The voice Obito used now was his own.
Back when he intercepted and killed the first-generation Akatsuki members, he masked his tone to mimic Uchiha Madara.
Dropping the vocal disguise served as his first deliberate flaw to throw them off the scent.
But Obito overlooked a fundamental factor: instinct.
It was a gut feeling derived from chakra.
After all, he was the murderer who personally slaughtered these original Akatsuki members, and he had close, violent contact with several of them, such as Kyūsuke.
Now that he appeared and spoke without the mask, his raw presence triggered a chilling, familiar vibe in the squad.
And it wasn't just a gut feeling. Rationally speaking, they spotted a glaring issue.
"He is your enemy!"
After burning through his nonexistent stamina, Uchiha Madara took quite a while to catch his breath.
The second his lungs worked, he pointed a shaking finger straight at Obito.
Obito's expression tightened.
"I am Uchiha Madara," he countered.
"You will regret this, Obito!"
Seeing the brat refuse to repent and double down on stealing his identity, Madara grew pissed!
"So you're Uchiha Obito, right?" Kyūsuke stroked his chin, walked up to the stone slab, and sized Obito up.
"My name is Uchiha Madara..." Obito forced his voice to remain steady.
"Do you think we're braindead? We don't need Kie's intel to know the name Uchiha Madara. The man was a god of shinobi! At first, we thought this dude didn't quite fit the bill, so we assumed he might be the fake. But compared to you..."
Kyūsuke glanced at Uchiha Madara.
Because Madara's Edo Tensei vessel was crippled, his raw strength sat in the gutter.
On paper, matching this frail body to the invincible ghost of the Uchiha felt like a stretch.
Decades of compromises and rotting in a cave had shifted Madara's aura.
But just as Kyūsuke noted, even a nerfed Madara possessed a commanding presence that Obito lacked.
"Look at yourself. Missing an arm, blind in one eye, half your face looks like chewed meat, the other half is stitched together with weird white putty, and you smell like a public urinal. How the hell are we supposed to believe you are Uchiha Madara?
"To me, you look exactly like the stinking rat who ambushed us in the dark—the coward who hid behind a mask because he was too ugly to show his face. You are Uchiha Obito!"
Kyūsuke aimed an accusing finger like a grand detective.
Hearing those words, a wave of profound vindication washed over Madara.
Finally! Finally, someone put some damn respect on the name Uchiha Madara!
'Exactly! Tell him!' Madara thought. 'How does this pathetic cripple resemble me in the slightest?'
Kyūsuke's roast was so satisfying that Madara silently forgave the squad for sawing through his torso with steel wires.
"I..."
Only now did Obito register his own disastrous state.
During the recent skirmish, the Second Hokage tagged his shoulder with a Flying Raijin mark, forcing him to chop off his own arm to survive.
Moments later, he burned his spare Sharingan to cast Izanagi, dumping a literal bucket of raw shit over his head to evade Izanami.
Even though he dodged lethal damage, Izanagi demanded its toll.
The eye went blind.
He was doubly disabled. As for the piss smell? He had laid paralyzed on that stone slab for days.
'Thankfully, the guards hosed him down when he first arrived.
Otherwise, he would reek of a lot worse than just urine.
"..." For a moment, Obito could not formulate a single bullshit excuse.
"Not only that, use your eyes," Madara chimed in. "He is flesh and blood. Not an Edo Tensei! Look at the era Uchiha Madara lived in. He should be dust by now! I am the true Uchiha Madara!"
Madara never imagined a day would come where he needed to prove his own identity to a bunch of grunts.
However, paired with Kyūsuke's deduction, the logic struck like a hammer.
The original Akatsuki members experienced a collective epiphany.
Without waiting for Obito to argue, the group moved into action.
First, they gripped the steel wires threaded through Madara's body and yanked them out.
"Agghh!"
Riding high on his vindication, Madara dropped his stoic guard and grunted in pain.
These grunts had no manners!
They knew they tortured the wrong man, yet they refused to extract the wires gently. Relying on his immortal healing factor, they ripped the metal out by brute force.
Madara experienced the physical trauma of Chibaku Tensei all over again.
But seeing the board flip in his favor—and spotting a golden opportunity to harvest Hashirama cells in the ensuing chaos—Madara swallowed his pride.
As his wounds sealed, Uchiha Madara slid off the slab and gave the squad room to deal with Obito.
"Wait, does that mean you're the Uchiha Madara with the shit fetish?" Kyūsuke watched his men drag Obito onto the slab, then paused and turned back to Madara.
"...I am not!"
Admitting to it would end the interrogation and spare him further explanations, but Madara refused to surrender his dignity.
A shit fetish crossed the line.
"When your scout collected intel, did she miss the files regarding Hatake Kakashi and his obsession with waste? The degenerate with the scat fetish is Uchiha Obito! It aligns perfectly with Hatake Kakashi!" Madara took a deep breath and laid out the facts.
"There's a connection like that? Maybe Kie rushed the reconnaissance and missed that section. Daibutsu, go outside and tell Kie to investigate that angle," Kyūsuke analyzed the situation seriously.
Madara scoffed internally.
'She missed that part of the intel? Bullshit.'
True, their reconnaissance window was short.
But the problem was not missing data due to time constraints; the problem was the sheer volume of highly specific data they gathered in minutes!
Only the intel linking Obito and Kakashi to literal shit vanished from the records.
Thinking it over, that missing detail served as the ultimate proof distinguishing Obito from Madara. Yet it disappeared!
No matter how he sliced it, this smelled like that evil Senju Tobirama censoring the files and feeding selective propaganda to the enemy!
"Why is no one moving? Are you waiting for Kie's updated report? We don't need it. The evidence proves this rat is our murderer. I only sent for the shit intel as a final confirmation."
After giving the instruction, Kyūsuke turned around and realized his squad stood frozen around the stone slab.
They held Obito down, but nobody made a move.
"No, Kyūsuke, it's just..."
"This guy is as smooth as a Ken doll down here. We can't use the punishment methods."
"?" Kyūsuke pushed through the crowd and stared down at the slab. He froze on the spot.
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