Darkness.
Boundless darkness.
Cold.
Bone-piercing cold.
And... a weight that crushed everything.
Obito's consciousness drifted through the darkness like a rag on the verge of drowning.
Kakashi's final roar and Rin's despairing cries seemed to linger in his ears.
Then everything grew distant.
Only pain remained.
Pain that burrowed into his bones and tore his soul apart.
He felt as though the left half of his body... was gone.
No, it wasn't gone.
It had been replaced by something colder, rougher, and filled with malice.
Something was burrowing into his body.
It wasn't healing. It was "filling."
Brutally, without allowing him to resist, it forced a thick, dark energy reeking of sulfur and despair into the gaps left by his crushed bones, muscles, and organs.
"Aaaaaah-!!!"
The agonizing pain briefly jolted him out of his near-death stupor, drawing a scream that no longer sounded human.
He barely managed to open his right eye.
His vision was blurry, his lashes stuck together with blood.
He saw the figure in the white haori standing beside him.
His head was lowered, and in his hand he held a mass of... substance that writhed ceaselessly, emitting an ominous dark-purple glow.
Countless tiny, veinlike tendrils extended from that mass, frantically burrowing into the left half of his body, which the boulder had crushed.
Every tendril that burrowed in brought another burst of agony, as though his soul were being torn apart.
Was he... the Grim Reaper?
Had he come to reap my wretched life?
That would be fine...
Better than... living like this...
Just as his consciousness began to fade again-
"Huh? What's Lord Madara's 'material' doing here?"
A flippant, oily voice suddenly came from the rock wall beside them.
The rock rippled like water, and a chalk-white humanoid creature with indistinct features, as though