That night, I wrapped up my business at the lab and headed toward a certain network of caves in another country: one of Akatsuki's bases.
"Figured he'd have them," I smirked, stepping into the underground chamber where an entire wall of jars greeted me, each one floating a Sharingan. "Not that they'll do him any good now."
I moved down the corridor and, a moment later, passed straight through a door into a room furnished with almost nothing.
In the far corner, darker than the rest, lay a sleeping bag, and in it, a ninja I'd known for far too long.
I approached without a sound and crouched over the man, who seemed not to have a care in the world.
His slow, steady breathing stirred something old in me. Old feelings of helplessness. Of despair.
"Calm, just like bef—"
In an instant, a hand shot toward my throat, kunai in its grip. It never arrived. My own hand moved faster than sound, and the arm went sailing into the wall, detached at the stump. The room shook with the crack of a broken sound barrier.
"—ore."
Obito grabbed what remained of his limb and lurched back. Pain carved itself across his scarred face, but he didn't let himself scream.
Now I could see him clearly: a ninja in black, both eyes blazing with Mangekyō Sharingan. The man who'd nearly killed me on my birthday. The man whose actions, if not by his own direct hand, had taken my mother's life and the lives of many others.
But I wasn't interested in the fine print. Details rarely change the reality of things.
"How does it feel, being a puppet on a very long chain?"
"Uzumaki Naruto…" he stated, his voice low. "You didn't come here to ask stupid questions. What do you want?"
"What do I want…" I rolled the words around on my tongue. "Your suffering. Obviously."
Slowly, I extended a hand toward him. Reality began to warp on cue, and from it emerged unmistakable tentacles, slipping into view.
They were woven from my soul's own energy. I had been so utterly powerless that day, I thought. Let's see what they can do today.
"Wait! Hear me out first, a world without suffering! That is my Eye of the Moon Plan. You don't understand what you're about to destroy. Akatsuki will bring true happiness to everyone!"
Halfway there, my tentacles stopped.
"I called you a puppet for a reason. Though I suppose you've already lost your strings. As for the Eye of the Moon, it's nothing more than a temporary illusion. Its endgame is this entire world becoming fertilizer for the Divine Tree."
The tentacles moved on.
In that same instant, the Uchiha attempted to phase into another dimension using one of his Mangekyō techniques, but my own Mangekyō countered and shut it down.
Realizing the ability wasn't working, Obito pivoted fast, letting his other eye go white to attempt Izanami.
Useless. An absurdly dense mass of chakra, blindingly fast and invisible by ordinary shinobi standards, was simply swept away with a flick of my wrist.
He tried to jump sideways next, but he couldn't move at all. My will had already entered his mind on Yin chakra. Only his remaining eye could shift, darting around, tracking the grey-luminescent tentacles as they drew closer.
And all he could do was let the rising terror show in his pupil.
The tentacles coiled around his soul's aura like a vise and squeezed.
When they bored through the Uchiha's aura, I felt Obito's soul radiating pain immediately. The tendrils converged on the outer core, letting me savor his despair.
The following portion of the scene has been removed due to its extreme violence and explicit sadism.
Holding the Uchiha's lifeless body, I closed my eyes. I'd finally done what should have been done long ago.
Then I let go. A body without a soul, like a puppet whose strings had been cut for good, simply crumpled to the floor.
"Nothing," I said, describing what I felt.
I'd expected something deep. Some profound sense of satisfaction. Instead, it felt roughly like taking out the trash.
Actually, no. Worse than that. My mood dropped.
I lowered my head, spared the corpse a contemptuous glance, and sealed it into a storage tag all the same. No point in wasting materials.
As for that room full of Sharingan, I'd study those dōjutsu capabilities later. Maybe something there would spark an idea for a new technique. Though I honestly doubted I'd find anything worth getting excited about.
With this Akatsuki base personally seen to, I headed home.
My next objective was to deal with the rest of the organization's members, though given my current mood, there was a very real chance I'd just kill them all if anything rubbed me the wrong way. And showing up in person wasn't exactly befitting of me.
So the next day, I sent them a messenger instead: an old "friend" of theirs who also happened to be the organization's traitor. Orochimaru.
My letter simply stated that I wished to speak. Pain, the acting leader of Akatsuki, took note of his true leader's disappearance and decided that, given their diminished numbers, it was wisest to gather together and come to the Emperor.
A couple of days later, in a considerably more neutral mood, I received several cloaked visitors in my temple: Pain, Konan, Itachi, Kakuzu, Hidan, the puppeteer Sasori, and the bomber Deidara.
As they drew closer, I spoke from my pompous throne.
"Well. You clearly have the good sense to come here rather than cause problems first. Before I get to why you're here, allow me to share a little history."
No preamble wasted, I laid it all out: the secret plan of their hidden leader Obito, the even more secret plan of their even more hidden leader Madara, and the even more secret plan of their naturally even more hidden leader still, Black Zetsu.
"And so now you may congratulate yourselves. The Akatsuki's mission is accomplished. The great villages will no longer be at war. Just not because of you, because of me."
They stood there, thoroughly overloaded with information, working hard to process it. The time leading up to this, since my public announcement to the world, had been anything but obvious or predictable, and it had generated truly colossal what-the-hell energy. Coming here and listening to me speak, they could only stand and soak in the reality that had just been dumped on their heads.
"Moving on," I continued, at which the audience snapped back to attention. "Your organization marched toward a noble goal, but the road it walked was drenched in blood."
I was about to go on when I was rudely cut off.
"Yo, hold the hell up!" shouted the silver-haired guy, jamming his enormous scythe in my direction. "Akatsuki used to help me pull off massacres just fine. But now that you've pulled that stunt in the Water Country, what, I won't be allowed to make offerings to Jashin-sama anymore?!"
"Hm." I fixed my gaze on this individual, scanning him carefully with my sensory abilities but finding absolutely nothing divine about him. "Hidan, correct? I've heard about your little Jashin cult."
At my words, he puffed out his chest like he'd just been given an award.
"Of course you've heard of us! We're the most badass cult in this whole goddamn world!"
"Right. At one point, I took an interest in you and your group specifically. And what I found was nothing but a tangled web of inhumane, forbidden techniques performed on human subjects, and you, their sole successful result. So here's the bad news: your immortality, your abilities, they're just ordinary jutsu. Not a gift from your made-up god."
In response to that, Hidan's eyes bulged with outrage, and he clearly wanted to say something very colorful.
"You—!" he started, but was cut off mid-word when the space around him began to spiral from my technique, and his body was sealed into a storage tag.
"I never liked him," Kakuzu remarked, apparently assuming I'd just killed his colleague.
A couple more Akatsuki members nodded at that, which made me look at them sideways. I'd expected a bit more solidarity from them.
"Ahem. Right, then. You are all stained with sin," I went on. "But I'm offering you a chance at redemption. Will you take it?"
"What exactly does redemption entail?" Pain, the organization's leader, finally spoke up.
"Essentially, work in your respective specialties, but under my authority. The work simply becomes less dirty. You'll be dealing with the world's problems rather than chasing money and power. Your terms, naturally, will be mandatory, unlike those of the less sinful."
The pierced redhead, or rather the puppet his true body was controlling from a distance, took a few seconds to think. Then he declared:
"Akatsuki agrees. We have been watching your actions, and they do not, in truth, contradict what we were striving for ourselves. But in fulfilling our duty, we will continue to observe." He glanced at Konan, received a nod, then turned those purple ringed eyes back on me.
In response to the Akatsuki leader's attempt to save face, I simply gave an indifferent wave of my hand, making it clear that I didn't rate them nearly as highly as he seemed to think. Also making it clear that I frankly didn't care, as long as they followed orders properly and didn't undermine my authority by stirring up chaos.
"So… we won't be making money anymore?" Kakuzu asked, sounding deflated.
"Redemption isn't permanent. Eventually, you'll be free to try something profitable. But legal."
Kakuzu perked up at that and nodded.
"And good service will be rewarded. You could ask me for something. Like the ability to walk, for instance."
I glanced pointedly at the redhead, and he and Konan exchanged a look. I'd just demonstrated that I knew their real situation: Pain being a puppet body controlled by a fellow Uzumaki, a Rinnegan user who also happened to be something of an invalid. By dangling the possibility of a full life in the new world ahead of them, I'd bumped up the probability of genuine loyalty and dedication by a few solid points.
Sasori, a shinobi who'd converted himself into a puppet and was currently operating in the form of a hunched figure, and Deidara, a blond with a ponytail and a prosthetic embedded in his eye, also exchanged glances. Their paths weren't so different: both had spent their lives in pursuit of their respective art forms. For the first, that meant puppet-making. For the second, making the biggest possible bang. Thinking it through, they likely concluded that their lives wouldn't lose their meaning; with caveats, they could still pursue what they wanted. Sasori just wouldn't be able to turn literally anyone into his next puppet whenever he felt like it, and Deidara wouldn't be blowing up everything in his line of sight. Naturally, they both had strong personalities, and under ordinary circumstances they wouldn't have simply agreed to bend the knee. But where are the ordinary circumstances, and where am I?
Having largely settled the question of their fates, I let them disperse, keeping only Itachi in the temple.
"I didn't think it would all unfold quite like this. Shisui… he would have been glad, seeing where the world is headed."
"He would have. The world awaits its own fate. As for you, your story with your brother isn't finished. Are you planning to die at his hands, or are you simply going to tell him the truth? Sasuke's unlikely to stay bitter, seeing as the main problems for the Uchiha have, in essence, been removed."
"I… will think about it," the schemer said, then turned and walked away.
"Hmph," was all I offered to his retreating back.
After that meeting, life ran its course for a while. I had a great deal to attend to. When several months had passed and my energy had restored itself to its former level, I found myself in my brand-new, absolutely enormous laboratory, or rather in one of its enormous halls, examining the husk of the Ten-Tails.
After a fairly brief inspection, it turned out that resurrecting Kaguya didn't require collecting the chakra of all nine tailed beasts. If the goal was to restore her consciousness and give her something close to her former power naturally, enough for her to reassemble her own body herself, then yes, you'd need all of them. But it was simpler for me to just do it by hand. With my own chakra, to be precise.
So a few hours later, I was looking at a female body floating in a tank of liquid: very pale skin, long light hair, horns, the Byakugan, and even a Rinne Sharingan in the center of her forehead.
I wasn't given long to contemplate the sight, or her internals in the most literal sense. From behind me, out of nowhere and from beyond this world, two old men appeared, hovering in the lotus position, suspended in mid-air.
"Wonderful. People just wander in and out of my lab like it's a bus station," I muttered, as Rinnegan and Byakugan turned on me simultaneously.
Before me hovered the sons of the very Ōtsutsuki I had resurrected, the one whose body was soon to wake.
"You are making a mistake," said the old man with the long goatee, chestnut hair, and Rinnegan.
"It pains me to say this… But she cannot be allowed to return to life," continued the second, beardless one with light hair and Byakugan.
"Hagoromo and Hamura Ōtsutsuki." I gave them a tired nod, having already made peace with the fact that they'd showed up. "You may call me Naruto."
Noticing they were still floating in the air, I walked a short distance away, dropped into an armchair that happened to be there, and turned it from the desk to face them.
"Everything is under control."
The old men pivoted slightly to follow me, and after my remark, Hagoromo looked ready to interject, but caught himself when a cracking sound came from Kaguya's tank.
The woman's eyes opened. She found those two with her gaze. Then her body moved with terrifying speed, and in an instant Kaguya was up close, lifting the chins of the spirits who had arrived from the Pure World. They froze like pillars of salt, rigid with shock.
"My children… You came to your senses." Tears traced lines down the woman's face. She had clearly concluded that they were the ones who had brought her back, even though they'd been the ones who sealed her away in the first place.
"Ahem," I cleared my throat to get their attention, at which Kaguya whipped around to face me. "For the record, I was the one who brought you back to life."
They stared at me like I'd spoken in a different language.
Meanwhile, Hagoromo, his hands trembling faintly as though still uncertain, was raising his palms. One bore the mark of the sun. The other, the moon.
"Hey!" I cut him off, annoyed. "We happen to be underground, and if you use that technique, over a hundred thousand people will die!"
I had no interest in watching this old man seal Kaguya away again, the way he once had with his brother. Or rather, I had no interest in the technique's side effect: ripping a truly staggering amount of earth out of the planet to forge a new moon. Even a scaled-down version of that would absolutely level Konoha sitting right next door.
"So it wasn't you?" Kaguya clarified, then flinched as I moved her away from the old men without asking permission.
And then this Ōtsutsuki, rather than appreciating my gesture, immediately seized my arm and began attempting to drain my energy.
"Are you feeling all right?" I asked Kaguya, and she frowned.
"All chakra must belong to me…" She immediately attempted some technique, but the sealing tags that erupted from my hand instantly subdued her, wrapping around her completely. Then I sealed her away.
"Well. Ungrateful, these extraterrestrials. Or maybe I assembled her wrong somewhere."
A thoughtful expression settled on my face while two pairs of freshly stunned elderly eyes bored into me.
"We know you managed to defeat our mother's enemy… But with such ease," Hamura said, clearly impressed, and I waved him off.
"I didn't give her much power. Right now she wasn't anywhere near the level of that alien."
"Indeed… I can sense six of the nine tailed beasts…" Hagoromo confirmed, eyeing me with slightly more suspicion than his brother.
"They're in my seal. Everything's fine."
"'Until the one who will guide them to the right path emerges, they must remain free. Do not attempt to gather them for personal power, that is the road to the world's ruin.' Look at what my descendants do," Hagoromo quoted, apparently himself, and shook his head.
"Well, technically, I saved this world with the Nine-Tails' help. He was at least one of the significant contributing factors."
"That is true…" Hagoromo conceded without reluctance. "It seems my teachings were not as solid or correct as I believed, if they could be so thoroughly turned against themselves."
"Change in this world is inevitable. One can only prepare for it," Hamura observed philosophically. "Not only your descendants cause headaches. Only one of mine is left, so that's still something."
"Our power wasn't needed," Hagoromo continued, gazing down at his own hands. "It seems you, the Emperor, genuinely do have everything under control. So why did you resurrect Kaguya? And please, indulge the curiosity of two old men: what is your vision for this world?"
To the request for information, I responded with information. By the end, the three of us had struck up a reasonably warm conversation, in which they shared their own stories and more recent experiences in turn.
Hagoromo's reaction to my fight with Isshiki had been fairly measured: he simply began nervously watching the Earth and positioning himself "energetically closer" to it, ready to manifest if the world had need of him.
Hamura's life, on the other hand, had been considerably more eventful. He told me about his clan of Ōtsutsuki, not Kaguya's kin but his own descendants who had lived on the Moon. They had, it turned out, interpreted their ancestor's words in precisely the same fashion as Hagoromo's descendants, which is to say through a particularly unfortunate part of their anatomy, and the end result was that only one of Hamura's descendants remained on the Moon. And not merely because the rest had died. No, that last surviving descendant had also developed an ambition to "save the sinful world of Hagoromo's descendants" by stealing a Hyūga woman with sufficiently pure blood from the Earth, helping himself to the eyes of another such woman for maximum potency, then using those eyes to connect to the Moon's ultimate dōjutsu, the Tenseigan, harness its power, and drop that very Moon onto the Earth, killing every living person. All of this in order to afterward repopulate the planet with the previously kidnapped Hyūga woman.
Hagoromo and I exchanged a nod at that little tale, and I asked Hamura if he'd care to enlighten me about what exactly that eye of his was. He explained that in his old age he'd awakened the next evolution of the Byakugan and fused it into something unified, intending to create an energy source that would improve his descendants' lives. But it had all spiraled into internecine genocide.
After that, I asked whether I might study the Tenseigan. The two old men, by that point fairly satisfied with my intentions for the world, agreed, and also agreed to teach me one rather impressive technique: the creation of Gudōdama, black spheres that unite all elemental natures within themselves.
Then, in parting, they invited me to drop by the Pure World if I ever wished to consult them, while I told them they were welcome to come by as well, whenever.
At the very end, Hamura made one request, about that last remaining figure on the Moon.
"My descendant, Toneri. I believe loneliness weighs on him up there. But he is not suited to society, and I cannot simply leave him on Earth alone. Might you look after him?"
"Um… Not personally, but yes. I can direct him somewhere he won't be alone. Somewhere he might learn how to interact with people. And perhaps begin to live something resembling a normal life."
"I could not ask for more." He bowed his head.
"Don't mention it. It won't cost me much." I waved my hand.
"Well, if that is so."
And with that, we said our goodbyes. The young man in question arrived on Earth shortly after, and in a spirit of genuine goodwill, I covered all the bills, set up a generous bank account in his name, and checked him into a psychiatric facility. Not to lock him up, but so that people who actually knew what they were doing could teach him how to function in human society.
After that, pleased with how things had unfolded and satisfied with the knowledge I'd gained, I headed back to the lab. I had an enormous amount ahead of me. Beyond configuring genjutsu on Kaguya so I could read her memories, I still had to study the Rinnegan, the Tenseigan, the tailed beasts' senjutsu chakras, and a whole pile of other things on top of that.
And on top of all of that, I still had to keep at least one eye on the Empire.
Sigh. My life is rough.
And so I went to work, while the world outside once again began to pick up speed.
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