Naruto: The Rise of Kurama

Chapter 93 93: Apotheosis

A/N: Happy New Year's, everyone!

Madara pressed his palm against the Ten-Tails' flesh and began to sink into it.

The beast's chakra surged to meet him, wrapping around his body like a cocoon of white light. His form blurred, stretched, and became indistinct as the boundary between man and monster dissolved. Kushina's chains lashed toward him, but they passed through the light without finding purchase- there was nothing solid left to bind.

She could only watch as Madara Uchiha ceased to exist as a human being.

The transformation took seconds and lasted an eternity. The Ten-Tails' massive body began to shrink, its chakra compressing inward with a pressure that made the air itself groan. The bulbous flesh contracted, the ten tails merging and reforming, the single eye closing as the beast's form collapsed into a humanoid shape- smaller, denser, and infinitely more dangerous.

When the light faded, a figure stood where the Ten-Tails had been.

He was humanoid again, but only barely. His skin had turned pale as bone. Two horns curved upward from his forehead, and his hair had bleached to pure white. He wore a robe that seemed woven from the same substance as his transformed flesh, and when he opened his eyes, the Rinnegan blazed in both sockets with an intensity that hurt to look at directly.

Then a third eye opened on his forehead.

The Rinne-Sharingan. Nine tomoe arranged in three concentric circles around a ripple pattern, red as fresh blood. It fixed on Kushina with an awareness that predated humanity itself.

The chakra pressure drove the air from her lungs. Even with sage mode active and with Kurama's power reinforcing her body, she staggered under the force of it. Her knees threatened to buckle. Her vision blurred at the edges.

Behind her, she heard Nagato collapse.

"Nagato!" She reached for him through the communication seal, but his response came back fragmented, barely coherent.

"I can't... the pressure... my eyes..."

He's alive, Kurama said, but he won't be fighting.

Minato appeared at her side in a flash of yellow, one hand gripping her shoulder to steady her. His face was pale with strain, but he was still standing. The chakra cloak Kurama had given him before the battle flickered tight against his body.

"What is he?" Minato asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

"Something that hasn't existed in a thousand years." Kushina forced herself upright, pushed back against the suffocating pressure through sheer will. "The Ten-Tails Jinchūriki. The Sage of Six Paths was the last one."

Madara- or the thing that had been Madara- smiled.

"Magnificent," he said. "I had imagined this moment for decades, but the reality exceeds all expectation. This power... this clarity... I can see everything now. Every thread of chakra in your bodies. Every beat of your hearts. Every desperate thought racing through your minds."

He raised one hand, examining it with detached curiosity. Black orbs materialized around him, floating in orbits- Truth-Seeking Balls, Kushina recognized, the same weapons the Sage of Six Paths had wielded according to Kurama.

"You fought well," Madara continued. "Better than I anticipated. Under other circumstances, I might have offered you a place in the new world I'm about to create. But you've proven too dangerous to leave alive, and I find I no longer have patience for half-measures."

"Big words from someone who spent the last hour running from me," Kushina said. Her chains reformed around her, golden light blazing against the oppressive darkness of his presence. "Let's see if that new body of yours bleeds."

She launched herself at him before the last word left her mouth.

Her chains struck first- a dozen golden links aimed at his throat, his chest, and his limbs. They moved faster than sound, faster than human perception could track. Against any other opponent, they would have been lethal.

Madara caught them with his bare hands.

His fingers closed around the golden links, and Kushina felt the impact shudder through her entire body.

"Interesting," he said. "The Adamantine Sealing Chains. Mito used these to seal the Nine Tails."

He pulled.

Kushina flew toward him, dragged by her own technique. She released the chains instantly, letting them dissolve back into chakra, but Madara was already there- crossing the distance between them in the time it took her heart to beat once. His fist connected with her guard, and despite the chakra mode, despite the sage mode, despite every enhancement she possessed, the force of the blow sent her hurtling across the battlefield.

She hit the ground hard enough to crater it, bounced once, twice, and skidded to a stop fifty meters from where she'd started.

Kushina! Kurama's voice was sharp with alarm. Damage report.

She took stock of her body as she forced herself upright. Cracked ribs, definitely. Internal bleeding, probably. Her left arm wasn't responding the way it should, which meant nerve damage or a dislocated shoulder or both.

I've had worse, she said, though it wasn't entirely true.

He's stronger than us. Faster too. The Ten-Tails chakra has elevated him beyond anything we can match in our current state.

Then we need to change states.

Not yet.

Yellow light flashed beside her as Minato arrived. "You need to retreat. Find another approach."

"There is no other approach." Kushina spat blood onto the dead grass and rose to her feet. "Our only chance is to stop him here, while he's not used to his powers."

Madara hadn't moved from where he stood. He watched them with mild interest, head tilted slightly to one side.

"She's right, you know," he called across the battlefield. "There's nowhere to run. No one left to call for help. The five great nations have been gutted by war, their strongest shinobi dead or scattered. You three are the last meaningful resistance this world has to offer, and you can barely stand."

He looked up at the sky, where the moon hung full and bright above the battlefield.

"I had planned to savor this moment longer," he said. "To test the limits of this new form, to explore its capabilities thoroughly before completing the plan. But you've irritated me, Kushina Uzumaki. You and your beast have caused me more trouble than any enemy since Hashirama himself."

The Rinne-Sharingan pulsed with light.

"So I'll end this now. No more games or delays. Just the dream, eternal and perfect, that will give this broken world the peace it has never been able to find on its own."

Madara raised his gaze to the moon, and the third eye on his forehead blazed with blinding crimson light.

He's casting it, Kurama said. The Infinite Tsukuyomi.

The sky turned red.

It happened in an instant- the pale light of the moon intensified, shifted, became a bloody radiance that washed across the entire world. The Rinne-Sharingan pattern appeared on the moon's surface, nine tomoe burning against the crimson glow.

Kushina felt the genjutsu reach for her mind, tendrils of foreign chakra trying to sink into her consciousness and drag her down into dreams. But Kurama's cloak flared around her, golden light pushing back against the red, and the tendrils found no purchase.

The cloak was working, she was immune.

"Minato," she said sharply. "Your cloak-"

"Holding." His voice was strained, his face bathed in red light, but his eyes were clear. "Kurama's protection is working."

The ground began to shake.

Massive roots erupted from the earth all around them, pale wood that gleamed with stolen chakra. They burst from the soil and reached toward the sky, splitting and branching as they grew. More roots emerged in the distance, rising from the sleeping world.

The God Tree was being born.

Where the roots touched sleeping bodies- the animals in the valley, the people Kushina could sense with her Mind's Eye across the world- they wrapped around them gently, almost tenderly. Cocooning them, and feeding on them.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Madara's voice carried easily over the rumble of growing wood. "This is the only way for true peace to exist in the Shinobi World."

He turned to face them, the Rinne-Sharingan still blazing on his forehead.

"You could accept the inevitable, let the dream take you, and spend eternity in whatever paradise your hearts desire."

The chakra, Kurama said suddenly. The Ten-Tails energy- it's everywhere now. Pouring off of him, saturating the air. I can absorb more of it than before.

Do it, Kushina said. Take everything you can.

She felt him reach out through their bond, pulling threads of power from the saturated battlefield. The chakra flowed into him more easily than it had before, drawn by the connection between Kurama and the beast he'd once been part of. Still nowhere near enough to match what Madara had become, but more than they'd had a minute ago.

"We're not accepting anything," Kushina said, and launched herself at the god before them.

Her chains erupted around her, spreading wide to form a barrier between Madara and her allies rather than striking at him directly. She didn't expect to win this exchange. She didn't even expect to survive.