Chapter 171: "Obito's Situation"
"Hm?"
"A shooting star?"
Tsunade was on the hospital roof with a sake jug and a cold wind for company, and the streak of light cutting through the dark was hard to miss.
"Haven't seen one of those in ages..."
She took a long pull from the jug and watched it, vision slightly unfocused. It was getting bigger.
She could almost hear it now — a faint, distant howl of atmosphere at high speed.
Big one.
What were you supposed to do when you saw a shooting star? She rubbed her temple.
"Oh. Right."
"Make a wish."
She clasped her hands together and shut her eyes with the solemnity of someone who had been drinking for a while.
I wish for...
Hmm.
Money. So much money I can never run out. A fortune that makes nations look poor.
Sakura looked up at the meteorite tearing through the night sky, trailing fire, falling directly toward her, and drew her right fist back.
"Sa — Sakura, I think we should run."
Sasuke had dropped Amatsukami. He'd seen enough.
Without the raw foundation to back it up, even a perfect luck buff wasn't going to bridge the gap between them. And Kotoamatsukami still couldn't touch her. These eyes had awakened because of her — it was almost fitting that they couldn't work against her. He could accept that.
"Run?" Sakura glanced at him. "You made this mess. You want to run from it?"
She turned back to the incoming rock and started gathering chakra in her right hand.
The Yin Seal split open across her forehead. Black lines branched out from the diamond, spreading down her face and neck and arms in an instant.
She hadn't been understating it. She'd felt the heat washing off the thing from a hundred meters away.
"Sasuke. Watch carefully."
She said it without looking at him.
"This is my real strength."
Sasuke's expression shifted. Whatever confidence had been sitting on his face a moment ago had gone somewhere quieter.
Human force can stop a meteorite?
The chakra on her fist ignited — blue and pink, burning like something poured onto open flame. It gathered shape, compressed, and the shape it settled into was a tiger's head, jaws open, chakra screaming off it in every direction.
Sakura released Sasuke's collar. One foot hit the ground.
The earth cracked outward from the impact. Cracked, then collapsed — a shockwave moving through the soil in a ring, and Sasuke's house lost half a wall before he could register what was happening.
But he wasn't looking at his house.
He was looking at the pink-haired figure launching straight up into the dark.
"Sakura..."
The chakra on her fist roared. Tiger jaws burning. The meteorite's heat visible now even from the ground — a halo of superheated air surrounding the impact point—
Her eyes went sharp.
The tiger's head opened its mouth and screamed.
"Full Power — Strength of a Hundred!"
"BREAK!"
For one moment the night went still.
Then the meteorite came apart.
Not chipped. Not deflected. Apart — shattered into fragments in every direction, hundreds of pieces catching the light as they scattered across the sky, trailing red fire-lines against the black.
The night sky became a backdrop for it. Red streaks on black, reaching in every direction — half of Konoha looked up.
"...Huh."
Tsunade lowered her jug slowly.
"Did I wish too big?"
She stared at the sky where the shooting star had been.
"It broke..."
She took another drink, blinking at the scattered embers.
Sasuke stood in silence.
It had broken.
An S-rank impact, conservatively. And she'd punched through it.
He ran the calculation. Against that meteorite himself — without Sakura standing in front of him — he probably would have dropped Amatsukami and hoped for something to redirect it. Hoped for the luck to hold. Maybe it would have. Maybe a freak updraft, a detonated tag he'd forgotten about at the right angle, something.
He'd learned what Amatsukami actually looked like in practice tonight.
Accidents. Useful accidents, happening in sequence, none of which he could have predicted any more than the enemy could. That was the texture of it — not deliberate manipulation, just favorable chaos arriving when it was needed.
Sakura was walking toward him, shaking out her hand.
Her knuckles were burned. He could see the discoloration, the slight wrongness of the angles under the skin — minor fractures, probably. The Yin Seal was already closing both.
"When did your Mangekyo awaken?"
She was watching him, though she probably had a guess.
Sasuke was quiet for a moment.
"When that Uchiha — Obito — stabbed Sakura through the chest. That's when it opened."
He'd been at the edge of the battlefield. He'd been watching.
Sakura's expression shifted slightly — something moving behind her eyes.
She looked at what remained of his house, pointed at the undamaged half's front steps.
"Come sit down."
Obito's appearance had shaken more than Kakashi. Sasuke had been carrying it too — the sudden existence of a third Uchiha, when he'd believed himself to be the last besides Itachi. And unlike Itachi, this one had shown up as an unambiguous enemy.
He'd held it together longer than his canon self would have. That was worth acknowledging.
They settled on the steps. Sasuke looked at her hand — fully healed now, no trace remaining.
The moment Obito had appeared, she'd cracked his ability in seconds. Phasing. One missed kick, deliberate — she'd read the intangibility and chosen to eat the rod rather than keep missing, trading the wound for a clear shot. The mask coming apart under one punch.
The healing ability was obviously the foundation of that trade. She'd had the certainty to take the hit because she knew what would happen afterward.
"Did you know him?" Sasuke asked. "Obito."
Sakura considered this.
"Not personally. But I looked into him afterward."
"Uchiha Obito. Student of the Fourth Hokage, Minato Namikaze." She turned a piece of rubble over with her foot. "Died a hero at Kannabi Bridge, or so the story went. In his last moments, he gave his eye to Kakashi. That's how Kakashi became the Copy Ninja."
Sasuke's hand closed slowly.
Whatever Obito had been before didn't change what he was now — a missing-nin, an enemy of Konoha. One more stain on the Uchiha name.
It also meant another item for the list. After Itachi, Obito.
"Uchiha Obito..."
"Uchiha Obito."
Rain fell on Amegakure like it was crying for something.
The steel towers of the city rose into grey cloud, and inside one of them a blue-haired woman regarded the masked figure across the room with open contempt.
"Still wearing the mask?" Konan's voice was dry. "Your identity's been burned. What exactly are you maintaining?"
She had never liked him. Especially not after he'd maneuvered Nagato into aiming at the entire world.
"Or should we keep calling you 'Madara'?"
The sarcasm was not subtle. Obito said nothing.
Particularly not with Pain standing two meters away.
Nagato's capabilities alone were enough to make Obito careful. And now he'd lost the one thing that had given him any footing here — the name. The weight of Uchiha Madara's legacy had let him stand across from Nagato as something close to an equal. Without it, that position dissolved.
He told himself, quietly, that at least Nagato's actual body was crippled. That was something.
Pain's expression was undisturbed. He had never believed the man in front of him was the real Madara. The real Uchiha Madara was a documented quantity — someone who had controlled the Nine-Tails directly and walked into open battle against Hashirama Senju without hesitation or disguise. Madara didn't wear masks. Madara was the definition of someone who didn't need to hide.
That the man had used the name for leverage was irrelevant to Pain. Shared objectives were sufficient. The name itself didn't matter.
But the name was gone now, and the leverage with it. That could be addressed.
"I require an explanation."
Pain's eyes — the Rinnegan pattern unmistakable — were completely still.
Here it is.
Obito kept his reaction internal.
The fight with Sakura had exposed too much. Abilities, limitations, the whole shape of what he could and couldn't do. Nagato would have read all of it.
Pressure-holding him at the lower position. That was the message.
"No explanation is needed." Obito's voice was flat. "I took the name of Uchiha Madara. I am Uchiha Madara."
Konan's mouth curved into something that could not charitably be called a smile.
The performance was, in her view, a complete farce. He'd stolen the name to manipulate Nagato, his cover had been destroyed, and here he was still insisting on the same lie. There wasn't a word for it except pathetic.
"If that's your answer," Pain said, "should I interpret it as sophistry directed at a god?"
Obito's jaw tightened.
God. You actually believe that.
You're a piece on someone else's board and you don't even know it.
He would not say this out loud. Not today.
"..."
"The name made operations easier." His voice came out rougher than intended.
Somewhere in the building's tower, a thin red-haired man's mouth curved slightly upward.
"Borrowing another man's name," Pain said, in the tone of someone stating the obvious. "That's the choice of something that crawls."
The fist under Obito's sleeve tightened.
Pain let the silence sit for a moment — enough to establish the point clearly — and then moved on. He had no interest in prolonged humiliation. The man's position in the hierarchy was now understood by everyone in the room, himself included. That was sufficient.
Obito's ability was real, if limited. The tailed beast collection operation hadn't begun. The organization still needed him.
Pain didn't create unnecessary friction.
"The state of Kumogakure," he said. "What is it?"
The subject changed cleanly.
Among the Five Great Villages, Kumogakure was currently running on Black Zetsu's interference and Kirigakure on Obito's. Between the two, three of the tailed beasts — Three-Tails, Six-Tails, Eight-Tails — were already functionally within reach before the formal collection even started.
Beyond that: nearly half the ninja world's political infrastructure was compromised, and Sunagakure was stretched thin under simultaneous pressure from Konoha and Iwagakure, surviving on Akatsuki's nominal mercenary reputation.
Pain could see the shape of it. Peace arriving at the end of this road. The world brought to stillness through sufficient pain.
It was only a matter of time.
Obito walked alone through the steel corridor afterward, footsteps flat on the metal.
The damage from losing the Madara name was worse than he'd calculated. The entire meeting had been Pain asking questions and Obito answering them. He hadn't directed a single exchange.
He understood now, in a way he hadn't before, what those four syllables had been worth. Uchiha Madara — the name had weight that filled a room before he opened his mouth. Without it, he was a missing-nin in a mask that everyone had already seen through.
Nobody knew the name Uchiha Obito.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Footsteps ahead. He looked up.
Red Sharingan. Cold. Itachi.
"Uchiha... Obito?"
Itachi said the name quietly, like he was confirming something.
"Oh my, oh my." A second voice, from Itachi's left. "And who might this be?"
"Why, it's our great Lord Madara, isn't it?"
Kisame. Absolutely savoring it.
Obito felt something hot move through him.
Pain he could accept. Konan he could endure. Itachi he could suppress, barely.
But Kisame—
Kisame, who had bowed and scraped and treated every word from "Madara's" mouth like scripture — looking at him now with that exact expression—
"Something wrong?"
Kisame's eyes were full of it. The specific joy of watching someone who had been lording over you come down.
"Did I say something incorrect, Lord Madara~~?"
He put just enough weight on the name to make it a wound.
Obito said nothing. He walked past both of them without breaking stride.
As he passed Itachi's shoulder, he heard something — quiet, almost not there.
"Do you remember the Nine-Tails incident? All those years ago?"
A pause.
"How did it feel? Killing your own teacher?"
Obito's step didn't falter. But his jaw was clenched so hard it hurt.
You want to go there.
I killed mine with my own hands, yes. What about yours?
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