The rain never stopped in Amegakure.

  Konan stood at the edge of the highest spire, a paper-white silhouette against the gray horizon. Her cloak clung to her like ink-soaked parchment, the crimson clouds blurred by the relentless downpour.

  She didn’t mind the cold. She had long stopped feeling it.

  Below, her village stretched in broken symmetry, steel towers, waterlogged alleys, the slow ripple of dark canals. The city was quieter than usual. Or perhaps she was simply listening less.

  Footsteps, soft but deliberate, broke the hush behind her.

  “Hm, what’s the matter, Konan?”

  Came Rei’s voice.

  She didn’t turn. She recognized him by his presence alone. He was the only member of the Akatsuki who spoke to her like this.

  She didn’t know whether it annoyed her or not.

  “I was just thinking,” she said softly, “of how far we’ve come. And how far we’ve lost.”

  Her eyes lingered on the rooftops below, blinking back water or perhaps something else.

  “Yahiko used to stand here, too. He believed this village would become a beacon, someday. I don’t know what he’d think of it now.”

  Rei stepped beside her, silent for a moment. Then he nodded once, his expression unreadable.

  “We captured the Eight-Tails.”

  He said, as if offering a fact rather than a triumph.

  Konan said nothing.

  “Pain and Obito are moving on the Four and Five-Tails next. I doubt they’ll fail.”

  Rei paused, glancing at her.

  “Especially since Pain is going himself.”

  Still, she didn’t respond. Her gaze hadn’t shifted from the skyline.

  Rei said nothing more.

  The conversation had run its course.

  Instead, he reached into the folds of his cloak and flicked his fingers in a sharp, invisible cut through the air. A second later, a mass dropped from the wall behind them with a wet thud.

  A Zetsu clone twitched on the tower’s edge, half-formed and half-dead, roots writhing like severed veins.

  Its blank eyes stared skyward, unblinking.

  Rei crouched beside it, violet eyes narrowing to a dull red as his Ketsuryūgan flared quietly.

  “Zetsu,” he said, his tone far more casual than his chakra implied, “I’ve told you so many times, stop trying to spy on me while I’m at headquarters.”

  The clone hissed, trying to reform, but Rei simply pressed a palm to its chest. A pulse of blood colored chakra rippled through the creature, freezing it mid-regeneration.

  “Your usefulness is wearing thin,” Rei muttered, more to himself than the twitching mass.

  “I’ve been patient. That patience is fading.”

  The Zetsu didn’t respond. It couldn’t.

  Rei stood, brushing rain from his sleeves.

  Konan finally glanced at him.

  “You shouldn’t make enemies inside the organization.”

  “I don’t,” he said, almost kindly. “Only warnings.”

  He walked away, his steps vanishing into the drizzle.

  Konan looked down once more at her broken city. The rain continued to fall.

  “It took four whole months, but I’ve finally stabilized this damn thing!”

  Ryuu exclaimed in exhilaration, the light of his sealing array casting flickering shadows across his face.

  He stood at the edge of the containment field, sweat-drenched hair matted to his forehead, his hands glowing with the residue of dozens of overlapping fuinjutsu formulas.

  His breath came shallow and sharp, not from fear, but from the sheer scale of chakra consumption and control he had to endure.

  Inside the barrier, the Zero-Tails… no, this thing, was no longer the same parasitic wraith he had first captured in Uzushio’s ruins.

  It had become something else entirely.

  The creature stirred, unfurling from its coiled rest like a waking god. Its body stretched the length of the chamber, longer now, almost serpentine in build but too angular, too segmented to be mistaken for a natural being. Its slick, black-violet hide shimmered with layered scales like wet obsidian, each one pulsing faintly with residual Ryūmyaku chakra.

  Down its back ran a jagged ridge of bone, crowned with warped spinal blades that rose like twisted fins. From its sides, six limbs had fully grown, two powerful forelimbs ended in bony talons that clutched the stone floor with unnatural dexterity. The middle set were smaller, insectoid, twitching constantly. The rear limbs, muscular and digitigrade, planted it with a predatory stance, its claws leaving gouges in the stone just from breathing.

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  Its tail no longer split into tendrils, but into a barbed fan of segmented spines, resembling the open petals of a corpse flower, each one alive, twitching.

  And its head.

  Where once the creature wore a single mask, now it bore a jagged crown of seven.

  Seven grotesque masks, fanned out like a halo around the central skull. Each was a distortion of human emotion, ecstasy, rage, sorrow, envy, despair, hunger, and apathy, all carved from bleached bone and laced with ink-black sealing script.

  Behind them, the true face had emerged, part draconic, part leech. Its mouth yawned unnaturally wide, filled with rings of inward-curving teeth. No eyes. Only the central mask, sorrow, glowed, with a single blood-red slit like a serpent’s gaze, watching Ryuu from behind layers of seals.

  The whole thing breathed in slow, rhythmic pulses. With each inhale, the surrounding air dimmed, chakra itself pulled toward it. With each exhale, it pushed out a shimmer of raw, corrupted chakra, painted black and violet like a dying star.

  Ryuu stepped forward, one hand resting on the seal etched into the floor, the other on his chest where the final fuinjutsu core had yet to be carved.

  This was it.

  The culmination of his plan.

  A new tailed beast, born not of the fragments of the ten-tails, but rather a fully artificial beast that utilized Chakra and energy of the same level.

  And he would be its Jinchūriki.

  Ryuu’s lips quirked upward, his efforts had finally paid off. From here, the only obsticle was the final but hardest path. This is where he could die if he wasn’t careful.

  But if he succeeded, everything would become much easier. The beast wasn’t sentient, it only acted on instinct. It was a mass of malevolent Chakra, essentially a large Chakra battery that had some unique skills paired along with it.

  “Now,” he whispered, “let’s make you mine.”

  The sealing array activated when Ryuu clapped his hands.

  Dozens of rings snapped outward across the chamber floor, inscriptions shifting like living script beneath Ryuu’s feet. The air distorted as chakra surged inwards, pulled through the layered symbols that shimmered with deep violet and red.

  The creature within the barrier reared back.

  It didn’t scream, but the sheer pressure it exuded screamed for it.

  The walls groaned. Stones cracked.

  And Ryuu, at the eye of the maelstrom, remained kneeling at the center, his hand pressed to the final seal etched into his bare chest.

  “Phase One… Activate.”

  The first formula ignited with a pulse of searing heat. The chakra barrier surrounding the zero-tails snapped inward like a reversed explosion, compressing its massive form into a stream of black-violet energy.

  It twisted, resisted, thrashed, but the seal held on.

  He and Hiruko had built the fuinjutsu like a lattice, flexible enough to hold something as chaotic as the Zero-Tails, yet responsive to Ryuu’s own chakra flow, adapting mid-bind to avoid collapse.

  Of course that didn’t mean that Ryuu had trusted Hiruko throughout the process. In fact he had done the opposite, having first acquired the skeleton of their combined fuinjutsu and remodeled it to fit his needs.

  However, these changes had a major drawback, but at least they were far safer than the alternative that had Hiruko’s trap’s inside.

  Pain lanced down his spine.

  He gritted his teeth, sweat instantly boiling on his skin. The energy funneled into him like a river through a pinhole, too much, too fast.

  The creature clawed against the current, even without a will, its instincts fought like a cornered beast.

  “Phase Two… containment.”

  He growled, slamming his second hand over the seal.

  New glyphs burst into light across his ribs, wrapping around his torso like skeletal fingers. Chains of chakra exploded from the seal, latching onto the stream of corrupted Ryūmyaku energy and dragging it inward, into him.

  He screamed.

  His back arched. His heart stuttered. Muscles seized as the first full wave of chakra entered his system.

  The seals flared brighter, racing to stabilize the bond.

  The Zero-Tails was inside.

  It flooded his network with heat, drowning his senses in a void that chewed through thought and form like acid. His veins lit up. His tenketsu screamed. The seal flexed, stretched… and held.

  Just barely.

  “Come on!”

  He rasped, forcing chakra through the core script at his center. A spiral seal bloomed across his abdomen, spiraling outward in jagged fractal patterns, each layer corresponding to a different chakra affinity, earth to anchor, wind to cut, water to channel, fire to contain, lightning to stimulate. At the center, his own chakra, pulsing in perfect synchronization with the beast’s.

  The creature’s final mask shuddered as it vanished into his chest.

  Ryuu collapsed, panting, trembling, twitching from the overload. For a moment, the world fell silent.

  Then… the chakra he had just stabilized roared.

  It didn’t explode, rather, it emerged, slowly, steadily, enveloping him in a thin veil of dark luminescence.

  His skin shimmered with a translucent black-violet glow, like oil lit by distant stars. Patterns formed along his arms, swirling, shifting lines that pulsed with power, similar to Naruto’s Nine-Tails Chakra cloak, but far more angular.

  He rose to his knees and slowly opened his eyes.

  They weren’t just red anymore.

  A vertical slit, thin as a blade and black as a void, now bisected each pupil, cutting through the crimson like ink spilled over blood.

  The air around him shimmered, then hardened.

  It didn’t take the shape of some protective aura or sacred beast, it formed armor. Black-violet plates slid over his shoulders and limbs, jointed like the carapace of a beast. Jagged greaves locked into place along his shins. Chains, faint and translucent, circled his limbs. His white hair floated behind him, slow and untethered, animated by the violent chakra saturating the air.

  He rose without effort. The pain was gone. All of it.

  What remained was a weightless pressure beneath the skin, a sea of power so vast it pressed against the edges of his body like something trying to burst free. He felt… free.

  The clarity rushing through his mind, like he could comprehend everything around him. The hum of something old and immense breathing beside him, no longer resisting.

  He flexed his fingers. Felt the blood moving.

  A blade grew from his palm, using his Shikotsumyaku as the base. It was darker than obsidian, barely translucent, rippling with energy. Its edge caught the light and broke it into something ugly. It felt heavier than it should.

  He turned the blade in his hand, watching how it held itself, how it pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat.

  Then he smiled.

  This was it.

  His Chakra reserves were now deeper than he would have ever thought. Deeper than any Kage. A flood with no end.

  Not only that, but the Zero-tails was a completely docile, acting as nothing more than a batter. It was odd yet satisfying somehow. He had gotten what he wished.

  It was a power-up that required so much of his time, one that could be considered a shortcut. However, he didn’t care. Even with this he still wasn’t sure he could deal with Pain.

  The blade receded. The cloak peeled away, dissolving into his skin like mist. The slits in his eyes faded.

  The ground beneath him was cracked. The walls of the chamber bowed slightly. The gravitational chaos of the sealing had done its work.

  So had he.

  He walked out.

  Lyra was waiting where he’d left her, just outside the lower levels, flanked by two guards who looked like they didn’t quite know whether to draw their weapons or run. She didn’t say anything at first.

  Just stared.

  She could feel it. The difference. The person in front of her was a totally different person than before.

  "It’s done," he said, voice steady. "The source is sealed. It won’t trouble anyone again."

  He hadn’t lied.

  The Ryūmyaku no longer flowed beneath Rōran. There was no more Chakra running underneath, since it was all absorbed by the Zero-tails.

  Ayame looked past him. Her expression cracked, she was obviously lost in what to do now. Her lineage had disappeared in such a short span.

  "I’ll speak to the Hokage. Petition for relocation to the Land of Fire. Your people will be safe there. Away from the desert."