Natsuki stowed the Black Holy Grail and let Unlimited Blade Works collapse.
The wasteland of swords peeled away, and he, Nawaki, and Tsunade were standing on the real battlefield again. A, Blue B, and the rest were dead, their bodies already sealed away.
Natsuki glanced around. Seven thousand Cloud shinobi still lay unconscious across the plain, not one of them stirring.
"Nawaki." He thought for a moment. "Head back to base camp and tell Minato and the others to come clean this up."
Nawaki nodded on reflex. He was still more than a little dazed.
Natsuki raised a hand and tore open a doorway in the air. Nawaki stepped through and was gone.
"Tsunade-sensei." Natsuki turned to her—she looked about as dazed as her brother. "Does our bet still stand?"
"Two favors in exchange for a decisive victory for the Leaf? There's no better bet in the world." Tsunade shook herself back to the present, waving it off.
Lazy she may have been, and idle when she could get away with it, but her attachment to the Hidden Leaf ran bone-deep. A crushing win over the Hidden Cloud had put her in a genuinely good mood—good enough to have taken his bet in the first place.
"Anything I want?" Natsuki coughed lightly.
"Guess." Tsunade's eyes narrowed.
She didn't say another word. She didn't need to; the message came through perfectly well without one.
"Then can I hold onto you for a bit? Just to rest." Natsuki's expression didn't shift an inch. "I burned through an enormous amount of chakra. Standing is a struggle."
Tsunade froze.
Her eyes traveled over him once, then again. He didn't look like a man who'd just come out of a battle at all.
"Holding. That's it." She hesitated a few seconds. "Otherwise you deal with the consequences."
"Tsunade-sensei. After all this, you still doubt my character?"
He walked over. She watched him come with a very serious look on her face.
Natsuki leaned in and put his arms around her.
Something in Tsunade's chest gave a small, traitorous lurch—and then her pupils shrank, because he had lowered his head and buried his face against her.
His breath brushed her skin, and a strange, unfamiliar warmth crawled up the back of her neck.
Natsuki, for his part, caught a faint trace of perfume. He shut his eyes and let himself sink into it.
He didn't push it any further. With Tsunade's temper, one unnecessary move and he really would be sent flying into the horizon.
Tsunade bit her lip.
In the end, she let it go.
The deal, as far as she'd been concerned, was the simplest possible embrace and nothing more. But weighed against everything Natsuki had done—for the Leaf, for Nawaki, for her—she decided she could allow this much. Once.
[Congratulations! Host has unlocked Laxus Dreyar's Template Ability 2: Dragon Slayer Magic.]
Dragon Slayer Magic traced back to the magic of the Lightning Dragon King. In practice it still manifested as Lightning Magic—it was simply on a completely different scale from the ordinary kind.
Especially the Dragon Slayer's Secret Art: Roaring Thunder. At full power, Natsuki suspected it would stand shoulder to shoulder with a Tailed Beast Bomb.
[You have awakened the Emiya Shirou template.]
A second line surfaced, and Natsuki nearly blinked.
What?
Why had the Emiya Shirou template triggered?
The Third Raikage had already produced a character template, and A, being cut from very similar cloth, shouldn't have generated a new one. Which left the two most likely candidates among today's dead: Blue B and Killer B.
In the original story, both had been Eight-Tails jinchuriki. And both had been exceptional swordsmen.
Natsuki had triggered a Heroic Spirit Emiya template and an Emiya Shirou template before—the former S-Rank, the latter only C-Rank. This new one was almost certainly S-Rank.
Which meant that beyond swordsmanship, Emiya Shirou and the two B's shared one more thing.
They all carried something inside them. It was just that Shirou's was a scabbard, and theirs was the Eight-Tails.
With that settled in his mind, Natsuki pulled up the new template.
[Name: Emiya Shirou][Period: The Case Files of Lord El-Melloi II][World: Fate/stay night][Rank: S]
[Ability 1: Projection Magecraft — UNLOCKED][Effect: Projection Magecraft as mastered by Emiya Shirou.]
[Ability 2: Projection Magecraft — Rule Breaker — LOCKED][Effect: Medea's Noble Phantasm. Nullifies any contract founded on chakra, restoring its target to the state it held before alteration.][Unlock Condition: Kill a traitor.]
[Ability 3: Projection Magecraft — Rho Aias — LOCKED][Effect: Drawn from Greek myth. Absolute defense; each petal constitutes one layer.][Unlock Condition: Block thrown weapons from a Kage-class opponent seven times.]
[Ability 4: Projection Magecraft — Jeweled Sword Zelretch — LOCKED][Effect: Through the Second Magic, draws limitless magical energy from parallel worlds.][Unlock Condition: Absorb the power of the Ten-Tails.]
[Ability 5: The Everdistant Utopia (Avalon) — LOCKED][Effect: The scabbard of Excalibur. Its bearer neither ages nor dies. The strongest defense known to exist.][Unlock Condition: Bring true peace to the shinobi world.]
Natsuki read it through twice, and even he was taken aback.
This template blew past anything he'd expected. Pleasantly so, for the most part.
Ability 1: Projection Magecraft.
He'd unlocked Projection before, but this was a different animal entirely—the complete, unabridged original. And it was precisely because of Ability 1 that Abilities 2, 3, and 4 existed at all.
Ability 2: Rule Breaker.
A dagger-shaped Noble Phantasm capable of voiding any chakra-based contract.
His first thought was the obvious one: severing the bond between a jinchuriki and its Tailed Beast. But "any contract" covered far, far more ground than that.
First, it could break any form of control. The jinchuriki bond fell under that heading. So did the bindings imposed by genjutsu and barrier techniques.
Second, it could unmake any creation. Puppets, for instance.
Third, it could strip any applied effect. Buffs like the Lightning Style Chakra Mode, for instance.
The unlock condition was to kill a traitor.
How to put it? Simple on its face, uncomfortably vague underneath.
A traitor—to him, or to the Hidden Leaf? If it meant the Leaf, easy enough; go find a rogue ninja and be done with it. If it meant a betrayal of him personally, that was a problem.
Because as of right now, not a single shinobi had betrayed him.
Ability 3: Rho Aias.
Not much to say about this one. The so-called Seven-Petal Shield, with defensive strength that bordered on absurd.
Unlock condition: block thrown weapons from a Kage-class opponent seven times. Hardly a tall order.
Ability 4: Jeweled Sword Zelretch.
He'd already unlocked "infinite magical energy" once, and what it had actually gotten him was the Black Holy Grail. The Jeweled Sword was infinite in the literal sense, because it drew from parallel worlds. There was no bottom to that well.
The condition looked brutal but wasn't, really.
Absorb the power of the Ten-Tails.
The Ten-Tails was the nine beasts plus the Gedo Statue. Natsuki intended to collect all nine regardless; adding the Statue was one more item on an existing list.
And the Gedo Statue was currently in Uchiha Madara's possession.
Conveniently, Madara was already on his list too. He could handle it on the way.
Ability 5: The Everdistant Utopia.
An ability so absurd it arguably qualified as conceptual. Hold it, and you neither aged nor died. Release its true name, and it deployed a defense that was simply absolute—ignoring all attacks, ignoring all interference from the world itself, sealing its bearer away from every form of intervention.
Unlock condition: bring true peace to the shinobi world.
On the surface, peace meant an end to the wars. That much, at this point, Natsuki could manage.
His one concern was whether "peace" meant more than ending wars—whether it also required building the shinobi world into something better. If so, this one was going to tie him up for a very long time.
He exhaled quietly.
Either way, this template was a windfall.
"That enough for you?"
Tsunade shivered faintly as his breath moved against her, and the question came out before she could stop it.
"Thank you, Tsunade-sensei."
Natsuki knew exactly where the line was. He stepped back and smiled.
Tsunade met his eyes and felt heat rise in her chest. She turned her head away fast and fixed her gaze on the unconscious Cloud shinobi instead.
"What are you planning to do with all of them?" she asked, changing the subject.
"Send them back to the Hidden Cloud."
"You're just letting them go?" Surprise flickered across her face.
"We're sending them back," Natsuki corrected.
Tsunade caught it a beat later, and the surprise deepened. "You want to occupy the Hidden Cloud? That's not going to fly. It breaks the rules."
"What rules?" Natsuki raised an eyebrow.
"No matter how bad things get, the system of Five Great Nations and Five Great Villages stays intact." Tsunade folded her arms. "Even the Fire Daimyo wouldn't sign off on you taking the Cloud."
"I never said anything about abolishing the Five Great Villages." Natsuki smiled thinly.
His plan was to leave the Five Nations and Five Villages standing exactly where they were, and to run them from the shadows.
For one thing, he already had quiet control of the Hidden Sand and the Hidden Mist.
For another, being the man behind the curtain was both more interesting and considerably less trouble.
While the two of them talked, far in the distance, Uchiha Madara wove a seal, dissolved into smoke, and vanished.
The shadow clone's memories flowed home, and the real Madara opened his eyes.
"How did it go?" Black Zetsu asked.
"Natsuki single-handedly destroyed the Fourth Raikage, the Eight-Tails jinchuriki Blue B, and over seven thousand Cloud shinobi," Madara said slowly.
"That—is that actually true?"
"I watched it happen. Of course it's true." Madara was quiet for a moment. "His strength is likely no less than Hashirama's or my own, back in our prime."
"That doesn't make any sense," Black Zetsu muttered.
It understood better than anyone just how monstrous Hashirama and Madara had been. Their raw talent had been part of it—but only part. They were also the reincarnations of the chakra of Asura and Indra, the sons of the Sage of Six Paths.
Black Zetsu had been created by Otsutsuki Kaguya. It had walked the shinobi world for over a thousand years, and in all that time, exactly two people had ever risen high enough to shake it: those two reincarnations. Nobody else came close. Bloodline decided that, and bloodline didn't negotiate.
So what was Natsuki?
Where had he even come from?
Black Zetsu had no recollection of Kaguya bearing any other children.
"Our position is precarious," Madara said with a sigh.
After everything he had endured, his will had long since hardened into something like steel. Even so, Natsuki made it waver.
For one thing, his body was a ruin. He would never fight at his peak again.
For another, Natsuki's mere existence had ground his plans to a halt. Nagato, Uchiha Obito—every approach had come up empty.
Worst of all, Madara was out of time. He had been leeching chakra from the Gedo Statue to stretch out his lifespan, and his body had reached the end of what it could take.
Black Zetsu felt the weight of that just as keenly—arguably more so. It had waited a thousand years to find a Madara suited to carrying out the plan. If he died, would it have to wait another thousand for the next one?
Waiting was not something it enjoyed. And it certainly didn't want Otsutsuki Kaguya sealed away for another millennium.
"With the Cloud shattered, going after Uchiha Obito is pointless now." Black Zetsu turned it over for a long while. "The best move left is to accelerate the plan. Have Nagato use the Rinnegan."
The Eye of the Moon Plan, in its essentials: collect the nine Tailed Beasts, make Madara the Ten-Tails jinchuriki, and cast the Infinite Tsukuyomi. Nagato's part had always been twofold—gather the beasts, then use the Outer Path: Samsara of Heavenly Life technique to bring Madara back.
Black Zetsu was proposing they skip the collection entirely and jump straight to the resurrection. As far as it was concerned, only a Madara restored to his absolute prime stood any chance against Natsuki. Remove Natsuki, and rounding up nine Tailed Beasts became a formality.
"And how, exactly, do we control Nagato?" Madara frowned.
The whole reason he'd sought out Obito was to install him as the plan's proxy. A crucial piece of that had been steering a broken, embittered Nagato—ideally to the point where he'd use the Samsara of Heavenly Life technique of his own accord.
Unfortunately, Nagato hadn't fallen. And Obito had never become the proxy.
"I could try," Black Zetsu said.
"You're capable of that?" Something in Madara sharpened with suspicion.
"You made me. I am, in essence, the incarnation of your will." Black Zetsu's tone stayed level. "I can attempt to take hold of Nagato's will. I can't promise it works."
"Is that so." Madara sank into thought.
"We watch and wait for now," Black Zetsu added. "If nothing else presents itself, I'll go make the attempt."
Madara hesitated, then nodded.
It came back to the same problem: his lifespan was nearly spent. He had a feeling he had a year left, two at the outside.
And once he was dead, Black Zetsu could go try whatever it liked without needing his permission anyway.
In that case, he might as well roll the dice.
If it worked, he would come back. And he would come back young.
At which point, he had every confidence he could put Natsuki in the ground.
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