Pre-Chapter AN: Here we go. This is the final chapter of this story. The last one, the big one, the one we've all been waiting for. If you've read this far, I need just one small favour from you. Please go to my profile and check out my other story (One Thousand Hands) which has about seventeen chapters up now and the prologue to the new story that replaces this one: Doom Days.

Thank you.

XXXXX- THE ICHIKAGE

"You know, I thought it would take you much longer to try this", He said as he walked into his office and found a very familiar body sitting right in the chair that he called his. The Ichikage, in his four years of rule had been forced to face many problems, a practically infinite amount from four of the great five villages: Konoha had tried to secede - twice - Kiri had needed to be quelled after the Jounin led a coup against their own Kage for capitulating to his demands, both Kumo and Iwa had needed billions of Ryo in repairs, and he'd been forced to step in with his own people once the dissatisfaction had got to unsustainable levels, and then after they received their aid, they tried to press their independence. So many problems, so many solutions he'd been pressed to find.

But one village had never stepped a toe out of line. Gaara of the Desert had turned out to be a man of his word at the end. They abided by the quotas, they followed the pricing structure he laid down, they paid their taxes on time and never skimped a ryo- their accounting practices had been a work of art- and copying the basics fit was the only thing that even allowed him to exercise what seemed to be a modicum of control over the ship he was steering without running mad entirely. The good behaviour was a warning sign on its own, however. Shinobi were naturally greedy creatures, and not a single one of them would bend a knee with no intention to rise again. To make it worse, the man who sat before him was just like he was.

"Really?" He asked absently, opening his eyes to regard me with them while spinning a very familiar kunai in his hands. The eyes drew more attention, however. A rinnegan in one, and a sharingan in the other. The Ichikage would almost have been afraid if he did not know that he had two shinobi on his roster with one pair of rinnegan each, and when it came to sharingan, he had quite a few.

"Yes. At first, I did expect you to pull something before I entrenched myself in my position, but after those first two years passed, I began to expect that you'd be more cunning and circumspect about things. Only come when I was at my weakest possible state or you were at your strongest possible state. Considering I can no longer sense the Ichibi's Chakra within you, then the latter is not true and I know for sure that the former is not" He said, walking forwards and taking a seat right opposite his own. He'd play ball with whatever this asinine attempt was.

"Yeah, I can talk all about that, but I would prefer if you answered a question of mine first. I figured out what happened to Sasori, and Noel, and the rest of them, and you said enough that I have a very good idea what happened to Konan. But what happened to Uchiha Itachi? It's a bit of aa shame that I never got to face him myself."

"Uchiha Itachi, huh? Well, it's simple really. I came across he and his brother having a fight to the death in the crumbling ruins of Danzo's secret root base, and decided to introduce both of them to an ancestor of theirs"

"Madara, then"

"Precisely. It's a question I've always had since the first time I watched the anime, you know? Who would win between Itachi and Madara? I got to watch the fight, and I wish I could say that it was close. But Madara was something else, man. We think we're strong in the present day, but the things Madara could just do casually were something else. Both brothers went at him together, and they both died all the same." The Ichikage noticed the way his rival's eyes widened as he revealed the thing they had in common.

"You're an insert as well, interesting, Explains a lot to be sure" Yes it does.

"Well, I could tell you were an insert from the beginning. Pretty much from the second Gaara of the Desert began behaving dissimilarly from his canon self when there was nothing I'd have possibly done that could have done that, I had a pretty good idea. And the rasenshuriken was also kind of a dead ringer for an insert's jutsu if we're being honest"

He stared at him with no flinch in his body after his words. Like he had no reaction at all. That in and of itself was a reaction. With snake-like eyes, the Ichikage watched the man who had set all of this in motion as he began to digest what he understood had happened.

"So you're not from the world, just like me" He finally said, making the Ichikage smile and nod. H had looked forward to this day for so long.. When he could finally meet someone like him - an equal. A fellow human in this world of characters. A god, so to speak.

"I should say that explains a lot. Over the past few years, I've spent many a sleepless night trying to figure out which one of my actions could have fucked up canon so severely." He said next, looking like he was gearing up to say more, so the Ichikage allowed his rival to speak. He'd won, after all. He could at least afford to be magnanimous in victory.

"But that doesn't answer my main question. How in the hell did Madara not just kill you the second you summoned him?" The red head asked, throwing the Ichikage off with the way he smoothly moved away from the topic of both of them not being native to this world.

"Oh. That was easier said than done. The first time, I barely managed to dispel the jutsu in time once he turned to me with aggression and it was clear the attempt to crush his will hadn't worked. I could have done like Orochimaru and settled for summoning him at half or even a quarter of his power to make him easier to control, but my inner perfectionist would not allow it, and how could I when you were making history as the youngest kage of all time. I had to really study the jutsu and break it down to its basest components before my experiments could succeed. At first, I managed to summon him without his ego, but I found that that version proved to be a pale imitation. More powerful than me for sure, but not as strong as could have been. In a fight between that reanimation and a reanimated third Raikage, he lost woefully. So I had to go back to the drawing board. There was something in the ego that made shinobi as powerful as they were. Beating my head against I didn't work as it should have so I got the idea to recruit help. I summoned some Uzumaki clan heads after raiding Uzushio for what remains I could find - that was almost a failure on its own as well" Here, he stopped for a second as the thought of how he'd almost carelessly got himself killed came to mind.

"But I managed to run across the remains of the most recent clan-head completely by accident and then summoning him was easy enough. He managed to resist the control of edo tensei, but removing his ego was acceptable because I did not need him to actually fight. No, I just needed knowledge. And knowledge he had. He helped me open the other tombs, and I summoned more and more under my control until together we remade the edo tensei at its core. Now, I have a variant of the edo tensei that operates a lot like the shadow clone jutsu. It allows me to split my own ego and imbue that into the summoned shinobi. It's much harder to maintain than the standard jutsu so I only used it for Madara and Norotoshi Uzumaki."

"Norotoshi Uzumaki?"

"The maker of the death masks. He was the very first of the Uzumaki to solemnise their relationship with death and invent the reaper death seal" he explained.

"So that explains Madara, then. Now that we're done talking, shall we begin?" He asked, standing up from the chair and beginning to stretch. The Ichikage smiled and prepared to humble the upstart.

XXXXXXXX

I leaned backwards, enjoying the way I felt my back move with the rest of my body. In my fists was a strength that I had never been capable of before. Sage mode was something else, and I'd spent the last three days at the waterfall of truth, gathering as much senjutsu energy within my body as possible. The seal made it easy to gather even more on the move. But the point of going to a natural energy hotspot like that one was the quality of the stage energy. Not all natural energy was equal, just like I'd theorised, and that was proving to be true. Some shit just hit different.

When I crossed the distance that separated me and Kabuto, it was like I had moved even faster than my eyes could track. Everything was a blur. Regardless, Kabuto managed to bend around the attack, openly gaping at me as the shockwave from my punch shattered the wall behind him and continued until it broke a hole in the tower's frame. "This isn't going to go how you expect" I told him as I caught the snakes that short out from his sleeves in my grip and squeezed them to death.

He formed another hand seal, and nothing happened. I chuckled internally and stepped farther into his guard. Once again, he tried to run, but this time, he found that gravity itself would not allow him to move as he was pulled towards me. I grabbed him by the neck and slammed him against the ground, meeting his serpentine gaze with mine. He had some form of snake sage mode going for him, but we weren't even close to being equals. He was a soft weakling who hid behind the greater dead to exert his influence while I stood at the precipice of the shinobi world. I'd fought all comers and proven myself to be their better. None could match me.

Another handseal and this time, I actually could not stop myself from laughing at him as nothing happened.

"What have you done?" His voice gasped out.

"Levelled the playing field. You see, I had a good time planting seals all around this city you call yours. A seal matrix aimed at one simple thing. Call it a modification of the Reaper death seal if you would, but all it does is that it separates the soul from the body for a second. Just a second. For beings like you and I, living human beings, it's too short a period to be noticed. For reanimated shinobi, however, that split is enough to separate the bond that connects them to the host. Cleaves it irreparably, you know."

"An Anti-edo tensei seal. How fascinating" He said next, now beginning to look unbothered within my grip.

"I guess I have to give you a good fight then" He said, before going limp.

I stared at the body in my grip, noting that the chakra in it was gone. All gone, and all at once. How? Some sort of body switching technique? But I hadn't seen any seals. Hadn't even felt his chakra move in the way it would have for using a jutsu. To be safe, I smashed through his head with my fist, enjoying the way the grey matter clung to my glove. I put it down and got up next, turning to the other wall where I could feel the buildup of chakra.

"Madara?" I asked, when the body burst through the concrete wall and began to stare me down from on top of it.

"Not quite"

"Kabuto, then"

"I much prefer Ichikage-same, Kazekage-dono"

Once again, I felt myself burst into laughter against my will.

"Part of me wants to know how you did this, but the rest of me doesn't really care and would just like to kill you now"

"You will try, and you will fail"

We dove at each other at the same time, and I took some pleasure in noting that even with this body, I was still faster than he was. My roundhouse kick crashed against the arm guards of the Uchiha patriarch and sent Kabuto flying backwards. Stretching out my arm, I turned mat right hand into a chakra canon that smashed right into the space he was flying towards. With these eyes of mine, I could see the Sussano'o form before the canon hit and sent him flying back even further. He flew out of the tower and landed right on top of a duplex.

I jumped right after him and was forced to switch out the asura path for greta as I saw him send several chakra arrows at me from his Sussano'o. I absorbed all of them, and without letting the chakra into my main system, I cycled it into a different jutsu and opened my mouth to breathe out a powerful hurricane that blew apart the building Kabuto was standing atop, and much of the surrounding fixtures.

The Sussano'o remained undamaged, but that was a temporary problem. Still in the air, I opened my inventory and practically dumped a desert's worth of sand atop his form. I could feel him struggling against the sand for a bit, but I upped my chakra output to prevent him from moving at all. Of course, it only lasted a second, as the purple construct grew beyond its ribcage form into a full spectral giant that was easily the size of the tower that Kabuto had claimed for himself. I took note of the way the construct's form thickened and became even more complex, adding armour, and weaponry to its construction.

"How does the perfect Sussano'o look in person, Gaara?" Kabuto's voice came from Madara's mouth at the crown of the construct. I just shrugged. It wasn't that impressive, to be honest. This had formed many a nightmare for me in the past few years, and now that I had to look at it in person, I could see a million ways to deal with it.

Opening my inventory again, I took out a series of kunai that I threw at Kabuto's armoured form. I watched his sharingan cycle around to track each of them, and I teleported to the flying raijin marker on the one to the left, and then switched over to the right as his blade flashed upwards to attack me. I landed on top the armour and placed both my hands upon it and began to absorb the chakra that formed the Sussano'o. The blade came towards me next, but sand flowed from the ground beneath us and grabbed a hold of the construct's arm keeping it stationary. The Sussano'o went through a visible regression, moving from the armoured from, to the naked giant, and then down to the only top half before returning to the rib cage, and then nothing.

It was just me and Madara face to face. He ran at me, trying to get a punch off. I ducked around the fist and grabbed a hold of his neck before lifting him into the air for a second and then slamming him into the ground in a choke slam.

I felt for his soul within the body, and took great pleasure in dragging it out. This was the first time using this particular path, so I gasped as I felt knowledge flood my mind. Who Kabuto had been, what he had done, what he planned, I had all that information now. Enough information to know that this would have been a much harder fight if I'd waited another year.

And now became the time to decide what to do next.

XXXXXXX

"My Fellow Kage,

I am Gaara of the Desert, Fifth Kazekage of the Village Hidden in the Sands. I have been many things to all of you, an ally, an enemy, a pest, a destroyer, a saviour, a protector. A million things and one, and often at the same time, as well. We have had our differences, and I cannot deny that I have caused a good portion of them. Today I do not write to you as a would-be conqueror like I once would have, but as a liberator. The one under whose yolk we all suffered, Kabuto Yakushi, is now dead, and at mine own hand. The village hidden in the rain, and the land of rain which he had once administered as personal fief is now declared a protectorate of the Village Hidden in the Sands.

We are shinobi. I know that as you read this now, there are thoughts forming in your head. Thoughts of war, conquest, and maybe even revenge against me for the past wrongs that I have done each and every one of you. Maybe you even think of reclaiming the tailed beasts that now rest under my protection. But there is only one thing I can assure you off. If you break this peace that now exists between us, I will grind your village to the ground. I no longer seek to conquer all that is under the sun, but that position can change if I am stirred enough.

To prevent that, I advise that each and every one of you takes their freedom with both hands and uses it to better the lives of their people. If you must wage war, then do so amongst yourselves, for my involvement will only lead to death and suffering for whoever is foolish enough to court it.

But on the other hand, we can move past our violent and warring nations. Kabuto Yakushi, for all his faults, has shown us the way to a brighter, more profitable, and more prosperous future for each and every one of us. We can continue to pursue the framework of cooperation which he has laid down for us and move forward in lockstep, together.

Your choice.

Signed,

Gaara of the Desert."

A/N; And that brings an end to this story. Phew. That was a thing. This was everything to me for such a long time, and I love this story so very much. Thank you for reading, thank you for subscribing, thank you for your criticism, and praise, and love. This was not a perfect story. I am well aware of that fact. But thank you for enjoying it either way, with all its flaws, and plot holes, and terribly written bits or terribly executed plot points. 61 chapters. You've read 61 chapters of my writing. Thank you. I keep saying thank you because I am just so grateful about this. About you. About everything. Thank you. The fact that this story has come to an end now means that there is a hole in my rotation of about three stories that I update regularly. I will be filling that hole, but not with another Naruto story. If you want to have that particular itch scratched, then you could always read "One Thousand Hands". Nay, the next thing I will be writing will be a Harry Potter fanfic. The prologue to that story is up right now, and the next two chapters after that are already on pa-treon. Thank you once again.