Muzan charged forward, both whips extending in crossing patterns that carved through the air. The weapons stretched to their full ten-meter length.
Sasuke raised his staff horizontally across his body.
The whips crashed into the wood with enough force to send tremors up Sasuke's arms. The staff splintered along its length, then shattered completely. Fragments scattered across the ash-covered ground.
Sasuke stumbled backward, empty-handed and exposed.
"Menma! I need the staff!"
The monkey nodded once. Smoke erupted around it, and when the cloud cleared, the creature had vanished. In Sasuke's hands materialized an elongated black staff with a metallic sheen that caught the firelight.
Sasuke spun the weapon once, testing its weight. "Now we're even."
He charged straight at Muzan.
Muzan met him with both whips lashing out in rapid succession. The weapons wrapped around the black staff as Sasuke blocked. Muzan pulled hard, expecting the metal to bend or the wielder to lose his grip.
The staff held firm without even a scratch appearing on its surface.
Sasuke used the tension in the wrapped whips as a fulcrum and vaulted toward Muzan, bringing the staff down in an overhead strike aimed at his skull.
Muzan released one whip and threw himself sideways. The staff smashed into the ground where he had been standing and created a crater three feet deep.
From twenty meters away, Kaze's hands moved through seals. "Wind Release: Drilling Air Bullet!"
A compressed sphere of spinning air shot forward, whistling as it cut through the atmosphere.
Muzan raised both whips to deflect the attack, but Sasuke was already moving. He thrust the black staff forward and it extended rapidly, shooting out five meters, then ten, then fifteen in the span of a second.
The staff punched into Muzan's chest before he could react. The impact drove him backward, his feet tearing twin furrows through the earth as he slid.
Sasuke retracted the staff with a sharp pull and spun it into a defensive position as Muzan recovered.
"Combination attack!" Sasuke called out.
Kaze launched another technique. "Wind Release: Drilling Air Bullet!"
Muzan raised his whips to deflect the spinning sphere of compressed air.
Sasuke extended the black staff from Muzan's blind spot. The weapon caught him in the ribs and bone cracked audibly under the impact.
Muzan healed the fracture and spun around, both whips coming in horizontal arcs.
Sasuke retracted the staff just in time. The whips passed inches from his face, close enough that he felt the wind displacement.
Kaze's wind technique adjusted its trajectory mid-flight while Muzan was focused on Sasuke. Instead of hitting the whips, the drilling sphere punched directly into Muzan's chest.
The compressed air burrowed through muscle and bone with a grinding, tearing sensation. Muzan felt the spinning pressure carving deeper into his torso, getting closer to one of the pulsing organs in his chest.
The technique found its target.
Searing pain exploded through Muzan's chest as one of his hearts was punctured and torn apart by the spinning pressure. Blood poured from the wound in thick streams.
His legs gave out and he collapsed to both knees. The world tilted sideways and his vision grayed at the edges.
Sasuke had already closed the distance. The black staff extended toward Muzan's head, ready to deliver a finishing blow.
"It worked," Kaze said, his eyes wide with realization. "We need to destroy the rest."
But Muzan had six hearts remaining. The surviving organs compensated immediately, pumping harder to circulate blood through his system. Within seconds the dizziness passed and his vision cleared. He pushed himself to his feet, though the movement was slower than before.
The chest wound sealed shut as new tissue grew to replace what had been destroyed. The punctured heart remained gone.
Muzan changed his approach. He let both whips extend to their full ten-meter length and swung them in wide, chaotic arcs that carved through everything in range.
The weapons tore through tree trunks and sent the massive timbers crashing down. Boulders split in half when the whips connected. The ground itself ripped open in long furrows wherever the blades struck.
Sasuke extended the black staff to block one whip. The weapon held firm without even a dent appearing on its surface, but the force of the impact pushed Sasuke backward. His feet skidded through the dirt as he struggled to maintain his position.
Muzan's other whip carved through the space where Sasuke had been standing and split a boulder behind him.
Kaze raised his war fan overhead. "Wind Release: Air Wall!"
A barrier of compressed wind formed in front of him. Muzan's whip struck the shield and the impact shattered the wind into dispersing currents.
Muzan kept swinging without pause, creating enough chaos to make coordinated attacks impossible. Each swing of his whips forced his opponents to dodge or block rather than counter.
But his movements were slowing. Each swing required more effort than the last. The loss of one heart was beginning to show.
Sasuke spotted the opening. While Muzan focused on attacking Kaze, the clan head circled around behind him. The black staff began to glow with chakra as the monkey inside it lent its power to the weapon.
Sasuke thrust forward like a spearman.
The staff punched through Muzan's back. He felt it enter his body, pushing through muscle and scraping against bone as it drove deeper, angling upward toward his chest cavity.
Then the weapon pierced one of his hearts.
Pain exploded through Muzan's torso with an intensity that whited out his vision. He coughed and blood sprayed from his mouth.
Five hearts left. The realization cut through the pain. He was running out of redundancy.
Sasuke pulled the staff out and blood poured from the hole in Muzan's back in thick streams.
"Kaze! Now!"
Kaze was already in motion, his hands a blur of seals. "Wind Release: Vacuum Serial Waves!"
Multiple currents of compressed air converged on Muzan's chest, slicing deep into the exposed wound Sasuke had created. The wind blades carved through tissue and shredded his lungs. They tore furrows in bone and destroyed muscle. By chance they missed his remaining hearts, but the damage was catastrophic.
Blood poured from Muzan's mouth and chest and back simultaneously.
His legs buckled and he fell to one knee. His vision swam and his hearing faded to a dull ringing.
Regeneration began, but the process was agonizingly slow. Ten seconds passed before the chest wounds even began to close. Fifteen seconds before the damaged lungs started to reform. The destroyed hearts did not regenerate.
Muzan wasn't finished.
With desperate speed born of survival instinct, he lunged forward. His right whip extended faster than either opponent expected and wrapped around Kaze's leg.
He pulled hard.
Kaze stumbled forward and his war fan fell from his grip, clattering against the ground.
"Kaze!" Sasuke started to move, but he was too far away to intercept.
Muzan's left whip came up with the blade-tip aimed directly at Kaze's chest.
Kaze's eyes met Muzan's. There was no fear in the clan head's expression. Only determination and acceptance.
His hands moved in a blur despite his compromised position, forming the final seals of a technique.
"Wind Release: Vacuum—"
Muzan's whip punched through Kaze's chest before he could finish speaking. The blade pierced his heart, tore through his lung, and severed his spine completely.
But Kaze didn't stop.
Blood poured from his mouth in a continuous stream, but his lips kept moving. The technique completed even as his life ended.
"—Great Sphere!"
Kaze's final breath became a massive sphere of compressed air that launched point-blank into Muzan's torso. There was no distance to dodge, no time to defend.
The vacuum sphere punched into his chest with devastating force. The spinning pressure burrowed deep, carving through everything in its path without discrimination.
Muzan felt the technique tear through muscle, shatter ribs, and then find its target.
Another heart. The vacuum sphere ripped through the organ and shredded it completely, leaving nothing but destroyed tissue.
Agony exploded through Muzan's chest and his vision went completely white. His hearing cut out. His sense of balance disappeared.
Another heart destroyed. Four remaining. The number echoed in his mind like a death knell.
He gasped and coughed up blood in thick clots. His grip on Kaze loosened involuntarily.
Kaze's body went limp in the whip's coils. His eyes dimmed and the light faded from them completely. Even in death, his expression remained peaceful, almost satisfied.
He had struck a critical blow with his dying breath.
Muzan retracted his whip and Kaze's corpse collapsed to the ground.
"KAZE!"
Sasuke's scream tore through the clearing with raw anguish that made the name unrecognizable as speech.
Muzan turned toward the sound, still on his knees. Blood poured from his chest in streams that pooled beneath him. His regeneration was struggling badly now, much slower than before. Three hearts destroyed meant his healing was barely functional. Only four hearts remained to sustain his entire body.
He was getting weaker with each passing second.
Sasuke stared at Kaze's body sprawled on the ground. His hands trembled around the black staff and the weapon shook visibly in his grip.
Then his eyes locked onto Muzan.
All the grief, all the rage, all the accumulated loss crystallized into pure fury that radiated from Sasuke in waves.
"You bastard," Sasuke whispered.
His chakra exploded outward in a visible aura. The pressure was so intense that the ground beneath his feet cracked and splintered in a web pattern. Trees nearby bent away from him as if pushed by a physical force.
The black staff in his hands began to glow brighter as the monkey inside responded to Sasuke's fury, channeling more power through the weapon until it shone like polished metal under direct sunlight.
"I'll destroy every last piece of you," Sasuke said, his voice deadly calm now in contrast to his earlier scream. "Until there's nothing left to regenerate."
He began forming hand seals, one after another in rapid succession.
Muzan tried to move, tried to stand, but his body was too slow. The loss of three hearts had compromised him more severely than he had realized.
"Fire Release: Dragon Flame Song Jutsu!"
Four massive dragons formed entirely of flame erupted from Sasuke's mouth. Each one was forty feet long and fifteen feet wide, with scales of blue-white fire that turned the surrounding air into a shimmering haze. The heat was so intense that stones near Sasuke didn't just crack from thermal stress but vaporized completely. The ground turned to molten glass before the dragons even began moving.
The flame dragons roared toward Muzan, converging from four different angles. North, south, east, west. There was no gap to escape through, no angle that wasn't covered.
The dragons hit him from all sides simultaneously.
The heat was beyond anything Muzan had experienced in his entire existence. His flesh didn't just burn but vaporized instantly, turning to ash before it could even char. His bones turned to powder under the extreme temperature. The whips that had served as his weapons incinerated completely, leaving no trace. The blood in his veins boiled and evaporated.
He tried to scream but his throat was already gone, destroyed before sound could form.
The ground beneath him turned to molten glass that bubbled and popped. The flames merged into a single pillar of white-hot fire that reached toward the sky like a beacon.
Sasuke held the technique active. Five seconds passed. Ten. Fifteen. He poured everything he had remaining into the flames—all his chakra, all his rage, all his grief over Kaze's death.
When the flames finally cleared and dispersed, almost nothing remained of Muzan.
Just a charred skeleton partially sunken into molten glass. Scraps of smoking tissue clung to the bones in places. One arm was completely gone, vaporized entirely. His legs were blackened stumps that ended at the knees.
The destruction appeared absolute.
Sasuke stood thirty feet away, breathing in ragged gasps. He leaned heavily on the black staff and without its support he would have collapsed immediately. His chakra reserves were completely depleted.
"Is it done?" The monkey's voice emerged from the staff, weak and exhausted.
Sasuke stared at the charred remains that had been his enemy. "It has to be. Nothing could survive that level of destruction."
But then there was movement.
One of the charred ribs shifted slightly.
Sasuke's eyes widened in disbelief.
Deep within the smoking remains, protected by what little intact ribcage still existed, four hearts continued to beat. The rhythm was weak and irregular, but present.
Muzan also had three brains remaining, scattered through his skull. The redundancy kept him functional even when barely alive.
Regeneration began. The process was agonizingly slow and visibly painful. With only four hearts left, regeneration was no longer automatic or reflexive. Each cell had to be forced to divide and grow, pulled from reserves that were nearly empty.
Flesh grew outward from the bones one cell at a time. Organs reformed in pieces that gradually connected. Blood vessels reconnected with trembling threads of tissue. The entire process was excruciating and completely visible to anyone watching.
Sasuke watched in absolute horror as Muzan rebuilt himself from near-complete destruction.
The regeneration took a full minute. But at the end of it, Muzan rose to his feet.
His body was whole again on the surface, but he felt hollow inside. Exhausted beyond measure. Running on four hearts and three brains, operating at the absolute edge of his survival limits.
Sasuke's eyes went hollow as he stared. The black staff slipped slightly in his weakened grip. "Why won't you die?"
"Because I can't," Muzan said quietly, his voice raw and damaged.
The words hung in the air between them like a curse.
Sasuke stood alone now. The black staff was scorched but intact, holding him upright when his own legs threatened to give out. His armor had burned away completely. Blood ran from multiple wounds across his body. His breathing was labored and ragged, each breath clearly painful. His chakra was depleted entirely.
But his eyes were still fierce. Still defiant in the face of impossible odds.
He looked toward Kaze's body sprawled on the ground. Then back at Muzan.
"Menma," he said quietly to the staff. "One last time."
The staff pulsed with chakra, weak but present. The monkey's voice emerged from the weapon, exhausted but determined. "Understood, Sasuke. Together until the end."
Sasuke straightened his posture with visible effort. He pushed away from using the staff as a crutch and held it properly in both hands. One final combat stance.
"For Kaze," he said quietly.
Then he charged directly at Muzan.
No techniques left to use. No tricks remaining. Just a warrior and his weapon, charging an enemy that refused to die.
There was something beautiful in the futility of it.
Muzan was faster and stronger even in his depleted state. But he was exhausted beyond measure, and Sasuke was desperate beyond reason.
Sasuke came in low, extending the black staff mid-thrust and aiming for Muzan's chest.
Muzan tried to dodge sideways but his body responded too slowly.
The staff punched into his sternum and he felt it pierce deep, driving through muscle and bone with the monkey's power behind it.
By pure chance, the weapon found one of his remaining hearts. The black staff crushed the organ completely.
Three hearts left. The realization sent a wave of genuine fear through Muzan for the first time.
Pain shot through his chest and he staggered backward, gasping for air that wouldn't come properly.
But he caught the embedded staff with his left hand before Sasuke could pull it free. His grip closed around the weapon with desperate strength, holding it in place.
Sasuke pulled hard on the staff but it didn't budge even slightly from Muzan's grip.
"Let go," Sasuke growled through clenched teeth, pulling harder.
Muzan didn't release his hold.
His right arm began to change as he forced his remaining energy into the transformation. The flesh rippled and elongated in a way that looked painful. Red, spike-covered tissue erupted from his forearm, though the whip that formed was shorter this time—only five meters instead of ten—but the blade at the tip was still sharp enough to kill.
Sasuke saw the whip forming and his eyes widened in understanding. He released the embedded staff and drew a kunai from his pouch with his remaining strength. It was his last weapon.
"Come on then," he said, his voice hoarse and breaking. "Finish it."
The whip lashed out.
Sasuke tried to dodge to the side and raised the kunai to block.
The whip wrapped around his torso and the spines punched through what remained of his armor, through his flesh, through his ribs with wet tearing sounds.
Sasuke gasped and blood leaked from his mouth in a thin stream.
But he didn't drop the kunai.
With his last remaining strength, he lunged forward along the whip toward Muzan, ignoring the spines that tore deeper into his body with each movement. He closed the distance between them through sheer willpower. Five feet. Three feet. One foot.
His kunai came up in a final thrust aimed at Muzan's throat.
Muzan caught Sasuke's wrist with his left hand. The bones cracked audibly under the pressure of his grip.
Sasuke's kunai fell from his nerveless fingers and clattered on the ground.
They stood face to face with only inches between them. Muzan's whip wrapped around Sasuke's torso. Muzan's hand crushing Sasuke's wrist. Sasuke's blood pouring onto the ash-covered ground in steady streams.
"You fought well," Muzan said quietly.
Sasuke smiled bitterly and blood leaked from between his teeth. His eyes were fading rapidly but remained fierce to the end. "Not well enough."
He looked toward where Kaze had fallen. His expression softened with something like peace. "I'm sorry, my friend. I couldn't finish it."
"Fate is often cruel," Muzan said. "It favors no one."
Sasuke's eyes met Muzan's one final time. "No. It doesn't."
Muzan tightened his grip. The whip contracted and the spines drove deeper, pushing through Sasuke's lungs, sliding between his ribs, moving inexorably toward his heart.
Sasuke's eyes went wide. His mouth opened but no sound emerged, just blood that poured out in a rush.
One spine found his heart and pierced through it.
Sasuke's body convulsed once violently. Then went completely still.
His eyes dimmed as the light faded from them. The fierce defiance that had sustained him disappeared. Everything went out like a candle flame.
Muzan held him for a moment longer. Then he released the whip.
Sasuke's body fell heavily and collapsed beside Kaze's corpse. Their blood mixed together in the ash, forming a single spreading pool.
The black staff that was still embedded in Muzan's chest vanished in a puff of smoke as the summoning contract ended with its wielder's death.
Silence reclaimed the clearing completely.
Muzan stood alone among the scattered dead.
His whip retracted slowly, shrinking back into a normal arm. The spines withdrew into the flesh. The red tissue faded until it looked like ordinary skin, though covered in blood and ash. Within seconds his arm appeared human again.
Behind him, Amanai's voice was so weak that Muzan almost didn't hear it over the crackling of distant fires.
"Muzan..."
He turned and walked to where Amanai was propped against the broken tree trunk.
Amanai's eyes were open and his Sharingan spun weakly, the tomoe barely visible.
"What are you?" Amanai whispered.
Muzan knelt beside him on the blood-soaked ground. "I don't know what I am. Something beyond mortal comprehension. But I have fulfilled my promise to you, Uchiha Amanai. I have repaid your favor."
Amanai's eyes widened slightly in understanding. Then he smiled despite the blood that leaked from his mouth. "Thank you."
"You don't need to thank me," Muzan said quietly.
"No, I do." Amanai's hand moved weakly, reaching toward Muzan with trembling fingers. "You gave them a chance to escape. Miyako, Toshiro, Sayuri. I'm not certain if you're truly an Uchiha or something else entirely, but to us you will always be Uchiha Muzan."
His hand fell limply to his side. His breathing stopped. The light in his Sharingan faded completely until the red disappeared and only empty black eyes remained.
Muzan reached out and closed Amanai's eyes gently.
Then he stood and looked around the clearing one final time, taking in the full scope of the destruction.
Kenozo's body lay nearby with eyes staring blankly at the smoke-filled sky. The tanto still protruded from his back where Muzan had driven it through his spine.
Further away, Naroi's corpse slumped against the shattered oak tree with his throat torn out.
Takeo and Hana were charred husks, barely recognizable as human after the flames had consumed them.
Akari's headless body lay in a spreading pool of congealing blood.
And Amanai, propped against the tree as if he were simply resting.
All of the Uchiha dead.
Sasuke and Kaze lay together where they had fallen. They had fought as one and died as one, their final moments intertwined.
Bodies of Sarutobi and Shimura shinobi were scattered across the clearing in various states of destruction. Some were in pieces, some burned beyond recognition, some crushed into the earth.
The entire area was utterly devastated. Trees had fallen or were still burning with low flames. The ground was carved into furrows and craters from the battle. Scorched earth and patches of molten glass marked where the most intense techniques had struck. Blood was everywhere, soaked into the ash until the ground was black.
Soon the sun would rise and bring light to this scene of carnage, but Muzan would not be here to see it.
The Uchiha clan had taken him in when he had nowhere else to go. The time he had spent among them would always remain a part of him, a strange brief period of something almost like belonging.
But it was over now. Time to leave this place behind and disappear before anyone else arrived to investigate.
Muzan turned away from the bodies and walked into the burning forest without looking back.