The golden sun formed from countless wills slowly revolved in Naruto's palm, radiating a warm yet chaotic light that Kai simply could not comprehend.
"This is…"
Kai's right eye—the Mangekyō Sharingan that had once belonged to Obito—analyzed the energy at an astonishing rate.
The result was nothing but gibberish.
Hope.
Despair.
Love.
Hatred.
Courage.
Fear.
Trust.
Doubt.
Countless completely contradictory emotional data streams tangled together like a boiling stew.
By all logic, they should have repelled one another, canceled each other out, and ultimately returned to nothingness.
Yet somehow, they coexisted.
Not only that—they formed a stable structure overflowing with infinite possibilities.
"An illogical aggregate."
Kai arrived at his conclusion.
The streams of numerical data flickering across his body intensified violently, like a supercomputer infected by an unprocessable virus.
He tried isolating individual emotional variables for analysis.
But every time he locked onto one emotion, its exact opposite surged forward, trapping his calculations in an endless loop.
"I understand now."
After a brief moment of lag, Kai's voice regained its icy calm.
"This chaos itself is what you call a 'bond.'"
"It is not energy."
"It is a decentralized network protocol."
"Through a core node designated 'Uzumaki Naruto,' all of your independent programs—each riddled with bugs—have been connected into a single, vastly larger, vastly more chaotic, and completely unremovable virus cluster."
He raised his hand.
His palm pointed at Naruto.
And beyond Naruto—
At the entire Shinobi Alliance.
"Since the bug cannot be repaired..."
"Then I will format the hard drive."
The moment those words fell—
The world began to lose frames.
The distant desert.
The sky.
The clouds.
Everything suddenly resembled low-resolution textures.
Pixel-like squares appeared across reality itself.
Then they began peeling away one after another.
Behind them was only darkness.
Infinite darkness.
This was not genjutsu.
It was an operation performed through higher-level authority.
Kai was deleting the very module known as "the world."
The earth screamed.
Space collapsed.
The shinobi watched in horror as their bodies became translucent.
Pixelated fragments appeared along the edges of their forms.
"He's trying to delete the entire world!"
Shikamaru's face turned pale.
His brain raced desperately.
Yet he could find no solution.
Before power like this, every strategy seemed meaningless.
"Naruto!"
Even Sasuke's Susanoo had begun shedding data fragments.
Naruto did not look back.
He simply raised the sun in his palm high above his head.
"Everyone!"
"Put your most precious things into it!"
"Your most precious things?"
Chōji blinked.
Instinctively, he thought of barbecue.
Then—
An image traveled through the network of bonds and entered Naruto's mind.
It was a sunset.
A younger Chōji carefully splitting his final potato chip between Shikamaru and Ino, both of whom were just as hungry as he was.
Then more memories came.
Kiba and Akamaru arguing furiously over a piece of meat before finally sharing it.
Shino silently returning a lost kikaichū to its companions.
Lee doing handstand push-ups at sunset while crying.
Guy beside him doing them even faster, flashing a dazzling smile.
Tsunade losing every last coin she owned.
Then using her final bit of money to buy dango for Shizune.
Gaara sitting alone at night, touching his gourd and feeling the lingering will of his mother within the sand.
Countless memories.
Tiny memories.
Insignificant memories.
Memories full of flaws.
Memories full of imperfections.
All of them flowed through invisible connections into Naruto's palm.
The golden sun became more than mere light.
Within it appeared the reflection of an entire world.
A noisy world.
A messy world.
A ridiculous world.
Yet a world overflowing with life.
"Eat this, you bastard!"
Naruto roared.
And thrust the sphere forward with all his strength.
"Super Ultra Great Bond Rasengan!"
A golden galaxy collided with the cold deletion command that was consuming reality.
No earth-shattering explosion occurred.
At the point of contact—
Time itself seemed to stop.
The pixelated world began restoring itself beneath the golden light.
Collapsed sand reformed.
Cracked skies repaired themselves.
Kai's formatting command had encountered something even deeper.
A system protection process.
And it had been forcibly halted.
What confused Kai even more was that countless streams of chaotic data were now invading his core systems through the Rasengan.
[System Notification: Invalid data package received — Chōji's Potato Chips.]
[System Notification: Conflict detected — Kiba's Dog Food.]
[System Warning: High-intensity emotional virus "Guy's Youth" detected. Attempting quarantine...]
[Quarantine Failed!]
[Alert! Alert! Core logic database contaminated by unknown concept: "Ichiraku Ramen."]
Kai's body trembled violently.
For the first time—
He took a step backward.
An expression appeared on his face.
Not anger.
Not fear.
Something closer to disgust.
Like a neat freak being force-fed mountains of greasy junk food.
"Meaningless..."
"Redundant..."
"Filled with fat..."
"And carbohydrates..."
"Garbage data..."
The battle reached a stalemate.
Naruto alone—
Or rather, the power of everyone's ordinary lives—
Had actually stopped a god from erasing the world.
"Damn it..."
"This guy is even tougher than I thought..."
Naruto gritted his teeth.
His Sage Chakra and Nine-Tails Chakra burned wildly as he maintained the gigantic Bond Rasengan.
Then—
During the deadlock—
Kai suddenly spoke.
"I see it now."
It seemed he had finally recovered from the flood of junk data.
"So that is how it works."
"Your network protocol is not without weaknesses."
His gaze moved beyond Naruto.
And locked precisely onto Sasuke.
"Every network has a core node."
"And a primary backbone."
"Cut the most important connection..."
"And the entire system collapses."
Kai's right eye—the eye inherited from Obito—began spinning frantically.
"Kamui."
A space-time vortex appeared before him.
But instead of pulling anything in—
It projected something outward.
Like a holographic projector.
A figure slowly emerged from the void.
The figure wore an Akatsuki cloak.
Long black hair.
A handsome face marked by exhaustion.
Deep tear troughs beneath calm eyes.
It was—
Uchiha Itachi.
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