Chapter 224: Sage Art: Inorganic Reincarnation
The proxy body gave out.
Tatsuhata's duplicate had been running on borrowed time since the Mist engagement, and the final drain pushed it past the threshold. With no chakra left to sustain the consciousness inhabiting it, the connection simply severed. Tatsuhata's awareness snapped back across the distance to his real body, still seated on the stone outcrop in the canyon between the Land of Taki and the Land of Iron.
The body left behind underwent its final transformation — the prisoner's original face reasserting itself as the chakra holding the duplicate form dissolved. What remained hanging from Ritsu's white bones was a corpse. Seven orifices bleeding, features locked in a rictus, entirely without life.
Minato appeared at Ritsu's side and looked up at it.
"What technique was that? That wasn't actually Tatsuhata?"
"Anyone with a Mangekyō Sharingan isn't that easy to kill. We haven't even seen his Susanoo yet." Ritsu shook his head.
'Black Zetsu and Uchiha Madara chose their pieces carefully. Madara may be dead, but Black Zetsu is almost certainly watching over Tatsuhata constantly. The moment Tatsuhata faces a truly lethal threat, Black Zetsu will use White Zetsu to pull him out.'
He had already moved his attention past the corpse. Tatsuhata was a problem for another day. Nagato was the priority right now.
"This technique is probably a Rinnegan ability. But that's not what matters now." Ritsu looked at Minato directly. "We need to reach Jiraiya-senpai. If we take too long, this whole operation falls apart."
He activated the Byakugan and pushed his vision downward — through the churning water, through layers of rock and earth, into the vast underground pipe network below the Hidden Rain Village. The passages were enormous, constructed on an industrial scale, and deep within them he could see the chase still unfolding.
Jiraiya was falling behind. His smaller summoned toad was fast for its size, but the centipede carrying Nagato and Konan was pulling steadily ahead. If it had too much more time, the gap would become unclosable.
"Jiraiya-senpai is losing ground. If this drags on, Nagato escapes."
"Then we move now."
Minato grabbed Ritsu's arm and activated the Flying Thunder God Technique, navigating to Jiraiya's kunai — the marked tri-pronged kunai that Jiraiya carried, its seal acting as a reliable coordinate anchor. Space folded around them and they materialized in absolute darkness.
Complete blackness. No light whatsoever. The darkness underground was not the partial darkness of an overcast night — it was total, the kind that pressed against the eyes with physical weight.
Minato stood still and didn't try to move. His sensory capabilities were excellent for a non-sensor type, but without visual reference he was essentially navigating by chakra detection alone.
"Minato, you made it."
Jiraiya's voice came from nearby. Minato turned toward it and saw nothing.
"Jiraiya-sensei? I can't see you."
"I know. You need to enter Sage Mode. Your normal senses won't cut it down here."
The small voice of a toad — high and female, accompanied by a faint croaking — piped up from somewhere near Jiraiya. "That's right, little Minato. Sage Mode is the only way. A sage's eyes can pierce this darkness."
"Shima-sennin." Minato's voice carried a wry note. "My Sage Mode still isn't clean enough. Getting there takes time we might not have."
"Leave the pursuit to me," Ritsu said.
His Byakugan had already mapped the passage network in every direction. The darkness was irrelevant to him. He could see the centipede's heat signature, Nagato's mechanical walker, Konan's paper wings folded for speed — all of it perfectly clear two kilometers ahead and pulling further away every second.
"You and Jiraiya-senpai follow when you're ready. I'll make sure Nagato doesn't disappear."
Minato agreed without hesitation. There was no better option. Ritsu's Byakugan made the darkness a non-issue and his Wind Release Chakra Mode would carry him through these passages faster than any pursuit technique Jiraiya could manage on a small toad.
"Go," Minato said.
Wind Release Chakra Mode.
The wind erupted around Ritsu with an immediacy that sent a shockwave of air pressure rolling back down the tunnel behind him. He was already gone — not running so much as flowing through the passage like a current of air given human shape, the pale chakra wind around his body illuminating the walls in faint blue-white as he moved.
Nagato's Rinnegan detected him immediately.
"Again."
He looked back through the Hell Realm's borrowed vision and saw the light coming — not the warm yellow of torchlight, but the cold pale glow of Wind Release chakra cutting through the dark like something alive.
"Konan." His voice was quiet. "Keep going. Don't stop."
"What about you?"
"I'll catch up."
He had already made the decision before she asked the question. Running was no longer viable. The Yellow Flash would follow Ritsu eventually, and with two pursuers in these tunnels — one of whom could navigate the dark perfectly and the other of whom could cover any distance in an instant — there was no version of this that ended with Nagato and Konan simply outrunning the problem. It needed to be stopped.
The centipede slowed. It stopped.
Konan's paper wings stilled and she descended onto the centipede's broad back.
"Are you sure about this?"
"We fight here. One hard blow — something that takes their will to chase completely off the table. Then I come find you." He paused. "Go ahead. Find somewhere to wait. I'll come."
She looked at him for a moment, or rather looked at the darkness where she knew he was, and then moved forward without argument. She trusted him. She had always trusted him. He hadn't done enough to deserve it but he had never wasted it either.
Her footsteps faded. The darkness absorbed her.
Nagato and the Deva Path turned to face the incoming light.
The fight arrived quickly.
Ritsu came in fast and didn't slow down, his Wind Release chakra throwing pale light ahead of him as he closed the distance. He saw Nagato stop, saw the Deva Path position itself at the front, saw that Konan was no longer present.
"Not running anymore?" he called out.
"Being chased by the Yellow Flash makes running pointless eventually," Nagato answered from behind the Deva Path. His voice was measured. "Better to settle this here. Win or lose, at least the outcome is final."
"You sound confident."
"I have the Rinnegan."
The Deva Path raised its hand.
Almighty Push.
Ritsu met it with Eight Trigrams: Rotation — full power, no restraint, the chakra barrier spinning at maximum velocity. The repulsive force struck the rotating wall and rebounded, the collision sending vibrations through the entire passage. The Deva Path stumbled backward, absorbing the kickback, and crashed into the wall of the tunnel before finding its footing.
Ritsu stood in the same spot, Rotation fading.
Nagato kept his expression neutral. He had known about the Rotation. He was stalling.
Chibaku Tensei required accumulation. He had been building toward it since before the chase ended. Interrupt the buildup and it reset. Sustain it without interruption long enough and it became something that could level the Hidden Rain Village down to its foundations.
But the Deva Path needed to hold the line until the accumulation was complete.
Ritsu's Byakugan watched the chakra building in Nagato's clasped palms — a compression that was already visible as heat distortion even through the rock and distance. The density of it was remarkable. He had known, intellectually, that Nagato's chakra reserves were immense. Watching them actually compress toward a single release was a different kind of knowing.
If that completed, the consequences would be catastrophic for everyone in range including the Rain ninja still above ground.
"Thinking you can buy enough time?" Ritsu said. His voice was light, conversational.
"I don't need to hide it," Nagato replied. "You can see it building. The question is whether you can break through Pain's defense before it's ready."
He wasn't wrong as an assessment. The Almighty Push blocked direct approach. The Rotation could deflect it but couldn't break through to reach Nagato. Every second of exchange was a second of accumulation.
Ritsu activated Sage Mode.
The transformation was quiet and immediate — none of the muscle distortion that incompletely mastered sage transformations produced, none of the snake-scale spread across his skin. His eyes changed: the iris deepened to a saturated purple, the sclera shifting to catch the ambient chakra in the air. The sage marking settled like shadow beneath his eyes.
The natural energy that flooded through him was immense, adding its weight to the chakra he already carried.
"Sage Mode?" Nagato recognized it. Jiraiya's student would recognize Jiraiya's techniques. "You think that changes what's coming?"
"I think it gives you a new reason to pay attention."
Sage Art: Inorganic Reincarnation.
The walls of the passage moved.
Stone twisted. Steel support struts bent. The inactive material of the tunnel itself seemed to wake — warping, flexing, reshaping spontaneously into forms it had no right to assume. The rock split into sharp points and drove at the Deva Path and Nagato simultaneously from every surface, ceiling and floor and walls all at once, a sudden cage of improvised spears closing from every direction.
It was not Earth Style. Earth Style could not do this — not with this responsiveness, not with this simultaneous coverage from all directions, not from material that hadn't been chakra-infused in advance. Nagato recognized the distinction immediately.
The Deva Path's Universal Pull activated, yanking Nagato and the walker rapidly backward and away from the immediate threat zone, the inorganic spears closing through empty air where they had just been. The mechanical walker was riddled with holes. The centipede that had been stationary nearby was skewered thoroughly, its movement capability destroyed.
No direct harm done. But the accumulation had required both hands to be free and steady — and in the moment of evasion, the compression in Nagato's palms had partially scattered.
"Not Earth Style," Nagato said, recalibrating.
"No. And there's more where that came from." Ritsu rolled his neck once. "The sage techniques from Ryuchi Cave work differently from what you've seen out of Jiraiya. Today you get to experience the difference."
The inorganic material around them continued to shift — not aggressively, not driving toward a target, just present and moving, a constant background reminder that the tunnel itself was no longer neutral ground.
Sage Art: White Rage Technique.
Ritsu opened his mouth.
A dark crimson dragon made of chakra uncoiled from his throat — not a fire technique, not an animal summoning, but pure condensed energy given form, its claws wrapped around a black orb that pulsed with contained power. It moved through the passage without aiming at Nagato or the Deva Path directly, instead circling and then folding itself around the black orb, compressing inward.
Then the orb detonated.
The explosion in the sealed underground passage was a different category of event from an open-air detonation. The light it produced was absolute — total white in every direction, every shadow burned away for a full second, brighter than direct sunlight by a significant margin. And the sound that followed was not a boom but a sustained screech, a physical frequency that didn't just register in the ears but penetrated the body itself, every nerve ending in skin and muscle and bone receiving the same signal simultaneously.