This is...
...the ending for him and me? Outside the gourd-shaped crater, barely visible through the darkness screened by trees, a figure seemed to emerge from the shadows. He stood quietly at the edge of the trees beside the gourd-shaped pit, his brows deeply furrowed.
It was Uchiha Nobuhiko.
At this moment, aside from his tightly knitted brows, Uchiha Nobuhiko's face beneath his neat short hair was somewhat grim.
What lay before him was probably the sight he least wanted to see.
He had imagined countless possible outcomes for the current situation, but he had never once considered an ending like this.
He and Taki Chiba had actually perished together.
Of all the possibilities he had envisioned, the conclusion between the two of them had inevitably ended in death—but only one of them dying. Either Uchiha Nobuhiko would die, or Taki Chiba would die.
But both of them dying together, perishing together? He had truly never even considered it.
What... did this foretell? As he looked at the two corpses, the gloom on Uchiha Nobuhiko's face gradually turned into hesitation.
Yes, at this moment, Uchiha Nobuhiko hesitated.
Just like Taki Chiba, he had poured great effort into this split body. Moreover, over the past dozen or so years—or, strictly speaking, ever since the split body had been created—it had been this split body handling all manner of affairs. Even these Chunin Exams had been planned entirely by it.
He had scarcely interfered at all, merely providing mass-produced Sharingan and certain powers, including the Spirit Puppet Technique.
And what this split body had done was essentially what he had expected. Or rather, the things this split body did were, with overwhelming probability, the things he himself would have done. Though they possessed independent selves and had subtle differences in personality, the