Sasuke Uchiha, who had been standing in silence behind Tsunade, suddenly narrowed his eyes. His Mangekyo Sharingan flared to life, and he stepped forward at once, placing himself between the Five Kage and the danger he had sensed a heartbeat too late.
At nearly that same instant, a golden figure appeared before them like a ghost crossing through empty air.
It was Naruto Uzumaki.
The five Kage reacted immediately. Chakra surged. Killing intent sharpened. Every last one of them understood that this was the enemy around whom the end of the world itself seemed to revolve.
Sasuke's expression changed first.
"Naruto... your eyes..."
His voice was filled with disbelief.
The Mangekyo Sharingan in his gaze locked onto Naruto's face, and what he saw there made his whole body tense. Naruto's icy blue eyes were gone. In their place were circles upon circles of purple ripples—the unmistakable eyes of the Sage of Six Paths.
Naruto noticed the look at once.
A faint smile curved his lips. Almost playfully, he lifted a hand and covered one of those terrible eyes.
"This?" he said. "It's just the Rinnegan."
Sasuke's grip tightened on the Kusanagi sword in his hand.
"I never thought the Rinnegan would end up in your possession. This is bad. Worse than bad."
Tsunade forced down her own shock and stepped forward with the authority of a Hokage.
"Whether it's trouble or not, the battle doesn't change," she said coldly. "We'll deal with it by crushing you here."
The Fourth Raikage had already reached the limit of his patience.
With a furious roar, lightning exploded around him. His body became a blur of blue-white chakra as he launched himself at Naruto with enough force to split stone and crush steel.
"Stop playing games!"
Naruto didn't even move until the Raikage was almost upon him.
Then he merely looked at him and said two quiet words:
"Shinra Tensei."
In that instant, an indescribable repulsive force burst out from him.
It was not wind, not chakra in any form the eye could easily grasp, but the overwhelming weight of heaven and earth crashing outward all at once.
"What—?!"
The Raikage's cry broke halfway through.
His enormous body was hurled backward faster than he had charged, smashed into a rock wall, and buried in a cloud of shattered stone. Blood spilled from his lips before the dust even settled.
"Raikage!" Tsunade shouted.
She immediately moved to cover him, but the battle had already begun in full.
Sasuke no longer hesitated.
He drew his sword and became a streak of purple light, crossing the battlefield in a single fierce rush. In the blink of an eye, gold and violet crashed together and blurred apart again, the sound of steel, taijutsu, and exploding chakra echoing through the command zone.
The other Kage joined in as well.
Gaara's sand surged like a living sea. Mei Terumi's techniques boiled and melted the air. Onoki floated high and tried to seize the battlefield with the absolute terror of Dust Release. Tsunade moved like a force of nature in human shape, every blow carrying monstrous destructive power.
And yet, for all the violence of the assault, the people watching from beneath the Heavenly Curtain could see something chillingly clear.
Naruto still looked calm.
Too calm.
He wasn't under pressure. He wasn't being cornered. He wasn't even revealing strain.
He looked like a man indulging children.
***
Across the real shinobi world, another silence fell.
Rinnegan?
Naruto Uzumaki had the Rinnegan?
How?
From where?
From whom?
Inside the tower in the Land of Rain, Nagato stared at the sky through Pain's eyes, and for the first time in a long while, genuine disbelief shook him.
"My eyes... both of them... are with you..."
His dry voice trembled with a disbelief he could not suppress.
"Then in the future... do I die at your hands?"
He could not accept that possibility.
How could someone who bore the eyes of a god be defeated? How could the Rinnegan itself be taken from him and then appear in Naruto Uzumaki's face?
Konan stepped closer, paper wings trembling faintly behind her.
"Nagato... maybe something changed in the future. Or maybe you had a reason... another purpose..." she offered quietly.
Nagato clung to that thought at once.
Yes. That had to be it. He was a god. He could not simply lose like that.
***
Above, the battle intensified.
Tsunade's fist hammered the earth hard enough to shatter it, but Naruto slipped away untouched, protected by invisible force. Onoki's Dust Release never fully formed before something disrupted it. Mei's corrosive techniques were absorbed or diverted. Gaara's sand, usually absolute, seemed sluggish and strangely powerless against him.
Even the Raikage's renewed charge, backed by all his monstrous force, was halted by a single black rod in Naruto's hand, the recoil numbing the Raikage's arm instead.
Only Sasuke could barely hold the line.
With the insight of the Mangekyo Sharingan, strange ocular abilities, and the violent output of his purple Chidori, he managed to force Naruto to acknowledge him more than the others. But 'barely' was all it was. Wounds began accumulating across Sasuke's body, and every exchange left him closer to collapse.
Naruto watched all of them as though testing the limits of toys.
After toying with the combined strength of five Kage and the one man best suited to oppose him, he seemed to lose interest.
"Let's stop fooling around," he said.
The next instant, countless shadow clones burst into existence around the five Kage.
"It's only fair," Naruto said with a cold smile, "for Kage to be attacked from all sides."
"Damn it!" Tsunade cursed.
But before she could finish, the field had already become a flood of Narutos. The five Kage were dragged into an instant swamp of chaos, every direction crowded with enemies.
"Sasuke," Naruto said almost casually as he moved through the battle like a phantom, "you're still not enough."
Unlike the others, Sasuke was not immediately buried under clones. Naruto even spared him the insult of pretending otherwise.
"I haven't even used my real strength yet."
"Shut up!" Sasuke roared.
His chakra erupted, and the Perfect Susanoo rose like a purple god of war, immense and terrible, sword in hand. The very air bent under the pressure of its presence.
With a force that could cleave mountains, it brought that great blade down toward Naruto.
Naruto looked up and calmly raised a single hand.
"Bang—!!!"
The sound was dull, almost anticlimactic.
And then the impossible happened.
The enormous Susanoo blade shattered on Naruto's palm like fragile glass, exploding into countless motes of chakra-light.
"What?!"
Sasuke's pupils shrank violently.
"Sasuke," Naruto said, as if he were merely disappointed, "surrender."
He waved his hand again.
Invisible force slammed into the Perfect Susanoo. The giant let out a wailing cry as cracks ran through its form. A moment later, it burst apart completely, and Sasuke was hurled backward through the air, coughing blood like a kite with its strings cut.
"Naruto! I haven't lost yet!"
"Then I'll crush that hope too."
Naruto no longer even looked at the falling Sasuke. His attention shifted toward the five Kage, who were still being overwhelmed by clones and summoned beasts.
He formed a simple hand seal.
"It's over."
Then something struck.
No one saw it.
No one sensed it coming.
There was no visible flash, no roar, no warning—only the result.
The Fourth Raikage, still charging through the tide of clones, froze mid-step.
A line of blood appeared across his waist. Then, before anyone could understand what they were seeing, his upper and lower body separated. Blood poured out in a torrent.
"Raikage!!"
The cry had barely left someone's mouth before it happened again.
Onoki's head separated cleanly from his body while he was still in the air.
Mei Terumi and Tsunade were both pierced in the chest by that same invisible force, their hearts crushed before they could even turn toward the threat.
The entire battlefield became a slaughterhouse in an instant.
And beneath the sky, every person who watched finally understood what kind of monster Naruto Uzumaki had become.