The sky filled with fist shadows, so fast they left afterimages, crashed down amid the freezing, bone-piercing gale of the Land of Lightning. The Demonic Statue of the Outer Path's enormous, withered shell let out repeated dull, teeth-grinding tearing sounds under the relentless bombardment of countless massive wooden hands clad in blue chakra armor. It shattered completely into a skyful of splintered wood and pitch-black chunks of stone. In the instant the debris flew everywhere, one gigantic Wood Release arm behind Yoru's colossal Buddha swept down with a fierce gale, striking precisely at the dark figure standing atop the statue's head.
"Bang—!"
Obito was like a tattered sack caught in a hurricane, slapped straight down from a height of a hundred meters with a piercing whistling sound.
His entire body smashed heavily into the charred, muddy ground reeking of pungent black oil and burnt flesh, carving out a crater and splashing him with sticky blood-mud.
He let out a beastlike cry of pain. The iconic white spiral mask on his face cracked in half with a sharp snap the instant it struck a hard rock, exposing most of his face.
It was an extraordinarily strange, twisted face.
The left half was fair and clean, delicate like a young boy's. But the right half was covered in rigid scars, crushed by boulders and crudely stitched back together. It was uneven and pitted, like brown centipedes twisting through mud.
The broken mask fragments fell into the mud beside him with a dry plop, fully exposing that face—both familiar and unfamiliar, a face that had appeared in countless dreams—beneath the pale moonlight.
With his only movable right hand, he clutched his chest tightly. His throat produced heavy, rasping breaths like a bellows dragging through sand, and his single eye was filled with web-like