"You know my name?"
The question slipped out before Ōnoki could stop it.
Half a second later he felt stupid. Of course he knew his name. He was the Tsuchikage. Who in the shinobi world didn't?
"I know more than just your name," Sogetsu replied, lips curving faintly.
His gaze ran over Ōnoki with a depth that made the old man's skin crawl.
"For example… the you of the past. And the you of the future."
"My… future?"
Ōnoki's expression twisted.
For a moment, it was almost funny. Was this boy insane?
"I told you already."
Sogetsu leaned forward a little, fingers interlacing.
"I'm a spectator," he said, a smile touching his eyes. "I witness history that's been. And history that hasn't quite happened yet."
Logic told Ōnoki this was impossible.
But something underneath logic—something deep, animal, attuned to danger and truth—stirred restlessly, whispering: It's real. All of it.
"Then…" He hesitated, pride and caution wrestling with curiosity. Curiosity won. "Can you tell me what I'll be like? In the future?"
"I can."
Sogetsu's tone was light.
"But peeking at fate carries a price. Are you prepared to pay it?"
There was a note in his voice—a subtle weight that prickled against Ōnoki's nerves. He swallowed.
"What price?"
"Peeking at fate," Sogetsu said, tapping one finger idly against the table, "is the price."
His gaze didn't waver.
"But before we get to that, we should resolve a more immediate issue."
"…Another issue?"
A bad feeling crawled up Ōnoki's spine.
"Yes. Even if it was under fate's guidance…"
Sogetsu paused deliberately, letting the silence stretch just long enough to bite.
"You still barged into my god-country without permission," he went on, a hint of annoyance sliding into his voice. "Shouldn't you pay for that, too?"
In Ōnoki's sight, the softly glowing figure at the far end of the table shifted.
For one brief instant it was just a seated man, a blur of overlapping shadows.
Then the sun came down.
Light swelled—fierce, blinding, molten. The layered human outlines stretched and expanded, the silhouette swelling impossibly tall. Behind him, wings unfurled—pairs upon pairs of golden wings, twelve in all, each feather etched in marks too complex to follow.
They spread, filling the cathedral, brushing skulls and bone-pillars aside like dust.
A tidal wave of radiance erupted from him. The "sun" behind his form blazed hotter, a roaring star pinned inside the cathedral, its light beating down in suffocating waves.
Divine.
That was the only word Ōnoki's battered mind had left.
"AAAAAAAH—!!"
It felt like being thrown naked onto the surface of the sun.
His blood boiled. His muscles liquefied. He could feel each bone in his body creak and warp under the heat.
Above the stars. Above flesh. Above everything.
The will that pressed down on him wasn't just heavy. It was absolute. An impossibly vast consciousness glanced at him—just looked at him, once—and his mind convulsed.
This is what an ant feels like, he thought dimly, when a giant turns its head.
He couldn't breathe. Couldn't think.
It was like being dropped into a hurricane inside a volcano inside an abyss. His soul was a little boat on a black ocean, tossed and tossed and tossed again.
But Ōnoki of Both Scales had not lived this long by breaking easily.
His teeth ground together.
The will that had carried him through wars, rebellions, the era of Madara and Hashirama, the rise of new monsters—that stubborn, rocky core—held.
He felt himself scoured.
Every heartbeat grated. Every second stripped something away.
But he did not shatter.
Not completely.
The light ebbed, retreating like a tide.
The bone cathedral slid back into focus.
"From a human standpoint," Sogetsu's voice drifted over the table, calm once more, "you barely passed."
Ōnoki's vision cleared.
He was drenched in cold sweat. His clothes clung to him. For a second he frantically patted at himself—face, chest, arms, legs.
No burns. No missing limbs. No charred holes.
The pain was gone.
What remained was the echo of it, lodged deep in his bones.
Had it all been a dream?
"Consider the price for trespassing paid," Sogetsu said.
Outwardly, the young man was the picture of composure.
Inwardly, he let out a slow, controlled breath.
Using Sequence 5 power while forcibly borrowing the Sequence 3 authority of Hermes's brass candlestick wasn't something you did casually. Even as a Spectator, even with preparation, it put strain on his spirituality—weight that sat on the soul like a wet cloak.
But he was of the Audience pathway. Smoothing down ripples after the fact was what he did best.
Adjust. Observe. Adjust again.
Once he pacified the restless parts of his spirit, he looked up again.
Ōnoki still looked shaken.
He'd faced Uchiha Madara himself in the past—and yet even that monster had never made him feel fear like this. Not this clean. Not this direct. Not this close to being ripped apart at the seams.
"Are you… a god?" Ōnoki asked finally.
His voice had lost some of its usual gravel and arrogance.
He'd combed through every word, every concept he knew, and "god" was the only label that even came close.
"No. I'm not a god."
Sogetsu shook his head.
"I already told you. I'm just a spectator."
Ōnoki didn't believe a word of it.
A human didn't do that.
He filed away his doubts and carefully locked them behind caution. Whatever this being was, calling it "god" in his own head made it easier to treat with the appropriate level of care.
His pride, for once, shut up.
He never wanted to experience that burning, soul-deep agony again. Once had been enough to haunt his dreams for the rest of his life.
"Please…" Ōnoki said, choosing each word. "Let me see the future."
He'd thought it through.
He couldn't resist the lure.
If there was a chance to see what was coming—to catch even one glimpse of the storms ahead—and if that knowledge could help Iwagakure survive…
Then no price was too high.
"For the sake of my village," he said quietly, "I'm willing to pay whatever it costs."
"Good."
Sogetsu nodded.
"Then I'll show you."
Dream twisted.
The cathedral fell away.
Ōnoki felt himself drop.
Not down, exactly—but inward, sideways, into some impossible curve.
He plummeted through a lightless whirlpool, tumbled into a tunnel of color that didn't belong to any spectrum his eyes recognized. Streaks of light flashed past—each trail carrying a fragment of image, a sliver of sound.
Shadows carved themselves into his mind.
He saw a war.
Not a skirmish, not a regional conflict, but a war that swallowed the entire shinobi world. Blood. Fire. Broken banners. A sky burned black with smoke.
He saw the dead rise.
Bodies he knew were corpses—cold, lifeless—stood and moved, eyes empty, hands forming the seals for jutsu they had used in life. The Edo Tensei dragged soldiers out of the Pure Land and threw them back onto the battlefield like tools.
He saw a white tide.
Countless figures, pale and faceless, erupted from the ground, colliding with shinobi on every front. White Zetsu, multiplied into an army.
He saw a nightmare.
One man, standing alone against tens of thousands—cutting through them like wheat. Meteors falling. Forests leveled. A single pair of eyes looking down on entire armies as if they were insects.
Even as a silhouette, even blurred by the fog of future, Ōnoki recognized him.
Uchiha Madara.
He saw a tree.
A colossal, impossibly tall tree thrust from ruined earth, roots cracking apart the land. Its branches stretched up into a sky painted with a blood-red moon.
The sight of that crimson moon sent a chill through him that had nothing to do with chakra.
That's… the future?
Ōnoki's mind went blank.
The scraps of vision didn't line up neatly. There were gaps between every piece, scenes missing, context cut away.
But even in fragments, one truth was deafening:
The shinobi world was heading toward a catastrophe.
Not a war between two villages. A war that would drag everyone in. A war drenched in blood and madness and something worse, something that felt… wrong.
"Tell me," Ōnoki said hoarsely. "How do I stop this?"
More than anything, he did not want to see Madara again.
That man had branded fear into his bones—fear that hadn't faded in decades. Now, seeing that same monster standing at the center of future carnage, Ōnoki's gut screamed that the disaster and Madara were tied together.
The scenes of the great war, the rain of corpses, that towering tree and the blood moon… everything in him shrank away from it.
His instincts told him: That is not something this world should see.
"It's possible," Sogetsu said mildly.
He did not explain how.
Ōnoki blinked.
He waited.
Nothing else came.
"…That's it?" he demanded after a few seconds. "You say 'it's possible' and then stop?"
"Time's up," Sogetsu replied.
His expression turned a shade more distant, a shade more amused.
"You should be heading back."
He lifted a hand slightly, as if to wave the old Tsuchikage away like smoke.
"Wait, wait!"
Panic punched through Ōnoki's chest.
If you'd asked him at the beginning of all this, he would've done anything to escape. Run, flee this place, and never speak of it again.
But after what he'd just seen?
He couldn't walk away with only half an answer.
As he fumbled for words, his eyes snagged on something he'd ignored until now.
The long bronze table.
Seats lined both sides—heavy chairs of ancient metal, their surfaces scarred and worn, each one slightly different. Most were empty.
A spark lit in his brain.
"The seats!" he blurted. "On this table—besides your place… are there others?"
Finally noticed.
Sogetsu's lips twitched.
He hid the satisfaction and answered in a calm, matter-of-fact tone.
"Yes," he said. "There are a few others like you—people tangled up in fate—who, by coincidence, found their way into my god-country. For various reasons, with various wishes, they chose to join an organization I founded."
"Your organization?" Ōnoki seized on the words, heart hammering. "Then… can I join it as well?"
He almost held his breath.
"Of course."
Sogetsu smiled.
"The organization I founded is called the Twilight Hermits Society."
Ōnoki of Both Scales, Third Tsuchikage of Iwagakure, floated in a cathedral made of bones inside another man's dream and realized, with a strange, grim certainty:
He'd just stepped onto a road that left the shinobi world far, far behind.
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