The red paint on the mask flared purple. The cold in the room dropped instantly, freezing the breath in his throat. Up above, a massive crash echoed through the stone as the main barrier finally shattered. Thousands of boots hit the streets.
Ashina raised his trembling hands and started forming the hand seals, his fingers moving as fast as his old joints would take them.
Snake.
The ground beneath him started to hum. Deep in the earth, the natural chakra reservoir reacted to the hand seal, churning like an underground river.
Ram.
A jagged black line cracked open over the village square, floating high above the burning houses. The invading ninjas stopped running, looking up in confusion as the clouds above started pulling toward the rift like water going down a drain.
Boar.
Ashina felt his own heart stop as the Shinigami's cold arms wrapped around his soul from behind. The pain was unbelievable, like his veins were filling with liquid ice, but he forced his hands to keep moving.
Dog.
Rat.
The black crack in the sky widened. The wind started screaming through the streets, pulling loose tiles, banner poles, and bodies straight up into the air toward the floating void. The Kiri and Kumo commanders finally realized what was happening, their shouts turning into panic as the pull grew stronger. Ninjas grabbed onto stone pillars and trees, but the earth itself was crumbling beneath them.
Clap.
Ashina slammed his palms together for the final seal.
Clap.
His hands came together, or to be more accurate attempted to.
Half an inch before his palms could meet to complete the final seal, Ashina's heart simply gave out. The sheer strain on his frail, exhausted body snapped the last thread of his life force. The breath rushed out of his lungs in a silent exhale, his eyes went glassy, and the old man collapsed face-first onto the cold stone floor, dead before his body even hit the ground.
The seal was left unfinished. The circuit wasn't closed.
Without Ashina's mind holding the technique together, the delicate balance broke instantly. Instead of a controlled implosion that would cleanly pull the island inward, the trapped natural chakra from beneath the village rushed violently into the unanchored spatial tear.
High above the village square, the floating black crack stopped pulling. For one agonizing second, total silence fell over Uzushio.
Then, the rift expanded violently outward.
A blinding, violet wave of unstable spatial energy tore through the atmosphere, detonating upward into the sky like a giant, inverted volcano.
The blinding blast of violet light shot straight into the clouds, punching a massive hole through the atmosphere. The pressure wave slammed into the village below like a hammer, flattening stone walls, blowing out fires, and throwing thousands of Kiri, Kumo, and surviving Uzumaki shinobi onto their backs.
Gasping for air in the sudden vacuum, the soldiers pushed themselves up from the dirt, ears ringing, staring blindly into the sky. For a split second, it looked like the worst was over.
Above the village center, the black rift hadn't vanished. Starved of Ashina's stabilizing chakra, the jagged tear began to bleed. The edges flared with unstable, pulsing purple light as space itself began to fray like torn fabric.
Instead of sucking things inward, the unanchored anomaly began to bloom outward.
It expanded steadily, inching across the sky like ink spreading through water. Anything the widening edge touched didn't explode, it simply ceased to exist. Clouds vanished instantly upon contact. The top spire of the central citadel passed into the purple border and was shaved clean off.