Alex was launched, flying to the ground across to the opposite end.
Jada gasped as Izumi took a step back.
Even in the Tenseigan Chakra Mode—a state that rivaled the Six Paths power—Arthur had managed to cross the distance and land a clean hit before Alex could even finish his sentence.
Steam rose from Arthur's knuckles as he hovered there in midair. "I was coming for you next anyway…"
On the far side, Alex peeled himself off the floor. His flames flickered erratically before stabilizing. Then he felt it as he touched his nose: blood. It ran down his chin, staining the pristine white chakra cloak.
Alex stared at it with widened eyes. He was shocked. No, he was beyond that; he was utterly bewildered. Not a single person had ever made him bleed before!
Slowly, the shock morphed as his mouth twitched upward.
Izumi watched him, disturbed, because she couldn't fathom why he was still smiling.
"Okay," he laughed, wiping the blood away. "Let's see what ya got then!" He raised his right arm, causing a dense ball of golden chakra to begin to form in his palm. "Golden wheel rebirth ex—"
Arthur appeared right in front of him again. This time, as Alex thrust his palm forward, Arthur reached out and grabbed his wrist. One flare of Arthur's eyes, and the momentum stopped instantly as the golden chakra dissipated.
Alex's mouth gaped open. He hadn't even seen when Arthur closed the distance. When he looked down at his captured wrist and then up at Arthur's face, Arthur backhanded him.
Smack!
Alex's head snapped to the side. Before he could recover, Arthur grabbed him by the throat, flung him into the air, and then rag-dolled him straight to the ground.
Crash!
Jada was left stunned. Not even Alex, the best shinobi among them, could stand against Arthur's might.
From within the newly formed crater, Alex arose, coughing his lungs out. The white cloak dimmed for a second as he was visibly shaken. Then he felt it: his internal organs were rattling.
Arthur stood high in the sky over them all like a titan ready to end things. "It's time I finally put all of you in your places…"
At those words, he lifted the Blade of Chaos and placed it flat against his own chest. A surge of chakra exploded from his body like a tsunami of pressure.
The sheer potency of the energy forced both Uchihas to their knees. It felt as if the air had increased its weight tenfold. This forced Jada to react on instinct. "Susanoo!" Spectral hot-pink ribs knit together to form the skeletal defense around her and Izumi.
Izumi, still pinned to the ground by the pressure, looked at Jada with confusion. Why? she thought. She was just trying to kill her earlier, so why protect her from this? Yet Jada wasn't even looking at her; she was looking at Arthur.
The air around him began to twist. Alex, still on the ground, watched with wide, fascinated eyes as the transformation took hold. The Tenseigan could see not just Arthur's main chakra but every chakra being released.
Black lightning crackled and hissed like angry snakes. Thick, cloying smoke poured from Arthur's shoulders. Shards of supernatural ice formed in the air, freezing the moisture instantly. And Sage Chakra swirled in a vortex, mingling with the malicious red bubbling of Tailed Beast chakra.
"Harmonizing opposing natures?" Alex whispered, "Even I haven't mastered that."
Jada's Susanoo creaked. She was using every ounce of her reserves just to keep the Susanoo from shattering under the ambient pressure. Even the barrier Alex had erected began to fracture as the winds inside picked up to hurricane speeds.
Jada gritted her teeth because of it. This was nowhere near the time the two had fought. Against her, it was his Simian Sage Mode. Against Alice, the Angelic Mode. And against Margaret, the combination of the two.
But what was this new transformation?
Arthur's silhouette began to change. The energies fused into him as his skin crystallized, taking on the quality of polished diamond. He was becoming a singularity.
Alex struggled to his elbows. He felt a tugging sensation in his gut upon looking down at his hands. The white flames of the Tenseigan Chakra Mode were stretching toward Arthur.
"No way," he gulped. Arthur's power was enough to even be pulling in Alex's chakra while consuming the very environment. "Arthur..." Alex breathed, watching his own power drift away into the vortex of the man standing before him. "You... You're too strong."
The wind inside the crater howled, tearing at the ground as Arthur's transformation neared its zenith. The sky alone had shifted colours, reacting to the sheer density of the chakra coalescing around the man who sought to destroy this world.
It's then that Jada saw Alex reach into his own pouch and withdraw a single object.
It was a glass orb, roughly the size of a melon.
"What are you doing?!" she yelled over the roaring winds.
Alex pulled his arm back and threw the orb directly at the heart of the storm.
Arthur, still undergoing his transformation, saw the projectile. His diamond eyes narrowed with disdain. "Like that's gonna do anything…"
Simply lifting the Blade of Chaos, he slashed downward to swat the annoyance out of the air.
Clink.
The sound was impossibly soft, yet the moment the blade made contact with the glass, the world inverted with a blinding light erupting from the point of impact.
Arthur froze. He felt his transformation halt. The black lightning, the ice, the smoke, and the Sage Chakra—it all stopped flowing. It was as if the pause button had been pressed on his own existence.
He tried to concentrate, to force the energy to continue surging, but it refused to obey.
The light shone so brightly that he felt himself being swallowed into it.
"What is this...?"
He looked into the middle of the light, and there, in the center of the brilliance, an eye opened. It was red, with ripple patterns spreading out from the pupil, adorned with three tomoe: the Rinne Sharingan!
Impossible, he thought. This shouldn't exist.
He tried to unleash a technique from the Blade of Chaos, but even that refused to obey him. He had to do something. But what? What?!
Suddenly, swoosh!
The sound was like a vacuum sealing shut. The light collapsed inward, imploding in a single, silent instant. The wind died, the black lightning vanished, and the pressure that had pinned the Uchihas to the earth evaporated.
Arthur Bennett was gone.
The orb, now glowing with a faint, steady pulse, lost its momentum and fell. It dropped through the air, caught by Alex's naked hand.
He looked down at the trapped nebula inside as his chest heaved. Jada herself lowered the Susanoo.
"Just what was that light?" she breathed. A sudden movement to her left snapped her back to reality. It was Izumi, scrambling to her feet and bolting away. "Wait! Izumi, stop!"
Yet Izumi didn't listen. She boosted her speed with chakra, blurring toward the edge of the crater, desperate to put distance between those two.
Jada took a step to chase her, yet a hand stopped her shoulder.
"Let her go," Alex said with a tired voice, lacking the manic energy.
"Alex, what are you doing?! That's Izumi! We can help her. She's important!"
"Jada, she's the least of our worries right now. We have bigger problems."
Jada stopped struggling to look at Alex. She then followed his gaze down to the orb. The swirling mist inside had settled into a steady, hypnotic rotation. It looked innocuous, beautiful even, but the dread radiating from it was still intense.
"That..." she said in a cautious whisper.
"It's the Limited Tsukuyomi orb… The same prototype Obito used in the Road to Ninja movie."
Jada's eyes widened. She knew the movie quite well. But knowing it as a piece of fiction and seeing it before her very eyes were two very different things.
"I don't get it," she stammered, looking from the orb to Alex's face. "How did you... That technique requires massive resources. You need things like the Red Moon and Tailed Beasts from the Gedo Mazo to channel the chakra."
"Jasper helped."
"Jasper?"
"Months ago," Alex said. "I sent him on a mission to collect chakra from some Tailed Beasts. Thankfully, he made a pact with the Three-Tails so—"
"—you used them to recreate the Limited Tsukiyomi…"
"You sure are smart," Alex smiled in relief. He thought he had to explain everything for a second. "Combined with his own reserves and the traces of others we've encountered, I just made the chemical composition of the jutsu."
"Wait, then it's not the real one."
"I prefer to call things like these 'synthetic variants,'" he corrected. "Actually, I was going to save it in case we failed to convert Nagato or Obito later down the line." He proceeded to look at the orb. "But to think I had to use it on Arthur... Shoot, I didn't even know if it would work."
Jada was visibly horrified. Had Alex not at least tried what he did, Arthur would have finished that transformation. And if he had, who knows what would have happened here?
Yet something was still not to her liking. "Even if it's a variant, there's no way to make it without something like the Rinnegan."
Alex gestured to his own eyes. That's right; he had something no one knew he had: the Tenseigan.
"The Tenseigan is a sibling to the Rinnegan," Alex calmly said. "Technically, it lacks certain dimensional manipulation abilities, but when used correctly—and with enough chakra—it can simulate the projection. Don't think too hard on these things."
Jada felt a chill. The ingenuity was terrifying. Alex had recreate a beyond-S-tier genjutsu using borrowed parts and fan theories, and it had actually worked.
"So Arthur..." she asked.
"He's trapped," Alex confirmed, "in the 'Genjutsu World'."
From what she recalled, the Genjutsu World was an alternate world created by the user of the orb. Meaning, Arthur was sealed inside another dimension.
Jada took little time to process things. The strongest ninja in the world, the man who could fully revive the dead, was now sitting in Alex's hand.
As they felt more chakra signatures leaving the area, they understood that things were coming to their end.
"Looks like with Arthur gone, his army's falling back," Alex sighed in relief. "Guess we don't have to worry about them for the moment."
"Alex," Jada asked, turning to him. "How did you even know we were here?"
Alex opened his mouth to answer, perhaps to make a joke about his timing, but he froze upon feeling two large chakra signatures fast approaching. Jada felt it too.
When she turned around, her hands quickly came up into a defensive seal. Alex himself shifted his stance, moving slightly in front of her.
From the dust and smoke of the battlefield, Konan and the Naraka Path appeared.