The top floor of the tallest steel tower in Amegakure.
Deva Path Pain stood silently before the enormous floor-to-ceiling window, the scene on the Canopy Screen reflected in his purple, ripple-patterned Rinnegan.
When he saw Deidara utter the words "Boss Pain is no longer here" and "Sister Nan disbanded the Akatsuki Organization," faint ripples began to appear in his Rinnegan.
It was not because of death itself.
By the time he had decided to walk this path, he had already cast death aside.
The moment Yahiko died, a part of him had been buried with him.
What first caused his stone-cold will to crack was the conclusion hidden within those words—a conclusion he refused to acknowledge yet could not avoid: failure.
His plan had failed. The ultimate goal he had given everything to achieve, staining his hands with blood and spreading pain throughout the Shinobi World, had failed.
How was that possible? Collecting the Tailed Beasts, creating the ultimate weapon, making the world feel equal pain so that it could understand peace—how could this path be wrong? How could it be ineffective?!
Even his emaciated true body, whose life was barely sustained by the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path, began to tremble uncontrollably.
Nearby, Konan had been quietly folding the Paper Flower in her hands. When she heard the Canopy Screen mention Pain's death and her own disbanding of the Akatsuki Organization, her slender fingers suddenly trembled, and the white Paper Flower that was almost complete was instantly crushed out of shape.
She abruptly raised her head. Her pale-purple eyes contracted violently as she stared fixedly at Pain's mountain-steady yet icy back, while the paper slipped rustlingly from between her fingers.
"Nagato!" She almost soundlessly called out the name buried deep in her heart, her voice carrying a faint,