ATTENTION: PLEASE JUST READ THIS VERY SMALL PART OF THE AUTHOR NOTE.

A lot of authors have that first work of theirs that turns into a failure or something that they regret. Something that becomes their biggest posted failure. This chapter is mine. I would suggest you don't read it. It won't affect anything if you skip it.

35,027 words currently… holy effing sh*t, this may double the word count after I finish it.


Before you start, I just wish to say that I warned you not to read it. I wrote this after the ending note because I didn't wanna fix the mistakes I could have fixed instead of writing this. #Laziness

Also, did I mention I probably finished 99% of this in August? Because, yeah, that kinda probably did happen.


He tensed, ready for an attack from anywhere, eyes about to widen in shock as Sage Mode's advanced sensory abilities warned him of an attack from behind, he couldn't even widen his eyes in shock before a leg found its way mostly in his skull. It wasn't even the defense of his various chakra cloaks that saved him in the end, it was the fact that the fox—Kurama—was literally healing him so fast that the skull tried to heal THROUGH the leg going through it. To the fox's credit, it almost managed to cut off the attacker's limb with the creative method of healing Naruto's skull THROUGH the attacker's leg. All that managed to do was slow down the leg enough that it didn't go all the way in and come out the other way through the face.

Then the basic laws of physics came into effect as Naruto's body acted upon the immense kinetic energy thrust into it. To say he rocketed away would be an understatement

To say his body attempted to reach light speed in a lot less than microseconds? Less of an understatement.

The damage done to his brain was healed nearly instantly. In fact, it was healed in real-time as his body seemingly instantly un-impaled itself from the leg in it. The damage to the brain was healed but that didn't quite mean he was alright.

The damage healed simply meant his brain was returned to the somewhat default brain, albeit, a MUCH more mutated version with how many shadow clone memories it used to have. Keywords being "used to". That's right, the fox could fix the brain but it couldn't fix the memories. Now, it would have tried to give back a good portion of his memories with Ninshu from its view of his life, but that required a chakra bond from both sides. Naruto, being literally in a state that hospitals would call brain dead, was not able to initiate the chakra bond from his side or accept Kurama initiating it.

The situation seemed even worse as their opponent, while his body was not even 400 meters away from him, noticed the damage done to his leg, either from a half-grown skull surface being halfway in it from all sides or the bits of brain matter that were literally trying to grow into it. Needless to say, the opponent, who had viewed themselves as quite a higher being had taken a slight to this.

Kurama could tell this from the moon-sized Truth-Seeking Orbs that were VERY quickly forming behind the opponent and zooming past them. The impact would most likely be the end of any hopes for this fight.

And just when things seemed impossible, as they often seemed with Naruto, a miracle happened. A clone of Naruto popped, his eyes opening with a gasp as he was bombarded with most of the information he had before he had gone brain dead, and then a lot more memories from the clone that had popped.

The Kage Bunshin no Jutsu's memory transfer could truly be a blessing sometimes.

As Naruto burst with blue—that's right, blue chakra—chakra, Kurama also thanked the Kage Bunshin no Jutsu's chakra returning ability. Although, since most of the corrupted—that's what he liked to call most of Naruto's clones—clones could make their own chakra, it wasn't so much as chakra returning but chakra transferred.

With this, he could take a small breather and recover some chakra while Naruto burned through the clone's chakra.

He made sure to give a small enough stream of chakra going to keep the Bijū Mode part of the transformations going before quickly switching the source of chakra from him to the newly gotten chakra. It may take a LOT more of that chakra to even keep a weakened version of Bijū Mode going, much less one that was comparable to the original, but that was fine because, from what Kurama could tell, it was a LOT of chakra. And as long as he continuously sent it streaming through the seal after he began the transformation himself, it would work to sort of 'trick' Bijū Mode into working via an alternative power source. The damage healed simply meant his brain was returned to the somewhat default brain, albeit, a MUCH more mutated version with how many shadow clone memories it used to have. Keywords being "used to". That's right, the fox could fix the brain but it couldn't fix the memories. Now, it would have tried to give a good portion of his memories with Ninshu, but that required a chakra bond from both sides. Naruto, being literally in a state that hospitals would call brain dead, was not able to initiate the chakra bond from his side or accept Kurama initiating it.

The situation seemed even worse as their opponent, while his body was not even 400 meters away from him, noticed the damage done to his leg, either from a half-grown skull surface being halfway in it from all sides or the bits of brain matter that were literally trying to grow into it. Needless to say, the opponent, who had viewed themselves as quite a higher being had taken a slight to this.

Kurama could tell this from the moon-sized Truth-Seeking Orbs that were VERY quickly forming behind the opponent and zooming past them. The impact would most likely be the end of any hopes for this fight.

And just when things seemed impossible, as they often seemed with Naruto, a miracle happened.

A clone of Naruto popped somewhere, his eyes opening with a gasp as he was bombarded with most of the information he had before going brain dead, and then a lot more memories from the clone that had popped.

The Kage Bunshin no Jutsu memory transfer could truly be a blessing sometimes.

As Naruto burst with blue—that's right, blue—chakra, Kurama also thanked the Kage Bunshin no Jutsu's chakra returning ability. Although, since most of the corrupted—that's what he liked to call most of Naruto's clones—clones could make their own chakra, it wasn't so much as chakra returning but chakra transferred.

With this, he could take a small breather and recover some chakra while Naruto burned through the clone's chakra.

He made sure to give a small enough stream of chakra going to keep the Bijū Mode part of the transformations going before quickly switching the source of chakra from him to the newly gotten chakra. It may take a LOT more of that chakra to even keep a weakened version of Bijū Mode going, much less one that was comparable to the original, but that was fine because, from what Kurama could tell, it was a LOT of chakra. And as long as he continuously sent it streaming through the seal after he began the transformation himself, it would work to sort of 'trick' Bijū Mode into working via an alternative power source.

As for when he found out this worked?

Well, in about 3 seconds if it worked...

As his sunlight blazing cloak shifted into a blazing azure cloak with kanji for "human" overlapping the seal, Kurama knew it worked.

None of this really helped Naruto stop, though, his speed being too damn high to just stop.

Naruto quickly realized that there was no point in trying to stop with the moon-sized Truth-Seeking Orbs now after him.

Acceleration was the name of the game right now, not deceleration, and boy did he accelerate. Azure chakra claws grabbed onto anything ahead of him and pulling hard enough to TEAR the claws apart in the process, meanwhile many smoky tendrils formed from his back, eerily reminding Kurama of his previous host's chains for a second as the tendrils solidified, thankfully not as chains for Kurama's peace of mind, and began trying to push off the moon-sized projectiles after him, his once-used ability of Six Paths Yang Chakra having made it so that the chakra would treat it as a solid instead of dissipating under the mighty force that was the Truth-Seeking Orbs.

The massive amounts of nature chakra in his body helped too.

And so, when Naruto eventually started gaining distance from the ground, the planet's curvature leading the ground away from his body, it was of no surprise that the immense gravitational force of the planet was ignored like how a sharp object would just about entirely ignore air resistance. His IMMENSE speed, mostly born from having a leg inside his skull earlier, proved to be easily enough to reach the atmosphere. And then? Well, it wouldn't be a surprise to anyone that he found himself in space.

Except he didn't.

His opponent was waiting for him.

The blow that greeted him seemingly ignored the defences of all the modes he had on right now as it went straight through his chest and came out the other side. It was less a punch and more like his inertia blowing him into it with enough force for it to go through him. The opponent merely had to keep their hand straight and unbending.

And so, Naruto found himself impaled by a hand once more in life. It would be nostalgic if it wasn't… well, a hand going through his chest.

Of course, if it ended there then it would have been just a nostalgic moment reminding him of the times Sasuke had pierced through his chest.

Except it didn't end there.

Not even close.

Because his inertia wasn't NEARLY finished.

His body still went forward, inch by inch in what would be an instant to anyone else but was quite slow to the divine eyes of the Impaler. And then he hit rock bottom. Surely, he should have stopped there?

No.

The torso hit the shoulder hard enough for the shoulder to embed, go further in, and then SPLIT Naruto's torso from the chest where it was punched to the right side of his torso/chest.

In effect, it was roughly the same as if Sasuke decided to cut 50% of the way through his torso again. The nostalgia was strong. The places cut were from totally different angles, though, from what Sasuke did.

And, even after all of that, he still had enough inertia left that he still went flying past the now blood-soaked attacker, except now he was slowed down enough that the planet's gravity was strong enough to pull him down.

Predictably, his opponent was already waiting for him, having predicted his trajectory.

The opponent was also ready for a fully healed Naruto; because that was what he was when he was falling towards him: completely healed up.

And when Naruto put his hands in a hand sign, the opponent was ready to fight thousands of Narutos.

When the words that came from his mouth were not the words "Kage Bunshin no Jutsu" but something else, the opponent could honestly say he was not ready for this.

With a smirk, the azure blazing ninja muttered, "Dispel."

And then all anything or anyone around the planet knew was blue.


(POV Change [Not really, my mind just wanted this here for some reason.])

Large amounts of chakra were often denoted with the colour of red, this was because even though regular ol' chakra, in large amounts, was blue, it would have nothing against red chakra of the same amount. The chakra densities between the two were staggering. Even someone with above than average dense chakra like an Uzumaki, a Jinchūriki, an Uzumaki that is a Jinchūriki, or Kisame would never be able to beat red chakra with their blue, human chakra when both chakra amounts were equal. The denseness just wasn't comparable.

Which made Bijū chakra's colour the go-to colour for what people would think of when one thought of a lot of chakra, even though regular chakra COULD match it… You'd just need a shit ton more regular ol' human chakra.

This information was somewhat outdated among the most elite of shinobi—also known as: Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura, and Kakashi—as they now thought of silver chakra when one mentioned a lot of chakra or strong chakra. Their time against Obito, Madara, and Kaguya being mostly spent with at least one of them having their asses kicked cemented that in their minds.

Six Paths Chakra was to Bijū chakra what Bijū chakra was to normal chakra.

So, theoretically, blue chakra could beat Bijū chakra, it would just have to be in extraordinary amounts when compared to the Bijū chakra. The ratio between them would be quite unfairly large.

But, if blue chakra did manage to… ratio the red chakra, then there was no reason why it wouldn't win against it.

The point was, Naruto was definitely beating his previous chakra output when he was using the fox's chakra, even when one accounted for the density difference.

He was literally having so much chakra manifest around his form that one would not be able to see him with ordinary eyes or even regular dōjutsu. Heck, one wouldn't be able to see anything.

"I wonder if this is what Kaguya felt like when she took almost all the chakra from everyone?" He had dispelled every clone he could feel that he still had dominion over.

"Unlikely."

Before an argument could commence, Naruto remembered the LARGE Truth-Seeking Orbs still after him as he saw/felt interruptions in his chakra, which was basically giving him an incredibly chakra-exhaustive sensor ability via giving him various means of knowing what was in it depending on how it was being stopped from occupying some space. And the moon-sized Truth-Seeking Orbs were preventing his chakra from occupying space alright.

Deciding to flex even more chakra out of his body, basically ripping and burning all of his tenketsu while Kurama healed them at the same time, he sent more chakra out

It was sheer luck that they didn't all get utterly destroyed by the damage at the same time or even the fox wouldn't have been able to help him. As it was, it managed to use two of them to fix others from the outside before those two also stopped working/got mutilated.

The newly released chakra increased the pressure/density of chakra in the area so much that they actually started slowing down the Truth-Seeking Orbs before stopping them.

His speed when it came to falling towards the planet had slowed greatly, as well. The chakra that was much denser had settled closer to the planet, a feat that no one knew chakra would do as chakra, in its gaseous form, always went upwards; there had never been a case where an area was saturated enough with chakra that, instead of going up, the denser amounts went down. Of course, some of this might have had to do with the weird-ass planet down there as well. As far as Naruto could tell, it was made entirely of chakra metal and something else that he hadn't identified. And it was chakra metal of a grade that he had never come across.

As it was, the closer he got to the planet, the more the denser chakra actually started resisting his downward motion. Like air resistance but not really. Why?

Because air resistance didn't let him do this!

As he willed it, a path formed for him to his opponent. As he willed it, the chakra from behind pushed him forward. And as he willed it, chakra burst out of his soles, bursting with such force that it took the bottom of his feet along with it. But that was fine, he only needed that burst, the fox would fix them by the time he needed them.

Making sure to try and increase the chakra around the opponent as much as he could, to prevent his movements, he went for a haymaker. At the speed he was going, even his trained eyes had no idea what was going on, he was relying on his chakra to guide him straight.

There was one set of eyes that could see straight, though. The opponent watched, Naruto still seeming to go in slow-mo towards him, and he decided to block the blow.

His hands moved even slower as he looked at them. 'Impossible!'

How has such an imperfect being managed to have power over so much chakra!? For, indeed, the immensely dense chakra around him was actually slowing him down. He had paid it no mind before and was about to pay the price.

As the fist hit him, there was no sound to be heard. He assumed this to be a case of the fact that he was already travelling faster than its speed. Although, the vibrations not travelling through his body was odd. His divine eyes caught sight of his opponent's lips. "Vibration Release: Delayed Reaction!"

Well, that would be… unpleasant, if it was anything like the haymaker.

He didn't have time to worry about it, however, as the blond was soon upon him again, using a bastardized version of his honoured and near-perfect clan's dimensional control techniques, most of which were done with the various eyes they had. This… scum, didn't even do it with special chakra, much less some eyes worthy of the technique.

Being too slow once again when it came to blocking because of the blond's chakra constricting his movements while moving to help its master, he felt a minor sense of anger.

As he flew, he wondered if getting beaten up was worth the small amount of pride he was saving or should he just use more power than he should be using against this… human.

It galled him to admit that he would have to use his unsealed form, however.

As the next attack came towards his eye, he began to think about anything other than to have to use his esteemed unsealed form for this.

The Planetary Rasengan was absorbed by the eye it was aimed at.

"You imbecile. When was the last time you saw someone with that eye unable to absorb ninjutsu?"

'Well, I thought that since he didn't absorb the chakra around him, he couldn't do it!'

His momentary loss of concentration led to a rather brutal kick to the leg. Unfortunately for the opponent, though, this didn't lead to them getting some space to breathe because, in their anger, they kicked with enough force to just kick the leg clean off, the rest of the body didn't even go through a change in angle with how much of the force was taken by the leg.

It might give him a few microseconds before the leg grew back, though. The blond began to glow yellow. He paid no attention to it, he was most likely just going to his previous original transformation of his with that more potent chakra—not that it was potent enough to really be anything worth worrying about.

"Bunshin Daibakuha!" That is what he managed to get by reading his lips as the sound would still take a while to reach him. His face turning into one of realization would take less time. What would take the least time, however?

BOOOOOM!

The explosion.

He went towards the planet at speeds that should have easily guaranteed him going through it, his cloak completely burned—a cloak made from his chakra was destroyed. The disrespect!

What did happen upon him hitting the planet was him bouncing off of it.

No, not in the "trampoline" sense or the "rubber" sense.

More like, whatever sort of fucking chakra metal or shit the planet was made of, it absorbed literally none of his opponent's kinetic energy or it hit him with double of the energy he hit it with because he bounced and he bounced hard.

"Oooh," Naruto cringed, "that had to have hurt."

Upon the now naked—with tatters of his pants conveniently covering his crotch somehow—man was a silver chakra ring.

"To think that I must go this far to deal with you, mortal. Know that what comes of this is what you brought upon yourself, my unsealing shall spell your doom and I shall end this by making sure that even your afterlife is not a peaceful one. May you burn in hell."

Naruto's elegant thoughts to this speech? 'What's hell?'

The man slowly stood up, the ring of chakra beginning to spin before slowly lowering from its place over his head and covering his form. As it reached his hair, it turned from white to white with a mix of black and green outline around it in some spiritual way. And then the ring cracked and broke as the man started spasming all over the place.

"Brat… that 'Vibration Release: Delayed Reaction' of yours is a beautiful piece of work that chooses the most beautiful of times to activate."

'Aww, gee, Fox, that's awfully nice of you to say.' The man turned bashful, nervously rubbing the back of his head to the compliment, an act made much weirder by the world enveloping amount of blue chakra coming out of him.

They watched as the effects of the partial transformation that was done slowly faded away as the guy kept spasming over the place before he stopped.

"Well… isn't that ominous?"

'What's ominous is that the vibrations didn't tear him apart instantly. He should be in a gaseous state right now! Or, at the very least, burning up and incinerating.'

The man started getting up slowly. Emphasis on "slowly".

"No, I am going to have to disagree. That's definitely more ominous."

'... How much chakra do you think he got from absorbing the technique when it wasn't even a quarter of the way done?'

"I really do not want to think about it. You really should have attacked him at the time."

'Not my fault your compliments got to me.'

"Oh, so this is my fault now!?" the fox roared.

"This..." the man on the ground started speaking.

"Oh… classic, slow-speaking villain move right there. I am so glad I am not you right now."

"I won't..." The man continued to mutter to himself.

"You should probably interrupt him before he starts beating your ass again."

'He wasn't beating my ass!' Naruto thought back indignantly. 'But, um, yeah, I think I'll do that.'

He willed his chakra to stop holding him in the air by just being dense enough to keep him up, gravity doing the rest of the work to bring him down.

"I WON'T STAND FOR THIS INSOLEN—"

"Random Bullshit Style: Bullshit, Go!"

His opponent was met mid-speech by a toad-themed dildo to the face. The only saving grace in the situation was that Naruto's opponent didn't know of the nature of the item he was struck by.

The NOT saving grace of the situation was that it hit him right in the rippled eye.

The OTHER saving grace was that the technique had a lot of chakra put into it. It wasn't even close to being done.

A dog bowl, a manure shaped piece of wood, Amaterasu—a statue dedicated to the goddess, not the flames which might have actually been useful here—, something very similar to the faces on the Hokage monument of Hokage faces, and a very weird looking fruit with a tag on it that read "devil fruit" that seemed completely chakra-less were some of the things that were manifested or teleported by the technique to be used on Naruto's opponent.

As his opponent finally grew very irritated with the technique, he held one of the items being shot at him, a chakra-metal sign with the words "Word Count: 3863" engraved into it, and used it to bat away the other stuff being shot at him back at Naruto.

The blond ninja had to curse as his jutsu was turned against him, only barely able to dodge the items batted back at him, even after they were slowed down by his dense chakra acting in place of air resistance—because, yes, this planet didn't have air. Did have some other gases he hadn't identified, though.

Sage Mode's advanced perception abilities could only help so much, however, before he found the sign that the opponent was using as a bat, going through his torso. It was a mostly horizontal cut, thankfully. The separated body parts each had tendrils of blue, yellow, and red chakra connect both parts before reconnecting in a manner eerily similar to when Orochimaru's torso would reconnect with the help of snakes.

And then he felt the killing intent. To say he withstood it, if barely, would be a lie because his legs failed him the second it hit him. Images of his death, so vivid and in ways so terrible that they should have had him frothing from the mouth, filled his head. He knew that if it was not for a mix of his mental strength and unique brain mutated because of overuse of the Kage Bunshin no Jutsu, he would not have survived it at all.

That and the fact that the KI was probably diluted more than a few thousand times of what it probably would have been due to the amount of his chakra in the environment interfering with it.

The fact that he actually felt it, much less could barely breathe through it, was a terrifying thing to think about. The man shouldn't have been able to send enough chakra to him to actually project that much KI, it didn't matter how much he wanted to kill him, it just shouldn't have been possible with the amount of chakra he had that should have stopped interfered with that or downright stopped it from happening.

And then the man released all of his chakra. At least Naruto hoped it was all of his chakra as a graceful silver overtook his chakra, seemingly clearing the world of his chakra's blue influence and replacing it with malevolent gray.

"Well, that can't be good." His voice somewhat warped from the even larger amounts of chakra bursting out of him to combat his opponent's chakra and failing. The only good part about it was that either the density of chakra around him or the amount of chakra going through his vocal chords was making his voice sound deeper. Made him feel like a man after so much time spent having a high-pitched voice.

Back to the matter at hand, Naruto felt all of his previously surrounding chakra being pushed away, his opponent glaring at him while having one VERY veiny eye from when it was hit with a previously named object.

Man, if the guy tried to send Killing Intent his way now, he'd be toast without his chakra around to run interference.

"I am now using the same amount of chakra that you were using earlier to barely keep up with me. That being said, do try to keep up."

Shit.

Also, did he just imply he could use more chakra?

He couldn't think more on the subject as Sage Mode told him to dodge, and dodge he did.

.

.

.

Except he didn't… Just like with how his chakra earlier on was preventing his opponent from properly moving, his opponent's chakra was now doing the same to him. Except worse. Much worse. Like, very much worse. Because he was using the most top tier Six Paths Sage Chakra he had ever sensed. It was literally so dense that, even using all of his strength, he couldn't even move a millimeter from his place on the ground where he was laying down when he was affected by his KI.

'This is insane!' he screamed in the depths of his mind as his opponent appeared behind him, according to his senses, and kicked him.

And then he realized where he was gonna get kicked and smirked.

As the leg made its way between Naruto's legs to the place where they both met, it quickly found out just why Sasuke liked to call Naruto's balls the only true indestructible thing in existence. As unstoppable force met indestructible object, the victor was revealed when his opponent's face shifted from the angry, satisfied look he had while kicking, to shock and immense pain as his foot began collapsing in on itself.

As his opponent stared on in shock at the second, "true" piece of damage done to him all fight, the first being Naruto's skull healing through his leg, Naruto found himself contacted by the fox.

"I have managed to recover all of my chakra. So, take this." Naruto's Imitation Bijū Mode shifted to normal Bijū Mode, a feat that did absolutely nothing for his physical abilities besides increasing his healing speed, and then his Imitation Bijū Mode seemed to form OVER the Bijū Mode.

'You are the smartest fox ever,' he thought back as he stared wide-eyed at the amazing feat of chakra synchronization being done by the fox there. The newfound form gave him the augmented strength necessary to move.

If one could call running at genin speeds movement.

And then his opponent was upon him again, using Naruto's earlier bastardized version of his own clan's technique to make Naruto even slower when he consciously made the chakra around Naruto thicker and the chakra around him to boost him forward.

He could have easily used his own clan's superior version of the technique, but the idea of taking down the opponent with his bastardized version of the Ōtsutsuki technique appealed to him. Not to mention the fact that he didn't think the blond was worthy of having the original technique used on him.

As Naruto found himself slowed down even more with a fist coming at his face hard—the only place that wouldn't be easy to recover from, his earlier brain damage and memory fixture was more a miracle with Kage Bunshin, than anything else—he knew he had to do something, anything! To dodge. It didn't matter if he lost most of his body, as long as he still had his brain and residue chakra in the air or chakra in his body, he could heal from it.

Mentally cringing from the terrible idea presented to himself from his brain, he readied himself for pain. Every tenketsu on his face ruptured with the force of the chakra erupted from them as he found himself blown backwards from the face, the force almost enough to snap his own neck, something which he didn't exactly think about in his desperate attempt to dodge, but it all worked out. Until it didn't. The shockwave, whether from the force of the punch or formed from the punch via shockwave manipulation to amplify the normal shockwave that should have occurred with the surrounding chakra, he didn't know.

What he did know was that if this was what it felt like to get hit by "Vibration Release: Delayed Reaction" then he wanted to apologize to his opponent for it. The absolute agony his body was going through because of the shockwaves… He couldn't explain just how terrible it felt, various parts of his body seeming to try and rip themselves in various directions per each shockwave as the opponent started punching in the air in his direction. He wanted to curse at the chakra modes that were working overtime to keep him alive and intact, the forms extending his suffering.

And then it was over. He couldn't move. He felt like a piece of shit. Not the insult kind, just how his body felt. It looked alright from outside, the insides however?

"Your body is a mess..."

What the fox said.

"Do one of those speeches of yours to keep him distracted while I fix you."

Deciding to follow the fox's order rather than complain, he began trying to talk or taunt his opponent only to find out his mouth was messed up as well. And everything was so hazy… It was getting blurry, all he saw was silver. Too bright silver. It hurt his eyes. Maybe he should rest a bit, close his eyes and take a breather for three seconds.

"Oh no, you don't, brat." He felt a surge of PAINFUL energy in response to its words. Contrary to his belief, it wasn't the enemy attacking him. The man seemed content to do his slow villain walk over to Naruto.

He saw his veins and various parts of his body burn red, various negative emotions assaulting him as the fox used its unfiltered chakra through his system to force him awake. And he didn't like it. He would use this power to rule over the wor—oh wait, that was the fox's chakra talking, wasn't it?

He wondered if it would be worth it to use another Bullshit Style technique.

Probably not… Meh.

"Watch out for the Truth-Seeking Orbs from earlier." Oh damn… He had forgotten that they were no longer being kept at bay by his chakra. And if the fox was warning him about them, then they were probably on the move.

Still on the floor, he seal-lessly used a technique.

'Sage Art: Bullshit Style: Rebuttal.'

Nothing happened at first. And then it started raining nature energy-infused toad statues.

He quickly found out this wasn't all that great when one landed on him.

Although… a couple of thousands had actually done enough damage to a few of the moon-sized Truth-Seeking Orbs, so that was good. He could tell because they were destabilizing. Fast.

Oh, wait, that WASN'T good.

Looking around to find literally ANYWHERE to hide on this unnaturally smooth planet, he found nowhere that he could go.

Eyes widening at what could be his demise, he turned his eyes to the Ōtsutsuki that would most likely just survive by absorbing the chakra from the imminent explosion. Seeing the slightly panicked expression on his face, Naruto realized they were both screwed.

And then the Ōtsutsuki clapped his hands, not unlike him when he went full avatar Bijū Mode, and red chakra that DEFINITELY wasn't the fox's started pouring out of the ground. It increased and showed no signs of stopping. It seemed UNENDING! How hadn't he sensed this before!?

And then the ground started shaking, the shaking being bad enough that even a ninja wouldn't be able to balance themselves without chakra. An earthquake? The planet reacting badly to being juiced for power?

"That's no planet, boy." Was the ominous statement that was heard in his mind.

A massive portion of the planet detached itself and placed itself above them. When Naruto said massive, he meant like 1/10th of what he estimated the planet to be. It couldn't be an Earth Release technique, the entire surface of the planet was made of impossibly high-grade chakra metal, no Jutsu, even an Ōtsutsuki class one, had any chance of working on that.

A few more pieces, each the same size as the first one, detached themselves from the planet before placing themselves between the Truth-Seeking Orbs seconds away from exploding and destabilizing the others. And then all the… continents(?) collided with each other and pieced together so perfectly that it would have been pure darkness under them, where Naruto and the Ōtsutsuki were, if not for the glowing silver chakra illuminating it all, which was slowly going back to its master, the area getting dimmer until all that was left for light was the blip of light in the large area that was Naruto.

And then Naruto covered his ears, went into a fetal position, strengthened the chakra shroud him even more—being aided in that task by the fox—and waited for the world to go boom. He had remembered how much destruction a normal-sized Truth-Seeking Orb could cause, he DID NOT want to imagine just how bad a moon-sized one could be.

And he waited.

He waited.

He waited even more.

He waited for the explosion that would rip through him any second now.

Nothing.

Absolutely no sign of anything happening outside the dark area he and the Ōtsutsuki were in. No vibrations from the ground that he had his ears on, although… if he focused hard on the ground… Was that… breathing? Growling?

And why did that freeze the blood in his veins?

And then there was light, the… continents(?) used to protect them were separated once more, absolutely nothing about them looking damaged. In fact, all that was different was the absence of the Truth-Seeking Orbs.

"Get off this thing. NOW!" The roar and the fear in the voice of the strongest Bijū assured him that the fox had discovered something terrifying.

With his opponent's chakra having been absorbed back into him, it was all too easy to jump and find himself in space, the act seeming easy after the amount of struggling he previously had to do to just move.

And what he saw had him speechless.

The massive pieces of the planets, the continents or so he thought, were tails. As they unravelled, he counted them.

"Jūbi."/"Jūbi." They both said at the same time, Naruto's being pretty inaudible in the vacuum of space.

This whole time, they had been fighting on a Jūbi!?

How the fuck did this Ōtsutsuki get his to be so big!? Did he feed it steroids or something?

This THING was literally massive enough to exude a gravitational force equal to a planet's! Well, either that or it could utilize Deva Path pretty good.

As the pull on him increased, he deduced that it probably could use Deva Path but it probably also had its own base gravitational force of a planet and was simply using Deva Path to enhance that force.

"It's not the Jūbi doing that."

Never mind, then, apparently, the Ōtsutsuki was doing it.

But why?

As the tips of a variant of the progenitor of the Tailed Beasts' tails started glowing as he got closer to it, he realized why.

'Oh, that's why…''

Taking a page from one of his previous tactics in this fight, he didn't fight the pull but went along with it. He was smart to do so as 10 ridiculously large laser-like beams crisscrossed each other on their way to remove him from existence, the first of which was aimed at his previously resisting gravity position.

As his world became a mix of white coloured beams and a blue aura on top of a gold aura, he was just thankful that he didn't have that "epilepsy" that he heard people could have. He'd have had seizures long before now in this fight of colours.

As he neared the plane—Jūbi, he found colossal tails trying to hit him at speeds that they should not have been capable of moving at. Dodging with high-intensity bursts of chakra—thankfully not like the painful bursts that would take out some tenketsu for a while—he easily managed to position himself so that he'd miss the chakra metal parts of the tail and landed on the… fleshy? Woodlike? Parts of the tails, because they weren't entirely made of chakra conductive metal which he deduced was painfully attached to them later on. He didn't wanna risk having chakra interference on the more chakra-metal parts of the tails.

He ran down the tail he was on and it clearly irritated the Jūbi. He could tell because its eye had been tracking him the entire time and also because the tail started emitting massive amounts of red chakra. He was talking beyond the entire amount of chakra that the fox had. It was potent enough that it was almost burning him under his combined chakra cloaks.

When it realized that wasn't working, it made miniature versions of itself that looked like when a Jinchūriki would go into a version 2 form. Except they all only had one tail each, something he didn't know a version 2 transformation could do.

The scary part? Each of them had about the same amount of chakra as the fox, something that clearly annoyed the fox fiercely. And they all spawned about instantly on the tail he was running down on.

Stopping to think about how to deal with them, the amount of chakra being emitted from them made him wary of them, he was worship levels of thankful when Sage Mode warned him that it was just a distraction as another tail of the Jūbi's tried to squash him while he was on its other tail.

As he tried to jump, gravity multiplied by the thousands as it attempted to keep him on its tail.

So he did a tried and true classic.

"Kage Bunshin no Jutsu!"

The newly created clone threw him with all its strength just when he jumped, he also propelled himself with chakra to make it more effective.

"Not enough…"

"Kage Bunshin no Jutsu!"

Two of the clones held him by the arm, another three let him and the other two use them as a platform while they tried to expel as much chakra to keep themselves going in the direction away from the intense gravitational force without damaging a tenketsu and popping. And then he and the clones next to him jumped while doing all they could to propel themselves away, using chakra claws to try and even grab onto the tail about to hit them and use those to push even further. Then the clones threw him and blew themselves up. The explosion managed to do just the trick in barely letting him get out of the difficult situation.

He had to grin as the mini-Jūbis on the tail he was previously on were crushed by the original Jūbi's tail.

Closing his eyes mid-air, something many would normally be told was something incredibly foolish to do, he focused his senses on trying to find out where the Ōtsutsuki was hiding.

And he got absolutely nothing, the planet-sized Jūbi absolutely drowning the chakra of anything besides it, even his earlier chakra that was blown to space.

.

.

.

Wait a damn minute…

Focusing on the chakra, most of it responded to his will as easily as it would when millimetres from his skin. Not too surprising, considering how much of there it was for him to be able to easily sense and control back. And now he had about somewhere between a quarter to half of what he did when he dispelled clones at the beginning of the fight.

He bit his thumb. He was dimensions away—many, MANY dimensions away—would he really be able to do this?

"Kage Bunshin no Jutsu."

"Aw shit, Boss, this is gonna hurt, isn't it?"

"It's the less time-consuming way."

"Kuchi—"

"Look out!" It blew itself up, the explosion just barely throwing him out of the way of 2 incredibly large blasts of chakra and hundreds of much smaller but still very big blasts.

"What the…?" Looking at where the majority of the blasts came from, he was greeted with the sight of the previously thought to be destroyed mini-Jūbis.

"Kage Bunshin no Jutsu." Making another clone, he was quicker with biting his thumb before smashing his hand into its stomach.

"Kuchiyose no Jutsu!" Nothing happened. As in, not even the chakra drain happened. Looking at his very much NOT bloody thumb, he exclaimed, "What the…!?"

"Um… yeah, remember that super accelerated healing that you have had all fight? Well, it doesn't magically turn off when you bite your thumb."

'Well, then you turn it off, then.'

"Yeah, about that… You may have to turn off both of your cloaks for me to do that. Maybe one of your cloaks at best."

'But that's suicide in this fight!'

"Yeah, that's what I am trying to tell you."

It was silent for a second as Naruto contemplated this.

"By the way, dodge."

'Wha—' He found himself kicked away by his previously made clone, the clone itself getting pulverised instantly by the lasers he hadn't noticed. He has got to stop phasing out. Ironically, him phasing out to think that was what cost him an arm below the elbow as a beam grazed it.

"Quick, use the blood that dribbled on your pants from that before it dries!"

Using the—now healed—arm to swipe at the quickly drying blood, he summoned another clone.

"Ready?"

"Ready," it nodded.

"Kuchiyo..." He watched as the clone fell prey to a potential Deva Path technique and flew towards the Jūbi.

"Oh, for fucks sake!"

He only felt amusement from the fox.

And the blood had dried…

Summoning another clone, he just asked it to get the blood after asking it to leave all of the cloaks. His clones had proven durable enough to survive even after getting a bit of blood out, they were just wimps and dispelled afterwards. He specifically asked this one to hold on long enough to use its own blood to use the jutsu.

And in a very large puff of smoke that was only audible because of his vast amounts of chakra in the surroundings acting as a good medium for sound travel in place of air, a toad appeared. A very large toad.

A very large toad that appeared very small against their mutual opponent.

It took one look at its opponent.

"Oh fuck no, Naruto. What is up with your family and just summoning me to fight Bijūs? Now you want me to fight this monstrosity? Hell no. What do you want me to do exactly, spit a bit of oil on its eye?"

"Look, I have a plan. Trust me."

"So you're telling me that your plan can deal with that?"

"Yeah, we could take it do—oh my god, it's doing one of those Jūbi-dama thingies." He stared wide-eyed as its mouth had opened at an angle it should NOT have been able to open, the absolute feeling of despair that came from the technique being formed there was nothing to snuff at, either.

"We can take it."

"What the fuck is wrong with you!?" Gamabunta yelled in disbelief.

Then the supermassive, super-dense orb hovering near its mouth that was about half of its size began compressing until it wasn't even a thousandth of its size.

"We might not be able to take it."

Then its ten tails began to arc around it until they were surrounding it, and the orb compressed even further.

"You definitely aren't going to be able to 'take it'," a fox helpfully reaffirmed.

And then the tails began to physically press into it until he couldn't even see it, whether because of the tails blocking his vision or it was genuinely that small, he didn't care. He just didn't want to be here when that thing went boom.

"Gamabunta! Any ideas!?"

The toad seemed frozen in despair.

The Jūbi shut its mouth over the bomb.

"GAMABUNTA!" The thunderous voice and sheer will of domination in it got the toad out of its funk.

The toad nodded.

Naruto sighed in relief. "I knew I could count on you."

And then the toad vanished in a puff of smoke.

'Did he just unsummon himself and ditch me…?'

"GAMABUNTA, YOU SON OF"—And then the Jūbi opened its mouth, and all he knew was searing, painful light before a clone popping sound was heard—"A BITCH!"

.

.

.

"What?"

Huh? He wasn't dead? Opening his eyes—when did he even close them?—he was greeted with darkness. The brightness of that Bijūdama or Jūbidama or whatever it was called must have burnt his retinas. Either that or he was dead and the void was the afterlife, or a halfway point to it. If a white space could be used by the Sage of Six Paths to talk to him while he was half-dead before, then a black space seemed perfectly normal for a half-dead or halfway to afterlife point. Although considering he just heard Gamabunta's voice, that would imply that Gamabunta had died as well, which wasn't possible as the toad had bailed like a little puss—

"Why do I get the feeling that you are insulting me in your mind?"

And then his vision returned to him, the change from darkness to colours of all kinds was actually staggering, but then, his healing had been like that the entire fight when the fox actively helped along. It was just a mix of losing abilities like having two hands and then regaining the hands the next second and going along with it instead of being disoriented, whether by having two hands again, the pain of regrowing then, or the pain of losing one or two.

Blinking twice to get rid of the disoriented effect he got from having his sight back, he looked around to see dozens of toads. Raising a non-glowing hand—wait a second, non-glowing? He was out of his various combined forms besides Sage Mode! No wonder his eyes took that long to heal!

"It was needed. You were burning through too much chakra, and the reverse summoning didn't help bring around the surrounding chakra that I was using as fuel for the Imitation Bijū Mode form. I will now recuperate my chakra. And you do… whatever it is that you do when not fighting. Absorb nature energy from this place or whatever."

And, for a second, Naruto let himself imagine how much nature energy he'd have to suck from this place to do a proper balance with his chakra rather than the rough balance he had the entire battle. As his mind conjured up the image of a nature energy-deprived Mount Myōboku and the toads removing his name from the Toad Contract and banishing him from here, he shuddered.

Yeah, he wasn't going to be doing that.

Also… 'What do you mean by "whatever it is that I do when not fighting"? We are still fighting!'

A hand(paw?) slamming into a face was what he heard before he got his response. "You plan on going back!?"

'Of course! Why wouldn't I!?'

"Oh, I don't know, maybe the fact that you will die?"

'What are you talking about? I was handling myself just fine in that fight.'

"Were you and I even seeing the same thing? Because I know what I saw and it was you getting your ass beaten, ripped apart, healed together, then beaten again."

'... You are just scared of that dude, aren't you?'

It was a strike at his ego and they both knew it.

'Calm down, Kurama, he's baiting you. You know it. You know that he knows that you know it. Don't let him win.'

It was quiet for a moment. Naruto's victorious feeling in the seal-scape slowly started fading. That didn't necessarily mean much as he could choose to allow his emotions into the seal, so he might just be hiding it now. The only emotions he couldn't hide as easily were negative emotions.

"Let's fight the guy and his pet..." Kurama had cracked.

Naruto cracked a smile before replying to Gamabunta, who was steadily getting annoyed at being ignored and not answered.

"I wasn't insulting you mentally, Gamabunta." A lie of course. He had been sending all manners of insults when he thought the toad had bailed on him. "Anyways, let's go back now."

"... You are kidding, right, underling? I mean, you were getting your ass kicked."

"Why does everyone think I was getting my ass kicked!" He threw his arms up in annoyance. "I was handling myself just fine and had come up with a kickass plan that was bound to have me win."

The toad just stared apathetically before responding, "Yeah, no, I ain't coming to fight against that thing, whatever it was."

Naruto, feeling a moment of déjà vu, said the first thing that came to mind.

"... You are just scared of that Jūbi, aren't you?"

Gamabunta paused his smoking upon hearing that.

It was a strike at his ego and they both knew it.

And inside the seal, Kurama could just tell what the toad was thinking at that moment. It was an exact copy of what just happened a few moments ago with him.

It was quiet for a moment, Naruto's victorious smirk slowly started fading. That didn't necessarily mean much as he was surprisingly good at baiting people. It was the only time he could lie well, so he might just be hiding the smirk now.

"Let's fight the beast..." Gamabunta had cracked.

Kurama facepalmed, knowing just how badly he was played now that he saw the blond do the same thing to someone else.

Sighing, he reapplied the previous transformations on the blond just in time for the toad and the human to find themselves in space again as the toad reverse summoned Naruto and took himself along for the ride.

Or at least he thought it was space again. Something was terribly wrong. His negative emotion senses were going off the charts. Even not focusing on the amount of negative emotions showed an infinite NUMBER of negative emotion sources. And Kurama didn't use the word "infinite" lightly. It didn't make any sense either. Many infinites of the seemingly infinite sources were overlapping each other. As if one person was the source of many negative emotions or one person had many people in them.

.

.

.

Or… reality was overlapping. A LOT. And in a lot of confusing ways.

He tried to look out the eyes of Naruto.

Absolutely nothing made sense.

Deciding to prod with a chakra claw, he formed one out of Naruto's back only to pause… Why did the chakra claw that formed out of Naruto's back seemingly appear several hundred thousand lightyears away? Something had to be messing with his senses.

Doing something he only witnessed humans doing as they were the only ones to always get affected by genjutsu, he concentrated his chakra and pulsed. It shouldn't really do much but he was hopeful it would somehow break a genjutsu put on him or something. Absolutely nothing happened.

And then an avatar of Naruto walked into the sewer looking very green in the face.

"What's going on? I feel so dizzy, nothing makes sense when I look around, and I think I somehow scratched my butt when I moved my hand forward."

That last one got Kurama's attention. Dimension warping? Portals? Did the Ōtsutsuki know they would reappear from where they were reverse summoned and prepared traps there?

"Your chakra that was left behind. What about it? Can you feel it?"

"My chakra? Um, let me check." Watching the blond close his eyes to sense for it, him not being able to do it before as only Six Paths Chakra, when being flared, could be sensed across dimensions.

"Yeah, I think I can sense it… it's so weird, though… it's like it is still together but not together at the same time in some places."

"Like your body is."

"Excuse me?"

"Your hand, which is connected to your body enough that it is getting blood, is somehow positioned behind your butt. Space has no meaning here. Moving an inch could mean moving more distance than you have ever covered your entire life and will cover for the rest of your life."

Seeing the blond about to open his mouth, he continued, "Clones included."

The ninja's mouth paused its opening action and closed again.

"So… how do Gamabunta and I get out?"

"Well, if you knew the Hiraishin..." He got a flat look in return. They both knew he had zero success with getting that particular technique to work.

"Well, this doesn't have much of a chance of working, but since space does seem to have SOME semblance of understandability, it might be possible to try and go straight for the chakra that you sense and actually get to it."

And so the ninja between the two began to try and go towards the chakra. It wasn't too soon before he reappeared in the seal-scape. "This isn't working and makes no sense. Sometimes it feels like I get a lot closer randomly and sometimes it feels like I get a LOT further."

Placing a tail under its chin in thought, it got an idea. "But you can sense the chakra, right?"

"I thought we already established that?"

"Oooh, 'established'. Since when did you start using fancy words?"

"Really? You are gonna make a joke at a time like this? Our lives could be at stake."

"Meh, not really. It's already been proven that I can live through clones, and you could always reverse Summon to Mount Myōboku."

"... Our fight could be at stake?"

Sighing, the fox decided to tell the ninja its idea. "You once claimed to have a higher mastery of that cloning technique than even the mastery granted to Ōtsutsukis by their dōjutsu when it came to dōjutsu techniques."

"Are you doubting me?" The challenging gleam of defiance was strong in his eyes.

Deciding to fan the flames of defiance in Naruto, as doing so might make him try harder than he otherwise would, he nodded.

"Then what would you have me do to prove myself right?"

"You say you can still sense the massive amount of chakra left behind?" Not waiting for a nod or answer, it interrupted its own brief pause, "Prove you can manipulate it from here to make a clone that will summon that toad of yours which will reverse Summon you." If the kid still had his Sage of Six Paths Yang Chakra, the fox wouldn't doubt his ability to do it in the least. As it was? Well, the fox would be full-on doubting if it didn't know of Naruto's propensity of doing the impossible.

And then the kid sat still.

The fox stared curiously at his still avatar in the seal-scape. Did he have a stroke and die off? He wasn't exactly known for sitting still. And then he felt a putrid energy enter the seal and go for the ninja's avatar.

This energy would be defined as peaceful and strengthening by the blond but the fox always had his own opinion on it.

It was leagues more than the kid had ever managed to absorb per second. Mount Myōboku would have gone bankrupt when it came to nature energy if he did this for even a second there. The fox realised that just as he felt a seemingly infinite number of negative emotion sources in this weird place, the ninja was also feeling an infinite amount of nature energy sources.

And then it stopped. The kid had finally achieved perfect Sage Mode. Yet he still didn't move.

The fox narrowed its eyes. What was he doing?

He still wasn't moving, a fact that could be attributed to him using extreme concentration to do the feat that was asked of him but, from what the fox sensed, he was still absorbing nature energy, MUCH more than before while expelling massive amounts of the nature energy he already had through a very over-ratioed amount of chakra.

Basically, for every small amount of chakra released, a massive amount of nature energy was released with it, enough that it would have almost instantly turned the blond into a toad statue if he had that much nature chakra per amount of chakra inside his body. Him doing it outside his body yielded different results such as him not turning to a stone toad statue. And then, he absorbed more nature energy to fix the balance of the two energies in his system to achieve perfect Sage Mode once more.

And then he repeated the act. Again, and again, and again, before the fox got bored.

Turning off its cloak and the imitation cloak again, it started to get comfortable to sleep. Or just regain the small amounts of its chakra used, whichever came first.

It was a few minutes later that some sound was heard. Opening its eyes, it was greeted by the sight of a smirking Naruto. An ear flicked in irritation as he just stood there, smirking.

Another moment passed with nothing but another flick of an ear.

And then a giant tail slowly started to move towards the smirking blond from the side, as if the slowness of the tail would make up for its largeness and the blond wouldn't notice it.

From the flick of the blond's eyes to the tail before looking back at the fox, it knew it had been had.

Or had it?

A tail swept in from the OPPOSITE side and hit the blond.

Wait, what?

It hadn't actually expected to hit him. It let out a small grin in satisfaction.

"Oh fuck you, fox!"

The grin widened, unintentionally giving it a visage that would make most piss their pants, shit their pants, and then faint. Not necessarily in that order.

Actually, in the exact opposite of that order.

Which was why the ninja didn't bother telling it just how scary it looked. He knew it would take it as a compliment.

"You didn't have to do that, you know!"

"The fact that you got fooled by a simple feint was enough of a reason to do it."

All it got was a middle finger before the mental avatar walked out seal-scape, out to where an uncountable number of doors were.

It was silent for a second before the sole occupant in the seal-scape growled. 'He didn't tell me if he succeeded or not on purpose.'

Of course, it could guess, but guessing wasn't always good enough for its curiosity. It was Matatabi's sibling, of course.

It had the nine tails to make up for the nine lives. Not that lives were an issue for a Bijū. Plus, tails were better, which was why he was better—

'Which is why the Jūbi we are fighting is better than you.' came the voice from seemingly everywhere, as it often did when he spoke from outside the seal instead of with an avatar.

It growled in anger.

Upon hearing the growl, an exasperated, surprised voice echoed through the seal-scape. 'Wait, I actually guessed right? I was just making fun of you, I had no clue you were thinking about your tails again! Hehehe. I guess it shows how predictable you are.'

That decided it, then. it was going to give the blond its unfiltered, dense chakra for some time instead of the filtered chakra used for Bijū Mode. Screw the guy having his lifespan shortened and all that jazz, see if it cares.'


(Outside the Seal-scape a While Back.)

Some incredibly odd sound was heard by his ears. He could only assume that it was the sound of Gamabunta, who was either right next to him, an infinite amount of space away, or both—because space was confusing here—who had been summoned away, hopefully according to his plan..

Hopefully, he hadn't unsummoned himself.

Deciding to mess with the fox, he thought, 'Which is why the Jūbi we are fighting is better than you.'

It was just a random thought meant to rile up the fox. Of course, it wouldn't, but that wasn't the point. It was the attempt and intent that mattered.

The growl that he was met with showed that more than just intent was managed today. The fox had actually been annoyed by that.

That meant three things. The fox mostly thought about how great it and its tails were, how it hated the Uchihas and the Sharingan, and how much it hated being sealed.

There was a one in three chance of guessing which one it was. Well, luck liked to shine upon him in these moments.

'Wait, I actually guessed right? I was just making fun of you, I had no clue you were thinking about your tails again! Hehehe. I guess it shows how predictable you are.' He chose a bluff where the fox would think that he knew that it was thinking about its tails.

Feeling a painful flare of unfiltered Bijū chakra for a moment, he wondered if he went too far. After all, the fight was still going on… He looked around the very confusing place he was at… Maybe. The fight MAY be going on still.

At least one thing made sense, though. When he was in the seal-scape earlier, he had urged his chakra to join the nearest other source of his chakra; it had actually made its way there in the form of a… probably intangible and invisible tendril—he didn't know because sight still made no sense in this place. So, even though he didn't understand space or time or whatever in this place, chakra still had its rough methods of finding its nearby sources. Made sense with how chakra returned to the creator of the Kage Bunshin when a clone was dispelled. No reason why chakra couldn't find other sources of itself the same way. Only problem was, he didn't exactly have a jutsu for doing the opposite of the Kage Bunshin chakra returning function. He couldn't quite figure out a way to make one that fast, either. Luckily, he still had some innate form of understanding of chakra that was left from when he used to have the Sun Seal.

And after a little bit of what could only be defined as coercing, asking, pleading, begging, and bribing his chakra to find out other pieces of it, he finally managed to get it across to the arcane energy about just what he wanted. And what the arcane energy understood its creator/master wanted, the arcane energy did.

Sadly, he should have been a bit more exact with his needs as it seemed to find a piece of his chakra that was a couple of hundred thousand times smaller than the piece he wanted—it was kinda odd that there was some other portion of his chakra laying around closer than the mass amounts he had earlier.

After a bit more excruciating moments of trying to convey just what he wanted of it and the energy failing to understand or just misunderstanding, he finally managed to get it to do what was needed.

And his chakra went with the single-minded determination that he had come to expect of his own work ethic. In fact, if he tried to listen closely, he could almost hear the stream of energy going on, chanting "Return. Bigger Source. Find." repeatedly. It almost brought a tear to his eyes.

… Actually, it may have actually brought a tear to his eyes, but the less he thought about that, the better. For all he knew, his eyes were millions of kilometres away or, even worse, occupying the same space somehow. Ugh, being in a place where space didn't work normally hurt his head… wherever his head was.

'Probably in a few billion different places.'

Anywaaaays, once his chakra found the massive amount of chakra he wanted it to find, it connected him to it via a tendril of massive length. Or short. It was kinda hard to tell here. Once it connected, he sent a huge amount of nature energy through the tendril. As much as he could through it without the nature energy becoming too much and just blocking the tendril. A good analogy would be the tendril being a pipe and nature energy being something sludge-like that could solidify under pressure. The pipe would get blocked if there was too much of it in one place.

This was done to achieve perfect balance across ALL of the chakra, whether inside his body or outside.

As for how he could possibly get enough nature energy to achieve perfect balance with the MASSIVE amount of chakra he had left behind? Well, in here, space was odd. Normally, he would be limited to absorbing nature energy from a nearby place to his body. However, over here, he wasn't in any one place. Hell, if he was understanding right, he was overlaying other realities, being overlayed by realities, a whole lot of other overlappings also happening, and at the same time, he wasn't in one place. He also found that he could somewhat interact with the nature energy in some of these realities/dimensions.

With his body in many other places, he had already increased the speed at which he could absorb nature energy, as no place was running low when it was one tenketsu to a seemingly infinite amount of nature energy everywhere he was. Heck, even his chakra pathways were at random places in space, and he found that getting nature energy directly into them avoided stress on his tenketsu. The only problem was that he was having trouble absorbing it directly as he instinctively directed the absorbing nature energy at his tenketsu.

Unlike in a normal place where he would actually start depleting it, he could get nature energy from multiple versions of the same place across dimensions. The only limit was his own body turning to stone if he absorbed too much too fast and the tendril only allowing for so much chakra to be moved through it.

Once he had achieved senjutsu chakra with the mass of chakra he had left behind in his fight, he now had optimum chakra control for what could be one of his greatest feats in life.

Partially leaving the seal-scape, an act that basically meant his avatar still stayed there but with less of his mental power than normal, he focused on the real world.

Crossing his hands… Oh, right… space was funky here.

Attempting to cross his hands and focusing ONLY on the chakra that was left behind, trying his best to convey to his chakra that only THAT chakra was meant to be used, he yelled—not that even that came out right—"Kage Bunshin no Jutsu!"

Quickly, he checked through the tendril of chakra to check if the chakra it was connected to had any change in it or not.

A grin overcame… Oh, right, space was wonky so he had no grin…

A grin would have overtaken his face if he was in a normal, space rules-abiding place. The chakra had halved. Hopefully it wouldn't lead to one of those corrupted clones that had their own personality and didn't listen to their creator.

It was time to mock the fox.

And then the whole thing with it hitting him with the tail happened. He really needed to stop thinking backwards and forwards in such odd ways too much.

And then?


(A Long Distance Away… Or a Short Distance, Who Knows? Space Was Confusing There)

POOF!

Looking around, he was greeted by the sight of Gamabunta and a grinning clone. It worked! The clone had summoned Gamabunta who had reverse summoned him!

Ignoring the Jūbi in the background and the Ōtsutsuki that was probably somewhere on its body, he checked his body to see if he had left any parts behind.

And it seemed all fine. Yes!

POOF!

Because it seemed like a terrible idea to have about half of all his chakra in a clone that could get corrupted any hour or day, now.

Dispelling it was also a terrible idea, he thought as his body, chakra pathways, and tenketsu screamed in agony from having all of THAT chakra put in his body all in one moment. If it was just chakra, he might have been able to just release it out as fast as it came, but nature chakra was denser to work with, which wasn't a great thing in these cases.

On another note, though, he might set a world record for the widest tenketsu ever. Just in this fight, they had widened enough that he could now release multiple times more chakra at a time than he could in the beginning of the fight or ever before that. He was starting to wonder if they would eventually just get wide enough that they would touch each other or just make his entire body one big tenketsu.

One could hope, considering it was one of the disadvantages he had against Ōtsutsukis. Even when he could match them in chakra or even beat them with the help of the fox, he couldn't match them in chakra output when they started getting serious.

And releasing too much could only cause something he liked to describe as "tenketsu burns", and they hurt like a bitch for a while if the fox didn't help heal them. Considering how much he liked to antagonize the fox, that happened a lot more often than he'd like to admit.

The pain increased even more as burning, red chakra covered his body, both hurting it and healing the tenketsu. This was probably the fox's retribution from him making fun of it earlier. Hopefully, this was the last of its retribution.

And then the cloak receded. He was left in just his Sage Mode. He still had no clue where the Ōtsutsuki was as the Jūbi's presence was absolutely messing with Sage Mode's sensor abilities. He felt… exposed.

And then he looked at the Jūbi and felt scared. It wasn't immediately seeable, but if he looked at the point where it had shot its previous attack at him, there was an unnatural darkness starting from there. Incredibly difficult to see as they were in space and darkness was just about everywhere. This unnatural… line(?) of darkness seemed to go on for… Well, he couldn't tell how far.

"Oh..." came a somewhat scared gasp.

Well shit. Whatever that was, it had scared the Kyūbi.

"Oh..." That one was from Gamabunta. Was he the only one not getting it?

Trying to piece things together, he thought of all the facts. 'A big beam came at me. Reverse summoning seemed to fail and send me to a place where space wasn't working. There is now some weird… gap in space.'

"Oh..." Now he got it.

When his reverse summoning to Mount Myōboku was cancelled, he should have been brought back to where he was before he got reverse summoned. He got brought to some weird area that didn't make sense. And, now that he looked at the place where the Jūbi's beam had gone through—a beam of which he was in the trajectory of—he saw something not quite explainable.

The beam itself had not just been powerful, it had destroyed space there. That was terrifying.

And this is where the complications set in. Did this mean that the beast was so powerful that it could break space and time—not that it had done anything to the latter, Naruto was just used to thinking of both of them at once—or was it just something unique to this Ten-Tails that was totally irrelevant to its power? Did this imply each Jūbi had its own special ability or was it just this one?

Not to mention Six Paths Chakra. That chakra had a habit of messing with space and, maybe, time, along with many other things. Did its power do the trick or the potency of its power or the type of power it had? Because each option led to a different threat rating.

"Or its chakra can target concepts and targeted the concept of space."

'Is that even possible?'

"I would reckon it's possible with even regular chakra, considering regular chakra was used to power a seal that forcibly made a contract with the Shinigami, a physical manifestation of the concept of death. Add in Six Paths Chakra, not even the regular kind but the highest quality Six Paths Chakra I have ever felt, and you get a situation where that is a lot more than 'possible'."

Naruto just decided to give up on trying to understand what caused its attack to have the effect that it did because it was hurting his head trying to think of all the variables.

Suddenly, a figure flickered into existence right in front of him. Without his various cloaks to augment him, he had no hope of matching its speed. If the figure had decided to attack him while he was in Sage Mode only, without all of his transformations stacked on top of each other, he would have been done for.

"Do you now understand the futility of your actions?" the Ōtsutsuki stated more than asked, his voice warped from the stream of red chakra covering him, it being supplied by a tendril that led to the Jūbi.

"Listen here, buddy, just because your matured Jūbi has a bunch of cool tricks doesn't mean I am just going to give up."

"Matured? It is actually a juvenile Jūbi. I would go so far as to say it is prepubescent."

"Bullshit! It can't have all of that power without having absorbed it from a planet recently!"

The smirk that was given in response spoke much of how that was wrong.

The smug smirk annoying the hell out of him, he tried punching the guy before he flickered out of existence just as his punch was about to hit him.

Immediately, his attention went to the Jūbi, it would probably now attack as its master willed it— "Is it… licking my chakra?"

Sure enough, the massive amounts of chakra that he couldn't quite fit inside his body was still around, and the Jūbi had apparently found it to be a tasty snack or some treat it could lick; Naruto wasn't quite sure as it would occasionally just open its mouth and take a large chunk of his chakra that was near it in one go or it would just lick the nearby amounts.

… Didn't only juvenile Jūbis yearn for chakra and try to absorb it that much? But wouldn't that imply that it wasn't a matured Jūbi? Nah… He didn't wanna believe that.

"Gamabunta, remember that combined transformation you did with me once?"

A puff of smoke was his answer. "Let's do it again."

"That's your 'amazing strategy?'" His tone carried a hint of disbelief. And by hint, he meant a lot of disbelief.

The toad decided to give its summoner—that it has reverse summoned, so he was sort of the summoner here—the benefit of the doubt.

One minute and one transformation later, it found itself as a Jūbi sized toad.

'This is all sorts of wrong… Toads aren't meant to get this big, it is unnatural.' Gamabunta didn't notice the hypocrisy of his words.

This transformation had taken all the chakra Naruto had, including all the surrounding chakra.

Now, what did this mean exactly? Well, a peaceful tailed beast that had been busy eating chakra suddenly found itself deprived of said snack. The rage that followed was one that would be spoken of in legends if people were around to witness it; it only being less than the rage Sakura felt when she thought some girl was Sasuke's girlfriend.

It would have been an adorable sight if not for the fact that this was a primordial beast that feasted upon worlds, not a puppy that had its food reduced because it was getting overweight.

Its tails aimed towards the equally large toad that seemed to be facing incredible discomfort, or at least that's how it looked. Probably the thought of fighting such a beast that had it so uncomfortable.

As the tails began to glow, Gamabunta and, by extension, Naruto realized that it wasn't exactly possible for a toad to jump in the emptiness of space. So Gamabunta just spat a glob of oil at its eye. The oil hit true to its target.

The screeches that followed could not be heard as Naruto's chakra was no longer in the environment, thus, no longer a medium for sound to travel through.

Another consequence of this was that it tried to rub its eye with its tails. The tips of its tails. The tips that were still glowing, charged up with whatever powerful attack they were meant to release.

The blindingly bright light that followed from the explosion, along with the chakra shockwave was enough to cause intense pain in the eyes of Naruto and Gamabunta's combined transformation along with blowing it away quite far, even with how far away they were from it.

Naruto's chakra, being manipulated by the fox, healed their eyes in a small amount of time. Gamabunta was in awe of it, experiencing accelerated regeneration for the first time.

'I am sorry, brat, but this is all I can handle.' With one last expression of extreme discomfort, the transformation was cancelled and Gamabunta was sent back to Mount Myōboku, too damaged to continue.

'What!? But he was healed! If the shockwave wasn't enough to send him back then why was he sent back after being healed!?'

"Unlike you, he isn't used to too much chakra. I tried but even if I tried my best, I would not have been able to fix his tenketsu and chakra pathways with the amount of chakra you had used in the transformation. It just got worse and worse until he couldn't handle it."

Oh…

"So that's it, then? That's the winning strategy you were so sure of?"

What could he do now? His clones in this dimension—at least those he still held dominion over—were dispelled, and his chakra was finished. The only thing stopping him from freezing in space was a thin layer of the Kyūbi's chakra.

What could he do? He was barely keeping up earlier with both the Imitation Bijū Mode AND the Bijū Mode used together, and now he only had access to Bijū Mode, and that too was if the fox felt like being nice to him.

Meanwhile, the opponent hadn't just shown that they were still in a sealed, base form, but now they had a Tailed Beast of their own on their side. One that was better than the Kyūbi in terms of raw power. Even the Kyūbi had to admit that.

"So, that's it then? Do you finally give up?"

Yes… yes he had.

"Say it."

'What?' He materialized in his mental avatar form in front of the fox.

"Say that you give up."

Anger sparked in his eyes. He had already given up, what else did it want from him?

"Do you give up?"

He had already been beaten, ripped in half, pulverised, felt his atoms try to split apart in every direction, lost his memories, gained them back, and so much more in this fight.

"Say it."

He wanted to at least have it known that he didn't quit in the end. Sure, he did, but to vocalise it meant to make it a reality.

He despised quitting. Despised giving up. The act of just not doing something because it was just 'too hard' was something he thought was not in his blood, not in a single cell of his.

The fox got to its feet, tails moving agitatedly.

"Sa—"

"No." The look he gave back, teeth bared, was wild in nature, daring the fox to challenge his statement.

It was silent for a while, the fox's tails' movements having lost their agitated feeling behind them.

"Then get out of here."

Wanting to get the last word, he opened his mouth before he was drowned in red, malignant chakra. Only his will keeping him from falling prey to it.

He knew why it did this. It no longer believed he kept to his convictions, and so he no longer deserved its complete help and alliance in this fight. He'd have to prove to it that he was actually trying something; doing something. And that he WASN'T giving up.

Returning to the real world with a gasp of pain, he persevered.

Looking at the Jūbi, he realized that the time dilation in the seal-scape made it so that it still hadn't quite shrugged off or healed off the damages from its own attack to its eye. He had time to think.

And think he did, using all the multitasking skills he had to think of something—anything!

It all revolved around the fact that he had no chakra. And, sure he had recovered some, but what could he do with such paltry amounts? Regardless of the fact that the paltry amounts were more than some ninjas would ever have over their whole lives.

He had access to the Kyūbi's chakra, but using any of that in the amounts he needed meant having rage cloud his thinking or completely taking over.

He could try and make a few clones under the hope that they are spawned corrupted and start making their own chakra before dispelling them for their chakra, but he didn't have the time for that.

In the end, it all came down to his low chakra amounts. Heck, even at full capacity, he wouldn't manage much. What he needed was another few hundred thousand clones to dispel. Except he already dispelled all the clones in this dimension… Maybe even all the clones he held dominion over in all dimensions.

Wait…

Didn't his chakra latch onto another piece of itself when he was in that void-ish-like area?

Deciding to check if his hopes were right, he used a burst of chakra—The Kyūbi's—to propel himself to anywhere that was in the trajectory of the Jūbi's Tailed Beast Bomb when it had used it.

It was difficult finding it, it truly was. The only thing he could use to find it was that it was the only place where he couldn't see stars from.

It was also difficult to know how wide it was, how wide it got per meter, and how close he was to it. He really didn't need to get stuck there again. Using a red, arm burning chakra arm, he'd extend it forward just to use it as a reference point for when to stop. When the tip of the arm disappeared, he knew he had a path to his destination. He followed the rest of the arm until he was next to the void.

Taking a look at the Jūbi and seeing that it was almost fully recovered, it's ruined eye healing at a rate that almost made his previous regeneration factor in the fight seem pretty pathetic.

Well… this was it, he thought as he put his hand, not the chakra-formed hand, into the void.

Using Sage Mode to the extreme, he sensed.

He was bombarded by much. Too much. The information would have easily just melted his brain if not for the fact that his was a brain that was used to even getting over 200,000,000 days worth of clone memories in an instant. Chakra made shit possible, never question that.

But not even his brain could handle all of this. Thankfully, it came equipped with one useful function; he didn't always focus on all the memories he got, most were just ignored and put in the background, a sort of evolution of when he would ignore Iruka in the Academy.

'Heh, and they said my ignoring skills wouldn't get me far.'

A large, incredibly large map formed in his mind. A mind consisting of many blue dots everywhere, many even overlapping each other.

What made it even more amazing was that this probably wasn't all of it. His clones had most likely made ways to dimensions even further than the ones this broken space was overlapping.

But here's the beauty of it. Now that he could sense them, he could feel his influence increase. Those that were corrupted enough or far enough were those he held little dominion over. They could even shrug off the dispel command. But now? Now he could sense them. Distance was irrespective, he was both a dimension away and his hand was both near and further away from all of them, just one dimensional overlap away. He was close enough that only the most corrupted in these dimensions could refuse the Boss's dispel order.

And make no mistake, he was the Boss to these clones.

As the Jūbi's eye finally healed, he looked back at it with no fear. Why would he need to fear? He had all the chakra he had ever asked for earlier.

Forcing another hand into the void, somewhat increasing his dominion over more clones as more of him appeared near them, at least as far as chakra and the technique was concerned, he mentally yelled—probably causing the fox a headache—'Dispel!'

The void itself turned blue, the chakra bright enough to start burning at the Jūbi's divine retinas as it stubbornly looked at the man that had annoyed it, the man it was ordered by its master to attack.

And then BILLIONS of clones worth of chakra BURSTthrough the void, actually widening it as it forced its way through.

Oh shit. He may not have thought this through.

"My tenketsu," he whimpered.

Looking down at the seal on his stomach, he decided that he didn't care if the fox was gonna be cramped. He put an arm on it and twisted. And the chakra proceeded to funnel into it. Most of it. Not even the Shinigami had planned for this because a decent amount was still coming through his tenketsu as he tried to quickly funnel it out through other tenketsu. But, then, the seal's designs also weren't meant for this, so the Shinigami wasn't entirely to blame.

His desperation to survive, his desperation for the seal to work, his desperation to not have all his tenketsu burnt out was so intense that his mind recalled a time when it instinctively understood how to communicate with his chakra. How to make it work. His mind desperately tried to convey what it NEEDED to its chakra as it entered him. And from the chakra? A miracle occurred.

He was still Asura's chakra transmigrant. The loss of the Sun Seal shouldn't have done anything to that. But it had… Somehow it had. What it didn't do was stop him from permanently having the slight residue of Six Paths Chakra as all those who have it once are always left with an imprint. An imprint that is just enough that an enemy Ōtsutsuki's Truth-Seeking Orbs recognized the chakra for what it once was as it couldn't disperse it or negate it so it would treat it more solidly than it would anything else.

As all of this chakra came together, it brought together a MASSIVE amount of residue Six Paths Yang Chakra as well. It all kept adding up until it was actually enough to functionally be usable as Six Paths Yang Chakra.

And when he asked for it—no, when he begged for it to help, it focused around the tenketsu around the seal on his stomach and, quickly, writing (figures?) of some unknown language spread in a circle outside the seal. He instinctively understood that he was looking at the language of the Ōtsutsuki's. A seal of Six Paths was augmenting a seal of Death.

The newly made, white-inked—it probably wasn't ink—glowing seal helped so much that all the pain being caused from more chakra coming into his body disappeared as all the incoming chakra all went into the newly augmented seal without a hitch in its path.

God had he missed Six Paths Chakra. At least the Yang half he had.

He wondered what was going on inside the seal.


(Inside Seal)

"I am drowning. Send help—!" The fox was cut off as he was submerged in blue.


(Outside the Seal)

It was probably awesome in there. The Six Paths seal that was augmenting his normal one probably caused the inside to look sweet as hell.

He never quite thought about the fact that he never asked his chakra to change anything to make the insides better. He just asked for it to be able to contain his chakra.


(Inside Seal)

'Gotta escape this seal to some other clone's seal!' it desperately thought as it tried to swim and make sense of the sea, no, ocean—no, even more than that—of blue chakra.


(Outside Seal)

Pulling his hands back, he was rewarded with cold, unfeeling, crispy, burned hands.

Ah… his hands had been the first medium through which his chakra had tried to enter his body…

Well, time to face the Jūbi now, it probably would have readied an attack by now.

As he looked at it, he was greeted with a sight worse than what he thought he'd be greeted with. It was salivating heavily, tongue out and its eye had a gleam of hunger in it as it stared at him.

… It was an actual Juvenile Jūbi, wasn't it?

Well, as long as it wasn't attacking…

He put his hands back in the void. The more time he wasn't attacked, the more he could level the playing field. Putting his hands elbow-deep, unlike the wrist-deep as before, he focused on absorbing nature energy from the various overlapping dimensions the space was phasing between.

The nature energy he managed to absorb could honestly only be described as an ungodly amount. And it all went inside the seal to mix with the chakra in there, the glowing augmenting seal having most of his unused Six Paths Chakra, something he knew he would have to conserve. He couldn't produce more of that in usable amounts even though he should be able to. It was his spiritual right.

As he kept absorbing, he realised his hands were turning to stone. Realising his folly, he bent and managed to get only his stomach/seal into the void. And began absorbing again.

This time, it began to immediately funnel into the seal, leaving his body alone.

As he finished absorbing the nature energy once he felt that he had balanced all of it with all of the chakra besides the Six Paths Chakra, He could have almost sworn he heard the fox scream about drowning in Nature Chakra.

And then the Ōtsutsuki was in front of him again. Naruto prepared to fight him before seeing the look of absolute shock on his face.

As the Ōtsutsuki opened his mouth to speak, his chakra formed a bubble of air around them for them to speak—a pretty thoughtful and nice gesture, Naruto thought.

"How is it that a low level being like you has managed to figure out how to have that much chakra!? The Ōtsutsuki have had millennias to perfect our methods of harvesting chakra, and yet you show your face here and not only show a bastardisation of a Dimensional Manipulation technique of ours but you also have your own way of increasing your chakra!?"

"Um… yeah?" He was only going along with this to give his arms time to heal. They had been 'rekt' pretty badly.

"How did you do it!?" The man having a mad look on his face, hope shining in his voice at getting Naruto's corrupted Kage Bunshin chakra harvesting ability.

Naruto's "power-hungry" radar was going off the charts. In other words, he definitely wasn't telling.

"Because fuck you, that's how." He truly didn't mean to say it. Sure, he wanted to say it, but he didn't actually plan on vocalising it. Curse his mouth.

Although, it was interesting to see the man's face turn red, though.

"I will break you. I will take the knowledge from your very SOUL if I have to!"

Was that just a Human Path Rinnegan reference?

The attack hadn't even started when the Six Paths Yang Chakra in his body helped move him away, the chakra sensing the other Six Paths Chakra being flared irritatedly before the other chakra started flaring primarily Yin Based Six Paths Chakra for a Rinnegan technique. The Yang based chakra, remembering the last time it was faced with Six Paths Yin Chakra, categorised the other Six Paths Chakra user as an enemy.

He had barely avoided being touched by a hand shrouded in a Human Path aura.

He wasn't sure if he could recover from that. Sure, a healing factor was great and all, but it didn't do much when it came to damage to the soul.

Deciding to increase the distance between himself and the Ōtsutsuki, he tried propelling himself via sending chakra out of his legs, his arms still pretty much fried. It might have just been better to cut them off and use chakra arms instead.

Unfortunately, Naruto didn't get far before he felt the vacuum of space get a resistance to it that completely stopped him in his tracks.

The Ōtsutsuki was using his technique again, enriching the surroundings with so much dense chakra that Naruto couldn't move through it.

Naruto watched as an arm got closer to his face, inch by inch, centimeter by centimeter, and him being unable to do anything about it. The Six Paths Yang Chakra was churning inside his body, ready to do anything against the enemy that it had recognised as a hostile, but he kept it tightly inside his body; if that chakra was sealed or stolen by his opponent, his chances of doing much in this fight would plummet.

As his mind raced through technique after technique, it flashed through 3 different instances in life. When he learned the Rasengan, when Neji used the Hyūgas' 'ultimate defense', and when he had formed a dome of rotating chakra in the shape of a Rasengan when he was being trained to dispel genjutsu.

Remembering all those moments, he began to try and make a version of any of those that could help. Releasing chakra out of all the tenketsu that worked, he began having the chakra rotate. To grind. To continuously rip into anything inside the sphere that wasn't his body.

It took an absurd amount of chakra to even do that, the chakra of the Ōtsutsuki weighing heavily on him and his chakra as he tried to direct it but, eventually, he made it work.

The Ōtsutsuki's hand went through it without even bothering to absorb the chakra. As if to show that he didn't need to even bother absorbing it or take him seriously.

So he used the fox's hatred infused chakra with just a tiny amount of Six Paths Yang Chakra to direct and strengthen it.

The rotating chakra around him took a light reddish glow before it ripped the approaching arm to shreds before not even leaving those shreds behind.

"Haaaaaaa!" And then he enlarged the sphere, actually managing to get a part of the Ōtsutsuki's body in the attack, him being too shocked at the sudden reversal in roles for the nth time this battle to properly dodge.

As the sphere dissipated, Naruto got a view of the damage. The Ōtsutsuki had instinctively used his other arm to shield himself but had not been able to shift from Human Path to a Path that could have helped in time.

In other words, Naruto wasn't the only person without the use of both arms in this fight anymore. He had somewhat evened the playing field!

And then the enemy's arms healed themselves before his unbelieving, surprised eyes. No, healing didn't seem right… Not even instantaneous healing seemed correct, even though they weren't there one second and were the next second.

It was more like they had materialised.

And boy were they solid. Because, yes, he had already gotten punched through. The fox's chakra would only do so much healing without its cooperation so he decided to risk it and go with the old but gold tactics.

"Kage Bunshin no Jutsu!" Seal-lessly, there were only so many he could make. Thankfully, the Six Paths Yang Chakra was there to help. The best part? He didn't use it for the clones, he just had it guide his chakra properly into making the number of clones he wanted. So none of it was wasted.

The next second, a large cloud of smoke was everywhere, seemingly overtaking the silver colour of the chakra being released by the opponent.

And then?

Orange. EVERYWHERE.

He was a genius. Now, time to run. Oh… his opponent's arm was still in him. He had forgotten about that tiny problem.

'Henge.'

Turning himself into something more compact so he was no longer being impaled, he began to cancel the transformation to run, before he was kicked out of the transformation. If it wasn't for the Six Paths Yang Chakra strengthening the point of impact, it would have been the end of him.

As he flew into the hoard of clones, he allowed himself a painful sigh of relief. He was never going to be found. It was like finding a needle in a few million haystacks.

And then he found the enemy's chakra increase, the chakra pressure increasing enough to make it painful just to be in there. And then his clones started popping by the millions.

His opponent didn't need to find him when he could make the haystacks go away…

Using a highly concentrated burst of chakra to blow away all the enemy's chakra in around a 600m radius, he formed a Rasenshuriken before throwing it, a red chakra claw following after it in case changing its direction was required. It was seemingly for naught as the enemy absorbed it. Making nine Rasengans, he sent them flying at him with chakra claws as well, trying to hit the opponent from different angles, only for the opponent to absorb the first two to hit at the same time and flicker just 3 feet to the left before absorbing another two, a chakra claw, which left one Rasengan just stuck in space, and kicking a chakra claw in such a way that the Rasengan on in its claw collided with another Rasengan.

And then he just absorbed the last two as they looped around him.

'He can only absorb from his hands?'

The man then looked at him in a "what was that supposed to achieve?" fashion.

He got that answer from the Rasenshuriken that hit him from behind. When Naruto blew away the opponent's chakra away earlier, he stopped the only medium for sound here. When Naruto made clones, he spread his chakra everywhere.

The Ōtsutsuki had no method to sense the Rasenshuriken as anything different in the surroundings, nor could he hear the screeching sound it would normally make.

And lastly? He didn't think some clones in close proximity to him survived when he started popping them with chakra pressure earlier. Too bad corrupted clones came out tougher upon creation and only became harder to kill after that.

The explosion had barely begun, the Ōtsutsuki's eyes slowly widening in shock before another Rasenshuriken hit him. And another. And yet another. There were many clones readying various throwable/projectile attacks, but the corrupted ones got there first as they were the closest to the enemy.

It was a solid minute of bombardment before the Jūbi decided to intervene, it being bored of nothing different happening and seeing delicious chakra just being thrown at its master had it all riled up. Its tails began glowing white and it opened its mouth.

And began making a Tailed Beast Bomb WITHOUT the tails as the tails sent individual lasers of energy at everything in close proximity to its creator. All the Rasenshurikens making their way to the Ōtsutsuki were destroyed midway, and a decent number of chakra claws having Rasengans were also removed from existence.

Naruto, upon seeing this and seeing the Jūbi's hunger for his chakra, decided to do the Ōtsutsuki dirty. He released a massive amount of his chakra from inside the seal, and left it right next to the Ōtsutsuki.

And as expected, the Jūbi's eye locked onto it with laser-like precision, not even remembering that its master was in the way, it gave no heed to the fact that the attack in front of its mouth was entirely unstable and uncompressed, and it shot.

The large orb that was shifting uncomfortably like it was about to pop didn't even manage to keep its stability all the way to its target and blew up just a few hundred thousand kilometers from its starting point.

That didn't matter as much when it went boom, though.

Naruto had made his way as far away as he could when the attack was being charged, and when it was shot he had closed his eyes, covered them with chakra coated arms, and looked away from where he expected it to blow up.

And, for an instant, he almost felt like he could see through his arm, see through the bone in it when the explosion happened, and then his retinas probably burnt out again. That, however, had to be ignored as he screamed, not that it could be heard in the void of space. The chakra that was blown away by the attack had hit him hard enough that he felt it under his version 2 Six-Tailed transformation. Any higher and he wasn't sure if he could keep enough of his mental faculties in check to make sure to run.

As he screamed his voice box out from the pain, the dense chakra having hit just about everything in his body, unlike something that would just remove a body part, this was pain unlike any that he was prepared for.

And then the actual explosion hit.

As his skin was eradicated instantly and the explosion moved to do more damage to his body, he felt himself lose all senses of it.


(Seal-Scape)

There was only so long the fox could hold his breath for when being drowned by chakra, apparently. And, maybe, he could actually breathe it in but he did not want some foul, disgusting, human chakra in his body unless it also came with a human body he could chew on.

So he called for the blond as the last vestiges of air ran out while it held its breath. Again, it didn't really need it, but the Sage had, for some reason, designed them to actually have instincts that they didn't need, such as the intense urge to breathe after holding their breath.

As the blond was called, he planned to give an ultimatum. Either take all the chakra out of here or bring him out of the seal in avatar form.

When the blond actually appeared, something that was surprising considering he had to survive against a Jūbi and an Ōtsutsuki of the highest class while it, the almighty Kurama, destroyer of hope, being of hatred, only gave him minimal help. It was actually shocking he survived this long, even though his chakra still being in the seal was proof enough of him still being alive.

Well, that or the Six Paths Yang seal that was augmenting the seal was just THAT good.

Heck, just surviving for this long seemed to be enough for him to have made up for annoying the fox earlier by giving up and, thus, breaking his convictions and word to the fox.

As the blond's avatar appeared, the chakra made room for him, which unintentionally put even more pressure on the fox.

Realising that opening its mouth to talk to him would lead to the human's chakra getting inside it, it instead offered a fist bump.

As the mental avatar reciprocated, they found themselves in a white void.

Before the fox could even share its intentions, it was bombarded with the ninja's. The surprise bombardment led to the ninja getting the first word in.

"So, you are probably calling me back here because I proved myself and you are now willing to team up with me again?"

Taken aback because it literally wasn't watching the fight because of it going through the closest thing it could to drowning, it let out a very well put together response. "What? Oh, yeah, sure; whatever. Let's go with that."

A very put together response indeed.

But, hey, if it got him out of this stuffed up place then great.


(Outside Both the Ninshu Area and the Seal-scape)

The explosion was still quite in the process of destroying the deeper layers of skin, not quite having gotten far enough as to remove the nerves on his back that would have helped with the lessening of pain receptors screaming in his brain.

And then, from his stomach/seal, gold chakra burst forth, not even halfway to covering his form before azure chakra followed, making a second layer over the golden energy form that was almost encapsulating his entire form.

The last vestiges of the red cloak left him as an extremely potent, amazing force in the form of the two chakras took over. Both chakras working in sync to provide a form that held more power than any form bar a divine form that he had once used so long ago. And even that form paled in comparison to the sheer passive regeneration abilities of this form.

And thus, it became a battle of healing his body faster than the explosion could damage it.

The explosion winning, if only by a slight amount, before the fox properly acclimated to the forms he was using, its form being made of hazy chakra around him as it partially manifested. And then? It focused. The explosion stood no chance against his healing.

He felt clones pop by the millions, corrupted or not, their Sage Mode-only enhanced bodies not being able to keep stable.

Yet he still felt some survive. Odd. Curious, oh so very curious as to how that happened.

Nine, yellow chakra arms came out of his back before being joined by an equal amount of its blue brethren.

Rasengan, Rasenshuriken, Lava Release: Rasenshuriken, Vibration Release: Rasenshruriken, and many other variants formed, being protected from destabilising from the explosion that was still in progression by thick layers of blue chakra being guided by gold chakra.

Whether strong or not, the various attacks were thrown back at where the explosion had come from, partially to test if their opponent—who had 'coincidentally' been in the way last they saw him—or this Jūbi had any odd weakness that they could find.

As the chakra claws moved, the attacks in the claws, held in thick layers of chakra, also moved, before the claws began extending at a speed that would have made Orochimaru's Kusanagi green with envy. It wasn't long before they felt the attacks hit.

Not waiting for a retaliation, Naruto—with closed eyes—flew, chakra being used to propel him at speeds he had never matched except for one time in his life.

Negative emotion sensing leading him, he made sure to go around the mass of hatred that he was sure was the Ōtsutsuki.

It was hardly a second later that he found himself in front of the Jūbi, it seemed perfectly fine from his attacks from what he was sensing as was expected, although it didn't hurt to hope.

"It looks rattled."

Thank goodness for the Nine-Tailed fox manifestation around him that could see while he was still being blinded by the incredible display of light from the explosion that still hadn't run its course.

'Any idea if that's from its own attack or from one of mine?'

"We can test."

Ignoring the questioning look he gave its avatar, it made 9 chakra claws before making 9 various attacks that were used earlier before shooting them at the dazed-looking, planet-sized Jūbi.

The explosions that followed would have been impressive by the looks and the feels of them but he had just been through an explosion from the Jūbi's attack, and it had sorta set high expectations there.

Also the fact that he still couldn't open his eyes…

'See anything?'

"... Yeah, it looks completely fine from that. Must have been its own attack."

'Woah, woah, woah! You really think you can get that past me? I know you only tried your attacks. We still have mine from earlier.'

"This is ridiculous."

'Get your pride under control.'

Forming nine Azure chakra claws, he prepared his own attacks. Unfortunately, the Jūbi chose this time of all times to attack; for something of its size, its tails came at him way too fast!

Blowing chakra from his newly healed hands—something he should definitely thank the fox for, they had been useless for a while now—he barely managed to speed to the side enough to avoid the tail. Only to proceed to watch with wide… well, not wide eyes but you get the point, as it copied what Naruto was doing and started expelling way too damn much crimson chakra from that same tail, actually managed to get it to stop and reverse directions straight at him.

Oh… well... this this was going to hurt.

And then the tail started glowing with red, malicious, instantly-limb-melting chakra.

Him and his big mouth…

Shooting his half-prepared attacks at it, he prepared to use the explosions from them to help him be propelled away only to sense his attacks… for the lack of better word, melt, as they hit the tail.

No such explosion happened.

Closing his eyes… Oh right, they were already closed, he prepared for what was possibly his death.

Readying his Six Paths Yang Chakra, he wasn't sure if he could actually enter a transformation fast enough.

And then?

He felt blips of chakra in his mind.

His clones! The ones that he felt had survived!

Feeling the blips get closer at astounding speeds, he allowed himself to hope.

Why were some of them slowing?

"You lucky, insane brat… If your tactics from teenage-hood still work here, I will willingly do whatever Shukaku tells me to do for a day."

So, whatever it was, it was similar to something he had done in teenage-hood?

Feeling the uncountable blips of chakra seemingly form a curved line of chakra, he felt the nearest blip about to crash into him.

Unfortunately, he wasn't the only one to see it. The Jūbi, predicting where he'd go from the clone crashing into him, started moving another one of its tails to his predicted trajectory. His heart fell. The clone wasn't fast enough to hit him at a speed that could shoot him fast enough that he could clear the path before the Jūbi's tail blocked it.

And then the clone passed by, utterly missing him.

Welp, that was a terrible way to die. "Death by cloning missing to save you." Was running through his mind.

Maybe one of the other uncountable clones could help? His heart fell further when he felt their blips having completely stopped. Guess even they gave up. Most were even starting to accelerate away!

And then the clone that had missed him blew up. The concentrated explosion was such that he actually felt both of his transformations blown away for a second, the cold, emptiness of space being felt by him before his defense covered him again, his body flying away at incredible speeds but not fast enough to avoid the tail of doom. He flew right into another blip.

This particular clone had the fun of smashing a prematurely unstable Rasengan intohim, the explosion barely increasing his speed before this clone blew up as well. He felt himself make way to another blip of chakra.

'Oh!' he mentally exclaimed. It was a game of "Blow the Naruto to safety". This clone could not hit him with a Rasengan, his speed being too much for it to hit him. It exploded nonetheless.

The next few clones had already started speeding up before he did, and they did manage to hit him quite hard before exploding. Also, did he see some sadism in some of their eyes before they attacked him?

And he finally cleared the length of the tail. His clones had done it!

And then he was punched by another speeding clone with a Rasengan on the tip of its fist before it blew up soundlessly.

Alright, so he hadn't imagined the sadism, he thought as more and more clones unnecessarily kept the act up, making him go further and further from the tail.

But you know what? They had deserved it. They got him away from the tail and, hence, his eminent death, so he figured they deserved it.

It was only as a clone got an Ultra Big Rasenshuriken prepared that he decided that enough was enough and he diverted his trajectory so that he missed it.

Looking at the mass of clones that all had Rasengans and other techniques in their hands, he was greeted—because he could finally open his eyes now—with sheepish grins from many of them.

Looking further, he was greeted with the sight of many clones forming a rope of clones, each one holding the next one's legs. He supposed that was another idea to get him further away? Too bad it wouldn't be needed.

Looking behind him, he wondered if he was imagining it or was the Jūbi getting closer?

"You aren't imagining it. It's shooting chakra from its back to get closer."

Ah…

Looking at the rope/ladder of clones that went pretty damn far, he realized that he may have use of it yet. His hands started to glow an intense azure, seemingly overtaking the gold as they began blowing what seemed like azure flames, thrusting him and giving him a ridiculous acceleration. Giving the clone with the Ultra Big Rasenshuriken a warning glare as even he didn't want to know how it felt like to get hit by that particular technique. What was worse was that he wasn't exactly sure if he could heal from that… it was one of those more instant attacks that attacked everything at once, leaving no time for anything to heal.

As he reached the clone-ladder, he felt an ominous spike of chakra for an instant. The Ōtsutsuki might be back in action soon.

As soon as he reached the clone ladder, he stopped the intense flow of azure chakra to his hands, the lack of pressure being somewhat relieving before azure took over his legs and began blasting from there. It was difficult to keep balance like this but it left his hands free to work with his chakra claws in pulling himself 'up' the clone-ladder. His pulling being carefully at just the right level of force to not dispel the clones, it wouldn't do to break a clone before he could even properly pull on it.

'Kyūbi!'

"I am on it."

Attack after attack, Bijūdamas to Super Powered Bijūdama were shot, but it may as well have been throwing kunai and shuriken at it for all it did.

'AIM FOR THE EYE!'

"WHERE DO YOU THINK I AM AIMING!?" The fox obviously disgruntled, it wasn't every day that it fought against something that outmatched it much less was seemingly unaffected by all its attacks.

'You think it's absorbing them!?'

"No, the explosions did happen. It is just too big for them to do much."

'Maybe taunt it or trick it into trying to shoot another one of those unstable Tailed Beast Bombs that blew up in its face?'

"And how did that work for you last time?"

It was silent for a while—literally silent since there still wasn't exactly a medium for sound to travel through besides solids, or else they'd probably be hearing all sorts of horrific things from the beast after them.

'Wanna switch?'

While its first response was a definite, disgusted "no", it swallowed its pride and agreed. "Sure."

Gold chakra claws stopped shooting attacks and began being used to 'climb' while azure claws stopped 'climbing' and started forming attacks that Naruto knew how to form. The body's own hands instantly began moving much more clumsily than before, seeming to make its previous desperate movements almost graceful in nature, and its eyes became red; its cloak became slightly more red in colour as well.

As one particular attack hit it, the beast actually slowed down.

'Holy fuck, the Vibration Release: Rasenshuriken to the eye did something!'

Feeling morale heightened, they looked at the clones that had already been used as a pulling force, their purpose done but now they could have another one. With but a nod from him, they knew what to do.

They left a trail of Vibration Rasenshurikens behind as each clone that was left behind detached itself from the clone 'ladder' and formed one each.

A barrage of seemingly tiny blips hit the beast's eye, seemingly not even causing an explosion but the beast was obviously feeling it. The disruption in its focus was such that it stopped its acceleration towards them.

'Idea.'

"Shoot."

'Switch.'

Switch they did.

"Idea?"

'Full Tailed Beast Mode with my chakra to form an avatar around its size.'

"Not dense enough."

'Use your own chakra to form a sort of "skin" around it to prevent my chakra from escaping and keeping it in form?'

"... Might work. If I have enough chakra to form that much 'chakra skin'."

'If needed, we'll have to use the paltry amounts of Six Paths Yang Chakra I have recovered via my clones.'

"That will work."

'But at what cost? We can't afford to lose that before we fight the Ōtsutsuki again.'

"Let's go!"/"Let's go!"

Azure chakra blew out of the seal like intensely pressurised water might out of a broken dam, every bit of it knowing via its master's command that it was to be led by the allied golden chakra.

The golden chakra made the rough outline of a nine-tailed fox, the azure chakra filling it up until it actually looked like a normal-sized, albeit a bit odd, Tailed Beast Mode avatar.

And then it started growing, the golden 'skin' keeping the azure chakra in shape being stretched out, making it seem like it was one needle away from popping. The Kyūbi sorta did the closest thing it could to gritting its teeth as the toll of keeping up two transformations on the blond, one of which wasn't even meant to be a working transformation, and then also exerting this much chakra while trying to keep the unruly, azure chakra's pressure on his chakra from blowing the transformation up was slowly getting to it.

Sighing in annoyance and disgust, it decided to take help from something for once—something deemed amazing by many of those that knew of its existence and its capabilities but the fox never liked taking help from other things.

A thin tendril of gold flew to where it estimated the void that they were trapped in earlier was. And then it started willingly, if barely willingly, absorbing nature energy from the many dimensions.

The mass amount of nature energy was quickly absorbed by the fox, much to its disgust at having to rely on an outside power, strengthening it manifold. The golden chakra layer strengthened enough to the point where the transformation gained back its details while still growing, instead of looking like an inflated yellow/blue balloon about to pop.

Eventually, though, the transformation stopped getting larger, not even Nature Chakra and Kurama's Nature Chakra granted the ability to control THIS much chakra into such a condensed, solid-like form.

"You are going to have to use it."

'I know...'

Taking a paltry amount of Six Paths Yang Chakra out of the paltry amounts he had, he mixed it with Nature Energy to make Six Paths Yang Sage Chakra. Not quite a proper Six Paths Sage Mode as the rest of the Six Paths Yang Chakra still rested on the outskirts of the Eight Trigrams seal, to be used as a last resort, the chakra still showed a difference in his transformations due to its potency. His azure and gold cloak shortening to a jacket, the Six Paths Yang seal that was augmenting the original seal he had on his stomach glowing a bright white as the Kyūbi's seal turned into a perfect circle that glowed orange. Hints of black clothing appeared in many parts of his clothing before the transformation stopped halfway, the chakra he was using was not enough for a full transformation.

It was enough for his plans for it, however, as the instinctual understanding of chakra he now had allowed him to properly corral his chakra into not putting too much pressure on the outer golden layer while still increasing the chakra to increase the size of the avatar. The perfect chakra control helped, too.

And, soon enough, there was a Kyūbi avatar just as big as the Jūbi. This all happened in seconds if not less.

The Jūbi just blinked twice, not quite sure if getting hit in the eye that many times caused it some vision problems or if there was really something on its size against it.

As it realized it was all just made of chakra and, hence, basically one big treat for it if it could just get its teeth in there or use 'skin' to skin absorption, it began 'thinking' of the best way to eat it.

Too bad the golden outer-layered, azure energy-filled fox didn't have any such compunctions from attacking it, a fist crashed into it with all the force of a 25k km radius asteroid going at quite the speed.

The punch seemed to do more damage to the fox avatar than the beast as the blue chakra in it struggled to maintain form. The fist almost imploded in on itself from hitting the immovable force that was the Jūbi.

'Fox! Give me control of the layer of chakra keeping it together. I can do so much more with the dense chakra with my currently perfect chakra control!'

Disgruntled, control was given and, almost immediately, the golden skin tightened, forming a much more solid, thick layer of chakra that was meant for this, unlike the azure chakra as its true nature was NOT for it to act as a solid.

The next punch was one the Jūbi was ready for, it using its hands for the first time in the fight to block. Its lack of combat ability was shown as the block was bypassed, the Jūbi clearly not used to fighting beings of its size, just used to overpowering them. The fist was deliberately aimed at the eye and hit true—well, it hit the eyelid, anyways, but it was success enough, Naruto thought.

In response, the eyelid glowed red, the fist barely managed to disconnect before it was covered in a layer of the same chakra it had covered its tail with earlier. His bastardised Six Paths Sage Mode warning him not to touch it, he took heed and made sure the punch that came from the side, while its eye was closed, did NOT get close to the eye.

The punch actually tilted the great beast as it presumably roared in pain, the fox avatar roaring back in response, the sounds not heard but the malicious waves of chakra formed by both roars were felt by both parties.

The waves of chakra threatening to destabilise the barely held together form of the gigantic—even more gigantic than usual—nine-tailed fox and helping the chakra of billions of clones leak from it as a result.

As its eyelid stopped glowing red, a tail started glowing, a hint that it was the next appendage to be used for an attack, Naruto and the Kyūbi made sure to be wary of it.

"Did you notice?"

'Yes, it seems to only be able to make that chakra around one part of its body at a time. Let's not assume that yet, though.'

As the Jūbi's body continued tilting from the punch, it maneuvered its body just right so it could spin and swing its tails at them. Using one of their own tails, they intentionally let a hole form in the golden skin there, thus leaking azure chakra which was forced out so hard that the Tailed Beast started being propelled above the tails. Cutting off the flow by fixing the golden layer of chakra there after knowing that they would avoid the Jūbi's tails, especially the glowing one, they used the upwards but somewhat angle changing force from the tail to spin themselves and slam their own tails into the Jūbi. Succeeding in the endeavour, they watched with a hint of satisfaction as the previously thought to be impervious beast seemingly let out a roar of pain as it was blown below them.

The beast, seeming to have enough of fighting in ways it wasn't used to, went back to what it was used to: raw force.

Opening its mouth, the back of its throat glowing bright enough that it wouldn't take a genius to know what was going to happen, it seemed to smirk at them from how satisfied its eye looked as it looked at them. That was before two hands from the fox avatar forcefully closed its mouth, the fox avatar visibly smirking as azure chakra left through the gaps in golden teeth as it smirked, leading to an imposing image of its own.

They watched as the Jūbi gained a look of fear as it realised what was about to happen soon; it trying to struggle hard to get away with not enough time to swing a tail or arm at the hands keeping its mouth shut, it panicked, not remembering how much they seemed to avoid its crimson armour earlier.

And then it looked at them with one last look of panic before seemingly resigning to its fate as it closed its eye.

And then holes started appearing in its throat and mouth as intense lasers of energy began escaping its form from the explosion that had presumably happened inside it.

"If any of these lasers hit you, you are doomed." The fox remarked as it saw the lasers doing something similar to one of its earlier attacks; they were also dealing damage to space.

At point-blank range to the explosion, Naruto knew chances of that happening were high. 'I know. It was nice knowing you. Just wanna say that in case I do die.'

"I suppose it was nice knowing you as well."

'Well, isn't this a touching moment, fox?'

The fox didn't respond as, finally, a laser had pierced a piece of the avatar they had formed. As more and more holes formed in the head and neck of the beast, they accepted that this could be the end.

"I may have an idea."

'Then good luck.'

The fox felt the blond relinquish his Six Paths Yang Chakra's control to it. If this wasn't a last resort moment then nothing was.

It didn't exactly need it, but the sentiment was appreciated.

Letting go of the Jūbi's mouth was a big no-no, it used its tails to achieve its goal while its companion tried his hardest to stabilise the avatar and, especially, help stabilise the arms keeping the Jūbi's mouth closed.

The tails extended until they reached the back of the Jūbi. Making sure to avoid the glowing, red tail, they grabbed one of its tails and, almost instantly, the tail used to grab it started destabilising.

Painstakingly managing to pull the tail, using the Six Paths Yang Chakra it thought it wouldn't need for the act of stabilization, it brought the tail around the Jūbi's mouth and tied it there.

'Holy fuck… This takes "stop punching yourself" to the next level, if punching was replaced with choking yourself.'

Releasing the tail but keeping its hands on the mouth just in case as the lasers continued blowing holes, one actually blowing through a tail of the avatar.

Grimacing as that was one tailed lost, it being a deal to a being that was proud about tails like itself, it held another tail of the Jūbi, the chakra metal encasing a decent portion of it trying hard to disrupt the tails pulling it, the Kyūbi brought the tail around the neck, making sure the chakra metal parts faced the neck as it tied that tail around its neck.

And then? The lasers stopped.

As the Kyūbi let go of the mouth, nothing came out.

'You fucking madlad...'

"Oh, I wouldn't celebrate yet." As if to answer the Kyūbi, lasers started bursting holes out of the back of its head.

It was a tense few seconds as they watched to make sure if any more would come their way, but no, tying the mouth and the neck seemingly did the job.

'How?'

"Because I am just that awesome."

Deciding to let the fox have the moment as it had earned it, he tried to figure it out himself.

He didn't get it.

"Of course your pitiful brain doesn't get it"—Naruto decided to let that one slide—"but luckily for you, I am feeling most merciful and shall explain in case your pitiful brain explodes from the stress." At this point, his eyes were twitching.

Must. Not. React.

"Us Tailed Beasts have incredibly strong jaws/mouths—more durable than the rest of our bodies—as it is required if we are to survive the pressure of a full powered Bijūdama. The same is true for our stomachs for the rare variants where we swallow them, and our tails are strong as well because they represent our status."

'You totally made that last one up, didn't you?'

'I noticed that the Jūbi's tails had Ōtsutsuki grade chakra metal on them.' Yep, the fox was ignoring his statement. And also making up stuff. There was no such term as "Ōtsutsuki grade chakra metal". They had their chakra rods and all, but that was the closest thing as far as he knew. "So I wondered if it could be used to block out parts of the explosion from its own technique, even though it was slightly breaking space." To this, fox pointed around them, showing him the cracks in space that followed the previous lasers' trajectories.

"And I was right. It did block them, or conduct them through the tail, I am not quite sure."

'Huh… So, one down, one to go?'

"Yes, one dow—two to go."

'What?'

"Just help me recover the tail and other parts lost during that ordeal."

'Alright, I don't quite get why I need to—oh my god, it is getting back up!' Faster than the Kyūbi could boast of its superiority, the tail and various holes in the avatar were fixed, azure chakra no longer flooding out of them like some odd parody of blood leaking from its wounds.

They watched as it 'got up' despite its many wounds and the fact that its mouth and throat were most likely fried on a dimensional scale.

Something was different now, though. The beast stared warily at them. He didn't recall a Jūbi having this much intellect.

"Human, I can no longer sense the Ōtsutsuki."

'... Maybe the Rasenshuriken and the attack from the Jūbiactually killed him?'

The annoyed look given at him made him take back his statement. 'Alright, alright, maybe he is healing himself or something.'

"His ability to fix his physical body was shown in your fight with him. If he was fine enough to hide, he would be fine enough to fix his body."

'Let's just take care of the Jūbi first.'

Both Tailed Beasts started expelling massive amounts of chakra in order to propel themselves at each other.

Or…

'Is it running?' the ninja thought incredulously.

Their avatar being covered from the highly pressurised chakra being emitted by the Tailed Beast to run, they realized the highly corrosive chakra was actually damaging them.

Moving slightly to the side to avoid it, they realized the Jūbi noticed the movement as one of its tails started to specifically aim some corrosive chakra at them.

'I can't just keep wasting chakra like this. The speed at which I am blowing it away from the avatar is making it go way too far for me to recover it.' He gave the fox a status report. 'Ideas?'

"I might have two or three."

As the fox opened his mouth wide and began to move its tails to its mouth, he quickly blurted out, "An idea that DOESN'T waste too much chakra, thank you very much."

The fox seemed to give him a pout, something that creeped him out from his place inside of its modified avatar. It seeming very upset over not being allowed to do its technique of mass destruction. Not that he was sure it could even be done on the scale that it wanted, anyways. His chakra could do many things, but to form a Bijūdama? Yeah, no. No amount of manipulating his chakra was going to magically make it form the negative to positive ratio needed for a Bijūdama. Heck, it wouldn't make a positive or a negative energy to begin with.

Spreading its tails over its head, making the only place chakra was used to propel them forward as the back—it unintentionally just looked like it was farting azure energy and being propelled by it—the tails lengthened until they reached the escaping Tailed Beast, grabbing on various parts of it, the Kyūbi gave Naruto the go-ahead to stop wasting chakra as it used its tails to pull itself towards the beast.

This was easier said than done, however, as the Kyūbi soon found out. It found itself flipped around until its back was facing the beast, being pulled along by the panicking divine beast by the tails. It became a space version of holding on to a rope connected to a horse in the hopes that one could stop the horse somehow instead of the horse running away.

Eventually, the Kyūbi managed to make its avatar's tails pull itself on top of the beast with more tails before biting into it.

Of all the places to bite, it bit into chakra metal and found its teeth gone.

Managing to remake them, it prepared to bite into a correct area before the beast it was on figured out what was going on and started spinning in the attempt to make them lose their grip on it. It quickly found out, however, that managing to do that was harder than it should have been as the Kyūbi wrapped its tails around its torso, an area that was almost entirely devoid of any of the annoying metal that had caused issues in their fight with it.

And then the avatar bit into it, finding a surprising amount of resistance as the teeth barely made any headway into the 'skin' of the beast. It was still enough to make the beast feel pain, however, as it stopped accelerating and twisting; roaring waves of damaging chakra at them in pain—or maybe anger, it was hard to tell.

'Fox, switch.' Such was their teamwork that no response was needed but the feeling of the Fox taking over his human body while he tried to reorient himself into controlling the chakra from the seal.

'There has got to be a better way of doing this,' he thought.

Oh… wait, there was.

'Switch.'

Finding himself back where he was used to, he proceeded on with his plan.

Crossing his fingers, he muttered, "Kage Bunshin no Jutsu."

A single clone burst into life right next to him inside the avatar, fully encased with all of the chakra forms that he had as this was the first clone he had made under all of the current transformations. He had to say, though, the azure flame-like aura covering the gold one looked badass.

Nodding at the clone, he let it have partial power over the avatar, the fox letting him give it to it, he himself focusing on keeping it stabilised. The clone flew off to one of the hands of the avatar.

The avatar raised a hand, seemingly in response to the beast's roars before something started swirling in its hands.

Giving a smirk while his eyes were closed and beads of sweat were starting to form from the massive amounts of concentration needed to keep the chakra construct stable as his previously nature energy imbued Six Paths Yang Chakra started running out, he could feel his smirk widen as the clone he had just made dispelled, giving him knowledge of its succession in doing what he created it for.


(Back with the Clone a Few Seconds Earlier)

Leaving the boss, he left for a hand of the Tailed Beast Avatar, preparing to use a jutsu of a similar nature to that that the boss had seen to affect the beast. Just as the technique's beginning stages started, he started to feel the stress as the teensy amount of Six Paths Sage Chakra that the boss had shared with him started to finish. Suddenly, perfect chakra control was starting to go bye-bye.

"Kage Bunshin no Jutsu!" With a burst of clones, he suddenly had helpers to make up for the lack of chakra control. The technique, in its beginning stages, appeared to be a Rasengan the size of the Jūbi's Bijūdama that had been responsible for breaking space.

And, suddenly, the blue and gold swirls that were forming for a traditional Rasengan stopped swirling and began buzzing around. Each gold and azure bit of energy moving in some different direction before returning back to its original place before repeating. The chakra being given to the technique increased, the chakra beginning to swirl again while keeping its buzzing movement, something truly odd to witness. Forcing the swirls to increase while still buzzing, he—the first clone made for this task—saw some of the swirls or buzzing azure and gold energy start to leave the technique the shell of the technique.

With the help of many clones and teamwork Kakashi-sensei could have only dreamed of, they began to form many rings around the technique, the rings themselves rotating and changing angles at extreme speeds, even colliding with each other and seeming phasing through each other as if they weren't quite solid. Deciding this was the furthest they could get to its perfect form as they felt the chakra avatar around them beginning to fail, the first clone used its limited control over the avatar to slam the large orb into the Jūbi's eye. The movement was incredibly jelly-like as the avatar was starting to lose consistency and its form.

And, as the orb hit the eye, it seemed to get absorbed by it, seemingly doing absolutely nothing.

And then the first clone spoke, "Delayed Reaction:—"

The other clones roared together to complete the technique name: "Second Stage, Vibration Style: Rasengan!"

As the avatar slowly started bursting in places or just fully deforming, the effects of the technique finally made themselves known as ripples started showing on the surface of the poor beast's eyes, the thing going crazy as it scratched at its eyes and various other parts of its body.

And then, the eye seemingly ruptured from what looked like nothing, pieces of its eye being flung everywhere before even they started vibrating and separating in pieces in a very explosive manner.

And then the back of its head also exploded, chunks of it going everywhere and then the chunks exploding as well, rupture after rupture happening.

And then it got pretty horrible to look at, even for Naruto who was used to his Vibration techniques having effects on internals like this, as the Jūbi's body started healing at a speed that would have matched his near-instant regeneration before putting on his second chakra cloak over the first.

It was horrific because it kept rupturing to pieces as it healed, making it so that it went through the pain of having its eye blown off from the insides waaaaaay too many times more than it needed to.

He wasn't sure if the rest of the body didn't blow up because it was further from the center point of the technique or if the healing factor there was stronger there than it was at the eye, or if it had to do with the chakra metal on its body down there doing something to absorb and disrupt most of the vibration chakra that got there.

The clone then dispelled itself, its task done.

The other clones didn't.

As this went on for 10 seconds, the clones started to cringe. 20 seconds and their eyes started to water from seeing the Jūbi's eye continuously blow up. 30 seconds and the clones just started dispelling themselves after feeling very bad about causing the beast so much pain.


(Back with Naruto)

The enlarged Kyūbi avatar had failed at this point but he was smirking from his clones having landed the brutal and effective attack.

The smirk slowly fell into a frown before turning into a disturbed frown as he saw the beast go through so much more pain than he intended it to go through. He didn't think the healing factor would make it this bad! Or this brutal, he thought as one of the many pieces of its eye hit his foot at high speeds before then blowing up again all over him.

One thing was for sure, this was NOT kid friendly.

He was starting to feel very bad for the world destroying, energy sucking beast.

"Oh god… Why is it still healing?" Even the Kyūbi was disturbed.

"Just stop healing! Please! For your sake!" It was heavily disturbed.

… He should have put an "off" button in that technique. He put a delay in it, why didn't he put an "off" button!?

It was silent for a while.

And then, with the appearance of an air bubble around them, a voice broke that silence. "I see that you two have managed to hold off against my Jūbi. Not exactly a difficult feat but I suppose it is impressive for mortals like you."

Looking behind, Naruto was greeted with the sight of the Ōtsutsuki, who had apparently decided to not sneak attack when he had the chance.

After a moment passed, the Ōtsutsuki asked, "When… is this going to end?" He gestured to the, still convulsing and vibrating, beast.

'Fox?'

"I wouldn't know. A vibration Release technique has never been attempted on such a scale and with so much chakra before."

'Ah...'

He gave a shrug to the Ōtsutsuki as an answer.

"That is… disturbing to watch."

"Tell me about it. We can both agree on that."

"I hope you realise that your new level of strength will not save you from your inevitable demise."

"And if I told you that my method of harvesting chakra revolved around me being kept alive?"

The silence that greeted him gave him satisfaction. "Thought so."

Not that what he said was true but the Ōtsutsuki didn't need to know that. Anything that kept him from going full force was something he'd use, and getting him to think he was needed alive would stop him from trying to kill him via taking his soul, to trying to keep him somewhat alive, if barely. And he knew from personal experience with the Demon Cat Tora that taking someone alive was MUCH harder than just killing them.

And then they blurred, Naruto felt fist slam into the cloak around his face, forcing more chakra around there to both strengthen it AND push back against it, he managed to slow it down just enough to fully dodge it, retaliating with a fist of his own, his opponent simply moved his head to the left before the fist was even halfway there; as it was about to miss badly, Naruto, in an instant, formed a Rasengan and blew it via destabilising it. The explosion of dense chakra hit the opponent's face, not that Naruto noticed how bad as he started making distance between himself and the Ōtsutsuki.

Space started cracking and ripping around him, he didn't know where to go. Was he trapped? Or was there a way out of the forming rifts that were trapping him in the middle of them. He couldn't tell as the portals were nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding blackness of space.

Standing still, he closed his eyes and focused on his sensing abilities; eyes would not help him here. Besides—a smoky avatar of the fox started forming around him again—the fox would be his eyes.

"Brat, open your eyes."

Reluctantly doing so, he saw that there were a large number of black rods around him, extending from portal to portal to the point where he was unsure if they were many large rods or all the same rod that was just being spread across portals.

And then he realised the issue. He couldn't sense them. His sensing abilities might still have been able to tell him that he was being attacked by them if they were sent at him, but they weren't. And if the fox hadn't warned him, he might have gotten trapped in the rods that were coming out of portals one at a time, going in directions that seemed to steadily block his chances of moving if he stayed there for any longer.

As if knowing that his eyes were open now, the next time a rod came out of a portal, it came straight for him.

Going back to dodge it— "Gah!" He slammed into a rod behind him, the slam not doing much but, apparently, the rod was moving from one portal to another at such speeds that it rubbed through his cloaks and managed to make some headway into his back. The only good point about it was that it was a circular object, not something with a sharp edge or it probably would have bisected him instantly.

That decided it, then. The rods weren't rods but a singular rod that was either being extended from outside or was a singular, long rod that was being sent through portals at immense speeds, making it seem as if there were many rods, not one.

What was problematic was that he couldn't sense them and they tricked his eyes by camouflaging with the blackness of the surroundings.

"Then change it so it can't camouflage."

'I was going to!' Slamming hands together, he let out a roar that could rival that of the greatest Tailed Beast that he had just been fighting, and chakra, once more, began to flood out the seal in increasingly large amounts and, for a second, it almost seemed like his Bijū Mode cloak wasn't even there with how much the golden colour was overtaken by the azure energy.

And, just like that, the surroundings were now a bright blue, his chakra seemingly trying to fill up the vacuum of space with itself.

What was more interesting, however, was the fact that the black rods could be easily seen now that they weren't being camouflaged. His own chakra gave him feedback as well, when it came across a place it couldn't fill with itself—a solid/liquid or, in this case, the black rods.

Making a mental map of the locations of all rods with both his eyes and his chakra feedback, he got to work on dodging, hoping that the rods couldn't form other rods from the sides. It wouldn't be anywhere near the most surprising of things he has ever come across.

Blurring around, he dodged a great many of the rods before realising that if this went on for much longer, he would no longer have any place to dodge to.

Looking at the nearest portal he closed his eyes and sighed in a suffering manner. He knew it was a trap.


(Portal's Other Side)

As the azure and gold flaming form of one Naruto Uzumaki appeared, it was instantly held by its neck.

His opponent looked at him with a blank face but he could see a hint of satisfaction in his odd eyes.

As the grip around his throat tightened astronomically, he realised the opponent wasn't going to monologue.

'Aww shit… The boss really wanted him to monologue. Oh well… Katsu!' As his form shone ever so slightly brighter than it shone before, the opponent's eyes widened ever so slightly, a hint of a frown showing before a portal swallowed him away just as the clone exploded.

And then clones began bursting from the portal the previous—now known—clone had come through, the original presumably hiding among them.

"They can't get all of us!" This clone was heard by no one because the Ōtsutsuki's bubble of air wasn't around.

The clones began spreading in all sorts of random directions before they all hit an invisible barrier that did enough damage to all of them to pop them all. The barrier was presumably shrinking as even clones that didn't make it far were soon popped.

The barrier seemed to do nothing to the nearby and—still!—thrashing form of the Jūbi, it eventually led to no clones alive inside of it. The clones outside of it from much earlier did not care to test their lives against it. It all eventually pointed at the fact that the real one was not among them.

But then… where was he?


(Back on the Other Side of the Portal)

"Fuuuuu—" he almost swore before a speeding rod almost slammed into his mouth.

He was so sure that the rods would stop after the Ōtsutsuki thought he had him. Apparently not. Either he knew he was here or the guy had supercharged the rods with enough chakra to keep them extending through random portals for quite some time. What was worse was that he had used the surrounding chakra that was stopping the rods from getting camouflage to make those clones. So either he would have to release some more chakra or find some other way out of here.

"Every portal leads to the same place unless the black rods go through it."

'Yeah, I sorta realised that when I sent hundreds of clones through different portals only for them all to come out of the same one.'

"Do not get sassy with me, boy," it growled. "You have not even located the obvious point between portals that you can escape through."

'What!? No!' In disbelief, he focused on his chakra—which he had ordered to not go through portals—and realised that the fox was speaking the truth. There seemed to be a point between the MANY portals where his chakra was escaping.

And… "It's a trap, yes."

The 'hole', as it were, was just about large enough for only one person to escape through it.

'Never doubt the power of the basics, fox.'

"And what is that supposed to mean?"

'Just watch.'

Forming more clones, he had half of them transform into Gama-chan and then he did so himself, and he had the rest throw them through the hole. The—roughly—20 wallets flew through it all at once.

"Why couldn't you just be normal and turn into a shuriken or something?"

'Because normal is overrated!'

And then he hit the surface of what was on the other side, his clones instantly popped while he struggled to keep his form together.

The portal led to a part of the Jūbi. The same Jūbi that was still having parts of it blow apart due to various atoms vibrating intensely to the point of either accelerating off of it, breaking apart many other atomic bonds in the process, or heating those parts up if they didn't just break.

His form touching the surface of its body meant that the atoms on its body had something else to vibrate; the atoms in his body.

There was a reason why he never used techniques like these on planets normally, he had once felt the vibrations from his own technique via vibrations moving through the air to his form from the attack's destination. It had been agonising.

It was also why he learned to put a delay in vibration techniques.

His chakra cloaks had been torn apart, his body breaking in places as ripples started going through his body, a karmic response to him using this attack on the Jūbi.

And, soon enough, he found himself in the same situation as the Jūbi. A healing factor that wouldn't let him die—well, he could beg the fox to stop, but he had already given up once today, he wouldn't do that again.

So he grit his teeth—the few he had left after the rest had just turned to dust or just rocketed out of his mouth—and bore his way through it.

Unable to move, he found himself in quite the situation.

He could barely use any chakra as most of it was occupied, moving through his chakra pathways all over his body to points that needed healing. Pulling out more would just damage the chakra pathways and slow down the healing.

Many ideas ran through his head but none seemed doable in his situation. He could try and form some air and have it take some of the energy that was being pumped into him in the form of vibration, but the amount of air required was too much to form in his current condition.

Hell, not even his chakra cloaks could form back, the most that could be seen of them was the faintest hint of azure and gold here and there before being blown away.

He could try to cancel the vibrations with his own but that seemed like insanity.

He could try to form some solids from Earth Style and hope to move vibrations there but that had many issues, the biggest of which was that he didn't know Earth Release.

"Many of the clones you dispersed earlier probably learned how to do it." Came the strained voice, the owner of said voice clearly under immense stress from the concentration needed to heal him faster than the damage being dealt via vibrations.

… He didn't have enough focus to do that as well under this much pain and movement, even his chakra was wonky-ish due to being vibrated somewhat as well.

And then he felt a strong blip of chakra in his mental map.

"Brace yourself, brat."

Thinking it was the Ōtsutsuki, he closed his eyes, knowing it would be one of his final moments.

As a sphere was shoved into his gut at speeds strong enough to open his eyes in even more pain, he was greeted with the sight of himself grinning before mouthing: Rasengan!

And he was blown away with a chakra orb grinding into his stomach. This was terrible. Was this what it was like for those he used a Rasengan against?

But, he was grateful for that smug clone. It was probably still around from earlier along with many others that he had sensed were still alive earlier.

And then the Rasengan exploded.

"Fuuuuuuu—!"

The good part? The damage wasn't nearly as bad as the damage being caused by the earlier vibrations threatening to disassemble him or change his state of matter, so the chakra cloaks healed it right up.

The bad part? He was met with a fist that threatened to send him right back into the 'skin' of the Jūbi.

'I didn't even sense him!' he thought as he was blown right back to a very painful place.

"Neither did I," it growled back.

This time, he knew what was greeting him at his destination, so he began to greatly slow down progress in that direction through a vigorous use of expelling chakra to propel himself away.

Until another fist greeted his body and his progress in losing his previous velocity was lost.

Well, wasn't he in a pickle, now?

Although, his previous clone that had Rasengan'dhim was still around where it last was, with another Rasengan in hand to blow him away.

And then it popped as a black rod went through it so fast that he actually didn't even see it go by, the only reason why he saw it was because he saw the hole form in its body before it popped, and then he followed the trajectory of where it would go after leaving that hole.

It had stabbed into the surface of the Jūbi's 'skin', seemingly unaffected by the vibrations going on there.

Well, there went plan C.

Trying to cross his fingers, he found his hands held apart.

Well, there went plan B.

'Fox?'

"Yeah, I got nothing."

Well, plan D was probably getting less action than Jiraiya's D.

Forming a chakra claw, and having it slug the man holding his arms so hard that the chakra claw basically burst from impact, nothing happened.

Doing the same with 9 chakra claws, he got the same results as they all seemed to do nothing.

"I think he has a chakra cloak..."

'How!? I don't see it!'

"Well, obviously, not everyone has the terrible chakra control that you do and end up wasting it in the form of chakra just floating off their forms. Maybe he has just perfected his, he is the so-called 'King' after all."

Well, there went plan E.

Plan F time.

"Fuck you!"

Yeah, he really wasn't expecting much from plan F. Not like he'd actually get through to the guy with that.

And then he noticed that his momentum towards the Jūbi had stopped.

And then he noticed the frown on the guy's face.

Oh shit, Plan F worked!?

As he felt himself be impaled by a black rod that GREATLY weakened his control over his body and chakra, he couldn't help but think, 'Oh… how'd that get in there?'

This was definitely the wrong type of impalement to be caused by Plan F.

As another 15 rods found their way into his body, he realized that the situation was getting alarmingly bad. No doubt, getting caught by this dude would not lead to a good death. Or a good time left living in his care/imprisonment.

And he felt his chakra had just about been entirely stopped from flowing in his chakra system because of that. Heck, he could barely feel the Kyūbi. As more rods started forming, he figured he definitely wouldn't be able to after that. If he'd be conscious, anyways… His cloaks had been stopped so no instant regeneration for him.

"Take this, you impudent swine." Huh, he could hear that. The bubble of air must be back. Or telepathy. God, he hoped it wasn't the latter.

"Br… t—" Well, he may as well try to focus and meet the Kyūbi midway in its attempts to reach him or he would never hear its message to him.

It was probably gonna make fun of him.

Focusing on the barely there connection that he could feel with it, he pulled on it and felt time slow down just as the rods started getting shot at him, knowing that when he'd next get out of the seal-scape, he won't be having a fun time.

He was greeted with hazy surroundings, the floor seeming not even there or glitching into existence every once in a while. The walls there one second and then not there another second.

The pipes through which a representation of his chakra would flow and leak through seemed frozen, even a drop of water was frozen mid-drop.

"Brat."

Looking ahead, his eyes widened in surprise. Oh, he was looking at the fox. Their connection was just so weak that he had to strain his eyes to see it, like he had to when he had to try and see his opponent's black rods through portals earlier which were camouflaging with the darkness of space.

It was just about transparent. And, now that he focused, so was the vast amount of his chakra that was still sealed in here.

"Does this count as an emergency?"

What? What did it mean by that?

Sensing his confusion, it pointed an almost invisible arm up.

Looking up, he was greeted with something white that appeared every time the seal and everything in it disappeared. Something that was probably just outside of it?.

Oh.

"Yes, you dumb brat."

He had forgotten about the Six Paths Yang Chakra.

Holding out a hand to it, he saw it move with no resistance, very unlike the rest of his chakra which was frozen and the fox, which seemed to be struggling to move.

As it enveloped him, he made sure to cut himself off from most of it, no sense wasting it.

"You should use all of it." As the chakra connected and spread through his system, the seal-scape started becoming clearer, the rest of his chakra started moving somewhat, and the image of the Kyūbi also became very solid.

Snorting at the fox, he replied, "Then what would I do in an emergency?"

"This IS an emergency."

"I know that, I meant an emergency in this fight."

"... This IS—"

"Alright, I get where you are getting at there. I just think I should conserve it."

A snort was all he got before he focused on infusing the small amount of Six Paths Yang Chakra with nature energy.

And then he was back outside the seal-scape, seeing the rods coming at him, he gave a mighty flex of his Six Paths Sage Chakra, the first time he had used Six Paths Chakra for anything in this fight besides directing his normal chakra to do things, and the rods already in his body shattered, his opponent's eyebrows going up at the human's sudden ability to have and utilize what felt like divine chakra.

Oh sure, he knew the human had had some access to divine chakra at some point in his life, the fact that his Truth-Seeking Orbs didn't completely erase his chakra from existence spoke of the residue of such chakra being there. It never truly left. A mark that showed what this mortal once held or had access to, but it DEFINITELY didn't feel like he had anywhere more than residual Six Paths Chakra. Except… now he did? Granted, it was still incredibly small and didn't even fully feel like proper Six Paths Chakra, more like a fragment or something, but it WAS enough to be used. This was… concerning. And outrageous. No mortal should have access to the power of gods.

As the 16 rods coming at the blond also broke apart, the Ōtsutsuki had to quickly form three Truth-Seeking Orbs to block… three Truth-Seeking Orbs?

Feeling slight regret at not having unsealed himself when he had the chance to earlier, he activated his second eye—well, it was always activated but he could push it further to its full power via putting more chakra into it—still keeping the rest covered.

Contrary to his belief, however, the man didn't pursue him after the Truth-Seeking Orbs assault. He had gone for the Jūbi.

"Six Paths: Vibration Cancel." As he touched the Jūbi's 'skin', the vibrations stopped instantly, a feat he wasn't capable of earlier but was now. He did so because he didn't want to be forced into his own vibration attacks again.

Unfortunately, the act also used up the small amount of Six Paths Sage Chakra he had left, the opponent flying at him the second his chakra cloaks started reverting and his Truth-Seeking Orbs disappeared.

As his opponent appeared in front of him, Naruto tried to maximize the amount of power he could put into his cloaks and even try to use a bit of Six Paths Yang Chakra, the result being that along with the yellow and blue chakra, a white chakra also started to lightly form around his body as he blocked a black rod with a fist, ignoring the others once he realized that this form of his upped his durability enough that it wouldn't matter if the rest hit.

Sure enough, the rest failed to penetrate his skin and his opponent flickered before appearing behind him before Naruto flickered behind him, slamming a leg sideways into his opponent's leg, and the guy went flying, occasionally hitting some part of the Jūbi's body as he flipped around. As the man finally started to stop, he was given a similar dose of his own medicine as Naruto, like the opponent in the very beginnings of this fight, was already waiting for him there, his arm held horizontally to his left, coated in a deadly layer of wind to make the bisection easier.

Unfortunately, the opponent did not want a taste of his own medicine and formed a portal in his trajectory.

Escaping the portal behind the Uzumaki, he coated his own arm with black metal, sharpening it to monomolecular levels on the edges before his arm came in contact with Naruto's wind laden arm. There was seemingly no contest as the metal bypassed the wind and was about to cut into the arm before Naruto flickered away again, his abilities on land being much greater than his abilities in air/space, it would seem, even if that land was the Jūbi's body.

He saw the Uzumaki appear behind him again with one of his divine eyes, and he simply formed a black wall behind him, it acting as a barrier. Now that that was taken care of, he now has to guess where else Uzumaki would attack from, left? Right? Up? Dow—oh, right, not down.

What he didn't foresee was Naruto punching through the Truth-Seeking Orb shaped into a wall, the punch hitting and sending him to the horizon of the beast's body before he made another portal and disappeared.

'Fuck!'

"You lost track of him, didn't you?"

The silence gave him his answer.

"Great. Now what? I still can't sense him and you haven't been able to for a while now as well. Maybe chakra nullification is one of his abilities?"

'Nah, knowing how broken these Ōtsutsuki bastards are, it's just some super chakra control logic or something.'

The fox got an idea. "You still have your earlier clones?"

'Yeah, what about them?'

"You can't keep wasting your chakra by pouring it out into the surroundings so that when the Ōtsutsuki enters its field of range, it tells you about them."

'Actually, I can keep doing that. I got literally billions of clones worth of chakra.'

The fox just ignored him and continued, "So, just have those clones send waves of chakra all at different times but very frequently. It's not as good but saves a lot more chakra."

'Like echolocation?'

"Yes, just like echolo— since when did you learn of such complicated things?" It blinked confusedly at him from its smoky avatar around him.

'Laugh it up, why don't you?'

"Oh, I am laughing alright."

'Fuck you too, then.'

Cutting off the conversation with a wave of chakra in a sphere that went further and further before it reached his clones and stopped there, he started sending more and more until they started getting the message and started sending their own pulses. Every pulse had its own info, not much on their own but when so many waves were being sent at a time? Well, safe to say, it felt MUCH better/smoother than that time somebody made a 144 frames per second movie for some reason.

Of course, with so many waves of blue chakra everywhere, it damn near made his eyes useless in this fight.

And then his form flickered away, the first of the barrages of rods to try and impale him failed in their task.

The second did as well.

Eventually, it became less a barrage and more like a solid wall of rods coming from portals from around him.

And yet, he still dodged them. It was getting suspicious to him as he realized he was being made to go in one direction.

As soon as he realized it was to one of the Jūbi's chakra metal-coated/covered/skin that he was being sent to, he stopped in his tracks, allowing the barrage of rods to slam into his chakra cloaks and do nothing.

After a while of this doing nothing, he decided to deal with the still half-comatose-from-pain Jūbi.

As if sensing his intentions, the Ōtsutsuki came speeding at him from a portal before just falling to the ground, foaming from his mouth.

'Uh…'

"Huh…."

'Ideas?'

"Well… there are more than thousands of waves of chakra being sent everywhere. And, considering one of his eyes seem different than earlier, I am guessing he upped the chakra to it to either maximize its abilities or make it go to the next level. In other words, he is just getting too much visual feedback from the waves of chakra."

'Huh… isn't this the same explanation for the epilepsy ad I saw a while back?'

"I wouldn't know, I wasn't around."

Deciding to warily get close to the now not-regal/graceful-looking Ōtsutsuki, he wondered if it was worth wasting some Six Path Chakra to use Six Paths Sage Mode to form a Truth-Seeking Orb and turn it into a stick to poke him with. That was a mouthful to think about.

Forming a chakra claw, he had it tap the guy to check if he was fine.

Did he mention he had it tap the guy hundreds of times a second? Oops.

"Would you... STOP THAT!" The roar and the silver/gray chakra that followed it blew him far and disrupted quite a lot of the waves of his clones' chakra from reaching him.

At least before the clones just smartened up and started using more concentrated, denser waves of chakra.

"I think he is about to take you seriously now."

Looking at the man, one of his eyes bloodshot, veins pulsating on his forehead, and mad amounts of Six Paths Chakra leaving his form, Naruto only had one sarcastic response.

'Gee, ya think?'

And then the man blitzed and, even though his chakra was blazing, Naruto couldn't sense him. Relying on the information from his clones' easily disrupted chakra waves, he moved to his left in order to dodge, cheeks bulging out, he let loose an azure fireball straight into the man's eyes—or at least where he would appear a mere instant later according to his echolocation-like method of viewing him..

Or at least that's how it looked to anyone that could view his attack.

It was actually just pure chakra designed to irritate his opponent's eye further and just looked like a fireball.

Unfortunately, Naruto's entire plan was disrupted by one simple fact; the man was already at his left before his 'fireball' even got halfway to where Naruto THOUGHT his opponent would be at.

As his fist came at him, black metal coated its surface, threatening the stability of Naruto's cloak as he barely blocked it and then barely managed to stop himself from being blown back via large amounts of chakra expelling for propulsion from his back, and chakra through his feet to stick to the mighty beast he was on.

This wouldn't have saved him from the second punch.

So he let loose a few hundred, a few thousand—heck, as many as he could—chakra waves in the time it took for the fist to reach him.

And, as he hoped, the opponent backed off.

And then finally either turned their eye off or reverted it to a weaker form.

Aww… He was really hoping to irritate that eye with more and more waves.

Exploding into action, he ran at the man.

Knowing the man had his eyes on his face, he yelled, knowing the man would lip-read, "Awesome Punch!"

As the man prepared to block the fist, he was entirely unprepared for the kick that came instead, crashing into his balls at speeds greater than earlier when the man had done the same to his genitals.

Of course, not everyone had indestructible balls like he did.

As the opponent's face slowly began to turn purple from both pain and anger, he yelled, "Awesome kick!"

And then punched him in the balls.

He heard whistling in his mind. "Not bad, kid."

As he smirked at his opponent while looking him in the eyes, he almost failed to notice a tomoe disappear.

And then the man that was about to be blown away was suddenly fine, not even showing a sign of his body about to accelerate away from the force of his attacks.

As a fist came at Naruto, he tried to redirect, and everything went white.

As he opened his eyes, he realized he was now in the sewers. "What happened?"

"The Ōtsutsuki used the same technique that Senju Hokage of yours likes to use. Little chakra, huge effect. Except this was a lot of chakra, Ōtsutsuki Six Paths Chakra that feels potent on an unreal level, and the PERFECT chakra control they possess. Safe to say, it had a lot more effect. There isn't much of you left, your clones are fighting to keep you away in the meantime."

"Oh… it was such an even fight for a while… I thought I had him."

"He was trying to incapacitate you, not kill you. Of course it seemed like an even fight until you did the one thing you are good at and annoyed him."

"Ah… Well, when you put it like that, it kinda hurts."

"You try to heal a little runt's body, keep it going at beyond peak conditions in space with no air, then feel like your entire body is being absolutely invaded or raped by an opponent's chakra because your body is a fox made of chakra, and that's the closest you can get to a human's 'rape', and then STILL be all chipper!" it roared at him.

"Now, use the rest of that Six Paths Chakra or I am consistently just reminding you of that taijutsu guy that Madara fought and his apprentice hugging each other."

Seeing Naruto's face get green before seemingly getting inspiration from that, it cut in and cut the problem at the roots before it got out of control. "And NO! You may NOT! use a poor imitation of that against the Ōtsutsuki."

"Alright, alright,"he exasperatedly replied. "Looks like someone is grumpy today, he muttered."

"What did you say?"

"I said I was going to use the Six Paths Yang Chakra for Six Paths Sage Mode."

Seeing the anticipating look from the fox, he decided to continue the sentence under the pretense of completing it.

"All of it," he finished.

The nod of approval from the fox showed that it appreciated the statement. "Yes. You will."

As he held his arm high over his head, the seal-scape's ceiling cracked, the darkness of the ceiling seemingly breaking as light pierced it before joining his form.

'Finally… without the Six Paths Yang seal in place to help the rest of the seal keep the rest of the chakra in, it will leak out and I will finally have this place to myself.' Because, of course, the fox had its own personal reasons for wanting Naruto to use the Six Paths Yang Chakra.

As the chakra joined the man below, he began to shine brightly, a serene smile appearing on his face as he felt somewhat complete. The removal of most of the divine chakra after Kaguya's sealing and his fight with Sasuke using the rest of it, leaving only residual amounts which were the most that would regenerate had left him feeling empty for so long. As if something was just missing, something very important.

Getting and introducing the chakra in mass amounts to his body's chakra circulatory system right now made him feel complete for the first time in so long. It felt like his soul sang with joy as it was reacquainted with the power.

He could almost feel Asura grinning on the other side of the water as he stared at the reflective liquid on the floor of the seal-scape.

He could feel his counterpart dimensions away, the TINY amounts of residual chakra marking his location there. He actually felt sorry for Sasuke at that moment as he had his own divinity for a moment. Sasuke, though? He was stuck with a divine eye with no divine chakra to power it up, the eye sucking on his chakra and life force more than he could supply to it properly.

Also… now that focused, that wasn't the Elemental Nations that Sasuke was at. Not even close. Huh… odd? Maybe?

One of his clones had been there once but had swiftly left the dimension. If he recalled correctly… Skyrim? Yes, that's all he remembered of the dimension.

Focusing on the task at hand, he asked nature for help and nature gladly responded. Power, SHEER. FUCKING. POWER was felt by him until he felt that he wouldn't even need his pinky to take down the fox if they fought.

He cared not as the Six Paths Yang Seal on his physical body broke apart after the seal-scape representation of it broke apart, the Death God's power and the Eight Trigrams Seal cracking once more as the seal reinforcing it to keep literally BILLIONS of clones worth of chakra was now slowly fading.

The chakra flowing outside his real body in rivulets, the Ōtsutsuki stared wide-eyed, wide-jawed, slackened hands, and so many other signs of shock as he finally felt the massive amount of chakra Naruto had accumulated earlier but had then mostly kept hidden away in a seal.

The Ōtsutsuki didn't even react as clones slowly stopped being wide-eyed as well and started punching, kicking, Rasengan-ing, headbutting the Ōtsutsuki and even just aiming for the Ōtsutsuki balls.

The Ōtsutsuki just had one thing going through his mind. If he could take this method of chakra accumulation or chakra gathering or whatever it was, he would surely become on the level of his creator. He would finally start gaining chakra on a level that he could be the next Ōtsutsuki GOD within the next century.

Standing still, he began to unseal himself again before another barrage of attacks finally reminded him of why he couldn't.

'Blasted things!' the Ōtsutsuki thought as rods shot, clones dodged, and then portals formed.

Opening and closing at seemingly random intervals, clones finally started popping as they only had Sage Mode and the Imitation Bijū Mode going for them, the fox couldn't continuously spread its chakra through that many clones and give them all Bijū Mode or it would run out of chakra.

Maybe it was for the best, however, the Ōtsutsuki thought. Lower Ōtsutsuki's would die in the presence of his unsealed form, and he DEFINITELY didn't want to kill this man until he had taken his secrets from him. Besides, he could have as much chakra as he wanted, there was a point where mortals just couldn't use it to make themselves better, faster, stronger, or even more durable.

Heck, even some young Ōtsutsuki's would have that issue with too much chakra gained suddenly.

Although, if he was unsealed, he could just absorb all of that chakra instantly. As it was, his powers and even his ability over the Rinnegan's paths were weakened.

It was needed, however… It was needed.

And then his eyes widened as the azure chakra, one that he didn't care for much, suddenly had an incredibly bright, WHITE chakra.

Not yellow like from earlier, but white like the small amounts of Six Paths Chakra he'd use.

And he finally understood why it felt different.

"Yang."

But for it to be THAT strong when split!? It was ludicrous! He MUST find the Ōtsutsuki that was the cause of this. The thought that one that powerful was just around and yet undetected from him was unnerving.

The fact that one was strong enough that it was giving MORTALS this much power? This was ludicrous! The power of the divine was not meant for them!

And then his eyes widened in outrage as he felt it pushing HIS chakra away. HIS!

This… This monstrosity could not be allowed to continue. Mortals were not meant to match the divine.

Slamming arms into the two nearest clones, he pushed ALL the chakra available to him in his sealed form. His chakra slowly began to push against the offender's chakra.

He could feel the Jūbi start to panic, its feeble brain understanding that this was too high calibre of chakra for it to be so close to. That nothing good would become of this.

Stuck between fight or flight—well, more like flight or flight, by attacking and pushing them away before going away.

The chakra slowly changed, going from Six Paths… Yang? To Six Paths Sage Chakra. And it became hard to tell of its Yin deficiencies once that happened.

The white chakra parted through the blue waves of chakra that was seeming everywhere, even the Jūbi seemingly drowning in it while it tried to eat it. It being careful to avoid its master's silver/gray chakra, not wanting to piss him off.

He saw the blond man flex his arms and look at him with a cocky grin as if this changed anything. As if this would change the rhythm of the fight.

And then he realised that his sealed form's chakra's full force was now being utterly pushed away, RIPPED away by the waves of white chakra before it seemingly calmed down.

And then the man emerged from his cocoon of blue chakra, and he saw the changes. His face was seemingly no longer covered in chakra, along with some parts of his hands and feet. His chakra cloaks' cloaks had disappeared for the most part, apart from two blue lines of chakra going from the seal on his stomach to over both his shoulders, seemingly leaking and being connected to the rest of the chakra around them in the form of a sometimes translucent and sometimes solid-looking cloak of azure.

The seal had lost most of its detail and had just become a circle coloured a mix of white, azure, and gold, the colours changing slowly at all times. The centre of the circle was black in colour, as was the rest of his clothes including his gloves but excluding his jacket, sandals, and headband.

"You will be punished for your insolence in making a mockery of the power of gods, mortal!" he roared.

"But did I ask, though!?" Naruto roared back.

"... What?"

"I said," he yelled, "that's crazy, bro, but I don't remember asking!"

And then he was behind him. For the first time in this fight, the Ōtsutsuki couldn't do anything. Before, he had had to hold back even in his sealed form, but now? His eye still showed a track as to where he had gone, but that was about it.

The fist that came his way carved its way through his neck, him being barely able to move enough to stop it from going dead center.

Opening portals around him in an attempt to channel attacks through them and maybe escape in the confusion, he watched as the portals weren't even the size of a needle before the blond had seemingly noticed and reacted.

Grabbing a hold of the Ōtsutsuki's arm, Naruto PULLED almost ripping the arm off unintentionally but getting his goal done as he pulled the Ōtsutsuki along with him until they were both out of the sphere of portals that had formed. He did NOT feel like being trapped in those again.

And then, stopping, he threw the Ōtsutsuki, their previous momentum helping him with the act as they seemed to flicker from his hands to crashing into the Jūbi. And what a crash it was, the beast roaring in pain as the Ōtsutsuki actually embedded deep into it, his malicious chakra causing the Tailed Beast pain as he seemed to get more and more irritated over the path this fight had taken.

As but an instant was over, Naruto started suspecting the Ōtsutsuki was about to try to escape via portals. So, sending numerous chakra arms into the giant hole, he tried to have the arms pull at anything they touched that felt different, his ability to sense the Ōtsutsuki still seeming strangely negated.

As his arms seemed to rip the portion of the beast asunder, one of the claws actually managed to grab a silver/gray blur. "Gotcha!"

In a burst of speed that didn't even seem to have his form blur from one place to another, he merely was there one second and was near the Ōtsutsuki the next. A flicker, if you will.

Forming 27 claws, 9 golden and firm, 9 azure and struggling to keep shape when being formed, and 9 a brilliant white, keeping firmness, detail, and power from the moment they formed. The 27 tails arced around the Ōtsutsuki and slammed into him the instant his fist did. The tails' attack stopping the immortal from being sent rocketing away by providing an opposite force of equal measure.

"Gaaaaah!" And, with a yell, the tails bisected him in numerous places, and the fist simply went through.

He found himself looking at the upper neck and head that flew by, seeing a tomoe in an eye disappear.

"Fuck."

Twisting, he called upon two of the orbs floating behind him, shaping them into rods just in time to parry the rods coming for his heart and stomach. Continuing his twisting motion, he lashed out with a leg, the Ōtsutsuki being sent flying but not out of sight. If he couldn't sense his chakra then he'd have to keep his eyes on the man.

Flying—yes! Flying, not propulsion via expelling chakra—he quickly caught up to the man, aiming to get a good Rasengan in before seeing the man's destination.

Maybe he'll let the man be.

"This will be amusing," remarked the fox.

And amusing it was when the man finally managed to hit one of the areas of the beast that was made of the special chakra metal.

Naruto winced as he saw the man's form crumple into it, failing completely to penetrate, and then BOUNCE!

That… probably actually broke some parts of his. Not that it mattered with his healing/limb recreation ability.

As the man bonelessly slumped down, Naruto rectified his previous thoughts. It probably hadn't broken some parts, it had probably crushed his bones to dust. The chakra shroud Naruto could vaguely see around his skin must have been what kept his skin from tearing and breaking, spilling out the dust his internals must have become.

Not that it mattered as the man's various muscles started twitching. So his chakra was, in fact, capable of regeneration without his input. That was the only explanation he had for this.

Sensing movement from the only other being that he could sense if one excluded his clones, he noticed the looming mouth of the Jūbi open above him. Was it… Was it planning on blasting him even if it blasted its own body apart?

Seeing the primal fear in its eyes, Naruto concluded that, yes, yes it was. It must not want a repeat of the vibrations from earlier this fight.

The Ōtsutsuki gained enough control of his body around now to manage to twist his body around to see what was going on.

Looking at the mockery of the natural order that was the mortal, he noticed him flick his arm, at the end of the flick, a spiralling orb with blades white rotating blades formed, the attack growing larger at larger until its diameter was a fourth of what the Jūbi's mouth could open to. And it went straight into its mouth.

Instantly, the mortal raised his hands, and he felt a large amount of air form at both sides of the beast, before it all rotated until half was above its head and half was under it. And then the mortal slammed his hands together, the air following the motion, slamming into the Jūbi's mouth, forcing it closed on the attack that had just entered it and not yet detonated. The Jūbi didn't even manage to form an attack as its mouth was forced shut. Then another pulse of divine chakra, the mortal's hands' fingers intertwined as well, and earth started forming around the beast, seemingly muzzling it.

The beast tried to prevent this, of course, trying to open its mouth despite the air pressure and the earth muzzling it. It almost succeeded, too, when it started to use its tails, if not for the mortal's next chakra flare.

Reading his lips, he cared not for what was said after "Lava Release"as a stream of liquid-like burning red substance flew from the mortal's mouth, the substance searing itself upon whatever gaps in the muzzle of earth the beast had created, the beast surely regretting the gaps it had made as the gaps were filled with an incredibly hot substance that tried to burn the upper and lower portion of its mouth together at the parts it touched.

And then the substance instantly became more solid-like than liquid as the mortal released his control over it, thus allowing the coldness of the void, of the emptiness of space, to cool it down. The beast solidly muzzled, the technique finally blew up inside of it as evident by the beast's somewhat bulging eye and thrashing.

This all happened in but an instant.

Naruto turned his attention to the Ōtsutsuki as he felt his Six Paths: Wind Style: RasenShuriken detonate inside the beast.

He almost felt the urge to shudder, whether from the stare of hate he was being given by some of his opponent's eyes or whether because of the pain he had just caused the beast, he wasn't sure.

As he prepared to once more flicker over to his opponent and attack him while he was still vulnerable, Naruto stopped as he realised that the Jūbi was sort of bending over? The closest he could think of was a fetus position. Ignoring the pity he felt for it and the self-loathing for causing its misery, he realised with a moment of clarity that its tails were also starting to wrap around it. He did NOT want to check if he could escape the chakra metal-cased outer parts of the tails.

Flickering over to the Ōtsutsuki, he gave an annoyingly cocky smirk before grabbing him from the neck, easily avoiding the rods of death that sped from portals created underneath him so as to avoid detections, he THREW the man. And if his calculations were correct… he flew along with the man, seeing that it looked like he wouldn't make it out of the shell the Tailed Beast was making for itself.

And then the Ōtsutsuki had half of his body left behind, Naruto's throw having been calculated so well that he had thrown him at just the right point at just the right speed for him to get hit by the chakra metal parts of the swiftly moving tails as his form flew near one tail.

The result being that the Ōtsutsuki grade chakra metal seemed to ignore the Ōtsutsuki's durability and seemed to go through him with—dare he say— more ease than normal metal would through a civilian.

It was amusing seeing the bisected body fly along with him, spinning in amusing ways until Naruto's eye caught sight of a tomoe seemingly turn red in colour.

Deciding to not take his chances, he swung his arm around, hand wide open, looking like he was about to slap the man into oblivion. Just about a Rasengan's distance away from the body, a brilliant white, spiralling sphere instantly formed in his palm. 'Six Paths: Rasengan!'

Expecting to not be met with resistance as his Rasengan met the eye, his expectations were not met as he felt resistance; heavy resistance.

Narrowing his eyes, he tried to put more force into it.

Nothing happened except for the divine attack to start grinding itself away, he watched as it tried to grind into his opponent's eye with the new force behind it, and he watched as it started getting smaller and smaller, the opponent having apparently had his durability upped so much in such a short amount of time that the technique failed against him.

Watching blankly, he felt his palm land on the eye, Rasengan grinding away.

And then he clenched hard, hoping to take the eye out of the equation physically if not with a chakra attack.

Not only did he fail, he saw his opponent's other half start regrowing, another divine eye growing itself in front of his gaze.

Trying harder, he realised that not even with all of his strength could he damage it.

Taking his hand off, he realised that another two tomoe had turned red sometime when his hand had blocked the eye from his view.

With another flick of an arm, another orb formed, this one with searing white blades rotating around it. With a roar, he slammed it into his opponent, planning to escape instantly afterwards, the technique set to explode not soon after.

And he found his hand held by his opponent's arm.

When did that arm finally start functioning?

And then the Rasenshuriken glew brighter for a second. "Fuck."

The technique that had been set to detonate was still in his own grasp around it, the explosion caused was potent, of that Naruto could confirm.

What Naruto did not want to confirm was that his opponent had seemingly been fine in the middle of it.

How did he know that? Well, his opponent had still held onto his arm quite hard in the explosion, hard enough that, when his arm had to choose between being sent along with him at terribly fast speeds or being ripped apart and be held in the Ōtsutsuki's grasp despite the durability granted to it by his forms, the arm had decided to stay with the Ōtsutsuki.

As his smoking body healed itself on a cellular level, finally having felt what it felt like to be on the other end of his technique, he couldn't help but look at his missing arm halfway below the elbow and the explosion that hid the Ōtsutsuki.

"Oh no…"

"You lost track of him."

He still couldn't sense the 'god's' chakra. Or anything of his, actually.

"You gave him time to heal, hide, and prepare."

Maybe it was time he tried to bastardise something else of the Ōtsutsukis?

As he focused, his Six Paths Yang Chakra responded, trying its best to copy what Naruto wanted it to copy. Sure, he'd never have the Rinnegan, Tenseigan,or the other eye he knew the man had, but he had to be able to do some of what the man could do with Six Paths Yang Chakra. Maybe even a decent amount of his abilities could be copied when used as Six Paths Nature Chakra.

It was around now that the now-far-away Jūbi's tails finally closed around itself, giving the image of a scared turtle going into its shell.

Except this was a LARGE planet-sized beast managing to form what seemed to be a perfect sphere around itself of the Ōtsutsuki grade chakra metal around it. And thus, it went back into the form it was in at the beginning of the battle, back when he thought he was just on some weird planet when he was in it.


(With the Opponent)

His opponent's increase in power from the power divinity now flowing through their body had been… unexpected.

The man was faster than he could react to; hell, he was even faster than he could see in his sealed form.

The man was powerful, able to tear apart HIS body with but a simple tug.

It was disgusting to see himself be beaten by a mortal, the seals on himself be damned, it just couldn't have happened! But it had. It had.

The mortal had made a mockery of him and then made a mockery of his chakra seed, muzzling it, making it fear him enough to relapse into its shell-like form.

He had barely managed to survive through the use of techniques only he could use among his kind.

Reject: A technique where he could reject as many portions of reality granted he had the power for it. In his sealed form, he had barely been able to use it for the simple act of rejecting having his body slashed apart. It was costly. Too costly. The loss of a tomoe had made him cautious and against using it again in the fight.

Durability: This made any further damage to his body impossible for as long as he had chakra to power it. The problem was that he couldn't, in any form, regain chakra while using it. Whether by absorbing it from others or from a chakra fruit or pill, his body would reject it. He also couldn't simply turn it off to absorb chakra and then turn it back on, that was something he was only able to do in his unsealed form and even that had limits. This was used to prevent further damage after his body had been half removed by the beast's chakra metal.

Endurance: An Ōtsutsuki was one that must learn to endure. The forms of endurance didn't matter, being equipped to deal with all of them was a mark of a good one. It helped deal with the pain, the anger, and the humiliation he felt, giving him a slight piece of mind to think properly. It was needed, with half of his body, half of his divine eyes, gone. It had helped to let him know that to retreat was the best course of action. Temporary retreat, of course.

So when the blinding bladed-sphere had come at him, he hadn't even flinched. He just went for the man's hand. The technique going off had not been anticipated but it was hardly surprising enough for him to let go of the arm, holding it long after the mortal had disconnected from it.

And then, fully knowing the mortal couldn't sense him, he had made a portal to retreat while still in the middle of the explosion, subconsciously taking the arm with him.

It was here that he decided to take the seals on his power off. It was risky because he wanted to take the mortal's knowledge on chakra harvesting or whatever method he used for getting chakra. Going at him in his full form might as well as kill him with his sheer presence. He couldn't have the man die before he got knowledge of his chakra harvesting techniques.

Focusing on his unsealing, a ring appeared beneath him, slowly going up, slowly revealing his true form.

As this happened, he looked at the arm floating around him, still having a glowing sleeve around it from where it was cut off.

The ring/circle had only gone up to his ankles when he noticed something else about the hand. It had a brilliant white coloured, sphere-shaped mark on the center of its palm, the mark fading to almost nothing before reappearing, constantly repeating this action.

Getting the slight gut feeling of it being more than it appeared to be, he looked further into it.

And he felt a rage encompass him beyond anything else he had felt in this fight. Did the mortal know no bounds!? Was that a bastardisation of a Karma Seal!?

Such was his rage that it almost cancelled out his transformation before the ring even got up to his ankles. He started seeing red from how great of a mockery this particular ridicule was from the mortal.

Glaring hard enough that he would have destroyed the arm with his gaze alone if he had used any chakra along with it, for a faint moment he saw an image of a man form, his body forming from the cut off part of the arm, skin tone different from it along with clothes. Clothes that seemed to mimic an Ōtsutsuki's.

He had but a moment to see the young looking, brown-haired, dark brown-eyed man but he still burned his image to his memory.

The man's appearance, only visible to his divine eyes and even then it was hard to see him, waved his other hand at him and then gave him what seemed to be a mix of a cheerful and cocky grin.

And then the only physical part of his body, the part cut off from the mortal from earlier, started glowing. The sun marking's fading and reappearance happening at a higher and higher frequency, him being unable to do anything about it as there wasn't much he could do mid-transformation. The light from it was getting bright enough that he could only compare it to the many suns he had seen in his long, long life.

And then it just went dark.

'This might be… unpleasant.' he thought as he waited for the explosion. Or course, he knew it wouldn't be while Durability was still in action.

And then he had a moment of genuine confusion as nothing happened.

Looking at the avatar formed from the bastardisation of Karma, he saw the man still grinning at him, a knowing look on his face as if he knew something that he didn't. He'd make sure to remove that look once his unsealing was over.

The man's other barely visible arm and then the arm of the mortal moved—so he could affectthe physical world? The arms fingers splayed out, the mortal's arm having four fingers open while the other man's arm had… 5? It was still incredibly hard to see him, even with his visual prowess.

As one finger went down, and another, and another, he realised it was a countdown. He scoffed, as if it mattered. Nothing would harm him with Durability in use.

And yet, he almost felt some concern as he viewed the ghostly avatar's grin get wider and wider, somehow having an increment of mocking and cockiness with every passing second.

3.

2.

And soon there was only one finger left. As it went down, the immortal could only stare at the avatar with a "bring it!" look.

As the last finger fell, the Ōtsutsuki suddenly felt three of one of his eyes' red tomoes turn to their standard colour before disappearing. He had used up all the chakra his sealed form had to offer. Durability and Endurance were both off, and Reject was out of the question.

Looking at the avatar that seemed to have a freakishly large, annoying grin, he knew the man knew this as well.

And the mark on the arm lit up again, except this time it didn't stop.

He could only watch, eyes wide, as the arm blew up, his eyes having strengthened somewhat during the unsealing, he could now watch as it happened in super slow motion, a curse that he had brought upon himself for having started the unsealing.

He watched with his divine eyes as it reached the unsealing ring, not being stopped in the least by it and destroying it from existence, slowly getting closer and closer to his body.

'NOOOOOOO!'


(A Literal Instant Later)

A body appeared back where Naruto's Six Paths Rasenshuriken had exploded.

He had, at the cost of a FULL eye, used a time reversal technique with no chakra.

Reality manipulation was out of the question as he had already used it recently and using it repeatedly in his sealed form was not possible, there was a time limit between uses. He couldn't just make a portal at the cost of a few easily recoverable tomoes as even his soul had been damaged just from being close to the explosion, escaping the explosion with a decent amount of damage there was going to take too long to fix. Thus he had reversed time, an act that did NOT sadly give him back the chakra he had earlier but it did fix his soul. And, at the cost of a full eye, he could do some other minor things as well. Unfortunately, reversing the explosion so that he could flee was not one of them, so he had to reverse his destination after he had brought himself to the point he was at before the explosion. His destination naturally ended at the previous destination he had been in.

So there he was, his unsealing ring back in place, in the middle of an unsealing while having zero chakra.

It was worse than it sounded, really. Especially with his opponent's new levels of power after his newest form that appeared to be a mockery of divine forms.

But if he could just get the unsealing over with, it would be all fine.

Now, to hope he could do that before his opponent came at him.

… Where was his opponent?

Panic would not be too far from what he was feeling right now.

If the man had managed to get out of his sensing abilities then he must have escaped to another dimension, thus taking the secrets to increased chakra harvesting with him.

Or he began hiding among the many clones of his that still dotted this dimension.

But none of the signatures he felt had divine chakra or anything close to what the mortal had before. Unless the mortal had used it all up?

As his unsealing ring reached his palms, he was hit with an incredibly dense black orb. "Bijūdama!"

The name was left unheard but the effects sure were felt, the explosion instantly destroying his unsealing ring and actually doing some damage to his upper body, his lower half appearing to be unaffected.

Turning around as soon as he managed to stop tumbling around, he saw and sensed nothing. He hadn't sensed that attack!

Forming another ring in the hopes of completing his unsealing, he felt a black rod smash into face with enough force to cause him to tumble all around the vastness of the void again. Then another hit with a rod, and another, and yet another. The source of all attacks seeming to appear from behind him.

Thus, he couldn't see his opponent. And his 360° viewing ability could not be accessed with his chakra-less state.

On and on he was hit until he finally found himself blasted far enough that not even his eyes would be able to see the Jūbi's form or the clones that dotted around it. And he finally hit something.

Digging his way out, he realised that this fight had finally stopped being a space battle and became a more grounded battle on a genuine planet for the first time all fight.

There was so much of his opponent's residual chakra around him but he couldn't even use an absorption technique as that required chakra to begin using.

And then the mortal was in front of him, his power immense, his chakras many, and goal? One. To destroy him. It made him see red to see the man float in the air, looking down upon him as if he was above him. Nature growing near him on the ground beneath him, as if praising him. The man's white radiance mocking him, his already healed arm mocking him with yet another sun symbol on it! Normal Karma Seals didn't just regenerate that fast! He refused to believe the copy was better than the original.

Although, it did feel faint as if a residue of the actual thing, but that's how all the divine energy in his body felt, and yet he still somehow managed to pull a shit-load of it somehow. That shit was no residue!

But worst of all? He couldn't sense him.

Negating their own chakra came naturally to an Ōtsutsuki. It was instinctive to them.

The mortal was negating his chakra from his senses like he had been doing earlier. And he was doing it instinctively, he could tell from the look of no effort on his face.

The absolute worst part about it all was that he wasn't sure if this was a bastardisation of an Ōtsutsuki's instinctive ability or not. It seemed to be a perfect copy unlike all the other pale imitations.

And he wasn't sure if he preferred this to it being an imitation. Because if it wasn't an imitation then the mortal was truly crossing into divine territories for the first time all fight. Before then, his divinity had always been more of a 25% thing or far less. But this? Well, not even someone with a Karma Seal could do this unless they were significantly Ōtsutsuki-fied by it. SIGNIFICANTLY.

This… this changed things. More than anything else in this fight had. He was no longer going to treat him like an insolent, annoyingly durable mortal anymore; no, he clearly seemed to weigh more on the divine half of the spectrum.

"Give up, Ōtsutsuki, and I'll make this swift!" Came the otherworldly voice from above, further giving the image of the mortal being above him, not meant in the literal sense even if he currently was above him.

If only he had even a smidgen of chakra, he could have used it to activate Tenseigan Chakra Mode at the very least and then used the chakra from that to power his other eyes.

As it was, however…

His Tenseigan began bleeding white before beginning to break apart.

His other eyes weren't the only ones that could have parts of the eyes or the entire eyes sacrificed for a specific ability or power. The loss of the eye would be annoying, yes, but not anything to worry about.

As the Tenseigan completely disappeared, cyan chakra came out of the empty eye socket, the energy from it being enough for him to open his third eye once more. Unfortunately, it's abilities were only available in his unsealed form, the most he could use it for right now was heightened vision and many other vision based abilities at the cost of an exuberant amount of chakra necessary just to have the eye open. This was why he hadn't used its abilities so far in the fight. Well, that and the fact that he hadn't felt the need to use them against a mortal, even a blaspheming one.

His other eye was greatly affected from the loss of three tomoes, something that normally never happened as his tomoes nearly instantly regenerated as they never truly went away, they'd just turn red to signify usage of an ability or to signify a time limit put on it by an ability. Him using up all of his sealed form's chakra while the tomoes were in the red had actually caused them to disappear.

But he had some chakra thanks to the Tenseigan, now. And he'd put it to good use.

Naruto watched below him, wreathed in flames of gold, azure, white, with the occasional red—although that was mostly for show, the fox had felt the urge to show off its beautiful natural chakra colour as well, in the transformation.

The opponent raised an arm, body suddenly wreathed in cyan energy, Naruto wished he hadn't paused to give him time to recover.

Deciding to cow him once more, he bellowed, "So be it, then. If you will not bow, then I will make you before destroying you."

Flickering at his opponent, Six Paths Sage Mode was almost too late when it told him to dodge. Barely moving out of its grasp, he saw an eye in the palm of the arm.

'That wasn't there before!'

"Must have appeared when he tried to unseal himself before you interrupted."

However, it didn't matter that he had dodged, the palm connected with the trail of azure chakra that he left behind. And then it all disappeared, even the azure chakra he had just emitted had disappeared.

'What!?'

"He must have absorbed it."

'I didn't even see it happen! And why only my natural, base chakra?'

"He reached out to touch you specifically, not any of the residual chakra around you. Of course, you managed to avoid him and he went for the residual chakra. Maybe he can only absorb a chakra type at a time."

'So if he touches my Six Paths Yang Chakra…'

"It's game over."

'Oh...'

"That's not the worst part."

'Please don't tell me.'

"Too late. He absorbed all of the residual chakra that you had that was connected together. You have been leaking shit-tons of it for a while now. While some of your clones are safe, especially the ones only made from my chakra, the clones that were touching your residual chakra or were in a zone submerged with it were absorbed as well. It would explain the lack of many negative emotions that I suddenly feel now," the fox explained.

"In other words, you are fucked again. And I am retracting my natural chakra from you. You can have Bijū Mode but if he absorbs my natural unfiltered chakra, there is a good chance he'll absorb all of me instantly. The filtered chakra has enough of a difference that it can be considered as a different chakra type, so that should be safe. Although, most of your natural chakra in the seal is still safe, so there's that. Not sure how good of a shield the seal will be if he grabs you directly, though."

Seeing movement from his opponent after he absorbed his chakra, Naruto saw but a single hand rise before the ground beneath him, for as far as he could see, erupted in one very large-sized tower of magma/lava.

Moving his own hand down, in response to his opponent's own gesture, the lava tower and droplets of lava themselves found themselves flash-frozen. 'Ice Style: Flash-Freeze!'

He found no reprieve, however, as the frozen lava suddenly broke apart, the act seeming cataclysmic with how large it was, fire erupting out of it.

Cheeks bulging, he spat an incredibly large river of water that became oceans large with the use of more Six Paths Yang Chakra.

Instinctive understanding of the abilities was all that saved him. As it was, the planet was already seemingly destroyed, the once desolate planet having burned from lava from inside, then frozen, then burned with flames, and then…

As incredible amounts of steam formed, Naruto knew what was left of the planet was now just submerged in water.

Feeling unsafe in the mist-covered planet, despite logic stating that the chakra-laden mist would take care of his opponent's visual prowess, and since they both couldn't sense each other—something Naruto owed to his Six Paths Yang Chakra being able to seemingly perfectly imitate his opponent's chakra sensing negation technique, as if it was made to do that more than it was made to do most other chakra related things—they should be at an equal disadvantage there.

But… he also wasn't sure if he felt confident going to the void of space where his opponent was much more at ease with, his space living nature contrasting heavily with Naruto's planet life.

"Futon:" The wind chakra formed air at speeds fast enough to seemingly cause a shockwave of wind to blow past the entire planet, blowing the mist away, leaving the completely destroyed planet in view. Water submerging most of the previous damages caused in moments. The technique was used with his normal chakra, no instinctive knowledge of wind was needed, nor was the power for it, his normal chakra was good enough at the raw wind element technique.

Looking at the planet, he saw absolutely no signs of his opponent. He could have moved away via portal…

'Kage Bunshin no Jutsu.' Clones formed for the purpose of watching his back and sides for him in case portals formed.

Raising an arm, a Rasenshuriken began to form.

Using his current form's perfect chakra control, more than a few hundred thousand Rasenshurikens formed around him at the same speed as the one in his hand did.

Boy, if his opponent blew one of these up, it would cause a VERY bad chain reaction of explosions. The place around him was basically full of mines of his own making.

And then, with a regretful look at the lonely planet, he threw the first one, the rest following suit.

It almost looked like watching rain droplets fall, as they got far away from him and got closer to the planet. He began forming another barrage of them.

And then they all began exploding.

It didn't seem like much was happening at first.

Just nothing. Eventually, however, the combined explosions of the attacks got big enough that they could be seen as tiny blips on the planet. And as the explosions upon explosions kept happening, the tiny blips suddenly became not so tiny. Eventually, his entire view of the planet was covered in the blue spiralling explosions of wind. As they began expanding even more so, Naruto did not let up on the barrage of wind attacks destroying the planet on a molecular level.

Continuing his barrage, he made another clone, this one with the Six Paths Sage Mode cloak and had it fly to the other side of the planet.

Instantly, it dispelled, giving him knowledge that the entirety of the damage seemed to stop after a bit more than 90% of the planet.

Clearly a barrier of some sort by the Ōtsutsuki.

Stopping the barrage, making some chakra claws to grab the clones defending his back and sides, and flying to the other side himself, he noticed it was now being damaged. His clone must have been noticed and the Ōtsutsuki must have dropped the barrier.

And then his eyes widened before he had to dodge a Rasenshuriken. With the barrier not in place, nothing was stopping the last barrage of them from completely destroying the planet, not having anything to cause them to destabilise anymore as he had made them have an extra hard casing with the help of knowing how to do it from his divine chakra, and then they were now all coming at him as he was now on the other side of the planet.

'He played me like a fool.'

"You played yourself."

And then it became a game of "Dodge the Rasenshuriken", and boy did Naruto seem to be good at it despite it being his first time playing the game.

"Gah!" No, he didn't get hit by a Rasenshuriken. A barrage of black chakra rods had been hidden in the Rasenshuriken barrage, and he couldn't sense them nor dodge them as he couldn't quite see them. They had hit him and actually managed to stab him.

And then, as if in slow motion, his eyes tracked a rod barely miss his face and hit the shell of a passing by, barely dodged, Rasenshuriken.

Fuck.

And then it exploded, and he used its knockback to the fullest and tried to fly backwards from it as well, shooting him at other Rasenshurikens unintentionally.

Now, he could have easily dodged those if not for the fact that the chakra rods were making it immensely hard for him to use chakra, his various chakra cloaks were barely working, slowly losing their glow and would likely just become embers of energy at most, soon.

So he decided to pull a lot more chakra from the seal again, the chakra feeling like it was going to burst him from the inside as it felt like the rods were jamming all of his chakra inside his body while the newly introduced chakra from the seal tried to push through that while introducing even more chakra to his body.

In the end, however, the chakra started to pressurise enough that he almost felt like he felt a rod or two actually loosened out of his body a bit as, with a might roar of effort, a dense sphere of chakra formed around him before exploding outwards, causing all Rasenshurikens to detonate prematurely. This helped deal with the ones further away. For the ones near him, however? He'd just have to tank them.

"Oh no you aren't. Like hell am I regenerating you after you are damaged on a molecular level. Fuck that." And, just like that, he could feel that, with a tremendous amount of effort from the fox, golden chakra flowed through his system in greater amounts, managing to get past the chakra jamming rods' effects and forming an incredibly dense sphere around him. He felt like his body was going to just go pop from the pressure of chakra being caused from inside.

As he braced himself, he noticed that the Rasenshurikens' explosions were actually being held off by the sphere. As he noted some cracks form before disappearing as a new wave of chakra fixed them, he realised that it might not be enough. Acting quickly, he pulled out some rods and the sphere instantly stabilised and became denser in response. Taking out all of the rods, he finally stopped feeling like his body was going to explode from the pressure of his own chakra.

And then a hand touched the golden sphere and it along with all the golden chakra he was emitting disappeared.

Seeing another hand come at him in slow motion, the palm trying to touch his divine chakra, not his other chakras, he managed to barely move his hand fast enough to hold it at the wrist.

His opponent's other hand being busy trying to absorb or block the Rasenshuriken explosions, Naruto could quite tell which it was doing before, with a mighty grunt of effort from his opponent that Naruto could feel if only because of the chakra shockwave formed by it, the man blew away the explosions before his other hand tried to reach for the hand holding his wrist. His aim clearly being the divine chakra, Naruto barely managed to grab this arm by the wrist as well, being very glad to avoid the eye on the palm.

As his form started exuding golden chakra again, a sign of Bijū Mode's reactivation after its forced deactivation earlier, he mouthed at his opponent, "So, I suppose we are at a stalemate."

The narrowing of his opponent's eyes was the only warning he got—which was odd to see as one eye was a vertical eye on his forehead. Was odd to see it narrowing at him—before a mechanical arm seemed to form from his opponent's chest at UNREAL speeds, but he knew he couldn't dodge lest he be touched by his opponent's palm-eyes.

Freaking out at the arm coming to stab through him—or whatever it was supposed to do—he blinked in surprise as a yellow arm/claw came out of his chest and blocked the arm.

"You're welcome," grumbled the fox.

Looking back at his opponent, Naruto couldn't help himself and mouthed back, "Still a stalemate."

And then the eyes on his opponent's palms glowed a sickly green colour.

'I am guessing that's not medical chakra/ninjutsu.'

"No shit."

And just as they glowed brighter, Naruto forcefully pushed the palms to face each other at the last instant, and watched in surprise as both hands let out a laser of green energy… which, because of his act of changing the direction the palms were facing, ended up hitting both palms, the lasers from both eyes seeming to ignore each other and only showed any effect when they touched the opposite palms from where they were shot.

Instantly, Naruto saw his opponent's palms and, by default, his palm-eyes just disappeared from existence, the act earning an enraged look from the Ōtsutsuki.

'What happened!?'

"I am not sure but I think the beams were a long distance version of his chakra absorbing technique, and he may have just ended up absorbing whatever was in his eyes and palms. In other words, you got lucky once more in life."

'Well, I sorta wanna take him less seriously now but what are the odds that he has some eyes in his feet as well, now?'

"... Damn you for mentioning that. Avoid his feet, I guess."

Forming another white Rasengan in hand, he prepared to hit the humanoid in the chest with the Six Paths Yang/Sage Rasengan, watching it get closer, he saw the opponent attempt to dodge, only able to move enough so that the Rasengan would hit his stomach, not his chest.

"Explode it, now!"

Trusting the fox, he destabilised the technique early, preparing for the backslash, he received none.

"What?" he said in surprise.

"His dodge looked too suspicious. Why not move to the sides? Why move higher? It would take more time to dodge that way. So I suspected he has an eye on his stomach as well."

And the fox must have been right. Was probably another Rinnegan. Hopefully. Because he was starting to understand the abilities of various coloured Rinnegans from the purple/gray ones he first came across to the tomoe'd ones, the yellow ones, and more over the course of his life along with the special ability each might have that may be tailored to the owner's life/experiences. Meanwhile, if it turned out to be another bullshit eye then he'd have no clue what to expect.

And odds were that this Ōtsutsuki had such eyes when unsealed. Would explain why he hadn't seemed to have used the third eye—now second since the Tenseigan seemed to be blind now—on his face/forehead for anything other than tracking.

On a side note, his opponent just got some of his Six Paths Sage Chakra. Well, wasn't that great?

The absorption speeds on the eyes on his palms—which were now gone—and his supposedly-existing stomach eye were crazy. His Rasengan had blown up and was absorbed before the explosion could reach him. If the stomach eye could absorb all chakra as long as it was connected as well, like the eyes that used to be on the palms could, then it was a good thing the fox told him to disconnect from the Rasengan by destabilising it.

Looking at his opponent flare his newly-gotten chakra, his destroyed hands started regenerating. Naruto was about to try to stop the process as he didn't want the eyes to come back but he saw that the palms regenerated without them.

Heh. Seems his Six Paths Sage Chakra could not make up for the Six Paths Yin deficiency even after mixing with nature energy. Well, either that or his opponent's own technique was so effective that it was stopping him from healing the eyes he destroyed.

Seeing his opponent's frown, Naruto guessed it was the former and not the latter explanation.

Seeing him furrow his brows in slight concentration, Naruto panicked, seeing a slit start appearing on his palms. Getting two Truth-Seeking Orbs to come to his hands from their place behind him, he held them as they formed into black rods, not unlike many of the black rods his opponent had used all fight. Just that these were… less expendable.

He hoped that his opponent couldn't absorb these as the chakra behind them should not be absorbable as long as they were stable.

Holding one of the ends of the rods, he brought his closed hands down like fists on his opponent's palms.

It wasn't needed, however, as the slits started expelling a red a white liquid before sealing themselves up, the eye regeneration seeming to be a failure, so Naruto mid-attack, switched where he was aiming for. Flying half a meter closer to his opponent as his hand came down, the rods went into both of his opponent's shoulders, getting a gasp of surprise from him before a hand left one rod and came to give a devastating punch to the face, the other hand holding onto a rod that was still in his opponent's shoulder, impaled all the way down to his elbow, using it to pull his opponent closer.

His opponent's own hands were too slow as he found himself punched hard enough that, even with Naruto holding him with the help of a rod through his shoulder, he found himself blown away, the rod ripping out of his should/arm.

The other rod cleanly slid out in accordance to its creator's orders, Naruto not wanting it out of control range in case the man managed to destabilise it and absorb the chakra in it.

Flying forward after the man just moments after he started flying away at high speeds, Naruto caught the other rod in mid-air—mid-space?—and continued forward towards his opponent, trying hard to stay out of his vision now that he knew his opponent couldn't sense him nor could he see in 360 degrees again.

His burning azure, gold, and blazing white form flew ahead of the many-eyed opponent, two Truth-Seeking Orbs changing from rod form to standard form and combining to form a greatsword. Then the third orb combined with it, making it a butcher knife bearing a bearing resemblance to a butcher knife he once came across when he was much younger.

It was no Sword of Nunoboko but it would have to do.

Swinging it with a roar, he saw his opponent realize where he was and what he was doing. Unfortunately, the eye he made portals with primarily was greatly weakened with the loss of tomoes earlier, so he couldn't portal away.

And while he had absorbed an incredibly large amount of chakra from Naruto earlier, it was just the standard azure chakra. It was barely something that could keep his weaker eyes powered up enough that they wouldn't die off. The bare amount of Six Paths Sage Chakra he had taken from the blond was missing its Yin component, the nature energy mixed with it did not make up for that even though it tried, and thus he didn't have much proficiency with it to do much, much less the fact that he only got a little bit of it because he only got one attack's worth of energy.

Incredibly annoyed, he almost considered using up another tomoe and setting it in the red, but that was out of the question. If only he could unseal himself.

Roaring back at his opponent, he managed to change his body's angle so he faced the attack, before he swung at it from the side in an attempt to change its trajectory, using up the minor amounts of Six Paths Sage Chakra he had absorbed in the punch, it seemed like time seemed to stop for a moment, before cracks started appearing on both his hand, the sword, and everything in the general direction of the swing—him included.

Seeing his chance as the chakra behind the weapon was clearly imbalanced, he tried to fly forward by expelling massive amounts of blue chakra he had absorbed from the mortal before and try to get himself stabbed by the sword—at least that's what it looked like to Naruto.

Before, in front of his eyes, a large crack formed on his opponent's clothes and the stomach area was completely erased from existence, showing a bloody red eye there.

He couldn't let him absorb the chakra in the Truth-Seeking Orb formed weapon!

With but a thought, a clone formed right next to the end of the sword, already twisting around for what would be an incredibly painful kick—how would one know that? This particular clone was spawned with all the chakra cloaks, no chakra spared to conserve chakra. And it all showed results as the Ōtsutsuki went flying away, there would have been a resounding "boom" sound if anything was around to transmit the sound of it.

In fact, a few pieces of the Ōtsutsuki actually flew off from the kick, most likely pieces weakened from the cracks formed on his body from Naruto's Truth-Seeking Orb weapon.

Looking disturbed at the fleshy pieces around him, he almost didn't follow after his opponent. And boy was he thankful for not being late as his opponent had taken the opportunity, while still being sent flying away from his clone's attack, to try and unseal himself.

In but an instant, his opponent found his unsealing ring broken, a fist found itself in his stomach. Looking at the blond the fist belonged to, he gave a smirk. Upon the horrific look on the mortal's face as he saw the incredibly damaged eye on the stomach that he had hit and the realisation that he had forgotten about it. And that would cost him.

In an instant, all of his chakra was gone. All of his chakras.

And then he went poof, showing him to be the same clone that had kicked earlier, before—

"Six Paths: Rasenshuriken!" A divine chakra-made attack found purchase in his back, another hand holding onto the back just afterwards and flying back as fast as possible, getting clipped in the explosion but that was fine. Why?

Well… Naruto raised a hand, a glowing yellow, white, and blue tendril connecting it to the Ōtsutsuki in the middle of a terribly painful-looking explosion. It was time to take all of his chakra back!

Pulling back, he smirked as felt his clone's absorbed chakra come back along with so much of his chakra that had been absorbed.

"I would be careful, boy. You are facing an opponent that can absorb all of a type of chakra as long as it is all connected. And you just put one big direct connection between him and you. And you made that a connection to all three chakra types you are using."

Yeah, but, like, how was he gonna connect the chakra tendril to the eye on his stomach? Plus, after the punch from his clone, that eye was moments from failing his opponent.

And then, just as he began pulling more, the expanding swirling explosion around his opponent suddenly stopped expanding. In fact, it stopped existing altogether. Damn was that absorption ability fast. The only thing that could get around it was when the guy wasn't actually thinking of absorbing something or was in too much pain to do so.

Feeling a tug on the tendril, he suddenly wondered if he had made a mistake…

And, thus, it became a battle of wills, a battle of instinctive chakra understanding, a battle of chakra potencies, a battle of emotions, and a battle of so much more.

Fortunately for him, however, he could cheat.

As clones formed around him, each grabbing the tendril and forming their own, he felt the battle weaken for a second as each clone had a lesser chakra potency and the overall chakra was lessened as well.

Willpower, however… Willpower was plenty. Willpower was what would decide this.

And willpower did. He saw it. He felt it. Chakra started pouring through the tendrils like they were a leaky faucet.

And then his opponent started tugging harder, fear, anger, retribution feeding his tugs, equalising the playing field once more, his opponent seeming to remember why he wanted Naruto alive. Why he did what he did. And so willpower strengthened on his side as well, equalising the game a lot, the clones of Naruto not possessing a fear of death, or rather they were so used to it, they couldn't even think of fighting against it.

The will to live from his clones could have helped.

And then, a will to live showed itself; Naruto couldn't help but grin at the clone that was trying much harder than the rest, his hopes had been realized. It was a corrupted clone, a will to live was there and would cultivate plenty if allowed to do so.

And so they all tugged: on one side, a being that called itself a member of the divine, and on the opposing end of the pull, a being that represented what mortals could do.

Along with a lot of clones.

And a look of realization came upon the Ōtsutsuki. He wasn't winning this. Not by brute force, not by his own understanding of chakra, not with the chakra he currently had, and definitely not with willpower.

The numbers were against him and this was not his method of absorbing chakra, it was somewhat unfamiliar to him. Glancing downwards for a second, he hoped his highly damaged eye down there was up to the task.

He stopped pulling back, the line went taut as he got closer to the mortal and, just before the line could get tense again after how much the mortal was absorbing it, he tried to twist around. The tendril started from his back which required a bit of maneuvering to try and get it in contact with the eye on his stomach.

Unfortunately, the mortal realized what he was trying to do and he was instantly hit with a barrage of dense balls of air, small enough that they all didn't touch each other, and carefully aimed to the point where none came near the eye. He instantly knew that the goal was to get the tendril all tensed up again, so he—with a mental groan of effort—used the small amount of chakra he could spare while a decent amount was being assaulted and pulled back into the blond, and he directed it into the weakened eye that still hadn't recovered its tomoes.

The effect of the gravitational technique was instantaneous as the blond came flying at him while he went flying back, both of them trying to struggle against the forces working upon them, whether gravitational forces or a high-speed, dense air barrage, they both were failing.

Risking reduced ocular abilities, he tried to force another red tomoe ability, if only one of the ones that could help him win this tug of war/chakra. Feeling like his eye and his head were going to absolutely burn in response, he decided this was beyond his sealed form.

He almost thought about letting the man kill him and putting a karma seal on him. Would give him all of the man's secrets to chakra harvesting while he made his revival through the man's body.

He almost thought about doing that.

But, he had a feeling that the bastardised karma-like seal on his hand would mess up the karma seal and permanently kill him.

Well, not permanently, probably. He was only permanently killable in his unsealed form.

Giving the arm of his opponent that had the sun-like seal on it a wary glance, he changed that to "He was probably only killable in his unsealed form."

He really didn't like the feel of that seal.

And for a moment, he almost thought he saw the same old avatar from earlier that had formed from the arm/seal, and it was giving him the bird.

Snarling, he focused the rage into the chakra tugging, every little bit helped here.

As it was, just about all the chakra he had at his current form's disposal was chakra rightfully taken from the mortal. If the mortal took back the chakras he was aiming for with the tendril then he'd have about nothing.

On the plus side, however, the fact that he was taking back all the types of chakra he had taken from the mortal meant that the tendril was connected to every chakra type of the mortal. If he could just get rid of that pesky divine chakra—preferably by absorbing it.

The clones found themselves unwittingly following the duo as their tendrils—which were connected to the main one—were pulled along for the ride.

On and on the cycle continued, Naruto's wind pushing the man away, the man's gravity pulling Naruto towards the man.

And then something changed as the man suddenly gained an epiphany. His eyes saw the cracks that had spread across space because of his Jūbi, he saw the great final wall that blocked away the cluster of dimensions all Ōtsutsuki's had access to from whatever was beyond it.

He had a plan, then.

Painstakingly using chakra while his opponent was trying to rip it out from him, he slowly raised a hand and pointed at his opponent.

The man instantly tensed up even more but it was for naught as the finger moved sideways and, along with it, Naruto felt an intense gravitational force push him in that direction.

Taken by surprise, his body went far, the Ōtsutsuki following along if only to prevent the tendril from dragging him around.

Naruto tried desperately to push against the force acting on every single atom of his body individually, equally, rather than just act like wind and only affect him surface area-wise from one side.

In the end, Naruto's struggling chakra just couldn't hold up when stuck in a tug of war/chakra AND being required to push back against such a strong force, any attempts to make clones to hold him failed as well because they were subjected to the same push and, unfortunately, he couldn't quite spare the Six Paths Sage Chakra anymore so he couldn't form them with that chakra and have them be more useful.

As they both went tumbling once more, Naruto soon found the gravitational force completely gone, quickly straightening himself, he looked at his opponent before quickly deviating from him to the tendrils.

They were… gone?

No, he noticed his opponent still had bits of a tendril connected to him. Focusing on the tendril, he realized that his opponent had forced the middle of the main tendril and some parts of the clones' tendrils.

Taking a good sense of what was going on with his divine levels of sensing ability, he sensed an unbelievable number of signatures from the place in the middle of where the tendril disappeared and reappeared.

Many such signatures were overlapping.

Ah. 'Must be the still damaged space in the trajectory of the Jūbi's earlier attack.'

As he stared into the abyss, the abyss stared back.

Well, okay, it didn't so much as stare back but… How should he say it… It sensed him back?

Another chakra source, another, yet another, and it kept piling on top.

The most interesting part? It was all divine chakra.

Another interesting part? Many of the chakra sources felt just like him but he could just tell they weren't him. In layman's terms, his gut was telling him they weren't clones or clones of clones. Well, maybe some were clones but what he meant was that they weren't his clones or related to his clones in any normal fashion.

Were there… Were there other Narutos or something and they were now actively sensing him now that he was in his more divine of forms? But how? They shouldn't have been able to sense him sensing them, his chakra sensing negation ability that he had copied from the Ōtsutsuki had seemed absolute!

"Never underestimate chakra resonance, brat. It's what allows you to make that tendril to take back the chakra the Ōtsutsuki took from you and it is what can be used to do so much more."

He hoped for a second that these other 'Narutos' would come and help him in this fight but realised that that was wishful thinking. Why would they? Why would they risk their dimensions, their homes—assuming they could dimension travel here—for a random version of them?

Also… his senses ignored so many beings until they locked onto the person he wanted to find.

'Sasuke has got to stop having chakra exhaustion.'

Yup, the dimension he sensed his counterpart in—HIS counterpart, not an alternative reality one like he sensed—showed the man being low on chakra. This was bullshit. Guess he wasn't gonna expect much from there.

"Human!"

Widening his eyes, he realised that his wandering mind had forgotten to take note of the Ōtsutsuki, the so-called divine being attempting, and being very close, to get the tendril to touch the eye that was the god tier eye when it came to chakra absorption—he shuddered to think about how much more powerful that could get when he unsealed himself.

Unable to think about what to do in such a short time, he was immensely thankful when one of his clones took initiative, the corrupted one from earlier with a will to live showed its urge to live and actually began to pull the tendril and lots of chakra towards them, the Ōtsutsuki actually getting closer to them as a result as staying in the same position would mean having the chakra ripped out from his body.

Roaring to the void himself, he began pulling much more earnestly than before, and the Ōtsutsuki began roaring as well.

They both found themselves being pulled into the abyss in-between them.

'Not again!' Naruto thought about how he'd escape this time.

'Not again...' the Ōtsutsuki whimpered mentally, the last time he had been in a void had been torture, having ocular abilities on his level meant that the eyes would continue to attempt to see, make sense of, and give ALL information to the user. In broken space, that basically meant an infinite amount of sight's worth of information.

Thank the Ōtsutsuki God that his Tenseigan had been destroyed earlier. He did NOT want to have 360° vision to go along with an infinite amount of vision-based info.

And sure, one might think that he could just close his eyes and that would be it.

That worked for some eyes, yes, but the thing about the broken space was that your eyelids weren't necessarily going to be over your eyes there. Hell, it would be a miracle if they were.

In other words, he was fucked.

Just as he got into the abyss with curses of all kinds taken from all kinds of species he had come across over his long life, all directed at the mortal, he suddenly had an idea.

Well, before he began having blood come out of his eyes, nose, and blood and vomit come out of his mouth as his first eye finally made it into the abyss.

He had come near the broken space because he had hoped the chakra tendril would break apart once it was partially inside it and partially outside it...

This was going to be tough.

This was going to be very tough.

His opponent on the other hand?

'Guess I'll just ignore what my eyes, sense of touch, and hearing are telling me and focus on just chakra.'

Yeah, his opponent was having it much easier than him.

Once more, Naruto found himself in a place he couldn't call a place or even "space". He wasn't in one place, he was in an uncountable number of places. He wasn't in one dimension nor was he in many, he was somehow in-between. He felt like he was everywhere in every overlapping dimension this broken space, this abyss had managed to reach, and yet he felt like he was still in just one piece.

His chakra told him some pieces of him were too far to comprehend yet he could still move them.

Yes, Naruto decided, space was a bitch and space-time is probably a bitch and a half. Sasuke can keep his shitty ass Rinnegan if this is what he has to go through and if this is the stuff he has to figure out.

'Reverse summoning?'

"Not with that chakra tendril still binding you to him."

'Ah...' He mentally facepalmed. 'Hey, Fox.'

"Hmm?"

'If I… If I don't survive this, could you—'

"I won't take care of whatever friends you have made in these other dimensions."

'I was actually going to ask you to make sure to use up this one coupon I have for ramen and to not let it expire.'

"... How—"

'Oh, and could you take care of Gama-chan?'

"How exactly am I supposed to get into a ramen stand and buy ramen?" He gestured to his own size.

'That seems like a 'you' problem.'

The fox was instantly giving him the middle finger, so he manifested his avatar in the seal and gave it a Rasengan.

"A normal Rasengan? A regular-sized Rasengan against me? Made with regular chakra as well?"

Naruto had the decency to blush in embarrassment. It had been rather comical to shove a normal ball-sized Rasengan at a fox of titanic proportions.

So he made a bigger one. Upon the fox's patronising look, he changed the Giant Rasengan to a Massive Rasengan.

After physically feeling the disapproval from the fox, he made it bigger into a SuperMassive Rasengan.

The fox barely eyed it with interest, as if it was barely worth its interest.

"SuperMassive Rasengan!" And a giant, clawed hand simply blocked it before clenching and causing it to explode, sending him flying back.

"How! That should have done at least something! Hell, it did do something last time!"

"That was simply when you fought only my yang half. I am much more complete now."

"... Alright, fine, you can forget about the coupon but I ain't negotiating on Gama-chan."

"Alright. Although, you seem to be forgetting what would happen to that prized wallet of yours upon your death." Seeing the realisation in his eyes, he continued, "That's right, or have you forgotten?"

Naruto's downtrodden form simply left the seal-scape, the entire moment having only taken an instant in the real world, not that one could tell because of how broken space was out there.

Pulling on the tendril, he was very surprised to feel seemingly no resistance. Little did he know just how brain-dead the Ōtsutsuki was on the other side, all the visual information his brain was getting was too much for him.

As he absorbed the rest of his chakra, he sighed in frustration. He was just about out of Six Paths Sage Chakra.

And then he could suddenly see again, space being fixed or rearranged, he didn't know. What he did know was that he found himself at the furthest he could sense. The furthest dimension? The first dimension? The last dimension? Or something else?

Also, there was a pissed off being that radiated power like a malevolent god, madness shining in his eyes, hair glowing green, and various eyes dotting his body.

He had been unsealed.

And his eyes and nose were bleeding for some reason but Naruto chose to ignore that over the overwhelming despair he felt.

"Ş̖͕̙̯͍͔̣͍̼̙̼̞̪̝̈́̔̄̄̓̌͛̊̓͋ͣ̀̚Ư̍̐ͫ̆̆̽̃ͣ̑̋ͧͤͦͣͥ̋͠͏̳͈̟͚͎̯̥͎͓̺̫͔͓̖̲̥ͅF̛̣̜̙̺̙̲̖̝̘̒ͤ̽̅̌̓̏͊͟F̶̢͎̪͉̻͙͉̩̜ͥ̽͌ͣ͘͘E̢̡̜̰̗̥̣̅͗ͤͩ̐̀R̵̸̦͖̲͖̥͍͔͚͔͍̣̠̐̃̄ͨ̄̓͂̆ͪ́ͅ!͌̂ͣ̀ͪ̂͌ͣ̀͏͍̱̥͔̲͈̣̜̣͎̯̬̣̖͉"

The words were not words, they were beyond intent, searing themselves onto his mind, threatening to unravel his very being as the mad Ōtsutsuki's still suppressed chakra—likely by instinct—seemed to weigh down on him, moments away from ending his existence.

And then the man—no, the god threw a green bolt of energy at Naruto, which Naruto moved to dodge, knowing he could make it just in time, a fact that he wondered if the maddened god knew as well?

And then, all the white chakra his body was emitting disappeared, taking the sun mark along with it.

Six Paths Sage Chakra had run out.

This was it, then. The end of his story.

As he stared at the incoming bolt, he could only hope that others would be able to stop him—could any Naruto stop it? Any clones? Who knew, for they, the corrupted clones, often achieved powers not thought achievable to the original at first. At least not until the original got the memories. He just hoped that the last corrupted clone he made would survive. It barely had any juice during the end of the chakra tugging but it had a will to live and Naruto wished it success in its life.

At the last moment, his eyes moved from the bolt of green light to the Ōtsutsuki's face, his maddened face slowly morphing into a face of disbelief as he realised what was about to happen, and then Naruto's gaze moved somewhat far away to the stars and galaxies.

Wait… those weren't stars or galaxies… Were those… eyes?

And then, he raised his chakra output as high as he could, roaring as gold and azure burst out, still not overtaking the overwhelming brightness of the green, making sure that he would go out fighting, at least.

And then it came upon him; to say it ignored all his defenses, his attempts, would not be an exaggeration.

Nothing was left but smoke by the time it was over.

"S̼͎̦̦͎͙͛ͨ̇̏̑ͬ̋M̵͕̖̎̈́̒̊̌O̟͕̜ͪͪ̄ͮ̈̇̚͞K̝ͭ̇Ė͒?̹͇̹̍͌̚"

A clone? Except… No, he could sense all the clones in the other dimension where they started the fight, and they had all dispersed.

That was the original.

Had he been fighting a…

Had he just lost his chance to find out advanced chakra harvesting abilities?

"N̛͆̓̾̎͛̆ͦ͏͚̩̹͚̬ͅO̸̵̳̦͕̬̾͌̔̅͗͆͒́̀͟O̊ͨ̐͌̏͆̆͏̴̨̛̼̪̜̦̖̯̤̘̘͎͙͡Ǒ̢̙̭͚̘͙̟̜̹̗̪̠̘͚͙̻͑̈́̇̏̐ͦ̄͒̈́ͮͩ̐͐ͩ̀̚͟͢O̫̜̬͇̳ͫ͛͛ͤ̐͗̀̚͘͝Õ̷̢̝̗̭̜̘̟̭̝̜̹̹̿ͫͤͦ͑̄̄̅͗̑̿̇͟͜O̡̼̠̺̗̫͇͈͕͉̎ͫͮͭ̇ͮ̉ͯ̆ͫ́́̄ͧ̐̀͜͢Ơ̴̦͈̫̯̍̊ͣ͑͛͆̅ͨ͜O̶̝͔̟̲̖͍̘͕̰͚̼͕̱̳̩̹̞ͬͦ̐ͣͣͯͩ͆̒̈́͢͞ͅ!̛̫͚̭̲͖̟̓ͤ̓͂̈̔̅̓͠!̵̡̡̞̜̠̬̣͕̟͈̗͚̰̱̻̀̓ͥ̈͐͌ͭ́͜!̵̸̡͕̮̘̩ͧ̒̾̄̽͗͂͜͡!̵̨̘̪̟̩̖̫͕͓͈̦̓͐̽̓̅̌"

And so died a clone of a clone of a clone of Naruto Uzumaki, formed sometime during the Fourth Shinobi War years back.

So finished a battle of a fraction versus a fraction.

That was until one fraction decided to become more than just a fraction with his unsealing.

A fraction versus a quarter, perhaps?

But he did his job. Not the job he wanted nor the job he had planned to do, but he had done it. He had done what no Naruto clone had done before with its death.


(Elemental Nations)

In a dark hallway in what was supposed to be the abandoned section of the old hospital that was supposedly entirely destroyed by a village-wide Shinra Tenseiattack, a beeping noise could be heard behind a door.

Hidden purposely by Tsunade with the support of many others, laid Naruto.

Emphasis on Naruto.

Not a clone, not a clone of a clone, and not even a clone further down that path, but Naruto.

The original.

And as the Kage Bunshinof his popped, the one with the most amount of memories and experiences than any other Kage Bunshinof his or any Kage Bunshinto have ever existed, his body was suddenly filled up with more chakra than it ever had.

And it had had to deal with a LOT over the years as more and more clones popped. Or when many direct clones popped instantly.

While the clone that had popped was a clone of a clone, the chakra still found its way to him, rather than the clone it was created from—which had long since been destroyed.

And as many memories suddenly blew into his brain, a miracle happened.

His brain didn't just completely fail him as it should have. In fact, it sort of seemed like it jump-started it.

His body glowing a literal blue as it tried to contain the chakra within it, he awoke with a roar! Not a gasp, no coughs, and no pain.

A roar, and a will strong enough to defy the gods was seen in his eyes, as he got up and yelled out to the empty room, "DON'T YOU TAKE MY RAMEN, SASUKE!"

And so Naruto Uzumaki finally awoke, presumably from a very bad dream.


End of chapter.

Boom, baby! End!

And, I know you won't believe me but I was trying to end that since near the beginning lol. Way before it was 10k words lol. Maybe even before it was 5k words.

Except this ain't the end. Not for me. I tried to beta this but man is that kinda hard to do on mobile. Plus I keep laughing at my own terrible jokes so there's that…

Oh wow, it got to exactly 43k words at the end of the previous paragraph. Wow… anyway, time to ruin that by adding a large beginning author note. Why? Because I ain't like those humble authors that write a lot and don't even leave a note. No humbleness here.

The beginning author note already exists. Imma just make it bigger.

So, fun fact, I wrote this months ago. Like, 40k was probably written months ago. And then some person on Discord was like, "Yo", And I was like, "Yo back?", And they were like "Bruh, come back to the server", And I was like, "Bruh, I don't even know you."

Okay, it didn't go like that but I ROUGHLY followed how the entire thing went down so meh. They then got me back to this server and I grew crazy active. And then this dude, and admin/staff dude there just offers nitro to keep me going. That dude kept me from writing for so dang long…

Not that my nonexistent fan-base would care.

I'd probably grow a fan-base if I wrote in the more popular sections and continued that Hephaestus story… Meh. Don't feel like it.

It's probably arrogant of me to assume that I can just "grow a fan-base" with my writing skills. Let's not even mention the story skills or humour… There's a reason I write non-chronologically.

Imma 69 joke my way to peak humour lol.

So, I still have so much to fix, dang it… I also have other chapters I was supposed to send but I didn't for reasons I can't remember. I swear, if I didn't post all my ideas in my Discord server that has no people in it, I would never remember any fanfic ideas.

Bet this is where the 2 people who got here will expect to see a link to the aforementioned server. Not today! Hah! You thought! Boom! You got bamboozled!

Anyway, to the two people that got here, I don't believe you read it all. Maybe one of you two did. Jk, I got no clue about this, guys. Who the hell would read this? Certainly not me if not for the sprinkles of my own humour thrown around for myself. Even then, I don't know if I could make myself read it all.

At one point, I was getting dangerously close to the character count on Archive of Our Own. I JOKINGLY THOUGHT ABOUT GETTING THERE. I DIDN'T ACTUALLY THINK I WOULD GET CLOSE.

I had to summarize the sh*t out of the remaining parts of the chapter lol.

So, yeah, I decided to let my irritations at this chapter out through the author note. This is just my ranting and stress relief in a sense. Makes it feel like I am getting closer to finishing all the spelling mistakes on the chapter or that I am doing SOMETHING at least.

So another thing that's got me annoyed is that this dude that was given a thirty day ban on that server is gonna be back soon. That's gonna be annoying. Only guy I ever blocked.

The new Fortnite chapter event was pretty cool my internet in a remarkable display quite unlike itself, decided to sh*t itself just when it started so I didn't get to fully enjoy it. It was still quite cool, though.

I ain't ending this note yet. No sir. Imma continue tomorrow. Man is it late…

Continuation later:

First thing I did before continuing this author note days later is adding a Spider-Man reference where he says, "Oh… how'd that get in there?"

Do I have regrets? Maybe.

Several days later, I realized my one year of uploading fics will be here soon. So I guess I'll just post this then, regardless of whether it's ready to post or not… BECAUSE I CAN'T MAKE MYSELF BETA THIS.

A few hours from posting now and I realise that I never got to speak of the stuff I wanted to speak of in this note. Like the stuff about how the Naruto in this entire chapter is just a clone and how we last saw the original when he blew himself up with explosive tags. And I, regrettably, think that this note is already far too long for that. Sad.

Oh well, at least this chapter will make my total words on the site 100k+ lol. For the word count! Heheheh.

I gotta stop making that joke.

Anyway, I tried to Beta it and probably failed miserably. And, again, I sorta just didn't wanna post this because of how long this got and how bad it got. Seriously, just terrible at points. Some people told me to post it anyway, so if you like it, then thank those people, I guess.

Any longer and I would be limited by the AO3 word count… Over 240k characters right now. AO3 limits at 250k.

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.

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Imagine if FFN has a word count… Oh please no.