Chapter 318: Surpassing Fate, Ascending to Six Paths
"Answer me, Obito!"
"Tell me it wasn't you..."
Even a man who'd never once flinched facing the Hokage herself instinctively took a step back now.
Obito stared at the girl before him — her delicate, familiar face carrying an edge of cold grief he'd never seen there before — and felt his mind spiral into chaos.
"Rin..."
"I just... wanted to create a world... with you in it."
Obito couldn't bring himself to meet her eyes. Right now, he could barely tell what was real anymore.
In his memory, Rin Nohara had always been gentle, endlessly kind — even back when he'd been the class dead-last at the academy, she'd never once looked at him any differently. She'd always brought him medicine, without fail, whenever he'd been hurt in training.
Since when did she speak to him like this?
Did I... do something wrong?
Rin, hearing his words, felt her whole mind stall for a moment.
Is that... an admission?
And what did he even mean by "a world with me in it"?
Aren't I already right here, in this world?
Rin genuinely couldn't follow Obito's reasoning at all.
To her, Obito had simply been a friend. A teammate. A classmate.
"You... you weren't like this before..."
Rin looked at the grown man standing before her, then down at her own hands.
Even in this Edo Tensei body, her form hadn't changed at all.
She still looked exactly like a thirteen-year-old girl.
Because she'd died at thirteen.
The unreality of it all pressed down on her. Obito had grown into an adult. She was still a child.
But... was adulthood really this frightening?
Rin glanced instinctively at Tobirama beside her, then down at Minato, still pinned to the ground, and dismissed the thought entirely.
Both Tobirama and Minato were people who'd give absolutely everything for their comrades.
Which meant the terrifying one wasn't adulthood itself.
It was Obito.
"A world with me in it..."
"I'm already here, in this world. Whatever you do, Obito, I already exist, genuinely, right here."
"Don't use my name to justify chasing after your own desires."
"I already died once."
"I chose to die at Kakashi's hands, willingly."
"That was the best outcome I could have asked for."
"I would rather have died than hurt any of my comrades in Konoha."
Rin's eyes, looking at Obito now, held nothing but disappointment. She couldn't understand him at all.
"What... did you say?"
Obito stared at her, disbelieving.
Off in the distance, Kakashi stood, silent, watching everything unfold.
"I said — don't use my name to satisfy your own desires."
By now, Rin had lost any real interest in continuing this conversation with Obito.
Obito had killed her teacher. Killed her teacher's wife.
And beyond that, he'd manipulated the Nine-Tails, trying to destroy Konoha itself — the very people Rin would have given her life to protect.
Now Minato was dead. Kushina was dead too.
Rin couldn't even bring herself to imagine it — that cheerful, endlessly lively teacher's wife from her memory, lying cold and lifeless on the ground.
She, too, had been someone Rin would have died to protect.
Tobirama, watching this, gently patted Rin's shoulder, then turned his gaze toward the distant pillar of pink chakra connecting sky and sea.
"Hold him here."
Tobirama's intent was simple: have Rin stall Obito, currently controlling the Gedō Mazō, buying time until Sakura's return.
Rin fell quiet for a moment, then nodded.
"ROOOAR!!!"
Just as Rin opened her mouth to keep stalling Obito, a deafening roar shook heaven and earth, nearly bursting eardrums across the entire battlefield!
By now, the Gedō Mazō had fully transformed into the Ten-Tails — a colossal, terrifying form thousands of meters tall, its grotesque, monstrous face enough to strike fear into anyone who looked upon it, its chakra alone chilling everyone to the bone.
And that single, massive ten-tomoe Rinnegan-Sharingan eye, roughly the size of a small mountain, was enough to trap the weak-willed instantly, the moment their gaze met its own.
"The Ten-Tails..."
"Revived."
Watching this, Madara couldn't help the smile spreading across his face.
"Obito. Everything before you right now is nothing but illusion. Once Infinite Tsukuyomi begins—"
"A beautiful world will arrive."
"Everyone will receive the most perfect ending imaginable."
"What you're facing right now is nothing but the same cruel reality you've always known."
Madara looked at Obito beside him, still lost in his own daze, a curve forming at the corner of his mouth.
Madara understood Obito better than anyone else in the world ever could — arguably better than anyone alive understood his true nature.
On the surface, Obito seemed like someone who charged relentlessly toward his goal, willing to cut down anything in his path without hesitation — even a teacher, even a teacher's wife.
But underneath all of that, his true nature was that of a coward.
Much like his own Mangekyō ability itself.
Kamui. A genuinely formidable power — even Madara had no clean answer for it.
But it also proved something fundamental about Obito's own character.
He was always, ultimately, running away. Running from any truth too painful to face directly.
Carving out some private corner of reality, invisible and unreachable by anyone, and hiding there alone, safe from any attack, any scrutiny.
And yet, at the same time, he harbored genuine hatred — hatred for a world that refused to revolve around him.
Which was exactly why Kamui doubled as both the strongest defense and the strongest offense imaginable.
Only that offensive half of Kamui had been permanently ruined by Kakashi.
Not that Madara minded, honestly. If Obito's Mangekyō had ever come together whole, even Madara himself would have had to take him seriously.
Fools really do stumble into good fortune, don't they.
As far as Madara was concerned, Obito — a man with no particular redeeming qualities beyond sheer stubbornness — had somehow ended up wielding one of the most terrifying dōjutsu in existence.
"You're right."
"The Rin standing in front of me right now is nothing but an illusion."
"We need to move forward with Infinite Tsukuyomi. Then everyone will finally have eternal happiness."
"Rin... wait for me. I'll build a world with you in it."
Obito's gaze settled on Rin, deep and unwavering — and even in her Edo Tensei body, a chill ran through her at the look in his eyes.
She felt, with total certainty, that the man standing before her wasn't the Obito she'd once known at all.
The person in front of her now was, simply, a madman.
A madman wielding terrifying power.
"Obito. Don't compound one mistake with another."
"There's still time to stop, right now."
Rin, following Tobirama's plan, kept trying to hold Obito in place.
But exactly as Rin had feared, Obito had become a genuine madman — someone who believed, absolutely, that he alone was in the right.
He'd sacrificed everything, to get to this exact moment.
"Just as I thought — every Uchiha who awakens the Mangekyō turns into a madman."
Watching Obito remain completely unmoved, immovable as stone, Tobirama found his understanding of the Uchiha clan reconfirmed once more.
At that moment, the Ten-Tails moved.
Its massive, ten-tomoe Rinnegan-Sharingan turned toward the distant True Thousand Hands, a figure roughly matching its own scale.
No—
It was looking specifically at the yang half of Kurama, currently being crushed almost helplessly beneath that same True Thousand Hands.
Acting purely on instinct, it wanted to reclaim what belonged to it — to make itself whole again.
At that moment, Hashirama noticed the colossal Ten-Tails as well, his expression turning grave.
He had no idea what Madara was actually planning, but even to him, that towering Ten-Tails represented a genuinely serious threat.
"Madara!"
"What is that thing?!"
Hashirama's voice, carried on chakra, rang out across the entire battlefield.
"Obviously..."
"Defeating the Hokage."
A curve touched the corner of Madara's mouth, his expression unchanged.
He needed to become the Ten-Tails' jinchūriki, defeat the Hokage, defeat Hashirama, and unleash Infinite Tsukuyomi — none of that was a lie he'd told Hashirama.
"Defeating the Hokage..."
Hashirama looked toward the distant pillar of pink chakra connecting sky and sea, his thoughts churning with unease.
He genuinely wanted to believe Madara's words. But something about that massive Ten-Tails left him deeply uneasy — and on the other side, whatever unpredictable transformation was happening with the Fifth Hokage right now left him equally wary.
Hashirama found himself caught, genuinely torn, between two impossible choices.
Stop Madara, or stop the Fifth Hokage?
"He wants to become the Ten-Tails' jinchūriki and carry out some unknown evil scheme!"
Naruto and Sasuke were, by now, in genuinely terrible shape.
Even with Kurama wrapped in a full Susanoo, they were nowhere close to matching Hashirama. Just as Kurama himself had warned earlier — Beast Tribulation had only ever earned them the right to fight him at all.
Hashirama studied the badly battered Beast Tribulation before him, thoughtful.
The Fifth Hokage inspired wariness in him. The Ten-Tails inspired something closer to genuine unease.
That didn't mean the Fifth Hokage was actually weaker than the Ten-Tails — it was simply a deeper, more instinctive kind of dread. At least the Fifth Hokage was still human. The Ten-Tails wasn't even that.
"Madara!"
"Stop where you are!"
Hashirama shouted toward Madara, standing atop the Ten-Tails' head in the distance.
"Hashirama!"
"Our chance to defeat the Hokage is right within reach — are you really giving up on that now?!"
"Hand over that kid's Nine-Tails, and we can still win!"
A twisted smile spread across Madara's face, and he showed no sign of stopping.
"Impossible!"
"That boy is part of Konoha. Even if he's followed the Fifth down a mistaken path, he still belongs to this village."
"If he loses the Nine-Tails, he dies."
"There's no version of this where I let that happen."
Hashirama refused Madara's proposal without a moment's hesitation.
"Tch. Still exactly the same as ever."
Madara spat, irritated, then turned to Obito beside him without hesitation.
"Even with the Ten-Tails in hand, it's still in the middle of its own awakening — defeating Hashirama isn't going to be simple."
"Right now, priority one is reviving me properly."
"Prepare the Outer Path — Samsara of Heavenly Life Technique."
Obito paused at that, then gave Madara one long, deep look, and nodded.
"Understood."
The Outer Path — Samsara of Heavenly Life Technique was one of the Rinnegan's own dōjutsu, capable of bringing someone fully back to life.
But the cost was the caster's own life force.
If the caster happened to be the Rinnegan's true, original owner, that cost was practically negligible.
But Obito wasn't the Rinnegan's true owner — which meant using the technique would cost him dearly.
If Nagato had cast it, with his own monstrous vitality, he could have absorbed the cost easily.
Obito's own life force, by comparison, fell well short of that.
Once he activated the technique, Obito would become like a punctured balloon — steadily, irreversibly leaking away, until, eventually, there'd be nothing left at all.
Obito was mad, certainly, his intelligence arguably no sharper than Kenji's — but that didn't make him a complete fool.
What genuinely gave him pause was the seal Madara had placed directly over his heart.
If he refused, Madara could simply force him to use the technique regardless.
"Let's begin, then."
Madara nodded, satisfied.
—
What was Six Paths-level power, really?
Right now, Sakura's consciousness floated, submerged, within an endless ocean of pink chakra, countless streams of Yin Release surging toward her body from every direction, and her body seemed to draw them all in, endlessly, like a bottomless well.
A single question surfaced in Sakura's mind.
What does "Six Paths-level" even mean?
Is it defined by possessing the Truth-Seeking Balls, the signature marker of that level?
But in the original story, Sasuke — the vessel for Yin power — had never actually possessed Truth-Seeking Balls, and yet everyone still considered him Six Paths-level at that point in the story.
After all, even once he'd absorbed eight and a half tailed beasts' worth of chakra into his own Susanoo, he still never manifested the Truth-Seeking Balls.
And what, exactly, were the Truth-Seeking Balls, in the first place?
A perfect fusion of the seven chakra natures — Yin, Yang, Wind, Lightning, Water, Fire, and Earth — a bloodline-woven web of power capable of nullifying every jutsu in existence except for Sage Techniques.
Sakura let her mind wander, sifting through every Six Paths-level figure she remembered from the original story.
Six Paths Obito. Six Paths Madara. Yang's power in Naruto. Yin's power in Sasuke. Hagoromo Ōtsutsuki. Hamura Ōtsutsuki. Kaguya Ōtsutsuki. Isshiki Ōtsutsuki. Momoshiki Ōtsutsuki, who'd consumed Kinshiki.
Every one of them shared one thing in common: they all carried the Ōtsutsuki bloodline.
But Sakura carried no Ōtsutsuki blood at all.
Did that mean Six Paths-level power was, categorically, something only the Ōtsutsuki clan could ever achieve?
Or was this — her current level, right now — already the absolute ceiling for an ordinary shinobi bloodline in this world?
That couldn't be right.
If everything genuinely came down to bloodline alone, then Hashirama and Madara should have crushed her without any real resistance at all.
Instead, she'd overwhelmed them both — and even then, she'd held back enough that she hadn't struck to kill against Hashirama, despite everything.
Which meant—
Even an ordinary bloodline could suppress the so-called Ōtsutsuki bloodline itself.
No one in the entire shinobi world had ever managed to reach a point like this before.
Now, there is.
Watching from nearby, Karin looked, puzzled, at the massive glowing pink sphere before her.
By this point, Sakura's form had vanished entirely from view, wrapped completely in countless glowing threads of pink chakra, resembling nothing so much as a cocoon of yarn.
Did Sakura just... say something, just now?
Karin couldn't quite make sense of it.
...
Within an endless blue expanse, a white-clad figure sat cross-legged, suspended high above, his Rinnegan eyes calm and unmoving, ancient as a well with no ripples.
He seemed to have always been there. He also seemed to exist everywhere at once.
At that moment, something in Hagoromo Ōtsutsuki's expression stirred, faintly.
"Has it succeeded?"
He spoke aloud.
His expression carried something like wonder, something like relief, and yet something else — complicated, hard to fully name.
For the first time in the shinobi world's recorded history, an ordinary mortal had reached the threshold of destiny itself.
No bloodline. No inheritance.
Not a single drop of Ōtsutsuki blood.
Entirely, purely, an ordinary lineage.
Bloodlines like that existed by the countless millions across the shinobi world — glance in any direction, and you'd find thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, hundreds of millions of people carrying exactly that kind of unremarkable heritage.
Across a thousand years, Hagoromo had watched countless people of exactly this kind pass through the world. Billions of them, easily.
But not one, not a single one, had ever reached this level.
Not even the so-called Extreme Kage had come close — you couldn't count them on one hand.
Finding, among all those countless billions of ordinary people, even a single one capable of touching Six Paths-level, standing as his equal—
That was less like finding a needle in a haystack, and more like something that shouldn't be possible at all.
And yet now—
This person... had been born.
...
Within that seemingly endless pink ocean, a pair of eyes watched everything unfold.
Six Paths.
Six Paths.
Six Paths!
Was the concept of Six Paths truly the exclusive privilege of the Ōtsutsuki bloodline?
That couldn't be right. And if it had been —
Then now, she would be the one to break it.
Sakura had never believed in fate. Never believed in destiny.
If she'd genuinely believed in something like predetermined destiny, she wouldn't have needed to walk this path at all — she could have simply stood by, uninvolved, and watched Sasuke and Naruto grow at their own pace instead.
This so-called shackle of fate. This so-called cage of bloodline.
The time had come to shatter it completely.
She would be the one to break it, with her own hands.
What others couldn't accomplish, she would accomplish. What others couldn't complete, she would complete.
She would be the first to break this cage.
She would open this gate — the one called bloodline, the one called destiny — for every ordinary person across the entire shinobi world.
And after her, countless others would walk the same path she'd carved — the path of the cherry blossom.
She would become Six Paths-level. She would become the one who stood above the heavens, crushing every injustice beneath her own hand.
And now—
The time had come to shatter this cage of bloodline and fate, with her own fist.
...
The endless flow of pink chakra connecting heaven and earth froze suddenly, and within that pink sphere of light hovering high above, a flicker of gold surfaced.
That gold light fused seamlessly with the pink chakra surrounding it.
Karin stared, her heart pounding with fear, watching this unfold. As the person closest to Sakura right now, and as the shinobi world's foremost sensor-type, she could feel every shift in that overwhelming chakra more clearly than anyone else present.
What she sensed now was Yang Release, surging outward from within that pink chakra.
Sakura's own Yang Release.
And that thread of Yang Release was fusing directly with that terrifyingly powerful Yin Release.
Within that unified Yin-Yang chakra, Karin thought she could sense, faintly, Sakura's own will.
A will that could never be broken. Never shattered. Not by anything.
"Sage Technique — Wood Release — Bright God Gate!"
Countless crimson torii gates fell from the sky, pinning down the thousand-meter-tall Ten-Tails in an instant.
Hashirama, having completed the technique, didn't move to press the advantage immediately — instead, his gaze turned toward that distant, heart-stopping pillar of chakra.
He could feel it — that terrifying chakra carried the Fifth Hokage's own unmistakable will within it.
He understood, with total clarity, that there was no longer any way for him to alter her path, whatever came next.
And now — what right did he have left to stand in her way?
It wasn't just Hashirama. No one present, anywhere on the battlefield, could ignore that pillar of chakra.
It was chakra powerful enough to bring the entire shinobi world to its knees.
"ROOOAR!!!"
As if sensing the threat, the Ten-Tails thrashed violently, straining against the Bright God Gate's suppression!
"No more time to wait — I need to become the Ten-Tails' jinchūriki, now!"
Madara — just freshly revived — sensed the shift with genuine alarm.
Even something at the Ten-Tails' level felt this same restless, unmistakable dread.
"H-how do we do this?"
Obito gasped for breath, his body already deteriorating fast, having activated the Outer Path — Samsara of Heavenly Life Technique. He wasn't long for this world now.
At that moment, a hand pressed suddenly against Obito's face, and in an instant, both his eyes were torn out.
"AAAH!"
Not just the Rinnegan — the Kamui Mangekyō as well, both ripped from his sockets by Madara at once.
"You!"
Before Obito could even manage a shout of fury, Madara had already set both the Rinnegan and the Kamui Mangekyō into his own eye sockets.
The other Rinnegan still rested in the Hokage's grip — which left Obito's Kamui eye as the next best option available.
Obito, to Madara now, had outlived his usefulness entirely. Without a shred of hesitation, he kicked Obito's body off the Ten-Tails' head, and prepared, at last, to become its jinchūriki, to complete his ascension to Six Paths himself.
Meanwhile, Sakura remained entirely unconcerned with anything happening in the outside world.
By now, the ocean of Yin Release chakra had been fully absorbed into her own body.
With a single thought now, Sakura could arrange and recombine every possible application of Yin Release within her mind at will.
Much like Madara, in the original story, who — despite never having trained in Storm Release — could effortlessly wield techniques like Storm Release: Light Fang or Yin Release: Thunder School the moment he reached Six Paths-level.
Unmatched Yin Release represented the absolute peak development of the mind itself.
Whatever technique she encountered, she could learn it at a single glance — and even in the face of sudden crisis, she could improvise, on the spot, a technique perfectly suited to meet it.
If Six Paths-level Yang Release represented the ultimate development of life itself—
Then Six Paths-level Yin Release represented the ultimate understanding of technique itself.
At that moment, the surging river of chakra came to a complete stop. The glowing pink sphere hung, suspended, high in the sky, and everyone present — save Madara — stared, transfixed, unable to look away.
Crack...
Cracks began spreading across the surface of that pink sphere...
Every new fracture drew every mind present, unable to look elsewhere.
At that moment, the terrifying chakra vanished all at once, drawn entirely back into whatever remained within that glowing sphere.
However long it took — a second, perhaps a minute—
A single bare hand reached out from within the cracked, splintering sphere...
And with a gentle wave, the sphere shattered entirely!
Then, an unimaginable storm swept across the entirety of heaven and earth!
The storm roared. The ocean surged violently. Sun and moon dimmed. The sky itself turned dark as night!
A single wave of one hand alone, and it struck like a natural disaster!
"Th-that's... is that Sakura?!"
Naruto gripped Sasuke tightly, desperate not to be swept away by the storm.
"Yes!"
"And can you let go of me?!"
Sasuke had driven his blade into the ground, straining just to stay upright — Beast Tribulation, forcibly broken apart by Hashirama, had left both of them at their absolute lowest point yet.
And at that moment, the presence hovering in the sky finally revealed itself, fully, to the entire world.
A pair of green eyes gazed down over heaven and earth like something divine.
In that instant—
Surpassing fate itself. Ascending to Six Paths.
(End of chapter.)
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