"What?"
Hearing these ants threaten torture based on fresh "intelligence," Uchiha Madara narrowed his eyes.
How much time had passed?
A mere hour?
Did that girl outside possess some rare intelligence-gathering kekkei genkai?
She could not harvest this volume of classified data in such a brief window.
A setup was in play.
Did that naturally despicable Tobirama deploy Shadow Clones and the Transformation Technique to feed them tailored dossiers, baiting these grunts into taking revenge?
The longer Madara pondered the theory, the more it solidified!
But the window to explain himself had closed.
The squad reached their deranged conclusion through their own flawed logic; words would not sway them.
Besides, the intelligence itself rang true—an unseen hand simply manipulated the context.
"Forget it. I know you refuse to believe me. If you seek revenge, then come," Madara said, his tone dripping with forced nobility.
"A sensory formula binds this vessel. Pain registers exactly as it would for a living man. Extract your vengeance! However, understand this: I accept your wrath not because I am the man who wronged you, but because I am the man who saved Uchiha Obito. I indirectly birthed your suffering. I bear a duty to take responsibility."
Madara delivered the speech with such righteous dignity that an uninformed bystander might mistake him for a tragic hero.
His words made the kinder members of the squad hesitate.
But Kyūsuke shattered their doubts.
"Do not let him deceive you! This righteous act is just another layer of his disguise! Do not forget: whether he is Uchiha Madara or Uchiha Obito, he is either the man with the old-woman fetish or the man with the shit fetish!"
"Right!"
"This bastard loves to put on a show!"
"Up the pressure!"
The squad felt mocked, reliving the helplessness of the night the masked man slaughtered them.
Their fury ignited.
Skimming the intelligence scroll, they found an appropriate method for vengeance.
"You Uchiha pride yourselves on Fire Release and shuriken jutsu, right? I read about a specialized method for controlling projectiles called the Manipulated Shuriken Technique." Kyūsuke unrolled a spool of steel wire.
This tool formed the backbone of the technique.
Shinobi tied highly elastic, durable, nearly transparent wire to the rings of kunai and shuriken to alter their trajectories mid-flight or bind an opponent.
Seeing the steel wire, Madara let out an internal sigh of relief.
He even found the breath to educate them. "The Uchiha clan's advanced throwing arts require no such crutches."
Madara did not fear blades, spears, or halberds.
He only feared they would misinterpret the name Manipulated Shuriken Technique in the most literal, grotesque way possible.
The squad ignored his lecture.
Following the scroll's instructions, they prepared to exact righteous judgment.
Rip.
Kyūsuke tore away a chunk of Madara's Edo Tensei flesh and tossed it aside.
Daibutsu clamped a hand down over the wound to stall the regeneration.
"?"
"What are you doing?!" Madara's pupils shrank.
"We know standard pain means nothing to a hardened shinobi," Kyūsuke said, tapping the closed scroll.
"So we cross-referenced the manual from Konoha's Torture and Interrogation Force, specifically the methods authored by Morino Ibiki. We hope this yields results."
'Aahhh. Konoha's Torture and Interrogation Force.'
Madara relaxed.
At the end of the day, it was just pain.
Obito battered his lower half a few minutes ago, and Madara endured it.
As long as these grunts maintained their integrity and relied on pain rather than attempting to induce pleasure, he could weather the storm.
But Konoha's Interrogation Force? When he and Hashirama founded the village, that department did not exist.
Did Tobirama create that twisted division too?
"?!"
Madara's guard dropped for a fraction of a second before a spike of ungodly agony shot straight into his skull.
He looked down.
His Edo Tensei vessel had regenerated. His armor reformed. But now, steel wires threaded through his body!
He felt exactly where the wires pierced him.
'That naturally evil Village!'
After his departure, under Tobirama's wicked leadership, Konoha developed such a depraved interrogation method!
A warrior should face death, not humiliation!
The steel wire pierced straight through his anatomy—threading his dick and his balls.
Daibutsu and Kie stood on opposite sides of the stone slab, pulling the wire back and forth like a saw.
In the center, a grunt with a background in music began plucking the taut wire like a twisted instrument!
The resulting tune sounded horrific.
Madara's convulsing body threw off the acoustics.
"Count your sins! You evil Uchiha Obito, harborer of old-woman fetishes and furry obsessions!" Kyūsuke delivered the righteous verdict.
Daibutsu and Kie accelerated their rhythm, sawing the wire like a bellows until a faint sizzling sound echoed in the cell.
Hiding beneath the stone slab, Uchiha Obito broke out in a cold sweat.
Even though he lacked the dick, hearing his own name chanted during Madara's mutilation triggered agonizing phantom pain.
...
Minutes dragged by.
For Uchiha Madara, those minutes stretched longer than a lifetime.
The pain pushed him to the brink of the horizon—wait.
There was the singing again.
"Stop!" Madara gasped, pointing a trembling finger.
From the moment he fled this room to the moment he was captured and tortured, his body passively gathered a microscopic drop of chakra.
It was not enough to cast a jutsu or break his bonds.
But it was enough to ping the curse mark he planted on Obito's heart.
He wished he never pinged it.
The second the signal bounced back, Madara realized the coordinates rested mere inches away.
Obito never shattered the chakra suppression seal to escape!
Beneath the slab, Obito noticed the horrific sawing and twitching sounds above him halt.
Suspicion crept in.
Without making a sound, he tilted his head and peered upward.
He locked eyes with the original Akatsuki squad.
They stared straight down at him.
In that frozen second, gazes met.
If this were the Pokémon world, battle music would have triggered.
Looking at those familiar faces, Obito forced down his rising panic and played dumb.
"Who are you?"
Right now, Madara shouldered the blame.
Obito could not expose his true identity, or he was dead meat.
He flicked his gaze toward Madara's mutilated form pinned to the stone bed above.