"Erupting Propulsion Fist!" Deiji forced air through his helmet in white huffs that left to the outside in steam streams. The manner in which Deiji breathed air out from his helmet when forcefully driving it out matched the manner in which steam moved all over his armor and burst forth through the specific exhaust pipe.
An ethereal arm of sapphire shade formed in front of Madara Uchiha simultaneously with a ribcage ring hanging over his upper body and clutched his fingers to lock Deiji's arm in while absorbing the full force of the blow with what seemed to be no effort at all.
"Not a bad punch for a kid," Madara smirked while using the occasion to the fullest and swinging his subdued opponent about while his other ethereal hand locked around the first, entrapping Deiji inside the combined clutch of the two and smashing both of them downward in a hammering slam. The resulting force popped out from underground in a howling pillar of blasting air while the air that couldn't leave underground at once resonated through the ground and left cracks and ripples making the sacred garden remind more of a floor of shattered glass.
"That's reckless!" Itachi scolded the rushing Jinchuuriki but the sight of Nanaba's face seeming calm made him soothe his own worries a bit. After all, if such a goofy girl didn't drop her carefree smile after such a gruesome display of force, perhaps she didn't think much of it nor considered it a danger to her comrade's life.
"Don't worry, Deiji's too strong to be done in like that…" Nanaba winked at the cloaked Uchiha. As a testament to her words, the Jinchuuriki of the Five-Tails burst from underground in between the pair with dirtied but undamaged armor.
"Drat… I thought that we would fight this guy the same way we fight any Uchiha…" he muttered to himself.
"Oh? You have a way of fighting Uchiha?" Madara turned his head with a smirk, asking to be humored with a mocking tone of voice.
"Yeah, those eyes of yours seem like nothing when you use them sparingly but their strain builds up over time. More so, the strain progresses the longer the fight continues." Deiji explained. While it would have seemed like an odd way to approach a battle since most Uchiha were monumental ninja who possessed vast chakra signatures, therefore making such battles of attrition pointless. However, given that Deiji was a Jinchuuriki and had the nigh limitless chakra of a Tailed Beast available to him, this fact made such a strategy not just viable but potent.
"It won't be that easy with Madara, I'm afraid. He doesn't use the normal Sharingan of the Uchiha. His eyes are the Eternal Sharingan, meaning that they do not suffer the same exhaustive drawbacks of the Mangekyou Sharingan." Itachi briefed the kids he employed to even the odds between himself and the owner of the pair of eyes he desired.
"Mangekyou Sharingan?" Kouta scratched his head. "That's already plenty unnatural to us. I'm not sure what the Uchiha in your universe are up to, but in here even normal Sharingan is plenty enough to deal with."
"So then the Uchiha here haven't suffered a profound loss in their lives?" Itachi mumbled to himself, "I must admit I am a bit jealous of that, I wish that my clansmen from my own universe would have been able to live that sort of life."
"What's the matter, mites, are your pants wet already? If you won't entertain me, I'll just get bored and wipe you all out at once!" Madara threatened the opposing squad and clutched his battle fan more tightly, swinging it with purpose and raising turbulent gusts before what he channeled his chakra for even kicked in. Two, three, four and five vortexes of howling wind picked up and split apart into crescent blades of slicing winds only to form more and more twisters that pulled apart entire trees and ground them to a rain of sawdust over the bracing genin.
"Tsk, Madara's legendary Gunbai, it has been described as able to deflect enemy projectiles with the force of wind but wind manipulation of such scale…" Itachi braced for the incoming impact, grunting as his cloak struggled to keep stuck to its master. The cloaked Uchiha appeared to get sucked into the twister as if by a void of vacuum, disappearing inside with a bent up arc of a black streak and once the twister left its destructive path, it scattered only shreds of Itachi's Akatsuki cloak behind it.
"What a scary jutsu!" Nanaba bent back and bit into her fingernails before tapping them to her temple and snapping her fingers. "Right, I guess it can't be helped… Let's go, Chomei!" she jumped up with a little bit of assistance from chakra augmentation to acquire elevation reaching up to the levels above the highest level of trees while massive wings fluttered from behind her and sent waves of gold-encrusted winds to counteract and dispel Madara's own twisters.
"The Five-Tails as well as the Seven-Tails… Have the Tailed Beasts become just playthings for children in this pathetic peace that's neutered the villages?" Madara sighed when confronted with such blatant disrespect to the once mighty and feared beasts used as weapons of mass destruction in his time. A might sufficient to scare a mighty army off of foolish illusion of war all in itself. Perhaps the Tailed Beasts truly have lost their purpose similarly to ninja as powerful as he was?
"Insult my grandpa, will you!?" Tsunade's valiant roar cut through the silence as the blonde soared through, riding the golden wind toward the arrogant Uchiha prodigy of the past. Madara swung his Gunbai in to block the flying punch of the rabid youth with a disinterested expression.
"I was never the one to enforce foolish stereotypes but… It seems like this generation truly can't sit down and hear a thing out." Madara declared with a disinterested tone while Tsunade's punch let out a wild thud when contacting the surface of the chakra-coated war fan. "I did not offend your grandfather, nipper, quite the opposite, he is the only ninja to have ever lived of any worth to me. I cannot let this opportunity go to waste without challenging and defeating him at last."
"I'm the Princess that inherits my grandfather's Will of Fire, if you insult me, you insult grandpa and the legacy of Senju itself!" Tsunade roared out while stomping at the war fan with her foot just to keep her opponent in place while she flared up her fist with Chakra Enhanced Strength and repeated the strike with thousandfold the power.
The resonating shockwave deflecting off of Madara's fan sent the blond ponytails flying back and landing in a rough way on her back. The Uchiha warlord from an era past sent the little Senju princess packing just in time to employ his Gunbai to fend off Kouta's own flurry of blows, just like with Tsunade's case, Kouta's fists glowed blue from the chakra that augmented his strength.
"Another medical ninja? Who do you even have to treat when your world has forgotten the madness of war?" Madara mocked the young man while his eye flared up with a malicious, scarlet gleam. "Tsukuyomi!" he proclaimed.
Kouta grunted as his feet began feeling light. A sense of warmth began seeping through his sandals as something warm, pulsing and fleshy began swallowing him up into the ground beneath, the rate of the submersion was quite pathetic, suitable perhaps more to torture or interrogation but Madara appeared to be nowhere to be seen. Kouta felt all alone in a world of darkness and inverted shades, where the only laws that applied were ones that Madara imposed on it.
"Weak, you've always been weak!" father's judgmental voice echoed as the figure of Kusagoro loomed in on the horizon, like a pissed off God that oversaw his dominion. "Why can't you be strong, like me? I don't get it, the more I whip you into shape, the more you bend and break and whine, like a sissy little girl… I'd probably make a true warrior out of your girlfriend faster, if only she hadn't dumped your sorry ass…"
Just as Kouta raised his voice up to object to a figure so far away in the distance, the fleshy substance that began swallowing him up turned ablaze. Despite feeling every little bit as intense as the embrace of actual flames, the energy that scorched his flesh didn't offer any illumination, on the contrary, it seemed as if though the walls of emerging flames consumed all the limited light around it and converted it to irresistible heat that converted Kouta's objections into a desperate scream of pain.
"Are you okay?" Kouta felt a tap of somebody beside him and woke up from something that seemed akin to a daydream. The Juugo looked to his right only to see Itachi in a mesh shirt and matching, baggy pants and a white belt tied over his waist. "Be careful, one who possesses the Eternal Mangekyou can also use all the powers that the owner of the Mangekyou has. I hope you haven't been roaming your nightmares for too long?"
"I'm fine… Just… Gimmie a second…" Kouta breathed out a heavy sigh of relief, feeling his own body resisting the instinct to take a shot at this seemingly invincible man ever again. That thing he did… He twisted the rules of everything around him, created a faux reality with rules that he himself decreed upon it and even worse – it made Kouta believe all those nightmares were real, even though they weren't. No matter how much one would convince themselves what they were seeing wasn't real – they wouldn't even have the willpower to finish that thought once, let alone use it as a mantra for concentration. This felt like a whole different thing altogether compared to Mana's illusions…
"Madara Uchiha! What an absolutely awesome dude!" Hoshigaki Morei of Team Angler yelled out while pounding the shaking ground with both of his shark-like hammers for arms. The expression of glee earned the energetic young man a glance from the Ghost of Uchiha himself.
"Now do you understand then? The difference of power between a handful of guppies and the Ghost of Uchiha, the Savior of the World, what will you do when confronted with such astounding might, ninja of Kirigakure?" Madara spread his arms out, manifesting his ethereal ribcage and long, skeletal arms that emanated such powerful chakra that it seared over the skeletal structure like flames.
"I'm gonna run at you!" Morei declared and pointed one of his fists straight at Madara. Then, not at all intimidated by his bold declaration of his upcoming battle plans, the shark-man bent his body down as if prepping it for a dash.
"You will… Run at me…?" Madara mumbled out, shocked by the blunt and rather silly nature of the Kirigakure ninja but feeling too above it all to express just how much the youth's antics got to him deep down.
Morei took off in a dash that shattered the ground underneath his feet, sending layers of dirt and rock flying behind him in a trail that downed a couple of trees that grew lined up while the rest of the ground rumbled and messed itself up like a hectic rug as the Kirigakure powerhouse took off. Before he could cover half the distance he meant to cover with his straight as an arrow dive, the hammer smash of Madara's Susanoo fists pounded him down into a crater.
"Hmph… Kirigakure seemed off to such a good start, a pity to see it all go to waste on dogs of loud bark that can't get close enough to bite even once." Madara mocked the downed Kirigakure ninja. "Although the secret of the Sharingan appears to have been well-protected from your village, otherwise you'd have known that trying to blitz me with a frontal, physical assault was pointless."
"I… Seemed to have forgotten that ability of the Sharingan… It's got so many…" the shark-man sat up in his crater and wrapped his bandaged arms over his head, dragging his webbed fingers across his temple, as if suffering migraines from keeping up with the abilities of his opponent.
"That's like… The one main thing the Sharingan does… How did you forget that one of all the others?" Chu shook her head in disappointment in her own teammate, looking like she was just walling herself off of the embarrassment he was bringing to her whole team.
"Water Style: Hidden Mist Jutsu!" Raizo grumbled beside the frustrated kunoichi of the Mist, forming a thick haze around them that transitioned into a full-on mist in mere moments. The speed at which the technique took place and the seemingly effortless and perfect execution of the jutsu made it obvious that the third genin of Team Angler excelled at using it in combat.
"A chakra smokescreen…" Madara smirked. "It seems as if though not all Kirigakure ninja are quite braindead." He spoke while his Eternal Mangekyou raced across the white mist, trying to see any notable chakra signatures inside it but finding it difficult due to the amount of chakra present in each water particle in the air. Because of the fact that the mist was created artificially, with the aid of chakra, it made it an effective tool for concealing oneself when facing weaker sensors.
"However…" Madara turned around and thrust the other end of his Gunbai into the gut of the emerging Kirigakure genin who had attempted to assassinate him from behind. "My Eternal Sharingan sees through all such drivel…"
The impaled Kirigakure ninja collapsed into a streaming puddle of water like a stabbed water balloon that had somehow maintained its rough shape and managed not to pop immediately. Madara let out an intrigued and accelerated breath before realizing that he had fallen prey to underestimating these kids based on the showings of one simpleton. The heart of the Ghost of Uchiha sputtered in excitement just trying to figure out the intricate plans these kids will employ to get one over him.
"See this, see that!" a boisterous yell of the Kirigakure kunoichi echoed from behind him. "This here staff's gonna make your eyes see stuff popped outta your skull!"
Madara's Susanoo arm caught Chu's weapon and stopped her bashing approach in mid-air. Madara's eyes managed to boil in fury of eternal disappointment in the next generation while at the same time showing none of it on the outside at all. His arms raced through hand seals while in the safety of his Susanoo ribcage.
"Fire Style: Great Fire Destruction!" Madara yelled out while breathing air in and blowing it out in a titanic stream of violent flames. Had it not been for the fact that the jutsu aimed its major devastation up in the air with sufficient heat to cleanse away anything susceptible to heat in its way, far superior in terms of intensity than it should have taken to sear flesh from the bones of mere children but these scamps had not yet earned his mercy. "This staff of yours is called a kanabo, girl. Know your own weaponry testing the mettle of another's."
"No!" Itachi yelled out, racing across the battlefield to try and ensure the survival of each of his fundamental game pieces as they acted without his permission or order, keeping him too occupied with keeping them alive to formulate any meaningful plan of his own. The rest of the genin just observed in horror at what would be left of the poor Kirigakure girl consumed by Madara's flames.
Chu ragdolled out of the firestorm like a doll thrown aside by a capricious brat, covered in meaningless, surface-level burns and damage to her already plenty-limited clothes, she slammed onto the ground while her ponytails let her hair flow wild. Jiraiya raced across the battlefield to see if the young lady was okay, being ever the gentleman, but Chu sat up before he could even get to her and shook her fist from the distance.
Madara looked like he was questioning the meaning behind the girl's survival. This was one factoid of this clash that truly did get to him and managed to creep up one hint of bafflement onto the face of the self-proclaimed Savior of the World. His blows should have utterly decimated these children. He was nothing short of a God of Shinobi back in his universe so there was no reason he should not have dominated any other universe just as well.
And yet, the chick sat up and cursed at him like she had been just barely inconvenienced by an attack that would have razed an entire village back home… What a wild world!
"You appear a bit shell-shocked, Madara." Tsunade mocked the surprised Uchiha warlord. "You should have listened to what Lord Seventh told you when he enrolled you or read the fine print of the contract you've signed. Here, we can just pack enough of a wallop to whoop your ass!"
"Utter rubbish," Madara declared and closed his eyes just for a moment. Despite his Mangekyou closing for a blink, the Susanoo remained to protect him and threaten to smash anyone foolish enough to enter within the arms' reach. "Mere brats cannot beat me. Neither in here nor in any other world. No matter how long you browse the totality of all the worlds that exist, there is no world in which Hashirama's pipsqueak can beat me."
"Let's make it a bet then, Madara!" Tsunade declared and pounded her fist into her free hand while rocking her not yet fully-formed hips to the opposite side.
"You may as well have gone on and doomed us all, Tsunade…" Orochimaru, who was quite hesitant to involve himself in the engagement declared while Raiza appeared from the mist beside Jiraiya and his team.
"Don't worry, it's a bet on my life and, when betting on that, I never lose!" Tsunade smiled to her gloomy teammate and gave him a confident look. "Something about this creep makes me want to pound him to dust so that my grandpa doesn't have to waste his time, if he's even here, to begin with."