"There's definitely something wrong inside. I sent a Shadow Clone in earlier, but it vanished shortly after entering."
Senju Tobirama, living up to his reputation as a speed demon, had managed to bring Kakashi and Rin here while simultaneously dispatching a clone to scout ahead.
"No need to try again. Leave the rest to Kakashi."
Makoto speculated that Ōtsutsuki Toneri, still paranoid after taking Hanabi's attack to the face, had temporarily locked down the passage.
Or maybe the alternate dimension's weird physics just rejected Shadow Clones.
Either way, poking it further was a waste of time.
"Go ahead." Tobirama nodded, stepping aside to look at Kakashi.
Even though his Edo Tensei body made him immortal and the Flying Thunder God gave him an instant escape button, Tobirama had zero intention of going in himself.
Edo Tensei wasn't true invincibility, and FTG wasn't foolproof.
He knew his strategic brain was way too valuable to waste on frontline scouting.
If they really needed a meat shield, he could just resurrect some random passerby and control them.
Since Makoto said skip it, they skipped it.
"Mm-hmm!" Kakashi lifted his forehead protector, exposing his Sharingan.
Rin desperately wanted to place a dramatic hand on Kakashi's shoulder, but since she died as a stunted pre-teen, she couldn't reach.
She settled for pressing her hand flat against his back instead.
"Dumping all that accumulated global trash at once takes way more chakra than absorbing it in batches..." Kakashi muttered.
"I'll give it my all!" Rin declared, clenching her fist in sheer determination before Makoto could even finish his sentence.
"I meant just give him enough," Makoto interrupted, ruining her shōnen protagonist moment.
"Let the chakra cloak cover you. Don't accidentally trigger Baryon Mode and evaporate Kakashi's lifespan."
There was a hard limit to how much Tailed Beast chakra a Jinchūriki could shovel into another person.
Since Tailed Beasts are pure chakra constructs, dumping all of it into someone else would basically turn them into the new Jinchūriki.
As for Baryon Mode... it could indeed generate a massive nuke of additional chakra through a nuclear fusion reaction. But that chakra gives off severe radiation.
The core gimmick of Baryon Mode is exploiting chakra collision, allowing each physical strike to literally shave off the opponent's lifespan.
If Kakashi got pumped full of that radioactive chakra directly, a huge chunk of his lifespan would vanish on the spot.
"Huh? Is that how it works?" Rin blinked, sounding disappointed.
Truth be told, she had been plotting to use this exact excuse to inject Kakashi with maximum chakra and test-drive Baryon Mode herself.
Looks like that idea was off the table.
"Stop daydreaming about temporary, desperate breakthroughs," Tobirama lectured coldly. "Focus on steady accumulation and actual progress."
While pulling a sudden power-up out of thin air mid-battle might look heroic in a story, it just proves you prepared poorly.
Take the legendary clashes between his elder brother and Madara Uchiha.
Each fight was a brutal test of their foundational stats, with zero room for last-minute buffs or friendship speeches.
Tobirama himself spent his life inventing countless forbidden jutsu just so he always had a diverse deck of trump cards to play.
According to Makoto's lore about the future, Tobirama noted how this exact bad habit doomed the Seventh Hokage, Uzumaki Naruto.
In his early days, despite pulling the occasional protagonist power surge, Naruto actually trained hard, grinding out his stats to beat enemies.
But as time went on, his mid-battle power spikes became a crutch.
Since he lacked actual intelligence and self-discipline, Naruto unconsciously became addicted to the formula.
This laziness peaked when he realized that even if he got himself killed, the Sage of the Six Paths would just step in and hand him god-tier power-ups.
It gave him an inflated ego, making him think he could punch his way out of anything.
That probably explained why the adult Naruto showed zero actual improvement in his baseline jutsu arsenal, relying entirely on the Nine-Tails' Baryon Mode just to survive a boss fight.
At first, Tobirama assumed Naruto was just a workaholic idiot, micromanaging the village so badly that he spent his days creating Shadow Clones to help old ladies cross the street instead of training.
But then Tobirama did the math.
'Wait a minute...'
'According to Makoto, Naruto was only Hokage for three miserable years before getting sealed in a jar. What the hell had that blonde menace been doing during Kakashi's ten-year term?'
'Ten years!'
'How many decades does a guy get? A single year was more than enough time for the Ōtsutsuki to drop in and wreck the planet.'
To prevent this brain-dead, power-up-reliant ideology from poisoning the current Shinobi World, Tobirama resolved to eradicate it at the root!
"Kamui!"
Kakashi focused his Mangekyō gaze on the spatial void beneath the hot spring and begang sending the Shinobi World shit to the moon!
...
The Moon
Several miserable days had passed since Ōtsutsuki Toneri, acting like a cursed deep-sea diver, submerged himself into the underground septic tank.
Cut off from his usual senses, he had to rely entirely on touch to confirm that the inner rock walls remained intact, finding no cracks in Kaguya's seal.
After thoroughly groping the walls in the dark, Toneri finally discovered a single, tiny hole, no thicker than his finger.
This hole was the result of Hanabi's Eight Trigrams Air Palm.
If you ran the math, if Hanabi prioritized leveling up her Tenseigan and unleashed its full power, her eyes would leave Toneri's future Tenseigan in the dust.
The logic is basic: Tenseigan = Pure-blooded Byakugan + Ōtsutsuki Chakra.
In the original timeline, Toneri's Tenseigan was a bootleg made from Hanabi's eyes mixed with his own chakra.
Hanabi's current Tenseigan, however, was forged from her own eyes mixed with the premium, purified chakra of Momoshiki.
Even though Toneri called himself a true Ōtsutsuki, he was just a descendant of Hamura.
Even with all the intense inbreeding keeping the bloodline concentrated, his genetic ceiling only capped at the Indra or Asura tier.
Momoshiki, on the other hand, was the real deal.
Toneri had seen a Tenseigan before—the giant battery on the Moon stitched together from countless harvested Byakugan.
But Toneri's perception was stuck on a lower wavelength.
He lacked the hardware to detect higher-tier powers, like Hanabi's recent sniper shot.
He didn't even recognize it as the very Tenseigan power he was obsessed with.
Toneri poked the bottomless hole, lost in thought.
His fingers couldn't reach the end of it.
But the angle of the puncture was the real headache—it didn't shoot straight up from the Earth's core.
It came in on a weird diagonal trajectory.
'The main seal was fine.'
This was baffling.
'If the attack came in at an angle, who fired it?'
After verifying the seal wasn't broken, Toneri began to swim up to the surface.
But...
"?!?"
To his sheer horror, Toneri realized he should have breached the surface by now.
He had already felt his way past the septic tank's upper gate, yet he was still swimming in liquid shit!
'What was happening?'
Had the Moon experienced a massive global flood in the few days he had been underwater?
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