Chapter 20 — Our World Is About to Be Destroyed
The war room was a theater of shadows. Paper maps lay rolled and pinned, cups of gone-cold tea steamed forgotten, and the faces of those who had dreamed of changing the world were drawn tight with a new and terrible fear. Nagato sat at the head of the table in his wheelchair, a living statue with hollowed eyes, while Konan hovered at his side like a pale sentinel. Obito stood with his hood down, one Sharingan eye blinking like a slow, red ember. Black Zetsu's voice threaded through the hush, calm as rot.
"That's right," Zetsu said, folding his long, leaflike hands over the diagram he'd drawn—the concentric rings of the spreading field. "He is still flesh and blood. No matter how voracious the phenomenon he commands, he is not immortal. One day, his body will wear out. No one escapes death."
Obito's posture shifted. He had been rigid, taut with guilt and calculation, but a slow smile—dangerous and small—began to tug at the corner of his mouth. The simplest truths cut deepest when you had a plan.
"You mean we hide," Obito said softly, and the sentence had the flavor of something old and terrible put back together. "We shelter what matters in Kamui. Let the world devour itself while we wait." He glanced toward Nagato. "Let the field take its toll. When Raizen finally perishes—of age, starvation, or some unforeseen weakness—we emerge. The world will be vulnerable. Then we move."
Black Zetsu's smirk was a smear of wet ink. "We prolong the age of our masters and steal what remains. With enough patience—hibernation, shelter, the Outer Path Statue under lock and bone—we can still turn this into victory."
Nagato watched them like a prophet who had seen a ruin and now listened as others proposed mosaics to cover it. The room smelled of cold metal and old paper. He could feel the slow, sickening slide of time, as if the world itself had started a countdown hands no one had asked for.
"It's a clever escape," Nagato said, voice low, hoarse from the wounds that still ached beneath his chest. "But you fail to understand the cost. If we retreat into some private dimension and wait, we become cowards who let the world die around us. The Will of Fire—" He let the words hang, like a word that used to keep fires burning and now only kept ash. "—what becomes of it then? Will the world's children forgive us for bartering their tomorrows for a chance to play god later?"
Obito's jaw tightened. He did not deny the moral calculus; he lived beyond it. He had traded and stolen and buried his conscience once already in the name of a dream. Now that dream had cracked, and the shards threatened to cut everything.
"Morality will not resurrect our dead," Obito answered. "It will not stop the ice from climbing glaciers or stomachs from hollowing. If Raizen's field swallows the world, our bodies are buried with it. But if we preserve the core—Nagato's Rinnegan, the Gedo Statue, our knowledge—then the next era will be ours to shape."
Zetsu tapped the parchment, where the rings had begun to eclipse continents. "We don't have certainty that the field grows without limit. But we have time measured in months, not years—if we are generous. At present rate, once forty to fifty percent of the planet is cold and dead, the climate system collapses. Seas freeze, crops fail, storms rearrange the world. Civilization doesn't survive that. Half the planet is our deadline."
The words felt like a verdict. Conversation became a battlefield of smaller plans, each one measured by appetite rather than conscience.
Obito found himself thinking like a man whose house was burning: salvage what you can, then take what you must. His mind moved quickly—Kamui as refuge; Nagato's Rinnegan as bargaining chip and engine; Akatsuki's members as pieces to be repositioned. A glimmer of the old strategy, frayed but surviving, illuminated his face.
"What if we do not merely hide?" Obito said at last, pushing the map aside. "What if we use the fear he inspires? If word of Raizen's power spreads, the nations panic. They will beg for sanctuaries, bargains. They will be willing to surrender anything—artifacts, power, even their jinchūriki—to ensure survival. We collate the most desperate among them into Kamui. That day becomes our recruitment. We become the architects of their dependence."
Konan's paper wings trembled faintly as she listened. She had always been the practical counterpoint to Nagato's grim idealism; she measured danger and profit in the slit of a papercut. Her face remained unreadable.
Nagato's eyes, dark and chapped, burned for a moment. "You would gamble the world's survivors on the possibility that Raizen's death will save us. What of the alternative? If he does not die? If his eyes regenerate, or if the field's hunger becomes self-sustaining and unforgiving? We shelter ourselves and the world dies. We gamble and fail, and no one is left to rebuild."
"Then what choice do we have?" Zetsu asked, almost pleasant. "Retreat and hoard sorrows? Or use the coming chaos to reposition power? Obito's plan gives us options. We are not choosing merely to survive—" he smiled a smile that had eaten too many things to be innocent, "—we choose to remain relevant."
The meeting changed tone then, sliding from moral philosophy into logistics. Zetsu explained contingencies: Kamui access points, numbers needed to maintain a human population in stasis, mechanisms to preserve the Gedo Statue and Nagato's Rinnegan, proposed seals and redundant safekeeping. Obito's single eye tracked the diagrams like an assassin reading a map. It all depended on callous precision: gather, condense, lock away, wait.
"Could the jutsu be invented?" Konan whispered—more a question asked of the paper under her fingers than to the men present. "A hibernation technique to carry thousands? To slow metabolism, to preserve the mind until the end?"
Zetsu's face split into a mock of enthusiasm. "We will harvest combinations—medical ninjutsu, sealing, senjutsu stabilizers. The world is rich in scientists, in fools who would sell anything to survive. We combine their desperation with our cunning and craft a lullaby for civilization." He laughed once at the image, and the sound grated like a blade.
Obito looked at Nagato. He needed an affirmative, however hollow. Nagato had the aura of a man who could have the faith of nations if he so chose. Obito needed that faith turned into a mechanism he could direct.
Nagato's expression was unreadable. He thought of the ruined villages, the bodies pulled from frost, the children who would never see spring. He thought of Yahiko's laugh, the bright plan that had promised a kinder world. The plan they were now asked to bless came without the spark that had once led them to avenge the weak. It came as a spiderweb intended to catch the desperate and convert them into leverage.
Slowly, Nagato nodded.
"If we do this, it will be with rule," he said quietly. "Not for Madara, not for Obito, not even for Zetsu. After the ice retreats and the world is ours to shape again, we—Akatsuki—will be responsible. We will not simply resurrect old hierarchies. We will remake the world with new principles or we will be the last to die. That is my condition."
Obito felt sweat bead at his temple. Power, once within reach, always came with strings. But this was a string that could make his dream live on.
"We will do that," he murmured.
Zetsu clapped his leaflike hands together. "Good. We begin immediately. Send envoys. Stage a visible panic. Leak the truth in fragments to the five great nations. Drive them to ask for shelter. Prepare Kamui. Secure Nagato's Rinnegan in layers of seals—redundant, nested. Build the hibernation protocol. We must move quicker than the field grows."
Konan folded her hands together on the map, the tips of her fingers whitening. A different thought, quieter and more dangerous, stirred in her—if they corralled the world into Kamui, what choice would those locked away have? Would they wake to a world remade by men who had gambled with their lives?
Outside the hall, the world kept sliding toward cold. Someone had placed a clock in the room earlier that day, and its second hand seemed to stutter. The small human motions—coffee cooling, boots on stone, a courier's hurried step down the corridor—seemed insignificant beneath the diagram on the wall. The planet was a tinderbox made of frost and rumor, and the match had already been struck.
Obito stepped away from the table and toward the window. Beyond the mullions, the night lay thick and venomous; in the distance the black silhouette of Raizen's domain lay like an oil spill across the world. He felt an old calculation rise in his chest—the same cold arithmetic that had once led him to accept horrors for the promise of a future.
"Then let us begin," he said, voice steady.
Nagato closed his eyes for a moment, and behind the lids his sight was the last of the old orders—fields of children's laughter, the smell of rain, a small hand clasping another. The Will of Fire had been their fuel. Now, choosing to lock the world into a pocket and wait felt like stepping back from a furnace that had once warmed them into a freeze that would not forgive.
He opened his eyes. They were empty, and yet they were filled with a resolve that had nothing to do with innocence.
"Prepare Akatsuki," he said. "Summon them. We will orchestrate the panic—and if we must hide to ensure some future, then so be it. But remember this: the world will not forgive us lightly. When the ice thaws, it will ask for the price of what we owe."
Zetsu's smile did not falter. Obito's eye glowed just for an instant—less the hunger of a monster, more the patience of a man who had learned how to wait. Outside, the rings on the map grew a little wider.
They had chosen a course. Whether it was wisdom or cowardice, salvation or theft, would be something the future had to decide.