The Great Hall of the Five Kage did not shatter. It shifted.
"I tried to offer you the architecture," Arahata's voice was no longer a human sound; it was the overlapping resonance of a thousand echoes. "If you will not live within the blueprint, then you shall be buried by the raw stone."
He slammed his foot onto the cold floor. The impact didn't sound like wood on stone—it sounded like a crystal chandelier shattering in a vacuum.
"Ryōiki: Tenka Kakumei." (Domain: Heaven-and-Earth Revolution)
The world didn't change its color, but its logic failed. The walls began to "vibrate" in time—flickering between the pristine stone of the present, the ruin it would become in a hundred years, and the quarry rock it had been a century prior.
The Kage were paralyzed. Not by jutsu, but by Option Overload.
Onoki, the Tsuchikage, raised his hands to cast his Dust Release, but he saw forty versions of his own hands. In one, he succeeded. In ten, he missed. In one, his heart failed before the jutsu launched. Because he could see every failure, his brain—honed by decades of decisive combat—could not choose which reality to inhabit. He was frozen in a nightmare of his own potential.
"This is my world," Arahata said. He stood in the center of the flickering hall, his eyes now blinding suns of concentric gold. The black stain was a crown of jagged ink across his forehead. "Inside this space, I am the only one with the will to choose. Your lives are just a deck of cards. I am the dealer."
He looked at the Raikage, who was struggling to even raise his lightning-shrouded arm.
"Raikage-sama, in one version of this second, you decapitate me. In another, your heart explodes from the pressure of your own chakra. Which one would you like?" Arahata waved a hand, and Ay's lightning flickered and died. The probability of his chakra coils failing was suddenly manifest.
Then Arahata turned to the blonde boy.
Naruto Uzumaki was the only one still moving with any fluid grace. His face was twisted in concentration, sweat beads flying off his forehead—but they didn't branch. When Naruto sweat, the water fell. When he stepped, the floor stayed solid.
"Why won't you splinter?" Arahata roared, the stain on his chest throbbing with such force that blood began to seep from his pores. "I can see the paths for you, Uzumaki! I can see a version of you where you never brought Sasuke home! I can see the version where the Kyūbi took your mind! I can manifest them right here! I can make you a failure!"
"You're seeing the wrong things, then," Naruto gasped. He was being pushed down by the invisible pressure of the Domain, but his blue eyes stayed locked on Arahata. "You keep looking at all the things I could have been. But I'm only the guy who's standing here right now."
Arahata gripped his own head. The data was corruption. The Jūgan was screaming.
Fifty-nine hours, twelve minutes.
"I will force you to see!" Arahata's Domain expanded. The room was suddenly filled with ghosts—translucent, screaming versions of the people present.
The Mizukage saw herself as an old, lonely woman. The Kazekage saw himself as the monster he used to be. The Raikage saw the death of his brother. These were the "Shadow Futures"—the discarded probabilities that Arahata was dragging into the "Now."
"It's too much," Ren whimpered, collapsing to his knees. His Byakugan couldn't handle the multi-versal feed. "Arahata-sama, please... the strain..."
Mei reached out in the darkness of her blindness, her hand finding Arahata's hem. "Arahata. You're destroying yourself to prove that you're right. Is that certainty? Or is that just fear?"
"I am NOT afraid!" Arahata screamed.
The Domain buckled. A massive crack appeared in the air, a rift of pure white light.
Naruto took a step forward. He wasn't using a Rasengan. He wasn't in Sage Mode. He was just walking, leaning against the weight of a thousand possible failures as if they were nothing more than a stiff wind.
"I used to think my life was a mistake," Naruto said, his voice quiet but filling the room, drowning out the ghosts. "I used to think that every bad thing happened because that's just how the world was built. But my teacher told me... the ending isn't written yet. We write it with the things we do next."
"There is no 'Next'!" Arahata's voice broke. "The math is complete! The stain—it's the ink of the final page! I am the only one who sees the wall at the end of the tunnel!"
"Then stop looking at the wall," Naruto said. He reached the edge of Arahata's personal space—the eye of the probability storm. "Look at me."
Arahata's Jūgan pulsed one final, agonizing time. He tried to manifest a future where Naruto tripped. He tried to manifest a future where the ceiling fell. He tried to manifest a version of reality where they had never met.
But he couldn't.
Because in every single probability path Naruto Uzumaki possessed—across every branching timeline the Jūgan could reach—there was one constant variable. One "Certainty" that Arahata's eyes had ignored because it was too simple to be a calculation.
The decision to stay.
In every version of the future, Naruto did not turn away.
Arahata's certainty snapped. He felt the Domain—his perfect architecture of controlled peace—begin to dissolve. The "Doubt" he had tried to excise his whole life flooded in like cold water. If even one person could defy the math of probability by sheer, stubborn force of character, then the Jūgan was not a god's tool. It was a curse.
"How..." Arahata's rings began to fade, his eyes bleeding. "How can you choose just one? How can you stand the loss of everything else you could have been?"
"Because if I tried to be everyone," Naruto said, placing a hand on Arahata's shoulder, "I wouldn't be able to hold my friends' hands. You have too many versions of yourself, Arahata. That's why you're so lonely."
The Domain collapsed.
The Great Hall returned to the present. The Kage fell to their knees, gasping for air, their "Shadow Ghosts" vanishing back into the void of the un-happened. The fires roared again. The snow hissed against the roof.
Arahata slumped forward. The black stain had consumed his entire neck, wrapping around his throat like a choker.
Fifty-eight hours, forty minutes.
He looked up at Naruto, his golden eyes dimming into a human blue. For the first time in seventeen years, the world was just... one world. It was quiet. It was small. And it was terrifyingly, beautifully simple.
"You've... collapsed the wave," Arahata whispered, a single tear of normal, clear salt-water tracking down his face. "You've killed me before I've even died."
"Nah," Naruto said, giving him a small, sad grin. "I think you're just finally getting some sleep."
Arahata didn't respond. He fainted, falling into a darkness that even his Jūgan could not map.