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GINORMOUS shout out to darkwolfz, CrookedKing1996, hells-fox, zerkses, kingnarutoxqueenkushina, skfff, Darkwave20, TheKing91, TigrezzTail, Tohka123, paulagustin101, Saiyan prince1, BigY1308 and Bakeneko. You guys are spectacular :)
Woah haha, I got a lot of mixed reactions from the last chapter, some positive and some negative, but it's all really good feedback. I'm learning from both the good and the bad. I think the me of last year or two years ago would have succumb to the fewer negative reviews and abandoned this story to start another one, but all your wonderful and insightful reviews make me even more determined to end this story in the best and most unexpected way I can. One reason I'm getting a thick head for finishing this story is cuz I (we) have already come this far with this story, I'll be disappointed in myself if I don't finish it, and another part of why I want this story done and dusted is out of sheer stubbornness XD
That said, thank you all so very much for your amazing words!
Before you all get into this next chapter, Madara may be undead and in some way that would serve to keep him uninjured but, being realistic, even when Madara was alive he could take a good beating. It is also important to remember that White Noise and Silent Night are techniques that were created before Naruto fought Hanzo the Salamander. There will be some flashbacks spread out here and there (they would be in all italics, like so).
Enough of my blabbering.
Enjoy…
CHAPTER 33
The question of how Madara Uchiha, the real Madara Uchiha, was alive never even crossed Naruto's mind.
He saw his country being bombarded.
He saw cannons bring down meteors.
He saw his shinobi create a perimeter around Mito's Grassland.
He saw Madara gear up to drive a fist into Kushina's face, to crush her nose and bounce her brain in her head.
He moved, surging forward in a spurt of white lightning and instantaneous speed, and it was Madara who found a fist jammed into his face, a right hook so jarring his jaw shifted out of its joint with a blood chilling click.
Kushina's one open eye widened at her husband's appearance, nearly thrown back by the wind and the lightning blasting around Naruto's form as he watched with morbid satisfaction when Madara's reincarnated corpse get thrown backwards, his back slid on the ground and he turned over onto his feet, screeching back a few feet.
The spikey haired Uchiha grabbed his misaligned jaw and snapped it back in place, wearing a hard frown.
The man that had done that to him, flashing before him in an explosion of chakra that temporarily blinded him, stood up straight and leaned back in a relaxed pose but his sky blue orbs narrowed as his head tilted to the side, almost as if he didn't understand how Madara was still able to stand.
The blonde Leader mutely jerked his head to the side and Kushina, with grated teeth, stepped back and took her leave to the perimeter outside of the grassland. She knew when not to complain.
"You're as fast as they say." The mad Uchiha complimented with a dark smirk, his Eternal Mangekyo sharingan spun faster.
The lightning on Naruto's form cooled down and receded into his body. The glasses wearing man hummed and cocked his head to the other side and answered. "That wasn't fast. I'll show you fast."
As soon as he said that, he was gone.
Madara lifted his right forearm and guarded against a jab to his neck but his eyes bugged out when all he guarded against was an afterimage, meanwhile the real Naruto had dealt him real damage to his jaw from another side, spinning around the undead Uchiha and delivering a liver jab and spiralling again before Madara and digging three hard fists into the Uchiha's plated abdomen, all within the space of a quarter of a second.
He wasn't done.
Naruto smacked away another guard with the back of his left hand, driving a right jab into Madara's chin, returning again with a left elbow across Madara's face, a body shot with his right hand and a savage knee into the Uchiha's side that cracked through at least three ribs. The sharingan user swung a fist and the Ghost ducked the blow, delivering five decisive punches into Madara's gut and rising up with a base palm strike to Madara's chin.
The reincarnated legend lifted off the ground after the blow, feeling his gnashed teeth rankle violently in his mouth and the aftereffects of the previous attacks wreck his undead body.
Naruto flattened his feet in the ground and hunched forward, merging his fingers together and burning through four hand signs.
Snake-dragon-bird-tiger
"Hiden art: Smoke release: King Cobra."
Smoke permeated through the pores of his back and shoulders, flowing through his shirt and jounin vest and rising out of him, forming a slender, white eyed snake made wholly of Naruto's lightning-water formed smoke. The large serpent hissed and his hood flared open, showing the Dark country symbol on the back of his hood and the eight foot long fangs that leaked with a liquid version of Naruto's chakra. It rose up high into the air, reaching about thirty feet high, and its head blurred down and snapped at the still airborne Uchiha, biting down hard on Madara's armour and sinking its teeth into flesh.
The Uchiha and the snake smashed into the ground with a resounding thud!
Billows of smoke and dust blew around from the impact and Naruto squinted his eyes, carefully watching for signs of life in the shallow crater he had formed with his last jutsu.
The blonde's eyes bugged out as a hand snapped out of the crater and gripped the edge, proceeding to pull out the rest of the Uchiha.
Completely unscathed, besides for the two teeth holes on his chest and stomach.
Madara calmly brushed off his shoulder.
"Was that supposed to hurt? I barely felt that." he reached a hand behind him and yanked a kunai out of a holster on his lower back, spinning the small blade in his palm before holding it in a reverse grip, lowering himself in what anyone could identify as a movement in preparation to run towards a target, keeping the blade hand away from his body and his left hand curled into a one hand ram seal close to his chin. "Tell me if you feel this."
His right foot shuffled back a little and he muttered.
"Storm release: Earthly Floodgates."
Fwoosh!
He leaped forward and Naruto was forced to squint his eyes behind his glasses at the explosion of wind, water and lightning booming from Madara, leaning his neck back and grunting as Madara's kunai sliced through the stomach of his jounin vest, tearing through the material and the shirt underneath and nicking his stomach. Naruto's knee shot up to Madara's wrist and the older shinobi yanked his hand back, shifting to his right from a straight punch and slammed his palm in Naruto's chest.
"Ooof!" the Leader of Dark country toppled backwards, grating his teeth as the added wind ripped his chakra attached feet from the earth. He rolled twice before he got back to his feet, settled in a slightly low crouch.
Madara stood there, taking his time to retract his formerly thrown palm and starting at the blonde with a near invisible smirk.
"You are not the only one that can combine water and lightning, boy." Madara's red orbs slowly turned and he lowered his kunai holding hand, noticing the way Naruto's volatile black-white chakra was easing the throbbing pain of the palm strike to the chest he had formerly delivered. The Uchiha hid his impressed smirk when Naruto didn't visibly show any pain, for any lesser man would be reeling on the floor in a pool of his own blood at the loss of his heart. The black haired man still had his pride, though. "While I acknowledge that you are fast, it is nothing I haven't killed before."
"That's my line." Naruto hissed under his breath.
Storm release was vastly different from Smoke release, the only similarity being that both were made from clashing water and lightning together.
Naruto hadn't encountered anyone that could use Storm release, only weaponizing water by electrifying it, but what little he had seen told him that it did exactly as the name implied. Though wind wasn't a major factor, it created brute gusts of wind, massive waves of water and visceral lightning, coupled with Madara's Indra-inherited chakra, it was a terrifying combination.
Naruto felt it.
Excitement.
Pure, unfiltered excitement.
A twisted grin threatened to overcome his face and his jagged, gnarly teeth clenched.
Madara, seeing through his Eternal Mangekyo eyes, was taken aback by the small burst that came from Naruto's heart and the micro expressions on the blonde's face that gave away his eagerness.
The Leader of Darkness was delving into a situation that he was almost completely blind in, seeing as Madara probably had abilities no one had ever seen or could fully comprehend.
That excitement-that body tingling eagerness-took Naruto's mind back to when he was a child again, when he was just learning about his body, his mind and his chakra, and facing shinobi he had no information of and were reputed to be unbeatable.
Like when he was a chakra-less prisoner of the Snow country Maximum Security Prison, pitted against King and his gang.
Madara, not knowing the thoughts of the silent blonde, shared that emotion.
The peril of being in such a situation made the Uchiha grin demonically, matching Naruto's now blaringly obvious dark simper.
The two didn't speak, not for five seconds, allowing the sonic booms of the Chakra Canons shooting at the levitating balls of destruction hovering over Darkness, bringing them down to the earth, where the Shinobi of Darkness would try to seal away the falling debris before they could impact the earth. Civilians clambered to the windows peering out of their semi-underground bunkers and watched shinobi and Kunoichi of their country bound off the ground, ricochet off structures and fly into the air, sealing falling debris into long scrolls before neatly landing on another structure.
The atmosphere around the two Legend Class ninjas became turgid.
If it was even possible, the air became more charged.
The wind hastened.
The earth trembled.
Madara chose that time to not hold back.
Naruto rose up off the ground and held his palms together, as shadows gathered over his face and his glasses reflected his electric blue eyes.
"White Noise."
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
A few miles from Clover Mountain
Hidden Mountain
BLAK Operative Fox of Team Twenty Two cast a grim look around him, a sinking feeling settled in his gut and his teammates also felt an equal amount of dread at the scene around them.
The Fox mask wearing Deputy Captain of the team cleared his throat and murmured.
"This…doesn't look good."
In various positions of distress, terror and instinctual retreat on that empty, barren road to Clover Mountain were exactly twenty rock statues.
They weren't all jumbled up in one place but rather more than half were in a tactical escape formation, one used to flee from a mine detected at the last second or a bomb that was bound to explode in any moment. The rest were toppled onto their side and curled up into fearful balls, their faces twisted in both horror and dismay.
Peering at one statue, BLAK Operative Rabbit, one statue that was broken at the waist-the legs rooted on the floor in a retreating position while the torso laid in near ruin on the ground-noticed that the frozen Kunoichi had a two tomoe sharingan.
The other members of their tracking team identified the others; those with their eyes open at least, as Uchiha with sharingan varying from two tomoe to three tomoe, none any less than that.
Bending down low and carefully watching the body positioning of each statue, they seemed to be running anywhere but forward, and from the shallow depression in the ground it would seem that the cause of them being turned into statues had originated from the front of their group, probably a person in the position of leader.
A female ninja wearing the Chipmunk mask and her comrade, a male ninja wearing the Monkey mask, confirmed that there was only one person missing in the horrific display.
Fugaku Uchiha.
Investigating further, members of BLAK Team Twenty Two-Fox, Rabbit, Chipmunk and Monkey-discovered that the few near the front of the fleeing band of statues had a few odd deformities, specifically reptilian deformities.
One had half of his face turn scaly-though still a dull greyish statue-, another had his right arm shifted completely into what was now a stone snake, another had snake-like eyes that were wide with agony and another, one curled up on her side, was simply a mass of stone-y, frozen snakes from the waist down, her mouth gaping open and wailing in eternally silent pain.
Pain.
That seemed to be the main theme among this grotesque display.
Needless to say, these twenty statues were in a world of pain before they met their untimely demise.
Who was to say they were even dead?
Frozen forever and immortalized as statues, they could still very well be alive, eternally cursed to stare back at a world they would never ever participate in again.
Or they could be dead.
No one would ever know for sure.
For now, feeling no pulse and sensing no life from the twenty Uchiha, the four BLAK Operatives presumed they were all dead.
Captain Rabbit gave a short, quick sign to her Deputy Captain, Fox, and the man took out a fairly large camera and began taking pictures of the scene around them, of the Twenty Uchiha, so that they could add it to the report they would submit to Naruto, their master.
To some, they might have looked artistic in a grisly, grotesque way.
In the future, the Twenty Uchiha would serve as a major tourist attraction for Hidden Mountain.
It rubbed them the wrong way that there were no fires coming from Clover Mountain and no riotous noises either.
"Rabbit-senpai, ne." Monkey called as he ambled to the shallow crater at the front of the rock formation. He placed his hand at the bottom of the crater and his other hand on his thigh, humming reflectively. "I think I know what did this, ne."
Monkey was among a small, select group of people within BLAK that older, veteran operatives playfully dubbed 'True Kohai', meaning they were the youngest and a bit less experienced than those that had been in service from the very beginning, like Rabbit, Fox and Chipmunk. Monkey was so new to BLAK that he didn't get to name his mask but rather inherited it from a retiring shinobi from another team, incidentally by his own choice.
Nonetheless whether or not Monkey was a day old in BLAK or even ten years old in BLAK, the junior shinobi had already gone through rigorous drills to be a member of the Elite Shinobi of Dark country; passing the Boot camp in the Kurama clan BLAK Recruitment camp, thereby qualifying and passing the Regional Recruitment and Training camp and finally making his way into the main BLAK Training Camp, which he passed with flying colours before becoming a full-fledged member of Dark country's finest ninjas.
To be able to do that alone without breaking or giving up needed an unwavering spirit, strength that came from ones very own soul and, most important of all, loyalty to the Leader of Darkness.
Monkey had all of that in spades, and his loyalty came from being in the same general vicinity as his unquestioned Leader when the man was liberating his clan from Konoha.
He might not be as strong as Onion or as smart as Carrot, and he might have a verbal tick-ne!-but Monkey would go to hell, dine with Yami and come back, if it would please his Leader.
The other members of Team Twenty Two gathered around the young Kurama as he picked up clues with his fingers from the shallow depression.
"What are you getting?" Rabbit asked.
The touch sensor confirmed what they were all thinking.
"Nature chakra from…snake summons."
Chipmunk bobbed her head and frowned thoughtfully, then looking up at her squad captain, stammering. "D-Do we-we r-report ba-back n-now?"
Rabbit's response was immediate. "No. Our mission is to find Minato Namikaze and assist him if he is in dire need of assistance."
Fox hummed. "Hai, Commander Fox gave us this mission herself, and she says it's a direct order from Lord Naruto. We cannot return unless we have exhausted all aspects of this assignment."
The deceptively effeminate looking Deputy Captain threw a look to his Captain, turning his head to the path towards Clover Mountain.
"Rabbit-senpai, I believe Monkey can lead us to Fugaku." He lifted a sleek eyebrow under his mask, addressing his kohai. "Can't you?"
Monkey punched down his blush at being directly spoken to by Fox, focusing more on the nature chakra speckled around the small crater. "I can, I can, ne…"
"Good idea, Fox. Wherever Minato is, Fugaku would certainly be close by." For the Namikaze was the Uchiha's target from the very beginning. "Monkey, take point; we proceed to Clover Mountain." The small chested Captain then shared the focus among her squad mates. "Fox, you and Monkey would follow that lead. Chipmunk, you'll gather information from the people, see if they know anything." Sueki-or Commander Bat-insisted that they didn't need to keep a low profile. "I will check on Minato Namikaze and Tsume Inuzuka's home at the top of the mountain. There might be clues."
Chipmunk spoke up feebly, shrinking into herself as her teammates faced her. She stashed the camera Fox handed to her into her black and grey, BLAK standard issue camo backpack. "W-W-What if…M-Mister Na-Namikaze i-is th-there…?"
Monkey gingerly took off his shinobi footwear, which were pitch black combat sandals, as Rabbit answered the gentle woman. "Then we see if he's ok, tell him that Tsume Inuzuka is safe and with the Fire Daimyo and report back to Lord Leader."
"Ne," Monkey piped up, standing onto his feet and wiggling his bare toes, feeling for the nature chakra but not dragging it into his body, rather letting it flow underneath the soles of his feet, for if the chakra entered him then he would share the same fate as the Twenty Uchiha Statues. The other BLAK operatives gave him their attention. "So we all agree that we don't care what happened to Fugaku, right?"
"Agreed." they answered simultaneously, hiding their smirks and their jeering smiles under their strictly professional appearances.
"We don't have time to waste." Captain Rabbit said. "Let's go."
"Hai, senpai!"
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Under the Valley of End
Fire country
Two shadow swaddled shinobi blazed down a long path way that branched off to the right and left at the end, and they both took the right path, flipping dextrously over a rusted bear trap and skidding under a plume of toxic mist that puffed out from both sides of the wall a few feet from the failed bear trap. Their masks, a Bat and a Komodo Dragon, pushed away the poison from their wearers' lungs, not even allowing a sliver of the misty attack to seep through the sides or through the eyeholes.
Several metres away from them and panting from running nonstop for what felt like an hour, Kabuto dove into a trapdoor to his left and Komodo hissed lightly under his breath as he and his superior stopped before the jammed shut door.
They hadn't seen the person that had leaped into the door and was now burning a path as far away from them, through the network of caves and caverns under the Valley of End, but the two shinobi were sensors of a different kind.
Komodo was a taste sensor and Bat, being a Sakenomi and a pure blood vampire, was a life sensor, which meant that she could sense blood or life sustaining liquids for miles around, no matter how hard the person being tracked cooled down their blood and slowed down their heart rate.
"Slippery little shite." The long tongued shinobi muttered quietly, making sure to do so away from the hearing of his Team Captain, who just so happened to be the Commander of BLAK. His battle hardened emotionless façade didn't shatter at his frustration at their evasive target, and Sueki purposely ignored Komodo breaking composure, even if it was for the slightest of moments.
Komodo clicked off the lower half of his lizard mask, just about under his upper lip and on both sides of his chin, and his seven foot long tongue snaked out of his mouth and it extended down to his chest, curling upwards and tasting the air. The man's unhinge-able jaw creaked a little and Bat busily began opening the solid iron trapdoor, her masked face firmly devoid of expression.
"Senpai," KD called and the woman gently placed her closed right fist on the door, standing back till the trapdoor was at arm's length. She drew her arm back and hummed, affirming that she had heard him, and slowly placed the same fist on the door, testing the sturdiness once more by pushing her fists into the cold door. "Traps ahead." The tip and sides of his extendable tongue wiggled briefly in the direction of the door. "Flash bangs and ropes."
"He doesn't intend to bring the whole mountain down on us." Bat mumbled and let her fist fly full force. The door blasted inwards, folding into itself like muddy paper and KD slipped in front of his captain, throwing his own fists to the side and crushing the spring coil release rope traps, closing his eyes at the flash bangs. "This place is huge; it'll take another hour for him to get to the other side and escape."
"Hai, senpai." While on missions with her, the member of Team Twelve referred to the Captain of Team Eleven as 'senpai' instead of 'Commander' because that was part of procedure; it accorded to Bat the amount of respect she was entitled out on the field to while still keeping her higher position largely a secret on the rare occasion an enemy shinobi heard them. It was exactly like not saluting to a superior in command on the battlefield.
Quite frankly, it was an honour for Komodo to be on a solo mission with his idol, Bat. The fact that silence wasn't important in this present mission gave him the opportunity to speak to the vampire as much as he wanted, though with the same reserved respect the white haired lady deserved, so as not to annoy her.
"Home base is under attack." He reported as his BLAK tattoo thrummed with a short Morse code message.
"I'm aware." Bat answered as she surged past the man towards Kabuto's retreating form. "Our orders are to remain here and kill 'the Masked man' and eradicate any signs of him from this general area."
'This general area' meaning the Valley of End.
"That means this person we're chasing dies." KD asked as he pelted behind his superior.
"No two ways about it."
Their feet instinctively took them towards Kabuto.
"We're only an order away from heading to Konoha."
KD tried not to shiver and the hollow honesty of the Commander's voice, telling him that she meant every word when she said that she would and could slaughter everything that lived and breathed in Konoha and burn the village down to the ground if it meant that all signs of 'the Masked man' was destroyed.
All it took was a single, uttered word from Naruto and Bat would obey without question.
"Bat-senpai, this person smells like Orochimaru."
"He isn't Orochimaru." Bat confirmed, no falter in her step. "I skewered him on his own sword, the Kusanagi, peeled off his skin bit by bit and kept his heart and brain alive as I fed his internal organs to my salamander summons. Then when I couldn't keep him alive any longer, I burnt him down to the bone, including his Jiongu, and I gave his remains to Panda to scatter in the ocean. I assure you that Orochimaru is dead."
"…Sorry I asked…" KD swallowed and Bat chuckled airily, sparing the man running behind her a look, one that showed the lizard man the brief glimmer of laughter in his superior's dark red orbs. "What if the Masked man disappears with our target?"
"Then we chase them. They cannot escape from us."
With KD's tongue and Bat's bloodline, there wasn't anywhere 'Madara Uchiha' could hide that they wouldn't find.
They had their orders.
'Madara Uchiha' was to die, end of question.
The person they were chasing was merely a means to an end. For they knew the person they were running towards, though not by name; Naruto had unknowingly sent the persons DNA among the package he sent to Sueki through the Kitsune scout, gathered from the laboratory in the Amekage's Tower.
Bat's Deputy Captain, Wasp, who was also her Second-in-Command in BLAK, had taken over for her until her return, coordinating the Dark country sub-organization in their defensive efforts against the present threat as well as maintaining order among the other black operatives. The black ops weren't going to work in front of the civilians, that was reserved for 'normal' ninjas, DC Officers and Police Officers, but they didn't do any less than anyone else.
Their existence was to be less pronounced by direly important, that was the basic tenet Naruto had put forward before he created the hidden sub-organization.
Ninjas generally didn't have any honour; they weren't above stabbing a person in the back, attacking one's family to get to their target or fleeing, abandoning comrades to their fate, but something told Obito that if he ran away and hid Kabuto from detection, every single day would be of him constantly looking behind him, for Bat and KD.
Then there was the snake he was charged to protect; the two Dark Ninjas already had his scent, so there was no rest or escaping them.
There were no more useable corpses to resurrect support.
They were gaining on Kabuto, and fast.
The younger Uchiha only had a single rinnegan eye, so he couldn't summon the King of Hell to fully restore the real Madara Uchiha.
Obito chose not to run anymore.
His rinnegan glowed ominously and his sharingan darkened as he stood in the way of the approaching shinobi, just around a corner and within their sensory range. Kabuto flew past him and Obito didn't even glance at him.
"Water release: Water Wall Encampment jutsu!"
What could only be described as a typhoon of warped out of his rinnegan eye and smashed against the corner, crashing and clamouring noisily on a warpath to the two black operatives.
Bat flagged behind him and yelled over the din of the oncoming tidal wave of water. "After me!" KD ran behind her and Bat flashed through a few hand seals. "Water release: Underwater Torpedo Drill!"
The vampire exhaled her own volley of water through her mask, this one coming out in in a straight line. Her fingers formed and held the Dragon seal and the end of the line of water slammed into the aggressive wall of water a short distance from her and KD, frilling open like an umbrella and spinning savagely, creating a tunnelling path of water that boiled as it grinded against the defending drill of water. The two never stopped running forward.
Sueki stopped exhaling water as she detected a pulse of air coming to them.
Komodo pointed to the right, straight into the wall. "On your right!"
He skirted around her, under the line of water from her mouth that led the drill through the attacking cavern flood of water, and, as the summoned mole broke out of the wall, he sent over a skull crunching punch to its forehead, dispelling it and leaping into hole the animal had burrowed, leaving Bat to divert the water drill to her left, into another wall of rock just in time to dodge the fatally repulsive force smashing behind the wall of water.
"Tch!" the Uchiha ground, annoyed that his Almighty Push had been evaded, though he had to limit the rinnegan jutsu to not expand outwards but rather keep within the cavern walls. He senses flared and he held his palm out to his right, sucking the chakra out of the water drill that blasted out from the wall but holding his breath as a fog made entirely out of blood washed over him.
His first instinct was to go for another Almighty Push, though he didn't for if he did then their hideout would be destroyed and Kabuto might be crushed with it, leading the real Madara Uchiha to be dispelled before he could finish crushing Dark country.
In the dense fog, he constructed a solid ribcage and jumped out, containing the red mist inside the ribcage.
"Amaterasu."
The red mist recoiled from the fire and reformed the stoic, unfazed Legend class Kunoichi.
A bead of sweat rolled down the back of her neck as she thought, staring from the bonfire of blackness that burned hotter than any fire she had ever encountered, giving her no room to move. 'This must be the fire that burnt Kisame.'
The fire grew inside the Susanno ribcage.
He gleefully watched as the Ghost's first student pushed further and further back from the swelteringly hot flames, fully aware that the long tongued black operative was biding his time, hiding in the hole that had been formed by the formerly alive rinnegan mole summons.
Hold. His superior ordered through a Morse code message. Hold.
"What are you gonna to do now, hag?!" Obito yelled at the trapped woman. "You've got nowhere to go!"
He didn't realize something.
The ominous silence from the BLAK Commander and the cool air about her as she huddled into the last remaining corner of the ribcage, feeling the sleeves of her uniform scorch off and blisters grow along her arms.
Now.
All KD had to do was leap out of the mole-hole, diverting Obito's attention.
Then, in one smooth motion, the blood mist that clung to his hair gathered together and formed liquid blood.
Discovering his mistake as the blood shot down his temple, Obito made to drain the chakra.
It was too late.
The blood flowed into his nose in a gasp of horrified air and Obito choked.
The blood of the woman infamously called The Vampire Empress went straight to his head, permeating into his brain and tagging along with the unfortunate Uchiha's blood as his heart pumped the life sustaining liquid around its body, replicating and multiplying, outnumbering Obito's in only a handful of seconds and seeping into the Uchiha's organs, skeletal system, muscles and skin tissue.
There really wasn't any hope for him anymore.
Free of the Susanno, Bat became a puppetmaster of ill-intent.
Obito, with his own hand and against his will, slid a lethally sharp kunai across his throat and Komodo came up behind him, stabbing him in the side of the head with one short obsidian blade and in his lower back with another.
The last thing Obito Uchiha saw, in his last few microseconds of coherence, as shadows fogged his mind and his eyes dimmed with heavy, inescapable sleep, were a pair of blood red orbs that emotionlessly watched him topple onto his side.
Once his body hit the floor, his soul fell out of his body and into the void, and those cold red eyes silently looked on as he plummeted into the icy hot depths of death.
The single chakra receiver pierced into his lower right abdomen deactivated.
His right Eternal Mangekyo eye ground to a stop and dimmed to a dull, coal black while the Rinnegan Reflection genjutsu-the same one Nagato had used on the corpses of his former Six Paths of Pein-crumbled, revealing it to be a plain black eye underneath.
The lesser powered, false image of the rinnegan Madara had bestowed on the living Path deactivated.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
White Noise was a Sage art.
Sage art crafted from Atmospheric nature chakra, which was basically nature chakra that was present in extremely high altitudes. Naruto did this by sending up a single bolt of lightning from the nape of his neck and into the sky, shooting higher than the clouds where it would absorb the denser nature chakra and release some of Naruto's own chakra to form thunder clouds and create lightning storms. This wouldn't have been the case for anyone else, but Naruto was partly privilege to be able to create his own thunder storms due to the chaotic nature of his chakra, another part being that he had two bloodlines-Lightning release and Smoke release-.
The rest was simply mastery in motion.
He knew what to do and how to do it.
Atmospheric nature chakra was heavier than the nature chakra under the clouds, that is the usual nature chakra, and even at that the usual nature chakra couldn't simply be tampered with for the consequence of abusing it would result in the victim being turned to stone. The only probable loophole in this was that people with well-established summoning contracts-like Toad, Slug and Snake-could tap into this dangerous source of chakra to amplify their abilities close to, if not the same as, that of a kami.
Needless to say, the nature chakra high above the clouds would do unthinkable things to a person that wasn't careful.
It wasn't that no one knew of the existence of atmospheric nature chakra, it was that no sane person wanted to mess with it.
Luckily for Naruto, his sanity wasn't so dependable.
Naruto was the first person in the world to be able to harness nature chakra without the help of a summons, or his summons. Besides Hashirama Senju, that is.
People only knew that White Noise equalled death.
A little nature chakra would go a long way, and Naruto's bolt of lightning didn't gather a little.
Far from it.
Madara's face became grim as lightning crackled through the sky, flashing through the black storm clouds and bending his knees, lowering his stance a little bit closer to the ground to maintain his balance as thunder roared through the sky, rocking the earth.
Naruto stood up with a slight bow, his shaggy blonde shading his bespectacled orbs.
The nature chakra laden bolt came back down and struck Naruto's neck, coating his chakra coils with it and mixing it into his own chakra reserves, spreading it to every nook and cranny of his body.
Naruto had meditated for a whole year in a Holy Temple at the top of Yomisaki Mountain in Demon country during the period of time he was on his personal training. He was about fourteen then and at that altitude, it was a constant war just to breathe. The monks refused to teach him how to properly breathe at the top of that mountain, though they did bring him down from the mountain if he ever passed out. The monks there were capable of dragging the high density nature chakra into their bodies but solely as a way they prayed to their kami, by meditating at the summit of the mountain. They had taken oaths to never weaponize their ability, as well as a pledge to not spread the knowledge to anyone, not unless that person in turn took that oath.
The blonde teen, at that time, had managed to steal a scroll that taught him how to breathe from his gut. After getting past how to breathe at the peak of the mountain without blacking out, the next thing was dragging atmospheric nature chakra into his body without evaporating into the air.
It wasn't nearly as easy as it sounded and the mental training had been gruelling, and most days he would lose feeling of his face or his extremities would disperse into air. Mastering atmospheric nature chakra gave Naruto the feeling of the weightlessness of air while at the same time making him feel stronger than obsidian steel, the strongest material on the planet.
The training had paid off in the form of the creation of not one but two of Naruto's personal techniques.
White Noise and Silent Night.
Though the latter was far more powerful than the former.
Naruto's eyes flicked up and Madara grinned wildly as Naruto's eyes flared white with potent energy, beaming from behind his glasses and further making his darkened face more foreboding. His white orbs became large and haunted.
Manic.
A web of veins crept out from the corners of Naruto's massive, amplified eyes, reaching his ears.
This change in Naruto's body and the change in the weather took only about two seconds, but it still raised a question in the minds of the Dark Ninjas watching hundreds of miles away, at the edge of Mito's Grassland.
Why wasn't Madara attacking?
"I want you at your best." The Uchiha snapped, his grin threatening to take over his face. Emboldened by the Ghost's silence, he shouted with his arms open. "Make this worth my time."
Naruto was indeed a worthy threat, Madara unabashedly acknowledged, but he wasn't a Hashirama Senju kind of threat.
The black clouds that cracked with white lightning covered only Mito's Grassland, at Naruto's mental command.
Naruto exhaled a small plume of thick black smoke from his clenched teeth.
He then proceeded to walk forward, beginning at a leisurely pace and this time leaving behind no solid body afterimage but rather a semi-unseen wraith that vaguely resembled him. Madara trekked to the blonde with that same pace, increasing his step as the phantom in turn quickened to a steady jog, and speeding up to a hard jog before the two men blazed together in the middle of the field in an explosion of dust and wind.
Fighting Naruto, Madara came to find out something particularly…difficult.
It wasn't Naruto's raw speed, though that too was a challenge, and it wasn't that he couldn't see Naruto, for Madara could barely catch a glimpse at his translucent opponent and thereby was able to touch him.
Blocking and countering, as Naruto in turn blocked and countered.
It was Naruto's unpredictability.
The Uchiha didn't know when he entered the defensive.
Naruto knew twelve fighting styles, and he had fully mastered seven of them, the rest being up to if not a little bit over jounin level of proficiency.
Madara's Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan was finding it harder by the millisecond to pin down which style his opponent was using, for the ancient Uchiha spotted exactly twelve styles with each snap and smack of Naruto's limbs, creating a tidal wave of afterimages and swarming his evolved doujutsu with a crowd of probabilities, that his brain frantically grinded down to discern which probability he should follow.
Madara's eyes burned in his sockets.
The Naruto before him, though nearly invisible, couldn't escape his powerful sharingan, but being able to see him didn't equal being able to keep up with him.
He stepped back and used his right shin to guard a low kick to his knee, hopping onto his other foot as Naruto switched into a high kick with his other leg, shielding his face with his forearms as a straight blow tore in the direction of his nose, lowering them to each of his sides as the Ghost targeted his ribs with body shots. The Uchiha leaned back as far as his back allowed, barely dodging a spinning hook kick and sweeping to his right, escaping a Spartan kick that carried along with it a blast of white electricity, creating an air shockwave of epic proportions.
THOOOOM!
Dropping his leg and spinning with the momentum of that front kick, Naruto delivered a hook kick aimed at Madara's temple, which the Uchiha ducked, shifting his head back from an elbow to his temple again and flickering to Naruto's other side to avoid a solid, five fingered palm strike that resulted in a massive column of the earth being uprooted.
FWOOOOOM!
The Dark Leader pulled his palm back as Madara came at him with a knee to his attacking elbow, having to fall back into a crab as a volley of dark flames furled out of Madara's lips at a followed up attack to his upper body.
Naruto pushed up onto a handstand and clanged the soles of his sandals against a pair of chained scythes Madara had materialized into his hands, cycling his feet and walking backwards on his hands to keep his balance while blocking the lethal bladed strikes with his feet. He relaxed his right arm and fell onto his side, tucking into a roll as a frustrated Madara slammed a heel kick down on him, as if he had fallen down from the heavens with the intent of splitting him in half. He righted himself and flattened his feet on the ground, lowering his stance and holding up his palms, the right being in front and straight and the left being behind and closer to his gut, and the Uchiha unfailingly came at him, his blood roaring to take Naruto down a peg.
Any Dark Ninja that managed to look directly at their Leader's fight against the undead Uchiha without going blind would say that it was as if two fireworks, one white and black and the other dark red and black, were popping and thudding on the ground, flashing and smashing at the centre of the field.
That is, if the thunder clouds above head weren't shaking the very foundation of the earth.
The blinding lights increased as Madara became enraged, ruffled by the cool headed emotionlessness Naruto was maintaining and having his pride prodded that another shinobi other than Hashirama-and who just so happened to be centuries younger than him-was fending him off so effectively.
Madara was confident in his combat skills.
Tried and tested, his only foil was Hashirama.
He didn't take too kindly on Naruto's capabilities as a shinobi.
Each motion and every movement of Naruto's body and White Noise made the Ghost dimmer and harder to detect, forcing Madara's sharingan to grind faster to spot even a sliver of the blonde's presence.
Not that it was an easy fight for Naruto either.
The Uchiha tunnelled a blow to his left cheek but he batted it aside with his right hand, slapping down a knee to his abdomen with both of his hands and guarding his neck with his left forearm when Madara made to jam a finger into his jugular.
The two men entered a fevered sequence of strikes and blocks, one that no outsider could possibly even follow.
Until finally, Naruto's cells and his chakra reached past the speed of sound, a whisper close to the speed of light.
Madara's eyes bugged out when his roundhouse kick wafted through the phantoms head and the returning front kick thudded into his chest.
BOOOOOM!
The Ghost didn't let up.
As Madara screeched to a halt not two feet away from his former position and his stomach roaring in agony from the last atmospheric nature powered blow, the invisible creature attacked again, this time with a higher front kick, one that planted Naruto's foot squarely under his chin, followed closely by a grab for his airborne shoulders, angrily yanking him back to earth to meet a knee strike to his chin.
Madara's back arced with the flow of the knee, avoiding as a jagged shard of lightning screamed down at him from the heavens.
A line cracked on his face.
Madara came to a realization.
He had to take this seriously.
Undead or not, the blonde man before him was tossing him around like a child.
The Hashirama cells surging through his body healed his wounds and a frown crossed over Naruto's face.
"You are not Hashirama." The reincarnated Uchiha spat hatefully, his pride almost overcoming his intellect. A painful grin shot up on his face and his eyes pulsed with insanity. "You are better." His sharingan whirled, blindly so, and Naruto no longer became invisible. The thunder storm rumbled and a kamui above Madara's head swallowed a bolt that had made to strike him. Naruto warily clenched his fists and his blazing white orbs flicked about the Uchiha from behind his glasses. "Your abilities are a waste on you. I can sense the power you hold back."
Madara chuckled deeply as Naruto ran to him, before his eyes Naruto was running at high chunin speed but in real time the Ghost was cutting the distance in less than a nanosecond.
The world distorted as gravity fought to remain in place when Naruto cut through the very fabric of existence with his swift feet.
Yet it was nothing for the Ghost of the Uchiha clan.
Absolutely nothing.
"That ability to shape space and time. Reality as we know it." His grin broadened and his eyes laughingly curved upwards. "You may not have Senju blood running through you," like Nagato. "And you may not have inherited Indra's chakra," Like Madara. "But you are indeed…something I have never seen before."
No longer needing to feed a sliver of the Rinnegan's power into the chakra receiver in Obito's presently dead body, Madara Uchiha's left eye evolved.
Revealing it to be his rinnegan.
He took a step forward, erasing the distance between himself and the slower shinobi, and crushed Naruto's face with his right forearm, jostling his brain in his skull. He went low and dug his fist into Naruto's diaphragm, rose up and cracked his left elbow across Naruto's cheek and ended his sequence of light speed attacks with a solid knee into Naruto's stomach, blasting Naruto clear off his feet. The Ghost crash landed and skidded on his back thrice, before he rolled with the motion and came up to his feet, digging his fingers into the ground to slow himself down.
"These eyes of mine surpass even you, Naruto."
Standing back, Madara checked the Rinnegan Reflection genjutsu he had put over Obito's three tomoe sharingan left eye, the one Kabuto had implanted for him. He pushed a little of the Rinnegan's power into the boy, through the chakra receivers and the Uchiha teen marvelled at the increase in the ocular perception of his left eye, not like when he had the original but much better than his own sharingan.
He looked to Madara and the man's rinnegan visibly devolved into an Eternal Mangekyo sharingan.
"The Ghost," Obito began. "He is not as weak as you think."
"I will have to see that for myself." He held out his right hand and Kabuto placed a petri dish in it. Inside was a flack of skin. The undead Uchiha turned and forced the god Tree to absorb Hashirama Senju's tissue.
The area he had placed the DNA sample contorted and with a groan, the Shodaime Hokage walked out of the tree, unclothed.
The mindless copy dropped onto his knees, weak from just being born, and Madara wasted no time absorbing the clone into himself.
Hashirama's Senjutsu chakra put up a fight but quelled itself when it recognized the DNA Madara already had inside himself, the one that formed the pale face on his left chest as an end result.
Madara didn't want to admit it.
Naruto made him pause.
"My apologies, Naruto. I have not been taking you seriously." Madara said, honest, as the skin around his eyes darkened. The vegetation of the almost destroyed grassland reacted to him entering Sage mode, rigidly rising out of the ground and swaying at the torrential waves of chakra he was exuding. Madara's rinnegan pulsed, glowing evilly, and he closed his Mangekyo eye. "Allow me to honour this battle by not holding back."
His hands blazed through a sequence of two hand seals and Naruto, still able to see at speeds no normal man should ever be able to, recognized the last seal, his own fingers flashed through a single hand sign.
"Fire release: Great Fireball Annihilation."
"Water release: Tears of the Kraken."
The surging wall of water smashed into the approaching wall of fire, and it was chaotic.
Scolding heat flew about unhindered, scarily similar to the Five Tail's Boil release, and the battleground festered under the heat. The grass dried and the resulting hot wind effortlessly blew it away as dust, the soil hardened and turned black, feeling like cement beneath their feet but acting like silt as the two powerful shinobi used their chakra to find purchase on the ground but were ever so slowly pushed back by the sheer power in their opposing jutsus.
Naruto's eyes flicked up and a bolt of electricity roared down from the black clouds.
A shadow clone melted out of Madara's back and flicked through seals. "Sage arts: Storm Release Lightning Fang." He pointed his palms at the approaching bolt of lightning and fired off his own bolt of lightning.
Earth's gravity reacted to that by doubling for half a second.
CRRRACK!
From Hidden Mountain to Kumogakure, from Wave country to Iron country.
The whole continent rippled with brief seismic shifts, earthquakes that loosened up the foundation of the planet.
Seemingly not as affected by being two times their own body weight, the men cut off their attacks and Madara flew to Naruto, his feet no longer touching the ground and a broad, maniacally excited grin etched on his face. The clone seeped into the earth and Naruto's white eyes saw the clone swish under the ground in his direction.
The Ghost crossed his forearms and bent his knees at a ninety degree angle, before his fist crashed into the ground.
"Earth and Fire release: Combination jutsu: Volcanic Swamp of the Nether realm."
The earth in a five mile radius of him, far away from his shinobi yet within the area Madara and his clone were found in, bubbled and rose up to form an active volcano, with Naruto standing in the middle on a slab of solidified rock not affected by the lava. Testament to Naruto's chakra control and the volatility of his chakra, the lava was not red.
It was black.
The volcano Naruto had formed was roughly a hundred metres high and five miles wide, and it erupted.
Residents of Hidden Chill, hundreds of miles north east of the continent and further past Kumogakure, could see the volcano erupt white lava and panic ensued.
The same could be said about the rest of the continent.
Madara's clone leaped out of the ground in time, before it turned into lava, and the two shinobi flew high into the air, away from the eruption of molten magma that chased them into the sky, but the real Madara soared down and around the eruption, avoiding being burnt alive.
The clone wasn't so lucky, as it flew up into the clouds and was summarily roasted into dispersing by Naruto's storm clouds.
Naruto, standing inside the volcano with his sleeves singed off by the fire, removed his right fist from the ground and shifted the fingers of both of his hands into the Dragon seal.
The lava abruptly stopped erupting and continued in its path into the clouds.
"Volcanic Hailstorm."
The lava above the clouds broke up and came down, falling down to the earth in the form of spears.
They were numerous enough to blot out the sun.
Something even his storm clouds could not fully do.
It looked like the end of the world.
Madara, flying in the air, cackled with glee as the white hellfire came shooting down on him. His rinnegan eye pulsated again and the spears broke up into dust as he used a barely uttered Yin-Yang release jutsu, one that negated all ninjutsu.
Naruto gnashed his teeth and cursed, leaping out of the volcano he had created; Nagato had not been able to scatter that ninjutsu, not with that much ease.
Madara blinked down to the Ghost and slammed his foot squarely into the blondes hastily formed forearm guard. Naruto suppressed the feeling of his bones being broken, patching them up with the atmospheric nature chakra in his body, and he side stepped a straight kick that could have taken off his head, bent under a right hook and rolled to the side, away from a savage uppercut.
The two men appeared and disappeared in various, random places around the battlefield, their arms and legs constantly in motion, attacking and guarding.
The fevered pitch of the battle sliced through the veils of reality.
Spots of blackness tore open and closed with each leap around the ground the two combatting men took, fraying the fabric of space and time with their fight.
Naruto slapped a punch to his right with his palm, batting another to the other side, smacked a knee back down to the ground and tunnelled a fiery, chakra coated blow right onto Madara's chest. The clone dispersed after the strike and the real Madara materialized before Naruto, close to the partially smoky area his clone had been dispelled on, cracking a roundhouse kick into the side of Naruto's head.
A memory ran into Naruto's head.
Naruto's bare feet softly padded down on the ground, trying to be hasty and stealthy at the same time as he snuck into the small camp.
The seven year old appreciated the rain for masking his footsteps but cursed in his head as his feet nearly slipped.
The camp he was entering had only a tent and a stone throw away was a fire that burned under the shade of wall that leaned dangerously close to the ground. Next to the fire was a pot of what Naruto could only hope was food.
Food.
His stomach grumbled traitorously.
A mere week ago his world had fallen apart.
His parents stepped on an active mine, and his friends had been unable to grasp the full gravity of how their childhood had gone up in flames.
Tears welled up in Naruto's eyes as he recalled how his parents ran behind them as Iron country samurai, Iwa shinobi and Kumo shinobi-turned their once peaceful town into a warzone.
Yahiko had been staying with them, when his uncle had gone off to fight the war in the centre of Ame, alongside Hanzo the Salamander.
The mine had gone off and Naruto didn't dare look back at what at become of his parents.
He hid Yahiko and found Konan some hours later; hugging her mother's decapitated head. Sueki had been found blankly holding a hand; the rest of the person's body was crushed under what used to be the Sakenomi household.
He dragged them away and carried them, Konan on his back and Sueki clinging to his middle.
He didn't dare look back.
He didn't dare remember.
He had been the single provider for his friends; feeding them, clothing them and protecting them, as they were too unresponsive to do anything for themselves.
Awake but unresponsive.
Nagato's eyes had changed somehow, from brown to purple with concentric rings, and Naruto didn't know how; he was only staved off from worrying too much when it seemed that his first friend wasn't blind.
Naruto could only hope they would pull out of their depression soon.
Naruto rubbed out his tears with the back of his hand and plodded to the pot; he opened his lips and cheered quietly as he saw a whole chicken breast and thick chicken broth inside.
"Who is that?"
Naruto froze, already lifting up the pot by the two handles it's the sides. He slowly looked up to the other side of the dangerously leaning wall and he swallowed when he saw a pile of rags and clothing move about, sitting up weakly.
"I know you're there. Who are you?"
The person didn't sound afraid, Naruto noted to himself, and as the clothes on the persons head fell down, Naruto also noted that the person was old.
The person had white hair, attained from old age, and his face was wrinkly. His white hair was spikey and seemed to be extremely long, possibly reaching his waist if he was to stand up.
The way the persons head was slightly turned to the right and how the person's eyes were covered in bandages, Naruto also realized that the person was blind.
"I asked you a question, boy." The man said low, intimidatingly and the recently orphaned child trembled.
"I-I…I'm sorry old man!"
He turned and fled with the pot of food, and Madara Uchiha allowed him to go.
Naruto shook his head of the cobwebs, pushing out of the dream-like memory by willpower alone, and he blocked a punch to his neck with his forearms. The blow pushed him back, giving him space to look at Madara.
Really look at him.
Naruto's eyes widened. "You."
Madara never forgot the boy's chakra signature.
Water and Lightning affinity, the latter of which was potent enough to be a bloodline, while still not taking back how the child's combined chakra felt uncontrollable, not out of negative emotions at that. His sensory ability saw Naruto's chakra as a warbling, sputtering mass of black and white.
It was the same as the boy that had been hanging around the redhead child he identified as having Senju blood, Nagato.
It was when he had been reincarnated that he found out the child's name.
Naruto.
"How are you alive?" Naruto whispered to himself.
Yet another memory struck him.
"Mortality is the bane of humanity." Orochimaru told his student, a now ten year old Naruto, as the masked child stood next to the scientist.
"But Orochi-sensei," the blonde boy objected, staring at the Nagato, Konan and Yahiko having target practice, using either normal kunai-Yahiko and Nagato-or a paper kunai-Konan-. Naruto flicked his cerulean eyes up to his tall teacher, then back to his friends. Sueki was wall walking up a tree behind Naruto; she made it a quarter of the way up before she tumbled to the ground, just able to get her feet under her to avoid falling on her behind. Her teacher spared her a look and a quick, encouraging thumb up to reinvigorate her as she performed the chakra control exercise. "I don't want to live forever. I want to die someday, preferably of natural causes."
The Snake Sage chuckled at his students words. "Many people don't share your thoughts, Naruto."
"I assume you want immortality."
"Some form of it, at least."
"…Stay away from Sueki, ok?" he glared at Orochimaru and the man hissed out a laugh, raising his hands in surrender.
"Kukukuku~. Keep both of your eyes on her."
Naruto didn't like how his teacher didn't promise to leave his student alone.
"Tobirama Senju." He looked to Naruto with a raised eyebrow. "You know who he is, don't you?"
"Konoha's Nidaime Hokage."
"Correct." He patted Naruto's head and the boy shook the hand off with a mildly annoyed flick of his head. Orochimaru continued. "He created a jutsu that can raise the dead…but…it isn't perfect."
The masked preteen was sceptical, and he displayed it with a single raised eyebrow. "Raise the dead?"
"It isn't perfected." Orochimaru repeated. "And it isn't resurrection, per say; rather it is more like reincarnation. That jutsu isn't to preserve youth but to bring the dead back to life, though at the cost of being tied to obey the summoner. That, child, is why Tobirama's jutsu isn't perfect."
"So…you want to perfect that dead dude's resurrection jutsu." Naruto summarized.
"It is one of my projects, yes."
"Why are you telling me this? You know damn well I don't care. Don't think that I'm going to resurrect you if you die."
"Even if, say, Sueki was to die and you know this jutsu, you can bring her back for however long you want."
"If she's dead, she's dead. I will not disturb her rest." Naruto directed his narrowed eyes to the Snake Sage. "Right now though, I'll make sure she doesn't die."
Orochimaru chuckled again. "When you get older, those thoughts will change. You are yet still a child."
"Not anymore."
Naruto stopped being a child when he took up the role of guardian for his friends.
Orochimaru was a private person though he made it clear that he wanted to impose his beliefs and opinions on the seemingly impressionable child he was teaching.
That Sannin wanted Naruto's loyalty, and after years of trying and failing to garner some sort of dedication from the future Ghost, he lost interest and left.
Naruto wasn't going to bring him back to life or even continue his research on the event of his untimely demise.
Reincarnation.
That was the closest, logical conclusion Naruto reached to answer why the ancient man he had stolen from all those years ago was alive and younger than before some thirty three years later.
Unfortunately Naruto didn't press Orochimaru for how to negate the reincarnation jutsu and the blonde didn't know any reliable fuinjutsu that would successfully seal Madara-his EMS and his rinnegan-without the undead Uchiha breaking out somehow.
Thinking on his feet and brainstorming ways to kill a corpse, Naruto called down a long bolt of electricity, one that was partially still in the ground while almost nearing the ground. The Ghost blazed up the jagged white arc of electricity and leaped off at the top, to where Madara had been hovering.
Three more blasts of lightning served as his footholds as he tore through the sky towards the Uchiha, mere seconds after leaving the ground and seemingly in the blink of an eye for the spectating Dark Ninjas, before a single bolt slammed into Naruto's back, propelling him forward at breakneck speed.
Naruto felt two things.
He felt the sound barrier crack and he felt his shoulder tackle Madara's middle.
The two men came down to the earth, not unlike a meteor.
GOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMM!
Those Dark Ninjas behind the barrier around Mito's Grassland erected five more layers and the explosion of pressure and wind shattered all of them, and so they used their wherewithal to craft more and more barriers, unrelenting as each one crashed into nothing, layering them one behind the other until the pressure let up ever. The barriers that remained, twenty in total, bulged and stretched, containing as much of the shredding wind and the burning heat caused by the impact on the ground.
There was silence.
Stifling silence.
No one spoke.
A few closed their eyes and prayed.
Kushina swallowed and her purple orbs squinted, looking through the twenty-layered barrier seals, though the fog of dust and the falling clods of earth.
Their hearts fell as chakra that didn't belong to their Leader roared through fifteen of the twenty barriers.
A giant, humanoid construct made out of ethereal blue chakra rose up out of the crater. The chakra construct very nearly reached the very clouds of lightning that had long since been threatening its summoner, though the white lightning now couldn't affect it now. It wielded a massive sword and a pair of blue wings flapped on its back, aiding it as it leaped out of the deep hole.
GYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
A black salamander with red and yellow splotchy markings with beady red eyes, one so big that it reached the blue giants lower abdomen, squealed to the heavens, rearing back on its hind legs and dropping back down to all fours with a resounding thud. It snapped it's treacherously serrated jaws, banging it's somewhat long tail on the earth.
Standing on the Salamander Chief Summons slimy head was Naruto, holding his throbbing left shoulder and breathing haggardly through his plain black half mask.
Madara wore a proud smirk, hovering in the chest region of his Susanno. Most of his red armour had been blown off his body and the long sleeved undershirt too had half-shredded, leaving him bare-chested on his right side and clothed on his left. He tore off his shirt without so much as a thought and the Shodaime Hokage's face on his left chest opened its mouth, moaning soundlessly.
The Uchiha didn't want to admit that the Ghost's deft shoulder tackle had snapped his spine and obliterated two of his lower ribs, and Hashirama's Sage chakra was still in the process of fixing it while he hovered in the Susanno's chest.
It annoyed him, for he too had been putting active effort into ending the Ghost's life.
He looked over the salamander summons and the summoner standing on it at the crowds of shinobi that lined the edges of the grassland, several thousand metres away. The Uchiha hummed at the bubbling volcano that the blonde had created with his chakra and the broken earth. Black lava leaked from the mouth of the volcano and a few fissures in the ground festered with heat, forming small geysers of scathingly hot, light red vapour.
The effect of both Madara and Naruto's potent chakra clashing was visibly affecting the ecosystem; the soil was leached of its plant sustaining nutrients, the bodies of unfortunate animals that had made the area their home-if they had not fled on time-were crushed by slabs of rock, seeping their blood into the earth which in turn was part of the reason the geysers were light red, and the air density within the general area was heavier and more poisonous, so much so that life-plant or animal-could no longer be sustained in the area any more.
Mito's Grassland couldn't be called Mito's Grassland anymore.
It was now called Mito's Wasteland.
One glaring thing he noticed Naruto was doing was that he strictly kept the decimation of their battle within Mito's Wasteland. The barrier seals were performing their function but it was actually their Leader that was drawing the battle from them the best he could, dividing his attention.
Not that Naruto hadn't been trying to lure Madara out of Darkness; their fight had started a mere stone throw away from the shinobi at the border of Mito's Wasteland and now Naruto had been able to take Madara some thousand metres away from them.
Though forcing the fight out of Darkness altogether was a difficult affair.
Mito's Wasteland was near the Dark capital and the Dark capital was in the heart of Dark country, which was the very centre of country.
Madara had shown that he could match his speed and pace with Naruto and the Uchiha would admit that he had fallen for the now blatant misdirection techniques his bespectacled opponent had been using to take the fight away from his ninjas, but anything other than teleportation wouldn't work on the crazed Uchiha.
An idea came to Madara.
Divide Naruto's attention even more, strain his reach.
Being Leader was his ultimate weakness.
His hands and the hands of his fully formed Susanno clapped together and moved through three hand seals.
Ram-Snake-Bird
"Extinction."
Meteors as far as the eye could see were pulled in by Madara's superior gravity manipulation from out of space. These monumentally large rocks, roughly ten or so in total, hung in the air above Darkness.
Naruto ground his teeth as he saw those meteors poised to crush his country to dust.
Chakra canons from around the country boomed relentlessly, firing canon after canon at the heavenly bodies but not making much progress in denting the space rocks.
"So this is your plan." Naruto mumbled darkly, the hand supporting his shoulder clenched hard at the shoulder strap of his flak jacket. The chief salamander looked up as well, growling in a deeply and slamming its tail in the ground. Naruto lowered his stance and place his free hand on the top of the chief summons head, calming the beast down somewhat, and he muttered for only the salamander to hear. "I have an idea."
GEEEEE-GYYYEEEEEEEEEE!
"Three seconds should be enough." Naruto answered to his summons and to himself as Madara's blue Susanno rumbled towards them. "Hold him back for three seconds."
The Ghost fastened his feet to the slimy head of his summons as the great salamander craned open its mouth and released a thick jet of a clear blue liquid, one that the attacking Uchiha blocked with a materialized chakra shield. The poison streaming out of the salamanders mouth was specifically made to breakdown chakra, and it was slowly eating away at the chakra shield.
Madara created four shadow clones, each one saturated with his Indra-inherited chakra-and those clones surrounded the Ghost and his Salamander summons, materializing their own fully formed Susanno's, which ambled to their targets with single minded determination, drawing their ethereal blades and focusing their sharingan right eyes downwards.
THOOM-THOOM-THOOM-THOOM!
The summons expelled poisonous mist from its pores, as well as its mouth, and the clones exhaled gales of wind from their mouths.
Chakra canons exploded in the background.
The meteors drew neared, gathering speed and pushing hard against the country's dome-like seal barrier.
The four Susanno's got closer to them.
Naruto clapped his hands together, meshed them and flipped through two seals, two less than when he was seventeen and used the technique for the first time.
Tiger-Ram
"Silent Night."
Authors note
You all saw this coming but can you see how it's going to end?
For those that are wondering, that last thing Madara used (Extinction) is indeed from the anime/manga/game but I changed the name to what it is not cuz I didn't like the original name and I didn't like the English translation either.
The next chapter will be the last chapter, and after that will be the epilogue.
Thank you all for reading this far. I friggin appreciate it!
Who's ready for the last chapter?
Leave a review of your thoughts, would you so kindly. Please stay safe, wherever you are in the world, and I will see you when I see you.
Foy.