While Naruto spoke with every tailed beast and their forr hosts within the inner world, Sasuke completed Fugaku’s sealing.
To Naruto, that exchange felt long and heavy, as if ti itself had slowed. In reality, barely a heartbeat passed.
The mont Naruto returned to the battlefield, each shadow clone finished its task. One by one, the black receivers were torn free from the tailed beasts.
Naruto exhaled, then turned to Sasuke with a grin.
"I heard everything just now," he said. "If you need to head back, go. I can hold things here until you return, dattebayo!"
He flashed a thumbs-up.
Sasuke studied him for a mont, then nodded. He dismissed his Susanoo, and the armored form faded back into a blazing golden chakra Nine-Tails.
In the next instant, Sasuke vanished.
What remained was a single kunai.
Naruto caught it imdiately and tucked it away with care. This was Sasuke’s return ticket.
The masked man watched the exchange, puzzled. He didn’t understand why Sasuke would leave now—but one less enemy only made things easier.
"Impressive, Naruto," he said coldly. "Perfect control over the Nine-Tails. But it changes nothing. The outco was decided long ago."
The Demonic Statue opened its mouth.
Eight chained hooks shot out, piercing the tailed beasts and dragging them forcibly into its body.
Naruto rembered the voices from the inner world. The nas he’d struggled to morize. Every one of them had mattered.
He clenched his fists and shouted, "It won’t end the sa way!"
The masked man paused, then sneered.
"Then witness true despair."
Sasuke reappeared in Konoha.
He went straight ho and opened the room he rarely entered.
The air felt heavy.
Familiar, yet distant.
He didn’t linger. Naruto was still fighting. Every second mattered.
Then he noticed it.
A faint disturbance beneath the bookshelf.
Too obvious—if it had always been there, he should have found it long ago. So why now?
Sasuke recalled Fugaku’s Mangekyō at the end.
...He lifted whatever had been hiding it.
The concealnt was gone.
Sasuke pushed the shelf aside. The floor looked ordinary—until his eyes shifted into Mangekyō Sharingan.
A hidden seal unraveled.
He pulled out a small wooden box.
Inside were two Sharingan, preserved in fluid.
Not Mangekyō. Just single-tomoe Sharingan.
Yet the sheer amount of ocular power inside made his breath hitch.
"...Father’s," Sasuke murmured.
That explained it.
Fugaku had stripped his Mangekyō of all power and sealed it here. Empty eyes were worthless to those who ca after.
This was what he left behind.
Sasuke hesitated.
He didn’t need it. His eyes had already reached their peak.
But this was his father’s last gift.
He absorbed it.
As expected, his eyes reached saturation almost imdiately.
Still, Sasuke didn’t stop.
"This is yours," he thought. "I won’t waste it."
Pain blood. Blood ran down his face.
He ignored it.
He had endured worse.
Cracks ford—not in his eyes, but in the invisible limit holding them back.
And beyond that limit... sothing opened.
The pain vanished.
Sasuke stood up and looked into a mirror.
White eyes stared back at him, ringed with rippling patterns.
The Rinnegan.
So that was it.
Mangekyō didn’t end here.
He sensed it imdiately—this eye resonated with his space-ti abilities, as if waiting for them.
But there was no ti to test it.
Naruto was still fighting.
Sasuke looked around the house one last ti.
He imagined his parents. His brother, before everything went wrong.
"...Thank you."
His Rinnegan softened.
And then he vanished.
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