Chapter 225: Nagato Cornered
The light from an open-air detonation dissipated in all directions. Underground, there was nowhere for it to go.
The White Rage Technique's flash filled the passage from wall to wall and wall to ceiling, an absolute white that pressed against closed eyelids and still registered as light. For ordinary eyes, in ordinary darkness — that would have been blindness, temporary or otherwise.
Nagato's Rinnegan and Ritsu's Byakugan were not ordinary eyes.
Ritsu had prepared for it. In Sage Mode, the ophidian cornea from his Ryuchi Cave training extended across his eyes the moment before detonation, a membrane of Otsutsuki-lineage adaptation that filtered the peak intensity before it could saturate his vision. He was already moving as the flash peaked, the White Rage's timing built into his attack sequence.
The Rinnegan's visual tolerance was exceptional. It absorbed the light without destroying itself. But "exceptional tolerance" and "completely unaffected" were not the same thing. Nagato and the Deva Path were both flashed — vision washing out to a white blur for a critical instant, the detail stripped from everything they could see.
The noise was the other half.
In the open air, the White Rage Technique's sonic component dispersed quickly enough that its effect on the body was transient. In a sealed underground passage with stone walls, it didn't disperse at all — it bounced, ricocheted, layered over itself, and concentrated. The frequency drove into skin and muscle and bone like a current, and every nerve ending in Nagato's body received the same simultaneous signal: stop.
His fingers unclenched involuntarily. The chakra accumulation he had been building for Chibaku Tensei scattered in an instant — preparation toward that technique gone in a fraction of a second.
His whole body went stiff with the temporary neural paralysis, and he couldn't stop it.
That was the danger. His vision was compromised, his body wasn't responding, and he knew — had known before the technique landed — that Ritsu would be moving toward him right now.
He pushed chakra to his eyes with the urgency of someone betting their life on a single action. The white fog receded at speed under the forced flow. The shapes around him started resolving — blurs gaining edges, shadows separating from the passage walls.
The shape closest to him was already there.
He saw the silhouette rather than the details. Close. Very close. Arm extended, palm forward.
He had prepared for exactly this contingency. Not the specific technique — he hadn't known about the White Rage — but the general shape of it: a scenario where both visual capability and body control were temporarily stripped, and a fast attacker was in range.
Diamond Chain Jutsu.
Four gold chains erupted from behind him with a sound like struck bell metal, their movement not dependent on hand seals or conscious direction but on chakra intent alone. The chains were dense constructs of compressed chakra with sealing properties embedded in their structure — built for restraint, built to bind things that normal physical or elemental techniques couldn't hold.
They drove toward the incoming shape with a speed that Nagato couldn't consciously guide in his current state but didn't need to — the chains had their own momentum now, and the distance was short enough that conscious guidance was unnecessary.
Ritsu saw them coming.
He recognized the technique in the instant before it reached him — Diamond Chain Jutsu, the Uzumaki clan's innate sealing ability, the one that in another timeline had been used to restrain Tailed Beasts. It appeared in Hyuga clan records as one of the Uzumaki bloodline's most distinctive expressions. He had never seen it deployed against him personally before.
He did not intend to find out what it felt like to be caught in it.
Gale Fist — both hands, sustained output.
Wind Release chakra sheared into the incoming chains in four rapid exchanges, the cutting force meeting the dense chakra-material with a series of impacts that felt less like blocking and more like trying to cut through something that had been designed specifically not to be cut. The chains didn't break. They bent, deflected, redirected — but they didn't break, because sealing chains weren't a standard chakra-material construct and the interaction with his Wind Release was different from what cutting through stone or steel produced.
The stalemate between the chains and his Wind Release held for three seconds.
Three meters apart. Neither of them going anywhere.
Ritsu could see — with the clarity of Byakugan vision that no light condition impaired — that the neural paralysis from the White Rage was fading. Nagato's fingers were moving again. The rigid posture was relaxing degree by degree as the resonance frequency dissipated.
And he could see something else: the accumulation Nagato had been building was gone. The density that had been compressing in those clasped hands was dissipated, the chakra diffused back into his system. Whatever the Chibaku Tensei would have done, it wouldn't be happening today.
"Jiraiya-sensei and Minato-sama are two minutes behind me," Ritsu said. He kept his voice even. "The passage has no oxygen left. We're both running on what's already in our lungs."
He didn't say it as a threat. He said it as a fact.
Nagato said nothing.
"You can't win the sealing technique standoff and build toward that technique at the same time. You've lost one and you're in the middle of the other. The body you're moving with is going to exhaust you before the Deva Path can hold me back long enough to matter."
Still nothing.
"I don't want to kill you," Ritsu said. "That's not a lie or a tactic. A dead Uzumaki is worthless to me."
That got a reaction. Not a large one — a slight shift in the quality of Nagato's silence, a change in the angle of his attention.
"What I want from you is something your bloodline carries. The Uzumaki clan's chakra, the Uzumaki clan's vitality — that's what I'm here for, not your death. Jiraiya-senpai wants you alive for different reasons. Minato-sama wants you alive because dead people can't be held accountable and can't be reformed." Ritsu watched him steadily. "Right now you have three people coming for you who all want you alive, and zero who want you dead. That window doesn't stay open forever."
The Diamond Chains had stopped driving forward. They were still present, still extended, but the pressure behind them had eased — not relaxed, but paused.
Nagato's breathing was visible now. Shallow, controlled, the specific pattern of someone who had done what Ritsu had done and recognized that the combusted air was a clock running down for both of them.
The Deva Path stood between them, unmoving.
"You said your bloodline," Nagato said. His voice was flat but present. "What does that mean."
"It means what it says. The Uzumaki bloodline is something I'm collecting. Not stealing. Not taking against your will — I'd prefer cooperation to the alternative. But I will obtain it one way or another."
From the direction they had come, moving fast — a point of warm chakra that resolved into Minato's signature, followed closely by the slower but still-approaching presence of Jiraiya on the small toad. Both of them navigating the dark on Sage Mode and Flying Thunder God respectively.
Nagato heard the incoming footsteps and presence through the Rinnegan's sensory range.
The oxygen clock was running. His body needed to move before the situation became irreversible.
He could see two outcomes. Attempt to continue fighting in a passage with no breathable air, against three people who all wanted him alive enough to hold back, while the Deva Path couldn't function at full capacity because the Hell Realm needed to repair it and the Hell Realm was not present. Or find a different exit.
Neither option was good.
He had, however, been in worse places than this and found his way through.
The right shoulder mechanism on Nagato's walker extended — not a weapon this time, but a sealed container built into the frame, containing something he had prepared before leaving the tower. He reached into it with one hand, not breaking the Diamond Chain standoff with the other.
"You said you don't want me dead," Nagato said. "Then move aside and let Konan go. Whatever you plan to do with me, she isn't part of it."
Ritsu looked at him.
"Konan is already ahead of you. I can see her." He glanced in the direction Nagato already knew she had gone. "She's alive. She's not being pursued." He paused. "That condition holds as long as this conversation does."
It wasn't a promise. It was an observation of current facts, framed as leverage. Nagato recognized the distinction.
The oxygen in the passage was nearly gone. Ritsu could hold his breath longer than most people alive, the Otsutsuki bloodline's physical endurance extending every baseline human limit significantly. But Nagato's mobility was already compromised by his legs. Hypoxia on top of that, with the mechanical walker's response time already slower than direct combat required, would make him completely unable to function inside a minute.
Minato arrived.
The yellow light of a Flying Thunder God jump flared in the passage and was gone, replaced by Minato standing ten meters back with Jiraiya's small toad visible just behind him. Shima the toad sage sat on Minato's left shoulder now, having transferred her position between carriers during the pursuit.
Jiraiya arrived seconds later, slightly out of breath, and stopped when he saw what was in front of him.
The Diamond Chains suspended between Ritsu and Nagato. The Deva Path standing still. Nagato in his walker, watching all of them.
"Nagato." Jiraiya's voice was rough.
Nagato looked at him.
"Yahiko wouldn't want this," Jiraiya said. He'd already said it once tonight and been shut down. He was saying it again anyway. "He wouldn't want you to throw yourself away on a plan that can't deliver what it promises."
"You don't know what Yahiko would want," Nagato said. "You left."
Jiraiya took that without deflecting it. "I did. And I was wrong to. But you surviving to tomorrow matters more to me right now than being right."
The oxygen was gone. Every person in the passage was now running on held breath and chakra-sustained physiological tolerance, and the margins were narrowing for everyone.
Ritsu exhaled the last air from his lungs, slow and deliberate, and breathed in nothing. His body registered the absence and the Otsutsuki endurance compensated — not indefinitely, but long enough.
Nagato's eyes moved from Jiraiya to Ritsu to Minato and back to Ritsu.
Then the Diamond Chains retracted.
Not an attack. Not a surrender. The chains simply withdrew, coiling back and disappearing, removing the active standoff without replacing it with anything.
Nagato lowered his hands to the walker's controls.
"I'm not giving you anything willingly," he said. "Not the bloodline, not cooperation, not my surrender. But I'm not dying in a tunnel either." His eyes were steady. "So make your next move."
Ritsu was already moving.
Not to attack. He moved sideways, putting himself between Nagato and the direction Konan had gone — not blocking pursuit so much as repositioning, letting Minato and Jiraiya fill the space closer to Nagato while he took the angle.
The geometry of the passage had just become a conversation conducted in body position rather than words.
Four people, limited air, a standoff with no clean resolution.
And somewhere ahead in the dark, Konan was waiting.
****
advance chapters at patreon.com/Eatinpieces COMPLETED