At the edge of the deep crater, shattered stones rolled down with a rustle.
The smoke and dust had yet to fully disperse, but at the bottom of the pit, Madara Uchiha—who had once looked down on the Shinobi World and had only just ascended to his Six Paths form—was now sunk deep within it like a broken doll, his aura so faint it was almost impossible to detect.
And there, on the suffocating edge of the battlefield, a mass of viscous, pitch-black matter—Black Zetsu—was writhing violently.
The storm raging inside him was almost about to burst through his inhuman form.
Just moments ago, when Madara had easily seen through his trick of controlling Konan and pointed out the flaw in how he had broken through the Truth-Seeking Orb's defenses, Black Zetsu had felt despair like never before.
A thousand years of planning was about to fall short at the very last step!
He knew full well that in front of a Madara Uchiha who possessed complete Six Paths power and was highly wary of him, the ritual that required him to personally thrust his hand into the other party's heart to initiate the "unsealing" was nothing more than a fantasy.
Madara's vigilance had left him unable to make a single move. The hope of reviving his mother, Kaguya, seemed to have been completely severed.
Yet even in his wildest dreams, he had never imagined that the mysterious "Collector," Minamoto Takuya, would possess such inconceivably terrifying strength!
Ignoring the annihilation rules of the Truth-Seeking Orbs, creating Truth-Seeking Orbs out of thin air, crushing Six Paths Madara—who had fused with the God Tree and possessed an Immortal Body—until he had no power to fight back, even leaving him too badly injured to move...
All of it had surpassed the limits of