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It hit Manji all at once. Indra was going to die.
In the original story, the brothers had beaten each other half to death, then gone their separate ways. Lived their own lives. Died on their own terms. Reincarnated. That was how it was supposed to go.
But this wasn't the original story anymore.
Asura had the combined power of every single person in Ninshū funneled into his body. The Thousand-Armed Buddha wasn't throwing punches. It was delivering a verdict. And Hagoromo was standing right there, face blank as a slab of marble, making zero effort to intervene.
This wasn't a fight between brothers.
This was a firing squad.
They weren't trying to defeat Indra. They were trying to erase him so completely that even the cycle of reincarnation couldn't bring him back.
"AAAAAAGH——————!!!!"
The scream punched through the sky like a knife through wet paper.
Indra's Susano'o had already disintegrated into violet confetti. His actual body lay half-buried in a crater of his own making, bones shattered in places bones shouldn't shatter, blood pouring from his mouth in a steady, relentless stream that had already soaked through everything he was wearing.
Those eyes. The ones that had always been too proud, too fierce, too full of fury to ever look anything but dangerous.
Now they were just... fading. Dimming like lanterns running out of oil.
But they were still pointed upward. Still locked on that blurry silhouette floating against the stars.
He forced his mouth open one last time.
"Grandpa... save me..."
The voice was so small it barely qualified as sound. A candle flame in a hurricane.
And somehow, despite the distance, despite the noise, despite the explosions still echoing across the battlefield, it reached Manji perfectly.
Nearly a thousand years of living. He'd watched friends die, civilizations crumble, entire species go extinct. He'd compressed his emotional range so far down that most days he genuinely couldn't tell the difference between watching a sunset and watching a funeral.
But Indra was different.
Sure, Manji had plenty of disciples. Gamamaru. Hagoromo. The Tailed Beasts. The toad elders. Dozens of names across centuries of teaching.
But they were mostly toads. Animals. Creatures he'd guided with a few words, pointed in the right direction, then let loose to figure things out on their own.
Indra was the only human he'd ever taught from the ground up. Hand over hand. Day after day. From the fumbling kid who couldn't hold a seal properly, to the teenager who practiced until he collapsed against Manji's shoulder, to the young warrior whose Sharingan blazed with the absolute conviction that he could remake the world.
Every single step of that journey had Manji's handprints all over it.
"Can't let this one die..."
"Guess I'm stepping in."
The words came out barely above a whisper. Part emotion. Part calculation. Both pointing in the same direction.
"Fukasaku. Head back. This chapter of the history will have to wait. I'll dictate when I return."
Fukasaku didn't question it. A quick seal, a puff of smoke, gone.
........
Then the sky changed.
HMMMMM————!!!
Space itself bent around Manji like heat distortion over a desert road. The pressure that fell from above didn't arrive gradually. It simply was there, all at once, settling over the entire battlefield like a hand pressing down on a table.
Everything stopped.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM——————!!!
Sage energy of a magnitude this world had never tasted crashed into the atmosphere like a meteor made of pure intent. The kind of power that didn't announce itself with flashy effects but instead made the air itself feel heavier, made gravity pull a little harder, made every living thing within range instinctively understand that something fundamentally above them had entered the equation.
Hagoromo's head snapped upward.
His Rinnegan went wide. Actually wide. For the first time in decades, his face showed something other than carefully managed composure.
This Sage chakra. It's HIM.
Asura, still driving the Buddha's assault, felt his entire chakra network lock up mid-strike. Every pathway seized. Every technique froze. It was like someone had grabbed his skeleton from the inside and simply said stop.
The Thousand-Armed Buddha, still mid-swing with a billion tons of concentrated Willpower behind each palm, halted in the air. Completely. Every single hand. Frozen in place like a painting.
Then...
CRACK——!!!
One crisp sound. And every last palm strike shattered into nothing. Dissolved. A billion points of concentrated chakra, scattered into the wind like dandelion seeds.
Hagoromo stared at the sky. His Rinnegan trembled in its socket.
A figure was descending through the parted clouds.
"He's intervened... but why?"
The question came out of Hagoromo's mouth before he could stop it. His brain was already running calculations, and none of them were producing answers.
That man never involved himself in Ninshū's business. Not once since its founding. Not a single public appearance in centuries. He lived on his mountain, trained his toads, and treated the human world like a show he'd already seen the ending to.
So what changed? What was different about tonight?
"FATHER! WHAT IS THAT??"
Asura had never heard his own voice sound that small before.
Hagoromo's expression was something Asura had never seen. Not anger. Not fear, exactly. Something deeper. Something that made the most powerful man in the world look suddenly, uncomfortably mortal.
"He's here... I just don't know why."
"Who? What's his name?"
"That name cannot be spoken. Must not be spoken. Must never be called aloud."
The words landed on Asura like cold water. He looked at his father's face, and the pieces fell into place with a sickening click.
"He's... real? He actually exists? Why would he show up now, of all times?"
"..." Hagoromo's fists were clenched so tight his knuckles had gone past white into grey. He'd spent centuries trying to understand Manji. Failed every time. The man showed up once per century if you were lucky, revealed nothing about his past, nothing about his goals, and vanished like morning fog the moment you blinked.
His origins? A mystery. His motivations? Completely opaque. His reason for being here tonight?
Absolutely unknowable.
........
Down below, the disciples of Ninshū were having simultaneous religious experiences.
The Indra-Asura fight had already been incomprehensible. Gods fighting gods. The kind of power that made ordinary people feel like ants watching a thunderstorm.
But the Thousand-Armed Buddha, a construct bigger than a mountain range, channeling the collective will of their entire order, had just been deleted with what appeared to be zero effort.
Whatever had descended from the sky existed on a level that made everything they'd just witnessed look like children throwing rocks.
Sarutobi stared at the light breaking through the clouds, and something resonated inside his chest so powerfully it nearly knocked him off his feet.
It's him...
When Sarutobi had been nothing. A nameless orphan with no parents and no future. That person had appeared. Had taken him by the hand. Had personally walked him to Ninshū and said this one stays.
Without that moment, Sarutobi would still be herding cattle in some village nobody remembered the name of.
Not that there was anything wrong with herding cattle.
But ninjutsu had given him the whole sky.
Sarutobi lowered himself to his knees. Slowly. Deliberately. The way you kneel when you mean it.
"He's here..."
His voice was reverent. He didn't say the name.
The disciples closest to him nearly had a collective stroke. Their unshakable senior, the man who'd never bent his spine for anyone, was on his knees.
"Brother Sarutobi? What are you—"
"The real God just walked in."
"...What does that mean?"
Sarutobi resisted the urge to smack someone.
Look at Hagoromo's FACE. When was the last time you saw the founder of Ninshū look like someone just told him bad news?
There was exactly one being in existence who could put that expression on Hagoromo's face.
"The real old guard has arrived."
Sarutobi pressed his palms together.
........
Manji hung in the air. White robes catching the wind. Sage energy radiating outward in concentric waves that made the entire world go quiet, like a room full of people holding their breath at the same time.
His gaze dropped to the broken figure lying in the crater below.
Something moved behind his eyes. Complex. Brief. And then it was gone, replaced by the same studied calm he'd been wearing for centuries.
"Indra. Your master's here."
A flick of his finger. A thread of pale gold light spiraled down, wrapped around Indra's shattered body, and lifted him gently out of the crater. The Toad Sage Talisman's energy flooded through the boy's system, mending bones, sealing vessels, knitting torn muscle back together at a speed that made the word "healing" feel inadequate.
One second, Indra was dying. The next, he was whole.
And the moment his body was his own again, the tears came.
Not the dignified kind. Not the kind you see in paintings of noble warriors accepting defeat with grace. These were the ugly, shaking, can't-breathe-properly tears of someone who'd just been dragged back from the absolute edge and didn't have enough composure left to pretend otherwise.
"FOUNDING PATRIARCH! YOU'RE MY REAL FATHER!!!"
The words ripped out of him.
Down below, Hagoromo, the biological father, had watched his son get beaten to a pulp without moving a single muscle. And up here, the Founding Patriarch, bound to him by choice and not blood, had descended from the sky to pull him out of the grave.
The math wasn't complicated.
"Founding... Patriarch..."
Indra's voice dissolved into fragments. Blood and tears ran down his face in mixed rivers. That proud head, the one that had never bowed for anyone, for any reason, dropped low.
Nothing left in his expression but unguarded gratitude and the kind of vulnerability that only surfaces when every wall you've ever built gets knocked down at once.
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