Chapter 541: Late-Game Power
"Get out of my way, you absolute idiot!"
Young Sasuke's voice shot upward in pitch, and the cold, closed-off tone returned so quickly it was like the protective outburst a moment ago had never happened.
"Leave! This has nothing to do with you!"
He was still wrenching his arm, still trying to break free, and he aimed the shout equally at adult Naruto and at the orange-clad figure standing nearby.
Young Naruto was not listening.
"Stop saying stupid things!"
His eyes were locked onto young Sasuke with a stubbornness that was absolute. He was not going to look away.
"I am not letting you go to Orochimaru! He wants your body as a vessel!"
"So what?!"
Young Sasuke's dark eyes were burning with something frantic and desperate. "Can staying with you and the rest of your so-called Konoha comrades give me strength?!"
He threw another punch at adult Naruto as he shouted -- his free hand driving forward with real speed and power.
Adult Naruto tilted his body to one side, and the fist passed through empty air.
Another punch. Another effortless lean away.
A third. Still nothing.
It was like watching a small child try to hit an adult who wasn't particularly interested in engaging -- all the effort in the world, and none of it landing.
Adult Naruto moved without any strain whatsoever, his face -- nine parts Naruto, by any measure -- remaining completely calm throughout.
"And you!" Young Sasuke's teeth were clenched. "Impostor!" He kept twisting, kept pulling. "Don't push your luck!"
"You want power," adult Naruto said.
It was a statement, not a question. And his tone was the particular tone of someone with a great deal of patience watching a child throw a tantrum.
Young Sasuke went still for just a second.
"That's right!" He snapped back, voice climbing higher and colder simultaneously. "So what exactly are you trying to do?! Even if you have that face -- if you get in my way, I'll kill you!"
The words had barely landed when young Sasuke flinched involuntarily.
A killing intent hit him from nowhere.
It arrived without warning, without wind-up, without any signal at all. It was cold and enormous and absolute, and young Sasuke's knees nearly buckled beneath him. He caught himself -- but only barely, muscles locking against the instinct to collapse -- and stood with his lungs heaving and his face gone white.
This killing intent --
He had felt killing intent before.
On the mission to the Land of Waves, Zabuza Momochi had projected a killing intent that had made the air around him feel like blades. At the time, Sasuke had thought it was the most frightening thing he had ever encountered.
He understood now that he had been wrong about that. He had felt Orochimaru's killing intent since then. He had thought Orochimaru set a ceiling.
But the killing intent he was feeling right now made Zabuza look like nothing. Made Orochimaru look like nothing. The gap between this and anything he had experienced before was the gap between a mountain and a grain of sand.
Who was doing this?!
Young Sasuke's eyes swept the gorge in every direction.
There was nothing. Nobody. Only the adult man in front of him. Only young Naruto at a distance. No other face anywhere.
Adult Naruto looked at him -- this young Sasuke with his back against the world -- and felt an unavoidable wave of something like sorrow.
Nine parts tsundere. One part warmth.
He had just shown genuine protective fury for young Naruto, and now he was back to acting like a closed door. A good kid, bent into this shape by his brother.
"So then." Adult Naruto's voice was even. "Let's try something. Would power like this be enough for your revenge?"
He reached out with his senses.
A hundred-mile radius of forest in every direction, completely uninhabited. No villages, no homes, no one at all -- only Satsuki, concealed somewhere in the shadows.
No one would be hurt.
Adult Naruto raised one hand.
Chakra began to gather.
The color of the sphere forming in his palm was wrong. Not the usual blue. Not the bright, vivid color he typically used.
Black.
A deep, consuming black -- the kind of color that seemed to swallow the light around it rather than reflecting it back.
The black sphere rotated in his palm, encircled by a faint luminous ring that drifted around it like a planetary halo. It was small -- no bigger than a fist.
But the pressure it exerted on the air made the atmosphere over the entire Valley of the End feel heavier.
"Rasengan."
Adult Naruto named the technique.
Young Sasuke went still, because he recognized it.
The last technique Naruto had used in their previous encounter -- the form was the same, the signature was the same, though that version had been nothing compared to the black sphere in front of him now. But it had been the exact moment he realized Naruto's strength had already surpassed his own.
"Black... Rasengan?"
Young Naruto's voice came from nearby, his eyes fixed on the rotating black sphere in the adult man's palm, enormous and unblinking.
The sphere was small. But that depthless black, those orbital rings, the pressure it was broadcasting -- something in him recognized it as dangerous in a way that bypassed thought entirely.
"Who are you?!" he shouted. "Why do you use techniques like the perverted hermit and the Fourth Hokage?! Wait -- why do you look so much like me?!"
He was already moving into a ready stance.
"You've had hold of Sasuke this whole time! What are you trying to do?!"
The black sphere, in the meantime, had begun to drift upward.
It lifted from adult Naruto's palm slowly, floating out over the gorge, moving toward the empty forest in the distance.
And then young Sasuke stopped.
He went quiet.
He stopped struggling. Stopped shouting. Stopped trying to pull his arm free.
Because he understood what was about to happen.
"It's been a while since I've used this." Adult Naruto watched the black sphere drift away, speaking quietly. "This level should be enough."
The words finished.
And the world came apart.
A white light swallowed everything.
It began as a point of unbearable brightness -- like a sun rising on the horizon at ten times normal speed. But the expansion was faster than any horizon, faster than any eyes could track --
In the next instant, it had become a wave of pure white consuming everything in every direction.
The shockwave radiated outward at impossible speed.
In its path, the earth tore open like wet paper, great masses of it hurled skyward. Trees that had stood for centuries vaporized in thousandths of a second -- not burning, not shattering, simply ceasing to exist, leaving not even ash behind. Mountains warped and collapsed in the heat, solid granite flowing red, spraying in every direction like volcanic ejecta.
The molten rock was caught immediately by the shockwave and scattered further, a rain of fire reaching still further outward.
The light was too bright. It was impossible to look at.
The sound was too vast. For a moment, the world went deaf, leaving only a high, ringing tone in its wake.
The heat was too extreme. Even at this distance, both young Sasuke and young Naruto felt it press against their skin like an open furnace.
Time passed.
A second. A minute. It was impossible to be certain.
Finally.
The light faded. The shockwave stilled. The world settled back into silence.
Young Sasuke and young Naruto stood where they had been, motionless.
They looked toward where the forest had been.
Where, a moment ago, there had been a continuous sweep of dense woodland and rolling hills --
Nothing remained.
Only a crater. Enormous. Bottomless. The diameter of it stretched for what had to be dozens of kilometers in every direction. Its edges were precise -- cut clean, as though something had simply removed that portion of the earth. The bottom was darkness, too deep to see.
No forest. No mountains. Nothing.
Young Naruto stood with his mouth open and his eyes unblinking, the animation gone out of his face. He looked like someone who had just had the floor disappear beneath him.
He had never seen power like this. Had never imagined that anything like this was possible. Even the Hokages -- every Hokage across all of history -- could they have done this?
He had no answer.
And young Sasuke --
He finally stopped fighting.
He stood where adult Naruto held him by the wrist, still and silent, looking at the crater. Looking at the obliterated earth. Looking at the space where a mountain range had been.
The first blankness passed.
And in the depths of his eyes, something ignited.
Not despair. Not fear. Not any of the emotions that might have been expected.
It was fire. It was want. An intense, burning, forward-leaning desire directed entirely at the adult man holding his arm -- a desire that had nothing complicated in it and nothing ambiguous.
He wanted that power.
He needed that power.
With power like that, he could get his revenge. With power like that, he could destroy that person. With power like that, he would never have to walk through Orochimaru's door, never have to follow the dark path he had set himself on.
He looked up at adult Naruto. At those calm blue eyes, undisturbed by what had just happened. At the face of a man who had just erased a piece of the earth's surface the way someone might brush dust off a table.
The light in young Sasuke's eyes burned with something he had never felt before.
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