Oh, wow. That hurt so bad that I stayed up writing LONG past the point where I should have slept. Killing myself to live here. You're free to hate me, but please believe that your old buddy Melkor (no matter the sticky wicket he's written himself into now) has a plan.

Review response:

1. TigrezzTail: It's a Game of Thrones joke; the creators talk of "subverting expectations" is something of a focal point for a lot of fans who are still mad about how bad the last season (or two seasons, depending on who you're talking to) was written.

Also, "Byahebi" is a title that I use to refer to Orochimaru—it literally means, "white snake," and I use it for the same reason that I'll sometimes use "Otoyon" instead of "Sound Four." At least on my end, as the author, it breaks the monotony of using the same epithet (or two) for a character...though, I guess it's a lot less common to refer to Orochimaru as "Byahebi" than to call Jiraiya "Gama Sennin."

2. Noahendless: More information about Makai, you say? Have no fear, my friend...have no fear.

Let's get this trainwreck moving.


Not one to be outdone by his opponents or subordinates, Yuurei looked at the scene taking place around him with a smile. The mist began to clear unwillingly as corpses, fallen weapons, and loose rubble began to shake and rise. The sandworm tooth in his left hand disappeared, and he felt malevolence fill his entire being. A brilliant multicolored tail grew out from behind Yuurei's back, only to split into three, and those three tails all multiplied the same way. In the cool air of this January morning, Yuurei bellowed a challenge to the world, and his demonic strength knew no limits. All across the battlefield, corpses burst into clouds of bloody fog, and hard layers of dirt and stone collapsed into fine powder.

The Sharingan in Yuurei's left eye spun at an impossible speed, its constant revolutions giving the appearance of a solid black ring. A short distance away, the Rain guard clutched at his mask's right eye hole—the horrific pain that Yuurei's transformation was putting him through couldn't be understated as the veteran shinobi sank to his knees, and blood began to pour out from his eye as it changed its shape—the Mangekyou Sharingan now presented itself, and a matching pair of three-bladed pinwheels appeared in the eyes of Yuurei and the Mist Guard. In the distance, Mei felt an overwhelming surge of power as she heard her master's war cry; spitting lava, she melted a loyalist's throat away with ease.

Without activating it herself, Tayuya felt heat fly out from the fang-marks on her clavicle. The scar-like seal shone with golden light, and the redhead's heart gave one massive thump before it paused its rhythm. Her pale skin darkened considerably, reaching a deeper shade than Kidomaru, as her eyes transitioned brom brown to red and yellow. Out from her back, two bony appendages exploded, only for flesh and feathers to cover them; between her shoulders, a massive pair of black wings had sprouted. Finally, the young woman's hair was forcefully parted as horns grew out from around her head. Only Yuurei, Sai, and Ayame had seen this form before; she hadn't used it since the day she'd arrived in Mizu no Kuni. Lifting off of the ground, she watched Yuurei carefully.

"Do you remember the day you gave me this wound, Zabuza?" Yuurei asked, his left hand rising to trace the long mark across his bare skin. From his right collarbone, a pale line marked its way across the blond demon's ribs before stopping in the middle of his stomach. The scar was mirrored on his back, clearly having split through no less than seven bones and four internal organs. "The day I destroyed a country?"

"Oh, spare me the romance," Zabuza groaned. "If you're going to use your mouth in a fight, then do it by eating this!"

The burly swordsman swung his truncated blade at a perfect level with Yuurei's jaw, only for the transformed demon to bite down on the Kubikiribouchou's shortened end. Try as he might, to the mild amusement of several witnesses, he could neither pull the blade free nor push Yuurei back.

"Well, Zabuza, you got what you asked for!" Kisame chided his former teammate with a glance in the brunet's direction, a predatory smirk on his face.

"Kisame? Shut up, or I swear on my grandmother's corpse that you're next." Zabuza's retort was all but ignored as Kisame began to dodge successive strikes from Sai's pair of pure-Yin sai.

It was clear that the pale-skinned teen wanted to drive him away from his fellows, but Kisame was happy to oblige—it wasn't every day that he came across an opponent this strange, able to survive multiple swings of his sword. Though the bloody shredding of Sai's previous body had been cathartic, Kisame knew better than to assume such a glancing blow could be a killing strike. He'd seen weaker ninja come back from worse. After being prodded toward an isolated area in the middle of the battlefield, Sai dropped his offensive tactics, instead returning to a neutral stance while Kisame stood with his back to a small boulder.

"Do you think you can kill me?" Kisame asked, the feeling of blood in his ears driving the shark-man towards a frenzy.

"Maybe. Maybe not," Sai replied, a fearless expression dominating the set of his eyebrows and the tightness of his jaw. "Hubris isn't my specialty."

"Ha! Good!" Kisame laughed, swinging the Samehada down. Sai dodged the attack, only to lock his sword-breaking weapons towards the base of the blue-scaled sword. As Kisame tried to pull back, the Samehada cried out in a painful protest.

"How long does it take for a fish to regrow its scales?" Sai asked.

With a mighty pull, Orochimaru's son stripped the flesh off of the Samehada, and its blue scales fell to the ground as blood-red flesh met the mist in the air. Kisame's expression moved through rage, disbelief and pain, then back to rage, only to settle on horror. Never in his life had he seen anyone do this level of damage to his legendary sword. Certainly, it had lost a scale or two over the years, but wielding it now would be like slapping the man in front of him with an oversized pork tenderloin. The attack hadn't come without cost; Sai's right arm had been stripped almost in half as its bloody muscles were revealed. Black and white snakes seemed to knit together with one another, and the younger shinobi's wound closed after several seconds of waiting.

Caught between a rock and a hard place, Kisame had to ask himself: was avenging his sword's pain so important, when his fighting style relied so heavily upon it?


When Yuurei's sandworm tooth had cut through the Kubikiribouchou, Zabuza had known he was out of his depth. To obtain a cut that fine without sending any chakra through his weapon meant one of two things: either he'd become a Kenjutsu master in the seven and a half months since they'd parted ways in nami no Kuni, or his weapon was strong enough that it didn't matter.

Zabuza knew it was the second of those options, and he hated it. What even was that thing? It looked like some kind of giant tooth!

Almost lazily, Yuurei batted Zabuza's blade away by its flat side. Unlike Kisame's Samehada, there was little risk in simply touching the sword. What he couldn't feel, though, was that the Kubikiribouchou was continuing to react to his iridescent youki. Though Zabuza began to feel that the very air he breathed was an irritant—and it was, as Yuurei's acidic youki rolled off of his body—the legendary executioner's blade in his grasp grew increasingly lighter.

Against an ordinary weapon, one that wasn't used to chakra surging across its surfaces or through its entirety, Yuurei's oppressive youki might have melted it on contact; this was just one reason he'd stopped carrying shuriken and kunai after he'd gone through his supply. The Kubikiribouchou, on the other hand, was made of sterner stuff than mortal men could comprehend. It lost more and more weight in Zabuza's hand, and it became exceptionally ravenous for the blond demon's youki. Like a bottomless well, it swallowed the ambient energy up...and only Zabuza seemed to be aware of it.

Taking two steps forward, Yuurei made a palm thrust that was meant to break his opponent's shoulder—but as Zabuza stepped back, the Rain Guard took his place. Before Yuurei could blink, three of his tenketsu had been closed; a sense of numbness lingered in the demon's lower arm, but the Rain guard was worse for his wear. Though his stolen Byakugan allowed him to see the chakra networks of those around him, it couldn't explain the corruption that roiled beneath the blond's skin. Oily black energy, multicolored and menacing, had all but consumed Yuurei's body...and made its way into the fingers of the Rain Guard. Looking at the hand that had struck Yuurei, the Mizukage's bodyguard was horrified by what he saw.

In his index and middle finger, which had struck Yuurei's arm a moment ago, wisps of iridescent youki were trying to dissolve his body on a cellular level. The concentration was too small to be successful, and it wouldn't be difficult to heal himself after the battle was over, but it was still a shock to witness.

"I don't particularly care about killing you, but..." Yuurei's left hand swung up, coated in youki, and the Rain Guard felt an indescribable pain as the right side of his chest began to dissolve. Yuurei's clawed hand had carved through his ribs and lung, and blood poured out from his gaping wound. The tall man fell down unceremoniously, and his mask slipped away to reveal his face.

As the entire upper right of Ao's body dissolved, eventually separating his arm from his torso, he knew death had come for him. His blood flowed into the cut end of the Kubikiribouchou, slowly restoring the mighty blade to its full length, but something was different about it. He wasn't sure, but...he would never discover what it was.

Standing above the blue-haired man, Yuurei tore out his Byakugan before holding an open hand above his face. As the all-seeing eye disappeared from sight, a powerful burst of youki dissolved Ao's head, and wisps of light flew into Yuurei's body. He shuddered briefly in ecstasy, only turning his gaze to Zabuza's weapon after its transformation had completed. When he finally laid eyes upon the Kubikiribouchou, he was just as awestruck as everybody present.

The once-sleek blade had taken on scalloping on the sides of its edges, taking the smooth surface of the metal and pressing it into something that resembled saw's teeth—or, perhaps, a set of gums. The once-detachable handle had fused together with the metal, calcifying into a bone-like substance that long strands of sinuous flesh were growing over. And, in the circular cutout that its wielders had used for decapitating strikes since time immemorial, two rows of beastly, yellow teeth protruded; the hole was still roughly the same size, but the two-layered maw...breathed.

The Kubikiribouchou had waited for thousands upon thousands of years for the chance to achieve its own form of sentience; though it was possible for such things to happen naturally, almost every instance of a genuine "living artifact" in this world had been destroyed during the demons' war against the dead gods. When Yuurei had touched it in Nami no Kuni—when he broke it, scarred it, and brought his youki to bear against its regenerative powers, that evolutionary spark had been lit. Just like the Samehada, a fellow member of Kirigakure's legendary seven swords, it had gained an overwhelming hunger. However, unlike its blue-scaled brethren, the Kubikiribouchou was demon-strengthened, and could grow further. It knew the only thing that could spur its transformation forward, and had waited patiently for several long months.

Without a second thought, Zabuza swung the mutated sword around, intent on avenging Ao's death and splitting Yuurei in half. The massive sword cut through the air with ease, so much so that it seemed to split the world around it to remove the forces that resisted it. In a split-second, Yuurei had summoned both of his sword-length sandworm teeth; the Kubikiribouchou screamed in pain as its edge crashed against the crystalline weapons in Yuurei's hands—but for the first time since he'd begun to wield them, they didn't slice through their target.

"Oh, that was everything I needed," Zabuza chuckled darkly, a chakra-fog beginning to roll out from his body. There was a deep and malevolent presence inside of Zabuza—a bloody heritage passed down for generations. Long ago, before gods had come to the world of men, Zabuza's ancestors had sworn an oath to a feline demon that predated any of the Biju. Though the demon itself was long dead, held behind the wall of sleep, Zabuza had become its latest avatar in the world of the living. With its unholy blessing, he had reached and breathed the boundary of his abilities. In the presence of Yuurei, that demon's fighting spirit roused itself from death.

He would kill Yuurei...but first, he would break the blond teen's spirit. A hopeless expression would suit his face much better.

Tayuya's Genjutsu couldn't infiltrate the fog, and neither could Sakon or Ukon with their kekkai genkai. Jirobo's techniques couldn't siphon its chakra. Kidomaru's blind shots did nothing, All the while, feeling left out, Yugito and Fu stood to act as a deterrent against Yagura or Utakata's involvement. As the field of fog widened, an incomprehensible pressure weighed down on everyone inside of it.

"My lord...we must withdraw!" The Mist Guard said frantically, only for the Mizukage to turn toward his bodyguard with a lazy smile.

"You don't believe Zabuza will take this opportunity to kill me, do you? I doubt he could strike me down in one blow, no matter how much his sword transforms," Yagura laughed lightly.

"There are...eight targets..." Zabuza's ragged voice carried through the fog, clearly beginning to run into chakra exhaustion after using this technique on a large scale for the second time in an hour. As the unquestioned master assassin of Kirigakure, however, this was the swordsman's trump card—he could strike from anywhere his fog reached, as silent as a leaf that floated on the wind. Tayuya began to fly up, attempting to break the cover of the oppressive fog, when she thought she heard a sword swing across the spot where she'd been hovering.

"There are...haha...four targets..." The Kirigakure no Kijin laughed as he threw his voice, and Yuurei could only picture the expression on his face.

"Enough!" The demon shouted, an a searing pulse of youki rolled out from his body. The effect of the blast could be felt halfway across the battlefield, but its effect was relatively minor; all it did was dispel the fog that Zabuza had summoned, revealing the scene around him once again.

Six bodies lay on the wet grass beneath them in a small mound, and Tayuya faced the cold reality that she was the last living member of the Sound Four. Sakon and Ukon had been beheaded in the same strike that had split Kidomaru's neck open. Jirobo had been split in half by the Kubikiribouchou. Ayame's armored breastplate had been split open by the back-facing tip of the blade. In one swing, without bothering to think about it, Zabuza had killed Orochimaru's most prized soldiers. And now, the muscular swordsman had another victim in his sights.

When the fog rolled in, Yugito had turned to face Yuurei; though nothing else was certain in those conditions, she'd known where he was, and she'd only kept from moving toward him in an attempt to avoid Zabuza's notice. Unfortunately, that simple motion had given away her position. Blood ran down from the base of her throat as the Kubikiribouchou's mutated teeth cut through her windpipe, preventing her from speaking. As she looked at the young man she'd come to appreciate over the last four months of her life, there were no tears in her eyes. Fu, Tayuya, and Yuurei looked at their companion with shock and horror on their faces, but Yugito's expression was resolute.

From the day they were born, this was the fate that every ninja accepted. To walk with death in one's heart could only mean that they would, eventually, come to rest in death's home. Though Yugito couldn't speak now, blood ran down from her lips as she mouthed the words, "I'm sorry," to Yuurei. Whatever that regret was, it was a secret that she'd keep forever. With a smile on her face, she stared forward, and Zabuza tore his mighty sword through her neck.

He'd done it, hadn't he? Just by looking at Yuurei, Zabuza could tell that the blond was in a state of deep distress. He couldn't believe what his eyes were seeing. His breathing had become irregular. His body didn't know what to do with itself. Now was Zabuza's chance! Leaping forward, the swordsman sought to cleave through Yuurei's bare torso, but a pitch-black force stopped him while he was still mid-air.

From deep within the recesses of his body, Yuurei had called upon the overwhelming force that he'd been given in the City of the Dead. The small fist-sized chunk he'd shown to Shukaku during the invasion of Konoha had only been a small fraction of that inheritance; the ancient clone in Uzushiogakure had given Yuurei enough youki, so pure in its corruption, that he could destroy all of Mizu no Kuni a dozen times over...but something else came over him, in that moment, when his sandworm teeth had vanished. He had gone beyond his universe's understanding of strength.

Launching that mass of jet-black youki into the sky, Yuurei revealed a massive sealing circle that sprawled across the covered cosmos. Like nothing that anybody who saw it had ever witnessed, it didn't seem to have been written—as if it was engraved upon the sky itself, and Yuurei had unleashed it on the world. Tears flowed freely down the blond demon's cheeks, unabashed grief swallowing him like a flooding river would swallow a valley. The imprints of the five elements glowed, and Yuurei had only a split-second to decide: what cycle would they flow through? What kind of catastrophe did he scar the world with?

After understanding the anguish that nearly brought him to his knees, why would he ever limit it to one?

"Fire. Earth. Metal. Water. Wood. Yin. Yang," the demon exclaimed somberly, his clenched teeth adding an edge to his words. "Fire. Metal. Wood. Earth. Water. Yang. Yin."

The black sigils in the sky glowed, and then faded, in the order that he'd specified...but the Oathkeeper wasn't done yet.

"Fire. Water. Earth. Wood. Metal. Yin. Yang," he intoned, power radiating from his voice as he prepared for oblivion. "Fire. Wood. Water. Metal. Earth. Yang. Yin."

The fabric of the world seemed to split itself open, a towering black chasm wrenching the sky apart as it radiated evil intentions. Forked tongues of lightning erupted out of the ground, and one such backwards disaster flew out from underneath Yagura's feet. Without so much time as to scream in fear, the Yondaime Mizukage burst into chunks of cooked flesh and a charred skeleton. His chakra filtered into Yugito's body—not in wisps of light, but in a lime-green stream that connected the dead blonde's decapitated head back onto her shoulders. All across the battlefield, and throughout Mizu no Kuni, hundreds of people died in a matter of seconds. As one, their chakra, Primordial Yin, and Formative Yang all came to rest inside of Yugito's corpse. In a few more seconds, hundreds more were killed, and the process repeated itself.

There was neither rhyme nor reason to the deaths caused by this unnatural assault, created by taking the elements of the world though every cycle before reversing their generational concordance. Yuurei would kill them all, if that was what it took. As one of the earth-born bolts of electricity shot through him, Yuurei felt an incredible amount of strength leave his body. Mei had only received the life force equivalent to a handful of people, hardly something he'd noticed at the time; In one lightning strike, the strength of thousands left his body, and Yugito's limp cadaver consumed every single one. Still, the dead woman refused to blink her glassy eyes. Still, the blood began to dry at the corners of her mouth.

"Tayuya! We need to get out of here!" Sai shouted, a telltale ink-black pool showing his location. He'd arrived next to the corpses of the Sound Four, shocked by what he saw, but as he felt the break in Ayame's armor, he couldn't help a small smile.

"No! I'm staying with him!" Tayuya yelled back to the ghost-white teen. Sai gave her a look that seemed to say, "suit yourself," as he sank into his pool of darkness with five dead ninja in tow. Tayuya didn't know where he was going, and she didn't particularly want to find out. In her peripheral vision, she saw Mei racing toward Yuurei's location, and she joined her fellow redhead as Fu cradled Yugito's head in her hands.

"There's no pulse," the Nanabi Jinchuriki said, aghast. "Why doesn't she have a pulse? She's absorbed so much energy..."

An invisible force propelled Zabuza into the vertical fissure beneath the massive seal that Yuurei had summoned. Screaming, the swordsman could only hold on to the handle of the Kubikiribouchou as he was swallowed by the darkness. With a heaven-shaking roar, Yuurei gnashed his teeth in frustration; the object of his wrath continued to elude him. He'd been so close to killing Zabuza, until...

"Do not follow me," Yuurei growled, lifting Yugito's body from Fu's grasp and cradling her still-warm flesh to his chest. But, as he began moving closer to the universal calamity that had taken so many lives, he realized that he couldn't shake the three women behind him. Tayuya and Mei, he could understand—the oaths and seals on them were compelling reasons to follow behind him—but he couldn't understand why Fu, who he hadn't really interacted with on a deep level, would be chasing after him.

"Don't try to leave us behind again, master. Don't you remember what happened last time?" Tayuya chided. It was all that she could do to keep herself from breaking down. Yuurei was the only other Uzumaki she'd ever met, and she wasn't about to let him leave without her.

Not saying another word, Yuurei relented. Together, the four ninja walked into the darkness of the unseen world, with an unmoving body in tow. Wherever Zabuza had gone, Yuurei decided, he would hunt the bastard down. Passing through this tunnel of nothingness that seemed to go on for eternity, Mei and Fu watched their entrance close behind them; the only way out would be forward.

On the remains of the civil war's last battlefield, survivors on both sides watched the tear in the air mend itself before the giant seal above it faded from view. None of them knew what had happened, and none of them would ever know the truth; in the aftermath, a burnt skeleton with a hooked staff would be identified as Yagura, and the rebels would claim victory with the Mizukage's death.

The Kyuubi no Yuurei had spoken.