Arcs of blinding lightning danced across Mufasa's eyes, making him look like a wrathful god descended from the heavens.
"Go play with the nine dragons for a bit and learn some manners," Mufasa muttered coldly.
"ROAR!"
A deafening, primal screech tore from the jaws of the nine lightning dragons.
Twisting their massive bodies, the serpentine beasts shredded straight through the incoming chakra beams and plunged directly into the colossal meatloaf.
BOOM!
The Nine Thunder Dragons burrowed deep into the beast's core. The abomination convulsed in agony, raw hatred bleeding from every single golden Rinnegan.
POOF!
The massive entity violently shuddered.
A blinding golden radiance erupted from its hide, forcefully ejecting the dragons' heads and tails until they dangled helplessly from the surface.
From a distance, the sight resembled a twisted, oversized stargazy pie.
With the beast temporarily pinned by the lightning constructs, Mufasa knew the window wouldn't last.
"Uchiha Hashirama, lock it down right now so I can activate the transmutation circle!" Mufasa barked.
He turned toward the reanimated Raikage. "Hit this damn thing with your strongest Lightning Style!"
"Supercharge my dragons!"
The Raikage didn't hesitate, unleashing torrents of high-voltage lightning into the struggling mass.
"Cloud ninja aren't the only ones who know Lightning Style!" Hiruzen Sarutobi shouted, joining the fray. "Everyone, fire together!"
Every reanimated Kage capable of lightning manipulation unleashed their jutsu into the center of the formation.
BZZZZT!
Lightning arced wildly across the transmutation circle, transforming the perimeter into a miniature forest of crackling thunder.
Deep inside the flesh, the meatloaf used its internal pressure to crush the dragons while detonating chakra spheres to disperse the incoming electricity.
The barrage from the Kage couldn't even breach its outer perimeter, disintegrating upon contact with the repulsive field.
Even so, the lingering electrical charge in the air was instantly funneled into the nine dragons, bolstering their form.
The surge bought the dragons just enough leverage to hold the beast in a bitter, high-voltage deadlock.
Yet, watching the deep blue bodies of the dragons slowly bleach into a brittle, translucent white, Mufasa knew their time was short.
He let out a sharp sigh.
'Damn, what a freakish monster.'
'Good thing it's completely braindead. If this thing actually had an IQ, we'd all be dead ten times over.'
'Which idiot cooked this nightmare up in the first place?'
Miles away in the retreat convoy, Orochimaru suddenly sneezed several times in a row, rubbing his pale nose in pure confusion.
Stepping clear of the circle's outer perimeter, Mufasa prepared to ignite the array.
"Uchiha Hashirama, buy me ten seconds!" Mufasa yelled.
"The second those ten seconds are up, get the hell out of the ring."
"Once this transmutation matrix ignites, I can't steer it. If you're still inside, you'll be refined into the stone right along with it."
WHOOSH.
A blur flickered beside him, and Uchiha Hashirama materialized at his shoulder.
"Why didn't you say so earlier?" Uchiha Hashirama scoffed, crossing his arms. "Were you trying to cook me in your little trap?"
Mufasa gave him a flat look. "If you're out here, who's holding the front line?"
"Don't sweat it," Uchiha Hashirama smirked. "My Limbo clones are still in there. They're more than enough."
As a seasoned veteran of a thousand bloodbaths, Uchiha Hashirama wasn't about to get caught flat-footed by an alien alchemy circle.
Safety first, always.
If Mufasa was slipping away to detonate the bomb, Uchiha Hashirama was smart enough to let his clones take the heat.
"Stop staring at me and hit the switch," Uchiha Hashirama urged. "They won't hold it for long."
Inside the circle, the four colossal, Susanoo-clad Kan'on avatars lunged from four directions.
Thousands of massive wooden hands clamped down onto the writhing mass, pinning it firmly against the desert sands.
The containment was already falling apart.
Blinding flares poured from the creature's golden Rinnegan like white-hot plasma, melting the wooden limbs the instant they made contact.
The moment the clones exhausted their chakra reserves, the titan would break free.
"Here goes nothing," Mufasa muttered, slamming his palms flat against the earth.
"Philosopher's Stone Transmutation Matrix—Ignite!"
CRACKLE!
High-voltage electrical currents raced through the alchemical glyphs etched across the sand.
The complex geometric patterns flared to life one by one, bleeding an ominous crimson light.
Once fully illuminated, the matrix would systematically dismantle and sacrifice every shred of organic matter within its bounds.
Sensing the impending harvest—a primordial, cosmic destruction echoing from deep space—the biomass went into a frenzy.
It rapidly compressed its bulk inward before detonating outward with apocalyptic force.
BOOM!
A blinding nova of pure chakra erupted from every pore, resembling a dying star going supernova.
The nine lightning dragons took the brunt of the shockwave, instantly vaporizing into thin air.
Next came the four mountain-sized Kan'on statues.
Beams of superheated chakra punched clean through their wooden torsos, dissolving the colossal avatars into ash.
The lingering reanimated Kage scattered along the perimeter were pulverized in a fraction of a second.
The electromagnetic barrier in front of Mufasa groaned, cracking under the immense thermal wash.
Locked into channeling his chakra into the matrix, Mufasa couldn't spare a hand to reinforce his guard.
"Three more seconds! Hold the line!" Mufasa roared.
Uchiha Hashirama was already moving. "I'm on it!"
"Tengai Shinsei: Deep Forest Bloom!"
CRACK!
The sky tore open above the biomass, revealing two titanic meteorites plummeting through the clouds.
Sensing the falling masses, the beast redirected its golden beams upward, blasting the meteorites to pieces.
The kinetic strikes shattered the celestial rocks, but they failed to stop the jutsu's true payload.
As the burning fragments rained down, a massive forest of ancient trees erupted from the rubble, their branches wrapping together into thick, fortified domes.
Colossal chakra flowers blossomed across the bark in an instant.
The blooms voraciously drained the ambient chakra, swelling rapidly before releasing thick, paralyzing pollen.
Every falling boulder became a living seedbed.
The more the beast obliterated the meteorites, the more trees sprouted from the dust.
Countless wooden structures crushed down onto the biomass, smothering its golden beams under an endless jungle.
Mufasa rose to his feet, letting out a breath. "Leave it to real estate to save the world."
The array beneath his boots reached critical mass, vibrating the tectonic plates with a deep, mechanical hum.
HUMMMM.
A dark, blood-red pillar of light erupted from the sands, passing cleanly through the biomass and piercing the upper atmosphere.
The crimson beam connected earth and sky, spinning like a colossal vortex.
From the desert floor, it looked like a pillar of blood anchoring the heavens.
The transmutation matrix was broadcasting its sacrificial coordinates straight to the conceptual source beyond the universe.
The hum deepened into a deafening roar, sounding like the startup of a cosmic engine.
Sensing absolute doom, the biomass shredded the wooden forest and attempted to breach the light barrier.
Uchiha Hashirama stood his ground, ensuring nothing escaped the zone.
The beast violently slammed into the crimson light wall, sending violent ripples across the energy barrier.
"Damn, this thing can actually rattle a Philosopher's Stone matrix?" Mufasa muttered, though his smirk remained steady.
"If you break out of here, the whole continent is doomed."
"Guess I'll have to play exorcist today."
THUD! THUD!
Mufasa planted his stance, his muscles tensing as faint peals of thunder rattled inside his joints.
The atmosphere reacted instantly.
Dense storm clouds gathered over a hundred-mile radius, blocking out the sun as lightning coiled across the sky like a celestial ocean.
Uchiha Hashirama stared at him, genuinely stunned.
"What kind of freak are you, brat?"
"Just how much power are you hiding?"
Mufasa smiled faintly. "Honestly? I have no idea."
Without a proper benchmark in this world, gauging his ceiling was impossible.
His baseline was already the absolute peak of the shinobi realm.
KABOOM!
The abomination threw its entire weight against the barrier with suicidal fury.
The sacrifice had begun.
The crimson light operated on absolute deconstruction laws, dissolving the creature's outer tissue layer by layer.
Even its Rinnegan techniques were powerless against the alchemical extraction.
The beam stripped away muscle and chakra like a scalpel peeling an apple.
Had it been an ordinary shinobi or even a Kage, they would have disintegrated in a microsecond.
Only its absurd pool of stolen divine flesh allowed it to endure the refining process for this long.
Knowing death was seconds away, the beast went berserk.
The containment barrier groaned, spider-webbing with fractures under the violent impacts.
Mufasa's eyes narrowed. "Playtime's over."
"Ten times gravity."
CRUSH!
The localized gravitational pull spiked instantly, slamming the beast toward the ground.
It shrieked, firing its thruster organs to fight the downward momentum.
Mufasa scoffed, driving his palms downward. "One hundred times gravity."
Under a hundredfold increase in gravitational mass, the creature's bulk collapsed under its own weight.
SLAM!
It crashed violently into the core of the transmutation array, utterly pinned.
The blood-red light shifted into a translucent, blinding scarlet that swallowed the horizon.
A suffocating, incomprehensible pressure descended from the void above.
Every living soul across the entire continent froze, looking up at the sky in pure, instinctual terror.
"Fall back!" Mufasa barked, grabbing Uchiha Hashirama as they bolted clear of the expanding scarlet dome.
Uchiha Hashirama stared at the heavens, shivering despite himself.
"What did you just summon, kid?"
A feeling of complete exposure washed over him, as if every secret of his soul was laid bare before an omnipotent observer.
Mufasa scratched his cheek awkwardly. "No clue."
SHING.
The storm clouds vanished in an instant without a sound.
A colossal, white marble gateway hovered upside-down in the empty sky, its face pointed directly at the desert floor.
The two warriors held their breath. "Here it comes."
The ancient doors ground open with agonizing slowness.
Behind the threshold sat a singular, colossal eye.
It was pure, immaculate, and utterly devoid of human emotion.
It held neither cruelty nor warmth—only a vast, infinite emptiness far beyond mortal comprehension.
Every single shinobi on the continent saw the eye in their mind's eye, trembling beneath its suffocating gaze.
The Eye of Truth pierced through all creation, judging and binding the world beneath it.
Deep inside Kaguya's dimension, Conan collapsed to his knees, his entire frame trembling violently.
"The Gate of Truth..." Conan whispered, his voice cracking with horror. "It really is the Gate of Truth."
Kazuha blinked, trying to support him. "The Gate of Truth? Is it like the portal you summoned earlier?"
Conan shook his head with a bitter, haunted smile.
"It doesn't even compare... It's the difference between a grain of sand and the sun itself."
What in the world was Mufasa trying to pull by opening that door?