The frozen plain was no longer a battlefield. It had become a chapel of awe and dread, a silent amphitheater where the laws of reality themselves were being gently, firmly questioned. The Conceptual Gourmet Devils of Indra and Rias hovered in the air, not as weapons poised to strike, but as instruments of measurement, their mere presence redefining the scale of what was possible. Before them, Uchiha Madara, the Ten-Tails Jinchuriki, floated not in triumph, but in the eye of a hurricane of his own irrelevance.
The crushing weight of their unveiled potential had not just halted his assault; it had dismantled the very urge to fight. For a being who defined himself by struggle and supremacy, this was a fate worse than death. Yet, within the ashes of his godly ambition, one last, bitter ember glowed. The Infinite Tsukuyomi. His dream. The one thing they had not yet rendered obsolete. Perhaps their cold science, their sovereign laws, could not account for the raw, universal yearning for peace, for an end to pain. Perhaps this was the human variable their equations missed.
A desperate, final defiance kindled in his eyes, cutting through the fog of insignificance. He still had the power. He still had the Rinne-Sharingan. He was still the key.
His voice, when it came, was stripped of its earlier thunder, reduced to a dry, determined rasp. It was not addressed to Indra or Rias, but to the very cosmos he sought to enslave.
Madara: "You measure. You analyze. You build. You see power as a tool, a resource. But you do not understand pain. You do not understand the weary, endless scream of a world built on loss. Your 'better world' is a theory. My dream… is a mercy."
He began to rise higher, the Six Paths chakra within him swirling not outward in attack, but inward, focusing into the third eye on his forehead. The Rinne-Sharingan began to pulse, its tomoe pattern spinning, not with the arrogance of before, but with the focused intensity of a man igniting his own soul as the final torch.
Hashirama (shouting from below, voice raw with empathy): "Madara! Don't! This isn't the way! Look at them! There is another path!"
Tobirama (gritting his teeth): "The chakra is being focused into a genjutsu of impossible scale… He's really going to do it."
Naruto (yelling, cloaked in orange and red): "Stop it! You can't just put everyone to sleep! That's not peace, it's running away!"
Madara ignored them. His gaze was fixed on the pale, ghostly orb of the moon, visible in the twilight sky. "All will be one. All pain will end. In the eternal dream, there is no measurement, no analysis… only contentment. This is the gift… of Uchiha Madara."
The Rinne-Sharingan's light intensified, becoming a miniature moon on his forehead. A beam of eerie, silver light, visible only to those with the highest level of chakra perception, began to connect his eye to the celestial body above. The air grew thick, heavy, pregnant with the promise of oblivion. The very light around them seemed to dim, as if reality itself was holding its breath for the casting of the ultimate illusion.
Indra and Rias watched, their Devils still present but unmoving. Their expressions were not of panic, but of intense, clinical observation.
Indra (murmuring, to Rias): "The chakra wavelength is attempting to harmonize with the celestial body's reflective resonance. It's a brute-force planetary-scale genjutsu carrier wave. Inefficient, but the scale is… notable."
Rias (her eyes tracking the energy flow): "The emotional component is the key. He's weaving his own longing, his own twisted definition of mercy, into the fabric of the technique. It's not just light; it's a broadcast of his pathology."
They were observing, as before. But for the first time, a slight tension entered their postures. This was not an attack to be deflected or rewritten. This was a paradigm shift he was trying to impose, and stopping it would require a different order of intervention—one they were prepared to make, but which would have catastrophic collateral damage. They exchanged another glance. The moment to move from measurement to termination was approaching.
But they were not the only ones observing.
At Madara's feet, the inky, living shadow that was Black Zetsu had been unusually still. It had watched Madara's humiliation, his desperation, his final, foolish grasp at relevance with the silent patience of eons. It had felt the awe-inspiring terror of the Devils' appearance and recognized it as a complication, but not an insurmountable one. The script, written over a thousand years, was reaching its final, immutable lines. And Madara, in his arrogance and desperation, was playing his part perfectly.
As Madara poured every ounce of his will, his stolen godhood, into the Rinne-Sharingan, as his body became a conduit for the chakra meant to enslave the world, he was at his most powerful. And, as Zetsu knew, at his most vulnerable. His defenses were turned outward, toward the moon, toward his enemies. He was a castle with its gates thrown open, its walls facing the wrong way.
The shadow at his feet flowed.
It was not an attack. It was a reunion. A homecoming.
Black Zetsu surged upward, not as a separate entity, but as a liquid spike of pure, ancient malice. It bypassed Madara's Truth-Seeker Orbs as if they weren't there—for they were his power, and Zetsu was not an enemy. It ignored the potent Six Paths chakra shielding him—for that chakra was, at its deepest root, hers.
It plunged directly into Madara's back, precisely through the spot where Hashirama's face was etched into his chest.
There was no sound of tearing flesh. There was a wet, organic schlorp, the sound of a key turning in a lock it was made for.
Madara's body jolted. The brilliant beam of light connecting him to the moon flickered and died. The Rinne-Sharingan's furious spin stuttered to a halt. His eyes, wide with the effort of his casting, now widened further with a shock so profound it bypassed pain and went straight to cosmic disbelief.
He looked down, slowly, as if in a dream, and saw the slick, black tendril protruding from the center of his chest. It writhed, not like a weapon, but like a root drinking deeply.
Madara (a wet, gurgling whisper): "What… is this…?"
From behind him, from the mass of Zetsu now merging with his spine, a voice spoke. It was the voice of the earth, of cold forgotten depths, of a child's mocking lie given sentience. It was Black Zetsu's true voice, stripped of all pretense of servitude.
Black Zetsu: "A necessary adjustment, 'Madara-sama.' You have performed admirably. The gathering of the chakra. The weakening of the world's defenses. Your little drama with these new variables… all according to plan. My plan. The only plan that has ever mattered."
Madara tried to move, to will his godly power to expel this parasite. He couldn't. His chakra wasn't being stolen; it was being reclaimed. The Ten-Tails energy, the Six Paths power, even his own formidable Uchiha chakra, all of it was flowing backwards, into the tendril, drawn by a will infinitely older and more absolute than his own.
"N-no…" he gasped, blood—real, living blood, not Edo ash—trickling from his lips. "The dream… my… dream…"
Black Zetsu (a chilling, almost affectionate chuckle): "Your dream? A child's fantasy. A coping mechanism for a lonely, hateful little man. A useful narrative to motivate you. The real dream is much older. The dream of a quiet world. A world without conflict, without noise, without… disobedience. A world returned to its true state. To Mother."
The word hung in the air, heavy with primordial meaning. Mother.
On the ground, Hashirama felt a wrongness deeper than any injury. "Something… something is being born. Or… awakened."
Tobirama had his sensing technique active, his face ashen. "The chakra signature… it's changing. It's not Madara anymore. It's… older. Vaster. It's consuming him from the inside."
Naruto and Sasuke felt their own potent powers, their recent triumphs, shrink into insignificance as a pressure began to build that made Madara's godhood feel warm and familiar by comparison.
Indra's Rinnegan narrowed. His analytical calm finally cracked, replaced by a sharp, focused intensity. "The parasitic entity is not extracting chakra. It's executing a pre-programmed soul-transference and dimensional anchoring protocol. It's using Madara's body and the assembled Ten-Tails chakra as a ritual focus."
Rias paled, her harmonic senses screaming. "The song of the world… it's being overwritten. A new, ancient frequency is asserting itself. It's… hungry."
Madara's body began to distort. His proud form convulsed, limbs twisting at impossible angles. The black Zetsu substance spread from the wound, crawling over his skin like oil, replacing his flesh, his cloak, his very being. His voice was no longer his own—it was a ragged chorus of agony and disbelief, rapidly being smothered.
Madara (voice fading, being subsumed): "All… for nothing? I was… a puppet? A tool… for you? A shadow's… tool…?"
Black Zetsu (its voice now the dominant one, emanating from the twisting mass): "Not a tool, Madara. A sacrifice. The most important one. The final vessel. Thank you for your service. But Mother… needs her chakra back."
With a final, silent scream that echoed only in the spiritual realm, Uchiha Madara's consciousness was extinguished. Not killed. Erased. His life, his suffering, his ambition, his entire century-long struggle, was consumed as the final offering on an altar he never knew he was building.
The twisted, Zetsu-covered form hanging in the air shuddered once, violently, and then went still.
Then, it began to expand.
Not in size, but in presence. The sky above it darkened, not with clouds, but as if a great eye was closing over the sun. The ice of the plain didn't melt; it turned grey and lifeless, then crumbled into fine, sterile dust. The air grew thin and cold, not the cold of winter, but the cold of the void between stars.
From the silent, monstrous cocoon, two figures began to emerge, peeling away from the central mass.
One was a tall, willowy woman with long, pale hair that flowed like moonlight and stretched down to her ankles. Her skin was alabaster white. She wore a simple, white robe that seemed to bleed into the distorted air around her. Her eyes were blank, pupilless white, and on her forehead, the Rinne-Sharingan glowed with a calm, terrible authority. This was not a wielder of power. This was power incarnate, given a feminine shape. Kaguya Ōtsutsuki. The progenitor of chakra on this world. The Rabbit Goddess.
The other figure was Black Zetsu, now fully formed, clinging to her shoulder like a malignant child, its single yellow eye gleaming with triumphant, filial devotion. "Welcome back, Mother. The world is prepared for your harvest."
Kaguya did not speak. She simply… looked. Her gaze swept over the assembled armies, over the Kage, over Naruto and Sasuke, and finally, it settled on Indra and Rias and their hovering Devils. In those blank white eyes, there was no curiosity, no malice, no recognition. There was only an ancient, proprietary assessment. The look a gardener gives to a patch of overgrown, unruly weeds that have sprouted in her absence.
She raised a single, slender hand.
Reality warped.
It wasn't an attack. It was a correction.
The space around the Allied forces folded. One moment, the entire army was arrayed across the plain. The next, they were scattered across a vast, impossible landscape of floating rocks, gravity-defying waterfalls, and jagged, purple-hued mountains under a blood-red sky. The very terrain of the world had been rewritten. They were no longer on the battlefield. They were inside Kaguya's expanded Truth-Seeking Ball dimension—a world of her own making.
Shinobi cried out in terror and confusion, disoriented, their formations broken, their sense of direction annihilated. The Kage shouted orders that were swallowed by the bizarre, echoing acoustics of this new space.
Naruto and Sasuke found themselves back-to-back on a floating island of obsidian, the ground shifting under their feet. "What the hell is this?!" Naruto yelled.
"A dimension shift," Sasuke said, his Eternal Mangekyō scanning the impossible geometry. "She didn't move us. She changed the rules of where 'here' is."
High above this manufactured hellscape, on one of the largest floating landmasses, stood Kaguya and Zetsu. And facing them, alone on their own fragment of stable rock, were Indra and Rias. Their Conceptual Devils still surrounded them, but for the first time, the Devils' forms seemed to tense, to orient themselves not towards a test subject, but towards a peer threat. The humming song of Rias's Devils grew defensive. The silent authority of Indra's Sovereigns focused into a unified, wary readiness.
The two groups regarded each other across the gulf of twisted space. On one side, the ancient, hungry silence of the origin of all chakra. On the other, the calm, analytical resolve of its most radical evolution.
Black Zetsu's voice slithered across the dimension, filled with gloating venom. "You measured. You calculated. You thought you understood power. But you were only playing with the crumbs that fell from Mother's table. Now, you stand before the baker. Your science, your sovereignty… it ends here. All chakra returns to its source. All will be one again. In silence. In obedience."
Indra met Kaguya's blank gaze. He saw no madness there, no ambition like Madara's. He saw only the void of infinite hunger and infinite loneliness. A force of nature that had consumed a world once and saw no reason not to do it again.
He spoke, his voice clear and firm, not in the void, but in the new, terrible rules of this stolen world.
Indra: "We identified you as a high-probability variable. A 'Cataclysmic'-class threat in our models. The data from Madara's Ten-Tails form confirmed the chakra's progenitor signature. We are prepared."
Rias stood beside him, her spear held ready, her three Devils coalescing into a protective, harmonious formation around them. "You speak of oneness. Of silence. But a song with only one note is not music. It is a dirge. And we," she said, her voice gaining the strength of her choir, "we have learned to sing in harmonies you cannot even imagine."
Kaguya, for the first time, showed a reaction. Not on her face, which remained a placid mask. But the dimension around them shivered. The floating rocks trembled. The blood-red sky darkened. She had been acknowledged. Not as a goddess, not as a monster, but as a problem to be solved. And in the absolute, timeless void of her consciousness, that was a new, and therefore, an unacceptable sensation.
The betrayal was complete. Madara was gone, his dream a used-up fuel cell. The real war, the war for the very right of reality to exist in its complex, chaotic, beautiful plurality, had now truly begun. And the first move had been a checkmate that erased the board and brought in a new, infinitely more dangerous player.
End of Chapter – 119.