"Sunagakure?"
Deidara looked at the crimson puppet shell in front of him. "Sasori-danna, you're from Sunagakure, right?"
Sasori of the Red Sand didn't answer directly and continued instead. "Konoha should be in the middle of the Chūnin Exams' combat matches right now. The Fourth Kazekage was invited to Konoha to watch, but I heard he ran into an assassination attempt by Orochimaru on the way."
"Orochimaru? That traitor?" Kakuzu said, a little surprised that their former defector was being brought up again.
Hidan and Deidara didn't know much about it. By the time the two of them joined Akatsuki, Orochimaru had already left the organization.
"Yes. The original plan was to kill the Kazekage, shift the blame onto Konoha, and sever the alliance between Konoha and Sunagakure. That would push Sunagakure into joining forces with Otogakure and launching the 'Konoha Collapse Plan.'"
"Quite ambitious," Kakuzu commented.
"But it seems he failed," Sasori said. "He couldn't even take down the Kazekage in the first stage."
"The Fourth Kazekage is that strong?"
"Not weak," Sasori replied, "but against the crafty Orochimaru…" He recalled Orochimaru's Edo Tensei, when the Third Kazekage had been summoned to fight against his own Kazekage puppet.
"The intelligence didn't say how the Fourth Kazekage survived, but something must have happened for him to come out of it unharmed."
And whatever that reason was…
…it definitely had something to do with Konoha.
"Looks like we should pay Konoha a visit later," Kakuzu said. "There might be business opportunities."
"Why is it always about money?" Hidan complained. "Can't you think of something else, like going with me to recruit new believers for the Jashin cult?"
"Not interested. Skip it. Next topic."
...
On this side, the Akatsuki members left on standby chatted casually while exchanging bits of information.
On the other side, the Adult Obito Uchiha who had followed Pain and Konan away spent the entire walk calculating how to get his counterpart from another parallel world to come back and help draw the heat, so he could seize the chance to grab the stash of Sharingan from the base and bring it back to Itachi.
But time kept ticking by, second after second.
Half an hour wasn't long, but it wasn't short either, and there was still no sign of Ōtsutsuki Obito.
Only then did Adult Obito suddenly realize—
Once the Masked Man turned back into that Obito Uchiha who dreamed of becoming Hokage and couldn't ignore anyone in trouble…didn't that mean the curse of always being late came back too?!
Damn it!
So this was how Minato-sensei, Kakashi, and Rin had felt back then!
Help!!
Did he really have to mess with him like this? They were all on the same side!
By the time he arrived at the place where "Madara," Konan, and Nagato were talking, cold sweat had nearly soaked through Adult Obito's clothes.
He suddenly remembered how, whenever he went to other parallel worlds, he would just dump the truth on them and leave the mess for that world's version of himself to deal with.
Now karma had come full circle. The version of himself who knew the truth had come to this world and done the exact same thing—thrown out the truth and left everything else behind.
And now he was the one suffering.
How was he supposed to explain all of this to Nagato and Konan?
"You're not Madara Uchiha."
Pain got straight to the point, his Rinnegan fixed coldly on the black-haired man in front of him.
"But that doesn't matter. I don't care whether you're Madara Uchiha or someone else," Pain continued. "What I care about is my plan: to make the world feel pain, to make humanity understand pain, and through that, achieve true peace."
Obito Uchiha: "..."
It felt like he had gone back to that parallel world where Pain attacked the village.
"Um, Nagato."
"Call me Pain."
"Alright… Nagato. The truth is, I'm not Madara Uchiha."
"..."
Pain had already said he didn't care. If the other party wanted to talk, he would listen.
Adult Obito said, "Whether it was me or Madara Uchiha, we were both deceived by Black Zetsu. He wrapped the Eye of the Moon Plan in the lie of a genjutsu world where everyone would be happy, but in reality, it was a conspiracy he spent over a thousand years weaving, all to resurrect his mother, Kaguya Ōtsutsuki."
"That's your problem. It has nothing to do with us," Konan said coldly. "We're only partners. If you want to end the cooperation now, we don't care. But Akatsuki will never tolerate betrayal."
By the end of her words, her killing intent was aimed squarely at Obito Uchiha.
Obito wasn't afraid of Konan or Nagato. There were no six hundred billion explosive tags here, and as long as his intangibility held, even Kaguya's power couldn't touch him.
But when Yahiko's death was brought up, guilt still lingered in his heart. After all, he had been the one who killed all of Akatsuki's early members back then.
"Nagato, I think you may have misunderstood what Yahiko meant by pursuing peace."
Obito recalled the parallel world where Pain attacked the village, where he had seen sixteen-year-old Naruto Uzumaki fight Pain with everything he had.
Even after his mentor was killed by Pain, even after the village was left in ruins, even after the people who had slowly come to acknowledge him died protecting him in that battle—the peace Naruto sought was still the right path.
Unlike Madara Uchiha, unlike himself, unlike Nagato, who had all failed to endure the pain of loneliness and, as a result, misunderstood the meaning of peace. They were exploited by Black Zetsu and tempted into believing there was a shortcut, a way to end everything once and for all.
How many times had Obito Uchiha crossed worlds, how many truths had he learned, before reaching this understanding?
How could Pain, whose meeting had been interrupted out of nowhere, possibly comprehend or digest any of this so easily?
"And now you're telling me this?"
The low voice carried far more anger than usual.
Having recently grown used to hearing the Second Hokage's voice, suddenly hearing Pain speak again actually made Obito feel a little unsettled.
Obito said, "What I'm suggesting is that we revive Yahiko. Then you can ask him yourself whether you misunderstood his intentions."
"Are you joking?!"
At the mention of reviving Yahiko, Pain—or rather, Nagato—exploded in fury.
But Obito Uchiha noticed that Konan, standing beside Pain, reacted with far more shock than anger. There even seemed to be a faint trace of hope in her expression.
"This world is rotten and beyond saving!" Pain declared. "You should understand that better than anyone! People will trample over others without hesitation just to protect what they want! As long as we live in this cursed shinobi world, there can be no salvation!"
"Listen. I don't care whether you're Madara Uchiha, Obito Uchiha, Tobi, or anything to do with the Ōtsutsuki clan or the Uchiha clan!"
"If there truly is a way to revive Yahiko, then it will only happen after I cleanse this world completely. I'll give him a world without war, without death, a world where the people most important to him will always remain by his side."
"Only then—whether it's my people or yours—"
"—will those important to us be revived."
Obito Uchiha looked at him calmly, as if he were seeing his own reflection from the day he lost Rin. Pitiful and tragic, convinced that the once-beautiful world had turned into a living hell.
In the end, different mindsets saw different landscapes.
He had already found his way back, while Nagato was like Madara back then. Less lecturing, more pouring out his own pain.
"This shinobi world isn't as hopeless as you think, Nagato."
"What?!"
Konan and Pain stared at the man in front of them in shock.
Less than a month had passed. Why did this "Madara" seem like a completely different person now? If it weren't for the fact that only Madara possessed that unique Mangekyō Sharingan intangibility, they would have believed he was an imposter.
What they didn't know was that while only half a month had passed in this world, more than two months had gone by across several other parallel worlds combined.
And on top of that, Obito Uchiha had experienced seventeen full years of Naruto Uzumaki's life within an illusion.
"In the near future, you'll kill your mentor, Jiraiya. After that, when you go to Konoha to capture the Nine-Tails jinchūriki, you'll be persuaded by him. You'll then die after using the Six Paths Rinne Rebirth technique to revive everyone, your chakra and life force completely exhausted."
"How do you know that?!"
At their level, Pain and Konan could tell the difference between empty scare tactics and someone who had truly seen the future.
After all, everything Nagato knew about using the Rinnegan had been taught by "Madara." Even if the other party possessed some unknown secret technique or dōjutsu that allowed him to glimpse the future, it wasn't entirely impossible.
"Because of this."
Obito Uchiha took out a mission scroll.
"This thing sent me to the future and let me witness how all of us ended up."
"A scroll?"
Konan frowned slightly, not quite understanding what "Madara" meant.
Pain, with his Rinnegan, could clearly see the unusual chakra flowing from the scroll.
"The energy on that scroll is similar to my Rinnegan. It's definitely not an ordinary item."
Konan's expression changed in shock.
Obito Uchiha opened the scroll, intending to show them the missions he had received and explain the rewards—when a brand-new A-rank mission suddenly appeared on the scroll in his hands, at some point unknown to him.
[Mission Rank: A] [Mission Content: Have all Akatsuki members check into the Missing-nin Inn.]
"..."
Would Kakashi and Minato-sensei beat him to death for this?