Chapter rewritten on September 26th, 2018. Summary: Chapter was shit, pretty much. Everything needed redone. EDIT: Go down to the bottom to read the updated A/N regarding the story.

Thanks to my new beta-reader, ShiningShadow1965, for checking the chapter over.

Chapter 1: A Final Farewell

"RASENGAN!"

"KAGUTSUCHI!"

Naruto struggled to stand as he unleashed his last-ditch method of stopping Sasuke, his tried-and-true A-rank chakra sphere, utilizing as much of his remaining chakra as he could to propel himself off the destroyed remains of what was once the two statues at the Valley of the End. Their previous large-scale jutsu clash, Sasuke's Indra's Arrow versus Naruto's Six Paths: Massive Rasenshuriken, created a giant vortex of energy two miles wide and at least as high, sending shockwaves throughout the continent and completely decimating what was once a beautiful landscape and monument to two of the most powerful, skilled, and respected shinobi in history. He would bring Sasuke back to the village in some way, shape, or form, once and for all, even if he had to die to do it.

Sasuke launched forward, Inferno Style manipulating the Chidori in his hand into a handheld ball of what was more or less plasma than any actual jutsu, as he used what little chakra he had left to shoot himself off the wall of the Valley that had been created when Naruto had let loose with a powerful chakra-infused jab straight to the face earlier in the fight. He intended on using this amalgamation, a bastardized combination of Fire Style and Lightning Style, to end Naruto's life once and for all. Then, and only then, would he become the sole enemy of the entire world, intent on burdening himself with all its hatred in an effort to create a world that was truly peaceful.

As Naruto flew up toward Sasuke, hand outstretched with the Rasengan swirling violently, he thought of all his friends and comrades, and all the things he had experienced in his life up to that point. His first Chūnin Exams, dealing with Orochimaru, defeating Gaara and Shukaku, going to many far-off places such as the Crescent Moon Kingdom, saving Gaara from certain death at the hands of the Akatsuki, killing Kakuzu with his first successful Rasenshuriken, mastering Sage Mode and single-handedly defeating all six Paths of Pein and reconciling with Nagato, saving the village in the process, the joy and sadness of finding out who his mother and father truly were, eliminating the rest of Akatsuki, nearly dying at the hands of Madara and the Ten-Tails, and defeating Kaguya. Everything led to this moment. If he succeeded, Sasuke would be forced to accept the truth, that Naruto was never going to give up on him. If he failed, he instinctively knew certain death was his fate. This was the culmination of all of his experiences with Sasuke, from the Academy to the Chunin Exams to Akatsuki, and even through the War. This was it.

Naruto and Sasuke's jutsu finally clashed in a shower of sparks that seemed, in that instant, ten eternities overdue, as the two jutsu battle for supremacy. Unlike their first battle, though, Naruto did not give in and allow Sasuke to strike him, continuing to push past the sheer power the two jutsus' contact point was emitting, past his own exhaustion, and past the feeling of finality, shoving every ounce of what power he had left into the slowly destabilizing sphere in his outstretched hand. He could feel Sasuke's own jutsu give a little, but then he felt Sasuke push back with just as much ferocity, and the jutsu returned to being locked in a stalemate.

Under any other circumstances, they'd be tied permanently, the piercing power of the Chidori unable to overcome the constantly spiralling nature of the Rasengan, its chaotic nature acting as a repulsive barrier, while the Rasengan's swirling motions would be unable to whittle the Chidori's piercing and cutting power down even a bit from the precision of the sharpest scalpel.

This was certainly not any other circumstance.

Naruto's eyes widened, first in shock, then abject terror, as the Sharingan-supplemented, Inferno Style-infused jutsu literally began eating away at the chakra powering the Rasengan, disintegrating it from his hand like it was toilet paper. Naruto shifted his body in the split-second it took for the Chidori to come close enough to start doing damage to his arm, and Sasuke's hand plunged into his stomach, the Inferno Style eating away at his organs and flesh and cauterizing the wound instantaneously, while the Lightning Style immediately undid the cauterization by splitting the fused tissues and muscles right back open.

Naruto let out a silent scream as Sasuke removed his hand and deactivated the jutsu before they both fell to the ground. Sasuke barely managed to stand and walk away from the battle, intent on leaving Naruto to die. Naruto weakly used his hands to vainly attempt stopping the blood from flowing from his now destroyed intestines. He could feel himself slowly losing consciousness, but two things registered before he finally accepted his fate and gave himself to the void.

First, he watched and barely comprehended as all nine iterations of the Planetary Devastation Sasuke had used to trap the Bijū exploded from the sheer power that the nine suddenly unleashed, rocky shrapnel flying in all directions, before Kurama suddenly let out a feral snarl of rage and teleported above Sasuke. The severely weakened shinobi could barely even lift his arms in defense, let alone be able to activate base Sharingan before the Demon Fox was upon him, and Sasuke was violently smashed into the ground by Kurama's front left paw. The mighty fox then lifted Sasuke into the air and threw him until the raven-haired shinobi found himself a half-mile up into the now-frigid air. Kurama let out one final devastating attack: a Bijū beam attack so powerful, no one short of the Fourth Hokage would have been able to escape it, and no one short of Madara himself would have been able to survive it. The attack was upon Sasuke so suddenly, he was atomized before he could even register his impending doom.

What happened after that shocked Naruto for the rest of his now exceedingly short life. Kurama, as well as the other eight Bijū, approached him and were engulfed in blinding flashes of golden light as wide as the entire valley, before he could feel their energy sealed inside himself. He could also barely register another presence, more than a hundredfold stronger than the nine combined, settle in what he could barely feel was a seal over his heart. This having happened, and his wound becoming too great to maintain consciousness, Naruto slipped into unconsciousness.

Bijū - Realm of the Six Paths

One moment, Kurama could feel herself and her kith become trapped by the Planetary Devastation. The next, she was able to feel the bastard using his Perfect Susano'o to drain their power and use it to amplify his own. Before her youki could completely fade away, however, she felt her being pulled into the realm that she instantly recognized as the Old Man's mindscape - or, at least, what used to be it. She looked around and observed as her kith were pulled into the mindscape in the same manner - whatever manner that even was.

As the nine slowly settled from their sudden shift, the Sage himself appeared before them. They were all shocked for a brief moment, before nodding to the man that was basically their father in respect. The Sage took his meditative pose, legs crossed, floating a foot in the air, with his staff vertical and grasped in his left hand, and the nine Truthseeking Orbs floating in a circular formation behind him. His facial expression was always neutral, schooled into a thin line that betrayed none of what the man was thinking. His piercing Rinnegan eyes could extract the information out of the soul of even the most reclusive and hostile person, and he carried himself with the demeanor of a scholar, the wisdom and understanding in his eyes belaying experience far beyond even his years.

The Sage looked each of his 'children' in the eyes momentarily, then slowly spoke. "The Prophecy has been fulfilled."

All nine of them easily and quickly understood the underlying meaning behind their father's words: it was time for a new mission. Gyūki was the first to speak, a hint of uncertainty in his inflection, but otherwise analytical and observant. "So the shinobi world is finally coming to an end, then."

"Undoubtedly. With the fall of young Naruto, the world that my mother mistakenly and brazenly gave life when she bit from the fruit that gave humanity chakra will soon declare its span of centuries and fade into the ashes, to be replaced by another society, perhaps another race entirely. Instead, another world awaits our arrival, in another reality. I have foreseen a calamity so devastating and far-reaching, if nothing is done, it will consume this world and bring upon it its downfall most prematurely."

"Prematurely?" Saiken spoke up. "Does that mean this world you speak of hasn't had sentient or sapient life at all?"

"Not so, dear Saiken. I simply convey that the sapient beings of this world, though numerous, are still in their infancy, and must be set upon their proper path, a path I am afraid Fate has not performed its proper duty to ensure. They stray off this path and toward their own untimely destruction."

"So where and when are we going to this other reality?" Matatabi spoke up in a quite uncommon display of seriousness that those who knew her would be convinced barely existed. "I have to assume this world you speak of is in truly dire straits, if all nine of us are needed to correct such an imbalance?"

The Sage spoke up a final time. "As soon as I have gathered one more ally who shall be joining you on your... adventure." The Sage turned his back to the Bijū and began chanting out what sounded much like powerful words and phrases, indecipherable to the Bijū, in a language only he knew, a relic from a far-passed age.

For several minutes this continued, until, finally, something happened. The Bijū stared in mounting horror as a huge mass of energy coalesced into being in front of them - the Jūbi. All nine were instantly on guard, ready to fight for their existence at a moment's notice. The Sage held his hand up in a placating gesture to stop them, and they did, not because they actually wanted to - they were absolutely convinced that they would be dying here and now, in whatever sense of the word applied to beings like themselves - but because said gesture resulted in a universal measure of great confusion that all nine of them shared, a sudden change which was so palpable as to be tangible, to the point the Sage actually snorted briefly in amusement.

Shukaku was the first to recover, as he quickly transitioned rom being stunned to glaring at the Sage. "Old Man, what sorcery is this?! Even beings comprised entirely of chakra - or in our case youki - like us have a limit to the feats we can accomplish with our abilities. And bringing the Jubi into this realm despite the fact that it should be both physically and theoretically impossible, considering we are STANDING here, is definitely not one of them!"

Shukaku was stopped dead in his tracks as the Sage raised his hand once again, a thin, weary smile coming to his lips, as if he had been expecting Shukaku's reaction from at least one of them the entire time. "Of that, you are correct, my child. Indeed, it is not. However, this is not the Jubi, at least not the concept of the Jubi of which you are familiar with."

If Shukaku had been the only one to have been stopped to a dead halt, that was no longer the case, as the thought processes of the other eight ground to a dead stop as well. "And what exactly does that mean? You can forgive us for being a little skeptical, considering that, by all accounts, a physical impossibility is standing in front of us, one that should have stopped existing the moment we were born!" Isobu picked this time to speak up for the first time, his normally timid personality long forgotten.

"This is the Shinju, the entity that existed before my mother foolishly disrupted the balance of the natural order by consuming the fruit that has given the human race chakra. He appeared to me in a vision after I and my younger brother, Hamura, defeated my mother and sealed the spiritual essence of the Jubi inside of myself.

"He imparted his knowledge of how to split the Jubi's chakra unto me, as well as the vitality required to do so, and explained his own origins. Before my mother's interference, he stood alone, proud at the center of the world, watching over what was left of a once-immortal realm. When my mother extracted and ate the forbidden chakra fruit from one of its massive branches, he immediately sealed the remainder of his power in the core of our world, to prevent any more of his power from being stolen and used for nefarious purposes.

"Before he sealed himself into the core one final time, he also imparted unto me knowledge of another world of which great peril would in time befall. He also spoke of a relic of a bygone age, a Golden-eyed God, whom would either bring upon that world's salvation, or become instrumental in its destruction. He had already foreseen our departure from this world, and expressed interest in assisting us in saving this other world." The Sage stopped speaking, allowing the others to digest the information and waiting for them to speak.

Instead, the Shinju was the first to speak, its voice commanding either instant obedience or total annihilation, gravelly as if it hadn't spoken in many months or years. "Hagoromo. It is time."

The Sage turned to the Shinju and nodded. "I had previously made assumptions about circumstances and come to the same conclusion."

"Yes. The time has come for us to depart this world and its dying civilization. Before we proceed, I must restore your corporeal form and summon forth once more into the world of the living another that will be necessary in the coming trials. The Shinigami will send us the last two needed to proceed." The Shinju's eyes pulsed for a brief moment with barely restrained power, and Hagoromo disappeared, reappearing shortly thereafter in his physical form.

Minato Namikaze - Realm of Judgment

Minato blinked in shock as he suddenly found himself standing in a black void. His feet were on what felt like solid ground, but when he attempted to look, he was met with blackness. In such a dark landscape, he couldn't even tell whether his eyes were open or not. He had just been preparing to use Flying Raijin in a spar he was having with Hiruzen. Suddenly, he felt another presence next to him, and turned to find Hiruzen standing next to him. That doesn't make a lick of sense. How can I see Old Man Sarutobi next to me, but can't even see my hands in front of my face?

Hiruzen looked to the left upon registering Minato's presence and smiled in uncertainty. "No, Minato, I don't know what is happening."

Minato sweatdropped. All this time, and I'm still an open book? Damn, I thought I had that under control. "Heh, didn't even have to ask for you to figure out what I was going to say."

"Well, you've always been an open book, Minato. Jiraiya could read you so easily, and I trained him, so it's not a stretch to assume I would have the same propensity." Hiruzen chuckled, then schooled his features into an inscrutable expression. "The Shinigami must need something from us. That, or we're being impurely summoned back to the world again." At that, his expression contorted into one of disappointment.

"ONLY TOOK A SINGLE TRY." The booming voice of the Shinigami resonated throughout the black void. "FATE HAS OTHER PLANS FOR THE TWO OF YOU. YOU BELONG IN MY DOMAIN NO LONGER. TAKE YOUR PHYSICAL FORMS, AND HEAD QUICKLY TO WHAT YOUR KIND CALLS THE VALLEY OF THE END. YOUR FATE AWAITS THERE. THAT IS ALL THE KNOWLEDGE I HAVE OF YOUR SITUATION." Despite the fact that they were basically told they were being revived and brought back to the world of the living, the both of them were stood stiff in primal terror, a side effect of hearing the Death God's voice.

Then Minato and Hiruzen registered what the Shinigami had said, and their eyebrows twitched in surprise, a motion most shinobi below the rank of jonin wouldn't have noticed. The two Hokage refrained from reacting further because they did not see the point of overreacting and possibly causing themselves physical or mental strain in the process.

Before they had any more time to think about it, though, they suddenly found themselves standing atop the remnants of the Hokage Monument. The two quickly deduced that the Bijudama the Jubi had fired immediately after Orochimaru had brought them forth with Edo Tensei had slammed and exploded in the core of Konoha, atomizing the majority of the village and completely destroying the rest. Nothing was left, and it was likely every remaining civilian in the village had been killed. Minato and Hiruzen took a short moment to bow their heads in silence and respect for those who had been lost, before Minato gathered up large amounts of scroll paper and summoned clones, who quickly created two hundred massive-capacity sealing scrolls.

Minato gave one of his Flying Raijin kunai to Hiruzen, before looking at his predecessor with a soft, yet stern gaze. "I need to gather supplies, or at least what's left that I can gather. If anything the Shinigami told us has any bite to it, I have the feeling we'll need to be well-stocked and well-prepared for wherever we have to head. Head to the Valley without me for now. Hopefully between myself, my clones and my Flying Raijin, I should be able to find enough quickly and probably beat you to the Valley."

Hiruzen paused in thought for a short moment, before nodding and taking the three-pronged kunai in Minato's extended hand, stashing it in his rear kunai pocket before running off to what was left of the Sarutobi estate to grab what he could of his own belongings. Ten minutes later, the elderly Hokage, dressed in his battle armor, with several spare sets of clothes sealed in a pocket scroll, the Scroll of Forbidden Seals strapped to his back, and a variety of weapons in other scrolls, as well as a plethora of scroll paper, kunai, shuriken, and sealing ink stored in his personal scroll, dashed out the toppled north gate of the once proud Village Hidden in the Leaves.

Fifteen minutes later, Minato finished his own scavenging, having gathered up and sealed away massive amounts of every conceivable item it would be useful to bring, including unfinished versions of his own kunai, and teleported to Hiruzen, who at that point had made half of the two-hundred-mile journey from the village to the Valley.

Hiruzen stopped to take a breath after he sensed Minato's chakra flaring, followed shortly by the man appearing next to him. "Finished gathering, I presume?"

Minato nodded curtly while observing his surroundings for any threats, not like there would be any. He could still sense every other shinobi on the planet trapped in the effects of the Infinite Tsukuyomi, but more than ten years of battle-honed instinct was hard to simply discard, even for someone as young as Minato. An amusing, cynical thought occurred to him then. Hah, that means I'm literally the strongest living shinobi right now. For all intents and purposes, everyone else on the planet is dead. He turned back to Hiruzen, watching as the man chewed half-heartedly on a ration bar that had likely been procured from the village's emergency supply vault. "Yeah. Between the clones and my abilities, it wasn't too difficult to get everything I thought we would need in a timely fashion. Let's head out of here and get to the Valley."

Hiruzen nodded and finished his ration bar, and the two got moving to the Valley. It took another ten minutes at their borderline-breakneck pace, but they reached the Valley... or what was left of it. Total destruction turned the land for miles around into an unrecognizable dirt and stone crater, all traces of life having been completely vaporized. Hiruzen quickly found the area where Hashirama and Madara's statues had once stood, and a sudden pull convinced them to start heading in that direction.

When they arrived at the destroyed remnants of the two statues, Minato spotted his son's nearly motionless body resting on where the destroyed part of the statues that represented the Seal of Reconciliation had fallen. He and Hiruzen quickly ran over to Naruto's form, and Minato kneeled down to check his pulse. He became very worried when even with his shinobi-enhanced senses, he could barely feel a pulse, and could barely hear the whisper of Naruto's very shallow breathing. Then he noticed the reason.

A large hole, slowly healing from the edges toward the center, had been torn through his son's stomach, and had likely been the reason Naruto was now in such bad shape. He could sense Kurama's chakra, however, trying to repair the damage as best it could. Naruto's hands were placed over the grievous wound, as if he had ben futilely trying to stop the bleeding before he had fallen unconscious.

Before Minato had much time to do anything about his son's condition, what he could only describe as a tear appeared directly in front of the three, and two people stepped out of the tear and out of the realm hidden within. The first, he obviously recognized as Jiraiya, though he certainly looked a little bit worse for wear. His clothes had holes in them, and where there weren't holes, dried blood caked and soiled the ruined clothing. The back half of his dark upper garment had been nearly ripped off, and hung in tatters, and his pants, below the knee, hadn't fared much better.

The second, he only recognized as Hagoromo Otsutsuki, the Sage of Six Paths, due to the very recent War that had happened. The old man was still as he remembered, with long, gray hair and a gray beard, two small horns jutting out of the sides of his forehead, the Rinnegan staring back at him from his eye sockets, the gray haori tied closed with a darker gray sash, the paper white sandals, the magatama necklace imprinted into his collarbone, the black staff with the ring at the end in his hand, and the nine Truthseeking Orbs floating behind him. What was surprising, though, was that the man was not floating in the air in his meditative pose, rather he was standing on solid ground, and he was not surrounded in a shroud of chakra like before, which must have meant the man was here in the flesh.

The Sage stepped forward. "Ah, so you must be the former captives of the Shinigami. Minato Namikaze, Hiruzen Sarutobi." When both Hokages' eyebrows twitched in surprise for the second time that day, Hagoromo allowed a tiny smile of amusement to briefly cross his features. "Yes, I know your names. I have always made it a point to memorize the catalysts of change in this drawn-out history you call the shinobi age. More importantly," Hagoromo glanced to Naruto's motionless body, "my charge is here as well. Naruto Uzumaki-Namikaze, the strongest reincarnation of my older kin I have yet known. Minato, take your son into your arms. Fate has given us a destination, one we must embark upon immediately."

Minato quickly did as was told, picking Naruto's body up, careful to avoid causing any further damage. While this was happening, Hagoromo glanced to the brightening sky. The sun was not far from rising from the horizon. "Take this time to make peace with the world you once called your own. I have not the strength to break the Infinite Tsukuyomi's effects on my own, my chakra has been distributed thinly enough that I cannot distribute it to others to complete the task again, it would not work for me to distribute the chakra to those other than reincarnations of my kin, and because I can sense that the chakra of my younger kin's reincarnation has faded entirely from the cycle of this world, there is no reversing what has transpired."

Minato, Jiraiya, and Hiruzen briefly looked to the sky, unshed tears springing to their eyes as they said one final goodbye to everything they had loved and everything they had lost, while Hagoromo waited patiently for them. The trio steeled themselves, wiping the tears away before they could fall, and turned to Hagoromo, who nodded. "You are ready to depart, then?" When they all nodded, Hagoromo turned around and flared the power of his Rinnegan, creating a portal to the Convergence, the trans-dimensional link that connected every world in existence on a level no mortal could comprehend.

As the four men and one unconscious teenager crossed the portal's plane and it closed behind them, the sun dawned, for the first time in nearly a million years, on a world devoid of human life.

Welcome to the rewrite of this story thus far. Had a lot of ideas for this, including fixing what I should have done FAR better, as evidenced by quite a few things being different from the first time around. Anyway, I have some studying I need to do tonight for a test tomorrow afternoon, but after that, I'll get started rewriting Chapter 2.

In the meantime, those to travel to my profile will notice I've removed two of the stories there. The "original version" of MSL got cut because it was a giant, unreadable wall of text that I should have gotten rid of a while ago, as it served no purpose being here when anyone who wants it can simply search the story in Google to find it. The other, Of Mares and Men, I've basically put on hiatus. I've just lost the drive to write it, especially since I don't keep in touch with the others who initially approved the idea for the story anyway. Besides, a more worked version was on Fimfiction anyway.

Anyway, that's all for today/tonight - I spent eleven and a half hours working on this to make sure it was of good quality and fixed as many errors from the original chapter as I could - and I'll see you guys again when I get work on Chapter 2 done.

EDIT 09/27/2018: Forgot to mention that I'm not writing this story with pony characters as I did before, I haven't written pony characters in over a year, and as such, depending on what you guys prefer, I'll either be writing anthro or human characters.