An indescribable terror pressed down across the entire battlefield!
At that moment, Senju Hashirama and Uchiha Madara moved simultaneously.
"Come, Hashirama!"
Uchiha Madara stood atop the Susanoo wooden statue's head and let out a roar.
Boom!
With a deafening rumble, Uchiha Madara guided the Susanoo wooden statue forward. Its massive silhouette charged ahead.
As it moved, the wooden statue raised its hands, holding a three-tomoe black energy sphere that radiated destruction and warped the surrounding space. It hurtled toward Senju Hashirama.
"It's over!"
"Madara!"
Senju Hashirama answered with his own shout, his thoughts stirring.
Behind the colossal Kannon statue, over a thousand arms, each as large as a small mountain, surged into motion.
Those arms blotted out the sky, covering the heavens above Uchiha Madara. True Several Thousand Hands – every fist swung down from the air.
Each fist was wrapped in solidified blue chakra, tinting the entire sky an azure blue, dazzlingly beautiful.
Yet this beautiful scene was drenched in an indescribable aura of death!
With Senju Hashirama under the Eight Gates' enhancement, the power of True Several Thousand Hands' thousand fists surged, and their speed multiplied several times over.
The thousand fists not only generated terrifying wind pressure but also ignited into blazing flames from friction with the air!
In the blink of an eye, the sky, once azure, was engulfed in a sea of fire. Each fist became a burning meteor plummeting from the heavens!
A scene of apocalypse blanketed the entire battlefield!
Boom! Boom!
Boom! Boom!
The instant Senju Hashirama and Uchiha Madara's attacks collided, something eerie happened – no thunderous explosion rang out. Instead, as if someone had pressed a pause button, the entire world fell silent!
But a heartbeat later came a cataclysmic explosion and a deafening roar!
The battlefield where they stood cracked and collapsed into ruins the moment their attacks met.
The colossal impact and rumble carried all the way to the sky above Konoha, twenty or thirty kilometers distant!
The thunderous sound shook the Hidden Leaf Village, the Hidden Mist forces, and the Hidden Stone forces, startling everyone.
All eyes reflexively turned toward the source of the sound.
Even from such a distance, they could clearly see a visible shockwave rippling outward across the sky above the battlefield.
A look of stunned disbelief crossed every face.
"I-It's incredible."
"The aftershocks… reached all the way here."
"Is this really power that shinobi can wield?"
"Terrifying. With our strength, we probably aren't even qualified to approach the edge of the battlefield."
Stammering voices of awe and fear rose among the various factions.
Of course, beyond the shock, the Konoha side felt a surge of morale at the sight.
None of Konoha's shinobi knew the exact state of the battle, but the colossal disturbance generated by Uchiha Madara and Senju Hashirama's clash told them all that Lord Hashirama was fighting fiercely.
Invisibly, their morale climbed.
At that same moment…
Not only on the Konoha battlefield – in another location, Yuto sat cross-legged on a giant tree, attempting to fuse the chakra of nine Tailed Beasts within his body. The tremor shook him awake as well.
"This commotion… the battle is far more intense than anticipated."
Yuto's eyes snapped open toward the direction of the sound, a flash of gravity and restless eagerness in his gaze.
Such a fierce battle was rare indeed.
Yuto's heart urged him to rush over and watch, but as soon as the thought formed, he suppressed it.
Setting aside that he had already promised Uchiha Madara he would not interfere in this fight…
Even if he stood at the battlefield's edge doing nothing but watching, Uchiha Madara and Senju Hashirama would likely hold back.
That would be counterproductive.
"Madara seems to be losing…"
Yuto murmured, gazing toward the battlefield.
Though separated by a great distance, Yuto's powerful perception could sense two blazing auras clashing far away.
One aura was stronger, the other weaker.
Having just fought Might Guy, Yuto recognized that the stronger aura belonged to Senju Hashirama, who had activated the Eight Gates.
Yuto guessed that Hashirama had not opened all eight gates.
Even so, Hashirama already surpassed Uchiha Madara by a wide margin.
Madara's chances of victory had grown slim.
After all, in the original story, Might Guy with all eight gates open had nearly killed Uchiha Madara, who possessed the power of the Six Paths.
Now, Madara had not yet obtained that power – only the Rinnegan. And Hashirama was no Might Guy; he was stronger.
With these factors, no matter how one looked at it, Uchiha Madara was bound to lose!
Yuto's eyes flickered. Though he thought this, he did not believe Madara was truly doomed.
If battles were decided solely by strength, there would be no need to fight at all.
Back when Tsunade, Jiraiya, Orochimaru, and Senju Tobirama had surrendered to him, they had not bothered with schemes and plans.
Yuto understood better than anyone that at their level, the outcome was never certain until the very last moment!
"You two must have had quite the fight."
Yuto leaned against the tree and chuckled.
A moment later, he patted his clothes and stood.
He had spent the entire night researching the chakra of the nine Tailed Beasts. No matter how he tried to mash the nine streams together, nothing worked.
Though all nine originated from the Ten-Tails, they remained stubbornly distinct.
Simply merging them was useless – as if some catalyst that could bind them together was missing.
Though Yuto had been jolted awake by Hashirama and Madara's battle, he knew further research would yield no results.
He decided to stop wasting time.
"As expected, after this war ends, I'll return to the Hidden Mist Village and inject the last stream of chakra into the Gedo Statue. Perhaps that will trigger a qualitative change."
Yuto murmured, then pushed off lightly and shot into the sky, heading toward Konoha.
Meanwhile, on the battlefield where Senju Hashirama and Uchiha Madara clashed…
Their shockwaves kept rippling outward. A raging tempest of energy annihilated everything in its path.
At the epicenter of their collision, space itself rippled and warped.
"Argh!!"
Uchiha Madara's neck bulged with veins as he roared, pushing the Susanoo wooden statue forward.
Massive fists wreathed in flame kept crashing down from the sky like meteors.
The instant they collided, cracks had already spread across the Perfect Susanoo encasing the wooden statue.
Though Uchiha Madara poured his vast ocular power into repairing it, the cracks showed no sign of healing.
And when Senju Hashirama's True Several Thousand Hands struck the tomoe energy ball, over a hundred fists were obliterated on contact.
But the True Several Thousand Hands had far more than a hundred fists. A storm of brutal, relentless fists engulfed Uchiha Madara!
Terrifying impacts continued to detonate overhead!
The colossal sounds lasted roughly twenty minutes before finally ceasing!
At the center of the battlefield, the ground had sunk five or six meters.
Senju Hashirama stood atop the giant Kannon's head, gasping for breath.
Of the original thousand-plus fists of True Several Thousand Hands, two-thirds had been destroyed. The surviving arms hung loosely around the Kannon, a pitiful sight.
Hashirama drew a deep breath, then quickly looked ahead.
The Susanoo wooden statue he had summoned had been reduced to scattered fragments across the battlefield.
Uchiha Madara's figure had vanished.
"Did I win?"
Hashirama sensed no trace of Madara's aura. A complicated expression crossed his face as he murmured.
As he spoke, he slid rapidly down the Kannon's body, leaping from ledge to ledge.
With a heavy thud, the giant Kannon dissolved into a massive puff of white smoke and disappeared.
Hashirama landed on the ground, then sat unceremoniously on a pile of rubble.
"That was a difficult battle."
He exhaled in relief and slowly relaxed.
But just then…
His loosened nerves snapped taut again. His pupils contracted sharply as he stared at the ground ahead.
There, where moments before there had been nothing, Uchiha Madara's figure slowly materialized.
What truly stunned Hashirama was that Madara showed not a single wound or injury – only slight panting.
Impossible!
Hashirama was supremely confident in his own attacks. Under that onslaught, Madara should have been dead, or at the very least severely wounded.
Uchiha Madara stood amid the rubble, clenched his fist lightly, and exhaled.
"Truly terrifying methods, Hashirama!"
He looked up at Senju Hashirama, his voice carrying an enigmatic tone.
In the exchange just now, Madara knew he had lost.
In truth, he had been killed by Hashirama once again.
"That's impossible! What's going on!"
Hashirama leapt to his feet, his body tense with alarm, and demanded an answer.
Madara blinked, momentarily caught off guard.
They were enemies – why would he reveal such a thing under normal circumstances?
But surprisingly, Madara simply opened his palm and said casually: "Izanagi – a forbidden technique that converts all unfavorable outcomes into dreams."
As he spoke, he drew a finger across his own chest, right over the spot where Hashirama's face was embedded in his flesh.
In an instant, a bloody slit appeared. Madara thrust his hand inside and pulled out a milky-white eyeball.
Obviously, before the battle, Madara had stored a Sharingan eye in the Hashirama-cell tissue on his chest.
"I should thank your Konoha shinobi for slaughtering the entire Uchiha Clan."
"Otherwise, I wouldn't have so many spare Sharingan."
Madara gazed calmly at Hashirama and spoke slowly.
At these words, Hashirama's expression darkened.
This was wrong!
He had naturally studied the Izanagi technique after being revived.
After all, Danzo possessed an entire arm of Sharingan, and facing Uchiha Madara as an enemy, Hashirama had certainly reviewed this knowledge.
But that only made his brow furrow deeper!
Because during the fight, he had already factored in this technique.
Izanagi could indeed convert all negative effects, including death, into dreams. But using it required an enormous amount of chakra!
Moreover, the chakra consumed by Izanagi could not be restored by the technique's reset.
The amount of chakra consumed also scaled with the severity of the damage or negative effects.
In other words, the greater the injury, the more chakra was required.
In Hashirama's calculations, the two had already battled for an entire day and night, exhausting most of their chakra.
And the final blow – True Several Thousand Hands powered by the Eight Gates – would have consumed a large portion of Madara's remaining reserves.
Under normal circumstances, Uchiha Madara should have had no spare chakra to use the forbidden Izanagi!
[
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