Senju Hashirama's Wood Human gripped the bucket in its massive hand.
After crushing the wood to splinters, the foul payload dumped straight into the construct's giant palm.
The Wood Human wasn't Senju Hashirama's main body, nor was it a Shadow Clone that fed physical sensations back to the user, so Hashirama didn't hesitate for a single second.
At that exact moment, an absolutely magical scene unfolded.
The putrid sludge pooled in the Wood Human's palm rapidly began churning into a compressed sphere.
Was he trying to copy Naruto's Rasengan?
Not quite.
A Wood Human forming a massive chakra sphere had actually debuted in the Limited Tsukuyomi world.
It was the ultimate tag-team jutsu used by generations of Asura reincarnations, where Asura and Senju Hashirama's twin Thousand-Armed Buddhas helped Naruto forge a sphere together: Secret Technique: True Several Thousand Rasenshuriken!
However, the Limited Tsukuyomi was technically unofficial history.
In canon history, Asura possessed a similar, devastating technique called True Several Thousand Hands: Spiral Palms.
Its activation method was brutally straightforward: summon the True Several Thousand Hands, force every single one of the giant Buddha's thousand hands to spin up a massive sphere, and smash the entire payload straight into the opponent.
Compared to Senju Hashirama's purely physical Wood Release barrages, this technique packed an extra layer of raw destructive power, but it was also much easier to counter if the enemy could absorb chakra.
If the Sage of Six Paths hadn't played blatant favorites back in the day and had just given Indra the Rinnegan, Indra could have easily absorbed the barrage, rendering the god-tier jutsu totally useless.
As for the current Senju Hashirama, this sudden breakthrough could practically be considered a "return to ancestry."
He had successfully unlocked the Wood Release sphere-forming mechanics Asura once wielded.
There was no denying that the Rasengan was a ninjutsu Namikaze Minato engineered by reverse-engineering the Tailed Beast Ball.
Asura's sphere, however, was named the Gale Sphere, and its core mechanics were fundamentally different from the Rasengan.
Because at their very core, all of Asura's techniques were simply the byproducts of overwhelming raw numbers.
Asura could manifest a giant, glowing golden chakra avatar practically identical to Naruto's Kurama Link Mode.
But Asura wasn't the jinchūriki of any Tailed Beast.
He forced that avatar into existence through sheer, unadulterated raw stats—stacking his own monstrous chakra with the Six Paths power inherited from his father.
True Several Thousand Hands operated on the exact same logic.
Asura never actively trained in senjutsu, nor did he ever rock the trademark eyeliner markings of Sage Mode.
He brute-forced the Thousand-Armed Buddha into existence through pure, unfiltered chakra output.
Right now, Senju Hashirama finally reclaimed the pride of being Asura's direct reincarnation.
He learned how to innovate ninjutsu by simply bullying the laws of physics with raw numbers.
The putrid, yellow spiral sphere violently rotated in the Wood Human's massive palm, and Senju Hashirama mercilessly crushed it straight toward the masked man.
"No—!"
The masked man stared at the toxic sphere barreling closer and closer.
With no room left to retreat, he could only let out a ragged, despairing scream.
Without his crutch of passive intangibility, he literally had no way to fight back.
...
Back in Konoha
The rescue squad touched down in Konoha and immediately tracked down Kakashi, giving him a rapid-fire rundown of the situation.
Upon learning the squad had finally cornered the masked man, Kakashi completely ignored the fact that he had recently collapsed from severe chakra exhaustion while saving the village.
He immediately prepped to jump into the fray.
"First, try and see if you can pull the people trapped inside directly out. If you can't hook them, then I will personally warp inside and drag them out myself," Tobirama instructed, clapping Kakashi on the shoulder to steady the anxious jōnin's nerves.
Accurately sniping a specific person out of the Kamui void was something Kakashi had never actually pulled off before.
He had literally just started practicing retrieving empty soda cans when the masked man blindsided him by violently opening the sewage floodgates.
However, armed with that previous experience, Kakashi felt he could at least attempt the extraction.
Even if he completely failed, having the Second Hokage standing by as the ultimate insurance policy was a massive comfort.
The squad secured an open clearing and formed a tight perimeter, locking down all escape routes just in case the masked man still had enough gas in the tank to counterattack the second he spawned.
"Oh, right. If possible, leave my brother inside for now," Tobirama suddenly reminded him.
This was just another calculated precaution against unexpected variables.
However, when the portal finally opened, zero accidents occurred.
Kakashi flawlessly warped both the masked man and Senju Hashirama out of the dimension, proving his micro-control over Kamui was leveling up fast.
"So it really was you, Obito." Kakashi sagged, his visible eye clouded with deep exhaustion as he stared at the motionless body sprawled on the dirt.
The masked man was completely out cold.
His trademark mask had completely shattered during the extraction, exposing the heavily scarred, half-ruined face underneath.
Finally, the truth was bare.
Kakashi had intellectually known the masked man was his old friend for a while now, but today was the first time he genuinely saw what Obito had become.
"Tobirama, hurry! Hit me with a Water Release and hose me down!" After realizing he was back in the real world, Senju Hashirama froze for a split second.
Then he frantically sprinted toward his younger brother, wildly waving his arms in distress.
"Uh..." Tobirama originally wanted to stamp another Flying Raijin mark onto Obito's unconscious body first.
But after taking one look at his brother and remembering the unspeakable sacrifice the First Hokage had just made, he paused.
A high-pressure Water Release quickly blasted Senju Hashirama clean.
Compared to awkwardly scraping himself down with raw Wood Release constructs inside the void, a proper power-wash was infinitely more effective.
Once again, this definitively proved that while bidet-style sprayers might feel a little strange at first, they were undeniably practical.
"Let me take care of Obito. I'll watch over him." Kakashi suddenly spoke up, his tone heavy.
He and Obito shared way too much tragic history.
As his best friend, Kakashi felt an absolute duty to stop Obito from walking any further down this dark path.
"No." Senju Tobirama, having just finished power-washing his elder brother, instantly shot the idea down.
"Kakashi, you are the least suited person to guard him! This man is teetering on the edge of complete despair, and he could snap past his own moral bottom line at any given second!
Think about why we warped back here in the first place. While staring down Izanami, this naturally disgusting Uchiha actually chose to bathe himself in shit just to avoid getting caught!
If his mental state fractures even a fraction more, and you slip up for a single millisecond, he won't hesitate to gouge that Sharingan right out of your skull to reclaim it. Based on my extensive, historical understanding of the Uchiha, reuniting his original eyes will drastically multiply his Mangekyō's power output.
Right now, he's shackled by a strict five-minute intangibility limit, and warping his own body requires him to materialize for a dangerous window of time. But once he slots both eyes back into his skull, the rules change entirely.
Not only will those glaring weaknesses be patched, but acquiring both original eyes unlocks his ability to manifest a Susanoo.
When he only had the single eye to spam intangibility, his defense was practically impenetrable, but his offensive lethality was severely lacking. If he reclaims your eye, he will wield the ultimate offense and the ultimate defense simultaneously. Exactly how many lives in the shinobi world are you willing to risk by putting yourself in striking distance?"
"...Lord Second is right."
Tobirama's blunt breakdown snapped Kakashi back to reality.
He let out a weary sigh, actively stepping back to put a safe distance between himself and Obito.
Makoto listened to Tobirama's paranoid speech.
He completely disagreed with the logic, but he didn't bother speaking up to correct the Hokage either.
This setup was perfectly fine.
After all, the very next phase of his master plan involved systematically applying crushing psychological pressure to force the masked man into making a permanent choice.
The masked man was going to suffer, sure, but he was going to suffer constructively.
Letting Kakashi hover nearby would only muddy the waters and turn a simple multiple-choice question into a chaotic, emotional mess.
Even if Obito somehow managed to snatch Kakashi's eye and unlock Double Kamui, it posed absolutely zero threat to Makoto.
Whether Makoto wanted to casually execute him or capture him alive, the outcome wouldn't change.
'As long as Obito doesn't dump another bucket of shit over his own head, anyway,' Makoto mused.
Under the authority of Time Stop, that "unsolvable" passive intangibility wouldn't even trigger.
Frozen in time, Makoto could casually slit the guy's throat or spoon his eyes out of their sockets with no resistance.
"Oh, right! Kakashi, this belongs to you." Hashirama suddenly tossed a large storage scroll straight at Kakashi.
"What is this?" Kakashi caught it reflexively.
"That contains the grandmother the masked man sealed away!"
"...How about we just undo the jutsu and let her rest in peace?" Kakashi broke out in a cold sweat.
He desperately wanted to shout from the rooftops that he genuinely, absolutely did not have a fetish for elderly women!