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"Asura is dead?"
The words came out hollow. Like an echo returning from a place that no longer existed.
By the time the news reached Indra, three months had already passed.
He stood perfectly still when he heard it. Not shocked, exactly. More like something essential had been pulled out of him without warning, and his body hadn't figured out how to compensate yet.
He stayed like that for a long time.
"He just... died? That quietly?"
The voice that came out didn't sound like his own. A lifetime of rivalry, obsession, hatred, admiration, envy, and something he'd never once admitted was love, all of it suddenly pointed at an empty chair.
The enemy he'd defined himself against for decades was gone. Not in battle. Not in some final, apocalyptic clash. Just... gone. Quietly. In his sleep, probably. The most anticlimactic ending imaginable for the most important relationship of Indra's life.
He sank onto the cold stone seat, and for the first time, his posture didn't carry even a ghost of his old pride.
"Grandpa! Grandpa, what's wrong?"
A small voice piped up. Indra's grandson came trotting over on stubby legs, round face pinched with worry, tiny fingers tugging at the hem of Indra's cloak.
Indra blinked. Looked down. His weathered hand rose and settled on the boy's head with a gentleness that would have startled anyone who'd known him in his youth.
"Just an old acquaintance."
His voice hardened on the next breath, every syllable weighted with the obsession of a lifetime.
"Remember your mission. Destroy Ninshū."
The boy stared up with clear, uncomprehending eyes.
"Okay, Grandpa."
"Good boy."
Indra said nothing more. He rose from the seat and walked toward the door.
..............
Outside, snow had begun to fall. Fat, heavy flakes spinning down from a lead-colored sky, blanketing the world in silent white.
The wind cut through his cloak like it wasn't there. Cold seeped into his joints, his bones, places that hadn't been warm in years.
"Cold? Does losing half your soul really shorten your lifespan?"
He lifted his face to the grey sky. Let the wind fill his clothes, let the snow settle on his shoulders. His voice was nearly lost in the storm.
Each step through the deepening snow left a heavy print. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
The sound got slower.
And then the figure that had stood defiant against the entire world for an entire lifetime simply... couldn't stand anymore.
He fell forward into the snow. Slowly. Almost gracefully. Like a tree that had been dead at the roots for a long time finally giving in to gravity.
"GRANDPA!!!"
The scream tore through the settlement like a blade, shattering the stillness, bringing every member of Indra's clan running.
Indra was dead.
The prodigy. The rebel. The man who'd created hand-sign ninjutsu, awakened the Sharingan, defied the Sage of Six Paths' chosen successor, and built a warrior clan from nothing through sheer force of will.
His road had finally run out.
A legend, closed.
But that night, something strange happened. Under the watch of the clan members keeping vigil over his body, Indra's corpse vanished without a trace. The stone bier sat empty. No footprints in the snow outside. No sign of disturbance.
Just gone.
..............
Mount Myōboku. Deep in the mist-shrouded heart of the Sage Region.
Indra's body lay on a stone platform, perfectly preserved.
Manji stood over it, hands behind his back, looking down at the still face of his first human student.
No grief in his expression. No sentimentality. Just the clear-eyed understanding of what this body represented.
Those eyes. That bloodline. A physique carrying Ōtsutsuki essence at a concentration the mortal world could barely produce. Every piece of it was invaluable. Left in the human world, it would be picked apart by scavengers. Dissected. Harvested. Exploited down to the last cell.
Asura had Sarutobi to handle his funeral rites. A proper cremation. Dignity in death.
Indra had no one.
"I won't let anyone take you apart."
Manji said it simply. Quietly. The way you'd make a promise to someone who could no longer hear you but deserved to hear it anyway.
He produced a set of preservation talismans infused with Sage energy and applied them to the body. Followed by a series of sealing techniques that locked the remains in a state of permanent stasis.
When it was done, Manji closed his eyes.
The years stretched behind him like a road with no beginning.
Kaguya, sealed away in the distant past. White-Brow and the White Monkey King, gone for centuries. Hagoromo and Hamura, dust. And now Indra and Asura too, both departed from a world they'd spent their lives fighting over.
He'd outlasted every single one of them. Watched every familiar face grow old, grow frail, and disappear.
Infinite lifespan or not, standing in a room full of graves that used to be friendships still left a mark.
"A thousand years from now, then. We'll meet again."
Manji turned and walked away.
..............
Twenty more years blinked past.
Sarutobi was over a hundred years old now. A genuine relic. The last living connection to the founding era of Ninshū, and the undisputed patriarch of everything it had become.
And the war that had always been coming finally arrived.
Ninshū versus the Uchiha shinobi clan. Indra's legacy against Asura's. The thousand-year grudge match, playing out in flesh and blood for the first time.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The battlefield was a nightmare of smoke and noise. Explosive tags detonated in chains, throwing columns of dirt skyward. Kunai clashed against kunai in a relentless metallic chorus.
"I may be old, but I lived through the era when all of this was born. Storms like these? I've seen more than I can count."
Sarutobi stood in the center of the chaos. White-haired. Gaunt. His battered Ninshū robes hanging off a frame that had been shrinking for decades.
Facing him, several dozen Uchiha fighters closed in from every direction. Every pair of eyes blazed with three-tomoe Sharingan, crimson and hungry.
This was a last stand in every sense of the word.
Dozens of Sharingan tracked his every twitch, predicting movements before he made them. Great Fireball Techniques erupted from all sides, walls of red-orange flame converging on him from four directions simultaneously.
"Hahaha, getting tired, old man?"
Sarutobi's hands blurred through seals. Earth Style: Mud Wall erupted from the ground. But the combined firepower of dozens of Sharingan-enhanced fire techniques was something else entirely. The wall cracked, buckled, collapsed. Heat seared his skin. He stumbled back, breathing hard.
"Old fossil! We'll send you to meet Hagoromo!"
The Uchiha pressed their advantage. Kunai and shuriken rained down like a monsoon. Sharingan genjutsu wove invisible nets around his consciousness.
"You think you invented ninjutsu? Your old clan leader was still in diapers when I was learning hand signs!"
"BREAK!"
A hundred years of accumulated experience slammed through the genjutsu like a battering ram. Sarutobi's hands moved through seals that predated the Uchiha Clan's entire existence.
"Wind Style: Great Breakthrough!"
The gale scattered most of the projectiles. A few kunai slipped through, slicing his arms open. Blood soaked through his sleeves immediately.
"DIE, OLD MAN!"
Multiple Uchiha launched Dragon Flame Technique simultaneously. Fire dragons twisted and roared toward him from every angle.
Sarutobi bit through the pain. Chakra surged through depleted pathways. Water Style: Water Dragon Bullet met the flames head-on. Steam explosion. Visibility zero.
But his body was done. A century of living didn't leave much in the tank for this kind of fight.
Blood at the corners of his mouth. Hands shaking too badly to form clean seals. Each breath a conscious effort.
The Uchiha closed to melee range. Sharingan-boosted taijutsu from all sides. Precise. Brutal. Relentless. Sarutobi blocked what he could. Absorbed what he couldn't. His robes tore to ribbons.
But he was the last wall standing between these people and everything Ninshū had ever been.
"I WILL NOT FALL!"
One final roar ripped from his ancient throat. Every remaining drop of chakra poured into his hands as he formed the seal sequence for Ninshū's most closely guarded technique.
"Sealing Art: Four-Sided Demon Seal!!!!"
Golden sealing formulas erupted from the earth, spiraling upward into a cage of light that slammed shut around the entire Uchiha strike force. Sharingan, genjutsu, taijutsu, ninjutsu, all of it nullified instantly inside the barrier. Dozens of elite Uchiha fighters went rigid, chakra networks locked down, bodies crumpling to the ground like puppets with cut strings.
The battlefield went quiet.
"What comes next... is up to all of you."
Sarutobi's eyes drifted, unfocused, seeing something far beyond the scorched earth around him.
His knees buckled. He hit the blackened ground hard, blood still flowing from a dozen wounds.
"But it was worth it."
A grin spread across that ruined face. He was dying. He knew it. But Ninshū still stood.
That was enough.
"I'll face the Founding Patriarch with my head held high."
"I'll face Hagoromo with my head held high."
"I'll face Asura with my head held high."
"Ninshū... survived."
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