The frozen world held its breath within Indra's shimmering stasis field. Obito, trapped in his glacial swing, was a statue of agonized ambition, the unstable chakra of the incomplete Ten-Tails frozen in mid-eruption around him like a cursed halo. Naruto and Sasuke hovered at the field's boundary, their combined ultimate attack poised—a miniature sun of Bijuu chakra and a spear of black annihilation.
But before they could strike, the fabric of the trapped space twitched.
Not from Obito. From the maddening, alien intelligence of the chakra itself. The stolen power of five and a half Tailed Beasts, forced into a crucible and failing, made a final, desperate bid for a stable vessel. The compulsion of the Outer Path, the link Obito had forged in his desperation, reversed polarity.
Within the stasis, Obito's body convulsed. His cracked-mask face turned upwards, not in triumph, but in dawning, horrified understanding. "No… not like this… MY dream… I have to be the one…!"
The black receiver rods impaling him glowed white-hot. The unstable Ten-Tails chakra surged, not outwards, but inwards, collapsing into his core with violent finality. But it wasn't staying. It was using him as a conduit, a focusing lens. The energy, rejecting his incomplete will, sought the template it was always meant for—the template that had grafted Hashirama's flesh, that had waited in the darkness for decades, that had been originally chosen by Black Zetsu and the Gedo Statue itself.
"OUTER PATH — SAMSARA OF HEAVENLY LIFE!"
Obito's voice was a distorted scream, but the words were not his own; they were spoken by the chakra, using his mouth. A beam of pure, white life-energy—not the golden revival of Nagato's technique, but a cold, sterile light—erupted from Obito's chest. It lanced across the battlefield, bypassing the stasis field's temporal rules as if they were mere suggestions, and struck the spot where the broken, disillusioned Madara Uchiha stood.
Madara, still reeling from the intellectual demolition of his life's work, looked down as the light hit him. His Edo Tensei body, already a living vessel, began to burn. Not with pain, but with transformation. The grey ash and paper dissolved, consumed by the white fire. Beneath it, new flesh knitted—not the pale imitation of Edo, but real, living tissue, flushed with blood and bursting with impossible vitality. His hair darkened, his posture straightened, the deep lines of age and bitterness smoothed away, replaced by the prime of his physical power. The Rinnegan in his eyes blazed with a depth and stability they had never possessed before.
The Ten-Tails chakra, the unstable 68% mass, flowed out of Obito and into Madara in a torrent. Obito's form shriveled, the stolen power abandoning him, leaving him a drained, broken shell that crumpled to the ice, his mask falling away to reveal a face aged far beyond his years, his single Sharingan dim.
Madara, however, expanded. The chakra didn't fight him; it welcomed him home. It settled into his cells with a rightness that made the air hum. The missing harmonies of the Two and Three-Tails? Their absence became structured gaps, waiting to be filled, not destabilizing voids. The power was no longer a rebellious tsunami; it was a ocean recognizing its true tide.
He floated into the air, no longer needing a Susanoo. His simple, black mantle flowed around him. In one hand, the Sword of Nunoboko formed, its shape perfect and unwavering, a blade of solidified creation itself. In the other, a black staff materialized. Six black Truth-Seeker Orbs, perfect spheres of silent annihilation, arrayed themselves behind him. On his forehead, a third eye—the Rinne-Sharingan—slit open, gazing upon the world with cold, omniscient indifference.
Uchiha Madara. The Jinchuriki of the Ten-Tails. The true inheritor of the Six Paths.
He took a breath, and the world seemed to exhale with him. He looked at his hands, flexing his fingers, feeling the absolute, seamless power coursing through him. The doubt, the horror of irrelevance, was burned away in this ascension. This was the power he had suffered for, planned for. This was godhood, undeniable and complete.
His eyes found Indra on the distant platform. A slow, terrifying smile spread across Madara's face. "You spoke of science, boy. Of understanding. But this… this is transcendence. This is power that rewrites reality by its very presence. Your equations are scribbles in the dirt next to this."
On the ground, Hashirama stared, his grief for his friend warring with horror. "Madara… what have you done to yourself?"
Tobirama hissed, "The chakra cohesion… it's perfect now. He's stabilized it. He's become the stable vessel the construct demanded."
Minato shielded his eyes from the radiant pressure. "This… this is a different league entirely."
Madara didn't bother with them. He raised a single hand towards the Allied forces. Not in attack. In dismissal. "Shinra Tensei."
It was not the focused push of the Deva Path. It was a planetary repulsion. The very atmosphere itself became a wall that moved. Thousands of Allied shinobi, entire divisions, were swept off their feet and hurled back like leaves in a hurricane, their formations shattered, their barriers meaningless. The ice plain for kilometers flattened as if pressed by a giant's palm.
Only the strongest—the Kage, Naruto, Sasuke, the elite jonin—managed to root themselves, but even they skidded back, straining against the impossible force.
Madara then turned his gaze and his raised hand towards Indra and Rias. "Let us see if your 'sovereignty' can withstand a real god."
The same omnidirectional repulsion focused into a beam, a concentrated hammer of spatial force aimed to obliterate their platform and them with it.
Indra and Rias looked at each other. A silent communication passed between them in a microsecond. The time for analysis, for containment, was over. The calibrations were complete. The threat had achieved its predicted final form.
They didn't brace. They didn't form desperate seals. They simply acted.
Rias stepped in front of Indra, not as a shield, but as the first note in a harmony. She placed her hands together and sang, a single, pure syllable that held the concept of "HALT."
"Sonic-Destruction Fusion Release: Cacophony of Absolute Stillness."
The air before her didn't just harden; it entered a state of resonant negation. The incoming Shinra Tensei beam, a force that repelled all things, met a field that un-made vibration, that dissolved directed energy into harmless, dispersed frequencies. The world-shaking force hit her localized field and shattered into a spectacular, silent shower of prismatic light that dissipated harmlessly against the greater barrier around Kumo's forces.
Madara's smirk didn't fade; it deepened with interest. "Good. A proper response."
He vanished. Not Body Flicker. Not teleportation. He moved at the speed of thought, appearing instantly behind Rias, the Sword of Nunoboko aimed to cleave her in two from shoulder to hip.
He never completed the swing.
Indra was already there. He hadn't moved to intercept. He had always been there, the space between his original position and Rias's back simply ceasing to exist for him. His hand was wrapped around Madara's wrist, stopping the divine blade cold. No flash of light, no strain. Just an immovable object meeting an unstoppable force, and the force being stopped.
Indra: "Your spatial manipulation is linear. Predictable. You think in terms of points A and B."
Madara (eyes widening slightly): "What?"
Indra's free hand tapped Madara's chest. "Spatial Law: Recursive Coordinate Shift."
Madara didn't feel an impact. He felt the universe stutter. He was suddenly five hundred meters to the left, then instantly back, then three hundred meters up, then back—dozens of times in the span of a nanosecond. To the observers, he simply blurred violently in place. To him, it was a nauseating, lawless dislocation. He solidified back in his original spot, a faint frown on his face.
The battle proper began.
Madara unleashed his Truth-Seeker Orbs. They shot forward, each capable of erasing all matter and ninjutsu they touched. Rias gestured, and from the ice grew a forest of Singing Crystal Trees. The Orbs struck them, and instead of erasing them, the crystals sang the Orbs' own erasure frequency back at them, causing them to shudder, slow, and deflect off harmonic pathways Indra carved through the air with a glance.
Madara roared, summoning a Planetary Devastation core above them—a black gravitational sphere meant to crush them into the earth. Indra looked up. "Gravity Law: Inversion." The core's pull reversed. It shot upward into the stratosphere and vaporized against the Guardian Bastion's outer barrier in a silent flash.
Frustration, a feeling long foreign to the now-godly Madara, began to simmer. He clapped his hands together. "Limbo: Border Jail!" Four invisible, intangible clones existing in the parallel "Limbo" dimension converged on Indra and Rias from all sides, attacks that could not be perceived or blocked by conventional means.
Rias closed her eyes. Her senses, attuned to the harmonics of all existence, didn't "see" the Limbos. She heard the dissonance they created in the world's song. She didn't attack them. She hummed the "Chord of Tangibility." The Limbos, forced to resonate at a frequency of the prime material plane, flickered into visible, ghostly outlines for a split second. That was all Indra needed. A flick of his wrist, and four Spatial Scissor techniques, invisible blades that cut dimensions, passed through where they'd been. The Limbo clones dissipated with silent screams.
Madara descended then, not with jutsu, but with pure, close-quarters divinity. He moved like lightning, his staff and sword a whirlwind of absolute power. Indra met him blow for blow, not with brute strength, but with impossible precision. He didn't block; he redirected, his hands and arms moving in tiny, efficient arcs that guided Madara's world-shattering strikes past him, using the god's own momentum against him. Rias flowed around them, her spear Gae Bolg a darting serpent of sonic and destructive energy, striking not at Madara, but at the chakra connections between his orbs, at the seams of his spiritual robe, at the very air he breathed to disrupt his rhythm.
It was a dance. A terrible, beautiful dance between a god of dogma and two sovereigns of law. Mountains of ice were vaporized by stray energy. The sky tore. But Indra and Rias were untouched, their movements economical, synergistic, and utterly calm.
From the sidelines, the veterans watched, their earlier shock now morphing into sheer, dumbfounded disbelief.
Hashirama, who had fought Madara at his peak, whispered, "They're… matching him. They're not just surviving. They're exchanging blows with the Ten-Tails Jinchuriki."
Tobirama, his analytical mind running at fever pitch, was muttering data. "Chakra output readings are off the scale on all three… but the efficiency… look at the two from Kumo. There's no waste. Madara's attacks spill energy for kilometers. Theirs is contained, focused. It's like comparing a forest fire to a laser scalpel."
Minato, the fastest of his age, felt slow. "Their reaction times… they're not reacting. They're anticipating on a level that makes the Flying Raijin look like jogging."
Then came the moment that froze the blood of every seasoned shinobi present.
Madara, in a rage, disengaged and hovered high. He spread his arms, and the very natural energy of the world began to howl towards him, visible as raging currents of blue light. "Sage Art: Storm Release Light Fang!" A beam of pure, ultra-compressed light, said to be the fastest and sharpest attack in existence, faster than light itself, shot from his mouth towards Indra.
Indra didn't dodge. He raised his right hand, the Palkia sigil blazing. "Spatial Law: Metric Compression."
The beam of light, as it entered the space around his hand, didn't hit him. The very distance between its origin and its target was increased by a factor of thousands within a localized field. The beam, still moving at light-speed, now had to cross what was effectively a continent's worth of compressed space. It slowed to a crawl, a beautiful, shimmering ribbon of energy trapped in a bottle of folded reality, before winking out as Madara's technique ended.
It was impossible. It broke known physics. And Indra had done it with the casual ease of a man adjusting a dial.
In the ensuing silence, Madara panted, not from exertion, but from fury and dawning, unbelievable comprehension. He stared at the couple floating calmly before him. They weren't sweating. Their breathing was even. Rias's hair was barely out of place. Indra's cloak was unruffled.
A horrific, undeniable truth clicked into place in Madara's mind, refined by his new godly perception. He could sense chakra scales, depths, reserves. And what he sensed in them…
Madara (his voice a low, disbelieving rumble): "You… you're not even straining. This… this isn't your limit."
Indra said nothing. He simply watched.
Rias offered a small, polite smile. "Observation is the first step to understanding."
Madara's eyes darted between them, his Rinne-Sharingan analyzing frantically. "Your chakra reserves… the output you're using… it's only… it can't be more than… sixty percent. Sixty percent combined."
The words, spoken aloud by the Ten-Tails Jinchuriki himself, echoed across the broken battlefield.
Hashirama felt the ground drop out from under him. "Sixty… percent?"
Tobirama actually staggered. "A sustained engagement against the pinnacle of shinobi power… and they are operating at little over half capacity… as a team."
Minato looked at Naruto, then back at the serene couple. He understood now, on a visceral level, the difference between being the strongest shinobi of an era, and being something that existed outside the era's definitions entirely.
Gaara, from his command post, whispered, "They were never just participants in this war. They were its auditors."
Madara's fury evaporated, replaced by a cold, bottomless chill. The euphoria of godhood curdled into the dread of meeting a higher authority. He had achieved the dream of every shinobi, only to find two people for whom his dream was a baseline, a starting point they had long since moved beyond.
"Who… what are you?" Madara asked, the question leaving him not as a challenge, but as a genuine, desperate plea for context.
Indra finally spoke, his voice the calm center of the storm. "We are the consequence. The answer to the failed question that is your entire life's work, Uchiha Madara. You asked, 'How can I gain the power to remake the world?' We asked, 'How can we build a world that doesn't need to be remade?' You have reached your destination. We are still walking our path. And you are in our way."
For the first time since his resurrection, since his ascension to Six Paths Sage Mode, Uchiha Madara felt a flicker of something he thought he had transcended: fear. Not fear of death, but fear of irrelevance. He was a finished painting, hailed as a masterpiece. They were the living artists, still holding the brush, and they had just glanced at his work and found it… derivative.
With a roar that was equal parts defiance and existential terror, Madara gathered the full, dreadful power of the Ten-Tails within him, determined to erase this unsettling future before it could fully dawn. The final, truly serious clash between the god of the past and the sovereigns of the present began in earnest, and for the first time, the veterans of countless wars knew with absolute certainty they were witnessing something that would make all their past battles look like children's squabbles. The real war for the shape of reality had just begun.
End of Chapter – 117.