Imu hovered in midair, his chest rising and falling slightly.
Black mist churned around him in his Half-Human Half-Demon Form. Twenty royal weapons circled him once more, their eerie eyes slowly turning.
He looked up, his enormous crimson eyes fixed on the now-empty sky. At last, some of the tension he had held inside eased.
Then he heard a soft chuckle.
It was quiet, barely more than a breath.
Yet across the battlefield, amid the deathly silence of tens of thousands, that chuckle pierced every ear like a needle.
Madara Uchiha stood at Susanoo's brow, his Rinnegan gazing impassively down at the devastated battlefield.
His lips curved in undisguised mockery.
"Not bad."
His voice was low, but it carried through the smoke and sea wind to every ear.
"Worthy of someone who's ruled these seas for centuries."
Imu's pupils contracted.
The mockery in Madara's eyes deepened.
He slowly raised a hand, fingers spread and palm turned skyward, repeating the gesture he had made when summoning the first meteorite.
"But—"
Madara tilted his head and looked down at Imu's face, now drained of color. His tone was casual, but every word cut like a knife.
"What will you do about... the second one?"
The instant he finished speaking, the void overhead tore open into a rift larger and deeper than the first.
A black meteorite thousands of meters across slowly emerged from the rift.
No, it could no longer be called a meteorite.
It was a small planet.
Its surface was pitch-black, scored with cracks denser and deeper than those on the first. Dark violet light flowed through them like rivers of lava.
More than twice the size of the first meteorite, it swallowed the entire sky in shadow as it emerged.
Even the Red Line's ten-thousand-meter cliffs vanished beneath that