Chapter 425: The Stray Dog of a Ruined Future
The fabric of reality warped, spitting out three intruders into the desolate expanse of the Tianyu Dimension.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Heavy impacts echoed across the barren ground as three figures crashed unceremoniously into the dirt, kicking up clouds of gray dust.
"Ow, ow, ow..." Boruto groaned, his face twisting into a grimace. He pushed himself up from the hard earth, aggressively rubbing his bruised backside. "Where the hell is this?" His bright blue eyes darted around the unfamiliar, oppressive landscape, wide with absolute confusion.
Beside him, Adult Sasuke did not waste a single second. He sprang to his feet, his lone hand instantly dropping to the hilt of his sword as he threw himself in front of the blonde boy, shielding him from whatever unseen threats lurked in the shadows. His purple Rinnegan flared to life, its concentric circles rapidly scanning the strange environment.
'Another dimension...'he analyzed, his jaw tightening.'And it is an extremely stable one. Someone is manually controlling the spatial coordinates here.'
A cold weight dropped into the pit of Adult Sasuke's stomach. They were entirely at the mercy of this realm's master.
A furious shout shattered his tactical assessment. A few paces away, Young Sasuke scrambled up from the dirt. He completely ignored the scrapes bleeding on his arms and the dust clinging to his clothes. Instead, his dark eyes locked onto the older man with a piercing, unwavering intensity.
"What did Hokage-sama mean by what he just said?" the boy demanded, his voice cracking slightly under the strain of his rising panic. "What do you mean, 'the future me'?"
Young Sasuke possessed a mountain of arrogance, but he was by no means stupid. The pieces clicked together, forming an absurd, terrifying picture in his mind. He slowly raised a hand, pointing directly at the weathered shinobi standing before him. His extended finger trembled just a fraction of an inch.
"You..." he breathed out, the word barely escaping his throat. "Are you... the future Uchiha Sasuke?"
Adult Sasuke stared down at his younger self. Heavy silence stretched between them, thick with unspoken history. Since Uchiha Akira had already torn away the veil of secrecy, maintaining the disguise served zero purpose. Reaching up with his single hand, he grasped the edge of his dark cloak. He pulled the hood back in one slow, deliberate motion.
The fabric fell away, exposing a face that mirrored the boy's by at least seventy percent. Yet, the older visage was carved from harsh experience—sharper, weathered by years of wandering, and etched with a deep, chilling stoicism.
"Ah! You guys really do look exactly alike!" Boruto blurted out from the sidelines, his jaw dropping as he looked back and forth between the two Uchihas.
Ignoring his student's outburst, Adult Sasuke kept his gaze pinned on the boy. "That is right," he stated, his tone perfectly flat, devoid of any warmth. "I am Uchiha Sasuke. The you from the future."
Even though his sharp mind had already deduced the truth, hearing the actual confirmation struck Young Sasuke like a physical blow to the chest. He stood completely frozen, staring blankly at the one-armed man. This ragged, exhausted figure was his future self? Why did he look so utterly defeated? So weathered by the world? And where was his left arm?
The boy's dark eyes swam with a chaotic mixture of confusion and absolute horror. This was his future?
'Are you kidding me...' Young Sasuke's lips twitched violently. He tried to force his usual arrogant smirk, but the expression shattered into a grimace of pure denial. "How could the future me end up in such a pathetic state?" he spat, the words dripping with venom.
"A severed arm? Dressed like some homeless wanderer? Dragging around a noisy, blonde brat?" He gestured wildly at Adult Sasuke and Boruto, his entire body shaking as his emotions spiraled out of control.
"I am an elite of the Uchiha Clan! A peerless genius of the greatest bloodline in Konoha! My future should be paved with absolute glory and power! How could it possibly devolve into this..." He sucked in a sharp breath, his eyes burning with furious rejection. "A stray dog!"
Young Sasuke roared the final words, his voice echoing harshly across the barren dimension. He refused to accept it. He would absolutely never accept that this broken vagrant was the culmination of his life's potential.
Faced with the boy's blistering rage and insults, Adult Sasuke offered no defense. He merely stood there, his expression unreadable, letting the vitriol wash over him.
"Enough."
The single word cut through the tension like a sharpened blade. Uchiha Akira's voice descended from the empty air above them, cold, commanding, and carrying the absolute authority of a ruler.
"Though you share the same face, and the exact same blood flows through your veins," Akira declared, his tone echoing with absolute certainty. "He is not your future."
Young Sasuke snapped his head upward, a desperate glimmer of hope instantly igniting in his dark eyes. "Hokage-sama! I knew it!" he yelled, pointing an accusing finger at the older man. "This guy has to be a fake! Just some pathetic liar using the Transformation Jutsu to mess with my head!"
Uchiha Akira ruthlessly crushed the boy's fragile fantasy before it could even take root.
"He is Sasuke," the Hokage stated flatly. "And he is a true Uchiha. However, he does not belong to this world, nor does he belong to our timeline."
High above, Uchiha Akira extended a single finger from the folds of his pristine robes and lightly tapped the empty void. A faint ripple of spatial energy cascaded outward.
"Parallel worlds," Akira explained, his voice devoid of any warmth. "Or rather, parallel spacetime. You two came from a completely different iteration of the Ninja World. You crossed the barriers of time and space, and blindly wandered into my domain by mistake. Is that not right?"
Hearing that precise deduction, a visible ripple of shock finally broke through Adult Sasuke's stoic mask. His lone hand tightened slightly on his scabbard.
"As expected of the man... who possessed the power to lead the Uchiha Clan to their absolute peak," Adult Sasuke murmured, his voice laced with a complex mixture of awe and sorrow. He took a slow, deep breath, steadying his nerves, and nodded.
"You are entirely correct," the older shinobi admitted, his gaze dropping to the dusty ground. "We... indeed do not belong here. We hail from a world where... the Uchiha Clan has already perished."
Those final words struck Young Sasuke's chest like a physical lightning bolt, stopping his heart for a fraction of a second.
"Per... perished?" the boy stammered, his eyes widening to the point of tearing. "What absolute nonsense are you talking about!"
Blinded by sudden, violent panic, Young Sasuke lunged forward. He closed the distance in a flash, his hands violently gripping the lapels of Adult Sasuke's cloak. He yanked the taller man downward, his young face completely distorted by rage.
"The Uchiha are the undisputed number one clan in the entire Ninja World! We have Hokage-sama! We have my father leading the police force!" he roared, spit flying from his lips. "We are on the verge of unifying the entire Ninja World! How could we possibly perish! You lying bastard! How dare you curse our family!"
Faced with the boy's explosive fury, Adult Sasuke offered zero resistance. He allowed himself to be manhandled, his body limp. His mismatched eyes looked right through the young man's contorted, furious features. In that desperate, screaming face, he saw only the ghost of his former self—a boy who was just as hopelessly naive, just as blindly proud.
"In my world," Adult Sasuke began, his voice terrifyingly quiet, "there is no Fifth Hokage Uchiha Akira."
He let the words hang in the air, a heavy, suffocating truth.
"Father is dead. Mother is dead. Every single member of our clan... is dead. The entire Uchiha bloodline was slaughtered down to the very last person in a single, blood-soaked night."
A cold, sickening intuition gripped Young Sasuke's gut. The sheer emptiness in the older man's eyes proved it. This broken version of himself was not lying. The boy's grip on the cloak loosened slightly, his knuckles turning white.
"Who... who did it?" he whispered, his voice trembling.
Who? Who possessed the monstrous strength required to wipe out the mighty Uchiha in a single night? Could it be the man standing before him?
Adult Sasuke slowly closed his eyes. The nightmare buried in the deepest, darkest recesses of his soul—the memory that bled fresh agony every time it was disturbed—clawed its way back to the surface. He saw the massive, blood-colored moon hanging heavy in the sky. He saw the lifeless bodies of his parents sprawled in a massive pool of their own blood. And... he saw that solitary figure perched atop the wooden utility pole, his back silhouetted against the crimson moonlight, his Sharingan eyes as cold and indifferent as a butcher's blade.
"It was Itachi."
Adult Sasuke opened his eyes, forcing himself to look at the boy as he spat out the name that this timeline's Young Sasuke regarded as an absolute taboo.
"Uchiha Itachi. On that night, he slaughtered our parents with his own two hands. He butchered the entire clan, men, women, and children, and deliberately left only me alive."
A brief flash of deep pity crossed Adult Sasuke's eyes as he watched his younger counterpart mentally crumble.
"In my timeline, the Uchiha Clan was heavily marginalized and oppressed by the village brass. They attempted to launch an armed coup to seize control," he explained, his voice hollow. "For the sake of the village's peace, to prevent a catastrophic civil war that would have invited foreign invasions and caused countless more deaths... Itachi chose to bear the weight of all those sins. He became a double agent for Konoha. He accepted a black-ops mission from the village elders, and personally annihilated his own flesh and blood in exchange for maintaining the village's peace, and... for sparing my life."
Reaching the end of his explanation, the faintest tremor of a suppressed sob fractured Adult Sasuke's stoic tone. Even after all these grueling years. Even though he now stood at the absolute pinnacle of power in the Ninja World, wielding the Rinnegan itself. Whenever he recalled the sheer magnitude of Itachi's sacrifice, and the agonizing pain his older brother had endured completely alone in the darkness, his chest would tighten until he physically could not breathe.
Hearing that twisted justification, Young Sasuke violently snapped his head up. His crimson eyes flared to life, the Three-Tomoe Sharingan spinning wildly in their sockets, fueled by an explosive surge of pure, unadulterated disgust.
"For the village? For peace?" the boy mocked, his voice dripping with absolute venom. "He had to butcher his own family for that? He had to let his own parents bleed out on the floor like slaughtered animals?!" He shoved Adult Sasuke backward, his face twisting into a snarl. "Absurd! Only a broken, brainwashed coward from your pathetic world would ever accept such absolute bullshit logic!"
"What could you possibly know?" Adult Sasuke countered, his hoarse voice carrying the crushing weight of decades of exhaustion. "That was Itachi's ultimate resolve. He willingly bore all the hatred and darkness of the world, just so Konoha could continue to bathe in the sunlight. He... is a hero."
Though his childhood had been defined by blinding pain and hatred, from the very moment he finally learned the bloody truth, the hatred in Adult Sasuke's heart had mutated. It had long since warped into a deeply twisted, tragic admiration, heavily anchored by an ocean of survivor's guilt.
"A hero?" Young Sasuke repeated the word as if it were a foul curse.
Suddenly, he threw his head back and laughed. It was a harsh, grating sound that echoed through the empty dimension, ringing with absolute mockery until angry tears pricked the corners of his eyes. He leveled a glare of pure, burning contempt at his older self.
"In this world, Uchiha Itachi is nothing but a pathetic, groveling sinner. He is the greatest shame to ever stain the name of the Uchiha!"
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