"Let me see how far you can make it."
Madara watched the fight in the field.
On the battlefield, Kiyohara's clash with Hōzuki Kurotsuki had already hit a fever pitch.
Twin blades versus a single blade; water-hardened threads versus Magnet Release sand-iron—both of them moving at high speed within a hundred-meter radius, every collision kicking up a shocking blast of air.
"Water Release: Water Dragon Whip!"
Kurotsuki stopped reinforcing the seal on Nohara Rin. With his left hand forming seals, he drew the Thunder Sword Kiba that had been hanging at his waist and lashed out—high-pressure water whipping toward Kiyohara.
The Hōzuki clan specialized in controlling water.
Not just standard Water Release, but Water-style secret techniques as well.
The "Water Dragon Whip" Kurotsuki used now was an upgraded form of "Running Water Whip."
Like a dragon's tail, the watery lash roared toward Kiyohara.
Kiyohara's Sharingan tracked the water's trace.
Everything in his sight became frame-by-frame.
In less than a second, he reached out.
With the double hardening from Steel Release and Earth Release: Earth Spear, Kiyohara's hand was pitch-black, heavy as black metal.
He spread his fingers and—under Kurotsuki's stunned gaze—caught the dragon-tail whip.
Then he yanked hard.
Kurotsuki was caught off guard and got dragged straight in.
Kiyohara swung his blade—one clean cut aimed at Kurotsuki's head.
SHK!
Water spilled.
In that lightning-fast instant, Kurotsuki used the Hōzuki secret art "Partial Hydrification," liquefying his head.
"Heh… heh heh… I really almost got killed there."
Kurotsuki hurriedly pulled back to widen the distance.
If he hadn't used that secret technique, his head would've been split in two.
"My Hydrification Technique makes me immune to physical attacks. You've heard of Hōzuki Mangetsu, right? He's my cousin."
Kurotsuki grinned.
Hōzuki Mangetsu was Mist's most famous prodigy—practically guaranteed to become the next Seven Swordsmen, and the strongest tier the moment he joined.
So as his cousin, Kurotsuki was no ordinary fighter either.
"You've got something."
Kiyohara sheathed his blade.
Cuts and slashes really couldn't do much to Kurotsuki.
To beat him, you needed the right tool for the job:
Either Fire Release to evaporate the water—
Or… Lightning Release.
Lightning could paralyze the hydrification process and effectively lock that ability down.
That was the Hōzuki clan's biggest weakness.
"Thinking of using Lightning Release? You really think I'll let your lightning hit me?"
Kurotsuki sneered.
With Kiba in hand, he was effectively a Lightning specialist too. If Kiyohara tried to throw lightning at him, he could block it at range.
"You guessed right—too bad there's no prize."
Kiyohara smiled faintly.
Sand-iron surged from the gourd at his waist like black water and coated his fists.
He made himself a pair of sand-iron gloves.
Wrapping lightning directly around your skin was a high-level technique—like the Lightning Chakra Mode, a Cloud Village secret, rare even inside Kumogakure.
Kiyohara couldn't do that.
So he went one step down and "enchanted" the sand-iron instead.
Same result.
All that mattered was hitting Kurotsuki.
"Lightning Release… Lightning Flow!"
A C-rank current wrapped around Kiyohara's fists, forming pale-blue lightning knuckles with crackling arcs.
"What?!"
Kurotsuki clearly hadn't expected that.
Kiyohara's legs flexed—
the nearby ground compressed and sank, spiderwebbing with cracks.
BOOM!
A lightning-fast dash shot forward.
For a split second, Kurotsuki almost saw the silhouette of Minato Namikaze—
except this lightning was black.
Kurotsuki raised Kiba to block Kiyohara's left punch.
Kiyohara's right fist drove straight for his head.
That punch borrowed power from the surrounding magnetic field—
a rotation buff, like stacking a layer of berserk force.
Even a casual strike now could explode into an absurd "critical hit."
Kurotsuki didn't even see the fist; he just felt his ears ring.
The wind pressure had battered his eardrums into tinnitus.
Instinctively, he liquefied his head again.
He gambled that he could be just a hair faster than Kiyohara.
Even with the arcs—so long as his head wasn't completely pulverized, so long as he could keep Hydrification running, he wouldn't die.
Did I make it…?
Adrenaline spiked his thoughts into a brief acceleration—
and then he felt himself rising into the sky.
Kiyohara was getting smaller. The trees beneath were shrinking.
Then came the thunderous boom—
his head, half water and half brain matter, burst like a smashed watermelon, spraying everywhere.
In that moment, Kurotsuki could even see his own headless body.
He… was already dead.
The moment that truth landed, his awareness went black.
Kiyohara was still holding the follow-through of his punch.
From burst to kill, it took under half a second.
To everyone else, it looked like Kiyohara coated his hands in sand-iron and lightning—
and then Kurotsuki's head exploded.
"Interesting… that speed…"
Madara watched through the shared vision.
He couldn't actually see Kiyohara's movement clearly.
The feed came from White Zetsu's eyes.
If Zetsu couldn't track it, then the image reaching him was blurry too.
"So then… how would you handle a tailed beast?"
Madara rubbed his chin.
Kiyohara's display against Blackhoe Raiga and Hōzuki Kurotsuki had been outright domination.
And even so, his chakra reserves still looked plentiful.
For a shinobi, chakra quantity was everything.
The more chakra you had, the higher your ceiling usually was—
and Kiyohara's reserves clearly dwarfed Kakashi's… and Obito's.
"Madara, that kid's talent is really something," White Zetsu sighed.
"It is," Madara nodded.
Now that he knew Kiyohara carried Uchiha blood, his view of him shifted.
Was his "stage" really going to produce two Uchiha who awakened?
As Kiyohara finished off Kurotsuki, Obito clutched his aching side and forced himself up again.
"Rin… stop… look at me…"
Obito shouted, trying to use the "bond" between them to reach her.
"If I still matter to you even a little—stop, Rin!"
His duck-cracking voice mid-puberty made the line sound bizarre.
He didn't dodge. He kept stepping forward.
BAM!
Rin answered with another heavy punch wrapped in crimson chakra—straight into his chest.
Fine cracks spread across the White Zetsu body like something overloaded.
The pain stole Obito's breath; he flew back again, carving a deep furrow in the ground.
"Obito, what the hell are you doing?!"
Spiral Zetsu grimaced in pain.
Did Obito have some kind of weird fetish—charging face-first into a berserk jinchūriki and eating hits?
Was he drunk?
"Give me control. I'll handle it," Spiral Zetsu said.
"No… no, I can't."
Obito stubbornly refused.
A second and third crimson chakra tail fully solidified behind Rin, the impact of their slams making the entire woodland quake.
The water prison formation shook violently, water bursting off its surface; two of the "Water-Form Chains" snapped completely and scattered into chakra motes.
"We can't hold her!"
"Retreat—pull back!"
The remaining Mist shinobi went pale.
They were down to barely twenty-something after losses to Kakashi and Kiyohara.
Facing a fully berserk, indiscriminate tailed-beast cloak host was suicide.
"Water Release: Water Wall!"
"Water Release: Water Dragon Bullet!"
A few Mist jōnin tried to stop her, but their water dragons only steamed against the crimson cloak—then got torn apart by raw chakra.
Rin burst free of the last restraints.
Trees snapped. Rocks shattered. The ground plowed into deep trenches.
The tailed beast's terror finally showed itself.
"AAH!"
One Mist Anbu was a fraction too slow—one chakra tail slammed his chest and sent him flying like a ragdoll into a distant cliff. He never moved again.
"Spread out—don't cluster!"
"Use binding jutsu or sealing!"
Crimson chakra raged through the forest with the dying screams of Mist shinobi.
"Rin… stop… please, stop…"
Obito muttered. The two tomoe in his Sharingan spun to their limit, blood vessels creeping across the sclera.
"Hey, Obito—your eye…"
Spiral Zetsu's voice echoed inside him.
Obito didn't hear it.
In his world, there was only that crimson-wrapped silhouette destroying everything.
Kiyohara's gaze swept the battlefield.
Mist forces were already cut down to under ten fighters who could still stand, all of them injured.
"Obito's emotions are at the threshold… the eye changes are obvious."
"But it's not enough. It still needs one last spark… and Madara's waiting."
Kiyohara's hand brushed his pouch—where he'd prepared medical supplies:
scalpel, bandages, quick suture thread, strong hemostatic injections, a cell-activity stimulant—restocked from Konoha Hospital once he realized Rin's event was coming.
"Plan stays the same. Timing matters."
He took a breath and concentrated chakra into his eyes, watching the chakra flow around Rin's heart.
There, he could see an unnatural "knot"—the core of the binding talisman.
Kiyohara understood: Madara must've actively driven it, making it obvious. Normally it would've been hidden.
"Kakashi—buy me time," Kiyohara said.
Once the talisman was destroyed, he'd stop the bleeding immediately.
"Got it."
Kakashi nodded.
He saw Obito trying to approach Rin, and the Mist survivors pulling back to keep distance—and he stepped in front of Obito.
As Obito started forward, electric arcs flared in Kakashi's hand.
"Chidori!"
Blue lightning tore the air, stabbing straight at Obito.
From Kakashi's perspective, this spiral-faced, pale creature had appeared out of nowhere, tried to get near Rin, and kept pressing even as she went berserk.
It looked exactly like a deeper enemy plot—maybe they meant to capture the raging "container."
Kakashi chose to strike first.
Obito just stared at Kakashi.
The eye he'd entrusted.
The vow to protect Rin.
The friend and rival he'd loved most.
He didn't recognize me.
He really… didn't recognize me.
Even with my face like this—my voice changed—me screaming in pain—
Kakashi, Rin…
Have you… forgotten me?
Or did you always think the loser "Uchiha Obito" should've died in that cave—never should've come back—never should've returned as a monster and disrupted your lives?
Something inside Obito finally collapsed.
The world lost sound.
Lost color.
All that remained was Kakashi's face—so close, yet impossibly far—and the Sharingan in Kakashi's eye spinning like it was going to bleed.
Obito's own eye shifted.
The two tomoe became three.
While Kakashi and Obito faced off, Kiyohara poured Lightning Release chakra into his blade.
Heat built until the metal glowed red-hot—just enough to sterilize the surface in an instant.
Disinfection, completed in a heartbeat.
Then Kiyohara's single-tomoe Sharingan locked onto Rin's openings.
Berserk Rin was all instinct.
And her tailed-beast cloak was still the bubbling, foamy crimson phase—not yet the darker, denser form.
The moment Kiyohara caught a gap, he moved.
With a flick of his wrist, the red-hot blade—like a surgeon's scalpel—slipped between ribs, cut through the tailed-beast cloak and skin, and stabbed into Rin's left chest.
The tip went straight for the "knot."
SHK!
Rin's outer chakra began to dissolve.
Her slit pupils started to return to normal.
"Kiyohara… kun…"
With the talisman broken, her consciousness came back.
She looked down at her pierced chest and—strangely—felt relief.
"Don't be afraid, Rin," Kiyohara said.
He withdrew the blade quickly.
He hadn't done it on impulse.
Tailed-beast chakra increased a host's healing.
As Rin's cloak dispersed, that leftover regenerative boost would make her internal recovery far faster than normal.
That was exactly why Naruto could take horrific damage early on and still bounce back the next day.
"?"
Rin blinked, realizing Kiyohara had avoided her heart.
But her body went limp—she collapsed into his arms.
She'd burned too much stamina, and the rampage had drained her; she was dangerously weak.
"Hold on. There's something inside you."
Kiyohara slid two fingers in and pinched out a thin talisman.
It seemed Madara hadn't built Rin's "binding" as perfectly as Obito's—maybe because he never planned for her to survive.
"Mmm…"
Rin winced at the pain.
And suddenly her memory caught up.
In a black cave, a Mist Anbu woman had forced her to swallow a talisman.
It wriggled inside her, then latched near her heart.
Now Kiyohara had pulled it out.
"I'm stopping the bleeding, Rin."
Kiyohara pressed a hand over the wound and used the "Hemostasis Technique" he'd learned from Tsunade.
Once the bleeding stopped, he could follow with "Regeneration."
Rin wouldn't die.
She'd just be horribly weak.
Behind them, Obito saw only Kiyohara's back—and the moment the blade went into Rin's chest.
To him…
What was this…?
What was happening?!
"I refuse… to accept this!"
In Obito's eyes, everything else vanished.
The wrecked trees, dead Mist shinobi, Kakashi blocking him, Kiyohara's cold strike—everything blurred into background noise.
The only thing that stayed sharp was Rin's "near-death."
Memories flashed:
their first meeting, Rin talking to him first—
"Hi! I'm Nohara Rin—wanna play together?"
"What a coincidence, our seats are close."
"I believe you'll become an amazing Uchiha someday."
"I'll always be watching you, Obito."
Her smile carved itself into his mind.
In that instant—when he thought Rin was dying—something inside him shattered.
He clutched his chest.
It hurt.
It hurt so much.
To lose the one he loved—
His chakra boiled, surged into his brain, and the world washed red.
"Ugh…"
Kakashi turned—and saw something terrifying.
He clutched his left eye too, as if resonance had stabbed him with sudden pain.
His heart felt like it had been hollowed out.
Nothing left.
A void ripped open by this hellish world.
This was wrong.
Why did Rin go berserk?
Because Mist tampered with her.
Why were they here?
Because of war.
Everything was wrong.
Ah…
A world this wrong… was false.
"I'll… create a world with only Rin!"