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Chapter 23 - Chapter 23: The Scorched Earth Judgment

The world ended at the edge of the village. One moment, there was the gentle rustle of leaves, the distant chirp of birds. The next, there was only a silence that screamed. It was a silence woven from the absence of life, punctuated by the faint, choked sobs that Indra's Six Eyes could perceive from a mile away. He stood at the tree line, his body a statue of coiled fury. His senses, expanded to their cosmic limit, painted a fresco of hell in his mind.

He saw the men of the village, farmers and craftsmen, not warriors, lying in contorted positions in the mud, their tools still clutched in dead hands. He saw the broken doors of huts, the torn screens. He heard, not with his ears but with his soul, the echoes of violation, the terror of women, the confused whimpers of children who had seen things no child should ever see. The air was thick with the stench of blood, sake, and the vile, triumphant chakra of the radicals.

This was not a battlefield. This was a slaughterhouse. A playground for monsters wearing human skin.

His rage, a constant, simmering sun within him since he'd left his father's side, did not boil over. It crystallized. It became a diamond-hard core of absolute, unforgiving purpose. This was the injustice John Pendragon had been powerless against. This was the corruption that had festered in the world that took Vidya from him. Here, in this wretched village, it had manifested in its purest, most vile form.

A soft swish of air announced her arrival. Tōka landed beside him, her own sensory abilities granting her a glimpse of the horror within. Her face, usually a mask of fiery confidence, was pale, her lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line. She saw the tremor in Indra's hands, the way the very air around him wavered with heat haze. This was beyond the rage of a warrior. This was the fury of a primordial force witnessing a fundamental desecration.

He didn't look at her. His gaze remained fixed on the village, his Mangekyou Sharingan—the sun-like pattern of Amaterasu no Yomigaeri and Yata no Kagami—already spinning slowly, casting a bloody light on his impassive face.

"They celebrate," he whispered, his voice devoid of all humanity. It was the sound of grinding tectonic plates. "They drink and laugh amidst the ruins they have made. They believe themselves victorious."

He finally turned to her. In his eyes, she did not see her husband, John. She saw the War God. She saw the embodiment of the judgment he had spoken of on the mountain.

Wordlessly, he reached over his shoulder and drew the sheathed Nature's Dragon. The deep forest-green scabbard felt cool and calm in his grip, a stark contrast to the inferno raging within him. He held it out to her.

"Take this," he commanded, his voice still that low, terrifying rumble. "Do not let a single one of them escape."

Tōka's fingers closed around the familiar hilt. The sword seemed to hum in recognition, its pervasive life force a counterpoint to the death before them.

"Hurting the innocent is a crime," Indra continued, his gaze returning to the village. "An unforgivable crime. It is a sin against life itself. And whoever commits it… be they man, demon, or god… I will deliver justice upon them myself."

The conviction in his voice was absolute. It was the conviction of a man who had once been powerless, now armed with the power to reshape the world. Tōka felt a surge of fierce, proud love. This was the man she had fallen for—not despite his pain, but because of the unyielding morality it had forged in his soul.

"Then let us deliver it," she said, her own voice hardening into steel.

They moved.

They were not shinobi. They were phantoms. Wraiths of vengeance given form. Indra's Body Flicker was not a technique; it was a localized bending of space. Tōka's movement was a blur of raw, silent speed. They slipped into the village from opposite ends, their presence completely undetectable.

Indra found a group of children huddled in a root cellar, their eyes wide with terror. A single Uchiha radical, drunk and leering, was prying at the door. Indra was behind him in an instant. There was no flash of a blade. A single, precise chop to the neck. A muffled crack. The man crumpled, his spinal cord severed. Indra looked at the children, placed a finger to his lips, and with a gentle pulse of chakra, rendered them into a deep, dreamless sleep. He gathered them in his arms and was gone, depositing them safely outside the village perimeter before the body had even finished cooling.

Tōka found two radicals dragging a weeping woman towards a hut. Her Nature Dragon Sword Given by Indra was a blur of green-tinged light. One moment the men were standing. The next, their heads were separated from their shoulders, their expressions frozen in surprise. She caught the fainting woman, her touch gentle, her eyes burning with cold fire. "You are safe now," she whispered, and vanished with her to the forest's edge.

They worked with brutal, silent efficiency. A shadow here, a dead radical there. A rescued villager whisked away to safety. They were the reapers, culling the herd of monsters while shepherding the innocent to pasture. Within twenty minutes, the entire surviving population of the village—the traumatized women, the elderly, the children—were gathered in a hidden clearing deep in the forest, protected by a powerful genjutsu of Tōka's making.

The village was now empty of innocents. It was a stage set for the final act.

In the central square, the celebration was at its peak. Uchiha Heru, a gaunt, cruel-faced man with his son Saho's fanatical eyes, raised a cup of sake. "To a purified future!" he slurred. "With the old fools Tajima and Butsuma dead, and the abomination Indra next, our clans will return to glory!"

Beside him, Senju Mahi, a hulking brute, laughed, a coarse, ugly sound. "And to the spoils of war!" he roared, gesturing to the empty, violated huts around them.

Heru, his cup halfway to his lips, felt a strange sensation. A lightness. A disconnection. He looked down.

He saw his own body, still holding the sake cup, standing before him. The sight was confusing. Why was he looking down at himself? His gaze traveled upwards, and he saw a young man with hair as white as moonlight and eyes that held a spinning, scarlet sun. The young man held a fiery red katana, its blade clean, already sheathed on his back.

(every time Indra Use his mangekyou His hair turned to White Like Gojo Saturo)

When did he draw it? Heru wondered, his mind sluggish.

Beside the white-haired youth stood a blonde girl, beautiful and terrible. In her hands was a sword of deep, forest green, its point resting on the ground. And beneath her boot was the headless body of Senju Mahi. Heru's eyes, drifting downwards, saw Mahi's head, and his own, tumbling through the air in a macabre dance.

The world went dark for Uchiha Heru. The last thing he saw was the War God looking at him not with hatred, but with the utter indifference of a man swatting a fly.

The remaining ninety-eight radicals, their revelry shattered, scrambled for their weapons. The air filled with the shriek of drawn steel and the first sputters of forming Fire Style jutsu.

Indra did not move. He did not even look at them. He looked at Tōka, a silent communication passing between them.

Then, he spoke, his voice calm, conversational, yet it cut through the panic like a knife.

"Do you know what you are?" he asked the encircling mob. "You are not warriors. You are not revolutionaries. You are a cancer. A collection of cells that has forgotten its purpose is to support life, not consume it."

He brought his hands together in a single, complex hand seal. It was not a seal for a ninjutsu. It was a key, turning in the lock of reality itself.

"And you," he said, his Mangekyou blazing like a miniature star, "are about to witness a miracle. The miracle of understanding the sheer, infinite scale of your own insignificance."

"Domain Expansion," he whispered.

"Infinite Void."

There was no boom, no flash of light. The world simply… changed.

The village square vanished. The sky, the ground, the huts—everything was replaced by an endless, featureless white void. There was no up, no down, no sound, no smell. The radicals froze, not by choice, but because the very concept of movement had become meaningless. They were suspended, trapped in a universe of absolute nothingness.

And then, the knowledge came.

It was not an attack. It was a flood. The infinite, boundless information of the universe—the birth and death of stars, the countless lives across infinite worlds, the vast, unfeeling laws of physics, the sheer, staggering scale of existence—poured directly into their brains. It was too much. There was no filter, no processing. Their minds, finite and fragile, were instantly overloaded. They could not scream. They could not twitch. Their nervous systems were paralyzed by the sheer volume of data. They were conscious, aware, and utterly, completely broken, forced to comprehend their own meaningless existence in a cosmos that did not care if they lived or died.

Indra stood in the void, the master of this sterile hell. He looked upon the ninety-eight frozen statues, their eyes wide with a terror beyond comprehension.

"You sought purity," his voice echoed in the silence of their minds. "You sought to remove a 'stain' from the world. Behold. This is the true face of the world. Your hatred, your pride, your entire lives… are less than a single grain of sand on an endless beach. And now, you will be returned to that nothingness."

He drew the Phoenix Sun blade once more. It glowed, darkening to the color of a dying star.

"Sun Breathing: Thirteenth Form," he intoned, his voice the only sound in the infinite white. "Hinokami Kagura: Celestial Star Exploding Strike."

At the same time, Tōka, standing beside him in the void, her chakra harmonizing perfectly with his, formed her own seals. "Wood Release: One Thousand Hand Buddha's Strike!"

His technique was the focused, annihilating power of a supernova. Hers was the vast, crushing judgment of nature itself. A colossal, spectral Buddha with a thousand arms manifested behind her, each hand glowing with emerald power.

The two attacks did not clash. They merged.

A beam of pure, white-hot solar energy, wreathed in the primordial green of creation, lanced out from Indra's sword, amplified a thousandfold by Tōka's Buddha. It did not strike the radicals one by one. It filled the Infinite Void.

There was no sound. There was no explosion.

There was only light. A light that erased.

When the light faded, the Domain was gone. They stood back in the village square. The ninety-eight radicals were gone. Not just dead. Not turned to ash. They were unmade. There was no trace they had ever existed. The ground where they had stood was not even scorched. It was just… clean.

The entire village, however, was not. The sheer, leaking power of their merged technique had scoured the land. The huts were gone. The trees were gone. Every building, every body of the slain villagers, every blade of grass—everything was vaporized. All that remained was a vast, glassy, concave crater of fused earth and rock, still glowing faintly with residual heat. It was a hellscape of absolute nothingness.

Indra and Tōka stood at the crater's edge, their weapons sheathed. There was no triumph in their eyes. Only a cold, grim satisfaction. Justice had been delivered. It had been absolute, and it had been terrifying.

For the next two days, they worked quietly. They guided the shell-shocked survivors to a secluded, fertile valley far from any conflict. Using their immense power, Indra manipulated the earth to raise simple, sturdy houses, while Tōka used her Wood Release to cultivate instant groves of fruit trees and fields of grain. They provided supplies, medicine, and a promise of protection.

When they finally left, the survivors looked upon them not as shinobi, but as the divine, avenging spirits who had saved them from hell.

Days later, a contingent of the Daimyo's guards, along with investigation teams from every major clan, arrived at the site of the village. They found no village. They found only a massive, vitrified crater, a testament to a power so far beyond their understanding it was blasphemous. There were no bodies to bury, no enemies to identify. There was only the silent, screaming evidence of absolute annihilation.

The name "Indra Uchiha" was no longer just that of a War God. It became synonymous with divine wrath. And "Tōka Senju" was no longer just a War Goddess. She was his equal, his partner in judgment. Together, they were not just the strongest shinobi of their era. They were a force of nature. A warning to the world that there was a line, and those who crossed it would not just be killed.

They would be erased.

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