Sarada's consciousness slowly floated back toward her body, but Chōmei's voice rang in her mind before her senses fully returned.
"Are you sure about this, Sarada? You can't actually guarantee you'll stay alive."
"There will always be a way," Sarada answered, her tone cold but steady. "It all depends on how much that guy in white cares about getting a complete Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan."
"And if he loses patience and kills you anyway?" Chōmei pressed.
For a tailed beast, it was a very practical fear. Sarada had already lost one Sharingan—something crucial to the Mangekyō. Without that eye, all she could rely on was the impossible ability of "Other Shore":
An eye technique that had let her regenerate, and even reawaken the left Mangekyō after death.
To Chōmei, that was absurd.
Now that things had come this far, Sarada had no real options left—but she still wanted to push forward. In her mind, the white-robed man's strength and speed meant he could easily return to the earlier battlefield and retrieve the scroll with her stolen eye that her clone had hidden.
She opened her eyes, ready to ask him about it—
—and froze.
She was still standing on the same ruined battlefield.
"…Huh?"
The village around them was nothing but broken walls and scorched earth. Smoke coiled up from collapsed houses. The man in white stood in front of her, his pristine robe only lightly dusted with ash.
Sarada blinked, and realization clicked.
She was inside his other space again.
From here, she could see the outside world as if there were no barrier at all—but no one outside could sense her presence. It was like standing behind clear glass in a dimension that didn't exist.
So while her consciousness had gone to the tailed beasts' mindscape, the white-robed man had already brought her here and fought in the real world without her even noticing.
Since when did he get this "considerate"…?
Or was this just him protecting his investment—the Eternal Mangekyō he wanted from her?
Another thought slipped in: Has his eye power ever decreased at all?
Everyone said overusing the Mangekyō burned out your vision, but his eyes never seemed to weaken. Sarada had assumed she was only "fine" because her eye technique was cheating death itself—"immortality" constantly reversing that degradation.
But him?
The white-robed man's breathing was a bit rough, faint condensation of breath in the cool air. He hadn't expected his opponents to be this desperate—charging him like men with nothing left to lose. The power raging in their bodies clearly wasn't their own. Their chakra was running out… and so was their life force.
He was, essentially, fighting a squad of dead men walking.
If he hadn't used Time Gap to store Sarada in his personal time-space for the entire battle, it would have gone like usual: a short, clean fight that didn't even dirty his clothes.
Even so, his other Mangekyō technique—Drunken Life—remained terrifying. It was a genjutsu capable of pinning down even Tomoe Rinnegan without losing ground, as long as the target was trapped in the illusion barrier.
That limitation didn't change how broken it was.
He walked toward the last man still alive. While Sarada had been in the tailed beasts' council, he had already killed two of the Kage-class shinobi—one with earth release, one with water.
The last survivor stood trembling, chest heaving.
"I… didn't think you'd be this strong… cough…"
He spat a mouthful of dark blood onto the rubble, his body already half-ruined from earlier wounds and the backlash of the drug burning through his system.
His kunai crackled with violent lightning in his grip, but even so, he retreated step by step, keeping his distance. He'd tested this enemy enough to know that even the simplest ninjutsu in his hands turned into something monstrous.
Earlier, the earth-style ninja had tried to rush through a Great Fireball, assuming it would be nothing compared to his boosted body. He'd charged straight in with a roar—
—and been cremated on the spot, reduced to ash mid-air.
They'd been operating at Kage-level after injecting that "medicine," yet still got erased by a basic C-rank jutsu. And the white-robed man hadn't even gone all out.
Later, they'd tested more and realized something important:
It wasn't that he refused to use high-ranked ninjutsu. It was that with his Mangekyō constantly active, most of his chakra was already being consumed by his eye techniques.
He simply didn't need powerful ninjutsu.
They thought figuring that out meant they'd "won half the battle." Then he killed their water-style comrade with a single kunai, and the illusion of "understanding his limits" was shattered.
"Lightning Release: Cataclysmic Shift!"
The last man leveled his kunai at the white-robed man's heart, brought both hands together, and pressed the blade between his palms. Lightning exploded from the tip like a compressed bolt fired from a gun.
"Water Release: Water Spirit Wave."
The white-robed man only lifted his hand, forming a casual gun shape with his fingers. His Mangekyō tracked the lightning bolt's path easily.
Droplets shaped like bullets shot from his fingertip, colliding midair with the lightning. The electric spear should have overpowered a simple water bullet, but instead—
The lightning unraveled and scattered, while the water bullet kept going.
puff—
A neat hole opened in the man's already shredded torso. Blood seeped out slowly, life leaking away with it.
He didn't have much time left.
Still, he forced his shaking hands into a final seal. The scattered lightning around them suddenly flared, surging outward in a sphere of blinding white that swallowed the white-robed man whole.
The crackle of current filled the air. Even the white-robed man's expression shifted for a heartbeat—he hadn't expected such a wide-area strike.
Then he understood why.
Before the water-style shinobi had died, he had used a massive water technique. After it was blown apart, that water had lingered as tiny droplets—thin mist filling the air.
Now the last man was using them as conduits.
The dispersed lightning had traveled across those countless suspended droplets, gathered, and then chained together into a single massive network of current.
"It… worked…!" the man laughed hoarsely, a flicker of joy on his broken face.
But that level of attack was nowhere near enough.
The white-robed man casually released his own lightning, dragging the electric current off his body and compressing it into a ball in his palm.
He stared at the man, saying nothing, eyes betraying nothing but a sliver of respect—for someone who had truly given everything for his cause.
It was just a shame that the cause belonged to the wrong person.
The survivor knew he was finished. Even if the white-robed man didn't move again, the recoil and the drug's backlash would kill him in a few seconds.
His thoughts began to blur, and the flood of images from a life about to end rushed up to the surface.
They were nobodies in the Fourth Shinobi World War, just foot soldiers who had been lucky enough to receive Naruto's Nine-Tails cloak, reinforcing their bodies. They had looked up from the blood and mud and watched monsters reshape the sky.
Their hatred for the Uchiha wasn't some grand ideology—it was the powerless fury of ordinary people crushed under a god's heel.
It had been the Uchiha who started that war. Madara Uchiha had nurtured Obito, twisted him, and started the Fourth Shinobi World War. Madara himself had cast Infinite Tsukuyomi over the world.
All for a ridiculous "dream world" that only he believed in. And for that dream, he was willing to use the entire world as kindling.
Why?
Just because he was strong enough to do it?
After the war, their homes were gone. Their families died. The five of them had clung to each other and sobbed like children amid ruined streets, watching everything they loved crumble.
War always demanded sacrifice. But this war… had been pointless. No justice, no fairness—just one clan's madness.
Later, when they were wasting their lives in quiet despair, someone had reached out a hand to them.
A "great man." A new faith.
He invited them to become unofficial operatives—scattered shinobi who would gather intel, run small missions, and move in the shadows.
Before this assignment, their job had been simple: track the movements of the tailed beasts, keep their organization informed of Moon's actions.
Because that man, their "light," wanted immortality. He nurtured saplings of the God Tree himself, fully aware of what it required.
Anyone who had seen the Fourth Shinobi World War knew what that meant: a fully restored Ten-Tails, all nine tailed beasts gathered, and another Infinite Tsukuyomi cast over the world.
The path was long, but he was already laying the groundwork.
The organization had existed for a terrifyingly long time—hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Its roots, according to rumor, stretched back to Kaguya's era.
His vision drifted away as the residual lightning finally crawled across his skin. It wrapped around him, gentle as warm water. His nerves stopped screaming. The world's color began to fade.
His final clear memory froze on that one day—the day five strangers met in the chaos of war, formed a squad, and swore an oath as comrades. They'd had nothing… and yet, at that moment, they'd possessed something precious.
A single tear slid from the corner of his eye. It fell slowly, silently, and hit the ruined ground with the softest sound.
The man in white exhaled, just barely, then released the Time Gap space around Sarada.
Reality folded back together. He turned, as if nothing had happened, and held out a familiar scroll toward her.
Inside, Sarada knew, was the glass tube holding her stolen Sharingan.
"Thank you," she said quietly, accepting it with both hands.
"I did it for the mission," the man in white replied, voice expressionless, though there was a faint heaviness there. "Not for you. For the sake of the plan."
From where she stood, Sarada couldn't understand what, exactly, weighed on him just then.
To her, this was just his usual detached attitude. In his eyes, she was nothing more than a vessel—raw material for an Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan.
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