However, Madara's proto–jinchuriki cloak surged violently again, its color shifting between muddied black and pale white.
Chakra leaked from it in wild arcs, melting stone wherever it splashed.
Ryusei blocked the next blow with one forearm.
The ground beneath him cratered into dust.
Madara recoiled half a step, surprised.
Ryusei glanced at his arm, dusting off a stray spark of unstable chakra like it was a mosquito.
"Your cloak is… messy," he said flatly.
Madara didn't laugh.
He simply lunged again.
Ryusei raised a palm.
His Slug Sage Mode activated instantly, but subtly, the ground softened beneath his step, his skin taking on that faint translucent ripple, his chakra blending perfectly into the terrain.
Madara's punch landed directly into Ryusei's chest.
The impact rippled.
Ryusei slid back a single meter.
Madara was thrown back across the crater, dragged by the recoil of his own unstable power.
He landed on a stone pillar, cracks forming beneath him.
"...Annoying," Madara muttered.
Ryusei stepped once.
A blur. And he was in front of Madara again.
Madara activated Limbo.
Four invisible clones intercepted Ryusei mid-step.
Their arms locked around him.
For a moment, it looked like they held him.
Ryusei looked at the empty air around him.
"Your Limbo is still too linear."
He snapped his fingers once.
The clones burst like soap bubbles, their forms unraveling under the weight of Ryusei's natural energy slug acid.
Madara's pupils tightened.
"So your sage state adapts on contact."
Ryusei shrugged.
"That's one way to describe it."
They moved again, this time faster.
Orochimaru, Ashina, and Nagato watched from the rim of the crater.
Orochimaru's eyes widened slightly.
"He's forcing Madara into rapid destabilization."
Nagato nodded.
"The cloak is collapsing and reforming each time he clashes. Madara cannot hold that form for long."
Ashina lifted one chain, letting it spin behind him.
"We step in when he signals."
Meanwhile—
Kiyomi clashed with Obito on a distant ridge, her black Susanoo hammer smashing through space itself to intercept Kamui-induced distortions.
Obito's eye bled, forced to use both intangibility and space-folding just to survive her assaults.
Pakura and Renjiro tore through the Kiri, Akatsuki remnants, and Zetsu forces in the forest beneath them.
Renjiro's blade carved white-black arcs across the trees, cutting through Zetsu's bodies in waves as well as Sasori and Kakuzu.
Pakura's scorching mirages burned entire clusters around the two before they could even react.
Together, they erased Madara's ground support in minutes.
Back in the crater—
Madara swung with a massive, jagged chakra limb erupting from his back.
Ryusei sidestepped, letting the limb tear through a mountain peak behind him.
Madara pressed harder.
His unstable cloak thickened.
His skin cracked deeper, glowing like molten lines.
The proto–jinchuriki form roared with each pulse.
"You do not understand," Madara growled. "Even incomplete, this power surpasses anything humanity has touched."
Ryusei tilted his head.
"Does it?"
Madara lunged again.
This time faster.
Harder.
Pushing the instability to its edge.
Ryusei caught the blow with one hand.
His truth-seeking orbs were also threatening him from other sides.
Madara froze.
His punch was held in place by two fingers.
Ryusei looked him dead in the eye.
"Your problem," he said calmly, "is that you think you're the only one allowed to evolve."
Madara's cloak flickered wildly.
Ryusei's Slug Sage Mode surged, his body shifting fluidly.
His arm softened, then solidified again, absorbing the force and sending it back into Madara's unstable chakra pathways.
Madara's arm spasmed.
His cloak shattered for a moment, revealing raw flesh underneath.
Ryusei didn't let him recover.
He slammed his palm into Madara's chest.
A ripple of adaptive slime-like sage chakra spread across Madara's entire body, destabilizing every chakra flow that wasn't perfectly harmonious.
Ryusei hadn't even opened the final Gate yet.
Blue vapor from the Seventh Gate swirled around him, mingling with the faint cyan flames of his Tenseigan chakra beneath, painting his figure in shifting hues of light and power.
Madara coughed up blood.
He flew back across the crater, landing in a heap of broken stone.
Nagato exhaled slowly.
"He cannot sustain that form."
Ashina nodded.
"Ryusei is deconstructing it from the inside."
Orochimaru chuckled.
"How elegant."
The proto–Ten–Tails roared again, reacting to Madara's weakening grip.
Its eye widened, shaking violently, as if it felt its potential future slipping away.
Madara rose again, trembling, his cloak barely held together.
He glared at Ryusei with something close to desperation and rage.
"You think this is over?" Madara rasped. "You think you stand above—"
Ryusei appeared in front of him.
Madara froze mid-sentence.
Ryusei's finger hovered a centimeter from his forehead.
"Yes," Ryusei said. "I do."
And the next clash was about to end it.
Ryusei's finger tapped forward.
Just a light touch.
But Madara's proto–jinchuriki chakra convulsed like a living beast struck through the spine.
His unstable cloak ruptured in a sharp burst, sending cracks of distorted energy across the crater floor.
Madara staggered back two steps, chest heaving.
His body glowed unevenly, flickering between regeneration and damage.
Ryusei didn't give him time.
He moved once, barely a blur, and drove his knee into Madara's abdomen.
The impact folded space for an instant, compressing the blow directly through Madara's unstable chakra core.
Madara's mouth opened in shock.
Blood mist burst from his lips.
He flew backward, carving a shallow trench across the crater before slamming into the far wall.
The proto–Ten–Tails howled louder, reacting to its host's sudden instability.
Its limbs writhed, attempting to attach chakra threads back into Madara's body to restore the link.
It didn't work.
Ryusei severed them with a simple glance, a ripple of natural energy slicing through the threads like wet paper.
Madara pushed himself to his feet, breathing loudly now, forced to maintain control over the wild cloak that kept collapsing every few seconds.
His eyes burned with defiance.
"You… you will not take this from me."
Ryusei sighed.
"Madara, you're fighting like someone who knows he already lost."
Madara clenched his fist. His voice cracked, the instability hitting his vocal cords.
"I have risen farther than any mortal—"
Ryusei appeared right in front of him.
"Not far enough."
He smashed his palm into Madara's sternum.
The blow wasn't flashy.
No explosion.
No dramatic burst.
But the conceptual force behind it, adaptive sage chakra shifting density and momentum to match the opponent's weakest point, was absolute.
Madara's body seized.
His cloak shattered again.
Dozens of fractures raced across his torso, glowing with unstable Ten-Tails residue.
The ground beneath him caved in.
Madara's Mangekyō flared to life from the moment this battle started, both eyes spinning violently.
Yokushi unfolded, showing him Ryusei's next movements.
Every intent, every possible strike toward him, while Kōro traced in perfect clarity the path to counter them.
He saw it all.
The angles, the timing, the flawless steps to victory.
Then he moved.
And still, he was too late.
Every time.
Ryusei's body moved faster than thought, faster than sight, his chakra tearing through the air before Madara's vision could even catch up.
Each "future" Madara glimpsed through his eyes collapsed in on itself, another failure, another death, each one his own, repeating endlessly.
There was no best route.
No perfect strike.
Only inevitability.
Madara clawed at the edges of it, forcing every last shred of power from the incomplete Ten Tails, hoping to turn the tide, to finally use his Mangekyō's full potential against a foe he could touch.
But it was useless.
Even his newly refined Sage Mode, born from his fusion with the beast, couldn't bridge the gap.
Ryusei's presence crushed everything.
His gravity was stronger than Madara's own Rinnegan's pull, his chakra control absolute, and the black orbs orbiting him drifted like silent executioners, constant, inescapable, final.
Madara's jaw locked as blood streaked from his eyes, the weight of collapsing timelines breaking him from the inside.
"…Impossible…" he rasped.
Orochimaru, watching with fascinated satisfaction, murmured, "He's breaking Madara's chakra pathways systematically."
Ashina nodded, eyes sharpening.
"One more clean hit to the core pathway and the form will collapse completely."
Nagato closed his eyes briefly.
"He will not hold on much longer."
Down below, Madara struggled to breathe.
His regeneration tried to activate but short-circuited with each attempt, as if Ryusei's strikes were canceling his healing before it even formed.
Madara slammed his palms into the earth.
"DON'T UNDERESTIMATE ME!"
A cluster of jagged chakra limbs erupted from the ground, shooting upward to impale Ryusei in one desperate move.
Before Ryusei could lift a finger, Ashina moved.
His black Adamantine Chains flashed across the battlefield, wrapping the limbs and crushing them instantaneously.
Madara's head jerked toward him. "You—"
Nagato attacked next.
A colossal golden spectral palm erupted from his Rinnegan, smashing Madara from the side and pinning him against the crater wall.
Madara roared, breaking the construct in half—
But Orochimaru appeared behind him, his serpentine sage aura extending into razor-thin senjutsu threads that sliced the air around Madara's back.
Madara barely deflected them.
"Three against one…" he snarled.
Ryusei stepped forward.
"No," he said. "Five."
Above them, two figures finished their tasks.
Kiyomi landed silently on a fractured pillar, Obito's mask discarded behind her, the man unconscious and sealed in her Susanoo restraints.
Renjiro and Pakura emerged from the forest below, bloodied but calm, having wiped out the last of Madara's support forces, including the last three inner Akatsuki members.
Renjiro rested his sword lazily against his shoulder.
Pakura's heated aura flickered around her like a shimmering mirage.
Madara looked around.
He saw it clearly.
Every subordinate he once controlled was gone.
Every barrier had been broken.
Every timeline he planned was collapsing.
Every possible path now bent toward Ryusei.
His Rinnegan dilated sharply.
And for the first time in this battle—
Madara Uchiha hesitated.
Ryusei approached slowly, each step bending the ground in soft ripples.
"Madara," he said, voice calm. "This ends here."
Madara grit his teeth, cloak sputtering, body trembling, chakra leaking from every wound.
"You cannot…" he rasped. "…stop the Ten Tails rebirth…"
Ryusei placed a hand on his shoulder.
"No," he replied simply. "I can stop you."
Madara's eyes widened—
Ryusei drove a concentrated pulse of that adaptive slug-like sage energy into his chakra core.
Silent. Precise.
A perfect counter to instability.
Madara's entire proto–jinchuriki form detonated into a shockwave of collapsing chakra.
His cloak evaporated.
His limbs failed.
His pathways folded in on themselves.
The partial Ten-Tails infusion shattered.
Madara crumpled to his knees, hands shaking.
His Rinnegan flickered.
Ryusei stood over him.
The battle was over.
Until his final breath, Madara couldn't understand how Ryusei's physique had evolved so far in just a few days, since that time in Konoha, surpassing even what he had achieved from his own Ten Tails state.
Madara's body barely hit the ground before Ryusei moved.
His hand pressed to Madara's chest, and the yin–yang ritual, which he was getting better and better with, ignited instantly.
Of course, Ryusei would never refuse world-shaping power when it stood right in front of him. He could already feel the entire dimension edging toward his grasp in the future.
Lines of shifting crimson patterns crawled across the corpse, coiling around the proto–Ten–Tails energy still trapped inside.
His slug physiology and the yin–yang ritual meshed effortlessly, reconfiguring his body and sharpening his essence through everything he consumed. A self-improving, ever-adapting organism with no ceiling. Exactly the kind of body Ryusei needed.
Madara's eyes widened in the last flicker of consciousness, confusion mixing with disbelief.
Ryusei didn't hesitate.
The ritual pulled everything inward.
Madara's chakra.
Madara's soul remnants.
The proto–Ten–Tails lodged deep inside him.
Ryusei absorbed all of it.
At the same time, a second Ryusei fragment emerged from the trees, carrying Kushina's limp body.
Her breathing was faint, almost extinguished, but a faint pool of chakra still clung to her, some of Kurama's power, unstable and starving for balance.
The fragment placed her beside him.
Orochimaru stepped back, eyes narrowing in fascination.
Ashina and Nagato stood guard as the ritual expanded.
Ryusei extended his left hand to Kushina, letting a layer of his slug physiology flow through his palm.
His adaptive tissues stabilized the remaining Kurama chakra inside her instantly, as she technically died, preventing it from detonating or dissolving.
The chakra settled, trembling, waiting.
Ryusei didn't reject the Ten Tails' power as it tried to surge violently inside him.
He invited it.
He forced the emerging Ten Tails mass and Kurama's fractured half into perfect yin–yang alignment, crushing instability with absolute control.
The ritual pulled everything together into Ryusei's chakra network, filling it like a new sun being dragged into orbit.
Orochimaru's brows twitched.
He felt it.
Ryusei wasn't becoming a jinchuriki in the conventional sense.
He was becoming something else entirely.
Orochimaru's lips parted for a moment, a flicker of envy crossing his eyes.
But he shut it down instantly.
Ryusei's power now sat at a level he couldn't reach even if he spent centuries chasing it.
He would never admit envy where it would be suicidal.
The ritual roared.
Madara's last fragment dissolved.
The proto–Ten–Tails collapsed completely.
Kurama's half-chakra merged into the swirling mass without resistance.
Everything entered Ryusei.
The ground trembled.
The sky bent slightly.
The air stilled, as if the world itself was trying to understand what had just emerged inside it.
Then Ryusei straightened.
His appearance shifted immediately.
His Slug Sage Mode fused with the Ten Tails chakra, turning his skin faintly translucent with swirling, liquid patterns of jade and white.
His veins glowed like rivers of living light.
His chakra didn't leak or pulse; it existed, everywhere, as if the environment itself had become an extension of his presence.
His hair lifted in weightless strands, touched by traces of natural energy and divine pressure.
His eyes turned gray and shimmered with layered concentric rings and soft ripple-like patterns, not Rinnegan, not Tenseigan.
Something new.
A complete, stable, adaptive divine eye.
The ground under him melted and reformed at the same time, adjusting to his density without cracking.
Air currents bent around him instinctively.
The ocean several kilometers away began rising and lowering in slow ripples that matched his breathing.
Nagato swallowed once.
Ashina exhaled sharply.
Orochimaru stared with open hunger he dared not act upon.
Ryusei looked at his own hand.
He flexed his fingers lightly.
The entire island quivered.
He felt it instantly.
He could be anywhere on the planet in a thought.
Touch any point of nature energy.
Sense every living thing.
If he willed it, the world itself could crumble.
The sheer scale of it made even him pause for a second.
"Is this…" he wondered quietly, "…the realm of high-tier Otsutsuki or more at least?"
The answer echoed inside him. Yes. And he was still rising.
There was still the Hamura's Giant Tenseigan in the Moon to take, and elevate his self-made bloodline even higher.