Amegakure.
Deep in an underground passage, standing water reached ankle height, and the smell of rust mingled with the stench of rotting flesh throughout the corridor.
A mass of charred sludge wriggled out through a crack, making wet, sticky sounds.
The sludge struggled desperately upward, piecing together the outline of half a face bit by bit.
Only a small portion of its half-black, half-white coloring remained. Most of the rest of its body was still smoking, as though someone had fished it out of a vat of boiling oil.
Its single yellow eye rolled twice before finally focusing.
"Lunatic..."
Its voice rasped as though its throat were full of broken fragments.
"That monster isn't a ninja at all."
"He sat in a chair and flicked one finger, and a forest thirty kilometers away just vanished."
"Not even scraps remained. I couldn't even see the bottom of the crater burned into the ground."
"The worst part was that his aura could cut through people along the air. I had to burrow thirty meters underground to shake it off. I nearly lost my life."
The sludge dragged the rest of its body out of the crack with difficulty and collapsed into the water, wheezing like a leaking bellows.
At the end of the corridor.
A man so thin he was little more than a skeleton sat in a wheelchair, his purple Rinnegan fixed on Black Zetsu's half-dead form without a word.
The blue-haired woman standing beside him had remained silent throughout. Her amber eyes rested on Black Zetsu's charred stump, her lips pressed into a line.
The silence lasted a long time.
Nagato tapped a finger against the wheelchair's armrest.
"A complete revision of the plan."
Konan turned to look at him.
"As for the Nine-Tails,"
"Put it on hold indefinitely."
Nagato's