Helplessness and Stalemate

The cold came even more suddenly than the lava.

Naruto felt as if he had been thrown from a furnace into an ice cellar in an instant. The heat from the Lava Dimension still clung to his Six Paths cloak, but upon entering the Ice Dimension, it immediately turned into white mist that steamed off his body like a thick cloud. The ground beneath his feet was ice—not ordinary ice, but deep-blue ice that had not melted for ten thousand years, so hard that even a kunai could not chip it. The sky was grayish white, with no sun, no moon, only an even, dead-fish-eye gray.

Kaguya Clan stood thirty meters away, her white robe drifting amid the snow and ice. On the wrist Naruto had grabbed earlier was a faint pale-gold mark—the imprint left by Naruto's Yang Release Chakra.

She looked at that mark, and at last, her brow drew tight.

It was not anger. It was "trouble." Like someone discovering an unremovable ink stain on their clean clothes.

"Yang Release," she said softly. Her voice was especially clear in the silence of that frozen expanse. "Indra's reincarnate uses Yin Release, and Asura's reincarnate uses Yang Release—Hagoromo divided the sealing formula between two people."

She raised her head and looked at Naruto and Sasuke.

"But you will not get another chance to touch me at the same time."

She tapped the ice with one foot. Her whole body rose—not flying, but floating. She stood in midair, looking down at Naruto and Sasuke on the ground. Her sleeves spread like wings, and countless gray bones flew from them, not toward the two of them, but toward the ice.

The All-Killing Ash Bones pierced the ice, and vast sections of it began to shatter. Those cracks were no ordinary cracks—gray matter