The air over the shattered tundra had become a canvas for a conflict that defied mortal understanding. On one side, Uchiha Madara, the Jinchuriki of the Ten-Tails, a being of condensed myth and pain-made-manifest, wielding power that bent the very laws of nature to his will. On the other, Indra Uzumaki-Uchiha and Rias Uzumaki, two figures moving with a synchronicity that felt less like teamwork and more like a single entity expressed in dual form. Their calm amidst the god-storm was more unnerving than any battle cry.
Madara unleashed a cataclysm. He swung the Sword of Nunoboko, and space itself sheared along its edge, creating a miles-long fissure in reality that raced towards the pair. Simultaneously, he gestured with his free hand, and the six Truth-Seeker Orbs transformed into a hail of black spikes, each one erasing the very concept of matter they touched.
The response was not a desperate defense, but a dissection.
Indra didn't move to block the spatial tear. He held up his left hand, the Dialga sigil in his Rinnegan glowing a soft azure. "Temporal Law: Causality Buffer."
The advancing tear didn't slow. Instead, its cause was delayed. The effect—the rending of space—preceded the action that created it by a fraction of a second. This created a localized paradox that the universe instantly corrected by smoothing over the tear before it could fully form. The deadly spatial rift silently stitched itself back together mere meters from Indra's outstretched hand, as if it had never been.
Rias dealt with the Truth-Seeker spikes. She didn't attack them. She hummed. A complex, three-part harmony spilled from her lips. The first note was a Sonic frequency that mapped the spikes' trajectory and composition. The second was a Destruction frequency that resonated with their erasure property. The third was a new, deep, green, living frequency that spoke of growth and order.
"Trinity Release: Harmonic Re-Weaving."
Where her harmonic field touched the black spikes, they didn't vanish or explode. They… bloomed. The absolute negation energy of the Truth-Seekers was met with a frequency of such pure, creative vitality that it couldn't be simply erased. Instead, the spikes unraveled, transforming into showers of harmless, glowing green leaves and petals that fluttered down onto the ice.
Madara's eyes, the Rinnegan and the Rinne-Sharingan, whirled furiously. The attack had been neutralized not with greater force, but with what seemed like… aesthetic correction.
"Enough of these parlor tricks!" Madara bellowed, his voice layered with the growl of the beast within. He slammed his staff into the ground. "Wood Release: Deep Forest Genesis!"
The ice for miles exploded. Not with water, but with gargantuan, rushing trees and monstrous vines, a tsunami of living wood that sought to crush, pierce, and consume everything in its path. It was Hashirama's technique, amplified a hundredfold by Ten-Tails chakra—a forest born in an instant, a weapon of apocalyptic scale.
Hashirama, watching from a distance, felt his heart clench. "That's my… but it's so violent. There's no love in it. Only hunger."
As the tidal wave of wood reached them, Rias did something that made Hashirama's breath catch. She didn't counter with a different element. She stepped forward, placed a hand gently on the leading edge of the fastest, sharpest, most aggressive vine—a vine meant to impale her—and sang to it.
It wasn't a jutsu. It was a lullaby. A song of sunlight on deep soil, of gentle rain, of symbiotic growth. Her chakra, a verdant, singing green, flowed from her hand.
The monstrous vine didn't attack her. It calmed. Its jagged, weaponized tip softened, sprouting actual leaves. The violent growth around it slowed, then changed direction. Where Madara's will demanded destruction, Rias's song suggested an alternative. The vines began to weave amongst themselves, not into crushing walls, but into great, arching lattices and stable, sheltering canopies over the retreating Allied forces. The forest, in a radius around her, became not a weapon, but a sanctuary.
Hashirama stumbled, his eyes wide with awe and a profound, personal shock. "She's… she's not controlling it with greater force… she's persuading it. Her Wood Release… it's not a manifestation of life-force as power. It's a conversation with life itself. It's… purer. It's what mine wanted to be, but was always tangled with my need to fight, to protect through strength."
Tobirama watched, his analytical mind reeling. "Brother… your Wood Release was a hammer. Hers is a sculptor's chisel. The chakra efficiency is off the charts. She's redirecting his energy, not opposing it."
Madara saw it too. The forest he had summoned was turning against his intent, becoming a shield for his enemies under the guidance of this red-haired girl. A growl of irritation escaped him. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. A god's will should be absolute.
He decided to end the farce. He would stop holding back. He would crush these intriguing insects and be done with it. He focused, drawing not just on the Ten-Tails, but on the deep, ancient well of his own Uchiha chakra, pushing his power to its perceived peak.
But as he did, a chilling pattern solidified in his mind, a pattern his combat genius couldn't ignore.
Every attack he launched—the Light Fang, the Truth-Seekers, the Shinra Tensei, the Forest—was met not with a corresponding escalation from them, but with a precise, minimal counter. They weren't overpowering him. They were… cataloging him. He remembered Indra's words from their first clash: "We're measuring."
A cold, sickening suspicion dawned. He watched Indra's eyes during their exchanges. The Rinnegan wasn't just tracking movement. It was recording data. He watched Rias's serene face as she sang his forest into a garden. She wasn't fighting for survival; she was field-testing a theory.
During a momentary lull, as Indra effortlessly warped a barrage of shadow clones Madara had created from the ice, Madara voiced the terrifying thought aloud.
Madara (his voice low, losing its divine boom, tinged with disbelief): "You… you're not even trying your hardest, are you? This… this is a spar for you."
Indra, having just dissolved a Limbo clone by folding the space it occupied into a knot, looked at Madara. There was no gloating, no smugness. Only the calm of a researcher. "We are optimizing our response protocols. Gathering data on Six Paths-level chakra interactions with localized reality fields. Your combat style provides a valuable high-pressure test environment."
The admission was worse than any insult. A test environment. He was a lab rat in a cosmic experiment.
Fury, hot and desperate, replaced his chill. "You DARE! You think to use ME, Uchiha Madara, as a measuring stick? I will show you the depth of your error! I will force you to show me everything you have!"
He decided to unleash what he considered his ultimate display of power, the pinnacle of his stolen godhood. He would summon the very manifestations of his will, the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path, and merge it with his own being for a final, obliterating attack.
But as he began to draw on that deepest, most violent layer of Ten-Tails chakra, something shifted in his opponents.
For the first time, a flicker of something other than analytical calm passed between Indra and Rias. A silent agreement. The baseline data was sufficient. It was time to stress-test the next tier.
Rias took a deep breath, and the air around her stillened. Not like silence, but like the moment before a symphony begins. Behind her, the space rippled. Not with chakra, but with concept.
From the ripple emerged a figure of pure, crystalline sound—a humanoid shape made of solidified, humming frequencies. Its form was ever-shifting, a beautiful, terrifying sculpture of audible light. The Sonic Devil.
A second ripple tore open, and from it poured a presence of absolute, silent negation. A form of swirling, dark smoke and embers that drank the light around it, not with hunger, but with the solemn duty of an ending. The Destruction Devil.
And then, from Rias herself, from the song still on her lips, grew a third form. It was vast, gentle, and inexorable. It had the form of a great, sleeping tree, but its leaves were galaxies, its roots delving into the bedrock of reality itself. It radiated not the aggressive vitality of Hashirama's wood, but the patient, all-encompassing force of Nature itself—growth, decay, and renewal as a single, eternal process. The Nature Devil.
The three Devils did not roar. They simply existed, and their existence imposed a new set of rules on the local reality. Sound became tangible. The concept of 'ending' gained weight and presence. The air grew thick with the scent of ozone, loam, and static.
Simultaneously, Indra closed his eyes for a heartbeat. When he opened them, the three orbiting sigils in his Rinnegan blazed like captive suns. The space around him didn't distort; it fractured along conceptual lines.
To his right, space itself crystallized into a towering, draconic form of silver and amethyst, wings made of folded void, eyes like collapsing stars. Palkia, the Spatial Sovereign.
To his left, time became a physical entity—a majestic, azure dragon whose scales were clock faces, whose breath made ages pass in a blink. Dialga, the Temporal Sovereign.
And rising behind him, from a crack of anti-light, came a being of shadow and broken geometry, a dragon of distorted mirrors and anti-matter, its very presence making the solid world seem like a fragile illusion. Giratina, the Distortion Sovereign.
These were not Susanoo. They were not chakra constructs. They were Conceptual Gourmet Devils—manifestations of universal laws that Indra had internalized, understood, and could now project. They were the "templates" given form, and their presence didn't just increase his power; it changed the genre of the battle from shinobi combat to a clash of cosmological principles.
The moment they appeared, a wave of primal, soul-deep terror washed over the battlefield. It wasn't fear of death. It was fear of insignificance.
Hashirama felt his legendary life force quail, a sapling before a hurricane that could erase seasons. He couldn't even process their power; he could only feel his own paradigm shatter.
Tobirama, the logician, felt his mind short-circuit. He could analyze chakra, tactics, even space-time ninjutsu. He could not analyze a dragon made of Time. He stood frozen, his famous scowl replaced by blank, terrified awe.
Minato felt the Yellow Flash flicker and die within him. What was speed when time itself was a combatant? He looked at Naruto, seeing not his son's power, but his son's shocking, brave humanity in the face of these… things.
Kakashi felt Obito's eye ache with a pain that had nothing to do with the physical. It was the eye's very nature, its Uchiha lineage, screaming at the proximity of these sovereigns of concepts the Sharingan could never hope to comprehend.
Even the Allied Shinobi, hardened veterans, many dropped to their knees, not from pressure, but from an instinctual, mammalian need to make themselves small before forces that governed the fabric of their existence.
The primary target of this terror was Madara. His Ten-Tails-enhanced senses were flooded. The Rinne-Sharingan on his forehead, the eye meant to cast the Infinite Tsukuyomi, watered from the overwhelming input. He saw not just power, but authority. The Sonic Devil's song threatened to rewrite the frequency of his own chakra. The Destruction Devil's gaze made his Truth-Seeker Orbs feel like childish imitations of void. The Nature Devil's gentle presence made his stolen Wood Release feel like a crude, violent mockery of life.
And Indra's three Sovereigns… looking at Palkia, he understood his control over space was that of a child drawing on a map compared to a cartographer moving continents. Looking at Dialga, he felt his immortal, Edo-born-and-then-revived lifespan shrink to a meaningless dot on an infinite line. Looking at Giratina, he felt the very reality he stood on become thin, insubstantial, a mere possibility among countless distorted others.
His grand, final attack died unborn. The Demonic Statue's chakra shriveled back inside him. The Sword of Nunoboko felt heavy and useless in his hand. He floated there, the Ten-Tails Jinchuriki, the supposed god of the new world, and felt… small.
His earlier suspicion was confirmed with devastating finality. They had not been fighting him. They had been calibrating their instruments. And now the instruments were online.
Indra's voice cut through the silent, crushing awe, directed at Madara. "You asked if we were trying. Before, we were running diagnostics. Now, we are preparing the measurement tools. Your power is a significant data point, Madara. But it is just that—a point. A single coordinate in a much larger graph."
Rias, her voice harmonizing with her three Devils, added, "You speak of a 'real' threat, Madara. A moon's eye to hypnotize the world. But you are a ghost fighting over a graveyard. The real threats are not ones that seek to rule this world. They are the ones that look at this world, and all others, and see only… lunch. Or data. Or nothing at all."
Madara could only stare, his grand plan, his centuries of suffering and plotting, collapsing into absurdity. He was a king who had fought his way to the throne, only to find the throne room was a tiny annex in a palace that spanned dimensions, and the true rulers had just walked in, glanced at his crown, and started discussing structural integrity and tax codes for the multiverse.
The battle was no longer about winning. For Madara, it was about grasping a single, horrifying question: If this was what they considered "measurement," what in the name of all creation did they consider a "real threat?"
End of Chapter – 118.