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Manji didn't look at Indra.
His gaze swept downward, past the settling dust, past the craters and the rubble, and landed on the two figures standing below.
Hagoromo moved first. "EVERYONE, FALL BACK. NOW."
No urgency in the voice. No panic. Just the flat, unarguable authority of a man who'd been giving orders for longer than most civilizations had existed.
The disciples obeyed instantly. Whatever was about to happen next existed in a weight class so far above theirs that being within visual range was a legitimate health risk.
Within seconds, the battlefield was empty.
Four people remained.
Manji in the sky, positioned squarely between Indra and everything else.
Hagoromo on the ground, Rinnegan throwing cold violet light across the ruined earth, Asura tucked safely behind him.
Master and student above. Father and son below.
Two pairs, facing off across a silence so thick you could've driven nails into it.
"Hagoromo..."
Manji's voice carried without effort. Not loud. Just present, the way a mountain is present.
"Indra is obsessive. Arrogant. He tried to take everything by force. He was wrong. He deserved to lose. He deserved to be humbled."
A beat.
"But he doesn't deserve to die."
"I'll take Indra with me. Train him under my watch. Grind the violence out of him until what's left is something worth keeping."
Hagoromo bowed. It looked correct. It felt hollow.
"Master. Indra tried to overthrow Ninshū. He was ready to slaughter his own people to seize power. If you let him walk out of here alive, he will become a catastrophe this world can't survive."
"Master, forgive my bluntness."
Hagoromo straightened up, and the Rinnegan blazed.
"Indra must die today. He's already walking the same road my mother walked. If you shield him now instead of stopping him, you're not saving him. You're creating the second Kaguya."
He'd played the Kaguya card on purpose. The woman who'd betrayed Manji, stolen his opportunity, put an Ash Bone through his chest. If any wound in that ancient heart still bled, it was that one.
Hagoromo was betting everything on it.
Manji's expression didn't change.
"You don't need to worry about that."
He knew what Hagoromo didn't. Indra's Ōtsutsuki blood was too diluted. His ceiling was hard-locked. He could train for ten thousand years and never become another Kaguya. It was physically impossible.
Hagoromo saw the immovable calm in those eyes and felt his stomach drop through the floor.
So that's how it is.
He closed his eyes.
In the darkness behind his lids, a lifetime of images crashed over him like waves. Ten thousand Ninshū disciples, laughing around campfires. Ordinary people suffering under the boot of a world sliding toward war. Asura's gentle, bewildered face. And Kaguya. Always Kaguya. The memory of what unchecked power could do to a world that wasn't prepared for it.
He'd spent his entire existence fighting this. Sealed his own mother. Built Ninshū from nothing. Spread a philosophy of understanding and compassion across the known world.
Was he supposed to stand here and watch a second tyrant walk out the door?
And then something else clicked into place. Something that had been nagging at him for years.
Manji was never the detached, desireless sage he pretended to be. A man who truly wanted nothing didn't descend from the clouds at the exact moment his hand-picked student was about to die. A man who truly wanted nothing didn't spend years privately tutoring one specific child while ignoring the other.
Manji was playing a game. A long one. A game that used people and centuries the way other men used chess pieces and minutes.
And Indra was his piece on the board.
The moment that realization crystallized, every shred of hesitation burned away.
"Master. Indra's crimes are beyond redemption. For Ninshū. For every innocent life in this world. He must die."
Hagoromo's voice rang with the finality of a gavel striking stone.
Next to Manji, Indra went rigid. Every drop of warmth drained from his body in a single breath.
His own father. His actual, biological father. Not just willing to let him die, but actively demanding it. Not a crack of mercy. Not a sliver of hesitation.
Manji's brow furrowed.
Something about this was starting to bother him.
Hagoromo had sealed his own mother. Now he wanted his own son dead. Both times, the justification was the same: the greater good. Ninshū's survival. The world's future.
Noble words. And Manji might have found them more convincing if he hadn't been the one who'd invented them.
That whole "sacrifice personal love for universal love" philosophy? Manji had made it up on the spot, years ago, specifically to manipulate Hagoromo and Hamura into fighting Kaguya. A rhetorical tool. A narrative weapon designed to override filial loyalty in two impressionable young men.
Manji himself had never believed a single word of it.
And here was Hagoromo, decades later, wielding that borrowed philosophy like a holy sword. Using it to justify killing his own child.
"Hagoromo. You've lost yourself."
"Master, I will NOT apologize!"
Hagoromo's chakra detonated outward. Six Paths energy erupted from a body that was already running on fumes, burning through his remaining life force like a bonfire consuming its last logs.
"Sacrificing personal love for the greater good! There's NOTHING to hesitate about! Today, I'll match myself against the gods! Show me your real strength, Master!"
A weapon appeared in his hand.
Pitch black. Wreathed in churning, primordial chakra that seemed to eat the light around it.
The Nunoboko. The Heavenly Jeweled Spear. A divine instrument of the Six Paths.
Behind him, Asura grabbed his father's sleeve with a death grip, face white as chalk.
The sitting leader of Ninshū was about to throw down with the Founding Patriarch.
"Father! That's the FOUNDING PATRIARCH!"
Asura's voice cracked on every syllable. He spun toward the sky and crashed to his knees, tears running freely.
"Founding Patriarch! Please, just take my brother and GO! My father's not thinking straight! He doesn't mean—"
"ASURA! GET BEHIND ME!"
Hagoromo's roar silenced his son like a slap. His Rinnegan was locked on Indra, and the look in those eyes had passed beyond determination into something colder.
"I fought Kaguya before. Today, I'm still fighting Kaguya."
"This is my last charge. The final stand of Hagoromo Ōtsutsuki."
In his mind, the figure he was looking at wasn't his son anymore. It was a ghost. The shadow of his mother's tyranny, wearing new skin. Kaguya reborn in his firstborn's body.
If not now, when?
........
Manji said nothing for a long time.
Then, slowly, Sage chakra began to rise from his body. Not violently. Not aggressively. Just... rising, the way floodwater rises. Calm. Inexorable. Filling every available space until there was nowhere left for anything else.
The pale gold energy pressed outward, and Hagoromo's Six Paths chakra actually recoiled from it, pulling inward like a flame shrinking from a larger fire.
"Hagoromo. How many years have you been running this world? A few centuries? You think you understand Indra better than I do? You think your judgment about his nature, his core, his potential is more accurate than the judgment of a man who was already old when you were born?"
"Fine. If you're determined to fight over this, I'll give you two exchanges. That's all you're getting."
Behind the calm, Manji's calculations had already finished running.
Hagoromo was dying. Depleted. Running on willpower and borrowed time. The man who'd sealed Kaguya at full power was long gone. What stood below was a shadow of that peak, burning through the last of his reserves like a candle drowning in its own wax.
And if this confrontation was unavoidable...
THEN THE RINNEGAN CHANGES HANDS TONIGHT!!
Hmmmm——!
The air split. A rift of pure darkness tore itself open, and from within, a blade emerged.
Black from tip to pommel. Radiating a quiet, suffocating menace that made the atmosphere itself flinch away from it.
The Six Paths Sword.
Centuries of Manji's personal refinement had fused it with Sage energy from five different traditions. It wasn't the same weapon Hagoromo had given him all those years ago. It was something else entirely now. Something that resonated with Manji's soul the way a heartbeat resonates with the body that houses it.
He gripped the hilt. The blade angled downward. Casual. Almost lazy.
The ground a hundred meters below cracked anyway.
"Hagoromo. Do you really want to test how sharp this blade has gotten?"
"Do you really want the world to burn because the two of us couldn't settle a disagreement with words?"
Below, Hagoromo's grip tightened on the Nunoboko until the bones in his fingers creaked. The spear hummed in response, its vibrations carrying across the distance, meeting the Six Paths Sword's resonance in crackling arcs of wild chakra that sparked and died between them.
Two divine instruments. Forged by the same hands. Recognizing each other across the gap.
Hagoromo poured everything he had left into the spear's shaft. Sage energy. Yin-Yang Release. The last reserves of a body that had been running on fumes for years. The earth around his feet split into chasms that plunged beyond sight, and his aura blazed with the desperate, magnificent fury of a dying star burning through its final fuel.
Truth-Seeking Orbs condensed and materialized around him, orbiting in slow, lethal circles.
He looked up at the man who'd been his master for centuries. A man whose full power remained a complete mystery to this day. A man who'd watched gods rise and fall and hadn't bothered to change his expression through any of it.
And he didn't back down.
"Master. My Nunoboko is just as sharp!"
The words crashed against Manji's pressure, and for a moment, held.
Then both auras collided.
The shockwave flattened everything within a mile. Loose stone evaporated. The fractured ground collapsed inward, layer after layer, forming new abysses. The blast scoured the landscape down to bare, smoking bedrock.
Both weapons drew their power from the same source: conviction. The stronger the will behind them, the sharper the edge. The more unshakable the resolve, the more devastating the force.
And these two? One had lived for nearly a thousand years and hadn't found a single thing strong enough to break him. The other had spent his entire existence sacrificing everything he loved for a world that kept demanding more.
Their willpower wasn't made of steel.
Steel would've bent.
Indra, sheltered behind Manji's talisman barrier, stared at the Six Paths Sword with the expression of someone watching God unsheathe a weapon.
Asura, rooted to the ground below, watched his father and the Founding Patriarch prepare to tear the continent apart, and couldn't make himself move.
This was what it looked like when the people who actually shaped the world decided to stop talking.
The sky went silent. The wind died. Even the dust stopped drifting.
Two figures, separated by centuries of accumulated will, stood in perfect opposition.
And the world held its breath.
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