While Otsutsuki Shinya was running off to throw himself away for nothing, Rei Kaguya confirmed that Hamura's stone statue had lost its controller and would not be able to cause him any more trouble for a short while. Then he lightly leapt up from the crystallized earth and flew straight toward the place where the puppet army had first poured out—
The sun hanging high at the center of this false firmament.
Just as another gray bone blade slid into his hand and he prepared to use it to tear open the barrier covering the sun, a massive hollow large enough for a person to pass through suddenly appeared on the sun's surface without warning.
No large number of humanoid battle puppets surged out from within.
No summoned creature stronger than Hamura's stone statue stepped out.
Nor did any member of the Otsutsuki clan dressed in their traditional white robes appear to make some grand declaration.
What appeared before Rei was only an empty passage.
It looked like a request for peace offered after surrender.
It also looked like a malicious trap meant to lure the enemy deeper.
Personally, Rei believed the truth leaned more toward the latter.
But so what?
With the chakra bestowed by Otsutsuki Hamura reinforcing him, he had temporarily stepped into the Six Paths tier. What reason did he have to fear petty schemes that people lacking decisive power were forced to use?
And so, while maintaining Sage Mode's danger perception toward his surroundings, Rei passed silently through the passage that had been opened from the inside and entered the lunar palace space where the Otsutsuki descendants of the moon lived.
The sky was a mysterious dusky yellow, carrying a strong sense of a sun setting over a life already near its end.
Looking at the rubble, ruined buildings, and clouds drifting through the sky along their own trajectories, then at the once magnificent and bustling palace below that was now silent and utterly deserted, Rei could not help showing a trace of regret in his eyes.
"What an absurd farce."
"Is that your evaluation, Kaguya of the earth?"
A male voice with an unfamiliar tone, yet carrying no barrier in either language or emotion, entered Rei's ears.
He slowly turned his head and looked at the white-clothed, white-haired figure descending from an extremely high place onto a piece of rubble floating in the sky. With a hint of disdain, Rei asked in return,
"What, did you expect me to look at the scenery outside and in here, then say something nice to a person who tried to drop the moon onto the earth, Otsutsuki of the moon?"
"If you do not step into this place, then today, the moon's descent will stop."
Otsutsuki Shinya looked at Rei's face, young enough to be unsettling, and spoke in a calm voice that was almost strange.
"Even now, if you stop here and return to the earth, I can still promise you that after I completely sever the connection between the moon and the shinobi world, I will stop the moon's descent and return it to its proper place."
"That sounds good. Unfortunately, I am not fond of letting a potential enemy I know nothing about keep a trump card capable of flipping the entire table."
Rei waved the Six Paths staff in his hand.
Three Truth-Seeking Balls arranged themselves in a triangle behind his head, assuming a posture that made it clear he did not intend to retreat even half a step.
Looking at Rei's movements, Otsutsuki Shinya sighed almost imperceptibly, then said with an expression that seemed to say, As expected,
"The shinobi world and shinobi created by the Sage of Six Paths truly are greedy beings driven by the fires of ambition… No wonder, during the thousands of years we have watched the shinobi world, war and conflict have always followed you."
"Don't speak as though you are some pure, desireless saint."
Rei sneered and pointed the Six Paths staff in his hand toward the land sealed outside the barrier beneath their feet.
"The corpses and lingering obsessions of the main family are still down there looking up at you. Have you forgotten?"
"They sympathized with you failures created by the Sage of Six Paths, so naturally, they were failures just like you."
Otsutsuki Shinya's expression did not fluctuate in the slightest.
"Failures should be purged together. The main family simply took the first step before you shinobi!"
Shhk—
A Kamui shuriken imbued with the power to tear space silently shot toward Rei from behind.
With lightning speed, it flew straight for Rei's back, trying to seize the opening created by his emotional fluctuation, strike first before the battle formally began, and accumulate some advantage that might perhaps affect the overall situation later.
But to the user's regret, though not surprise, Rei merely swung the Six Paths staff in his hand backward at random.
The brute force produced by his taijutsu caused the space around him to distort slightly, and with complete ease, the shuriken carrying Kamui's spatial distortion was sent far off course.
"You really do haunt people like a lingering ghost, Obito Uchiha."
Without even turning his head, Rei threw those words toward Obito Uchiha, who was no longer wearing a mask. Then he activated his Byakugan, whose field of vision had been vastly enhanced, accelerated, and appeared beside Otsutsuki Shinya in an instant.
A swift knife-hand strike directly cut off the other party's head.
Then, as he looked at the clearly visible puppet structure inside the severed neck, Rei sighed.
"Still, I did not expect you to be able to persuade these Otsutsuki on the moon, who look at others as though their nostrils are pointed at the sky, to join hands with you… I will give you some praise for that, at least, no matter what means you used."
"You still have that insufferable face, as though everything is under your control, Rei Kaguya."
Obito Uchiha emerged from the Kamui dimension.
The Mangekyo in his eyes spun, while his right hand removed the Uchiha gunbai from his back. His voice was ice-cold.
"The precondition for acting so composed is possessing power sufficient to settle all disputes and schemes. You, and Madara Uchiha who taught you, happened to lack precisely that."
Rei turned around and evaluated him indifferently.
"Madara Uchiha was at least somewhat better. Though he was inferior to Hashirama Senju, the gap between them could still, barely, be compensated for through schemes… As for you, even that chance is gone now."
"It seems you are very confident in your new power. Confident to the point that you no longer treat me as an enemy worth taking seriously…"
Hearing this, Obito Uchiha did not become angry.
The right half of his face, once crushed by a boulder, twitched, forming an extremely ugly smile filled with dense killing intent.
"But you seem to have forgotten one thing… What I inherited from Madara Uchiha was not merely his ninjutsu, nor just the title of Madara Uchiha's successor."
He swung his empty left hand down hard and shouted toward the dusky sky,
"Move, Black Zetsu."
"Roaaar—"
Boom!!!
A heaven-rending, earth-splitting vibration and roar entered Rei's ears together with the furious bellow of some enormous existence.
He abruptly raised his head and looked upward, only to see an enormous stone hand, so massive it seemed capable of covering the sky and blotting out the sun, tearing apart both the false firmament outside and the barrier surrounding the lunar palace.
Then it smashed straight down toward him.