The Stratosphere - Above Amegakure
'Cronos.'
Alaric floated smoothly through the absolute silence with one hand tucked casually in his coat pocket. He looked around with a contemplative, unhurried calm that made the act itself seem profoundly profane. He leisurely inspected the suspended paths, the frozen summons, the fragments of drifting, motionless debris, and finally looked down toward Amegakure, where the first massive pieces of the ruined upper architecture were still hanging in the agonizing pause before their eventual fall.
"Ten seconds," Alaric said softly into the dead, unmoving world. "You really don't appreciate how incredibly long that is until nobody else gets any of it."
He moved.
By the time the flow of time snapped back into reality, Alaric had already written thirteen complex sealing arrays in the air around the Animal Path, placed his palm gently against the giant bird's neck, tagged the Deva Path's cloak with a Hiraishin mark so microscopic it would go completely unnoticed for at least a few critical seconds, and carefully curled his fingers around the snout of one of the giant dog's regenerating heads.
Reality lurched violently back into motion.
The bird exploded first.
Wood Release burst aggressively from the exact point of Alaric's palm contact. It did not explode outward in a rough, crude spike; it surged inward along every single vein and channel of the summon's body, instantly turning the massive creature into a cage of rapidly flowering branches from the inside out before it shattered in a gruesome rain of blood and timber.
The Animal Path suddenly found itself completely encircled by blazing, golden seals before it could even begin to register what had happened.
The arrays snapped shut.
Its summoning link died instantly, cutting off any further reinforcements.
The giant, multi-headed dog tried to lunge forward in a desperate bite…
Alaric's hand tightened around its snout.
A pulse of chakra, exquisitely controlled and monstrously strong, passed directly into the beast's head and surged down its body, freezing its muscular action for half a blink. That microscopic hesitation was all he needed. With his free hand, he seized the beast by the neck, spun on his heel, and swung the impossible, multi-ton mass of the summon like a fleshy flail directly into the charging crustacean. He smashed both creatures away in a deafening collision that sent massive chunks of flesh, fur, and cracked shell tumbling down into the gray clouds below.
Jiraiya stared, his jaw slightly slack.
The Sannin had spent decades surviving the brutal realities of the shinobi world. He had seen monsters, Kage, rampaging jinchūriki, and the old, terrifying legends men only talked about in lowered voices. But this was fundamentally different. It was not just an overwhelming display of power. It was the utter, casual fluency of it. Alaric fought the way a learned man might speak his native language… effortlessly, creatively, and without the slightest, visible sign of strain.
Down in the rapidly emptying combat space, Pein made a final, desperate decision.
The Deva Path entirely abandoned caution.
A small, impossibly dark sphere formed in the palm of his outstretched hand… dense, tiny, and terrible.
Alaric's relaxed smile thinned considerably.
"Well," Alaric said, his eyes narrowing. "There it is."
"Chibaku Tensei."
The black sphere launched skyward.
At first, it was visually unimpressive, no larger than a polished skipping stone. But Alaric understood immediately what it would become if allowed to mature. Gravity began to violently convulse around it. The sky groaned. Massive chunks of the tower's debris, shattered missiles, the drifting remains of summons, and even the loose, ambient moisture in the air all began to pull fiercely toward the growing, insatiable core.
Far below, huge pieces of Amegakure's broken rooftops tore free with shrieks of bending steel.
The drowned city groaned as an artificial moon began to aggressively demand its tribute.
Jiraiya felt his stomach drop, gripping the frozen feathers of the Phoenix as the gravitational pull reached even their altitude. "What the hell is that…?"
Alaric watched the black sphere rise, his expression completely unreadable for half a heartbeat. Then, he sighed, a sound of profound disappointment.
"Nagato," Alaric called out across the rising chaos, his voice cutting through the roar of tearing stone as larger and larger chunks of the city ripped free and spiraled upward. "This is exactly what I mean. Every single time you try to look divine, you end up threatening to crush your own people first."
The Deva Path's answer was cold, absolute, and steeped in delusion.
"Sacrifice is the measure by which true peace is purchased."
Alaric's blue eyes turned flat and dead.
"No," Alaric said, and suddenly, there was absolutely nothing playful or laidback left in his voice. "Sacrifice is the pathetic excuse cowards use when they're too weak to carry the actual price themselves."
The Phoenix Sage awakened.
Intense, wavering heat poured off him… not ordinary, flickering flame, but a radiant, ancient heat underscored with brilliant gold and deep crimson, as though some mythical, subterranean furnace had suddenly opened inside his body. His physical presence tripled in weight instantly. The air around him shimmered and warped violently. His chakra, already monstrously deep, became so suffocatingly dense that even Pein's shared Rinnegan vision seemed to stutter and blur around the edges as it tried, and failed, to measure it.
Jiraiya felt the catastrophic change from kilometers away and involuntarily tightened his grip on Emberis's feathers. "…What is that chakra…"
"It's his sage mode," Emberis replied lazily to Jiraiya, simply observing the fight below with deep boredom. "The orange-headed human is certainly strong... human-wise... but Alaric? That kid is a madman that cannot be stopped."
"Ah..." Jiraiya stared at the blazing aura surrounding Alaric, before he narrowed his brows in sudden realization. He shook his head slowly as he looked down at Emberis's massive head. "Wait a minute... you can talk?"
"..." Emberis didn't even dignify the question with a reply.
Below, Alaric raised one hand toward the rising, terrifying gravitational core.
Then, he raised the other.
Massive, twisting wooden arms erupted from the very atmosphere itself.
They were not merely large. They were not merely towering.
They were colossal.
A thousand-armed wooden avatar did not fully form… not because Alaric could not call it, but because he simply did not need the entire construct… but the partial manifestation alone was enough to completely dwarf the growing field of swirling debris. Giant, articulated hands, each one significantly larger than a warship, bloomed from a rapidly expanding lattice of dark, living, invincible wood. They reached out and violently seized the spiraling masses of torn stone and steel before those pieces could fully consolidate around the black sphere, arresting their destructive orbit by sheer, crushing brute force.
Pein's eyes widened.
'Impossible…'
Hashirama's wood had been the stuff of legend, a power that shaped the very geography of the Leaf. This was worse. This was an insulting mockery of scale.
Alaric clenched his fist.
The wooden hands crushed inward.
Massive boulders shattered into fine dust. Thick steel beams screamed and folded like cheap paper. Entire sections of city structure were compacted and pulverized before they could even become part of the satellite.
Then, Alaric lifted his burning gaze to the black core itself.
"Kirin was entirely too elegant," he said softly. "Let's try something a bit uglier."
He disappeared.
The Deva Path instantly searched the sky with the shared vision of the remaining paths and found absolutely nothing.
Then, Alaric was directly above the Chibaku Tensei core.
A Rasengan-like sphere of rapidly rotating elements spun into being in his palm, but it was fundamentally wrong… far too dense, aggressively threaded with wild lightning, shrieking wind, and a compressive force in a volatile balance that made the surrounding air scream in protest. He drove the unstable orb straight down onto the black sphere.
The sky convulsed.
The core cracked.
For one impossible, agonizing moment, the singularity resisted the intrusion.
Then, Alaric layered a secondary force into the strike… a complex seal written in golden chakra directly across the gravity construct itself, a violent, aggressive piece of ascending fuinjutsu that did not merely attack the sphere's surface, but forcefully rewrote the stability of its internal balance.
The Chibaku Tensei burst.
It did not end in a grand, expanding blossom of light, but in a vicious, sucking implosion followed immediately by a ring-shaped, concussive shockwave that shredded the incomplete mass around it and flung the pulverized debris back across the sky like a broken halo.
Pein's absolute control finally slipped enough for genuine, naked disbelief to show on his pierced face.
"You broke it…"
Alaric appeared thirty meters in front of him, floating upright, golden-red heat still streaming steadily off his body in his altered sage state.
"Yes," Alaric said calmly. "I broke your ultimate Jutsu."
The Preta Path, having recovered slightly, lunged again. It was still smoking heavily from the earlier lightning absorption, but it was desperate now to get close enough to nullify whatever catastrophic jutsu the anomaly threw next.
Alaric's left eye focused sharply on the charging corpse.
Kamui twisted space.
The corpse's upper torso warped, stretched agonizingly, and tore completely away into the dimensional vortex before its outstretched arms could even reach him. The severed lower half dropped uselessly out of the sky, tumbling into the abyss.
Only three paths remained active in any meaningful sense: the Deva Path, the Animal Path… though entirely sealed and partially constrained… and the distant, hidden Naraka and Human Paths already removed from play. The Asura Path was ruined. The Preta Path was gone. The Human Path was gone. The Animal Path's summons were crippled, and its body was ringed by suppressive, golden formulae.
For the very first time since the organization's inception, the combat formation no longer looked godlike.
It looked hunted.
Pein understood it, too.
His face did not show explicit fear, but the subtle way he held himself still, the way the Deva Path's shoulders settled and its hands lowered slightly, carried a grim, unavoidable acceptance that this was no longer a contest of superiority. It was triage.
Alaric looked past the Deva Path, his gaze seeming to pierce through the puppet, looking toward the unseen distance where the true, crippled body waited in its hidden chamber.
"Do you want to keep doing this?" Alaric asked, and his tone was no longer mocking or arrogant. It was almost gentle, which somehow made the reality of the situation infinitely worse. "Because I can effortlessly dismantle the rest of your little pantheon in the next thirty seconds, then go downstairs and have this conversation with you face to face."
Pein's reply came after a long, heavy pause.
"You speak of dismantling pain as though you actually understand it."
Alaric's smile vanished completely.
When he answered, his voice lost all traces of playfulness and became quiet in a way that forced the very battlefield to pause and listen.
"No," Alaric said. "I speak of dismantling you because you took your pain, wrapped it in adolescent philosophy, and used it as permission to drag everyone else into the grave with you."
The Deva Path's hand rose again.
A smaller, much weaker Shinra Tensei formed… not to obliterate the anomaly, but to aggressively create space. The repulsion detonated outward and tore the last of the nearby debris away, clearing a brutal, empty sphere of air between them. It bought Pein necessary breathing room and one more interval of time.
Alaric simply let him have it.
The false god hovered in the center of the ruined sky. His cloak was torn, his orange hair whipped frantically by the recovering winds, his face pierced and dead, and yet he was somehow still desperately trying to hold up the crushing weight of divine judgment.
"You know nothing of true peace," Pein said, and behind the synthesized, flat calm, there was, at last, a distinct trace of buried, human fury. "You stand there with power that defies reason, and yet you speak like all the others. You think raw strength gives you the absolute right to lecture me. You think because you can crush my bodies, your answer is fundamentally better. But this world was shaped by men like you long before I was born. Men who had power. Men who could act. And they built nothing except new graves."
Alaric listened patiently.
Then, he nodded once.
"That," Alaric said quietly, "is the very first honest thing you've said since I got here."
For a moment, even Jiraiya, watching intently from above, forgot to breathe.
Alaric continued, his piercing eyes fixed on the corpse but his words aimed squarely at the broken boy hiding behind it.
"You're absolutely right. The world failed you. Hanzo failed you. The hidden villages failed you. The men who used bloody wars as policy and counted orphans as mere statistics failed you. But somewhere along the way, Nagato, you stopped trying to stop the machine and started worshiping it instead. You turned yourself into another version of the exact thing that crushed you, and you called it justice simply because pain sounded more profound than revenge."
Pein's jaw tightened visibly.
"And the worst part," Alaric said, twisting the blade, "is that Yahiko would hate this."
The Deva Path moved.
It was no longer about strategy. It was no longer about divine distance.
It was raw, unadulterated anger.
He lunged with a black chakra rod in hand, using violent pulses of attraction to augment each step, turning his desperate charge into a sequence of abrupt, unnatural bursts meant to break even superior reaction times through sheer unpredictability. From the side, the partially constrained Animal Path hurled the absolute last of its summon support into motion, while from far below, the miraculously repaired traces of Asura machinery began to rise again under residual, desperate control.
Alaric met the charge head-on.
The first black rod thrust viciously toward his throat.
Alaric caught it effortlessly between two fingers.
The second rod came fast for his ribs.
Alaric twisted his torso, drove his elbow into the Deva Path's wrist hard enough to audibly bend the limb backward, and then hammered his own forehead into the corpse's face with such terrifying force that the bridge of its nose and its cheekbones instantly collapsed in a spray of dark blood.
The Deva Path did not feel pain.
It kept attacking.
Black rods flashed in a desperate flurry.
Attractive pulses snapped the space around each angle in an attempt to disorient.
Alaric slipped between them all with terrifying, serene calm. His movements were tight and brutally efficient now; there was no wasted flourish left in his kata. He broke the Deva Path's elbow, tore one of the black rods away, and rammed it straight through the Animal Path's shoulder as that body came just close enough to interfere. Then he pivoted on his heel, hooked a strong hand behind the Deva Path's neck, and drove a knee viciously into its sternum, striking hard enough to shatter the breastbone entirely.
The corpse flew backward.
But Alaric was already there when it stopped.
Hiraishin.
The hidden, microscopic tag placed during the Cronos pause flared for a fraction of an instant, and Alaric arrived directly in front of the Deva Path's ruined chest.
Pein saw him.
Too late.
Alaric's palm touched the corpse's abdomen.
"Here's the fundamental difference between us," Alaric said softly.
A seal bloomed.
It was not a simple suppression mark, but a layered, aggressively ascending construct that spread rapidly across the torso like living, golden ink. It raced through the specific pathways receiving Nagato's chakra and forcefully locked them one by one. The black rods embedded in the Deva Path's body lit up brilliantly, then dimmed entirely as the formula severed their synchronization.
"You use dead bodies to imitate godhood."
The seal reached the throat.
The Rinnegan eyes flickered rapidly.
"I use impossible things to solve my problems."
Then, Alaric shoved.
The Deva Path was launched violently backward through the air. It crashed directly into the upper face of the central tower of Amegakure, punching straight through steel and thick concrete in a thunderous, billowing eruption of debris. The entire top tier of the structure bent and groaned precariously from the impact.
Silence followed.
A strange, fragile, echoing silence after so much roaring force.
The remaining active paths sagged.
Their movement became incredibly erratic.
Then, they stopped altogether, dropping like puppets with severed strings.
Jiraiya slowly lowered his hand from where it had unconsciously risen halfway through the brutal fight, as if some desperate, protective part of him had still believed he might have to jump in and save his student from the monster.
"…It's over," Jiraiya breathed, the adrenaline finally leaving him.
Not quite.
Alaric remained utterly motionless in the air, his eyes narrowed slightly as his senses expanded rapidly through the drowned city, sinking through the rain-choked steel labyrinth, parsing through dense pipework, reinforced concrete, and hidden, subterranean rooms.
There.
He found him.
A thin, cave-like chamber hidden safely behind layers of industrial infrastructure, filled with the undeniable smell of rusted metal, chronic sickness, stale blood, and old, suffocating grief. The true body. Emaciated. Pierced. Breathing heavily.
Alaric exhaled softly, the heat of his Sage Mode finally dimming.
Then, he turned his head just enough for his voice to carry upward toward Emberis.
"Jiraiya," Alaric called, and though he did not shout, the name reached the Sannin perfectly clearly through the open sky. "You can come down now. Your student isn't hiding in the tower. He's underneath the eastern reservoir annex, safely tucked behind the false maintenance shaft with the dead-end pipes. Bring your heart with you, old man, because you're going to need it."
Jiraiya jolted as if physically struck.
"You found him already…?"
Alaric looked down at the broken tower, at the limp, unresponsive Deva Path pinned within the rubble by the lingering golden seal.
"Of course I did."
Down below, Konan immediately rushed with frantic, paper-winged speed towards Nagato's real body, and Alaric allowed her to go unhindered. He was about to fully cancel his Phoenix Sage mode, to let the exhaustion settle, before his senses flared violently. He noticed Obito's distinct, swirling chakra signature suddenly appearing super near Nagato's location.
Alaric raised a brow at this sudden intrusion, then widened his eyes in stark realization. This meant that since Nagato had decisively failed to defeat the anomaly, Obito had opted to cut his losses, intending to steal Nagato's Rinnegan eyes and preserve them for his later plans.
"Damn it," Alaric cursed under his breath. He immediately willed Cronos to activate, intending to stop time so he could bridge the gap instantly, but as he pushed his chakra, the distortion only flickered feebly and died. It didn't activate. It was in cooldown.
Alaric cursed again, louder this time. "I didn't know there was a literal cooldown on that thing, fuck!"
Abandoning the time manipulation, he surged forward, flying as fast as his aura could push him toward the eastern annex. He engaged Swift Release to be as fast as physically possible to reach Nagato's sanctuary, becoming a crimson blur cutting through the rain. But the moment he reached the entrance of Nagato's safe place, he was met with a massive, heavily reinforced vaulted door.
Alaric didn't hesitate. He simply willed Vulcan, and the large vaulted door was instantly deleted from thin air, the metal bending and shattering into shrapnel.
The moment Alaric breached the chamber and saw who was inside, his heart sank. Obito had already moved. The masked man had mercilessly gouged out Nagato's eyes; the emaciated man's empty eye sockets were bleeding profusely down his pale cheeks as Konan desperately tried to staunch the flow.
Obito turned slowly, the bloody Rinnegan secured in his grasp. He looked at Alaric, the spiral mask giving away nothing, before calmly and swiftly retreating into a swirling, spatial vortex.
"You are indeed strong, Alaric," Obito's deep voice echoed as his body distorted. "Far too strong. We will meet again."
Alaric gritted his teeth in profound frustration before sighing heavily, releasing his tense posture. He couldn't do anything about the stolen eyes now; the spatial tear was already closed. He walked slowly into the chamber, his boots echoing on the metal grate.
He looked down at the bleeding, barely conscious Nagato, and the fiercely protective Konan shielding him.
"Now," Alaric said, his voice stripped of all mockery, settling into a grim, absolute seriousness. "Let's have a proper conversation, shall we?"
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