine Sealing Chains.
The four chains already anchoring Madara's Limbo shadows kept their hold. Nine new chains erupted from behind Ritsu and flew outward, each one colliding with a Truth-Seeking Ball in midair with a sharp, clear ringing sound.
The Truth-Seeking Balls were deflected. Every one of them.
The chains carried sage chakra. The Truth-Seeking Balls drew their power from the Ten-Tails, which drew its power from planetary energy — natural energy, gathered and refined over an unimaginable span of time. The Ōtsutsuki clan's mastery of that process was without equal. But the underlying substance was the same thing. One natural energy against another, and the Adamantine Sealing Chains, imbued with the accumulated refinement of Ritsu's sage art, didn't yield.
The nine balls recovered their courses under Madara's control and returned to orbit.
Madara hovered in the air and looked at Ritsu.
What kind of creature was this Hyuga?
Was the Sage of Six Paths reincarnated into him? Was that what this was?
He had absorbed the Ten-Tails. He had the Rinnegan. And still Ritsu stood there, unhurt, holding four of his Limbo shadows in chains, his sage barrier undented, his Wood Human waiting patiently below him as though this were all completely routine.
Madara held his position, suspended in the sky, and for a moment genuinely didn't know what move to make.
In the shadows below, Black Zetsu had gone still.
He didn't understand it either. How was this possible? Madara had the Rinnegan. Madara had the Ten-Tails. The mathematics of it should have been completely clear.
How was Ritsu still keeping pace? How was he ahead?
Black Zetsu's composure had cracked in a way it almost never did. Everything had come so far — the plan had moved through every stage, reached this point, and now, at the moment that was supposed to be the resolution —
He could only pray. He prayed with the single-minded focus of something that had no other option left.
Perhaps it worked.
Madara moved decisively. He shot straight upward, and as he rose, the nine black Truth-Seeking Balls converged around him and locked into place, forming a seamless spherical shell that enclosed him completely inside its dark surface.
He had given up fighting Ritsu.
His goal had never been killing Ritsu. His goal was the Moon's Eye Plan. There was no requirement that he defeat the Hyuga Hokage personally before proceeding — he only needed to wait for the moon to rise. The Infinite Tsukuyomi would handle everything else.
"Finally." Ritsu exhaled the word quietly from atop the Wood Human, a brief smile crossing his face before it settled back into a studied expression of frustration.
He furrowed his brow and studied the sealed sphere, made a show of running through various approaches, launched several attacks that accomplished nothing. The minutes passed.
The moon rose.
Tonight's moon was full and extremely round, a pale disc climbing the dark sky with unhurried patience. This timing wasn't an accident. The date had been chosen with care. The Infinite Tsukuyomi needed the moon as its medium, and this moon — tonight's moon — was exactly what the plan required.
When it reached its highest point, Madara emerged from his shell.
Between his brows, a line appeared.
It split.
What opened there was crimson, bearing eight black magatama arranged in a circle — the Rinne Sharingan.
Chapter 269: Otsutsuki Kaguya — Descend!
The moon had hung in the cold sky and watched the ninja world's conflicts for a thousand years without once being disturbed.
That ended now.
Madara floated in the air, tilted his head back, and turned the Rinne Sharingan between his brows toward the moon.
Infinite Tsukuyomi — activate.
His ocular power projected upward and struck the lunar surface. The pale, icy white of the moon bled into crimson, and across it appeared the same eight-magatama pattern that marked the eye between his brows.
In that moment, every corner of the ninja world could see the change.
"Damn it all." In the fortress in the Land of Iron, the Fourth Raikage's voice hit the walls like a physical thing. "Did the Hokage fail? How? How did he fail?"
The rage in A's voice was enormous and had nowhere to go.
Nobody answered.
The air in the room had become something close to solid, pressing down on everyone inside it. Most of them had lost the ability to speak or simply the will to try.
Onoki's face had gone dark, and the light behind his eyes was almost entirely gone.
Pakura had her fists clenched at her sides, wanting to fight something, finding nothing to fight against.
Yagura stood where he was, still as a statue, staring upward at the sky through the window.
Kakashi and Rin and the others who had come with Ritsu stood frozen in a different way — the situation had moved completely beyond anything they knew how to act on. They could only wait for what was coming.
In the Hyuga clan compound in Konoha, in Ritsu's home.
Hyuga Ryuchi had been asleep. He wasn't anymore. The five-year-old was pressed against the window with his nose almost touching the glass, staring up at the sky with wide eyes.
"Mama, look! The moon is red!"
Uchiha Aika, woken by her son, came to the window half-awake. When she saw the moon, sleep left her entirely.
Moon's Eye Plan. The words surfaced in her mind before she'd fully formed a conscious thought.
The cold that moved through her had nothing to do with the night air.
This was the Infinite Tsukuyomi being cast. The only person she knew of who could do this was Madara. And if Madara was doing this—
Where was Ritsu? Had he failed to stop it?
The same question was moving through minds across the village. Hiruko, Akimichi Torikaze, Inuzuka Jaw, Nara Shikaku, Uchiha Fugaku, Uchiha Shisui — all of them looking at the same red moon and asking the same thing.
None of them had time to find an answer.
The crimson moon released a wall of white light.
Night became day. It happened in less than a second, a brightness so total and so sudden that people sleeping through it were forced awake, and the moment they opened their eyes the light took them. It poured through walls and earth and eyelids and found everyone it was looking for.
Even those who were blind could not escape it. Even those underground found no shelter.
Across the ninja world, expressions went slack. Bodies froze in place wherever they stood or sat or lay, suspended mid-motion, unmoving.
Aika was caught like everyone else. Her face went empty. She stood at the window where she'd been standing, still as a painting of herself.
Ryuchi was not.
He stood beside her, completely untouched by the light, and he looked at his mother's blank face and felt the panic rise.
"Mama! Mama! What's wrong? Mama?"
She didn't respond.
His eyes changed. The pure white of his Byakugan became slightly transparent, and something moved through them — a luminous quality, bright and distant, like light coming from somewhere very far away. Pale green chakra rose from his entire body like smoke without fire, light and drifting, and it moved under the force of something in him that he couldn't have named — a will that hadn't been trained, just felt. The pale green chakra surrounded his mother, settled around her, and cut the white moonlight off from reaching her.
Aika's expression returned to her face. She blinked, looked around, and murmured, "I think I was having a strange dream..."
"Mama!" Ryuchi grabbed her sleeve. "Are you okay?"
"Ryuchi? I'm fine, I'm... wait." She stopped. Her eyes were fixed on her son's face. "What happened to your eyes? You — what—"
Whatever dream she'd been pulled into was immediately irrelevant. Every part of her attention went to the boy in front of her.
In a mountain forest in the Land of Frost, Orochimaru stood at the peak of a snow-covered hill and looked up at the white light pouring from the moon. A small, unhurried smile sat on his face.
The light reached him and found nothing to catch.
"As expected," he said to nobody in particular. "Rinnegan power is a sufficient counter to the Infinite Tsukuyomi's pull."
His eyes were no longer the three-tomoe Sharingan. What looked back from them was pale gold, ringed with concentric patterns — the same structure as a true Rinnegan, differing only in color.
This was the product of years of work.
Neither Madara nor Black Zetsu had ever suspected how far Orochimaru's research had progressed. They had been limited by their own assumptions about what was possible, which had made it easy for a man with none of those limitations to move past them without being noticed.
"Uchiha, Hyuga, Otsutsuki Kaguya, the Horn Clan, Uzumaki, and Senju," Orochimaru said quietly. "Combine the bloodlines of those six lineages, use the Uchiha Sharingan as the structural foundation, add my techniques, and the Rinnegan follows naturally."
He paused, looking up at the sky.
"You've opened yours too, haven't you, Ritsu."
The smile on his face deepened slightly.
Back on the battlefield in the mountains of the southern Land of Lightning, Madara formed hand seals for the second time.
Sage God: Advent of a World of Flowering Trees.
His chakra poured into the earth in quantities that made the ground shudder. Across the entire ninja world — not just here, not just nearby, but everywhere there were human beings — trees erupted from the earth and grew at a rate that shouldn't have been possible, their branches reaching outward and finding the people caught in the Infinite Tsukuyomi's grip. Each body was gathered up, wrapped, enclosed. The branches became cocoons, hanging from every tree in every place that had ever had a person in it.
Ritsu was among them.
The moment the Infinite Tsukuyomi had activated, he had gone slack, his expression emptying convincingly, his gaze lifting toward the moon. He had let the trees come. The wood coiled around him, sealed him in, and hid him from view.
In the Land of Frost, Orochimaru refused the process violently, smashing several waves of extending wood to splinters before the trees finally gave up on him and moved elsewhere.
In Konoha's Hyuga compound, a five-year-old boy instinctively threw out one hand. Jet-black spheres appeared from nothing, perhaps a dozen of them, and swept the reaching wood into fragments without effort. The only difficulty was that Ryuchi couldn't control the spheres well enough to aim them carefully, which was how he ended up demolishing most of his own house in the process.
Madara descended from the sky.
His breath came out long and slow with something that felt like it should have been relief.
Ritsu was handled. For all the absurd, incomprehensible power the man had shown, there was apparently still a ceiling to it — and eternal dreams were above it. The plan had worked.
He landed on the mountain slope and became aware, distantly, that the tension had left his body without his permission.
Then he noticed he wasn't particularly happy.
He looked at the cocoons hanging from the branches all around him — from every tree, in every direction. The ninja world, sealed away. His plan, complete.
He wasn't sure what he had expected to feel.
Familiar chakra approached from behind.
Black Zetsu.
Madara didn't turn. He wasn't surprised Black Zetsu hadn't been caught by the Infinite Tsukuyomi. Black Zetsu was his will incarnate — an extension of himself as the technique's caster, not a separate target for it to capture. Naturally, he would be unaffected—
Something drove through Madara's chest from behind.
He looked down.
A black arm protruded from his sternum, the hand emerging cleanly through the other side.
Madara's mind stopped.
He stood there with that arm through his chest and he could not make sense of what was happening. His body had locked up entirely — not from pain, not from damage, but from a complete failure to process the input. He tried to form a thought and couldn't.
"Why..." The word came out barely shaped, pulled from somewhere he didn't have access to anymore.
You're my creation. You're the will I made. Why.
The questions didn't reach his mouth. They piled up behind it, and underneath them, already, something was reconstructing itself from the wreckage — Madara's mind rebooting, reaching for answers with a speed that had always served him well. Fragments connected. The pieces of the picture arrived one by one and assembled into something he didn't want to be looking at.
He had made a mistake.
The kind he couldn't recover from.
"Because you were deceived."
The voice came from above.
It wasn't Black Zetsu. One of the cocoons in the branches overhead had opened, and the figure inside it was floating downward — calm, unhurried, smiling at him the way someone smiles when a long-running joke finally lands.
Hyuga Ritsu settled to the ground a few meters away and looked at him.
"The Moon's Eye Plan was a lie from the very beginning. There is no beautiful eternal world waiting inside the Infinite Tsukuyomi. There never was. This technique is nothing more than a harvesting method — the means by which Otsutsuki Kaguya creates the White Zetsu army. That is its only purpose. That is all it has ever been."
Madara's eyes were wide and fixed and almost empty.
His shock was split equally between what Ritsu was telling him and the fact that Ritsu was standing here at all, entirely unaffected.
Ritsu looked at him. The pity in his expression was genuine.
A man who had believed himself to be moving the pieces across the board. A man who had given up everything — his clan, his bonds, every relationship he had ever formed — to make this plan succeed. A plan that had been designed to use him and discard him, and he had never once suspected it.
"From the very first moment to this one, you have been Black Zetsu's instrument. You thought he was the will you created. He's not. He is Otsutsuki Kaguya's creation. He is the Sage of Six Paths' hidden brother. And he used you for every year of your life."
Ritsu let that land.
"You were lied to."
Madara didn't speak. The light in his eyes receded until there was almost nothing behind them, and what was left standing there was something that looked much more like an empty vessel than a man.
From the back of his head, Black Zetsu's face emerged. Those black eyes fixed on Ritsu with an intensity that had no warmth in it.
"Where did you learn any of this?"
His exposure didn't alarm him — if Madara was compromised, Madara was compromised; that had always been a possible outcome. What he couldn't understand was his own cover being seen through. From the day of his creation he had told no one his origins. Not Otsutsuki Hagoromo. Not Otsutsuki Hamura. Not his brothers, who had built the world and never known he existed.
How.
"That's not important," Ritsu said.
He didn't bother constructing a story. He just looked at Black Zetsu and said what he actually wanted: "Don't get distracted by details. Bring Otsutsuki Kaguya out. I've been looking forward to this for a long time."
Black Zetsu's expression — unreadable as it always was behind that black surface — had something difficult in it.
He had lost control of this moment. He'd known there was risk in revealing himself to Ritsu, but this feeling — the sense that the situation had escaped the shape he'd intended it to take — was not something he'd planned for. It sat badly.
But the knife was already in Madara's back. There was no route back from it. The sequence that began here had only one end.
Madara's Sage God technique was already working. The chakra it had extracted from the ninja world's countless people was flowing into him from every direction at a speed that was almost audible — an enormous torrent, converging on this one point, pouring into his body until the flesh no longer held its shape, swelling and distending into something vast and formless, studded with growths.
Black Zetsu's body dissolved. He became something like black tar running downward, flowing into Madara through the wound in his chest, merging with the chakra already inside.
The mass of flesh began to contract.
It took shape.
What stood there — floated there, a meter above the ground without touching it — was a woman. White hair fell from her head to the ground in a continuous cascade. Two horns rose from her brow. Between her eyes, a crimson Rinne Sharingan carried nine black magatama in its pattern. Her own eyes were pure white. Her robes were wide-sleeved and ancient, and the presence that surrounded her was cold and weightless and not quite of this world.
Otsutsuki Kaguya.
"You finally showed up," Ritsu said. "Kaguya."
"Otsutsuki..." She saw him and stopped.
For a fraction of a second, genuine surprise crossed the face of a being who had not been surprised in a very long time. Then the surprise became confusion and something else — she activated her Byakugan, the veins rising around her eyes, and she studied what was in front of her.
"Not Otsutsuki. No — it is Otsutsuki — no, not right, not ordinary Otsutsuki—"
Her voice had gone quiet.
"What are you."
The question wasn't rhetorical. She genuinely didn't have an answer.
Even with the thousand years of intelligence Black Zetsu had been feeding her — even with all of that — he hadn't been able to classify what Ritsu was, because Black Zetsu's perception, for all his longevity, didn't reach the levels hers did. He had watched Ritsu for years and hadn't fully seen him.
She was seeing him now.
And the fear that moved through her was something she hadn't felt since the age before the ninja world was built.
Inside her sleeve, Black Zetsu went very still as the full weight of his mother's perception reached him through their shared awareness.
He had nothing to say.
"Sharp eyes," Ritsu said. He sounded genuinely impressed. "Since you can see that much — why not just surrender now? I'll make it as clean as I can."
Kaguya's lips pressed together.
She struck.
Eighty Gods Vacuum Attack.
High-density chakra launched from her palm and spread in a cascade of concentrated impacts, each one carrying force enough to level a building, dozens of them firing simultaneously like a volley of guided weapons.
Sage Art: Void Severance.
Ritsu raised one hand. A barrier condensed in the air ahead of him — thin-looking, almost invisible — and the entire attack broke against it and dissipated.
He looked at her and smiled. "I had a feeling it wouldn't be that simple. We're going to have to do this properly." Something shifted in his bearing, and the smile took on an edge. "Then let me show you what I'm working with."
The chakra he had been holding back — constrained and contained through every exchange of this entire night, held in reserve behind a deliberate ceiling — let go.
The feeling of it expanding outward was like watching a mountain wake up. Something immense and long-dormant coming to life, filling the space around him, the presence of it pressing out in every direction without effort. Whatever Kaguya had seen in him a moment ago with her Byakugan, this was the thing beneath it, finally uncontained.
The third eye between his brows opened. The pale violet Rinnegan turned slowly, taking in the night.
His own white eyes shifted — the pure solid white became slightly transparent, and something luminous moved within them, the quality of light from somewhere enormously distant, the same radiance that had appeared briefly in his son's eyes not long ago.
Rinnegan. Tenseigan.
Both, together, looking at Otsutsuki Kaguya.
He raised his hand. Jet-black spheres appeared from the air around him, each one dense and quiet, orbiting slowly. They were built from the Tenseigan's power rather than the Six Paths' — the composition was different from Madara's Truth-Seeking Balls, but the ceiling on their destructive force was not.
The real fight was about to begin.
Chapter 270: He Who, With a Mortal Body, Hears the Voice of Heaven
The Byakugan originated with the Otsutsuki. The Hyuga clan had inherited it from Kaguya herself, a bloodline passed down through uncountable generations until it reached the world it now occupied.
But the Tenseigan was something Otsutsuki Kaguya had never encountered.
The Otsutsuki simply hadn't thought to research their own eyes. Their method for becoming stronger was straightforward — find a planet with sufficient energy, plant the Divine Tree, wait, and eat the Chakra Fruit it produced. Developing the Byakugan to its theoretical limits was not a project any of them had seriously pursued. Perhaps some branch of the clan had tried, somewhere across the ages, but Kaguya knew nothing of it. She didn't know the Byakugan could evolve into something else. She didn't know what the Tenseigan was, and that ignorance translated directly into a disadvantage she couldn't compensate for.
This fight was, at its root, a contest of information. And on that front, the asymmetry between them was total. Kaguya's understanding of Ritsu was limited to what Black Zetsu had been able to gather and what her own Byakugan could observe in the moment. Ritsu's understanding of Kaguya was comprehensive.
With that said — relying on the Tenseigan and the Rinnegan alone, the best Ritsu could manage was keeping Kaguya off-balance. The gap wasn't yet decisive.
They traded.
Eighty Gods Vacuum Attack collided with a Super Almighty Push — the shockwave reduced every mountain in the immediate vicinity to rubble.
Rabbit Hair Needles launched from Kaguya's hair, fine and indestructible, and the wind from Ritsu's Silver Wheel Rebirth Explosion scattered them.
All-Killing Ash Bones — the grey substance that caused everything it contacted to decay — reached for Ritsu from multiple angles. The Golden Wheel Rebirth Explosion met it, and the brilliant gold light annihilated every last tendril. The excess momentum continued on past its target and sheared through the edge of Kaguya's sleeve, coming close enough to the black shape hiding inside it to make Black Zetsu go very still.
Ritsu held the golden light in his hand, shaped into something like a blade.
Kaguya's expression had gone flat.
She glanced at the damage to her sleeve, ran chakra through it, and it sealed itself shut. But the exchange had said something that couldn't be unsaid — Ritsu had the reach to actually hurt her. She had felt it.
Amenotejikara.
The space around them warped and tore, and in less time than it took to register, the mountains of the Land of Lightning were gone. What surrounded them now was white in every direction — an alternate dimension of ice and snow, stretching without horizon, without any sign of living things. The cold here was a physical pressure.
Ritsu looked around and didn't hurry his reaction. This was expected. He had known she would try to shift the field.
Level 5 Physical Regeneration at its extreme limit gave him a body that could endure conditions far beyond human range. The cold here was severe but not threatening — and beyond that, the Tenseigan chakra moving through him provided an additional layer of insulation.
The ice landscape around Kaguya began to move.
Natural Integration.
She had merged with the dimension itself, and the frozen peaks responded to her as extensions of her body — driving toward Ritsu like an array of spears from every direction, simultaneous and relentless.
"This is similar to my Inorganic Reincarnation," Ritsu observed, and fired.
His Tenseigan chakra beads launched in all directions like rounds from a volley weapon, each one striking a peak and detonating through it. In the span of a few seconds, the entire field of ice spears had been turned to scattered fragments. Several of the beads curved toward Kaguya on their return trajectory and were intercepted by the barrier her Truth-Seeking Balls formed around her.
Then the environment shifted again.
The ice vanished. What replaced it was fire — or something that preceded fire. A sea of rolling magma spread beneath them in every direction, the heat rising in waves intense enough to reduce an ordinary person to ash within seconds of arrival. They were in a lava dimension now, the air itself carrying the smell of the planet's interior.
Ritsu looked at the magma and didn't look at it again. He swung the golden sword in his hand toward Kaguya.
Super Almighty Push.
The enormous repulsive force bloomed from Kaguya's palm and pushed the blade back. She had the Rinne Sharingan, which sat above the Rinnegan — and with it came all Rinnegan abilities, the Almighty Push included.
It stopped the sword.
It couldn't do anything more useful than that. Using Almighty Push on Ritsu didn't kill him. It simply moved him. And that wasn't enough.
"Monster," Kaguya said, very quietly.
Amenotejikara again.
The magma disappeared. What arrived around them this time was a landscape of pyramidal red rock formations rising from red earth, and with it came weight — gravity multiplied by tens, pressing down from all directions with a force that immediately drove Ritsu's body downward through the air.
He caught himself before the ground found him. Level 5 Physical Regeneration in its extreme state was, among other things, a body that could simply not be crushed — not by this. He held the pressure off, reshaped the Tenseigan beads in his hands into a large rotating shuriken form, and launched it at Kaguya.
The threat was real.
She waved her palm. Eighty Gods Vacuum Attack met the shuriken mid-flight and shredded it.
But her expression didn't change for the better. She felt nothing when the technique landed except pressure and the knowledge that Ritsu was still there, still intact, still advancing.
She changed approaches.
Yomotsu Hirasaka.
The space to her side opened — not a warp, not a shift, but a tear, and behind it was a black gate leading somewhere that wasn't this dimension at all. Amenotejikara was her broad transport technique, moving both parties to one of the dimensions her Rinne Sharingan maintained a connection to. Yomotsu Hirasaka was something more fundamental — a portal she could open freely, without a fixed destination, a door to wherever she chose to go.
She intended to use it to drop Ritsu in this super-gravity dimension and step away without him.
"You're not going anywhere."
Ritsu knew every technique she possessed. Even if he had ways to extract himself from this dimension alone, the moment Kaguya sealed herself behind that gate he would genuinely lose the thread. He could not allow it.
He had to follow her through.
Heavenly Transfer.
White light traced his trajectory as he threw himself into the black gate a half-step behind Kaguya.
They emerged together in another dimension — this one with red peaks and red ground. Kaguya turned and found him immediately beside her. Her expression went past displeasure into something rawer.
She threw an Eighty Gods Vacuum Attack on pure reflex.
Ritsu used the Heavenly Transfer to step a hundred meters sideways before it landed.
The fight paused.
Kaguya looked at him across the red distance and didn't reach for another technique. Her combat experience was deep and her mind was functional — she understood when something wasn't working. Both Amenotejikara and Yomotsu Hirasaka had failed to create separation. Continuing to use them would only waste her effort.
She was thinking.
Ritsu let himself breathe.
He had what he needed. The exchange had confirmed that Kaguya's arsenal matched his memory precisely — no surprises, nothing new. Which meant her most dangerous technique, the one he genuinely needed to not give her the opportunity to use, was still unused and waiting: the Expanding Truth-Seeking Balls.
That technique's destructive ceiling was in its own category.
He wasn't going to let her reach for it. He was going to end this now.
The Tenseigan and Rinnegan together were one foundation. His true finishing tool was the other — Physical Regeneration at Level 5's absolute limit. His body was his strongest weapon. And he had, through six years of relentless work, developed the technique to use it as one.
He maintained the Tenseigan chakra mode. He layered Sage Mode over it.
Then he opened the Eight Gates Formation.
Eighth Gate — Death Gate — Open.
He didn't step into it gradually. He went directly to the summit.
The blood vapor from the evaporating fluid in his veins rose from his skin, and the pale green of the Tenseigan chakra wrapped through and around the red steam. Two colors, intertwined, moving across every surface of his body simultaneously.
The threat that registered in Kaguya's perception in that instant was not the same category as anything she had felt in this fight so far. This was something that her body knew before she consciously processed it.
She moved.
Too slow.
Ritsu was already in front of her.
Gentle Fist Style: Eight Trigrams Sixty-Four Palms.
Every single palm strike carried force that would have flattened a mountain. Against a human body, a single one would have been the end. Against Kaguya — who had eaten the Chakra Fruit of this planet and carried in her flesh a power that could not simply be extinguished — it still mattered. Each strike landed, and all sixty-four of them landed, and when the sequence ended, what remained of Otsutsuki Kaguya was spread across the ground like something that had lost its structural integrity entirely.
She was conscious.
The Chakra Fruit's power wasn't gone. Immortality doesn't stop functioning when the body it lives in is ruined — it just needs time to reassemble.
A brief consideration: the Chakra Fruit grown from this planet was exceptional in ways that even Kaguya's clan hadn't fully understood. Ordinary planets exhausted themselves producing a single Fruit and died. This planet had survived producing one, though not without damage — the endless rain in the Land of Rain, the perpetual snow in the Land of Iron, all the strange and unnatural climate patterns scattered across the ninja world were the lingering fingerprints of what had happened when Kaguya ate what grew here. The energy absorbed had been too much for the world to release cleanly.
This was the source of her true immortality, and it was the reason she was still technically alive despite what the last sixty-four seconds had done to her.
Black Zetsu was in a similar state — a derivative of that same immortal power, and equally unable to hold a shape at the moment, reduced to an unrecognizable black smear beside his mother.
"Somewhat easier than I expected," Ritsu said.
He descended slowly, looking at what lay on the red ground with genuine interest.
The damage the Eighth Gate had done to his own body didn't concern him. Physical Regeneration would handle it, and was already handling it.
But he had no intention of waiting for Kaguya to handle hers.
Adamantine Sealing Chains.
Sixteen golden chains erupted from behind him and covered her completely — arms, legs, torso, even her hair wrapped in coils, nothing left free.
He reached down and closed his hand around her throat.
Tokoyo Insect.
This was his Rinnegan technique — the one that harvested lifespan and other, harder-to-name things from a bound target. He had used it on condemned criminals, on the bound souls of the three captive Kage, building toward this moment. Now he was using it on Kaguya.
Her lifespan was infinite. The Chakra Fruit had given her that.
A translucent insect emerged from his hand and entered her body.
The shapeless form that was Kaguya began to move — struggling, pulling against the chains, the soft ruined body rippling with the effort of resistance. The movement was sharp and immediate. Whatever the Tokoyo Insect was doing, she could feel it.
"You're afraid." Ritsu watched her with focused attention. "That's useful information."
The Tokoyo Insect could reach the Chakra Fruit's power. He had suspected it. Now he knew.
Time passed without clear measure in a dimension that had no sun, no moon, no other living thing to mark it by. Kaguya kept struggling. Ritsu kept her in place — maintaining the Tenseigan chakra mode, the Sage Mode, and the Eight Gates Formation together, returning her to the ruined state each time her body tried to begin reassembling itself. The chains held. The insect continued its work.
Eventually — the transfer completed.
What the Tokoyo Insect had taken from Kaguya was not merely her lifespan. It had extracted the Chakra Fruit itself — the source, the core of the power — pulling it strand by strand until nothing of it remained in her.
In its place, that power settled into Ritsu.
The moment the last thread transferred, Kaguya's body began to come apart. Not violently, not in pieces — it dissolved into motes of light that scattered and were gone, quietly, as if something that had been held in place by an enormous force was finally released and simply dispersed.
Black Zetsu went with her. His existence was entirely dependent on hers, and when she left, he left, the black shape fading without a sound.
A dull impact sounded from the ground.
Madara's body had dropped. It lay where it had fallen, the pale face bearing no trace of anything still present inside it.
Ritsu floated in the air above and gave the corpse one brief look. Then his attention returned inward.
The changes were immediate and significant. The Rinnegan between his brows took on a crimson tint. Nine black magatama arranged themselves in three rotating layers around its iris. A chakra coat began assembling itself around his body without any direction from him — the same automatic formation he had seen around Kaguya.
He didn't like the design. He imposed his own preference on it and the coat reformed into something simple: a plain white robe, clean-lined and nothing more.
That was the surface.
What mattered was what was happening underneath.
He could feel his body transforming. The Physical Regeneration superpower — which had been pressing against the threshold of Level 5's absolute limit for six years, circling it, testing it, never breaking through — was changing in a way that had no precedent. The immortal power from the Chakra Fruit had entered him and found the superpower waiting, and the two things fit together the way a key fits the lock it was made for.
In an instant, the barrier was gone.
Level 6 — He Who, With a Mortal Body, Hears the Voice of Heaven.
He had touched the divine realm. Not by being born to it. Not by consuming a god or inheriting one's power through lineage. By accumulating, relentlessly, over years, every fragment of strength this world had to offer, and arriving here under his own weight.
The realm of gods, reached by a mortal hand.
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if u want u can stop here, the next 10 chapters is just bs, the author thought he was going to do a crossover one piece FIC, but he quit after then 10 chapters.