Chapter 13
The original Itama knelt in the bloody mud, shaking fingers pressed against what remained of his ribs. His stolen Sharingan spun uselessly—blind from copying too many dead Uchiha at once. The taste of stolen lightning techniques still crackled between his teeth, warring with the phantom sensation of Hashirama's mokuton roots still growing through his intestines from yesterday's failed duel
.
A severed hand wearing Tobirama's battle rings crawled toward him through the gore. Itama laughed wetly as the fingers signed their clan's forbidden Earth Release seal—the same one he'd watched his brother invent three deaths ago.
"Stop eating my jutsu," the disembodied hand signed, knuckle bones clicking like a wounded cicada. The chakra strings controlling it smelled of butchered boar and burnt parchment—Tobirama's signature blend, now decomposing inside Itama's gallbladder where he'd stored it last Tuesday.
Ashura's ghost manifested in the shattered reflection of a falling raindrop, his translucent fingers gripping Itama's jaw from inside the water. "You'll choke on them eventually," the whisper came from three directions at once—left ear, gallbladder, and the fresh bullet hole in Itama's thigh where an Uzumaki arrow had exited twenty minutes before
breakfast.
Something inside his sternum hatched. Six tiny Hashiramas carved from his marrow burst through his skin in a spray of willow sap and blood clots, each miniature brother already mid-hand-sign for a different suicide technique. Their newborn eyes held centuries of exhaustion—Itama recognized that look from polishing Father's dented armor in the afterlife queues.
The largest chunk of regurgitated dragon lung landed upright like a grotesque mushroom, unfurling into a perfect replica of Madara circa their seventh mutual assassination. This one had working Sharingan. "Your turn," it coughed through lips still steaming with Itama's half-digested fire release, raising fingers already bleeding from formed seals.
Out in the crater where Izuna's head should have been, eleven fractured Itamas began harmonizing in reverse—a sound like fox kits drowning in saké. Their skin peeled back to reveal glistening Uzumaki chains knitting together with Nara shadow stitches, forming a living cage around Tobirama's still-twitching nervous system. One copy paused to spit out Hashirama's childhood molar before continuing the
song.
The original Itama's left kidney burst open, birthing a miniature version of himself carved from lightning scars and old betrayal vows. This one wore Father's missing eyebrows. "They'll never believe you," it whispered in Black Zetsu's voice while tap-dancing across his floating ribs. "Not even when you show them the inside of your
—"
Rain turned to glass halfway to the ground, each frozen droplet containing a different year of Tobirama's disapproving frowns. The hand wearing his rings finally reached Itama's remaining knee and started tattooing the clan's self-destruct seals directly onto his patella using ink made from condensed battlefield screams.
The Madara-copy exhaled, and the breath became a swarm of paper bombs folded into origami cicadas. They crawled into Itama's nostrils singing the Uchiha lullaby—the one mothers used to whisper while stitching their children's eyelids shut. His stolen Sharingan finally crumbled to dust, revealing the hollow where Indra's ghost had been nesting since the second death-cycle.
From the crater, eleven Itama-copies abruptly stopped singing. Their jaws unhinged like trapdoors, releasing a flood of half-formed Mokuton saplings that immediately began rooting themselves in Tobirama's exposed spinal fluid. One sapling grew leaves shaped like Hashirama's childhood teeth marks—the exact pattern left on their father's tanto after that incident with the poisoned persimm
ons.
Ashura's whisper now came from the spaces between Itama's teeth: "You should've swallowed the seed whole." Deep in his marrow, the six miniature Hashirama-clones simultaneously completed their suicide techniques. The resulting explosion tore open a hole in reality just large enough for a single Senju burial shroud to come fluttering through—stained with three generations of rust and the distinct scent of Mother's disappointed sighs.
The origami cicadas reached his eardrums and unfolded into perfect replicas of Madara's final written words, each character burning with Amaterasu's black flames. Itama's kneecap tattoos pulsed in time with the battlefield's fading heartbeat, their self-destruct seals now counting down using Hashirama's childhood stutter-rhythm—three quick pulses, then the long pause where Father's approval should have
been.
The cloned Madara collapsed inward like a dying star, its Sharingan pupils forming the exact spiral pattern Itama had last seen in Tobirama's irises right before stealing his water dragon technique. The subsequent implosion scattered eleven new memories across the crater: each one showing Itama dying in a different clan's colors, each corpse missing the same two fingers he'd offered to Indra in that forgotten barter behind the afterlife's administrative
offices.
From the hollow of his ruined eye socket, Indra's ghost finally uncurled—its fingers knitting together from the sparks of dying lightning techniques. "You forgot to chew," it murmured, pressing a single persimmon seed into Itama's trembling palm. The seed pulsed twice before cracking open to reveal Tobirama's frostbite-blue eyes blinking up at him, already forming the hand signs for their clan's most forbidden kin-killing jutsu.
Itama's activated his death technique which creates a black hole that nobody can defend against. The whole world ended up destroying itself. The End