The craggy silhouette of the trial hall cutting through the night was intimidating, but the vast ring of Union soldiers surrounding it was even more so. With winter-bitten faces and brittle weapons drawn, they made a spiral of a thousand encircling the hall, their dark armour dully reflecting the amber glow of its fading lantern-light.
Not a sound escaped them nor their quarry. Silence commanded the frozen army, the wind howling through them against the face of the trial hall. It wailed against the high double-doors, chilling exposed faces and hidden hearts pumping with adrenaline. Countless stares were tacked upon those doors; all minds were centered around the looming inevitability of when the soldiers could break free, allowed to let loose like a shower of arrows upon those in the hall with all the fury and might they'd built up through months and months of animosity.
One of the few not staring at the hall itself was Hayashi. He stood in the heart of the innermost ring of soldiers. Waiting within the front line, his focus was separate from theirs, attentive to everything else beyond the stoic, bleak face of the building he and the entire Union surrounded. With his shadowed gaze cast back and forth across the landscape, he seemed to wind up tighter like a coil the more silent minutes that passed — until he spotted her.
Sasaki was a blur of blackness, leaping over the heads of a hundred unaware soldiers and landing with catlike grace before him. Obsidian hair danced around her bloodless, grim expression as she rose to her full height, her charcoal-black Union armour whispering roughly around her tall, thin figure.
The sideways look she cast upon Hayashi with a cutting gesture was all he needed to understand.
His lifted hand raised high in the air gesticulating towards the east caused an immediate reaction in the Union ranks. Drawing back, the circle of a thousand surrounding the trial hall repositioned in an echoing shuffling of countless boots through snow and rocks, forming a large semi-circle facing it instead. As they did so, Sasaki turned to watch beside Hayashi, the both of their grim stares set immediately upon the figures beginning to flood out from the treeline behind the trial hall.
Hayashi's stare flicked between her and the Allied forces made more visible as they emerged into the cold winter moonlight. Just as silent and tense as the Union soldiers, they halted to stand in a growing pool of shinobi around the hall itself, leaving a sizable divide between the opposing armies. Facing off against them, their numbers slowly grew, no one coming out from the hall itself.
He didn't need to ask Sasaki how this was. Her arrival now meant that her underground reconnaissance with her squad had been cut short. Forced to retreat, she'd returned to him here as the bulk of Allied shinobi exited the hall through the tunnels rather than through the main doors. An obvious tactic to avoid a strike on a predictable place for them to emerge, it was clear that this move was one Sasaki could not have stopped without immediately sparking a battle into this renewed war.
As more Allied forces appeared by the hundreds beyond the treeline, it was additionally clear that they had far more soldiers than the Union did. Cold moonlight cut out a silvery line across the shoulders of a thousand emerging shinobi, swathed in all the colours of their own villages, their pinched faces obscured in the dark of the heavy winter's night as they strode forward to pool around the hall en-masse. While they lacked the clean uniformity of the Union army in their black armour, the Allied forces were nearly innumerable as only more continued to step out from the thick dark of the treeline beyond.
Regardless of their dual recognition of the unfortunate odds, Sasaki and Hayashi were both calm as they looked on, while their host of Union soldiers were watching with their knuckles tight over their drawn weapons. They understood they still had the advantage. They had trained their soldiers to within an inch of their lives for this inevitability. They had the advantage of their utter conviction, well-built armour protection, and gruelling, merciless months of drills. And — they had their frightening leaders inspiring them with their presence, though Isamu's absence wrought questions among some of the soldiers.
Neither of them betrayed a sign that they heard it as a deep murmur pushed beneath breaths amongst their own thousand-strong, a note exhaled in a soft prayer every mouth and every devout mind among the soldiers knew well. It was like a breeze shared among the many, weighted with words and the invisible cadence of synchronous tongues. Every embittered expression softened, and every head bowed, as if they were stooped before their god instead of facing their imminent deaths.
Unease painted a queasy hue across the Allied forces as they looked on with confusion becoming discomfiture at the sight of the Union army's visible, sudden reverence. Many stares shifted with confusion between Hayashi and Sasaki, who stood tall and unmoving at their forces' heart; their cold gazes remained affixed to their enemies, unwavering and strong. Even with the Allied side's shared judgemental whispers declaring their enemy's delusionment and madness, they were still visibly affected, something close to fear forming like a festering sore among their ranks as they looked on.
So quiet that their voices did not break the wintry silence above the battlefield, the cultists' murmured recitations coloured the tension among them with shades of hope drowning out fear. Hayashi and Sasaki shut their eyes briefly, long-familiar with their legions' words; they were memorised in months of tribulations from the whole of the Union dedicating their lives to their cult-sworn religion day and night. The soldiers' whispered tenets were soul-deep; their beliefs blinded, their cut-out peripheral views tunnelling their minds with complete focus upon their god and their desire to win this war, to bring about the infinite dreams; to ultimately reunite with the dead and the lost, the common trauma among all of their hearts in the only word their enemies could hear them bring to life. Loss.
Just as a thousand heads inclined in their murmur, a thousand heads slowly lifted. Their many rising eyes skewered through the Allied army in one single, unified glance. Their faces were reformed into the same expression matching among them all no matter their skin shade nor age.
Many of those among their enemies stepped unconsciously back, rattled at the sight of an entire cultist army staring them down with resolved, utterly lethal conviction.
Hayashi leaned towards Sasaki slightly in the wake of silence that followed, his long brown hair drifting over his face. His voice was quiet, his question regarding her previous retreat from underground not meant for nearby soldiers to hear. "Deaths?"
Her tone was flat. "No."
Hayashi nodded, hiding his relief just in case Sasaki took offense to it. "Of course not. Good, I'm glad to hear it. And the tunnels? How did it go when you and your squad performed your search?"
"We had plenty of time to check everything thoroughly. Knowing the subterranean layout made it a quick task for myself and my squadron." Sasaki's shadowed eyes never wavered from the trial hall's shut doors, her voice quiet beneath layers of ice. "There were some traps and seals they had attempted to set up that we easily disabled; placed right around this clearing between our armies, in fact. A rudimentary attempt at a backup plan for striking us." Her exhale was long and somewhat tired.
More Allied shinobi were making their appearances just beyond the trial hall, a great front line forming that stretched far in both directions, facing off army to army. There was a yawning divide between the opposing sides; enough that they were out of each others' earshot, but close enough to launch into the fight the moment their leaders commanded it. The air shivered with tension as countless glares locked across the battlefield, enemy to enemy.
"Beneath our feet here?" Hayashi glanced at the ground once before shaking his head. "Foolish. I doubt it could have snared even the weakest of our people." After a pause, Hayashi followed Sasaki's gaze to where her focus burned upon the trial hall, as intense as if she was setting it afire in her mind.
This time the silence between the armies wasn't as obvious to him as Sasaki's quietude. It bothered Hayashi that she was more curt and standoffish than she typically was, her icy manner setting him at unshakeable unease. He shifted his footing where he stood as he awaited her response; his charcoal-coloured armour plates scraped, his sheathed sword swinging at his side. His previous shallowly-set good mood from feeling that his side of the war had a solid advantage fell away to a rising anxiety as he sensed what he realised was an utterly murderous aura emanating from Sasaki's tensed figure.
Hayashi inched away from her subtly as he noticed her mood. He could understand being tense; he could understand a sort of anger seeing their enemies arrive to thwart them all from the glorious infinite dream, but Sasaki's deadliness seemed almost personal.
"Did — something else happen?" Hayashi hoped his question was vague enough not to provoke her.
Sasaki turned her shadowed violet eyes to Hayashi in a single glance that had him taking a full step away from her. The blood drained from his face, certain fear flickering in his eyes. Though her expression was as restrained and wooden as he was used to, there was an unbridled, hellbent rage blazing behind her eyes.
He broke eye contact with her quickly, swallowing hard as she made her quiet answer. "We were in such a position," she said with ice-crusted, measured words, "that we overheard the trial."
Hayashi tried to shake off his unease — had he always been afraid of Sasaki? he wondered, and decided he didn't want to think about that — making a short, bittersweet laugh in a thin attempt to ease the tension. "Well, so they condemned her, right? No surprise to anyone, and shouldn't be a surprise to you. Unless something unexpected happened?"
"No." Sasaki turned away from him once more, her long dark hair shadowing her snow-white features. Hayashi relaxed slightly, trying to act casually again with some aimless chatter. "There were so many of them in that hall at once. If only Sakura and the eye weren't in there, we could have made a huge strike on the building and obliterated them all at once rather than waiting for them out here."
He nearly didn't catch her serrated murmur to herself that faded into silence, her syllables sharp as blades. "I will make them regret…"
Both of their heads snapped forward as new movement had them instantly alert once more. The doors to the hall were opening.
As if their twinned reactions were commands in themselves, the whole of the Union army behind their helm stood taller too, their widened eyes stabbing through those double-doors as they creaked all the way open. A spill of light cast an edged shape against the clearing of rocky ground between the opposing armies, and silhouettes cut against it in sharp relief as a medley of some of the most powerful shinobi in history emerged.
Bold. Sasaki and Hayashi's expressions briefly matched in shared grimaces: this was an intentional draw of their attention. This move was made with purposeful intent for all to see who now entered so visibly into the wintry, ominous night.
The final arrivals on the Allied side stepped down from the double-doors, split into two small, distinct groups parting to the left and right; the doors behind them offered a glimpse of the utterly empty trial hall before thundering shut behind them. Though all eyes darted between the groups with great interest, the strongest gravity for the mass attention of both armies magnetised to Sakura within one of the groups.
Unconscious, slumped on the ground on her knees with her head of pink hair hung low, she drew nearly every stare, her slender figure lit in silver in the light of the rising moon. Beside her stood Hashirama, drawing back as Obito stepped forward behind her, Naruto lingering near the group. Their expressions were opposite; Obito appearing grim and calm with a lethal glint in his single uncovered eye, and Naruto with a nauseous look indicating his stress. Like everyone else, his gaze was pinned to Sakura, concern and anxiety apparent in his expression and tensed posture.
The other headlining group that stood apart from them stared down the Union army before them, narrowed eyes bladed and calm. Wary and observant, their attention moved between Sasaki and Hayashi at the helm of the army, clearly annoyed at the lack of the one they had been expecting to see.
Sasuke stood at the group's front, accompanied by the intimidating Raikage and Second Hokage at his back. They were two silvery cutouts in the moonlight at either of his sides, tall and just as cold as the winter air around them, suited in armour and furs alike with blades readied at their sides. Their eyes were icy upon the leaders at the head of their enemy's army, their stares those of calm, practised killers.
If it bothered Sasuke that he was standing with two of his former and perhaps future enemies, he didn't show it, his raven-hair drifting over his shadowed, restrained grimace, a dark cloak shifting around his frame. He himself was a lethal presence, just as expressionless and deadly-calm as his unusual company was; his mismatched Rinnegan and Sharingan eyes glowed in the shadowed pale set of his features, piercing through the night.
Sasaki's low hiss pulled Hayashi's fascinated attention away from these legendary figures back to her. "He's holding something."
Sasuke's hands were indeed cupped together around something, held low along his side. He wasn't making a show of whatever he held hidden between loosely gripped fingers, but Hayashi and Sasaki could easily guess what it was.
The two groups stilled where they stood, well out of reach of the other apart across the great divide, presented at the front of the Allied forces.
Hashirama made a quiet gesture. Tensed figures by the thousands held their ground as the vast trial hall shuddered like a pained wooden beast. It sunk into the ground slowly, the earth trembling, and in a rising cloud of dust and fractured ice it disappeared in a gradual destruction of its structures, disintegrating until all that was left was a flat stretch of torn-up ground in its stead.
The removal of the hall now left the rocky landscape as flat and faceless as it had been before its creation. After a pause, Allied soldiers took over the space it had been in, boots crunching through rocks and sawdust.
With a tension as impossibly taut as it ever could be, the two armies now faced each other in full with no obstacles or distractions between them but where the two protruding groups were shown — like bait, dangling before the hungry maw of bladed thousands.
Both Sasaki and Hayashi automatically drew their blades in instinctive reaction as a matte black figure emerged from the ground next to her. As soon as they became conscious of who it was that joined them, they sheathed their blades quickly, glancing away as he stared them down with flat, unreadable yellow eyes. Saying nothing, Black Zetsu's head swivelled then to the Allied Forces ahead of them, his unnaturally wide scowl tilting deeper across his face.
"This is it," Sasaki informed him quietly, none of the three of them taking their eyes off of their enemies, who watched them levelly in turn. "Isamu's watching the perimeter, but nothing else appears to be going on here but this… trap they've openly shown us now. My team has taken out what they set up underground in a feeble attempt to snare us." She cleared her throat uncomfortably, all three sets of their eyes upon Sasuke. "He has it. The…"
"I saw." Black Zetsu answered her curtly. Sasaki's expression was as flat as his now, their businesslike tones devoid of emotion. "It's too simple," he growled.
"Deceptively so," Sasaki nodded in agreement, ignoring the strangeness of this first conversation she'd ever directly had with either Zetsu. She knew Hayashi was too intimidated by him to even try, his head bowed where he stood in fearful respect, his eyes averted from Black Zetsu's shadowy black figure. She hid her disgust: Black Zetsu was not royalty to be feared and respected as their great leader was.
She didn't voice the question she wanted to ask him. It was one that everyone had, both on their side, and their enemy's side: the name on the tip of every tongue, leaving fearful, bitter aftertastes even without being voiced by so much as one person. A hundred years of rumours, terror, and fear-built reputation held an eternal weight upon that name, and all the intimidation he wielded burned among them now as he slashed through every mind in their mass anticipation of his arrival. The answer to that question was already known among them all, in turn: there was no doubt that Madara would soon appear.
The tension between every shinobi standing drew taut enough now to break as the darkness intensified. Inky shadows cast by thinning moonlight stretched long across the great divide between the armies, the silence from before making its weighted return, thick and freezing as the snow adrift around the rocky ice-slick landscape.
In the moments before the quiet broke, the wind withdrew. Its howling was silenced.
Several thousand feet stepped back as a black and white blur cut through the night sky. Where every eye had been drawn to the symbol of strife and hope alike where she slumped unconscious at the front of the Allied forces, their stares were commanded now by the jagged figure that rose to his full height at the helm of his army. Silver moonlight backlit his powerful frame and wild snowy mane, shadowing his face, and in a single cutting and analytical glance his powerful mismatched eyes sliced across the forces opposing him, irises glowing slightly through the thick of the winter night.
With impossible weight his attention shifted from Sasuke and his hidden burden to Sakura slumped at Obito's feet.
Pale hair fell back as Obito's gloved fingers curled around her chin, tilting her head up and letting the thin light of the moon reveal her twitching, tormented expression. She was still unconscious, but she looked pained, as if she was still aware of the present moment. Across the divide, Sasuke glanced over at Obito cuttingly, a warning look in his stare unnoticed by most.
He ignored Sasuke, his single eye piercing red upon Madara directly across the clearing.
Sasaki glanced at Madara as the rest of the army behind her did, unable to see his face. Behind him to the side, she couldn't read his features through loose falls of moonlit silver hair, his frame tall with the wide-collared dark armour he wore further obscuring his face to her. All she could read from his dangerous presence was his lethality and his deep, eternal calm.
"We're waiting, Madara." Obito's rough growl rang out across the armies, breaking the heavy silence.
Every stare shifted between the two of them, their clashing eyes locked as Obito's raspy growl rippled between their armies like the icy night breeze. "Go on… make your choice."
Madara's unreadable expression was as bloodless and pale as the moon, the sheer and utter hatred aglow in his mismatched eyes as he stared Obito down. Icily calm, he didn't move from where he stood, though his gloved fingers twitched slightly at his sides.
"It's right there…" Sasuke opened his hand as Obito's words rung out. The moonlight caught sharply in the metallic rings of the Rinnegan eye resting in his palm, its living surface oozing slightly, a familiar gash from its year-old injury seeping across the pupil into its sclera. It stared blankly upwards, almost as if looking at its near-twin where Sasuke's own living Rinnegan glared out beneath his drifting black hair.
Madara's shadowed gaze flicked between Obito and the gashed eye while Sasaki and Hayashi drew a hiss of air through clenched teeth. "The real eye," Sasaki seethed under her breath, "that's it. She gave it to them, or they took it from her person. We must — we need to —!"
The subtle clouds of breath rising in steam around hundreds of onlooking faces dissipated: breaths stopped, as Obito pressed a kunai up against Sakura's throat.
Sasaki's breath snagged in her chest, too. While Black Zetsu near her made an irritated grimace, she could see Madara's expression now from where she stood a little closer. He did not look away from the scene unfolding before him; and in the moment Sasaki glanced at his moonlit face, she felt the same fear Hayashi had when speaking with her earlier. Madara had changed: for the first time she'd ever seen, his steel calm was showing cracks.
Her stomach was sinking as she looked back to the choice presented between them. Madara must also be recognising the awful parallel, cast back against a tarnished memory: when Sakura had brought her kunai to Obito on his knees at the very start of this mess, but now it was her slumped on her knees, his kunai at her throat, and again the fate of it all hanging in the balance, depending upon Madara's decisions in the moment.
Madara burned with a rage a hundredfold stronger than what Sasaki had earlier. The stony, imperious, subtly disgusted look on his face did nothing now to hide the murderous fury behind his mismatched red and metallic eyes, glowing in the shadows cutting across his features.
It was like looking into the face of Death himself at the precipice of a heedless slaughter, and Sasaki paled further, looking away from Madara quickly. He was the only one in this world that could inspire fear in her, and he did so without so much as meeting her eye.
But this decision had to be made, and hesitation was not something in Madara's nature: he was always decisive, and the tension among him and every soldier among the thousand surrounding him weighed heavier with the knowledge that full-out war would break out at any second. His decision was the dam that held back the flood of fighting and death that all awaited. His decision in the face of this situation presented so cruelly to him and his army would determine the tides of this battle.
Few of the faces around Obito betrayed dismay to his threat on Sakura's life in a suspicious lack of protest, and Sasaki looked on with tension and suspicion as understanding spread beneath her skin. It didn't matter, she knew: she already understood what Madara would choose regardless, her gaze sliding worriedly to the vulnerable eye within Sasuke's grip.
Madara remained still. Fear and respect had his army brittle as frozen metal, doubly tense from his unpredictability; they all tensely awaited his sign to attack. The hateful power bristling in his presence somehow darkened further, causing all of those in his proximity to forget to breathe for a moment. It was like standing too close to a forest fire, feeling the heat singe one's skin, but they couldn't move either, bound too tightly by the tension.
"I'm tired of waiting." A bright red pearl of blood appeared beneath the edge of Obito's kunai. It dripped slowly in a thick red line down the sun-bleached skin of Sakura's throat.
Her brows twitched again in her terse, pained expression, her breaths shallow. Obito loomed over from behind her, his single eye as red as the stream of blood beneath his blade at her neck. "Everyone knows this won't be a difficult decision for you. We all know… so I'm sure you've reasoned this is, in the end, not even a choice at all." The wind hissed across his scarred, hate-twisted features, rippling through the pale tresses around Sakura's face, and the blood trailing down her snow-white throat continued to fall, dampening the collar of her shirt and seeping through it.
Sasuke glanced at Obito before closing his fingers slowly around the Rinnegan. Fingertips began to dig into its fleshy, slightly gleaming surface. The sclera began to seep further, and the metallic shine of it began to dull somewhat with the wet, squishing sound his digging grip made.
"No," Sasaki was hissing, stepping forward next to Black Zetsu and Madara, "that's the real eye, it's—"
Obito continued in a low, hate-twisted tone. "You've made us wait too long. Let's take both options off the table… in front of you, and your disillusioned cultist army. The death of your beloved Infinite Tsukuyomi vision."
The metallic sclera oozed. Sakura twitched bodily, Obito's grip digging into her as he held her still against the blade, never looking away from Madara. His single red eye was goading, hateful, challenging, as his words resounded in the divide between them. "You've known what you're doing and where it would end since the moment you chose to corrupt another innocent for the sake of your cause." His fervent voice carried to all, masking the trio's whispers around Madara he continued to show no reaction to, as if he was frozen in time by Obito's scalding words. "As such, I doubt her death will mean anything to you. Sakura has served her purpose, in your mind… a spent husk of trash you'll just throw away, her life expended for the greater good of your plans. Perhaps you already consider her dead, as much as you've already poisoned who she is and destroyed her life; all for your benefit."
Obito's face passed her shoulder as he leaned forward, his features level beside Sakura's as he glared out at Madara. "You never change. Ruining others for your selfish plotting has always come naturally to you, whether it's your kin, or your best friend." Many eyes shifted between the other remaining two Uchihas, stares lingering between Obito and Sasuke, then to what all understood was Madara's former friend Hashirama before Obito went on. "Or even… your only lover."
Silence fell again. His hand along Sakura's ghostly face kept her pained expression exposed to the moonlight, visible to all. The shadows beneath her flickering, shut eyes were deep, her dark lashes contrasting against her bloodless skin, the sorrow hollow across her hauntingly lovely features.
"You never deserved the way she championed for you, Madara. The way she even managed to convince some of us at her trial that you — you, the selfish bastard you are — might be worth a second chance. Without a curse tag, without anything else to lose, she still declared such a sad, naive hope. Like your own personal, fallen angel."
Obito's single red eye matched the one burning in Madara's pale, shadowed features, the both of their faces seized with the venomous throes of absolute hatred. They stared each other down in the vast divide across their bristling, tense armies; Sakura the one thing left between. Her breaths were shallow in her slumped figure, becoming ragged with the thickening stream of red beneath the blade against the soft skin of her throat.
"But in the end, none of that matters. We know better… you will never be able to change who you are or how you will always choose your own selfish gains over the lives of others. Her true value nor any of the rest doesn't matter; not to you. It's all the same as long as you get what you want." Obito eased the blade slightly as the single flick of his eye observed the red down her throat, the pinched look on Sakura's face easing slightly in turn, her breaths steadying somewhat.
Murmurs indicated vast dissent among the Allied ranks. As the tense Kages looked on from the front lines, their stares shifting between Obito and Madara, the truth of his words was clear in the uncomfortable tension he'd unearthed from them all.
"The eye," Black Zetsu and Sasaki hissed in unison, urging Madara.
"Everyone will soon understand the truth, just as we both want," Obito was saying in a raspy growl all could hear, his voice rising above the battlefield. "Go on—" Fleshy sounds as Sasuke's fist tightened, and there was runny fluid from the Rinnegan's sclera oozing from between his fingers now, his grimace deepening.
Another pair of unified hisses beside Madara, urgent, desperate, the pale hand on his arm knocked away in a single strike, his lethal eye shifting once to burn upon Sasaki in a silent rebuke; she withdrew like she'd been burned.
"I could," Sasaki was starting to offer, her gaze suddenly hardening upon Sasuke, "I could—"
The dribble of blood was bright red in the moonlight down Sakura's throat, Obito's raspy voice an impassioned, furious snarl across the clearing. "Do you hear me, Madara? This is your sentence as well as hers. If there's any sick, demented sliver of a heart left in you — I want to see it bleed. You'll make your choice, and as you do, you'll watch as she dies in front of you. Just like you did to me."
The ranks around Madara had taken an unwilling step back. The ripples of rage coming off of his jagged frame were murderous and oppressive, threatening everyone and everything within his vicinity with death. His gloved fingers twitched, seizing, his feet drawn apart in his offending poise as his former calm was entirely gone now.
Every soul present braced themselves. This was the second every mind was simultaneously united in a singular understanding: Madara was making his move. War was to finally break loose, and thousands of souls braced themselves in this cascading second before he made his decision already known among them all.
The fastest of all the Allied shinobi, standing near Sasuke's group, took their first steps forward. Tobirama's red eyes were narrowed, his cracked skin flaking but his poise strong and prepared, the Raikage matching his brittle stance with crackling tension and anticipation of a tough fight ahead. His toned limbs flickered with electricity, his teeth bared in a warrior's grimace. Hidden behind the front lines, hands between teams clasped in prepared jutsus, ready to weave their signs.
Sasuke shifted his stance with subtle nervousness muted in his confident, bitter expression, embedded over his knowledge that he was surely faster than Madara even in his enraged state, braced too for the deadly fight to come. Obito himself stayed where he was, visibly confident in his Kamui intangibility should he need it to protect himself and keep his captive – though he, as everyone else understood too, would not be the target.
Sasaki and Black Zetsu were mirrors of tension on either side of Madara, leaning forward on one foot in preparation to blaze forward. Hayashi positioned his blade high in the air, and in a rustling of cut-short breaths and excited tension, the Union army did the same, understanding his signal that it was time.
Naruto was the only shinobi who seemed to know differently, anger and anxiety behind his stare. He paid no attention to Sasuke's group, fully honed in on Obito and where Sakura was slumped before him.
Madara was a blur of black and white once more. His jagged silhouette was visible for a single moment high in the sky as he leapt upwards, his eyes burning gloriously within his shadowed figure.
Following his movement was a blur of action so concurrently instantaneous that few were able to track what happened. To those without Uchiha eyes or otherwise engaged vision it all happened in a lethal slashing and a rush of power — dust and snow and shattered earth rising in a cloud spattered red with a spray of blood, fogging over the scene of battle.
In a great roaring of a thousand voices, both armies surged at each other without waiting to see the results of Madara's choice.
Countless feet stumbled and leapt as the earth split and groaned. Recognising what was happening, shinobi on either side had to jump and run in a frantic dance of dodging, focusing on survival over fighting in a fleeting moment of desperation as the entire landscape changed.
The formerly flat rocky face of the battlefield erupted into a roiling ocean of Wood-Style branches thick as dragons. It snapped and rose and writhed like a world-sized living thing.
Allied Shinobi feet were snared in painful thorned vines they hacked at with blade and jutsu, while Union shinobi's feet went unhindered, their side of the battlefield higher than the other, giving them advantageous uneven ground. Upon regaining their balance they surged down upon their enemies with another unified roar, the strange, destroyed land around them a vast tangled knot of huge branches stretching into both horizons, flattening forests and rising like mountains into the sky.
Blood spattered the area Sakura had once been. Naruto was a searing of yellow light shooting backwards with Obito thrown over his shoulder, scooped up at the very last second before he could be instantaneously killed. Both of Obito's shoulders were bleeding stumps, his severed arms rolling away down the treacherous Wood-Style terrain at their feet, and Naruto made a desperate dodge as a slash of jagged white came down at him again with an inhuman snarl ringing out across the rippling battlefield.
A confusion of shouts to the side; Sasuke dodged a rain of blades, his grip seized and tight around the Allied forces' remaining prize, darting away as Hayashi and Sasaki made simultaneous attacks he had to continuously dodge. Tobirama and the Raikage had to reroute their powerful attacks aimed at where they'd thought Madara would make his attack, lightning and shuriken alike cast into diverging directions at the last second.
Flitting back as he dodged a medley of oncoming Union attacks, Sasuke's shocked gaze locked on to Madara just long enough to observe him cleaving another bloodied limb from Obito in an attack Naruto had managed to halfway-dodge. Sasuke wasn't the only one to be turning heads mid-battle to see it, something none had predicted but Naruto: the results of the Allied side's goading, threatening choice a sight unbelievable to either side of the war. The trap was a failed one, the majority's surefire bet incorrect in the face of the truth revealed.
All could see it now, even through the deadly, graceful speed in which Madara slashed down through the air once more — the unmistakable spray of red-tainted pink snared in his grip as he fought, limp and unconscious still.
A surge of power rushed his way in Naruto's defense as Allied shinobi recovered from their shock and moved to help him and Obito both. Blood drenched Naruto's clothing, Obito's scream raspy through the air, and just as a dozen different powerful attacks of all different natures skewered where Madara had been giving chase, he had disappeared again.
Left behind were the two armies left, the thousands of shinobi in opposition now clashing in full-out war. Roars among the Kages gave their commands to find Madara and his stolen captive, roars that sent side-teams racing around the edges of battle, abilities aglow as they hunted the two symbols of war and peace in order to end it all. In the race they made to do so, Sasuke was a dark shadow soaring through the ranks, chased by hundreds at once for the precious key to their win that he held.