Retrieving the Rinnegan

Then, a tremendous force slammed down from behind Madara.

Golden, blinding, carrying the searing radiance unique to the Nine-Tails' Chakra, it fell from the sky like a meteor crashing into the ground. At the heart of that light was a fist—Naruto's right fist, wrapped in the Nine-Tails' Chakra cloak, with a rapidly spinning Rasengan condensed over its knuckles.

That Rasengan struck Madara in the back.

Not from the side, not from above, but directly from behind—Madara's blind spot. Even without eyes, Madara could sense every Chakra signature within several hundred meters around him, but at that moment, his senses were disrupted by too many signals—Gaara's sand, Utakata's slime, Fū's scale powder, Han's steam. The Chakra of the four intertwined into an utter mess in his sensory web, and at the densest point of that mess, Naruto's Chakra came crashing down from the most unlikely angle.

The Rasengan exploded against Madara's back.

Golden light engulfed Madara's entire body in a blinding glow. The glow did not shine upon him from outside; it radiated from within his body—the Rasengan's force pierced his skin and detonated within his muscle layer, tearing apart dozens of muscle fibers across his back. Madara was hurled forward by the impact, like a bird struck from the sky. He traced an arc through the air before crashing heavily into a pile of rubble.

His body rolled several times through the stones, which carved countless tiny, bleeding wounds into his skin. At the point where the Rasengan had struck his back was a fist-sized indentation. The skin there had been completely ripped open, exposing dark-red, bleeding muscle beneath. His spine gave a dull sound beneath that strike, like bamboo snapping—not a fracture, but the grating sound of the ligaments between his vertebrae being stretched to their limits.

Madara knelt