"I beg you, O Ryūmyaku, as Queen of Lōran, I beseech you to close…"
Deep in the earth's bowels, at the altar lying at the heart of Lōran— the very one Sakura and her team would discover twenty years later— Queen Sēramu prayed ceaselessly for the Ryūmyaku's closure, even as the Dragon Vein's power surged endlessly beneath her… but it was all for naught. As she had feared, the blockage that had appeared six years ago was still there, holding the passage half‑open and preventing her from sealing it.
"No!" she cried in frustration. "Why won't it close?"
If closing the oculus wouldn't work, then perhaps doing the opposite might yield some result, so Queen Sēramu resolved to open the Ryūmyaku wider than she ever had at any time in the past six years. Logic told her there must be something lodged within it— something preventing the oculus from closing fully. If she widened the opening, perhaps she might catch a glimpse of whatever was causing it all and at last shed some light on this mystery…
Sēramu closed her eyes and whispered an incantation, punctuating each word with a strange hand sign. Through her innate gift of Ryūmyaku chakra control, she would glimpse the memories held within the chakra itself. She would see the day she had lost command of the Dragon Vein's power, and then slam the door shut, once and for all…
In her mind's eye, two thin, identical men crossed the suspended walkway leading to the Ryūmyaku's heart, stopping at the platform that overlooked the churning knot of violet chakra below. They were Mukade, and there were two of him… but only one of them was about to become Anrokuzan.
One of the two proffered his hand for his double to take, as though they were sealing some pact through a handshake… but at the moment their palms met, both flinched in pain. In an instant their kunai were drawn, blades clashing as each fought to hurl the other into the seething current below. For a while the pair struggled, neither gaining the advantage, each one more equal than the last… yet in the end, one of them fell.
"The clogging… it was him all along…?" Sēramu murmured. "How could one do such a thing… to oneself?"
The earth shook, and Queen Sēramu blinked, her vision of the past dissolving into the air like smoke. She looked over her shoulder and paled; an enormous, millipede puppet loomed over her, clinging to the ceiling above the purple chakra bubbling below… visibly, Anrokuzan had upgraded his ant puppet form.
"Why, thank you, Your Majesty," came Anrokuzan's mocking voice from within the puppet as he lowered his long body from the ceiling, bringing the puppet's enormous face level with hers. "You've opened the Ryūmyaku wider for me? Excellent. Then I've no further need to keep you alive!"
"RASENGAN!"
A figure in orange dropped from above, driving a sphere of whirling chakra into the puppet's head and carving a deep crater across its surface. Hissing, Anrokuzan flung the boy aside, and he landed nimbly beside the queen, grabbing her and leaping away to the circular room's perimeter in a flash.
The puppet's damaged area rapidly repaired itself, looking good as new within seconds.
"It's no good," Minato said, flickering to Sēramu's and Naruto's side. "He's regenerating faster than we can damage him."
Gritting his teeth, Naruto summoned hundreds of Shadow Clones, each shaping a Big Ball Rasengan in their palm as they sprang towards Anrokuzan, but the millipede puppet opened its jaws and unleashed a torrent of violet flame, engulfing and incinerating almost all of them at once. The backlash from losing so many Rasengans' worth of chakra struck Naruto hard, and he went pale, but the few clones still standing pressed on, keeping Anrokuzan busy for a while longer.
"Did you know?" Minato said calmly, looking his child in the eye. "A special kind of cooperation ninjutsu will be born if two compatible shinobi synchronise their chakra."
"Is it true, what that other Naruto said?" Naruto Prime asked weakly. "Are you… are you really our… my dad?"
Minato smiled. "Hold out your hand."
Naruto did as he was told, and before his eyes, a giant, turquoise-coloured Rasengan blossomed in his palm. A sense of serenity and quiet happiness filled him as his father drew out his chakra… not by force, but through resonance.
Holding his new Rasengan proudly aloft, Naruto leapt high into the air with a triumphant roar. The millipede puppet, which had been creeping down the wall with one spindly limb outstretched towards a petrified Sēramu, looked up and unleashed a torrent of black‑and‑purple fire from its maw at him.
"Father and Son Cooperative Ninjutsu:Supreme Ultimate Rasengan!"
The blazing stream met the Rasengan head‑on, yet the spiralling chakra tore the flames apart, carving a tunnel of light straight through the inferno… and in the blink of an eye, Naruto burst clear of the fire.
There was nothing Anrokuzan could do to resist at this point; Naruto drove his Yin‑Yang Rasengan into his millipede puppet's hardened shell, shredding it in a tempest of splintered wood, clay dust, and twisted metal.
With a cry, Naruto shoved the Rasengan deeper into the puppet's entrails, reducing them to dust… before blasting straight through the core. His momentum carried him clear through the monstrous puppet's guts, and he burst out through the other side, landing on the Ryūmyaku's far bank.
"Grr…" Anrokuzan growled, his body buckling as he compensated for the massive hole in the millipede puppet's abdomen. "You think this much is enough? My chakra is infinite! No one can stop me!"
Amazingly, he was already beginning to recover, though his puppet body was noticeably shrinking. The parts ground to dust by the Ultimate Rasengan were damaged beyond repair, forcing him to draw his massive form inwards to mend his armour and fill in the gaps… yet he remained colossal enough to crush them beneath his thousands of feet.
"He's telling the truth!" Queen Sēramu cried. "He's trapped his alter ego within the Ryūmyaku itself! He's drawing infinite chakra through their bond! That's why it refuses to close!"
Ironically, that was also why the Ryūmyaku refused to open completely. The Mukade who had lost to his Anrokuzan self was quite the vindictive fellow; if he couldn't accomplish his dream, then neither would his other self! That was also why Anrokuzan hadn't killed Sēramu, despite his inability to turn her into a puppet ruler; she was necessary to keep the Ryūmyaku from closing completely, because of his other self's pettiness!
"Dad!" Naruto Prime said, extending his palm. "Let's do it again! This time, for sure…!"
"I'm out of chakra," Minato sighed. "I'm afraid I put everything I had in that last Rasengan…"
"Then what about the resonance between two almost identical Narutos?"
Minato and Naruto Prime turned at the sound of Sakura's voice; she and the other Naruto had just made it down the stairs to the Ryūmyaku chamber.
So much for luring Anrokuzan into the Ryūmyaku dead zone, eh?
"I'll hold back Anrokuzan while Queen Sēramu fishes Mukade out of the Ryūmyaku!" called Sakura. "Naruto, Naruto, you know what to do, right?" she performed the Akimichi clan's secret hand sign. "Sage Art: Super Expansion Jutsu!"
Sakura raced past them, the ground trembling as her body grew with her every step. Leaping the Ryūmyaku in a single bound, she hurled herself at the recovering millipede puppet, slipping past its whirring buzzsaw tail and the blades bristling from its sides as it writhed. Each blow the giantess landed blossomed fresh, fist-shaped craters across its carapace, driving it deeper into the outer wall amidst its piercing, mechanical wails.
"Ready?" Naruto Prime said, grinning. "I'll be the bottom."
"Fine, I'll let you have all the fun, but only this time, ya know!" Dark Naruto replied, grinning as well. "I'll be the top, then! Get ready to receive my chakra~!"
Minato's fatherly smiled faltered. What on earth were his sons talking about? What kind of freaky shit were they getting on with their Shadow Clones!?
Naruto Prime thrust out his palm, and Dark Naruto began kneading the chakra that poured from it, blending in his own. Their chakra was similar enough to resonate with the greatest amplitude, yet different enough not to merge outright, which would simply have resulted in a Big Ball Rasengan.
After all, though Sacred Timeline Naruto and Darkest Timeline Naruto were genetically the same person and had identical souls, their experiences were completely different. As a result, their spiritual energies, and thus their chakras, were totally different. To put it into musical terms, it would be like combining two different yet compatible notes to produce a harmony, rather than combining two of the same note to produce a unison!
Thus, not a Unison Raid, but rather… a Harmonic Raid!
"Egotistical Cooperative Ninjutsu: Perfectly Ultimate Rasengan!"
"Get out of the way, Sakura-chan!" Naruto Prime shouted, holding the new Rasengan aloft. "Here I come!"
Sakura landed one final, cheeky punch on Anrokuzan's puppet before scrambling aside, her body shrinking rapidly, as Naruto sailed through the air. With a savage cry, he drove his royal‑blue giant Rasengan into the colossal puppet's damaged flank.
"Noooo!" screamed Anrokuzan, as the whirling chakra devoured him, grinding the rest of his puppet body to dust. "And I would have got away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling Konoha brats!"
The instant before it was reduced to nothingness, the millipede puppet spat out a smaller puppet— a man‑sized, human‑faced cockroach puppet— but Dark Naruto was upon it at once, tackling it to the ground before it could hurl itself into the Ryūmyaku.
"I've got the other one!" Queen Sēramu called. "Quickly, Lord Shinobi! Please seal the Ryūmyaku before it goes out of control!"
Minato was already moving, racing along the walkway towards the altar above the Ryūmyaku. Queen Sēramu raised her hand, and the Ryūmyaku spat forth a thin, sallow man… Mukade. He struck the stone floor hard, his bloodshot, obsessed eyes latching at once onto the cockroach puppet writhing in Dark Naruto's iron grip nearby.
"No! Get away!" Anrokuzan screeched, wriggling madly. "Don't let him touch me, I beg you! I'll do anything!"
"Six long, bloody years," Mukade hissed, eyes fixed on his parallel world self. "Six years I spent inside that hellhole, biding my revenge… and now, at last… vengeance is at hand…"
Anrokuzan was on the verge of crying, but his puppet body was sadly incapable of producing tears.
"It was my mistake! I admit it! I only realised later why our touch was poisonous to each other!" he screamed. "Please, it's not too late! If Mukade and Anrokuzan join hands, we'll truly be unstoppable! Together, we'll bring the five great nations to their knees!"
"Oh, I'll join hands with you, all right," Mukade said malevolently. "But… I don't intend to ever let go!"
Mukade lunged, and Naruto leapt aside as he flung his arms around his other self, the man who had become Anrokuzan. The stench of burning flesh filled the air as Mukade's body fused with the puppet's, for the universe could not abide what should have been one, existing in two different places at once. Their screams rose to a fevered pitch as they became a single, blazing abomination with too many limbs… and for a heartbeat, they remained so… before collapsing into a molten puddle.
The two Narutos stared at Anrokuzan's and Mukade's fused, half-flesh, half-puppet remains in abject horror.
"That's what would've happened if we touched each other, Sakura‑chan?!" Naruto Prime yelled, backing up fast from his doppelganger. "You really could've warned us it was that dangerous, ya know!!"
"And you let us do a Naruto‑on-Naruto Rasengan, Sakura‑chan!?" Dark Naruto stammered, his teeth chattering as he shook with fright. "What if our fingers had touched, y'know!?"
Sakura shot them a thumbs up.
"But you didn't touch each other in the end, did you?" Sakura replied matter‑of‑factly. "I trusted you'd follow my instructions, because I believe in you… ya know!"