System in Assassin's Creed

Chapter 365: Chapter 364: The Clockwork of God and the Broken Machine

---Previously, Alaric vs Pein---

”And I also know,” Alaric declared, his voice echoing with absolute, thundering certainty, ”that the Rinnegan on your eye sockets aren’t even yours.”

Pein froze, the accusation piercing straight through the divine armor he had spent a lifetime forging.

Before the Deva Path could process the world-shattering implication of those words, a terrifying, high-frequency screech erupted from Alaric’s outstretched hand. Pure, unadulterated electric chakra surged from his fingertips, a blinding geyser of white-blue lightning that shot directly upward into the heavens.

The electrical discharge was so impossibly dense that it violently ionized the stratosphere. The clear sky Alaric had just praised darkened instantly as the unnatural current forcefully seeded the atmosphere, dragging massive, roiling thunderheads into existence within a matter of seconds. The clouds churned, turning a bruised, violent black as static electricity arced across the firmament, answering the call of its master.

From the heart of the roaring tempest, a colossal beast of pure, concentrated lightning took shape. A mythological dragon composed of raw, screaming plasma descended from the clouds, its jaws gaping wide to swallow the false god.

Alaric brought his hand down with the finality of an executioner.

”...Kirin.”

---Now---

The Stratosphere - Above Amegakure

”...Kirin.”

For one suspended, unnatural instant, the heavens seemed to listen.

Then judgment descended.

The dragon of lightning did not merely fall; it tore its way out of the newly forged storm like a celestial beast enraged by its summoning, its body composed of condensed, shrieking plasma so bright that the bruised sky of Amegakure was bleached white around its passage. It crossed the distance between cloud and target in a fraction of a second, too fast for ordinary sight to follow, and its descent was accompanied by a crack so violent that the air itself seemed to split open.

Pein reacted.

The Deva Path’s eyes widened by the smallest measure, not in fear, but in urgent calculation, as the shared vision of the Six Paths delivered the obvious truth all at once: the jutsu was too fast to dodge conventionally, too vast to evade by simple flight, and too lethal to meet carelessly.

The Preta Path blurred into motion.

It launched itself across the fractured sky with dead, mechanical precision, placing its broad body directly between the descending dragon and the Deva Path. Both arms snapped upward, palms spread wide as the corpse prepared to devour the technique through the Blocking Technique Absorption Seal.

The Kirin struck.

The heavens exploded.

There was no subtlety, no clean cancellation, because the scale of the lightning was so immense that the collision became a miniature apocalypse in the sky. The Preta Path did absorb it, yes, but for several sickening moments it looked less like absorption and more like a corpse being crucified by the wrath of the atmosphere. Lightning crawled over its body in blinding rivers, carving white scars through the gloom, while the air around it turned incandescent with violent heat and static.

The body convulsed.

Its arms shook.

The chakra it devoured flooded its core so quickly that even Pein’s linked control had to stabilize it through sheer force of will.

Far above, seated atop Emberis, Jiraiya squinted through the glare and felt a cold knot tighten in his gut.

”Damn it...” he muttered, his voice nearly lost in the roaring wind as his eyes tracked the writhing silhouette of the Preta Path. ”That one really can absorb ninjutsu... so a direct bombardment isn’t enough.”

Below him, Alaric watched the scene with mild interest, his face lit in flashing blue-white bursts.

”He’s useful,” Alaric remarked, as though discussing a tool rather than a corpse. Then he tilted his head, the Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan spinning slowly in his eyes. ”Though I wonder... how much can you stuff into one shell before it bursts?”

The Kirin finally died.

It perished not because it had been neatly erased, but because the Preta Path had swallowed just enough of its core to forcefully collapse the technique’s structure. The remaining, unabsorbed static discharged wildly into the surrounding cloudbank and the open air, creating branching webs of lightning that crawled across the sky in fading, jagged afterimages.

Thick, black smoke rose steadily from the Preta Path’s trembling hands.

The corpse remained intact, though its pale skin had blackened and split in several places, and the faint, nauseating smell of cooked flesh drifted into the high-altitude air.

Pein’s voice, when it finally echoed across the sky, was even flatter and more detached than before.

”You test the absolute edges of my power with the arrogance of a child touching fire.”

Alaric smiled, a slow, predatory curving of his lips.

”No,” Alaric replied, floating there in his immaculate crimson coat like some obscene, untouchable nobleman who had wandered into the middle of a warzone by mistake. ”I’m testing exactly how many lies your little godhood can survive before it breaks.”

That did it.

Something remarkably cold passed through the Deva Path’s rippled eyes, and the combat formation shifted instantly.

The Animal Path threw both of its hands forward in a rapid, blurring sequence of seals.

The sky burst open around Alaric.

Summoning smoke detonated from the empty air in all directions... not anchored on the ground, not blooming from a solid platform, but exploding within the open heavens themselves. From those rapidly expanding white plumes came monstrous, shrieking shapes.

A giant, multi-headed dog lunged first, its snarling, saliva-dripping mouths already splitting wider as it fell upon the blonde anomaly from above. Directly behind it came the colossal bird, its massive wings carving the air like jagged scythes, followed closely by the armored rhinoceros, summoned at an impossible altitude only to plunge downward like a living, flesh-and-blood meteor.

At the exact same time, the Asura Path’s body violently unfolded.

Metallic panels split open along its shoulders, back, and forearms. Heavy artillery barrels emerged from the shifting flesh. Mechanical, extra limbs rotated into place with grotesque, clicking precision.

Dozens of chakra-guided missiles screamed into the sky, leaving thick trails of white smoke as they converged on Alaric’s position.

Alaric did not retreat.

He threw his head back and laughed, the rich, booming sound cutting effortlessly through the shrieking missiles and roaring beasts.

”Now that’s more like it!”

The first snapping head of the giant dog reached him.

It never got to bite.

A sprawling forest of dense wood erupted from absolutely nothing.

There were no hand seals. There was no shouted warning. There was no visible, gathering swell of chakra to betray the execution.

One heartbeat, there was only empty sky around Alaric, and the very next, there were thick, twisting trunks of dark, ancient timber exploding outward in a massive, defensive sphere. The Wood Release was so absurdly fast and violently alive that it looked less like a shinobi technique and more like the world itself had suddenly, angrily remembered a deeper, primordial shape.

One jagged branch impaled the giant dog’s first head cleanly through the lower jaw and out the skull; another massive, sweeping trunk smashed the diving bird aside with bone-crushing force; and a thick, spiraling pillar of ironwood caught the descending rhinoceros squarely in the chest, hurling the beast away hard enough to rupture the gray cloud layer far below them.

The swarm of missiles reached him an instant later.

Alaric didn’t even bother to look at them.

A transparent, perfectly smooth wall of metal... liquid one moment and as hard as divine judgment the next... rose seamlessly from the empty air around him. The projectiles slammed into the barrier, detonating in a rapid, deafening succession of fiery explosions that rolled and churned against the metal, but not a single spark or shard of shrapnel reached his body.

Pein’s eyes narrowed slightly, processing the impossible physics.

Vulcan.

He did not know the name of the ability, but his Rinnegan allowed him to feel the underlying principle. There was an ocean of metal in the city miles below them... in the towering skyscrapers, in the endless industrial pipes, in the rivets and reinforced beams of Amegakure... and somehow, this single man was commanding that distant steel from kilometers away as easily as drawing breath.

”Your city is incredibly convenient,” Alaric called out, casually glancing at the slightly distorted reflection of his own face in the floating, liquid-metal screen before dismissing the barrier with a careless flick of his wrist. ”Steel everywhere. Pipes. Rivets. Reinforced beams. You built yourself a nice little arsenal down there, Nagato.”

The Deva Path did not answer the taunt. He was already moving.

The rigid, five-second interval following his previous Shinra Tensei had been bought and paid for by the coordinated assault of the others. Now, the cooldown was over.

The absolute force of repulsion struck from point-blank range.

Unlike the earlier blast, which had been grand, sweeping, and city-shaking, this one was highly concentrated. Pein sharpened the gravitational wave into a brutal, invisible wedge meant not to devastate a wide area, but to violently break a single, specific target apart. The sheer pressure crashed into Alaric’s coordinates with enough compressed power to flatten a fortified bunker.

But Alaric vanished.

He didn’t teleport with a flash. He didn’t blur away with raw speed. He was simply, fundamentally gone.

The repulsive wave tore harmlessly through empty space, and before Pein could even shift his gaze to locate the anomaly, Alaric was already standing casually on the heavily weaponized shoulder of the Asura Path.

The mechanized corpse turned its head, its systems reacting entirely too slowly.

Alaric drove his fist downward.

There was no dramatic flourish. There was no amplified, shouted speech. It was just a brutally simple, devastatingly efficient punch delivered by a body that existed entirely beyond the old, tired language of Kage-level strength.

The Asura Path’s skull immediately folded inward under the pressure.

Its heavily armored torso catastrophically exploded. Mechanical components, severed limbs, jagged metal plating, and dark, coagulated blood sprayed across the sky in a spinning, horrific halo of ruin. The corpse was driven downward with such overwhelming kinetic force that it ignited into a flaming streak on its way back toward the drowned city below.

High above, Jiraiya’s mouth parted slightly, the pipe nearly slipping from his teeth.

”What the hell...” the Sannin breathed, his veteran mind struggling to comprehend the casual obliteration of a monster.

Emberis, vast and burning steadily beneath him, let out a low, rumbling trill of pure, arrogant amusement that sounded far too pleased by the violent spectacle.

The Naraka Path moved at once.

From the airspace just below the fray, the monstrous, horned visage of the King of Hell began to manifest in the air itself. Its grotesque, purple-skinned face forced its way into existence through a rippling, black mouth of chakra, looking exactly as though reality had become a thin membrane that something horrible was aggressively pushing through.

Pein had absolutely no intention of allowing the Asura Path to remain a scattered pile of flaming debris.

Alaric glanced downward, read the restorative intent immediately, and snorted loudly.

”Oh, no,” Alaric chided, sounding almost personally offended by the audacity. ”If I take the toy apart, you don’t get to put it back together just because you’re emotionally attached.”

He raised a single hand.

The empty space directly below the Naraka Path suddenly shimmered with faint, glowing geometric seals written not on paper or stone, but suspended on the very air itself. Symbols blazed into existence in rapidly expanding concentric arrays... dense, ancient, and so impossibly intricate that even from his high vantage point, Jiraiya’s experienced eyes could not follow the syntax.

The Naraka Path flew straight into the waiting trap.

Its body froze instantly.

Then, the golden seals violently closed around the corpse like an invisible, inescapable iron maiden. The Naraka Path spasmed erratically as layers of absolute binding formulae constricted, advanced chakra suppression arrays aggressively locking into its network and cleanly severing the esoteric resonance between the path and its distant controller.

Deprived of its anchor, the King of Hell flickered once, let out a hollow groan, and vanished entirely.

For the very first time since taking to the sky to face the intruder, Pein’s absolute, god-like composure visibly tightened, a distinct frown marring his pierced features.

”You...” Pein began, his voice tight.

”Yes,” Alaric interrupted, his expression bright and cheerful in a way that made the interruption infinitely more insulting. ”I know a little bit about sealing.”

Refusing to yield the momentum, the Human Path and the Deva Path attacked together in perfect unison.

The Human Path moved for direct physical contact, its hand outstretched like a claw to violently rip the soul from the anomaly’s body if even a brief, glancing grip could be achieved. Simultaneously, the Deva Path manipulated its attractive forces, casting Banshō Ten’in to drag Alaric completely off-balance and pull him directly toward the waiting, lethal reach.

It was a remarkably clean, devastating combination, timed with the absolute perfection only a shared hive-mind vision could achieve.

It failed for the simple, undeniable reason that Alaric was vastly faster than their plan.

Swift Release flashed through Alaric’s body like a private, localized storm. The very air buckled around him as his figure shot sideways, not merely evading the powerful magnetic attraction, but physically outrunning its useful line of effect. And as he moved at speeds that defied friction, he effortlessly seized control of every loose, falling fragment of metal still tumbling from the ruined Asura Path.

The jagged shrapnel stopped dead in midair.

It turned, pointing like a thousand jagged arrows.

Then, it fired.

Hundreds of sharp, twisted pieces of steel screamed toward the Human Path from every conceivable angle at once, accelerated by Vulcan far beyond anything the corpse’s physical frame could possibly evade. The path tried to weave. It failed miserably. Metal violently punched through its wrists, its knees, its throat, its ribs, and its skull, brutally pinning the path in a grotesque, spread-eagled suspension against nothing but the invisible will controlling the projectiles.

Alaric appeared directly in front of the crucified corpse, leaning in close to look directly into its ripple-patterned eyes.

”You’re the one that pulls souls out, right?” Alaric asked mildly, his tone conversational.

The pinned corpse said nothing, merely staring at him as it tried and failed to react against the iron biting into its joints.

”Cute.”

Alaric pressed two fingers gently against the center of its forehead.

For a brief, suspended moment, a golden seal no larger than a coin’s width appeared there, luminous and fine as master calligraphy.

Then, with a sickening shloop, the Human Path imploded into a tight, compact sphere of black formulae and vanished, stored away into a dimensional void so completely that not even a single scrap of tissue or drop of blood remained.

Pein’s stare hardened into absolute, unrelenting ice.

The Animal Path struck again, this time ascending rapidly from below. It slammed its hands together, summoning the giant, foaming crustacean, while the resurrected, multi-headed bird swept in fiercely from above, its beak open wide enough to split the anomaly completely in half. Simultaneously, the Deva Path extended both of its pale hands.

”Banshō Ten’in.”

The powerful attractive force locked on once more.

The air around Alaric folded inward.

This time, even Alaric allowed himself to be drawn a few meters, the heavy tails of his crimson coat snapping wildly in the sudden, violent pull. But there was cold calculation in the choice rather than surprise. The massive bird descended rapidly to meet the pulled target, and the giant crustacean opened its crushing claws to receive him from below.

”Finally,” Alaric murmured softly, ”a little bit of coordination.”

Then, time stopped.

There was no dramatic, visible tell. There was no sudden, swelling burst of visible chakra. There was no cosmic thunder to announce the absolute violation of the universe’s most fundamental law.

One instant, the battlefield existed in violent, screaming motion, and the very next, it did not.

The freezing raindrops that had not yet fully returned to the atmosphere froze like suspended beads of glass. The giant bird hung motionless in its fatal dive, its massive wings rendered into static, silent monuments of plumage. The spatial distortion of the attractive force was abruptly arrested in the air, reduced to a visible, frozen ripple locked in three-dimensional stasis. Even the stoic, indifferent expression on the Deva Path’s pale face became a sculpted, lifeless mask.

High above, Emberis’s roaring, living flames petrified into jagged, unmoving shards of solid light, and Jiraiya remained frozen mid-breath, his calloused hand gripping a golden feather that would not yield a millimeter.

’Cronos.’

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