"We'll need to get started quickly."

I blinked, turning to my older illusionary analog. "Oh?"

The girls frowned, looking between us.

Then the earth beneath us shook for a long moment, then stilled just as abruptly as it had begun, drawing our attention back to something I'd momentarily ignored in the name of getting through the conversation with Satsuki.

"Yes, 'oh.'" My duplicate stated pointedly, looking around as though he had never seen his surroundings. "Those have been happening for a while now. I'd thought they were earthquakes, but given what I know now and what happened in the other room..."

"I can't see why Satsuki would want Konoha to be wracked by earthquakes," I nodded, frowning as I contemplated our new issue. Looking to Yakumo I asked, "Is there a chance that the genjutsu is being... unbalanced or something?"

The Kurama heiress' brows furrowed as she contemplated the problem before looking to our daughter. "I don't think that's possible, but... Kokoro, not that I'm blaming you, but could something be happening?"

Kokoro pouted, but shook her head. "No, Mommy, it's not me."

I pointedly ignored how Yakumo stood stock-still for a moment when the word 'mommy' left Kokoro's lips, looking as though she was simultaneously shocked and elated.

"Everything I know about genjutsu says that earthquakes shouldn't be a part of this," I stated, looking at my clone. "Which means it's either the sharingan interacting with the dark chakra genjutsu or something we can't account for. Either way, both of those increase the urgency of our mission."

He snorted and shrugged. "Since everything you know about genjutsu is everything I know about it, I suppose it goes without saying that I'm forced to agree. Whatever these earthquakes are, they can't be good. Which is why we need to act, preferably soon."

"But Satsuki won't listen to us!" Naruko interjected.

Tenten nodded. "If we can't get through to her, how are we supposed to break out of the illusion?"

My clone and I looked at each other, shrugged in unison, and I extended a hand to him to signal he go first. He snorted, "Obviously, we lay a fuuinjutsu trap, activate it once she steps into it, and break the illusion without her direct aid."

The girls all looked thoughtful or nodded slowly.

"So what's up with this guy being friendly?" Naruko asked, pointing at my older duplicate. "Not that it's not super-cool or anything, but it's weird, believe it!"

"I cast a clone jutsu using my real body and targeted the illusion here, then substituted a heavy-yang blend so that it would bond with the illusionary clone," I explained shortly.

Tenten frowned, Naruko looked as though her brain had fried, and Yakumo appeared shocked.

"B-but that means you could leave at any time!" The Kurama heiress objected. "If you're conscious of your actual body, then you could just walk yourself out of the radius of effect of the genjutsu."

Kokoro's eyes widened at the assertion.

"So?" I asked with a shrug.

My clone smirked, chuckling as we all turned to him. I raised a silent eyebrow and crossed my arms. He just shook his head. "Ah, it's different looking at it from the outside in. We never even thought to leave all of you in here. It wasn't even a question to us."

I snorted. "What was it? Soldiers who don't obey orders are trash, but soldiers who leave their comrades to die are absolute scum. Something like that."

My clone laughed aloud at that. "Good one, good one! Anyway, c'mon. I want to get you outta here before the quakes get worse. Whatever they mean, it can't be good."

Walking behind him as he led us in a distinctly different direction, I turned to him. "So, not that I don't appreciate you being helpful and everything, but if this genjutsu ends what happens to you?"

It was a question I already knew, or at least suspected. As he'd said, though, we had exactly the same knowledge base, so he should have come to the same conclusion.

My duplicate shrugged. "Worst case? I imagine it works like Shadow Clones."

I hummed. "Best case?"

He shrugged. "I've got a few ideas I can work on. After all, we are geniuses. That begets options."

I frowned, knowing he was right, but stopped abruptly and stared at him. "We're not going to do that, 'curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal' thing, right?"

The girls behind me all tensed.

My older duplicate laughed. "Hardly. We're not that cliché. Have a little faith."

"I prefer firepower," I replied bluntly, but resumed walking all that same.

Tenten stepped up beside me and gave me an odd look. "Why is it that it seems like you two are speaking your own language?"

"Because we are," I stated, accepting the criticism point-blank. "Consider all of the thoughts you've ever had that you've never bothered telling anyone else. Things that wouldn't make sense to anyone else without explaining hours worth of you randomly pondering the shape of clouds that lead you to think of a new shuriken design or something."

The suspicion faded from Tenten's eyes as she nodded. "Okay, yeah... I guess that makes sense. Still, can we trust him?"

I hesitated, considering the matter, before I gave the only answer I thought made sense in a low tone. "As long as you girls are in danger, he'll cooperate. That means we'll be able to get out of the illusion."

What I didn't say, what I wasn't entirely sure of... was whether or not I was safe, personally. I didn't think my duplicate would do anything to endanger the girls, but given the choice between what was effectively personality death, I might choose to do something crazy. The problem, though... was that I didn't know precisely how crazy I'd get. When things got tense, I'd just escalate until my goals were accomplished, but that would depend on what kind of backup plan I might have brewing in that head...

The real wild card was the part of him that wasn't me.

The part of him that might have been dreamed up by Satsuki rather than copied over from me, because it was more than clear that her idealized version of me was a high-ranking and skilled shinobi.

I shook my head as we came to a large door by way of a deserted hallway. Waving at us to stop, my older copy stepped forward and sent the guards away before signaling us to move in his wake as he opened the door.

As I stepped into the newly-revealed room, I momentarily forgot any thoughts of sedition as I was utterly stunned by what I saw. Taking up central stage was a massive version of my automated Creation of All Things device, gently spinning as energy passed over it in arcs. Shards of hexagonal-shaped metal with clusters of seals on each were bound to a type writer-esque arm, sets of which were attached to dozens of rings above and below the center of the device. The structure allowed the tiles to interlink as necessary in thousands of different combinations for any and all materials I would need to create.

Around the room I spotted realized designs manifested physically that I'd only glimpsed in my imagination previously. In one corner was something that bore a striking resemblance to a miniaturized early-twentieth century artillery piece which I knew to be an enlargement of the wrist-mounted jutsu-caster I'd already created. Along another wall was a series of portals bounded by force fields that showed various places both in the Elemental Nations and a blue sphere bounded by star-studded inky blackness. Hanging from the ceiling were all manner of experimental flying craft I'd only just begun to sketch out in a coded notebook.

"Holy shit!" Naruko whispered, only to be whapped upside the head by Yakumo. "Ow! Hey, what-?"

"Not around my daughter!" Yakumo hissed, making Kokoro giggle.

Tenten, though, was openly staring at the room beside me.

"I have you to thank for this, you know," my duplicate stated as I admired the space. "The illusion is a bit fluid. When you changed me, my workshop changed with me. It was... quite a bit more spartan before your arrival."

"Daddy, what's that do?" Kokoro asked, pointing at the two partial-spheres of hexagons hanging above and below the open space in the middle.

Both my own gaze and my clone's moved towards the girls, then back to each other in a fraction of a moment. Then, in the moment of lingering silence, he shrugged. Right. One way or another, it was me who had to live with the answer.

I sighed. "It's a larger version of a machine I built to make something out of nothing." I paused. "The one I've got is a fraction of the size and prints off any kind of material I need."

Tenten and Yakumo's eyes widened slowly as that sank in. Naruko, though, simply nodded and shrugged. "Oh, cool."

"Daddy's smart," Kokoro stated, then perked up. "Oooh, could you make a body for me? In the real world?"

I chuckled. "The one I've got isn't big enough, but... yeah, I could." I turned to her and raised an eyebrow. "Did you think your father was making a promise he couldn't keep?"

Her smile grew just a bit too wide for a human face, and I braced to catch her as she flung herself at me. "Yaaaay! Daddy's the best!"

My duplicate cleared his throat. "Not to interrupt this attempt to give me diabetes or anything, but we are working on a tight schedule."

As if to punctuate his statement, the world shook briefly again.

I took a deep breath, extracted myself from the girl's grasp, and handed her off to Yakumo with a quick meeting of eyes and a nod. "Take care of Kokoro and watch the door. I have work to do."

…

The array we built wasn't a pretty thing.

I'd like to say that with access to a much more refined version of my mass-violating printer, we could have simply produced what we needed in its final form and left it at that, but a significant part of sealing is more art than artifice. There wasn't really a right or wrong way to do something so much as many different ways that worked and an infinitely larger number which did not. Much like coding in my previous life, you could produce the same superficial result with radically different architecture depending on how adept you were at it.

"No, no, look-"

"Well, yes, but if you'll just give it a chance-"

Also, there was the slight problem that he and I felt different approaches would be better.

"I don't want to give it a chance, I want something that works-"

"I'm saying it will, you just need to follow it to the next formula where it balances out-"

My duplicate and I looked up from our work, glaring at each other.

"Okay," I took a breath. "The problem is that I'm not sure to what degree our souls are still bound to our bodies since our consciousnesses seem at least partially-dislocated from our corporeal form. If it were just me, I think your way would work, but-" I waved at the girls. "-I'm not risking mismatching them to different bodies."

He shook his head. "That's overly-cautious. You, yourself, are still entangled with your own physical body-" I opened my mouth, but he held up a hand to stop me. "-which, yes, I know you're a special snowflake and neverlostconsciousness fully, so you're except, but your method will take far longer to implement and, again, we're on a schedule. We don't know what those earthquakes are or what's happening to this world."

As if on cue, another violent shaking wracked the room, sending one of the hanging miniature aircraft into another, tumbling them both to the floor.

"Goddammit," I muttered, seething as I looked between the two designs.

"What you're talking about is a low-possibility edge case," my duplicate stated, his brown eyes boring into my own. "I don't want anything to happen to them either, which is why I think this is the right way."

I groaned and ran a hand through my hair.

This kind of shit is why I'm not wearing a headband.

Naruko chose that moment to speak up. "Hey, guys! Is the moon supposed to be turning red?"

My clone's eyes widened in time with my own as our heads snapped towards the window Naruko was staring out of. "What!?" Moving as one, we dropped out tools and rushed to the window to lean out and look up to-

"Fuck," I cursed, hearing my clone echo it as I did.

Sure enough, the bone-white moon had a red eclipse slowly moving over it. No, not just red, but blood red. This wasn't a harvest moon, this was...

"Tsukuyomi," I whispered in horror.

No, no, no... that doesn't make sense! You need-

Satsuki's sharingan, triggered by dark chakra, now in an illusion consisting entirely of it. Satsuki herself, who was the reincarnation of-

"We need to do this, now," my duplicate stated with new urgency.

"Fine!" I spat, then repeated myself more calmly. "Fine, let's do it. Get a sheet of the sword material printed out. It takes seals well enough and we can etch them with diamond-tipped styluses. That should work." Ink would be bad, maybe explosively so. At least, if I had the opportunity, I'd rather not find out. I'd need to mix blood with it and I didn't know exactly how 'real' blood counted as far as metaphysical coding went in this pocket dimension.

"Then we only need to get Satsuki in here on the seal to activate it," he muttered, shaking his head. "This would be so much easier if she'd just realized it was an illusion."

"You're telling me." Firing up the machine, I watched as the various hexagonal plates moved according to the keyboard my duplicate used to input them. Soon enough, a large sheet of perfectly square metal floated out of the center of the sphere.

My clone and I worked overtime, only doing cursory checks to ensure our sealwork was on the level as we danced around each other carving and etching into the metal we'd just printed out.

"Kokoro! Come here, sweetie," I called out, looking over my shoulder.

The little girl frowned and looked at Yakumo longingly before pulling her own hand out of the other girl's grip. Yakumo, for her part, bit her lip nervously and took a half-step forward as our daughter crossed the room to me. Taking her in my arms, I clenched my grip around her tightly. "I need you to help power the seal to break the genjutsu. Once that happens, I'm going to activate the seal in the real world and you're going to go to sleep for a little while, okay? But it's just a little while. You'll be out before you know it."

"Out with you and Mommy?" Kokoro asked as she pressed her face against my chest.

"And Daddy. We can even have another day out. You'd like that, wouldn't you?" I asked, pushing back my sentimentality as she clung to me.

Kokoro opened her mouth to respond, but another violent seizure of reality cut her off, even as the door to the room shook out of sync with the rest of the room before blowing inwards.

At the threshold stood the adult Satsuki in her kage's robes, her face a rictus of fury that-

Her face twisted and tore as something else looked out from behind her eyes-

She took the scene in, her sharingan pulsing with power as crimson light from the moon began to fill the space. "Kotaro! What is the meaning of this!? Flouting the authority of your ruler!?"

My older duplicate stood up slowly, a grin on his face despite the low tone he spoke to me in. "Get the kids in the seal. I'll take care of Satsuki."

"Power the seal on, Kokoro," I whispered to my daughter with one last comforting squeeze. Turning to the girls, I swept them with my gaze before issuing a sharp order. "Get over here!"

There was a flash of movement.

My clone was standing with his sword drawn, paired off against Satsuki with a blade of her own she'd produced from seemingly thin air. The next few moments were a confused rush of junior ninja diving across the boundary line of the seal as my older duplicate fought a miniature war with Satsuki as she tried to get to us. Beneath me, on the sheet of metal, I feel a pooling darkness begin to energize the sigils we'd carved into it.

"Everyone's in!" Tenten shouted from behind me.

Satsuki froze as another quake hit, the world threatening to shatter as the metaphysical weight of something far greater attempted to force itself inside-

Where there was a single face, now there were two. An older man, still distinctly Uchiha and-

"Transformation isn't a free action!" My other cried, grabbing at the head with both his hands and tearing as his foot impacted Satsuki's chest and launched her across the room into the seal. Specifically, directly into me. "Do it now!"

A massive war-fan appeared in the half-formed figure's hand, most of his body still a red-black shadow as he brought the weapon down on the other-me like a club before turning his venomous gaze, only bearing the basic sharingan, towards our group as my hand was coming down-

Energy surged through the seal, linking up with Kokoro's as Uchiha Madara slammed against an invisible boundary.

"I'm scared Daddy!" Kokoro cried.

"It'll be okay, Princess!" I cried back, my eyes turning to look at my duplicate, who gave me a final nod. Whatever came of him, I wished him the best of luck even as he made a suicidal charge against ninja-satan to distract him. "I love you, Kokoro!"

"I love you too, Kokoro!" Yakumo cried.

Then reality shattered, one last time.

…

My hands swept through signs and pressed against Yakumo's bare head. "Seal!"

Power pulsed and the dark energy began to dissipate.

Instantly, a group of masked ANBU were upon us, catching me as I dropped from an exhaustion that was only half-real but all the more potent because of it. For a moment, I fought against the beckoning edge of consciousness, then gave up.

I'd fucking earned this.

I passed out.