Then—a familiar warmth spread through the clearing. The scent of damp earth, woodsmoke, and thousand-year-old cedar washed over them. The ANBU reflexively knelt as one. Even Stark's struggling ceased. Madara froze. He hadn't sensed him approach. Not through the ANBU barrier, nor the frantic chakra signatures. He simply… manifested. Like sunlight piercing storm clouds. Footsteps crunched softly on scattered pine needles. Madara didn't need to turn. The sheer presence pressed against his borrowed spine—a weight both comforting and agonizing. Finn's fragmented memories surged: betrayal etched into Madara's bones, a friendship forged in blood and shattered like pottery. Madara slowly lowered his outstretched hand releasing the Universal Pull. Stark crashed to the dirt, coughing violently. "Hashirama," Madara rasped, the name tasting of ashes and regret.
Hashirama Senju walked over with a wide grin splitting his face, utterly oblivious to the chaos. Sunlight haloed his wild brown hair near the broken trees where Stark's repulsors still sparked weakly. Madara immediately rolled his eyes, the gesture utterly Finn—a cop enduring bumbling partner theatrics fused with Uchiha disdain. The sheer dissonance choked Finn-Madara: Hashirama wore Konoha's Hokage robe adorned with intricate leaf motifs, yet Stark Industries tech hissed steam nearby. Madara's Rinnegan flicked between Stark's exhausted form and Hashirama's open joy—a post-war celebration? Impossible. Finn sensed Madara's bitterness simmer: *He smiles while worlds bleed together?!* Hashirama clapped Madara's armored shoulder, making the steel plates boom. "Madara! Scaring young innovators again?" His laugh boomed, genuine warmth washing over the clearing. Stark stared, bewildered—the armored nightmare and the grinning giant clearly knew each other. Madara suppressed a growl. Finn's analytical mind raced: *Is Hashirama truly alive? Or has resurrection woven us into some cosmic tapestry where timelines overlap? Who holds the needle?* The Hokage leaned in conspiratorially, ignoring Stark's coughing fit. "So…" Hashirama whispered, grin widening impossibly, "Still kicking? Good. We have much to discuss, old friend." He gestured toward Stark. "Especially about *him*."
The Gunbai hummed in Madara's grip. Hashirama's scent—woodland deep and impossibly present—filled Finn-Madara's nostrils, anchoring him in terrifying duality. Tony Stark groaned, struggling onto his elbows. Madara inhaled sharply. Hashirama's grin held secrets older than Konoha's foundations—secrets that suddenly mattered more than Stark's intrusion. The Rinnegan pulsed. Worlds had collided. Politics had shifted. And Hashirama Senju stood beside him laughing. The Game wasn't just changed. It had just begun.
Madara's jaw tightened beneath borrowed skin. He sighed—a low rumble vibrating steel plate—not exasperation, but predatory weariness. Years hunting corrupt captains paled before Hashirama's oblivious sunshine. Stark's bewildered gaze flicking between them? A new gristle added to the cosmic stew. Finn focused on Madara's instincts: *He knows*. Hashirama always knew. The ANBU lingered hesitant. A fusion of Finn's caution and Madara's impatience tightened Madara's grip on the Gunbai. Survival demanded anchors. Hashirama offered solace. And signals. The scent of damp earth sharpened resolve. Secrets weren't whispered lightly here. Whatever came next… required absolute control. Stark gasped weakly. Madara's Rinnegan tracked every tremor in the suit's failing armor. Potential leverage. Answers. Finn's cop mind lodged dissent. Stark wasn't prey. He was… witness. To everything.
Hashirama chuckled again. Madara sighed louder—a sharp exhale slicing tension. Annoyance prickled Finn's borrowed nerves. Hashirama's joviality felt like knives twisting inside Madara's bitter memories. Finn tasted copper. Logic intervened: Hashirama played deeper games. Stark remained vulnerable. Armor integrity flashed red behind Madara's Rinnegan—17%. Finn calculated angles: cover Stark? Or expose him? Before coherence formed, Hashirama waved dismissively. "ANBU—stand down." His voice gentled vines around stone. Kneeling operatives vanished like mist. Stark gaped upward, sweat plastering hair against his forehead. Hashirama leaned near Stark's ear, conspiratorial warmth radiating. "Steel yourself, innovator." He patted Stark's scorched chest plate. Finn winced internally. Stark's ragged breaths echoed trapped confusion. Madara's lips thinned. Disgust bled through Finn's caution: *Is Stark merely…toy?* The Gunbai's wood groaned beneath Madara's grip. Survival demanded understanding. Answers required…leverage. Stark's vulnerability suddenly felt like currency.
Madara stepped forward silencing Stark's stammer. His Rinnegan swept Hashirama's face—searching hints beneath the surface serenity. Finn sensed layers: affection? Manipulation? Worlds stitched together—Hashirama knew. Madara's voice emerged cold and resonant: "Explain." Not a plea. Command. Stark froze mid-protest gripping his cracked helmet. Finn focused Madera's gaze: anvils hung poised. Hashirama's smile softened—understanding unfolding beneath Finn-Madara's demand. Stark wasn't adversary. He was…pivot point. The scent of pine deepened. Answers swirled closer. Finn locked onto Stark's exhausted eyes—Iron Man's defiance flickering within Tony's fear. Madara shifted stance subtly shielding Stark with armored bulk. The Hokage Tower loomed. "Inside, Madara." Hashirama gestured gracefully toward the looming doors. Stark flinched. Madara exhaled—annoyance laced with anticipation. The Game tightened: heroes bled secrets too. Secrets Finn needed…before reality folded entirely.
Madara's armored hand snapped out—not towards Stark's throat, but the reinforced collar of his battered armor. Metal screeched against chakra-hardened steel gauntlets. Tony gasped, arching backward as Madara effortlessly hauled him off the pine-strewn ground like a sack of scrap metal. Stark's boots scrabbled uselessly against the dirt, carving twin furrows. "Hey—!" Stark choked. Finn channeled Madara's contempt: *Struggle wastes energy.* Madara pivoted dragging Stark ruthlessly towards the Hokage Tower's immense double doors. Hashirama watched impassively—approval? Madara noticed Stark's pallor beneath sweat-streaked grime. The Armored Avenger weighed nothing against Madara's resurrected strength—yet Finn felt pressure: *He's leverage. Handle carefully.* Pine needles crunched beneath Madara's armored soles. He ignored Stark's sputtering curses—the tinny whine of damaged servos louder than any threat. Disbelief radiated from Tony's rigid posture: *Ninja grappling Iron Man?* Finn catalogued reactions: panic warring with furious curiosity. Exactly as needed.
Madara adjusted his grip hauling Stark higher. The Gunbai's sharp edge brushed Stark's scorched backplate—accidental contact that made Tony stiffen. Finn tasted ozone and Stark's fear-sweat tart against his tongue. Through Madara's peripheral vision he saw Hashirama keeping pace—calm footsteps echoing Madara's dragging stride. The Tower doors loomed closer—ancient wood carved with Konoha's leaf emblem shimmering under hybrid light. Madara's Rinnegan dissected chakra signatures beyond: councils whispering sandalwood thick air. Finn focused inward: suppress Madara's hunger for chaos. *Answers before annihilation.* Stark gasped as Madara shifted angles forcing Tony's scrambling boots off solid ground entirely. Suspended mid-air Stark's helmet tilted revealing wide haunted eyes scanning Madara's face—purple rings bottomless voids promising cosmic truths…or oblivion. Stark whispered hoarsely: "What *are* you?" Madara remained silent. The doors groaned open. Darkness within swallowed the trio whole.
Inside the Tower's shadowed atrium Hashirama's presence ignited lanterns—soft light revealing polished wood corridors smelling of cedar and dust. Madara released Stark abruptly. Tony stumbled crashing against a stone pillar coughing violently. Madara stood unmoving Gunbai planted firmly beside him. Finn scanned Stark's shuddering form: armor integrity blinking critical error—14%. Vulnerability exposed. Hashirama stepped between them smile fading into solemnity. "Tony Stark meet Madara Uchiha." Stark spat blood glaring upward: "Yeah got that." Madara tilted his head Rinnegan locking onto Hashirama: "Now. Explain." The Hokage sighed deeply shadows pooling beneath his eyes. "Reality fractured Madara." Stark snorted weakly pushing himself upright against stone. Hashirama's gaze hardened. "Secrets kept even from Kage…" Finn braced. Madara's chakra coiled humming thunderously against the Tower's ancient beams. Stark froze sensing the shift. The Game tightened—knives drawn beneath lantern glow. "Speak." Madara commanded deathly quiet. Silence thickened. Only Stark's ragged breathing filled the void. Finn felt Madara's borrowed muscles tighten. Patience frayed. Truth…or blood.
Hashirama gestured toward the Tower's heart: Scroll Room. Madara seized Stark's arm hauling him forward ignoring Stark's gasp—metal scraping stone echoing through corridors rattling Finn's nerves. *He's leverage. Don't break him.* Brocade tapestries whispered past depicting Senju victories Madara slaughtered in. Finn tasted phantom bitterness—blood-slicked battlefields. Ahead scroll-laden shelves towered ceiling-high. Sage symbols pulsed faintly beneath layers of dust. Hashirama traced a seal—wood grain shifting revealing a hidden alcove. Within lay a single scroll—obsidian-black radiating cosmic dissonance. Stark squinted: "Tesseract knockoff?" Finn noted Madara's instant recoil—*foreign chakra*. Alien. Wrong. Hashirama's hand hovered hesitant. Madara's voice sliced darkness: "Origin." Hashirama met Madara's Rinnegan—no smile now. "Not ours." Stark leaned closer intrigued despite terror: "Multiversal bleed?" Madara's grip tightened on Stark's arm—bone creaking beneath armor. Tony hissed. Hashirama's expression darkened. "Worse." Finn braced. Madara inhaled ozone-tainted air. The scroll pulsed malevolently. Answers coiled like vipers.
Hashirama unsealed the scroll. Stark gasped—words flickering violently between languages: English kanji Asgardian runes Kree glyphs bleeding into Uchiha clan script. Madara's Sharingan activated involuntarily—memories surging: war declarations treaty drafts…all overwritten by scrolling data screaming *incursion*. Finn's mind reeled—translate! Police reports fused with battlefield dispatches: interdimensional breaches flaring globally. Stark deciphered aloud rasping: "…quantum entanglement…narrative collapse…Tony Stark dies 2018…" Tony paled gripping his chest reactor. Madara scanned faster—fragments crystallizing: *Madara Uchiha resurrected 2012*. *Konocha hidden within Manhattan's ley lines*. *Thanos' arrival imminent*. Finn tasted bile. Madara's fists clenched Gunbai humming—power begging release. Stark whispered "Thanos…" eyes wide with primal dread. Hashirama placed a hand on the scroll—wooden calm radiating. "Fragments…from beyond." Madara's Rinnegan blazed purple fury. "Who authored this?" Stark answered hollowly: "The Watchers? Or something…hungrier?" Silence swallowed them. Dust motes danced in lantern light. The scroll's truth settled—ice in veins.
Suddenly—the Tower shook violently. Dust cascaded from ancient rafters onto Stark's battered helmet. A bone-deep roar split the air—alien, mechanical, *wrong*. Outside the Tower's thick walls, Manhattan's skyline shimmered briefly through Konoha's illusionary canopy—impossibly layered—before fracturing into jagged shards of neon and pine. A shadow blotted the hybrid sun: colossal, armored legs crashing through distant skyscrapers toward Central Park. Madara's Rinnegan instantly pinpointed it—a cybernetic leviathan trailing oily fire, its insectoid head scanning hungrily. *Chitauri command ship.* Stark swore hoarsely, scrambling back: "Leviathan! That's—impossible! That invasion was *years* ago!" Hashirama's knuckles whitened on the obsidian scroll, ink bleeding timelines. "Fractures deepen," he murmured, voice tight with dread Finn had never heard. "Time folds onto itself. The scroll… predicted *all* attacks. Past. Future. Merged." Madara inhaled scorched metal—the scent of New York burning *through Konoha's cedar*. Reality was unraveling stitch by cosmic stitch.
Madara seized Stark's collar again, hauling him toward a towering arched window engulfed by the false forest canopy. Below, chaos erupted: ANBU blurred rooftops forming barrier seals while civilians—shopkeepers in kimono beside NYPD officers screaming into radios—scrambled for crumbling shelters. Stark's damaged suit scanners flickered wildly. "Chitauri foot soldiers! Mixed with…Iwa rock ninja?!" Madara's Sharingan confirmed: a nightmare fusion. Chitauri hover bikes strafed alongside Tsuchikage's stone golems crushing fleeing crowds. Konoha genin launched kunai only for repulsor blasts to vaporize them mid-air. Finn tasted ashes—Madara's battlefield clarity fused with Finn's cop-honed assessment: *Coordination*. This wasn't random bleed. The leviathan's gaze scanned…targeting the Hokage Tower. "They know," Stark rasped. Madara's Rinnegan pulsed violet—tracking the Leviathan's pilot chakra signature: cold, calculative, and terrifyingly familiar. *Zetsu*. Black Zetsu's gleeful malice clung to the mechanized horror like oil.
Hashirama slammed his palm onto the Tower's central support pillar. Wood surged—massive trees erupting through stone floors shielding fleeing civilians. But the Leviathan's cannon charged violet—energy humming with the same oily wrongness clinging to Black Zetsu's essence. Stark's gauntlet sparked futilely: "Weapons locked! That thing's shielded!" Finn-Madara's borrowed synapses screamed recognition—*Zetsu's* parasitic malice woven into the machine's core, amplified a thousandfold. Rage—pure, untethered, *Madara's*—ignited Finn's veins. The Rinnegan burned holes in reality, pinpointing Zetsu's consciousness nested within the Leviathan's cockpit. That mocking, slithering presence that orchestrated his resurrection, his suffering… and now this cosmic desecration. Finn's cop-mind dissolved. Only Madara remained.
His Gunbai slammed backward—not at the Leviathan, but at the arched window behind him. Reinforced glass exploded outward, shards glittering like false stars. Madara didn't leap; he *uncoiled*. Steel-clad boots crushed the windowsill, propelled by chakra so dense the floorboards groaned. Wind tore at his armored form. Below, chaos unfolded—ANBU futilely hurling explosive tags against reinforced alien hulls, Stark shouting commands into a dead comms link. Madara ignored it all. His Rinnegan remained locked onto that armored cockpit—Black Zetsu's gleeful malice radiating like poisoned honey. Distance vanished. The Leviathan's cannon pulsed purple, targeting Hashirama's defensive forest below.
Mid-air, Madara's armored palms snapped forward, fingers splayed wide. Power didn't gather—it detonated. Raw gravitational force surged, visible as rippling distortion waves tearing through the air itself. Concrete buckled beneath his flight path, trees splintered. Madara's voice thundered below the Leviathan's deafening roar, a roar that shook the fractured sky:
***"SHINRA TENSEI!"***
The Almighty Push struck like the fist of a god.
Not a wave—an annihilation. The sheer kinetic force slammed upward against the Leviathan's underbelly. Alien alloy squealed, then buckled instantly inward, crumpling like wet parchment. The violet cannon blast choked and died mid-flare. The colossal machine shuddered violently, its trajectory arrested dead. Below, streets erupted—pavement ripped upward in concentric rings of shattered asphalt and displaced earth. Swarm bikes and rock ninja caught in the periphery simply vaporized into dust motes. Stark shielded his eyes against the blinding pressure wave, shouting something lost beneath the roar of violating physics. Hashirama's defensive forest groaned, ancient trunks bending away from the epicenter.
Then—a flicker. Inside the Leviathan's shattered cockpit viewport, amidst sparking consoles and hydraulic fluid spray: a sliver of shifting, viscous black shadow recoiling from the light. Its oily surface pulsed with malevolent recognition—Black Zetsu's essence, exposed. Madara saw it. Finn vanished utterly. Primal fury, millennia old and meticulously honed, consumed every synapse. No thought. Only instinct—the instinct to *erase*. His Rinnegan blazed violet, locking onto that sliver of cosmic poison. Both hands snapped skyward, fingers clawing the fractured heavens themselves. Gravitational force inverted—not pushing *out*, but dragging *down*. The very air above the Leviathan screamed as it compressed, dragging clouds, debris, and distant skyscraper fragments into a screaming vortex.
High above Manhattan's bleeding skyline, reality hemorrhaged. A jagged tear ripped open—not across space, but *through* it. From that screaming void, raw celestial fury plunged downward: a colossal meteor, wreathed in superheated plasma and trailing the dust of dead stars. It wasn't summoned; it was *willed* into existence by Madara's absolute command over planetary force—Chibaku Tensei, scaled to annihilate gods. The Leviathan, still pinned by Shinra Tensei's crushing grip, became the focal point. Black Zetsu's shadowy form writhed within the cockpit, clawing at buckling metal—too late. The meteor struck with apocalyptic finality.
The impact didn't echo—it *consumed*. Sound vanished, replaced by a pressure wave that flattened nearby buildings not already shielded by Hashirama's desperate wood release. Light died, swallowed by an expanding sphere of superheated rock and vaporized alien metal. Within that inferno, Zetsu's shriek was a flicker instantly silenced—trapped, crushed, atomized within a kilometers-wide tomb of celestial rock now settling heavily atop Central Park's ruined meadows. Silence descended, thick and choking, broken only by the groan of settling stone and Stark's ragged, disbelieving gasp. Madara hovered above the devastation, Rinnegan blazing colder than the vacuum of space, untouched by debris or dust. Below, amidst the crushed rubble of the Leviathan, a lone viscous black droplet *twitched*. Zetsu's essence, fragmented but alive, oozing toward a cracked sewer grate.
Madara didn't land. He *descended*, boots touching scorched earth without sound. His Rinnegan tracked the droplet's slithering retreat—ignoring Stark's frantic attempts to reboot his suit scanners or Hashirama's stunned ascent through splintered wood. Finn's cop instincts screamed *containment*, but Madara's primal fury roared louder. Absolute annihilation had failed. This demanded precision. Cosmic indignation distilled into cold, surgical purpose. His left arm snapped up, not in a gesture, but in a grotesque *transformation*. Flesh warped, armor plates dissolving into swirling vortexes of dark chakra. Bone elongated, joints inverted, skin hardened into obsidian-black cannon barrels humming with gravitational collapse. The Deva Path's power manifested not as technique, but as blasphemous biology—a living weapon forged from stolen divinity.
Armored knuckles clenched around nothing, becoming a focusing array. The air *screamed* as reality compressed into the barrel's gullet—light bent inward, dying stars fed to a singularity. A pinpoint of absolute darkness formed at the cannon's tip, pulsing like a dead heart. Below, the Zetsu fragment sensed oblivion and *surged*, elongating into a desperate tendril darting toward the sewer's promise of shadows. Too late. Madara exhaled—a sound like mountains grinding. The cannon discharged.
It wasn't a beam; it was *anti-creation*. A shaft of distilled void, silent and absolute, ripped across the ruined park. Grass disintegrated inches ahead of its path, stone sublimated into quantum mist. The sewer grate vanished without debris. The viscous black droplet of Zetsu had just breached the opening when negation struck. There was no explosion, no flash—only instantaneous, total *unmaking*. Where Zetsu existed… ceased. The beam drilled deeper into the earth, carving a perfectly smooth, meter-wide tunnel into infinite darkness before winking out. Madara's arm reconstituted itself with a sickening wet snap—steel plate re-forming over flesh, fingers flexing once. Only the ozone-less vacuum smell and a perfectly cylindrical pit descending into the planet's crust remained. Silence reclaimed the broken park. Stark stood frozen, reactor light pulsing wildly against sudden, profound dark. Hashirama landed beside Madara, gaze locked on the abyss—his usual warmth replaced by ash-gray dread. Nothing emerged. Nothing ever would. Oblivion's work was done. For now.