The night sky cracked.
Not metaphorically — it literally fractured, as if the dome of the heavens had been a pane of cosmic glass. Lines of shimmering red energy spider-webbed across the sky above what used to be the Land of Iron, glowing like veins of some slumbering god stirring beneath reality.
Naruto stood at the edge of the new world scar, wind cutting across the ruined mountains. Beside him, Kai adjusted her visor, flicking through layers of scans. Her eyes were hard, tired, but focused.
"It's spreading again," she murmured. "Fourth incursion zone in two days."
"Throne response pattern," Naruto muttered. "It's hunting me."
Behind them, the remnants of Strike Team Nova waited in silence. No chatter, no wasted words. Each one had tasted the edge of annihilation back in the desert. They'd seen what Kawaki had become. They knew this wasn't just a war for land or dominance — this was a war against entropy itself.
"Any word from Konoha?" Kai asked without looking up.
Naruto didn't answer at first.
Konoha hadn't responded since the last pulse. The comms were dead, the barrier markers offline. Every satellite orbiting over the Hidden Leaf had gone dark thirty-six hours ago.
When he finally spoke, his voice was low.
"They'll hold. They always do."
He didn't believe it. Not fully.
The Throne's presence had changed since Kawaki's collapse. Whatever consciousness controlled that impossible construct had learned — adapted. Now it struck from oblique angles. Chrono-rift bursts. Reality folds. Entire cities displaced three seconds out of sync with the rest of the planet.
The people called it Vanishing Sickness.
But Naruto knew better.
The Throne was unraveling the world in layers — starting with the places tied to him.
This wasn't just retaliation. This was correction.
He was the anomaly now.
"Incoming," Kai warned.
The sky above them boiled.
From the fractures descended an entity wrapped in spiraling bands of gravitational pressure — a Throne Herald, armored in black-crystal scale and burning with dimensional fire. Its face was a featureless silver disk, constantly shifting, reflecting warped memories of those who looked at it.
Naruto moved before it fully emerged.
He launched into the air with a burst of Forge chakra, fists wreathed in compressed energy. The Herald saw him and shifted — one moment towering like a colossus, the next compact and floating inches above the earth.
They collided midair.
The Herald screamed, a sound like ten thousand broken souls wailing through space-time.
Naruto's punch shattered its outer shell. Feedback screamed through his nerves as the creature adapted in real-time, morphing its body into a lattice of phasing energy that refracted his attacks into mirror strikes.
Naruto grunted as a backlash strike hit him square in the ribs, flinging him across the canyon.
Kai responded instantly, activating the Gatekeeper Matrix. Her twin katanas flared with spectral energy as she sliced through the Herald's trajectory, delaying its shift. It wasn't about damage — it was about timing. Delays.
"Naruto—now!"
Naruto flipped in mid-air and skidded to a stop, already drawing a Forge seal mid-movement. He slammed it into the ground and activated it.
A gravity sink pulled the Herald downward, just for a second — enough.
He leapt again, slamming both hands into the creature's exposed core.
"Break."
The word was not a jutsu. It was a command — one only someone wielding the Recode could issue.
The Herald's structure collapsed in on itself.
But instead of exploding, it fragmented into thousands of glasslike shards that drifted upward into the sky.
Then, like blood drawn to a wound, the sky fractures fed on the shards.
The cracks pulsed with light, and a voice poured out of them.
"You reject your seat at the throne, anomaly."
Naruto froze.
This was different.
This wasn't like before. It wasn't just automated retaliation or AI-like recursion. This… this was direct.
"You were encoded to ascend. Your resistance is aberration."
The sky opened further, revealing a spiraling black vortex surrounded by luminous glyphs — each one resembling distorted versions of shinobi clan symbols, twisted into forms no human had ever drawn.
"You will comply."
Naruto's Forge threads burned against his skin.
He screamed as knowledge that wasn't his flooded into his mind — echoes of other Narutos, other lives, other failures.
One had embraced the Throne.
One had killed Sasuke to unlock it.
One had rewritten time, turning the world into a loop that reset every seven years.
None of them ended well.
But they all shared one thing: they bent the knee.
Not him.
Not this time.
He roared and unleashed a pulse of pure anti-code, severing the link to the vision.
The sky shuddered — and then slammed shut, as if reality itself rejected what had just tried to enter.
Kai caught him as he stumbled.
"You good?"
He nodded, barely.
"That was... the Throne."
She didn't question it.
She didn't need to.
Behind them, the rift crater began collapsing inward — reality healing itself, temporarily.
Naruto stood.
His vision blurred, the weight of all those possible selves pressing on his soul like ash on fire.
He whispered to himself, a quiet vow.
"I am not your pawn."
The words burned.
But they grounded him.
In a world breaking apart at the seams, the only way to win wasn't to rewrite the rules.
It was to break the game entirely.
And if the Throne wanted a war?
It had just found its first true enemy.