Chapter 538: What Became of the Uchiha (Patreon)

Land of Frost — Southern Forests

Madara did not take the shortest route to Konoha.

Under ordinary circumstances, crossing the distance would have been trivial. A sequence of Body Flickers, followed by several long-range leaps through the forest canopy, would have placed him near the village before most shinobi could finish preparing for the journey. Izuna, however, had been alive for less than an hour, possessed no eyes, and was still learning how to trust muscles that remembered movement better than his conscious mind did.

So Madara slowed down. Though… he hated that Izuna noticed.

"You're holding back," Izuna remarked as their feet landed upon another thick branch, his hand remaining lightly around Madara's forearm while the frozen forest rushed quietly beneath them.

Madara steadied him before answering. "You were dead this morning."

"I was dead for considerably longer than this morning, apparently."

Madara's mouth tightened.

Izuna felt it through the arm he was holding and gave a faint smile. "You always did become quiet when you did not want to answer something."

"You have been alive less than an hour, and you have already resumed being irritating."

"You sound relieved about it."

Madara did not reply.

That silence gave Izuna his answer.

They moved again, although their pace remained measured enough that Izuna could build a mental sense of direction from the wind, the changing temperature, and the rhythm of Madara's movements. His body still remembered how to balance chakra beneath his feet, and after several attempts he no longer needed Madara to physically carry him, although his fingers never strayed far from his brother's sleeve whenever they stopped.

Several minutes passed before Izuna returned to the question Alaric had accidentally planted before leaving.

"The Uchiha District," he said, turning his blind gaze toward Madara's breathing. "He said his compound stands where it used to be."

Madara continued walking along the enormous branch beneath them.

"Yes."

"What happened to it?"

Madara looked through the trees.

There were questions he had once imagined answering if some impossible resurrection ever returned Izuna to him, yet his fantasies had usually begun with Hashirama, the founding of Konoha, and all the ways their world had changed.

None of them had begun with explaining that the clan Izuna died protecting had almost ceased to exist.

"You asked how long you were dead," Madara said eventually.

Izuna's expression became serious. "You avoided answering."

"Because a number would mean very little until you understand what happened."

"Then explain."

Madara stepped from the branch and descended toward the forest floor.

Izuna followed the tug on his sleeve, landing beside him with slightly less grace before adjusting his footing. Madara could have corrected him immediately, yet he waited until his brother found the balance himself.

Then they began walking.

"The war between the Uchiha and Senju did not continue forever."

Izuna stopped.

Madara took another step before realizing his brother was no longer beside him.

"You're joking," Izuna's eye sockets widened. "Nii-san… that cannot be."

"I am not."

Izuna's brow furrowed. "The Senju accepted peace?"

"Hashirama never stopped wanting it."

"Tobirama did."

Madara's expression shifted faintly at the name.

Izuna noticed the silence. "…Tobirama lived."

"Yes."

"And I did not."

Madara turned toward Izuna. The latter's face remained calm, although one hand had tightened at his side.

Madara understood what memory had surfaced.

The blade, the wound, and the months of decline afterward.

"He lived," Madara confirmed. "Eventually, he became the Second Hokage."

Izuna's entire face changed.

"The what?"

Despite everything, Madara almost smiled.

"You should allow me to reach that part first."

"You have just informed me that Senju Tobirama, the man responsible for my death, apparently acquired a title important enough to require a number."

"It will become worse before it becomes easier to understand."

"That does not reassure me."

Madara resumed walking, and after several seconds Izuna followed the sound of his steps.

"Hashirama and I ended the clan war. The Uchiha and Senju founded a village together."

Izuna remained silent for several strides.

Then he laughed once, with no humor in it. "You and Hashirama."

"Yes."

"After everything."

"Yes."

"And the clan agreed?"

"Eventually."

Izuna absorbed that before asking, "What was the village called?"

"Konoha."

His steps stopped again, causing Madara to glance back.

Izuna slowly turned his face toward the south, where the village remained far beyond the forest. "The village Alaric just told us to enter."

"The same one."

Izuna was quiet for so long that Madara expected anger.

Instead, his brother released a breath. "So we actually did it."

Madara's expression softened.

Izuna could not see it.

"All those years," Izuna continued, his voice becoming quieter, "and someone eventually stopped the fighting."

"For a time."

There was enough weight in Madara's response to destroy whatever optimism had begun forming.

Izuna turned toward him.

Madara continued before another question came. "Hashirama became the First Hokage. Tobirama succeeded him. The village system spread throughout the nations, and the old clan wars gradually became wars between villages instead."

"Damn…" Izuna's lips flattened. "So people organized the killing better."

Madara gave a faint, humorless chuckle. "That is one interpretation."

"It sounds accurate."

They resumed their journey.

Madara told him about the Valley of the End next.

Not every detail.

There was no reason yet to explain how he had secretly prepared Izanagi, bitten away a piece of Hashirama's flesh, or spent decades waiting for Indra and Asura chakra to combine within him. Those explanations would come when Izuna could sit somewhere warm and interrupt him without risking falling off a mountain.

He did explain that the Uchiha rejected his warning about Konoha.

He explained that he left.

He explained that Hashirama fought him.

He explained that history believed Madara Uchiha died there.

Izuna listened without interruption until Madara finished.

"You left the clan."

"…" Madara's eyes lowered slightly. "Yes."

"And they chose the village."

"Yes."

Izuna walked another few steps. "Did you hate them for it?"

Madara considered lying, but he did not. "At the time, yes."

Izuna nodded slowly because that answer seemed to matter. "What happened after you were gone?"

Madara drew a breath.

"The Uchiha remained in Konoha. Tobirama established the Military Police and placed much of the clan within it."

Izuna tilted his head.

"That sounds like authority."

"It was," Madara looked toward the dark trees ahead. "It was also separation."

He explained how generations changed the relationship between the Uchiha and the village. The clan remained powerful, proud, and increasingly defined by an institution that simultaneously elevated and isolated them. Distrust did not begin with a single Hokage, nor did every villager despise the Uchiha, yet resentment accumulated through decades of political distance.

Then came the Nine-Tails attack.

Madara felt Izuna stiffen when he described the beast.

"A Sharingan was involved," Madara said. "The village leadership suspected the clan even though the Uchiha as a whole had not caused the attack."

Izuna turned sharply toward him.

"Who did?"

Madara did not answer immediately.

A masked boy with half a crushed body appeared in memory.

A boy Madara had found and reshaped for his own purposes.

"Obito."

Izuna frowned. "The one you said whose clone confronted us?"

"Yes."

"The same man you trained?"

Madara's voice became lower. "Yes."

Understanding took several moments… and when it arrived, Izuna's face hardened.

"So the village suspected the clan because an Uchiha you manipulated attacked it."

The words landed cleanly, and Madara accepted them. "Yes."

"…"

"…"

Izuna stopped walking, and Madara did too.

"You keep saying things that make me reconsider whether being resurrected was a good idea."

Madara looked at him.

Izuna's anger did not resemble Madara's. It had always been quicker to surface, yet less willing to feed itself for years.

"You abandoned the clan," Izuna continued. "Then you found another Uchiha, shaped him into a weapon, and his actions made the village distrust the people you left behind."

"Yes."

"That is your answer?"

"What answer would change it?"

Izuna opened his mouth.

"…"

"…"

Nothing came.

Madara's voice became quieter. "I have had considerable time to construct reasons for what I did. Alaric has spent the last several hours stripping many of them away."

Izuna remembered the strange man standing beside his coffin, casually discussing resurrection and godlike eyes as though both belonged on a merchant's invoice.

"You trust him?"

"No."

Izuna's brow lifted so much that Madara almost smiled.

"I agreed to work for him. That does not mean I surrendered my judgment."

"That sounds more like you."

They continued, and the next part was harder.

Madara knew because his pace slowed before he consciously decided to slow it.

Izuna noticed.

"What happened?"

"The Uchiha were moved."

"Moved?"

"After the Nine-Tails attack, the clan was relocated toward the village outskirts. Surveillance increased. Distrust became mutual."

Izuna's jaw tightened. "And the clan accepted that?"

"For a while."

Madara could almost hear Fugaku's frustration despite never knowing the man personally in life.

"Eventually, some among the Uchiha leadership planned a coup."

"Oh," Izuna exhaled through his nose. "There it is."

Madara glanced toward him. "You sound unsurprised."

"We are Uchiha."

Madara chuckled faintly.

Izuna did not.

"If the village isolated them and the clan answered with a coup, then someone should have stopped both sides before pride turned into graves."

Madara's amusement disappeared as he nodded his head. "Yes."

Izuna heard the answer and became still.

"What?"

Madara stopped.

The forest seemed to grow quieter around them.

He had faced Alaric in a dimension hot enough to liquefy Truth-Seeking Orbs. He had wrestled the Ten-Tails inside his own soul while fire consumed him from within.

This conversation felt less comfortable.

"The coup never happened."

Izuna's shoulders loosened slightly, then Madara continued.

"The clan was killed before it could."

"What…? Izuna did not move. "What do you mean… killed?"

Madara watched his brother's face before sighing. "Almost everyone."

The words sounded inadequate.

Izuna's lips parted, and Madara forced himself to continue.

"Men. Women. Children. The Uchiha District was emptied in a single night."

Izuna's hand rose slowly until it found the nearest tree.

His fingers pressed against the bark.

"How many survived?"

"Very few."

Izuna's breathing deepened.

"Who did it?"

Madara looked directly at him even though Izuna could not return the gaze. "An Uchiha."

His brother's fingers dug into the bark.

"Name."

"Itachi Uchiha."

Izuna repeated it beneath his breath.

The name meant nothing.

That somehow made it worse.

"How old?"

"Thirteen."

Izuna turned toward him so sharply that his shoulder struck the tree. "What?"

Madara's expression remained grim.

"He was a prodigy. ANBU. Son of the clan head."

"A child."

"Yes."

"You just told me a thirteen-year-old boy exterminated the Uchiha."

"He did not act alone."

Izuna's expression hardened.

"Who helped him?"

Madara waited one second too long, but Izuna understood.

"No…"

"Obito assisted him."

The forest remained silent.

Izuna's face slowly emptied.

"The same Obito."

"Yes."

"The one you trained."

"Yes."

A pulse of chakra escaped Izuna.

Snow dropped from nearby branches.

Even blind and barely an hour removed from death, his anger carried the pressure of an elite Uchiha.

Madara did not restrain him.

"You trained the man who helped slaughter our clan."

Madara's eyes lowered.

"Yes."

Izuna stepped toward him. "Why?"

"Obito had his own reasons by then."

"That was not my question."

Madara met him. "I did not order the massacre."

"But you made him."

The accusation contained enough truth that Madara refused to insult either of them by denying it.

"I helped make him what he became."

Izuna's jaw trembled, and for several seconds, Madara thought his brother might strike him. Instead, Izuna turned away.

"Tell me why a thirteen-year-old did it."

Madara explained.

He described Itachi's position between village and clan, although he refused to absolve him through simplification. Itachi had become a double agent, feeding information between two sides that increasingly regarded catastrophe as inevitable. Hiruzen had sought negotiations, yet time ran out beneath pressure from men who preferred certainty to compromise.

Madara's voice became colder when he reached Danzō.

"One of Konoha's elders forced the final choice. Itachi could allow the coup to begin and risk a civil war that might invite other nations to attack the village, or he could destroy the clan and preserve his younger brother."

Izuna looked sickened.

"And he chose the village."

"And Sasuke."

"So he murdered his parents."

"Yes."

"His relatives."

"Yes."

"Children."

Madara's mouth tightened. "Yes."

Izuna stood without speaking.

When he finally did, the anger in his voice had changed. "He was thirteen."

Madara recognized what had happened.

Izuna was still furious with Itachi.

He had simply found more people to hate alongside him.

"The village used him," Izuna said.

"The clan used him too."

Izuna turned toward Madara. "You are defending him?"

"No," Madara's answer came firmly. "He made his choice. People died because of it. He carries that responsibility."

His gaze sharpened.

"But a child does not become capable of slaughtering his entire bloodline because one person failed. Many adults built the road and placed him at its end."

Izuna remained quiet.

Perhaps Madara understood that lesson more clearly now because he had spent decades doing precisely the same thing to Obito.

"His younger brother survived?" Izuna asked.

"Sasuke."

"And Itachi?"

"Alive."

Izuna turned toward him.

"And I know for sure…" Madara continued, "…that both of them are in the compound we are approaching."

Izuna's face became utterly still. "Excuse me?"

"Alaric's compound."

"The man who killed the clan lives there."

"Yes."

"With the brother he spared."

"Yes."

"This is crazy…" Izuna slowly raised a hand to his face. "I have been alive for less than one night."

Madara said nothing.

"I have learned that you founded a village with Hashirama, fought him afterward, manipulated another Uchiha, indirectly helped create the circumstances that nearly destroyed the clan, abandoned a plan involving a Ten-Tails, agreed to work for a man who resurrects people, and now you are taking me directly into a house containing the boy who slaughtered our family."

"When stated that way—"

"Do not finish that sentence."

Madara closed his mouth.

Izuna breathed slowly.

"How many of us are left?"

Madara considered the wording.

"Among those known to me, Itachi, Sasuke, Obito, myself…"

He looked at his younger brother.

"…and now you."

Izuna lowered his head.

Five.

A clan that had once filled compounds, battlefields, council halls, and graveyards had been reduced to names that could be counted on one hand.

"…"

"…"

For a while, neither brother moved.

"…"

"…"

Then Izuna extended his hand and Madara looked at it.

"I cannot see where we are going," Izuna said with sigh.

Madara took the hand before Izuna tightened his fingers.

"But I want to meet them."

"Itachi and Sasuke…" Madara named the two Uchiha he mentioned.

"Both."

Madara's brow rose slightly.

Izuna's expression became hard. "I have not decided whether I want to embrace Itachi, break his jaw, or ask how a thirteen-year-old was left carrying an entire clan on his back."

Madara began walking with him again.

"You may have time for all three."

Izuna almost smiled. "Perhaps resurrection was worth it after all."

Unknown Underground Hideout

Obito opened his eye.

"…"

"…"

Then the memories arrived all at once.

Snow.

The ruined Land of Frost.

Platinum-gold light.

Madara standing alive without the Ten-Tails.

Alaric carrying the Ten-Tails inside himself.

The coffin.

Madara's voice informing him that Black Zetsu had manipulated everything.

The declaration that Infinite Tsukuyomi was over.

Then came the final insult.

'You're just a shadow clone.'

Obito sat motionless within the darkness while the extinguished clone's experiences settled into his mind.

His fingers were wrapped around the stone ledge beside him, causing them to crack.

Madara had abandoned the plan.

The thought felt impossible even after witnessing the conversation through his own clone.

Madara Uchiha, the man who had pulled him from beneath a mountain of stone and taught him that reality was a hell from which mankind deserved release, had looked at him and declared that the dream was domination.

Obito's teeth clenched.

"What a joke."

His voice echoed through the underground chamber.

He had expected betrayal from villages.

From allies.

From enemies.

He had built his entire identity around the certainty that attachments eventually became wounds.

Madara had been different only because their relationship had never pretended to be affection. They had possessed a purpose larger than either of them.

Apparently even that had been temporary.

"…"

"…"

Obito leaned forward as Rin's face appeared in his memory.

For years, Infinite Tsukuyomi had provided the answer to everything that reality had stolen. A false world could become irrelevant if everyone experienced it as truth. Pain could be erased because the circumstances producing pain would no longer possess authority.

Now the Ten-Tails was gone… not destroyed.

That was fucking worse.

It now belonged to Alaric.

Trying to extract it from him would be suicide unless Obito discovered something capable of overcoming a man who had apparently defeated Ten-Tails Madara, stolen the beast, and returned looking more annoyed about his ruined clothing than transformed by godhood.

So the old plan was finished.

Obito let himself acknowledge that completely.

Then something colder took its place.

If reality could not be replaced, it could still be punished.

He finally rose from his seat.

The world had survived for generations because people continuously rebuilt the same structures after destroying one another. Villages promised protection while producing child soldiers. Daimyō financed wars while remaining far from battlefields. Treaties lasted until fear became more valuable than peace. Shinobi killed for institutions and then taught their children that the institution made those deaths meaningful.

Infinite Tsukuyomi would have allowed everyone to look away.

Obito no longer wanted to let them.

He walked toward the old map spread across a stone table.

Five Great Nations dominated it while the smaller countries filled the spaces between them.

Years ago, he would have looked at those borders and seen territories waiting to disappear beneath a single dream.

Now he saw pressure points.

Not military targets alone, but relationships, secrets, old crimes, and unpaid debts.

The fragile trust created by enemies temporarily discovering that a greater enemy existed.

Alaric had frightened the Kage into cooperation.

Obito's eye narrowed.

Then perhaps the appropriate response was not to overpower that cooperation.

Perhaps he could make them destroy it themselves.

His fingers moved across the map without selecting a destination yet.

He remembered Nagato.

The Akatsuki.

The jinchūriki.

The countless shinobi who had already demonstrated how easily people returned to hatred when given a reason.

Madara wanted to call Infinite Tsukuyomi domination now.

"Fine…"

Obito would offer no dream.

No false heaven or merciful illusion.

If the world insisted that reality was worth preserving, then he would remove every comforting lie that made reality bearable and allow the shinobi nations to confront what remained.

The thought did not calm him. No… it focused him.

His mind turned toward people who could still be moved, grievances that had never truly healed, factions that feared the changing balance of power, and nations that would not appreciate discovering how much authority Konoha had accumulated through Alaric.

He would not rebuild Madara's plan.

That mattered.

For the first time since Rin died, Obito would create something that belonged entirely to himself.

His fingers stopped against the map… then he remembered the coffin.

Madara had brought a coffin back with Alaric.

Obito frowned.

The shape.

Madara's protectiveness around it.

Alaric's involvement.

The Ten-Tails inside Alaric.

A technique capable of changing the boundary between impossible and ordinary seemed increasingly plausible whenever Alaric was involved.

Obito's eye narrowed.

Whatever lay inside that coffin mattered enough that Madara had abandoned the Eye of the Moon and carried it personally.

Another uncertainty.

Another variable.

"I hate variables…" Obito murmured as he drew his hand away from the map.

For now, he would not chase Madara and would not challenge Alaric.

He would not waste himself attempting to reclaim a Ten-Tails locked inside a man who apparently could not stay dead and whose power continued becoming more ridiculous every time they met.

Instead, he would watch.

He would gather what remained of the people the great villages had discarded.

He would learn which alliances were real and which survived only because Alaric stood between everyone and catastrophe.

Then, when he understood the structure well enough, he would decide where to press.

Obito turned away from the table.

His anger had not vanished… it had become quieter.

This was more dangerous.

Madara had told him the Eye of the Moon was dead.

Perhaps it was, but Obito no longer needed the moon.

As he disappeared into the spiral of Kamui, the map remained behind in the darkness, its borders unchanged for now.

Reality had kept its world.

Obito intended to find out how much suffering it could endure before everyone inside it wished he had given them the dream instead.