The world-ending jutsu chakra flickered, spluttered, and finally died with the pathetic hiss of a spent firework.
Toneri floated three feet above the lunar dust, his tattered Otsutsuki robes fluttering in a breeze that shouldn't have existed.
Naruto's last punch had done a number on him—one side of the lunar prince's face had already begun to swell into a magnificent purple bruise, and his regal white hair looked like a bird's nest hit by a lightning strike.
He wiped a streak of blood from his pale lip with the back of a shaking hand, looking down at us with a sneer that didn't quite land.
Naruto stood a few yards ahead of me, his classic orange jumpsuit caked in moon dust and grime.
His forehead protector sat crookedly on his head, the metal plate scratched and dulled from the fight.
He looked exactly like what he was: a loud, exhausted thirteen-year-old kid who had just punched a god in the mouth.
Beside him, Hinata stood with her hands clasped tightly over her heart.
Her short dark bob was windswept, and her lavender eyes looked wide and glassy against the pale cream of her jacket.
"Give it up, Toneri!" Naruto shouted, shaking a fist at the sky. He looked genuinely concerned, in that weirdly aggressive way of his. "Come back to Earth and pay for your crimes! We have a really nice prison back in the village! It's got a communal lounge and everything! I think there's even a TV that gets, like, three channels!"
Toneri scoffed, his neck muscles cording.
He straightened his high collar, desperately clutching at a shred of his regal dignity while his eyes darted around the crater.
"You humans..." Toneri sneered, his voice beginning to tremble with a very specific, very frantic energy. "You ruin everything. You turn chakra into war. You turn bonds into weakness. You turn perfectly good world-ending prophecies into... into ostrich chases and filler arcs!"
He began to float higher, the artificial gravity of the moon castle warping and groaning around him.
"I will never submit to your 'Bureaucracy of Fire'!" Toneri announced. He struck a pose, his chest heaving, his throat thrown back. "I won't let you have the satisfaction of processing me through your legal system! I refuse to be a line item in a Konoha budget report!"
Suddenly, he stopped.
A long pause stretched between us.
A very long pause.
Toneri just hung there in the air, his face beginning to contort.
He started huffing—deep, rhythmic puffs of air that made his chest expand like a bellows.
A smile started to creep out across his battered face, a delirious, high-wire expression that looked like he was coming undone from the inside out.
He looked like a big bad wolf who found the act of blowing down houses to be personally, hilariously funny.
"I'm escaping!" Toneri snarled. He threw his head back so far I thought his neck might snap, his eyes rolling up as if he were trying to face God himself. "To the one place that hasn't been corrupted by Konoha's paperwork..."
He looked back down the "camera"—right at Naruto, right at Hinata, right at me—with a look of pure, unhinged, gloating glee. He looked like a man who had finished his script and knew there wasn't a damn thing we could do about it.
"SPAAAAAACE!"
With a thunderous boom of displaced chakra, Toneri rocketed backward.
He didn't just fly; he launched himself like a kinetic projectile, vanishing into the pitch-black shadows of the moon's dark side in a blur of white robes.
Silence settled over the crater.
Naruto blinked.
He reached up, adjusted his scratched headband, and pointed a confused finger at the empty sky.
"But..." Naruto's voice sounded small in the lunar vacuum. "We're already in space. Aren't we? Like... he lives on the moon. Where did he go? Is he going to Super-Space?"
I reached up and adjusted my glasses, the frames feeling cold against my temples. I rubbed my eyes, feeling the onset of a massive, lunar-grade headache.
"Let him have it, Naruto," I sighed, watching the faint trail of white chakra dissipate into the stars. "He's probably been practicing that line for three generations. Just... let him have his moment."