The sea breeze on Turtle Island still carried a salty tang, but Shengu Xuan was nowhere near as relaxed as before. The irritation of having his afternoon nap interrupted over and over had even made the demon black chi swirling around him restless.
After he disappeared, the terrifying pressure that had overwhelmed everything on the battlefield dissipated with him. What remained, however, was an even heavier, almost tangible awe and fear. The Allied Shinobi stared blankly in the direction where the black-clad youth had vanished, then looked at the bottomless, bowl-shaped crater beneath their feet, carved out by the aftermath of the Eight Demons' true forms. Their throats bobbed, but they could not utter a word.
At the edge of the crater, Madara Uchiha's Impure World Reincarnation body was slowly repairing itself, but the Sharingan he had just formed in an attempt to make one final gamble was growing dimmer.
"I really... can't accept this." Madara muttered hoarsely. He braced himself against the ground and tried to sit up, but the strength in his limbs seemed completely drained. He could not even lift an arm.
Just then, a familiar chakra fluctuation, carrying extreme weakness and panic, came from the edge of the battlefield. Madara turned his head with difficulty, then saw something that made his pupils abruptly contract.
Obito Uchiha, the "pawn" in whom he had once placed such high hopes, was now stumbling out of the woods on the battlefield's outskirts in an utterly wretched state. Wounds covered his body, and the mask over the left half of his face had shattered completely, exposing the face beneath, twisted with fear. But what shocked Madara even more was the faint outline of nine illusory tails behind Obito, glowing an ominous red.
That was... the Nine-Tails' chakra, and some greater, more