Chapter 628: Legendary Iron-Rank Black Zetsu

Naruto knew perfectly well that he wasn’t a match for the Sage of Six Paths.

The old man had manipulated him effortlessly just moments ago. Their strength simply wasn’t on the same level.

If Naruto attacked normally, forget dealing any meaningful damage—he probably wouldn’t even touch the hem of Hagoromo’s robes.

So Naruto chose the dumbest, simplest, and most effective solution he could think of.

He filled the entire mental space with physical shadow clones.

If there was nowhere left to dodge, then he wouldn’t have to worry about missing.

Of course, with the Sage of Six Paths’ strength, Hagoromo could have instantly wiped out a large group of clones and created plenty of room to evade.

But Naruto was attacking with absolute determination.

Hagoromo wasn’t.

As far as the Sage was concerned, this was still just an ordinary sparring session.

He actually found Naruto’s idea of using shadow clones to compress his opponent’s movement space rather interesting and watched with considerable curiosity to see where Naruto was going with it.

Hagoromo merely waved his staff and casually destroyed one cluster of shadow clones.

The instant he noticed new clones immediately flooding into the cleared area, he gave a small nod of approval.

The concept had merit.

And that was when Naruto exploited another property of the Multiple Shadow Clone Technique—

space-time manipulation.

That was right.

Nobody had ever realized it, but the Multiple Shadow Clone Technique was actually a space-time ninjutsu.

Naruto, the Number One Most Unpredictable Ninja, had figured it out.

His reasoning was simple.

His shadow clones were terrified of sewage.

And if sewage countered space-time ninjutsu, then anything terrified of sewage had to be space-time ninjutsu!

Naruto’s logic was roughly equivalent to throwing boiling sticky rice at your roommate, hearing him scream, and immediately concluding that your roommate must be a jiangshi.

The truly ridiculous part was that, somehow, the roommate actually was a jiangshi.

Because the real principle worked like this:

When a shadow clone was created, it normally appeared beside the original.

But it didn’t need to be physically touching him.

So could Naruto make the clone appear slightly farther away?

Of course.

There were plenty of occasions where a clone manifested directly in front of someone.

Could he push that distance even farther?

Normally, no.

Chakra functioned somewhat like a signal. The farther the clone was from the original, the weaker the connection became.

Tailed Beast chakra was different only because there was so much of it that Naruto could act as a relay and effectively establish a shinobi-world-wide network.

So what was Naruto supposed to do?

Simple.

Create an enormous number of shadow clones all at once.

If Naruto wanted one clone to appear behind an enemy, then he could simply create dozens of clones in a continuous chain stretching from his own position all the way around to the enemy’s back.

Because all of the shadow clones could appear simultaneously, the final result was functionally equivalent to Naruto instantly appearing behind the opponent.

Which meant—

space-time ninjutsu!

And now that Naruto had filled the entire mental space with clones, it effectively meant he had used this “space-time ninjutsu” to appear everywhere at once.

Including directly behind the Sage of Six Paths.

“Human Fang Over Fang!”

Naruto felt that simply using the ultimate secret technique of Kakashi’s Konoha-style taijutsu wouldn’t be enough to vent the resentment boiling inside him.

So two of his shadow clones each raised one hand, formed a seal overhead, then began spinning at high speed like Kiba using Fang Over Fang.

Naruto had nearly been drilled through by Kimimaro once before and had considered himself lucky to escape.

Yet inside Engraved Tsukuyomi, he had still ended up suffering a terrible humiliation at the hands of the Sage of Six Paths.

Now he wanted Hagoromo to experience the same sort of fear.

Unfortunately, Naruto had badly underestimated the terrifying durability of a Six Paths-level body.

According to legend, when the Sage of Six Paths once visited the Land of Lightning and left behind the bloodline that would eventually produce the Gold and Silver Brothers, he had also passed down the Lightning Release nintaijutsu known as the One-Finger Nukite.

The One-Finger Nukite later became famous as the “strongest spear.”

Originally, however, it had supposedly been little more than one of Hagoromo’s training exercises.

Compared to that—

Naruto’s improvised Human Fang Over Fang was simply too weak.

It didn’t even make Hagoromo’s expression change.

Naruto met the Sage’s utterly calm gaze.

His competitive spirit instantly flared.

“Uzumaki Naruto Five-Thousand Human Fang Over Fangs!”

Every remaining shadow clone paired up.

Then all of them launched the same spinning attack at once.

Still useless.

Some of the clones actually injured their own fingers from the force.

“Disappointing, Naruto.”

The Sage of Six Paths sighed.

“You won’t defeat Mother like this.”

“With an attack at this level, you wouldn’t even pierce the edge of her robe.”

Hagoromo was genuinely disappointed.

No matter which world’s version of the Sage of Six Paths you looked at, he had personally fought Ōtsutsuki Kaguya.

And the broad course of those battles had always been almost identical—

a cataclysmic struggle that devastated the shinobi world.

Hagoromo himself didn’t actually possess detailed knowledge of how Amenominaka or Yomotsu Hirasaka worked.

Otherwise, the moment Naruto began trying to fill the entire mental space with shadow clones, Hagoromo would immediately have realized that such a tactic would be useless against Kaguya.

Amenominaka could simply switch dimensions.

And each of Kaguya’s dimensions was enormous.

Naruto could possess all the chakra in the world and still never fill one completely with shadow clones.

Which raised an obvious question:

If Kaguya had those abilities, why hadn’t she used Amenominaka or Yomotsu Hirasaka when fighting Hagoromo?

Why did she only start using them during the final battle against Naruto and Sasuke?

The answer was actually quite simple.

And rather tragic.

Back when Kaguya fought Hagoromo, she hadn’t yet spent centuries half-asleep—

and, more importantly, she didn’t have an idiot Black Zetsu standing beside her constantly backseat-gaming.

Kaguya’s strongest abilities consumed absurd amounts of chakra.

If something like All-Killing Ash Bones was an instant-kill technique, then a massive chakra cost was understandable.

But Amenominaka?

It mostly changed the battlefield.

Against someone like the Sage of Six Paths, how much difference was a terrain change really going to make?

Using it repeatedly would just waste chakra.

People often claimed Kaguya had terrible combat experience compared to Madara.

But no matter how poor her battle instincts supposedly were, she was still the person who had ambushed Isshiki and left him half-dead for a thousand years.

When she was fully awake and fighting Hagoromo, there was no chance she would casually spam enormous chakra-draining abilities designed mainly for bullying weaker opponents.

Besides, fighting directly in the shinobi world actually gave her another advantage.

Either Hagoromo would become desperate enough to attack at full strength—

or he would constantly restrain himself out of fear of destroying the world around him.

Both outcomes benefited Kaguya.

Then came the final battle.

And suddenly—

legendary Iron-rank Black Zetsu decided it was time to coach a half-asleep Kaguya through her ranked match.

First thing he did?

Change the battlefield so the shinobi trapped in Infinite Tsukuyomi wouldn’t get caught in the collateral damage.

It was practically the equivalent of Pain using Almighty Push to clear all of Konoha just so Naruto would have a nice empty arena.

Then Black Zetsu’s opening strategy became:

Amenominaka.

Amenominaka again.

Amenominaka one more time.

The core philosophy was apparently to empty Kaguya’s chakra bar before the fight had even properly started.

So in Hagoromo’s memories, his mother hadn’t possessed many particularly strange mechanics.

She had simply been an absurd numerical monster.

To defeat someone whose stats were overwhelming, there were only two basic options.

Either possess even higher stats—

or exploit some kind of special mechanic.

And Naruto’s current method disappointed him on both fronts.

“Wait a moment, Naruto…”

The Sage of Six Paths suddenly gave him a strange look.

“You’re awfully obsessed with attacking that particular weak point.”

His expression became increasingly suspicious.

“You don’t have some strange idea about me, do you?”

“I’m the father of your previous incarnation, Asura, you know!”

The more Hagoromo thought about Naruto’s relentless fixation on that one target, the stranger the whole thing seemed.