The glow around the young man was faint now as he stood at the cave entrance looking down at the battlefield.
"How many more times before we're satisfied?" he whispered.
The survivors stood around him, each ready to strike the second he reneged on their deal. He'd already shown them, very slowly, the hand seals he was going to use.
Pain didn't raise his voice the way ninjutsu users usually did. It was even, so very even.
"Outer Path: Samsara of Heavenly Life Technique."
The abomination rising from the ground was every bit as horrific as he'd described. She didn't doubt for a second that it was a demon king from the Naraka Path, something that could only be summoned by a man who was an abomination himself. She needed only to look into its deep, baleful eyes, which were completely identical to Pain's.
The demon's maw opened wide, as if to consume every corpse on the battlefield in a single desecrating bite. But instead, streams of beautiful green light, like dancing kami who'd accidentally wandered into hell, poured out of its mouth and unerringly towards corpses (or pieces of corpses) wearing black cloaks with red clouds. Before her eyes, bones reattached themselves, were covered in flowing flesh, and finally tightly in skin. Fragments of human being drifted towards a single central point and reassembled. Some had to claw themselves out into the open world while the light briefly sustained them. One man stood up, gazing in bewilderment at his hands as if seeing them for the first time.
"It's over," Pain said loudly but clearly. "Thank you for staying by my side, and for devoting yourselves to a madman's dream. If I can make just one more selfish request of you, my friends… find your own ways to keep that dream alive. Even if there are no shortcuts to world peace, humanity can still do it the hard way."
With that, he fell to his knees, and was dead before he hit the ground.
Down below, seven figures left in silence.
