Less than three days remained until that night destined to be stained red with blood.
Before Konoha's Memorial Stone at dusk, the autumn wind swept up several withered yellow leaves, sending them spiraling past rows of cold gravestones.
In this deathly silent cemetery, a silver-haired youth wearing an Anbu mask stood quietly.
"Obito... Rin..."
Kakashi Hatake gently placed a bouquet of white bellflowers before a gravestone. His right eye, uncovered by his forehead protector, was filled with a weariness and desolation that seemed impossible to ever dispel.
Clearly, Guy's treatment had not achieved the slightest effect.
Guy's failed treatment attempts +1 Minato-sensei was going to have a child.
Kakashi's voice sounded especially hoarse in the empty cemetery.
He murmured to the gravestone for a long time, as though confiding his guilt, which had nowhere to go, to the ghosts of the past.
Only after night had fully fallen did Kakashi pull down his mask again and turn to leave with heavy steps, his solitary figure as lost as a stray dog without a direction.
Yet Kakashi did not know.
In the shadows less than ten steps away from him—perhaps even in his blind spot—a pair of scarlet eyes hidden beneath an orange spiral mask watched everything coldly.
Obito Uchiha.
This "hero," who should have been dead, now stood within a gap in the Kamui Dimension.
As he watched Kakashi's pained retreating figure, there was not a trace of sympathy in his gaze beneath the mask—only endless mockery for this false world.
Meaningless self-reproach, Kakashi. In this hell, worse than garbage, death is the only release, Obito coldly declared inwardly.
Only after Kakashi's chakra had completely vanished from his senses did Obito's body, hidden in the void, slowly condense into solid form amid a faint spatial distortion.
He walked stiffly to Rin's gravestone and stood silent for a long while.
Then, from beneath his wide black robe, he extended his right hand, covered in pale White Zetsu markings, and gently placed a bouquet of tiny white flowers, still bearing a few drops of dew and picked from who knew where, beside the bellflowers Kakashi had left behind.
Just as Obito set down the flowers and prepared to use Kamui again to leave this place that disgusted him yet that he could not bear to part with—
"This presence... is that Obito Uchiha? You're actually still alive?"
A curious voice suddenly rang out behind Obito without warning!
What?!
The pupils beneath Obito's mask abruptly shrank to pinpoints, and every muscle in his body tensed to the limit in an instant!
How was that possible?!
With his current senses, enhanced by Hashirama Cells and the Mangekyō Sharingan, not even Minato-sensei could get this close without causing spatial fluctuations!
He whirled around, the red glow of his Sharingan cutting a dangerous afterimage through the night.
Yet the instant he saw who had come, the fatal blow Obito had been about to unleash froze rigidly in midair.
Behind him stood two figures, one large and one small, both clad in black coats.
Yue Uchiha, who had used the ultimate Mirror Flower, Water Moon together with Yagokoro Omoikane to perfectly conceal all five senses and chakra fluctuations, stood there casually holding Uchiha Hikari's hand as he looked at Obito.
Yue... senpai?
Obito's mind went blank for a brief instant.
Even though Obito had completely severed himself and sealed his heart within endless darkness, the moment he saw that familiar face, a beautiful memory buried so deeply in his heart that it had nearly begun to mold still surged forth beyond his control.
That was back before he had "died," when he had still been the boy who was always late and mocked as dead last.
Within the cold, arrogant Uchiha Clan, Yue Uchiha had been one of the few people who had shown him kindness.
Whenever he was late because he had helped an old lady cross the street and was scolded by the clan elders, Yue-senpai would always smile, hand him a skewer of Three-Color Dango, gently ruffle his hair, and say, "Kindness is the rarest quality among the Uchiha, Obito. Don't lose it."
During Obito's childhood, filled with rejection and disdain, if Minato Namikaze had been a beam of light illuminating him, then Yue Uchiha had been the only warmth he could feel within the clan.
He had even saved Obito's life during the Battle of Kannabi Bridge...
Obito's lips trembled faintly beneath his mask.
But the warmth of that memory was swiftly swallowed by an even deeper coldness.
In this false world, all warmth was nothing more than candy coating wrapped around deadly poison!
Yue-senpai was the same—just another part of this illusory hell!
This hell!!! It should not exist!!!
Seeing Obito's posture tense in an instant as he released a chilling killing intent, Yue made no defensive move and merely watched him quietly.
"Why not return to Konoha?" Yue asked softly, his tone carrying the sigh of old acquaintances reunited, as though he were simply speaking to a child who had run away from home in a fit of anger.
Obito remained silent.
The night wind passed through the cemetery, sweeping fallen leaves between them. The atmosphere was so oppressive it was suffocating.
Standing behind Yue, Hikari quietly placed her hand on her sword hilt. She could sense that the chakra within this masked man was twisted and crazed.
For Yue Uchiha, however, this seemingly casual "encounter" was actually a long-planned gamble and experiment.
He was testing the boundaries of the World Correction Force.
Within the script called Naruto, the Night of the Nine-Tails was an absolute main-plot node, an ironclad law that could not be altered.
But Obito secretly coming to visit Rin's grave on the eve of the Night of the Nine-Tails was a small act filled with private emotion, something that definitely fell outside the compulsory surveillance of the "core plot."
If Yue attempted to use "talk-no-jutsu" here to change Obito's mind, the Corrective Force would most likely not immediately send down divine punishment.
Yue had already sensed its tolerance for non-main-plot developments back in Rōran.
Even if I fail, I won't lose anything.
Of course, success would be best. He wanted to see how much deviation from the "main plot" the Corrective Force could tolerate before it made a move openly and aboveboard.
Yue waited.
He was trying to use their bonds from the past to pry loose this stubborn rock that Madara Uchiha had thoroughly brainwashed and Rin's death had utterly shattered.
After a long silence.
The Sharingan beneath Obito's mask finally stopped trembling.
The beautiful memories that had flashed through his mind moments earlier were mercilessly erased by his cruel rationality, as though he were crushing dead leaves beneath his feet.
"I am not Obito."
The Masked Man's voice became hoarse and hollow, carrying a deathly desolation and coldness that kept others a thousand miles away.
"You have mistaken me for someone else."
As those emotionless words fell, the Mangekyō Sharingan in Obito's eye slowly began to turn.
Spiraling ripples of Kamui appeared in the air once more.
As though being pulled away by an invisible vortex, his body gradually warped and vanished into the void.
From beginning to end, he never looked again at the bouquet on the ground, nor did he spare Yue Uchiha another glance.
Watching the space settle completely back into stillness, Yue Uchiha tilted his head slightly upward. A trace of helpless acceptance flashed through his eyes beneath the mask.
"Did I fail...? As expected, a few memories alone can't bring back someone whose heart is already dead."
Yue did not feel much frustration.
Obito Uchiha's mind had long been completely destroyed and remolded on that bloody rainy night so carefully orchestrated by Madara.
Trying to make him abandon his obsession with "creating a world with Rin" through a few words was simply a fantasy.
He had no idea how that idiot Naruto had managed to persuade Obito.
As Obito's former mentor, Yue had not even been given the chance to say a second sentence to him.
Of course, Yue was a missing-nin now too, so neither of them had any grounds to criticize the other.
"Yue, he was clearly the Obito you mentioned. Why wouldn't he admit his identity?"
Hikari walked to Yue's side, her clear eyes full of confusion.
To her, something either was or was not. This kind of self-denial seemed deeply contradictory.
"Because he doesn't dare face it, Hikari."
Yue turned and looked at the lonely bouquet of little white flowers before the gravestone, then took a flower from his robe and placed it among them as well.
"Some people like to cut away their weak, miserable past selves. And the best way to cut oneself away is to put on a mask and play someone else."
Yue reached out and gently rubbed Hikari's soft black hair, his gaze seeming to pierce through time and space to see the youth who had once wept bitterly in the rain.
"Even our past selves are indispensable parts of our lives. We shouldn't blame who we were in the past..."
Yue's voice carried a compassionate clarity born from seeing through the vicissitudes of the world, as though he were speaking both to Hikari and to himself.
"Because he too had been lost back then. In the midst of that pain, he didn't know what he could do to win a better ending for himself or for everyone."
"Obito was like that. So was the Uchiha Clan of the past."
Yue withdrew his hand and pulled his black coat tighter around himself.
"Let's go, Hikari. We've seen our old friend."
"Since he chose to turn the gears of Fate as the 'Masked Man,' then we... should also begin preparing our own script of 'the oriole behind.'"
Before you continue