"I'm grateful for the playtime but this is enough entertainment. Your time in my spotlight is over." Madara put his hands together, connecting the tips of his fingers and spreading them apart. A crescent line of Yasaka Magatama formed around the body of the Susanoo armor as the formation moved them outward. The shaku curved jewels began rotating like shuriken in mid-flight before taking flight at the irksome children that seemed like ants before the colossal Susanoo.

Kouta roared out, still out of control with eyes sunken in black, wild bursts of chakra erupted from his cannon as he detonated a pair of the airborne jewels that headed his way. Orochimaru bit his lip in frustration, a giant boa burst from underground and swallowed him up, taking a dive down under and helping its master avoid the troublesome projectile and the destruction it wrought.

Tsunade soared took it to the air with a bountiful leap, she grabbed the Yasaka Magatama headed for her and spun it round and round before releasing it to detonate farther to the west from her location. Jiraiya scooped his teammate out of the air so that Madara would not exploit the fact she was in free-fall.

"This is crazy!" Jiraiya declared. "The highest you can jump and you didn't even reach its knees... Is this really worth it? I mean at this point I'd rather face that Itachi guy instead of fighting to win him a pair of eyes."

"Maybe so. This stopped being about Itachi and his eyes for a long time now. This is personal, this man disrespected me and my grandpa's family and for that, I will pound him!" Tsunade clenched her fist while staring at the colossal Susanoo that appeared indifferent to its miniature opponents and stared out at one blank point in space.

"Chu!" Raizo yelled out down on the ground. In acknowledgment of his callout, the injured kunoichi of Team Angler nodded and swung her kanabo over her shoulder before winding it up for a strike. Raizo weaved through a pair of hand seals.

"Lightning Style: Ball Lightning!" he hissed out, the spheres of Lightning Release didn't wait for the Yasaka Magatama to fall any closer, Chu swung her kanabo and sent the spheres crashing into the falling ethereal projectile. The resulting discharge of Lightning Release chakra detonated the Yasaka Magatama in mid-air. Chu's wild and dirty hair rustled and smacked over her own face from the resulting shockwave that threatened to knock people over even if they had managed to avoid Madara's actual attack.

Morei roared out, he extended his hands out and caught the Yasaka Magatama in his hands, sliding a fair distance back but managing to both apply enough force to stop it as well as not to be too rough and detonate it. The Great White let go of the ethereal jewel and kicked it in the rear, sending it back at Madara but it didn't seem to as much as scratch the armor itself despite a hollow thud.

Saol bellowed in pain, he had chosen to shield his team in his Super-Expanded State, which allowed him to cushion all the frightening power of the sacred and legendary Uchiha clan ninjutsu but also it meant that he took the share meant to crush his entire team.

"Saol…" Rarrifa muttered but her teammate tried to reassure her with a pain-ridden expression.

"It's okay, just tell me… That this is… Still a part of your plan…" he winced.

"The crucial part has been set, Itachi is the key to our victory. I'm surprised he picked up on our plan so fast." Rarrifa nodded. While it was evident that she didn't plan the entire battle out as she wasn't anywhere close to being aware of Madara's entire fighting style and incredibly vast array of techniques, she did plan ahead enough for Itachi to play his crucial role.

"That's what you've got me for." Faeino pointed at herself with her thumb. She had a point, without her supplying the mental link it would have been impossible to converse with Itachi with how flexible he was and how vast of space he covered with his Mangekyou Sharingan techniques.

"I'd like it if he'd hurry up…" Saol grunted before shrinking down to normal size and faltering on his feet. "I'm not sure if I could take much more of that... Sorry, team, some powerhouse I ended up being." The Akimichi pulled out a case from his pocket and stared at five food pills inside it.

"Don't, you've taken too much damage to hurt yourself even more with drugs!" Faeino objected.

Kouta roared out in the sky, unleashing blast after blast from his many cannons but they were more a testament to his fury instead of being meant to hit anything at all. Each blast just detonated at a faraway patch of the forest, reducing it to splinters and ash in a second.

"Shit, he can't revert…" Deiji cursed and looked to Nanaba. "He's going to break himself if Madara doesn't do it for him until then."

"Not much we can do at this point…" Nanaba shook her head. "We've already tried smacking him out of it during training, the only way is to knock him out and we can't do that if he wants to get his promotion."

It was then that Madara noticed the Amaterasu flames that Itachi had caught him with persisting, it was just a few tongues of obsidian flames that still clung to his body but they made every passing moment that much more irksome and the legendary Uchiha had already experienced all entertainment that this battle would provide him with.

"You think this is true fire? I'll show you true fire, the flame that is your end. The flames of Uchiha that you chaff will bow to!" Madara declared from inside the jewel at the center of the Perfect Susanoo's helmet while he went through hand seals and raised his hand upward. By breathing out all of his rage and pent up satisfaction with the battle, Madara made it rain fireballs, drowning out the sky in flames, each fireball four times the size of the genin that would have to deal with it or be cleansed away by the legendary flames. "Fire Style: Great Flame Flower!" Madara decreed the name of the alliance's doom.

"Chakra Grenade!" Kouta yelled out, firing off a volley of concentrated chakra blasts that slowly floated in front of him and blew up together with the raining flames, dealing with a large patch of Madara's rain of annihilation all at once.

"Water Style: Gunshot!" a toad of Jiraiya's employ fired an orb-shaped blob of water toward the oncoming blaze but in the totality of raining hell a large mass of water evaporated before it even reached the flames it was meant to oppose. The air drowned out in grunts and screams as Jiraiya got flung away by the brutal explosion alongside his bronze-colored toad ally while Orochimaru and Tsunade tried their best to block, claw and scratch their way through Madara's jutsu on their way to survival.

"Great! White…!" Morei was flexing his muscles in preparation of some grandiose maneuver before a sphere of water gobbled him up and he felt it carrying him away at a rapid pace. To his side, he could see Chu waving at him playfully as Raizo flashed in between both water spheres.

"What's with the obsession with getting yourselves killed with you two, honestly…" Raizo scolded his teammates after pulling the plastic beak off of his face to get some fresh breaths of oxygen in the stuffy, hot air.

"Did you just pull the Great Blue away from the Great White Punch of his life!? Let me tell you something, mate, that just ain't fine!" Morei objected.

"Tell me about it, to think that I might have had fish sticks for dinner tonight…" Raizo stood up on his toes to get all over in his teammate's face with a self-righteous expression to match Morei's razor-sharp pearly whites.

"Awww, they're screaming in agony, ain't it cute?" Chu licked her lips after whistling out to the air, referencing the mental signal of the Yamanaka girl from Hoshigakure and her team.

"We've got no time for your creepy routine right now. You've got your kanabo, stick to swinging it and leave the talking to me." Raizo snapped back at his other teammate.

"Yeah, you're the talkative one out of the three of us, that's the best punchline the Great Blue has ever heard!" Morei wrapped his oversized arms over his chest and snickered.

"Not yet…" Itachi mumbled on the mental link. "I need to give the Amaterasu more time to grow before I expand it, or else we risk losing it all if Madara somehow survives it… I know it's tough but… Please persevere."

"Jet-Powered Piston!" Kouta screamed out in the declaration of his own madness as black and white flares of chakra fired off from his cannons which the transformed Jugo directed behind him. The curious formation of his cannons and the chakra blasts sent him rocketing onward at the titanic Perfect Susanoo, reaching all the way to the chest of the colossus, something that seemed to amuse Madara more than anything.

Kouta's fist connected to the chest of the Perfect Susanoo with a deafening thud that sent the colossal armor reeling back a few inches but the Susanoo had managed to regain its footing and what was even worse – Kouta's punch didn't even dent the armor. That was not the end of the young man's assault however as blasts resonated from the ends of his elbow, further forcing his arm through the enemy and sending the Susanoo back with a mighty shockwave. While Kouta didn't down the armor nor its master, the Perfect Susanoo lowered its arms and appeared to hunch as if feeling a bit dazed for a couple of moments.

Cracks and ripples of azure began forming at the chest of the armor, Itachi's crimson eyes became the clearest they've ever been as the Uchiha widened them in utter disbelief at the incredible success that Kouta's attack had left on the gigantic world-shaker. If only the boy could have known his own success and further exploited his own gain for a finishing strike…

Despite the impressive showing, blood began trickling down the ridges and cracks in Kouta's black, wooden texture and the formation of the makeshift layer of armor that his Curse Seal provided him with. Just as Deiji and Nanaba had feared, the Second State of the Curse Seal threatened to ruin the boy's body as his mind only knew the infinite fury it had to cope with and not the bodily limitations that would have curbed such madness under normal circumstances.

"He only has seconds until he passes out!" Deiji pointed out as he, together with Nanaba extended their hands outward and focused both of their chakra into another combo of the pinnacle of Tailed Beast's power. "Tailed Beast Bomb!" the two of them roared out in synchrony, hoping to finish Madara off before Kouta passed out. The pair of the black spheres rotated one around the other as they blitzed toward their ultimate goal.

The Perfect Susanoo closed its wings, in front of it, taking the brunt of the explosion and despite its awesome might, all it did was send the Susanoo sliding back and left cracks over the wings. Deiji and Nanaba landed on the ground, huffing and panting heavily while their partial transformations disappeared. Being forced to face one's own shortage of strength was never a pleasant experience.

"We should have accessed more of the Tailed Beasts' power…" Deiji grunted.

"If we did, we wouldn't be much better off than Kouta," Nanaba dismissed the idea. "You! Please use your Sharingan to awaken Kouta, he'll kill himself if he stays much longer in that state!" she turned to Itachi.

"I'm afraid I cannot do that." Itachi shook his head. "If I did, I'd miss the moment when to claim our victory, plus, if I use my Mangekyou Sharingan to snap it out of it by force, he won't be much better off than if he passed out himself. It's not exactly a scalpel type of tool, you know."

"You're kidding, right?" Nanaba stared at Itachi in disbelief.

"Don't worry, I'll help your friend." Tsunade clenched her fists and prepared to take it to the skies via her own two feet. "I can't snap him out of it but I can heal his body so that he doesn't kill himself before he manages to overcome his own demons."

Tsunade took it up and threw her hands out in a butterfly-shaped blocking motion to absorb Kouta's kick when she closed up to him. Using the leg of the young man as a pole, she swung herself over his head and locked her arms over his neck in a clutch while she initiated her Mystical Palm Jutsu. Tsunade's eyebrows moved downward on the front while sweat ran down her forehead, she knew just how short on chakra she was running and just what this implication meant for such a wild battle. Just for now, however, she managed to ease the pain of the poor boy trapped inside his own mind.

"Hmph… And you call yourself Hashirama's granddaughter? Whom do you think you've helped here? Hashirama may have fostered some foolish ideas but he knew that a ninja must have eliminated the enemy before treating the wounded." Madara's Perfect Susanoo prepared all of its swords for a slash. Horror befell Tsunade's eyes as she saw the two katana attached to Madara's wings together with the one greatsword he wielded in two of his main arms prepared to slice through the entire battlefield and leave utter rampage in their wake.

Before the swords could complete their blood-shedding slash, however, they froze in mid-air. The Perfect Susanoo struggled against forceful pressure from behind when Saol's arms wrapped around it in a Full Nelson lock. He knew that he couldn't stop Madara from attacking as he lacked the strength and the number of limbs to prevent the attack altogether but he bought a couple of precious seconds.

"Begone, pest!" Madara cursed as the Susanoo, instead of struggling against the hold in an attempt to slash its hands forward, threw a wild elbow strike and freed himself from Saol's hold while the Akimichi stumbled back, bleeding profusely from his busted nose and wincing over the painful bruise all over his face. "As for you, lament your weakness in your final moments!"

Madara's ethereal blades stopped in mid-motion once more. Confused, the Ghost of Uchiha looked back at Saol but he did not appear to have played any role whatsoever in this stoppage as he still clutched his busted face and whined in pain. Madara took a glance downward and witnessed a shadowy tendril touching with the shadow of his Perfect Susanoo. He'd have erupted in laughter had he not been so irked by the utter refusal of these kids to fall over and just die.

"Such a big man makes a big target…" Rarrifa taunted the legendary Uchiha before glancing at the burning Forest of Death all around her – a result of Madara's own Fire Release techniques. "Thanks for all the fire though, it really helps with brightening the place up for my shadow hijutsu."

"Useless!" Madara roared out as he forced his Perfect Susanoo to struggle against the shadowy hold and overpower it in a heartbeat. Rarrifa grunted in pain and fell over, panting as she laid stretched out on the ground and stared at the sky that was beginning to slowly turn red from the blazing inferno of battle.

Just as Madara was about to hack and slash the entire battlefield to bits, emboldened by the agonizing black flames climbing slowly over his body and burning him up, the flames expanded wildly into a rotating pillar of an obsidian blaze that was so massive it burst out from the jewel Madara placed himself on. The Susanoo froze in place before beginning to fade away one patch at a time while Madara fell from the heavens he ascended to, paralyzed in disbelief of approaching death as his entire body became consumed by the expanding flames of Amaterasu – a tree that grew up from a little acorn Itachi had planted earlier. Not even the Perfect Susanoo could protect him from flames that blazed within the armor, after all.

Itachi grunted in pain and collapsed on one knee, blood burst forth on the black, dried out streaks covering his face as both of his Mangekyou Sharingan closed at once and the Uchiha raised his eyes that had turned greyer after such an intense battle up at the fallen ghost.

"Done in by mere children. Hmph… Back in my day, the era when body count of the enemy clan determined one's worth, children were the main target in the war. The young were the easiest to slay, after all… The reason Hashirama and I got closer was because both of us wanted children to never have to experience that ever again. You guys… You guys make me wonder if… Maybe Hashirama's way turned out alright… If not even… Uchiha Madara could kill all of you…" Madara mumbled as he laid defeated in front of the genin alliance, all of whom seemed too beaten to move a muscle and put their enemy out of his misery. The black blaze of Amaterasu gone out with Itachi's collapse and Madara was just worse off for it.

"Don't worry, Madara. Your eyes will see the path of the Uchiha clan all the way to the end. They will see the world that you and the First have created together." Itachi spoke softly before picking up the fallen katana that Madara himself once used and alleviating the pain of his predecessor with one swift motion.

"Kouta…" Nanaba looked up at the poor youth who seemed to not find a possible target to vent his rage out on now that the colossal, sapphire Susanoo had died out.

"Don't worry, Madara's eyes seem to be intact, I'll snap your friend out as a final favor but I'll need a favor in exchange. One from Tsunade-san." Itachi looked up to the confused blonde with his weakened, greyed out eyes. "I'd like to take Madara's eyes for a meeting with someone very important to both of us."

"Interesting…" Orochimaru hissed and smiled. "So what you're saying is that you will be near-blind and powerless for a moment?"

"To hell with that, why should we trust you, a hunter, right after you nearly got us all killed fighting that guy!?" Jiraiya flipped out on Itachi.

"Sorry, I'm with Jiraiya on this one…" Tsunade clicked her tongue in frustration and shrugged. "Even if Madara did a number on us, we still outnumber you and while meeting Madara and getting to get my hands on him was something… It still doesn't make me any more willing to gamble on your intentions."

"I see… Well then… I'll leave you to deal with the boy's torment on yourself then, take care…" Itachi replied in a husky voice before dispersing in a murder of crows that drowned out the entire hellish background of the apocalyptic battle that had transpired there. Not only was Itachi gone once the murder of crows became rare enough to see through but so was Madara's head as well. The hectic flapping of wings and the cawing of crows attracted Kouta's attention from up above.

"Motherf…" Jiraiya groaned in frustration as he forced his beaten and exhausted body off the ground to deal with the matter of one mad lad still willing to swing his fists.