In the dead of night, when everything was silent and still, Madara was already walking through the forest steeped in a mysterious gloom.
He looked up, gazing intently at the bright full moon in the sky, no longer remembering when was the last time he saw moonlight outside like this.
Maybe it was yesterday, maybe last year, or perhaps decades ago.
Throughout his long years of memory, ever since the day he faked his death and slipped away, only dull and monotonous darkness had kept him company—occasionally broken by the grumbling and playful chatter of White Zetsu, to help pass these endless, boring days.
Madara breathed deeply; the fresh air outside made every cell in his body seem to leap with joy, as if experiencing a rebirth.
Though his body was still unimaginably old, his steps unnaturally slow—like a tortoise crawling on the ground—the sharp, intimidating gleam in his eyes remained undiminished.
The gaze of the Sharingan penetrated through layers of forest leaves, already seeing the approach of the enemy.
Three kilometers away.
Hakushi and his two companions were rapidly closing in on Madara's location; Madara's chakra in this region was as clear as a firefly in the dark, under Hakushi's Perception Ninjutsu and Ayane's Byakugan scan.
Both Hakushi and Ayane had pinpointed Madara's location and were keenly aware of the distance separating them.
But before that, quite a few obstacles had appeared around them.
Humanoid beings, completely coated in white as if painted—White Zetsu.
Not just one, but a dense sea of them, surging in to surround them.
The three raced forward swiftly, with Ruri in the center, Hakushi on the left, and Ayane on the right.
"Hey there, good evening! Had dinner yet?"
"No need to rush, you know."
"Stay and have some fun with us! We're super amusing conversation partners."
"Wow, such a cold response, kinda hurts my feelings."
...
Their surroundings rang with the unending banter and laughter of the White Zetsu.
These guys were total chatterboxes, their mouths running Sop nonstop.
And they had no sense of timing—even at a tense, life-or-death moment like this, they still didn't act serious, just laughing away, as if they actually had some comedic talent.
"How many of them?"
Ruri asked.
She wasn't the team's scout, but the most aggressive combat specialist among the three.
But seeing the White Zetsu close in all around, she knew their numbers were anything but few.
Ayane, Byakugan already activated, quickly answered Ruri's question: "Three thousand."
She gave a hefty estimate of the enemy count.
Not an exact number, just a rough valuation.
After all, with so many enemies, even the Byakugan couldn't get a precise count in a short time.
"Three thousand, huh?"
Ruri murmured to herself.
It was certainly an intimidating number.
If it was any ordinary ninja, faced with that horde, they would have already surrendered to despair.
Even Ruri wouldn't dare say she could ignore an enemy of this size.
But this time…it wasn't just one of them. All three were advancing together.
"That's just barely enough for us to cut loose."
As a warm-up before the big battle, Ruri felt her blood beginning to boil with excitement.
The Uchiha Clan's ancient battle-hungry nature surged within her—faced with such a horde, she couldn't wait to wipe out all these White Zetsu in one go.
Without hesitation, Ruri straightened her back slightly, and in almost an instant completed an intricate flurry of hand seals. Her chakra gathered at a speed beyond common sense, and she opened her mouth:
"Fire Style: Great Fire Extinguishing!"
What she spat forth was a sea of flames surging like tidal waves, sweeping everything before her.
The noisy, annoying chatter of the White Zetsu vanished in her ears, drowned out by the roar of the firestorm that engulfed all the hubbub.
The White Zetsu were swept up by the inferno-induced gale, igniting in the sea of flames, bodies catching fire before all, one after another, were reduced to charred corpses—then, after the flames swept through, only blackened remains were left drifting from the sky to the ground.
The trees along the way were incinerated in the fire, the terrain turned into a scorched plain, jet black and devastated, stretching up to fifty meters ahead.
Roughly fifty White Zetsu died in the sea of flames.
They had no time to escape, no power to resist.
Though numerous, each White Zetsu was weak—among equal numbers, they were worse than ninja from a minor country, let alone standing up to a great nation's military-strength Ninja Squad.
Were that not so, Madara would have acted long ago, instead of scheming from the shadows still.
Even so, to manufacture so many White Zetsu, it's impossible that they were created at random—there must have been a heavy price paid.
From Hakushi's body sprang several shadowy long blades, decapitating one White Zetsu after another as they tried to break in from his side.
The Shadow Blades moved so fast that even a Jonin could barely evade, let alone these degraded White Zetsu Soldiers.
They couldn't even see the blur of the Shadow Blades as they slashed through the air—before they knew it, they had already been sent off to the next world.
"What the hell is that?!"
Failing to find an opening on Hakushi's side, the White Zetsu couldn't understand what sort of attack Hakushi had used; their dynamic vision couldn't keep up with the trajectory of the Shadow Blade at all.