Chapter 72: Waves That Washed the World
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Welydora
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A stream of energy flowed from Isshiki's soul into my maw. Once it shriveled down to nothing but a faded orb, my hand clenched, and a moment later its rapidly crumbling fragments hung suspended in the air before dissolving entirely.
"It's over," I said, glancing down at what was now, without question, the corpse of an Otsutsuki.
The dojutsu in my hand vanished, and my energy reserves tensed up...
A massive shockwave of my chakra instantly rolled out across the world, a silent declaration of my victory.
"Kgh..." I grimaced.
My central nervous system was running on fumes, strained to the limit, riddled with micro-damage throughout. No question, I could still dance if pushed. But even as things stood right now, I was looking at roughly three, maybe four months of self-repair just to claw back to where I was before the fight.
Thinking through my condition, my eyes drifted to the seal housing the Kyuubi.
"You and I were never going to be friends, were we?" I gave an ironic pat to my distorted, blackened abdomen, thinking of the emaciated fox. "And yet... if things had gone just a little differently, this Otsutsuki wouldn't have been a problem for either of us."
And that was the honest truth. If I hadn't been burning energy to suppress Kurama's hostile chakra, if I'd had his backing instead, just that one missing rung on the ladder, I could've ended Isshiki in seconds. Instead, I now had to bleed off all that aggressive energy and foot the bill for recovery myself.
I formed a one-handed concentration seal. Light and dark energies poured out of me into the world as my body visibly began to shrink, reverting to its original form. Then, pulling a change of clothes from my spatial storage, I quickly started shaping a construct-sphere in my palm, similar to the ones Hagoromo's children used, to pump energy into the cooling corpse at my feet. Without a soul, it would become useless fast, and I needed it. Even with a destroyed brain and no way to extract memories, an alien's body still had plenty of secrets to yield.
Then, sealing Isshiki away inside a separate spatial seal like a specimen in a jar, I swept one last look across the scorched desert and teleported home.
Three sets of worried eyes converged on me the instant I arrived.
Karin, who'd been sitting in a tight knot of nerves alongside an equally tense Hinata and Sakura, shot to her feet. She started moving toward me, but—
"...Oh." The redhead was immediately intercepted by Sakura's arm, her hand materializing firmly against Karin's back to stop her cold.
"You okay?" Sakura asked. That was exactly why she'd stopped Karin from accidentally putting pressure on a body that might currently be compromised.
Noting that I didn't look scratched up in the slightest, she released the redhead, who shot her a wounded glare in return.
"Not exactly at peak condition," I replied. "But I've still got enough left to put down ten Kage. Don't worry, nothing's broken that can't be fixed."
Hinata slipped up quietly and pressed my hand to her chest, offering her silent support. I found it absurdly endearing and rested my chin on top of her head.
Besides my "envoy" Sakura, the other girls had also, at their own request after yet another round of body cultivation, taken on a more mature appearance. And beyond the obvious physical changes, both Hinata and Karin had chosen to grow their hair out.
"We were worried..." Sakura noted, pressing in as well.
"Hey. That sounded an awful lot like you're blaming Naruto for having to deal with that unknown crap," Karin muttered, burying her face against my collarbone.
"I was just stating a fact. No subtext," Sakura replied evenly, with no real interest in arguing the point. Karin grumbled something unintelligible under her breath.
All things considered, a certain quiet bliss settled over us.
Gradually calming down, Karin eventually moved her hands away from my shoulders, where they'd been draped from behind, and began running them down my torso. But the moment they drifted one centimeter lower than what polite society would consider acceptable...
Smack!
"Ow!" Karin yanked her hands back as Sakura's slap connected. "What? I was just making sure Naruto was in one piece."
At that moment, eyes half-closed, I found myself contemplating my monastic existence in a house full of several very adult-looking girls.
We pulled apart.
"You had to ruin it," Sakura said, lowering her eyelids and casting a faintly disapproving look at Karin.
"Wait, so what, that means I'm the one at fault?!" the culprit managed, caught somewhere between outrage and dawning self-awareness. She got back a look from Sakura that said "Yes" as plainly as words could, with just the lightest edge of condescension.
"Let's just drop it," Hinata offered diplomatically, then redirected her attention to me. "What was that creature? Its chakra wasn't human."
"Right, what the hell even was that thing?" Karin seconded. I scratched the back of my head; the phrasing sounded awfully familiar for some reason.
"I'll explain everything. And I think... I'm taking a few days off. How do you feel about spending some time together?"
In response, I received synchronized approving nods, conveying that yes, I'd absolutely earned the rest after all that, and yes, they were more than happy to once again step away from the world for a while and enjoy life.
And so my account of events began. While I talked, I noticed the aftershocks of that battle were still rippling outward across the world. The floor beneath our feet had started to shift.
And at some point the sound waves would arrive too, rolling in like slow, muffled thunder, booming steadily for minutes at a stretch. With energy discharges that size, a strange aurora had painted itself across the night sky, so the girls drew the curtains.
So there it was: I'd essentially saved the world, and I stayed home. But outside, not everyone had the luxury of just handing the cleanup off to someone else and calling it a night. A battle with an Otsutsuki doesn't just vanish without a trace.
View From Other Nations
Of all places, the Land of Wind had it worst, which when you thought about it wasn't all that surprising, given that's exactly where everything had happened.
Residents who hadn't seen it coming were jolted awake by a violent tremor. When they stumbled outside, what greeted them was a sky far too bright for the hour, blazing with light. Then came a brutal sandstorm, and with it low, drawn-out sounds like rolling thunder that seemed to go on and on without end. It hit everyone, the outermost borders as much as the capital and Sunagakure alike. The earthquake shattered an immeasurable number of structures before dying down after about ten minutes. The thunder, though, the kind that made it impossible to think, hammered on for over half an hour, while the storms were set to flush the warmth right out of the country for more than a full day. People could only take shelter in whatever solid structures had survived. Only settlements with particularly favorable geography were spared the worst of it, places like the Hidden Sand itself, nestled deep between its rocky walls.
Konoha and the Hidden Stone, sitting nearly twice as far from the epicenter as the worst-hit parts of the Land of Wind, fared considerably better. But they still felt it, quite literally. They too saw the light first, in the dead of night, with the tremors and faint rumble reaching them later, and noticeably weaker. Both villages, built with attacks in mind, carried out successful evacuations to designated safety points. Even so, the incident left a mark on everyone. There was something deeply unsettling about knowing that somewhere out there, something so massive and so dangerous was unfolding and you couldn't touch it. Couldn't influence it. You just had to swallow it and hope fate was feeling generous.
The Land of Water and the Land of Lightning got off lightest. The former caught nothing more notable than somewhat rougher-than-usual storm swells, while the latter only felt a faint tremor considerably later. But the glow on the edge of the sky, and after an even longer delay a sound that wasn't so much heard as felt in the bones, one that left some people genuinely nauseous, was something else entirely. As for the sensors, who felt every bit of what was happening on Earth far more acutely than anyone else: not a word from any of them, except creative profanity. What colorful language was making the rounds in Konoha and the Hidden Stone, let alone the Hidden Sand, was anyone's guess.
Hatake Kakashi sat in his residence with a look that could curdle milk, listening to one report after another while keeping people posted outside to manage the evacuation.
Several hours after the "signal of humanity's victory," once things had more or less settled, Konoha convened an emergency meeting.
Presiding over it, naturally, was the new Hokage, Kakashi. Looking simultaneously bored and completely in control, honestly not sure how he kept pulling that off, the village head got straight to it, going for the jugular to kill the brewing situation before it boiled over.
Keeping an absolutely straight face and an even straighter line, he declared everything was fine and there was no reason to panic. Everyone had made it safe and sound into the shelters inside the Hokage Rock, so people were perfectly welcome to go home, write their reports, and get some well-earned sleep before noon. Oh, and by the way, their genin was home, and it'd be a real shame if anyone gave him a reason to get up. The kid was probably exhausted, and who knew what he might do if people started making noise. Besides, their shinobi had spotted some rather brazen Raikage spies out there. No point picking fleas off each other at home when there's someone sharpening a kunai right next door.
And then, without letting anyone get a single word in edgewise, he told them to go ahead and do what their smart Hokage had told them. Well, most of the shinobi did disperse. But a few stayed behind. The kind who tended to be older, far more convinced of their own authority, and conspicuously short on good judgment. They cornered their leader and promptly started tearing into one particular individual, leaving Kakashi to stand between them and whatever impulsive nonsense they were clearly itching to try.
The situation in the Hidden Stone wasn't entirely different.
Tsuchikage Onoki sat in the village council chamber in silence, sweating cold right along with everyone else. After a long deliberation, he finally arrived at a firm conclusion.
"That kind of power... capable of casually swatting down someone at Hashirama's level." The old man bared his teeth. "We weren't wrong to refrain from making any sudden moves against the Leaf. The time has come for me to make a difficult decision. I believe you'll understand. I am ordering our submission to the coming Empire. That is how we maximize what we stand to gain."
Onoki was, all things considered, a rather proud old man. But he also had just enough political sense to know that fighting the Emperor would only make everything worse, while the prospects of compliance, judging by the Mist, might not be nearly as grim as most people were painting in their heads.
The Tsuchikage had spent so many years winding his influence through the Stone that he had no doubts his word would carry. Especially now, when everyone was scared.
A, having convened his own council consisting only of his most trusted shinobi, was equally deep in thought.
"I... I don't know what the hell to do," the Raikage admitted, his bass voice filling the office in a rare moment of vulnerability that surprised even himself.
He sat behind his desk while the others stood around him. All except one, a white-haired aide seated at a nearby desk.
"Yo, doesn't matter what freak showed up to fight, our boy put him down — that's right. Chill, bro. We'll talk to the man and come out tight." said the Eight-Tails' jinchuuriki with an easy drawl, playing up his not-quite-rhymes as usual.
He shared a certain look with A, the same massive build, though with a bandana and shades pushed up on his head, plus a whole rack of thin-bladed scabbards across his back.
"Bee, shut the hell up with your rap crap!" A snarled. "You don't get it. What if we can't talk to him? Then what? We just roll over like the Mist did with the Land of Water?"
"Plan B still needs considerably more time," the aide, Mabui, noted flatly, which made A's fist tighten with barely contained frustration.
"Looks like we're gonna have to bend the knee to those bastards..." said the blond man standing against the wall with a deceptively calm face. His name was C, and he was one of A's bodyguards. Catching the extremely meaningful glare his leader leveled at him, he quickly added, "Temporarily!!!"
"A predator waits," came the voice of the blond girl across the room, the jinchuuriki of the Two-Tails. "We keep our heads down and our intentions to ourselves until we've developed either a sufficiently powerful sealing jutsu, which jinchuuriki do have a particular vulnerability to, or brought the Transfer Seal to an acceptable level."
The dark-skinned young man with voluminous white hair gave a quiet nod at that. Darui, A's second bodyguard and chosen successor.
A grimaced. Then he gave a measured nod.
"That's a plan. Now let's get the full council together and work out the details."
Mei, upon receiving the report about the wave of Naruto's victorious chakra washing over the planet, exhaled with a tired but genuine relief.
It was as if a mountain had slid off her shoulders, knowing that the words "this country might not survive the night" hadn't come true.
But when elephants fight, the grass beneath them gets crushed. And even the Land of Water hadn't been spared. A sound that drove people to the edge of sanity. Emergency evacuations. All of it whipped up panic and terror. Yes, the Emperor's victory over an unknown monster had strengthened the faith people held in him, but right now the immediate priority was reining in the chaos before too many lives were lost to it.
Interlude: Black Zetsu
Wet, rhythmic chewing sounds filled the dark cave. The creature, split into two halves, was nervously working its way through the flesh of an unknown but impressively muscled shinobi.
White Zetsu didn't particularly enjoy eating people; he found them too tough. Black Zetsu, on the other hand, had a taste for them, especially the ones with a satisfying chew. And besides, the act of eating them had a calming effect.
That said, this was the one and only situation in which Kuro Zetsu displayed anything approaching a positive feeling toward the human species. Or toward any other species, for that matter. His only revelation, his only devotion, was his creator. His mother. Kaguya.
He was furious. Rattled. And for the first time in a very long while, afraid. His plan, centuries in the making, had just cracked straight through. A bit more pressure and it looked like it might shatter entirely. And if it did, Zetsu would fail in his purpose. The very thought twisted everything inside him: that he might not be able to resurrect Kaguya.
Otsutsuki Isshiki had shown his face after nearly a millennium. A pathetic worm who once upon a time had fancied himself superior to the Mother.
Blasphemy.
Back when Zetsu didn't yet exist, Kaguya had nearly killed the one who'd dared raise a hand against her, against the Goddess. Now that lesser creature had finally died, and Kuro couldn't help but savor a flicker of petty satisfaction over it.
Still.
Zetsu stopped chewing.
A plan coming apart at the seams isn't the end.
This sudden enemy was far too powerful; even all of Zetsu's pieces together wouldn't be enough. That was a problem. But it didn't mean Kuro couldn't solve it.
Uzumaki Naruto... Zetsu choked on a bone as the name surfaced from the past, coughing it onto the cave floor. A curious kid. The one who's been making the Leaf's elders hide under their desks...
Black Zetsu had a hobby: he liked watching talented people. Collecting promising pieces, in a manner of speaking. The Will of Kaguya's curiosity had at one point extended to a certain blond. But now Kuro could only curse himself for not having given the Nine-Tails' jinchuuriki the attention he deserved.
Too entangled with the village, too complicated a target, too much heat. That had been his thinking back then. Now all that was left was kicking himself over it.
"You thought of something?" came White's infuriatingly chipper voice.
"Chew quietly," Black snapped in his low, grating tone.
But White wasn't wrong. A shape was forming in Zetsu's mind.
To resurrect Kaguya, he needed the Ten-Tails. But the revival of the Juubi didn't have to be perfect. A portion of the tailed beasts' chakra would be enough to give the Goddess her vessel.
The unfortunate reality was that without all of the tailed beasts' chakra, she would be nowhere near the peak of her power, and she would not be pleased about that.
Still, reason had to prevail. Given what that human aberration had demonstrated, Akatsuki had no hope of claiming even a scrap of the Nine-Tails, the Three-Tails, or, as Kuro was increasingly certain, the One-Tail. Which meant Kuro would have to take matters into his own hands.
They might be coming soon, and so the time had come to move fast and accept some risk.
Kuro had been watching the one they called the "Emperor" from a distance, studying his actions, and based on what he'd seen, he held certain cautious hopes that a dialogue might be possible. That he could offer knowledge. Point the man in a useful direction. With Kuro's experience, that shouldn't be beyond reach.
Kaguya's power was immeasurable. It dwarfed anything Zetsu himself was capable of. Even weakened, she would be able to walk between worlds. And so he had to do everything in his power to steer this "Emperor" toward resurrecting Kaguya, appealing to the simple truth that she knew more than Kuro did and could therefore offer more.
After Her resurrection, it would no longer matter what the "Emperor" thought, or what became of this world. Zetsu and Kaguya could simply find some other living world, consume it, and then return here for vengeance.
There was nothing left on this Earth for the Goddess to protect. And so she could move somewhere no mortal could follow and search for a suitable world across centuries if she had to.
On that note, having arrived at a difficult decision, Zetsu gave a nod to himself and, incidentally, to White. He still had to cook up a convincing story; people loved listening to those. But first, he needed to make sure one idiot in a mask didn't bulldoze through the delicate business of building a manipulative rapport before it had even started. And after that, gather more information to better know which strings of his target's soul to pull. Urgency mattered right now, yes, but a few days wouldn't break anything.
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"It's over," I said, glancing down at what was now, without question, the corpse of an Otsutsuki.
The dojutsu in my hand vanished, and my energy reserves tensed up...
A massive shockwave of my chakra instantly rolled out across the world, a silent declaration of my victory.
"Kgh..." I grimaced.
My central nervous system was running on fumes, strained to the limit, riddled with micro-damage throughout. No question, I could still dance if pushed. But even as things stood right now, I was looking at roughly three, maybe four months of self-repair just to claw back to where I was before the fight.
Thinking through my condition, my eyes drifted to the seal housing the Kyuubi.
"You and I were never going to be friends, were we?" I gave an ironic pat to my distorted, blackened abdomen, thinking of the emaciated fox. "And yet... if things had gone just a little differently, this Otsutsuki wouldn't have been a problem for either of us."
And that was the honest truth. If I hadn't been burning energy to suppress Kurama's hostile chakra, if I'd had his backing instead, just that one missing rung on the ladder, I could've ended Isshiki in seconds. Instead, I now had to bleed off all that aggressive energy and foot the bill for recovery myself.
I formed a one-handed concentration seal. Light and dark energies poured out of me into the world as my body visibly began to shrink, reverting to its original form. Then, pulling a change of clothes from my spatial storage, I quickly started shaping a construct-sphere in my palm, similar to the ones Hagoromo's children used, to pump energy into the cooling corpse at my feet. Without a soul, it would become useless fast, and I needed it. Even with a destroyed brain and no way to extract memories, an alien's body still had plenty of secrets to yield.
Then, sealing Isshiki away inside a separate spatial seal like a specimen in a jar, I swept one last look across the scorched desert and teleported home.
Three sets of worried eyes converged on me the instant I arrived.
Karin, who'd been sitting in a tight knot of nerves alongside an equally tense Hinata and Sakura, shot to her feet. She started moving toward me, but—
"...Oh." The redhead was immediately intercepted by Sakura's arm, her hand materializing firmly against Karin's back to stop her cold.
"You okay?" Sakura asked. That was exactly why she'd stopped Karin from accidentally putting pressure on a body that might currently be compromised.
Noting that I didn't look scratched up in the slightest, she released the redhead, who shot her a wounded glare in return.
"Not exactly at peak condition," I replied. "But I've still got enough left to put down ten Kage. Don't worry, nothing's broken that can't be fixed."
Hinata slipped up quietly and pressed my hand to her chest, offering her silent support. I found it absurdly endearing and rested my chin on top of her head.
Besides my "envoy" Sakura, the other girls had also, at their own request after yet another round of body cultivation, taken on a more mature appearance. And beyond the obvious physical changes, both Hinata and Karin had chosen to grow their hair out.
"We were worried..." Sakura noted, pressing in as well.
"Hey. That sounded an awful lot like you're blaming Naruto for having to deal with that unknown crap," Karin muttered, burying her face against my collarbone.
"I was just stating a fact. No subtext," Sakura replied evenly, with no real interest in arguing the point. Karin grumbled something unintelligible under her breath.
All things considered, a certain quiet bliss settled over us.
Gradually calming down, Karin eventually moved her hands away from my shoulders, where they'd been draped from behind, and began running them down my torso. But the moment they drifted one centimeter lower than what polite society would consider acceptable...
Smack!
"Ow!" Karin yanked her hands back as Sakura's slap connected. "What? I was just making sure Naruto was in one piece."
At that moment, eyes half-closed, I found myself contemplating my monastic existence in a house full of several very adult-looking girls.
We pulled apart.
"You had to ruin it," Sakura said, lowering her eyelids and casting a faintly disapproving look at Karin.
"Wait, so what, that means I'm the one at fault?!" the culprit managed, caught somewhere between outrage and dawning self-awareness. She got back a look from Sakura that said "Yes" as plainly as words could, with just the lightest edge of condescension.
"Let's just drop it," Hinata offered diplomatically, then redirected her attention to me. "What was that creature? Its chakra wasn't human."
"Right, what the hell even was that thing?" Karin seconded. I scratched the back of my head; the phrasing sounded awfully familiar for some reason.
"I'll explain everything. And I think... I'm taking a few days off. How do you feel about spending some time together?"
In response, I received synchronized approving nods, conveying that yes, I'd absolutely earned the rest after all that, and yes, they were more than happy to once again step away from the world for a while and enjoy life.
And so my account of events began. While I talked, I noticed the aftershocks of that battle were still rippling outward across the world. The floor beneath our feet had started to shift.
And at some point the sound waves would arrive too, rolling in like slow, muffled thunder, booming steadily for minutes at a stretch. With energy discharges that size, a strange aurora had painted itself across the night sky, so the girls drew the curtains.
So there it was: I'd essentially saved the world, and I stayed home. But outside, not everyone had the luxury of just handing the cleanup off to someone else and calling it a night. A battle with an Otsutsuki doesn't just vanish without a trace.
View From Other Nations
Of all places, the Land of Wind had it worst, which when you thought about it wasn't all that surprising, given that's exactly where everything had happened.
Residents who hadn't seen it coming were jolted awake by a violent tremor. When they stumbled outside, what greeted them was a sky far too bright for the hour, blazing with light. Then came a brutal sandstorm, and with it low, drawn-out sounds like rolling thunder that seemed to go on and on without end. It hit everyone, the outermost borders as much as the capital and Sunagakure alike. The earthquake shattered an immeasurable number of structures before dying down after about ten minutes. The thunder, though, the kind that made it impossible to think, hammered on for over half an hour, while the storms were set to flush the warmth right out of the country for more than a full day. People could only take shelter in whatever solid structures had survived. Only settlements with particularly favorable geography were spared the worst of it, places like the Hidden Sand itself, nestled deep between its rocky walls.
Konoha and the Hidden Stone, sitting nearly twice as far from the epicenter as the worst-hit parts of the Land of Wind, fared considerably better. But they still felt it, quite literally. They too saw the light first, in the dead of night, with the tremors and faint rumble reaching them later, and noticeably weaker. Both villages, built with attacks in mind, carried out successful evacuations to designated safety points. Even so, the incident left a mark on everyone. There was something deeply unsettling about knowing that somewhere out there, something so massive and so dangerous was unfolding and you couldn't touch it. Couldn't influence it. You just had to swallow it and hope fate was feeling generous.
The Land of Water and the Land of Lightning got off lightest. The former caught nothing more notable than somewhat rougher-than-usual storm swells, while the latter only felt a faint tremor considerably later. But the glow on the edge of the sky, and after an even longer delay a sound that wasn't so much heard as felt in the bones, one that left some people genuinely nauseous, was something else entirely. As for the sensors, who felt every bit of what was happening on Earth far more acutely than anyone else: not a word from any of them, except creative profanity. What colorful language was making the rounds in Konoha and the Hidden Stone, let alone the Hidden Sand, was anyone's guess.
Hatake Kakashi sat in his residence with a look that could curdle milk, listening to one report after another while keeping people posted outside to manage the evacuation.
Several hours after the "signal of humanity's victory," once things had more or less settled, Konoha convened an emergency meeting.
Presiding over it, naturally, was the new Hokage, Kakashi. Looking simultaneously bored and completely in control, honestly not sure how he kept pulling that off, the village head got straight to it, going for the jugular to kill the brewing situation before it boiled over.
Keeping an absolutely straight face and an even straighter line, he declared everything was fine and there was no reason to panic. Everyone had made it safe and sound into the shelters inside the Hokage Rock, so people were perfectly welcome to go home, write their reports, and get some well-earned sleep before noon. Oh, and by the way, their genin was home, and it'd be a real shame if anyone gave him a reason to get up. The kid was probably exhausted, and who knew what he might do if people started making noise. Besides, their shinobi had spotted some rather brazen Raikage spies out there. No point picking fleas off each other at home when there's someone sharpening a kunai right next door.
And then, without letting anyone get a single word in edgewise, he told them to go ahead and do what their smart Hokage had told them. Well, most of the shinobi did disperse. But a few stayed behind. The kind who tended to be older, far more convinced of their own authority, and conspicuously short on good judgment. They cornered their leader and promptly started tearing into one particular individual, leaving Kakashi to stand between them and whatever impulsive nonsense they were clearly itching to try.
The situation in the Hidden Stone wasn't entirely different.
Tsuchikage Onoki sat in the village council chamber in silence, sweating cold right along with everyone else. After a long deliberation, he finally arrived at a firm conclusion.
"That kind of power... capable of casually swatting down someone at Hashirama's level." The old man bared his teeth. "We weren't wrong to refrain from making any sudden moves against the Leaf. The time has come for me to make a difficult decision. I believe you'll understand. I am ordering our submission to the coming Empire. That is how we maximize what we stand to gain."
Onoki was, all things considered, a rather proud old man. But he also had just enough political sense to know that fighting the Emperor would only make everything worse, while the prospects of compliance, judging by the Mist, might not be nearly as grim as most people were painting in their heads.
The Tsuchikage had spent so many years winding his influence through the Stone that he had no doubts his word would carry. Especially now, when everyone was scared.
A, having convened his own council consisting only of his most trusted shinobi, was equally deep in thought.
"I... I don't know what the hell to do," the Raikage admitted, his bass voice filling the office in a rare moment of vulnerability that surprised even himself.
He sat behind his desk while the others stood around him. All except one, a white-haired aide seated at a nearby desk.
"Yo, doesn't matter what freak showed up to fight, our boy put him down — that's right. Chill, bro. We'll talk to the man and come out tight." said the Eight-Tails' jinchuuriki with an easy drawl, playing up his not-quite-rhymes as usual.
He shared a certain look with A, the same massive build, though with a bandana and shades pushed up on his head, plus a whole rack of thin-bladed scabbards across his back.
"Bee, shut the hell up with your rap crap!" A snarled. "You don't get it. What if we can't talk to him? Then what? We just roll over like the Mist did with the Land of Water?"
"Plan B still needs considerably more time," the aide, Mabui, noted flatly, which made A's fist tighten with barely contained frustration.
"Looks like we're gonna have to bend the knee to those bastards..." said the blond man standing against the wall with a deceptively calm face. His name was C, and he was one of A's bodyguards. Catching the extremely meaningful glare his leader leveled at him, he quickly added, "Temporarily!!!"
"A predator waits," came the voice of the blond girl across the room, the jinchuuriki of the Two-Tails. "We keep our heads down and our intentions to ourselves until we've developed either a sufficiently powerful sealing jutsu, which jinchuuriki do have a particular vulnerability to, or brought the Transfer Seal to an acceptable level."
The dark-skinned young man with voluminous white hair gave a quiet nod at that. Darui, A's second bodyguard and chosen successor.
A grimaced. Then he gave a measured nod.
"That's a plan. Now let's get the full council together and work out the details."
Mei, upon receiving the report about the wave of Naruto's victorious chakra washing over the planet, exhaled with a tired but genuine relief.
It was as if a mountain had slid off her shoulders, knowing that the words "this country might not survive the night" hadn't come true.
But when elephants fight, the grass beneath them gets crushed. And even the Land of Water hadn't been spared. A sound that drove people to the edge of sanity. Emergency evacuations. All of it whipped up panic and terror. Yes, the Emperor's victory over an unknown monster had strengthened the faith people held in him, but right now the immediate priority was reining in the chaos before too many lives were lost to it.
Interlude: Black Zetsu
Wet, rhythmic chewing sounds filled the dark cave. The creature, split into two halves, was nervously working its way through the flesh of an unknown but impressively muscled shinobi.
White Zetsu didn't particularly enjoy eating people; he found them too tough. Black Zetsu, on the other hand, had a taste for them, especially the ones with a satisfying chew. And besides, the act of eating them had a calming effect.
That said, this was the one and only situation in which Kuro Zetsu displayed anything approaching a positive feeling toward the human species. Or toward any other species, for that matter. His only revelation, his only devotion, was his creator. His mother. Kaguya.
He was furious. Rattled. And for the first time in a very long while, afraid. His plan, centuries in the making, had just cracked straight through. A bit more pressure and it looked like it might shatter entirely. And if it did, Zetsu would fail in his purpose. The very thought twisted everything inside him: that he might not be able to resurrect Kaguya.
Otsutsuki Isshiki had shown his face after nearly a millennium. A pathetic worm who once upon a time had fancied himself superior to the Mother.
Blasphemy.
Back when Zetsu didn't yet exist, Kaguya had nearly killed the one who'd dared raise a hand against her, against the Goddess. Now that lesser creature had finally died, and Kuro couldn't help but savor a flicker of petty satisfaction over it.
Still.
Zetsu stopped chewing.
A plan coming apart at the seams isn't the end.
This sudden enemy was far too powerful; even all of Zetsu's pieces together wouldn't be enough. That was a problem. But it didn't mean Kuro couldn't solve it.
Uzumaki Naruto... Zetsu choked on a bone as the name surfaced from the past, coughing it onto the cave floor. A curious kid. The one who's been making the Leaf's elders hide under their desks...
Black Zetsu had a hobby: he liked watching talented people. Collecting promising pieces, in a manner of speaking. The Will of Kaguya's curiosity had at one point extended to a certain blond. But now Kuro could only curse himself for not having given the Nine-Tails' jinchuuriki the attention he deserved.
Too entangled with the village, too complicated a target, too much heat. That had been his thinking back then. Now all that was left was kicking himself over it.
"You thought of something?" came White's infuriatingly chipper voice.
"Chew quietly," Black snapped in his low, grating tone.
But White wasn't wrong. A shape was forming in Zetsu's mind.
To resurrect Kaguya, he needed the Ten-Tails. But the revival of the Juubi didn't have to be perfect. A portion of the tailed beasts' chakra would be enough to give the Goddess her vessel.
The unfortunate reality was that without all of the tailed beasts' chakra, she would be nowhere near the peak of her power, and she would not be pleased about that.
Still, reason had to prevail. Given what that human aberration had demonstrated, Akatsuki had no hope of claiming even a scrap of the Nine-Tails, the Three-Tails, or, as Kuro was increasingly certain, the One-Tail. Which meant Kuro would have to take matters into his own hands.
They might be coming soon, and so the time had come to move fast and accept some risk.
Kuro had been watching the one they called the "Emperor" from a distance, studying his actions, and based on what he'd seen, he held certain cautious hopes that a dialogue might be possible. That he could offer knowledge. Point the man in a useful direction. With Kuro's experience, that shouldn't be beyond reach.
Kaguya's power was immeasurable. It dwarfed anything Zetsu himself was capable of. Even weakened, she would be able to walk between worlds. And so he had to do everything in his power to steer this "Emperor" toward resurrecting Kaguya, appealing to the simple truth that she knew more than Kuro did and could therefore offer more.
After Her resurrection, it would no longer matter what the "Emperor" thought, or what became of this world. Zetsu and Kaguya could simply find some other living world, consume it, and then return here for vengeance.
There was nothing left on this Earth for the Goddess to protect. And so she could move somewhere no mortal could follow and search for a suitable world across centuries if she had to.
On that note, having arrived at a difficult decision, Zetsu gave a nod to himself and, incidentally, to White. He still had to cook up a convincing story; people loved listening to those. But first, he needed to make sure one idiot in a mask didn't bulldoze through the delicate business of building a manipulative rapport before it had even started. And after that, gather more information to better know which strings of his target's soul to pull. Urgency mattered right now, yes, but a few days wouldn't break anything.
This fanfic is now complete. You can already read the entire story on my Patreon