A golden meteor streaked across the night sky.
Couples beneath the night sky made wishes upon the meteor. Shinobi stationed outside prayed for their missions to go smoothly, while children wished for lots of presents...
Only Aoike was enduring the agony in his eyes. His incomplete Susanoo had no ability to fly.
But it was clear that Aoike had yet to reach that level of power.
The golden torrent carried him beyond the atmosphere, then could go no farther.
Aoike could feel the air scraping against the shell of his Susanoo.
The heat was constantly draining the ocular power of his Mangekyō Sharingan, while blazing flames enveloped the silvery-white Susanoo.
There was no time to think about anything else. Aoike could only do his best to maintain his defenses. It would take just one minute to fall from an altitude of ten thousand meters.
The massive, sturdy Susanoo shielded him from the harm of passing through the atmosphere, but his falling speed kept increasing.
When he could see the continent with his naked eyes, Aoike deactivated his Susanoo.
All that remained were the people who had made wishes, staring in astonishment as the meteor carrying their hopes went out in midair.
The gale ruffled Aoike's composure. He shielded his eyes with one hand and peered through the gaps between his fingers to judge the distance to the ground.
When he was less than a hundred meters from a small hill, the Tengu-armored Susanoo appeared out of thin air. In the blink of an eye, it slammed into the earth.
At that moment!
Deep in the cave, Nagato was maintaining Pain and discussing their plans with Konan when a sudden sense of danger made his hair stand on end. Almost instinctively, he cut off the chakra supply to all the Pains.
"Shinra Tensei!"
Fueled by an enormous supply of chakra, the vast repulsive force diverted the Susanoo, which was smashing through the mountain and scattering rocks, slightly off course.
Even so, the entire mountain nearly collapsed.
Nagato furrowed his brow. Other than him, Konan, and Deva Path Pain,
all the other Pains and the White Zetsu informants had perished.
He didn't care about the White Zetsu, of which there were plenty of copies. But losing Naraka Path Pain not only made repairing the other damaged Pains more difficult; it also meant his external power would diminish in the short term.
This was an ominous sign for someone who proclaimed himself a god, especially after a sudden attack like this.
"I'll go check on things."
Konan flapped her wings, using her secret origami technique, and headed for the center of the ruins. Deva Path Pain hurried after her.
Meanwhile, the gaunt Nagato sat in his wheelchair, his face dark as he wheeled himself back into the hidden barrier.
When Konan reached the air above the target, she used Wind Style to effortlessly disperse the lingering smoke.
At the bottom of the crater, Aoike lay on his back, too weak to move. His eyes were tightly shut, two trails of bloody tears ran down his cheeks, and blood trickled from his mouth and nose.
If Shinra Tensei hadn't pushed him slightly to the side and absorbed a small portion of the impact, Aoike's condition would have been even worse.
He struggled to open his blurry eyes. He could barely see anything, and he couldn't even form Hand Seals.
As he struggled, a mouthful of blood welled up in his throat. The last thing he saw was a flash of blue.
A month later, in the damp, drizzling rain, Nagato remotely controlled the newly repaired Six Paths of Pain as he tested their performance.
In a nearby room, Konan stood beside a wooden bed. A faint, musty smell peculiar to the Land of Rain hung in the air.
"Since you're awake, there's no need to keep pretending to sleep."
"You've been asleep long enough."
Aoike's act, honed over two years of clawing his way back from the brink of death, was no match for the perceptive Konan.
Like a fish waiting to be slaughtered, Aoike obligingly opened his eyes without making any unnecessary movements.
The injuries from his fall from the sky still left his whole body aching and powerless.
"Can you speak?"
Her cool voice and indifferent expression naturally carried an air of detachment.
Aoike's throat produced a hoarse, rasping sound, like air leaking through dry grass.
Konan looked him over, then left after telling him to get some rest.
Only after Aoike came to his senses did he realize that this wasn't Root.
The Root in the darkness had plenty of ways to make a captive with a hoarse throat "talk," though few captives ever survived to tell the tale.
Aoike blinked. The clear, bright world was so detailed that he could only have seen it by activating his Sharingan.
Without thinking, he switched to his Mangekyō. As expected,
he was blind.
After a series of fierce battles and the feat of wearing through the atmosphere, his Mangekyō, far more durable than Sasuke's, had finally given out.
But in exchange, he would never again be at anyone's mercy.
He couldn't feel the Caged Bird Seal on his forehead. While he was unconscious, his Byakugan had undergone a developmental change and mutated into the Tenseigan.
Unexpectedly, it had also inherited the Byakugan's 360-degree, all-around field of vision. He no longer had to bulge the veins around his eyes to see people.
After a few more developmental changes, his blue eyes would mature into their complete form. By then, he would be able to fight even a "real" Otsutsuki who came calling.
Most importantly...
He had met his family at the boundary between life and death.
That conversation had made him understand that a person's fate and choices were different things. Though he couldn't make sense of it, the dead were gone, and all Aoike could do was respect their wishes.
And the only thing he could do for them was seek revenge.
It was no longer an angry outburst, but a realization he had reached after calming down. Though, for the targets of his revenge, that made little difference.
Aoike closed his eyes in exhaustion. It had been far too long since he'd last fallen asleep as peacefully as he did now.
The next day,
after getting enough rest, Aoike could finally force out a hoarse voice. During Konan's regular interrogations, he answered each question like a robot.
Aside from the things that were unusual about him, he had nothing to hide.
As for Konoha's secrets, he planned to hold them for ransom and see if he could get anything out of it.
It wasn't until a few days later, when Deva Path Pain tossed him a scroll densely packed with a record of the damage he had caused, that he realized just how bad things were. If this had happened before, he could have tried to wriggle out of it. But after this "rebirth," he wanted to be a good person with his own sense of identity.