The mass that had been blasted into fine mist was not dead yet. Fed by the void storm, dark red fragments frantically gathered. In less than five seconds, a black torso even thicker than before rose from the ruins of Hokage Rock, fifty meters tall and blotting out half the moonlight.
A crimson eye rolled out of its newly grown forehead and locked onto Goten's position.
"Are you ready to face true destruction?"
Its voice rattled the roof tiles across half of Konoha.
Goten stood in midair, golden flames of ki burning close against his bones, every strand of hair standing upright. Like a rivet welded into the sky, he did not budge.
He glanced over that absurdly enormous body, and the corner of his mouth twitched.
"Destruction? You haven't even made it all the way through the door, but your mouth got here first."
There was no more talk.
In the next breath, before even his afterimage had fully formed, he was directly in front of the thing's chest. Hundreds of barbed black tentacles stabbed at him from every direction, each nearly seven meters thick, carrying that sickening aura that would erase you from the world's underlying laws on contact.
He took them head-on.
His protective golden ki flames caved inward where the tentacles pierced them, hissing with corrosive white smoke. A patch of his martial arts uniform burned straight off his chest, exposing the scorch marks the black aura had seared into it.
He did not even furrow his brow.
He thrust both hands forward, driving all ten fingers into the very center of the black torso's chest cavity and seizing the dark red core of its essence, still beating desperately inside.
"If you're going to destroy something, do it on someone else's turf."
The words squeezed through