Naruto had to be careful, one wrong move and all the time he'd spent planning his escape would be wasted.

The balance he needed to keep was so incredibly delicate, how many years had it taken to learn how to mould his chakra with this kind of precision? The years he'd spent gathering information, all of it verbally confirmed because the written word couldn't be trusted in any way, shape or form. He'd spent far too long doing that. Not long enough. He wasn't ready. He was never going to be ready. Didn't matter. He was as ready as he was ever going to get.

He pooled his reserves, shunting aside as much as he could spare into the section of the seal he'd once held Kurama's separated Chakra in. Slowly and steadily he was amassing a store of charkra undetectable to his watcher.

The beautiful illusion Kaguya had created had taken enough time from him, had taken too many lives. Had twisted his every hope and dream into a sickening and ever-tormenting hell. The worst thing was he couldn't pinpoint the exact moment he'd gotten trapped in the faux goddess's false world and it sickened him. How long had he spent enjoying the lie? Falling for every deceit he was kissed up to with? He'd been so HAPPY everyone had finally acknowledged him, so swept up in the illusion that he hadn't paid any attention to the inconsistencies. Hell, he' practically thrown himself into it.

Not until years had passed.

Not until the moment he'd had to call on his Sage Charka on a particularly difficult 'mission'. He'd been 'defending' Konoha, fighting against an opponent that had proven too strong for his subordinates.

He'd stepped into the battle to take care of it and had stepped into Sage Mode. The inconsistencies were immediately obvious, he was cocooned in a living shell of plant material and the world around him faded to the intangible ghost-like phantoms they really were. The images were being projected directly into his mind though gossamer-like threads attached to his body but the Chakra he was calling on deadened the sensation.

The illusion holding him immediately strengthened but the damage was done, the seed of doubt had planted, sprouted and had Naruto finally opening his eyes to the realities of the illusion around him. If he was trapped in the illusion that meant Kaguya had… won. Naruto's heart, only having just felt like it was mending, broke.

How many of the people around him were real and how many were fake? He could feel the chakra of those familiar to him, Kakashi, Sasuke and Sakura were real. All the 'rookies' were real, the people he'd met before the illusion had caught him, the ones from before he'd turned sixteen, they were real. With a little trial and error with 'meditating', light use of the senses Sage Mode granted him and Naruto learned how to tell the differences in the people around him. There were the people like him, trapped in this beautifully twisted world of warped wishes and misshapen dreams. Then there were the illusion-generated individuals that seemed to exist for the sole purpose of driving everyone further into the Genjutsu.

The children.

It should have been obvious from the outset of the realization that he was trapped in the world Kaguya's Infinite Tsukiyomi had created. He didn't even remember starting a relationship with Hinata. He could count on one hand the number of significant interactions he'd had with her before the war and still have fingers left over. He didn't remember marrying her. Didn't remember her getting pregnant or giving birth either time.

His broken heart had shattered just that much further at the realization that his three year old, fluffy-haired blond son Boruto and his sweet little blue eyed baby girl Himawari… where nothing more than illusions.

He watched as the dreams of the people around him meshed with each other to keep the self-sustaining illusion. Feeling almost numb with grief Naruto picked apart the world Kaguya had created to distance himself from the pain and mentally tore up everything he'd ever thought he'd known about his family.

Hinata had wanted to marry Naruto and have everything that entailed, but her wish had clashed with his own obsession over the Hokage's hat. Naruto never accounted for a family in his fantasy of being Hokage. So his desire to spend all of his time caring for the village clashed with Hinata's desire to have a family with him.

Sakura and Sasuke had a healthier 'relationship' than he did with Hinata because Sasuke had at least considered the fact that someday he would have children. Sure he'd never considered BEING there for them except for in a vague sense, but he'd known he would have them. So his absenteeism was just his antisocial nature desiring solitude and he only returned to his family when he wished to. Sakura meanwhile held no illusions about Sasuke as a person. She'd known he was certifiable and a douche-bag to boot. Deep down inside she'd still wanted to marry him though, hence why their little 'family' seemed so much less messed up than Naruto's.

Shikamaru was kept from noticing anything by being so very closely bonded with his 'son' and that had him distracted at every turn. The illusion of peace meant that the genius didn't question how it was possible to have a child with a foreign Kunoichi and keep custody of their child at the same time, regardless of any peace treaties. Temari might not have been comfortable with the idea of being a mother, but would the woman who'd always stood by her Host of a younger brother really have given up her only son to be raised in a village she was only ever a visitor in for about a month or two in a year? They had both clearly stated that they didn't want to be in a relationship prior to the war and suddenly they were a couple?

Sai and Ino, both of whom had only ever really met each other once the one time before the war, and that had been in the middle of a group. A false marriage built up on nothing more than a simple 'compliment' Sai had thrown out because he'd been wary of a violent reaction at a terrible nick-name and a minor attraction on Ino's part to his looks?

Had Choji even MET Karui before the illusion?

Asuma's newborn baby, he could have sworn he'd heard someone say had been born a boy but then years later… it was impossible to tell. By the time Naruto thought to check if the only child he known was real Sarutobi Mirai had been replaced by an illusion. The baby hadn't survived having its chakra stolen at such a young age.

Kiba was dating the granddaughter of a cat summoner.

Lee was happy training his own non-existent genin.

The illusion worked that way for everyone trapped inside it, meshing wishes together to produce this faux-peace. Holding it all together were seemingly random moments of pure chaos, where the strongest were expected to step in and 'solve' the 'problem'. It didn't take him very long to recognize the pattern his life had fallen into and Sage Mode cleared up any confusion as to why Kaguya would even bother with the steady stream of conflict when she'd been so insistent on keeping everything calm.

He, and everyone else, were powering the illusion.

He could practically time it, every time the illusion started to weaken an over-powered asshole popped up out of the woodwork. Danzo had an heir to take up where he left off and the reinvented Root were stirring up trouble. Nukenin, created out of whole-cloth Genjutsu and word-of-mouth, would attack Konoha. It wasn't always the same thing but it had been getting a touch repetitive lately. A horde of cloned Uchiha kids who were acting out and just wanted to be loved and accepted? The white hair had been a bit much though, either Kaguya had an interesting imagination or there really HAD been experiments that had culminated in white-haired Uchiha spawn. Orochimaru's abandoned experiments? Again? Really?

With each 'new' asshole crawling out of the woodwork there was a fight, a large and highly chakra-consuming fight that left everyone exhausted for weeks afterwards. Reverse-tracking his own chakra was something he'd learned to do on the fly during his battle against Nagato. At the time it had taken literally stabbing himself in the shoulder, but he didn't need that kind of crutch now. He was surrounded in a cocoon of threads suited for that purpose and they were already thrumming to the brim on his chakra. Kaguya drained away all the chakra 'used' during the fights and fed it back into the illusion, unintentionally giving Naruto a guided tour of where the bitch was keeping everyone.

He almost wished he'd never figured it out, the grief he'd felt when he realized there were only a handful survivors among the many people that had been engulfed in the world tree nearly crippled him. There were a smattering of high-Chuunin level chakra signatures, Jounin outnumbered them all three to one and only the really heavy-hitters looked healthy enough to survive being extracted from the cocoons that were only just sustaining them.

Naruto's Chakra was the only thing keeping a few of them alive.

He'd been in the grips of near-blind grief and indecision for who knew how long after that revelation, but there wasn't a single moment of that time that he stopped siphoning any excess chakra into his seal. He'd immediately started distancing himself from his young 'family'. Pulled away from anyone he even remotely suspected as fake and learned how to separate his consciousness from his actual body. It was a lot like how he'd used to split his attention between fighting and talking with Kurama, only he was using it now to project his own illusion. He pretended to be so very oblivious to Kaguya's deception and he filtered his grief through 'work'.

He played the role he was given for the benefit of the rest of the survivors and the bitch who was no doubt watching everything and held the delicate balance he needed to keep everyone alive. He never stopped looking for a solution. A way to save the preciously pitiful scraps of humanity left alive. A way to break them out of the illusion. A way to KILL the bitch keeping them captive.

He hid it all under the guise of his 'rivalry' with just about anyone he could believably strike one up with and his job as the 'Hokage'. It was a surprisingly large group of people, his earlier years of immaturity had cemented his reputation as a fun-loving dork. His role as the village leader also gave him unbelievable access to just about anyone left alive. He made and discarded plans. He tested the boundaries of the illusion and stretched his senses out to the real world as far as they could go. He scoured the green covered earth for resources and memorized their locations. Finally he started conditioning his real body back into some kind of working condition, it was easy to disguise, he mirrored the exercises he did in the illusion.

When he was as ready as he was ever going to get Naruto waited for the next time Kaguya needed a large amount of chakra and made his move.

He filled the cocoon he was in with as many clones as he could comfortably fit inside without bursting it and waited, recalling the first time he'd done this. The villain-of-the-day had backed off so quickly that it looked like the illusion had peed itself. The Genjutsu had thickened around him so tightly that it had very nearly dragged him right back into it. A year or so of this kind of behaviour from him, filling the cocoon with bunshin without popping it, and Kaguya had eventually lightened up from her intense focus on him.

Hiding in the storm of Charkra he habitually pulled up around him in a fierce blaze Naruto replaced himself with a clone and transformed. A quick lightning-fast grab-and-throw from one of his clones and the whisper-thin shuriken he'd shifted into cut through the cocoon he'd been trapped in for god-knew how long and spiralled its way to freedom, disguised under chakra that went back to his replacement clone when the spares dispelled.

Naruto waited and ignored the small part of him that was gibbering in terror and was utterly convinced that she'd notice the difference immediately. It felt like an endless eternity passed before he gathered the courage to change shape. He edged out of the shape of the shuriken and into the form of a plain russet-red fox, he pressed himself bodily to the ground and fought against the urge to put a paw over his eyes as he flattened his ears to his skull.

Reality. This was reality. The sounds of animals off in the distance. The feel of dirt and grass under his paws. The air carried scents he hadn't even realized he'd missed until this exact moment and he shivered as the wind carded through his fur.

He hadn't even known how much he'd been missing this until he'd gotten it back.

OoO

Kaguya relied heavily on her eyes, too heavily. The kind of heavy dependency on her eyes was half of what Naruto would destroy her with.

He couldn't face Kaguya head on, he'd tried that and look where that had gotten him. She was insensate to Natural Chakra, couldn't feel or see it, especially not in the concentrations he was using it in. The cocoon would repair itself and conceal any evidence of his escape. The clone he'd replaced himself with had enough of his chakra that it should be able to fool her long enough for him to exact his plan. She could see through the cocoon with the Byakugan, but her Rinne Sharingan was line-of-sight, that coupled with her weakness against Sage Techniques gave him an opening.

She was no sensor. Her Byakugan had a blind spot and the Rinne-Sharingan on her forehead didn't cover it. Naruto felt the Chakra she used to see with her Byakugan sweep over the world and couldn't believe he hadn't ever noticed the opening before, it was that glaringly obvious to him now. She spread her Chakra out in waves as if she were a lighthouse, moving minimally and only in order to keep the moon reflected in her third eye. Her blind spot was so very obvious, all he had to do was stay in that Chakra blank zone at all times.

Every so often she was forced to hold the illusion on her own when the moon wasn't available. Which explained the steady stream of conflict in the illusion, she had no way of powering it alone. All of her concentration went into maintaining the illusion during those moments. She stopped using her Byakugan and everything went into the Rinne-Sharingan. Kaguya was also too lazy to chase the moon across the continent. She pulled what she needed from her helpless victims, siphoned off what she didn't immediately use and dumped the rest of the chakra into storage. The store of chakra was a bulbous shape at the base of the lotus-shaped blossom that had probably sprouted the moment the illusion had trapped everyone.

She was so open to attack that it almost hurt to hold back on the urge to scream forward and rip out her spine out via the back of her throat. Naruto waited for the next new moon. By his calculations he'd have nearly two whole days until Kaguya cut herself off of the real world and fully immersed herself in her illusion to create a new villain-of-the-month. His replacement didn't have the Chakra to last for much longer after that, especially not with the tree draining him.

This was his last chance.

Clones of himself scattered. They disguised themselves as animals, birds and insects and moved into position. Naruto himself scavenged the broken world Kaguya had created for weapons, clothes and the first real food he'd had in who knew how long. Naruto prepared as if he were heading out on a mission, it was the only way he could control himself enough to wait out the time.

He needed her to be as chakra-drained as possible. Needed her in that window of time that was practically the sweet-spot moment. That beautiful moment she closed off those Byakugan and opened her Rinne-sharingan up wide enough that she lost herself to the outside world.

Naruto untangled his overgrown hair and tied it up in a horse-tail like Jiraiya used to wear it. He dressed himself in black, pants, shoes, shirt and mesh. He couldn't bear the thought of wearing even the tiniest bit of orange and he was grieving. He's spent long enough pretending to love it in Kaguya's nightmare and had come to actively hate the colour. To think he'd once loved it and the symbol it had become to him.

Now it was just another twist of the knife.

He picked out a sword and meticulously restored it to working condition. He polished, sharpened and rebound the hilt like he'd been taught on that one excruciating D-rank mission way back when he'd graduated from the academy. It had been torture learning how to do all of that on a mission but now? It was comforting. He was going to use this blade against Kaguya. He was going to carve the back of her head open and— he was going to cut the Killing Intent before he was discovered. Hmm, maybe spending so much time restoring an old sword had been a bad idea.

Naruto spent the rest of his time meditating and moved only when he was in danger of falling within sight of the Byakugan. He stalked Kaguya with hard-earned patience and kept his Intent from broadcasting his plans by keeping his hand off the hilt of his sword. He wasn't going to ruin his own plans with Killing Intent, not with the lives of the whole world riding on his shoulders.

When the moment he'd been waiting for came and Kaguya settled fully into her petal throne to immerse herself in the process of creating her newest villain Naruto was more than ready for it. He held back until she reached the perfect moment where she expended her own store of Chakra on the Genjutsu and made his move before the 'conflict' in her illusion could even begin to start happening. He wouldn't let her suck even a slivers-worth of Chakra from her remaining victims.

At the same moment his clones slammed up an barrier and a time-space disruption seal down on the area the false goddess was now trapped inside Naruto MOVED. Kaguya was cut off from her victims instantly and wouldn't be able to spirit herself into another world to get away. He had his sword in hand and sheathed in a deadly storm of Chakra.

Kaguya never saw it coming.

Pulling his chakra up in a cloak around him Naruto screamed as he cut down through the back of her head, split her in half and kept going. The chakra enhanced blow ripped through the tree and right down through the bulb of chakra she'd been about to draw on.

A black shadow screamed and attacked him, Black Zetsu, Kaguya's so-called son. Naruto let go of the cracked and chipped sword that had served him so well and let it fall as his hands flashed in a series of handseals he'd memorized for this exact moment.

He wasn't going to Seal Zetsu, Hagaromo had tried that before and it hadn't worked. The shadow would one day worm its way out and no matter how thoroughly Naruto destroyed Kaguya's body Zetsu would find a way to resurrect her. History would just repeat itself.

One way or another he was going to end things. There was no room for talking here. Just death. Naruto would be the one to deliver it and he'd never regret it. He'd calculated for this as well. Didn't have to do anything else.

The barrier hadn't just been for Kaguya.

Naruto lashed out with his Chakra and long, deceptively delicate looking golden-toned chains speared through the shadow, held it and wrapped it up in a tight and unyielding cocoon. He tugged the resulting bundle close, and plastered it to his front.

"Surprise!" he rasped at his struggling bundle and allowed himself to fall to the ground, a wild and broken grin stretching across his face. He made sure his armful was facing the explosion of chakra when it hit and had the satisfaction of watching it scream and dissolve before he was slammed into the unforgiving ground beneath him.

The world turned blue.

OoO

Chapter End.

Guh, need to upload this now because otherwise I'm going to delete it out of frustration and throw my laptop out the window. Stupid plot bunny and its wall of blocks. Finally got this to a good point for a beginning, I know it's short but it's punchy~! Should be tasty enough to tide you over until I get the next chapter out, which is who knows when.

As ever a bright and beautiful thanks to the lovely Araceli and Thirteenth-To-Fall for being my idea bouncers and beta. Love you guys! This fic wouldn't exist without you!