The moment Kaito disappeared, he re-entered his alternate dimension. Though unstable with the sudden surges of spatial turbulence, he still forced his way in with the overwhelming power of the Six Paths.
Inside the lonely void, Kushina sat restlessly, boredom in her expression. The instant she saw Kaito rush in with an exhausted look, she stood up in alarm.
"Kaito! Are you alright? Did something happen?" she asked anxiously.
"It's nothing, I nearly got swept away by the turbulence," Kaito replied, waving it off with a calm smile.
"Space turbulence? What's going on? Weren't you just fighting Madara?" Kushina pressed, her eyes full of concern.
Kaito quickly recounted what had happened: how Madara's Limbo clones had wrapped around him, how he tore through them, and how he retreated to his personal space in an instant. Without wasting time, he locked onto the coordinates of Earth, intending to rejoin the battlefield.
Back outside, Madara's eyes widened when he heard Kaito's voice. His expression twisted in shock.
"Impossible! You escaped my Limbo space?!"
The disbelief in his tone was palpable. His ultimate pupil technique, executed with his full strength, had failed to restrain Kaito. At most, it left him slightly scuffed.
"Embarrassed, maybe," Kaito admitted lightly, "but that's all."
Madara's heart sank. The gulf between them was undeniable, like the gap between him and the Five Kage—only far greater. Even as the Ten Tails' Jinchūriki wielding the Six Paths' power, he could not bridge it.
"Hahaha! Good! As expected of you!" Madara roared with manic laughter. "Worthy of being the opponent I acknowledge! But… you're too late!"
"Really?" Kaito's tone was flat.
Lightning erupted across his body. Clenching his fist, he unleashed a devastating strike.
The thunder roared, swirling into a colossal fist of gray-black lightning, infused with the balance of yin and yang and the other four elemental forces. Its power dwarfed even that of the Truth-Seeking Orb scepter—this was his strongest bloodline technique.
Kaito had spent countless trials refining this fusion, and only recently mastered it. Unlike the subtle precision of the Truth-Seeking Orbs, this thunder was raw, violent, overwhelming. A storm of annihilation that made hearts tremble at first glance.
Boom!
The thunder fist surged forward, unstoppable.
Madara, unable to use Limbo again, fused his Truth-Seeking Orbs and scepter into a black barrier to block the strike.
Cracks appeared instantly.
Boom!
The barrier shattered, raining fragments like black stars. The lightning punched through, tearing straight through Madara's body.
Half of him was obliterated. What remained shriveled under the relentless thunder, his vitality devoured. The gray lightning gnawed at him like a hungry beast, preventing the rapid regeneration he'd relied on before.
Even with the Ten Tails' resilience, recovery was agonizingly slow. Without it, he would already have been reduced to ashes.
Madara stared at Kaito, disbelief burning in his fading eyes. Even now, as the Ten Tails' Jinchūriki empowered by the Six Paths, he could not endure.
How had Kaito reached such heights?
But his end was near, and Madara knew it. His lips curled into a final, grim smile.
Before I die, I'll leave you something to remember me by, Kaito.
He raised his remaining hand, pulling off his forehead protector to reveal an enormous eye embedded there—an evolved Rinnegan marked with tomoe.
"The Eye of the Moon… Infinite Tsukuyomi!" Madara rasped, forcing his last strength into the jutsu.
Hum!
A beam of light shot skyward from his forehead, striking the full moon above. The moon's surface warped and shifted, transforming into a colossal Rinne Sharingan that glared down upon the world.
The eye pulsed, waves of power radiating outward as its blinding light engulfed Earth.
One by one, people across the world froze, their eyes reflecting ripples of the Rinnegan as they fell into dreamscapes—prisoners of the Infinite Tsukuyomi.
But in the sky, Kaito remained untouched. Hovering above the world, he watched with calm, unaffected eyes. The illusion had no hold over him.
____
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