The Beacon shattered.
It shattered cleanly, without even a proper farewell. One moment, it was still struggling to give off light and heat; the next, it silently turned to ash, leaving not so much as a speck behind. The afterimage of the last coordinates it had traced still lingered in the sky, silver-blue, like a slowly fading scar.
Then, silence. Deathly silence.
Everyone froze, instinctively softening even their breathing. Tsunade was still poised mid-charge, Kakashi's Lightning Blade still hummed in his palm, and the double shield raised by Hashirama and Madara still glimmered... but the target was gone. The target that had drawn all their fire had collapsed on its own.
Immediately afterward, the Void Tendrils hanging overhead writhed aimlessly in the air like headless flies. They had lost their clearest, most stable "target," and chaotic perception took over again. Several nearby tendrils swept unconsciously across the area the Allied Forces had previously fortified. A few damaged barriers and defensive works vanished without a sound, erased from "existence" itself, leaving behind patches of emptiness so smooth they made the skin crawl.
"Spread out! Everyone, spread out! Don't bunch up!" Hashirama was the first to react, roaring hoarsely, his voice carrying a tremor he did not even notice. His golden senjutsu chakra no longer tried to construct a massive shield. Instead, it turned into countless tiny golden motes that drifted like dandelion seeds toward the Allied Forces' shinobi who could still move, trying to give them a thin layer of temporary protection.
Madara spat out a mouthful of bloody saliva, his Six-Tomoe Rinne Sharingan fixed on the turbulent currents spreading chaotically once more. "What a damn nuisance!" He controlled his Limbo: Border Jail shadows, no longer meeting the tendrils head-on but deftly guiding and deflecting their paths, as though plucking dangerous