Chapter 139: Kakashi and Despair in Another World's Future
"An imitation Bankai is just a twisted version of the real thing, born from lack of strength and experience but an obsession with power, right?"
Madara Uchiha stood with his arms crossed, watching Kakashi as waves of spiritual pressure rolled off him. His sneer was pure disdain.
"That kid Aizen and I traded techniques for a long time before he rose to power. The fact that he has not upgraded this technology in ten years means he does not value you very much."
"..."
Kakashi did not respond. He only stared at Madara, eyes flat behind the mask.
Around them, the once silent, lightless underground space began to shift. The world itself seemed to twist and sway, as if it too were waiting for something to fully awaken.
Madara needed time as well.
The instantaneous fusion that had birthed this body had been enough to send a terminal signal throughout the shinobi world. Far below, the Infinite Army, buried like chakra batteries in the earth, had begun to stir. Along the veins of natural energy, that power would be drawn back toward Madara.
Standing on the warped ground, Kakashi already understood that defeating Madara outright was almost impossible.
Shinigami powers and chakra were not fundamentally superior or inferior to one another. But low level ninjutsu could be unraveled and crushed, and a man like Uchiha Madara would never rely on crude techniques that could be neutralized so easily.
The odds of winning here were nearly zero. All of Kakashi's hope was pinned on one direction.
"Oh? You cannot move anymore under the strain of your fake Bankai?" Madara drawled. "What a stubborn little brat. Fine, I will wait."
He looked down from mid air at Kakashi, whose body was wrapped in light and heat as he struggled to force out the full shape of his release.
"How ridiculous. If all you can do is reach for heights you have no qualifications to attain, then you should die in your own little territory. Insects should not crane their necks at the heavens. Knowing your limits and living quietly is the only mercy we ever give you."
"...There is something I should correct," Kakashi said quietly.
"Oh?"
"The pseudo Bankai is not just a toy to let weak people taste power."
Light and shadow wove around him. Kakashi's silhouette warped, stretched, then split.
His single shadow divided into four, each with a slightly different outline.
Those four shadows slid away from him, separating in the glow and then slowly rising, like four tattered curtains being hoisted into place.
Under the pressure of Kakashi's spiritual power, the black silhouettes twisted, stretching into four human shaped gateways.
Kakashi remained at the front, sweat beading under his forehead protector as he forced the pseudo Bankai to hold together. He looked up at the exuberant Madara and spoke in a low voice.
"The pseudo Bankai is a mirror. It shows what kind of existence you might become in the future. Only when you see your own potential clearly can you decide to surpass it. If you cannot exceed your ordinary self, then talking about breaking fate is just empty words. This is only one possible future. Whether you reach a better one depends on you."
"Heh. Interesting perspective," Madara replied. "According to that logic, has Uchiha Kagami been on the wrong path all these years?"
"That is also my path."
Kakashi lifted his head, meeting Madara's amused gaze with open anger.
"And Rin and Obito's paths do not need your guidance. Everyone forges their own road. No one needs you to lay it out for them."
"It is like a Bankai," he murmured, "and in the future it will endure forever."
A faint click sounded.
Born from expectation toward the future and the instinctive yearning for the unknown, the first of the four shadow gates quietly cracked open.
"Hmm… a Bankai that condenses all of a person's future possibilities, and even calls on parallel worlds," Madara mused. "What an amusing little toy."
The torn curtain stirred. Faint figures lurked behind the darkness, pushing forward as if trying to step through.
The ability to reach across worlds was, in a sense, the power to alter this one.
But the future was still only the future.
It might come. It might not.
"...What is going on?"
A man wearing a green Konoha jōnin vest stumbled out of the first gate, one scarlet eye spinning with the pattern of the Mangekyou Sharingan. He looked up, saw Madara floating in the air, and froze.
Kakashi stared back at him, just as stunned.
The Mangekyou Sharingan in that man's left eye. The Konoha vest. The older face that was still undeniably his own.
"Who are you?" the man blurted. "Where is the original Second Espada of Las Noches?"
"Hahaha. Interesting, very interesting."
Madara threw his head back and laughed.
"Is this the effect of the space time barrier and the Infinite Army? It seems your future has already been twisted, Kakashi Hatake."
His laughter echoed off the rough black walls.
"So this is your idea of celebrating my resurrection? You summoned this just to amuse me, did you not? To think that in one world line you remain a mere Konoha ninja all the way to adulthood."
"...????"
The older Kakashi who had just been spat out of the darkness stood there, completely lost.
Who am I? Where am I?
What is this place?
Why is some arrogant man confronting my younger self?
What is this about the Second Espada of Las Noches? In what world was I that strong as a kid?
Or is this just some elaborate genjutsu?
If it was a genjutsu, it was an absurd one.
"Hey, future Kakashi," Madara called lazily. "It looks like that kid gave up on explaining. I will walk you through it."
He glanced down at the younger Kakashi, kneeling on the ground, gripping his sword and pouring the last of his strength into maintaining the four shadow gates. His spiritual power was stretched thin, his body shaking.
This future self, on the other hand, did not have so much as a hint of natural energy or spiritual power clinging to him. He was, at a glance, nothing but an ordinary shinobi with a Sharingan.
Chakra, at its core, was a hierarchy of power.
Once that structure was revealed, lower tier shinobi had no way to compete with those above them except with their bodies. Ninjutsu could be countered. Genjutsu could be broken. Lower level chakra could not overwrite higher level chakra. That was the nature of the system.
By that logic, a Kakashi who moved and fought like a normal ninja should not possess Sage Mode, spiritual power, or control over natural energy.
The one to truly watch out for was still the child in front of him, the Kakashi of this world.
Silently, three black orbs formed behind Madara in a slow spiral, hovering in a triangular formation around the back of his head.
The ultimate form of ninjutsu could only be reached by mastering all seven chakra attributes and pushing nature transformation to its end.
One of Aizen's final achievements in ninjutsu research settled over Madara's resurrected body like a shadow.
Wrapped in the protection of the Truth Seeking Balls, he finally allowed himself a thin smile and looked down at the adult Kakashi with open mockery.
Arrogance, frivolity, an overbearing attitude, these had become Madara's armor.
The truly unrestrained Madara Uchiha had already died once, three years ago, during his time under constant surveillance.
He had been watched like a specimen in a lab, thrown scraps of food and data like a caged animal.
For three years, his pride and his hatred had been played with by the man named Aizen Sousuke.
And yet, Madara had to admit, he respected him deeply.
Kido, sword techniques, Shunpo, all those tools Aizen had created by dismantling and reassembling natural energy and existing shinobi arts were terrifyingly efficient. Madara himself used them often.
Even so, in his current state, Madara could not defeat that man.
Right now, this was all just stalling. He could not allow Aizen to notice what was happening, not yet. If Aizen moved personally at this moment, Madara would be erased.
Only when the chakra of the Infinite Army finished returning to him, only when the energy of the Six Paths scattered across the world was smelted into his own power, could Madara truly claim dominion over the shinobi world again.
Only then did he believe he might be able to crush Aizen Sousuke completely.
Until that moment, he would buy time.
He looked at the bewildered adult Kakashi and began to perform, a show of arrogance masking careful delay.
"So, where should we start, Kakashi?" Madara asked lightly. "That eye was given to you by Obito Uchiha, was it not?"
"..."
"Hahaha. So, in that world, I ultimately chose Uchiha Obito after all," Madara said. "With no Aizen interfering, it seems the plan proceeded smoothly."
"If you mean Obito Uchiha," the older Kakashi replied, voice subdued, "as far as I know he died more than ten years ago."
"Oh?"
Madara's smile sharpened.
"Is that so? No one researched the Sharingan over there? A Sharingan transplanted into a foreigner will function, but it will not evolve on its own. And yet your eye shows clear signs of evolution."
He laughed softly and descended from the air, boots touching the ground with deceptive lightness.
The instant his soles met stone, the chakra saturating the wooden world around him surged up and into his body, swallowed by countless hungry cells.
This body, modeled after the Sage of Six Paths, still lacked two things: Yin attribute chakra and a powerful soul.
As the Infinite Army replicated and dissolved itself under the Divine Tree, their chakra would return to Madara as nourishment.
Another black orb formed behind him without a sound, joining the others.
Truth Seeking Balls.
Only those who had stepped into the realm known as Six Paths Sage Mode could create and command them. The addition nudged Madara's sense of safety up by the smallest degree.
Just a little.
"In the end, I am still tangled up with that ridiculous first draft of the Eye of the Moon plan," Madara muttered. "A rushed attempt to beat everyone and pull the entire world into Infinite Tsukuyomi without even mapping the signal source or the technique's path. I really let that special chakra influence me too much back then."
He snorted.
"But what surprises me more is that you people did not dig into the Sharingan at all."
"This man claims to be Madara Uchiha's senior," the older Kakashi thought. "The Uchiha clan in my world was wiped out ten years ago. Even if we wanted to study them, there is nothing left."
"...?"
Madara's expression froze for an instant.
Not just his.
The younger Kakashi, still sitting cross legged on the ground and maintaining the four shadow gates, also stiffened.
The Uchiha clan was wiped out?
How?
When members of their clan died, at least several Mangekyou should have awakened.
The Uchiha were widely considered one of the hardest clans to erase. Their trademark Sharingan could awaken from love curdling into hatred, a cycle that almost guaranteed survivors. How could they possibly vanish completely?
"The Uchiha clan was slaughtered by Konoha's rogue ninja, Uchiha Itachi," the older Kakashi said flatly. "Only his younger brother, Uchiha Sasuke, survived."
"Itachi Uchiha, a Konoha rogue," Madara repeated slowly. "He alone destroyed the entire clan in the heart of the village? Was it some genjutsu that made everyone look away? Or did one of your Mangekyou users failure to resist the seduction of power trigger a chain reaction..."
"No. The Uchiha were relocated from the center of Konoha to the outskirts due to tensions with the village. They were living on the edge of Konoha when Itachi killed them."
"..."
I care about this way too much.
Even knowing this was the worst possible time to get distracted by another world's history, the younger Kakashi could not ignore it.
Neither spoke, but both he and Madara were thinking the same thing.
This story was absurd.
Or rather, it should have been impossible.
The Uchiha clan, the greatest power in Konoha, reduced to exile on the outskirts and then erased by their own kin?
As he struggled to maintain the four dark curtains, Kakashi had already tested his pseudo Bankai many times. His rising status in Las Noches came from the belief that his ability touched the deepest mysteries of space and time.
In other words, the future selves he summoned should belong to extended lines of his own world line.
This, however, was the first time a future self from a completely different world line had been dragged in by the distortions of a space time barrier.
And the first thing this version did was drop a world shattering piece of news that sounded completely insane.
Madara, meanwhile, seemed quite content to let time pass.
This Konoha version of Kakashi was utterly unreliable.
He might as well leave his fate to the next draw.
Although the younger Kakashi had already started to regret his choice, the older Kakashi had not given up.
"What happened on my side does not matter," the older Kakashi said finally. "What matters is here and now."
He turned, putting his back to his younger self, and fixed his gaze on Madara. His dead fish eyes were calm and utterly cold.
"I do not know exactly what is going on, but the enemy is this man who calls himself Uchiha Madara, right?"
"That makes things simple."
He lifted his headband. The Mangekyou flared.
"As long as he has a physical body, he is not immune to Kamui. His hand should already be gone."
"..."
The younger Kakashi did not move, simply closed his eyes.
In front of them, Madara had not dodged.
He stared straight at his own palm as space twisted around it, a vortex of nothingness expanding to swallow the limb.
He neither retreated nor resisted.
He watched, almost idly, as the void ate his hand up to the wrist.
The pale wood grain at the edges of his exposed arm showed no blood, but one of the hands needed for forming seals and weaving complex ninjutsu was gone.
From a ninja's perspective, that was a major victory.
"As long as we stop him from using ninjutsu, we will manage somehow," the older Kakashi said. "Do not worry. If there are no accidents, I will do my best to heal you afterward."
He began tightening his mask and straps, already planning the next move.
The expected crack in Madara's composure never came.
Madara simply looked at him, expression flat.
"...Do people in your world not know how to use space time sealing?" he asked.
"What?"
"Directly cutting off a limb is meaningless," Madara said. "Unless you sever the head, space time ninjutsu is pointless."
He tilted his head, studying his missing hand. The stump began to glow.
"By linking to any remaining part of the body, you can resummon it from another space without a seal. That is all there is to it."
He smiled and let his chakra stir.
As if time itself rewound, the arm that had been swallowed by the void reappeared from nothing and dropped neatly into place at his wrist.
Pale green medical chakra seeped through the Wood Release fibers, and in the blink of an eye the limb was whole again, as if nothing had happened.
The older Kakashi stared, stunned.
Madara's smile grew even more mocking.
"That is something we teach at shinobi academies and training grounds," he said. "Do they not cover it over there?"
"Why did such a strange version of me get pulled over by my own summoning..."
The younger Kakashi let out a long breath, feeling his focus fray.
This was somehow even worse than the initial form.
If he had known it would turn out like this, he might as well have just gone in to fight Madara himself.
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