Countless sheets of paper whirled and circled around her body.
"This is Nagato's sanctuary… and Yahiko's grave." Her voice was icy cold.
"No matter who you are—you will not take another step forward."
Minato looked at the woman before him.
He still remembered her.
The Rain Village orphan Jiraiya-sensei had spoken of long ago—the girl who once held such innocent dreams.
"Konan," Minato's tone was gentle, "give it up. Nagato has already lost."
"As long as we're still alive, we haven't lost." Konan replied faintly.
There was not the slightest wavering in her eyes.
This was the battle she staked everything on.
It was the final offering she could make to protect the dream of her dearest friends.
Pain's Six Paths had been destroyed.
Nagato's strongest shield was gone.
Now, she alone stood as the last wall before Nagato.
Her life had long since been placed beyond concern.
Without another word, she brought her hands together before her chest, forming a seal.
Beneath her feet, the metal corridor shook violently.
Massive structural plates split open from the center and rumbled aside.
Below was no longer a bottomless urban gorge.
Instead, an endless ocean of paper stretched beyond the horizon.
Every single sheet was specially made, inscribed with the formulae of explosive tags.
Six hundred billion sheets.
It was a number that would make the scalp of anyone who understood it go numb.
This was the trap she had spent years of painstaking effort preparing—
a jutsu powerful enough to erase Amegakure from the map.
It had originally been prepared for a very specific target.
Now, she would use it to bury the invaders before her.
This was everything she had—her ultimate art,
the funeral dirge she prepared for Nagato and Yahiko.
She believed that in the face of this technique, any single individual was insignificant.
No one could withstand ten full minutes of continuous, chained explosions.
No defense could possibly survive destruction on this scale.
"Let this sea of paper… be your funeral pyre!"
In that moment, Konan released every last drop of chakra in her body, pouring it into the paper ocean below.
The chain reaction began.
The first explosive tag detonated, its flash igniting the thousands upon thousands of sheets around it.
The tide of explosions spread in geometric progression.
A field of white light surged upward from below, swallowing the darkness in an instant.
A devastating shockwave erupted skyward, carrying enough force to pulverize everything.
She was fully prepared to die together with her enemies.
This was her duty as "Angel"—
the final act she could perform to guard the legacy of Nagato and Yahiko.
Watching the rising inferno, she even felt a kind of release.
The enemy would perish with her, reduced to ash in that blinding radiance.
The breath of death rushed toward them.
Minato appeared in front of Shinju, his movements simple and precise.
He extended his right hand.
A gigantic golden formula unfolded in front of him, forming a semi-transparent space–time barrier.
The flood of destruction slammed into the barrier.
Konan's face went rigid.
The apocalyptic shuddering of earth and sky she'd envisioned—the deafening roar that should have torn heaven and earth apart—never came.
The explosive force that could flatten an entire village was twisted and absorbed the instant it touched the golden barrier, then shunted away into another space.
The colossal torrent of energy vanished without a trace, as though it had never existed.
Down below, the explosions raged on and the flames still soared into the sky,
but all that destructive power could not break through that thin golden veil of light.
The blinding radiance of the detonation lit Minato's face, yet his expression never changed.
Even the howling shockwaves failed to stir the hem of his cloak.
How is that possible…
Konan stared at the impossible scene before her, her body frozen in place.
Her mind went completely blank, unable to process what was happening.
Six hundred billion explosive tags.
Ten minutes of uninterrupted detonations, enough energy to obliterate a nation.
She had run the numbers countless times.
This was absolute power—something she believed no one could withstand.
Yet this power had been brushed aside so casually.
The man hadn't even taken a single step. He had simply manifested one technique.
Her ultimate art… had been reduced to nothing more than a fireworks display for the enemy.
The last of her chakra was gone. Strength drained from every muscle.
Her knees buckled, and she collapsed powerlessly to the ground.
Head bowed, she waited silently for the end.
A hand came to rest gently on top of her head—
and a warm, gentle voice sounded beside her ear.
That voice…
She had heard it countless times in her dreams,
had replayed it again and again while awake—
It was a voice that could never appear here and now.
"Konan… you've worked so hard."
Her whole body trembled violently as she snapped her head up.
An orange-haired young man stood before her, wearing the most familiar smile in her memories—bright, cheerful, and warm.
Yahiko.
"Ya… Yahiko?" Konan's lips quivered.
She thought it was a hallucination brought on by total chakra exhaustion—
the final dream before death.
What a cruel genjutsu this would be…
To show her the person she missed most, at the moment of her greatest despair.
"It's me." The young man smiled. "I'm back, Konan."
The solid warmth of his touch,
that familiar voice—
Together they told her a single, undeniable truth.
This was not an illusion.
Not a dream.
Konan could no longer hold back her emotions.
She threw herself into Yahiko's arms, clinging to him with all her remaining strength.
Over ten years of suppressed grief, pain, and longing burst free in that instant,
pouring out as sobs that echoed through the rain.
Shinju stood not far away, quietly watching without interrupting the reunion.
Before coming here, he had used a portion of his power to bring back Yahiko—
Akatsuki's original founder—in a special form.
Defeating a person's body was easy.
But changing a person's will required something they simply could not refuse.
For Konan and Nagato, Yahiko was exactly that—
the one existence they could never turn away from.
This was not mercy.
It was a more thorough form of conquest.
Nagato had seen Konan's six-hundred-billion-tag sea of explosions…
He had seen that sea of paper easily neutralized by the blond man in the sky.
And then he saw it—
the friend who should have died long ago, whose body he had personally buried…
standing alive before Konan, holding her in his arms.
After his faith was shattered at the roots, an immense hollowness and confusion washed over Nagato.
Everything he had done—
all the pain he had endured,
all the slaughter he had wrought—
It was all for Yahiko's ideal.
For the birth of a world without war, the world Yahiko had dreamed of.
He had proclaimed himself a god,
trying to make the world understand peace through pain.
He had even told himself that Yahiko's death was a necessary sacrifice—
the labor pains of a new world.
He twisted Yahiko's ideals,
fashioning his corpse into the strongest Pain,
using that illusion to numb himself,
whispering that Yahiko had never truly left.
But now Yahiko himself stood there, alive before his eyes—
brought back by his enemies.
Then everything he had clung to through all these years…
All that he had sacrificed—
What did it amount to?
A cosmic joke?
He had forced Konan to shoulder the crushing burden of being the guardian,
while he hid in the shadows, clinging to life—
and all of it, everything he did,
had been for someone now standing there, alive and breathing.
The moment Nagato saw Yahiko,
his will completely collapsed.
The agony from the black receivers jutting from his back
was nothing—
not even one ten-thousandth of the pain he felt as his faith crumbled to dust.
(End of Chapter)
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