Chapter 315 - 315: The Day Prophecy Finally Got Humbled

The ground beneath Konoha's ruined outskirts fell silent for a heartbeat.

Gamamaru exhaled, a low rumble that rolled across the broken plain.

Katsuyu shifted forward, a gentle ripple of weight, her massive body sinking slightly as her fragments tensed like an entire forest preparing to move.

The White Snake Sage finished coiling her spectral mass around Orochimaru's young body, her true form rising behind him like a pale storm.

Ryusei stepped back three meters, hands in his pockets.

"Alright," he muttered. "Don't nuke the village. Thanks."

None of the three dignified sages acknowledged him.

Which was fair. The moment Katsuyu's antennae lowered half an inch, the air changed.

Gamamaru felt it instantly.

Moisture thickened. Humidity shifted. The very air seemed to turn soft and weighted, as if the battlefield itself had begun to sag under Katsuyu's presence. Shikkotsu Forest's influence seeped outward, silent, inevitable.

Gamamaru's brows twitched.

"You intend to suppress the field already."

Katsuyu's voice remained mild.

"I intend to prevent you from ruining the scenery."

Gamamaru's throat vibrated once in irritation.

Natural energy surged through the cracks of the earth and rotated gently above his head, forming faint spirals.

"Barrier of Equilibrium."

The air snapped.

Suddenly, every particle of chakra within a hundred meters weighed twice as much.

Even Ryusei felt a subtle drag, like someone had wrapped thin cords around his limbs.

Katsuyu didn't move.

But a second later, half of her body dissolved, quietly peeling apart into dozens of huge fragments that spread across the ground, each settling like a puddle waiting to form something.

Gamamaru's old eyes narrowed.

"You disperse already?"

Katsuyu answered calmly.

"You increase the cost of chakra. So I stop paying the cost."

Her fragments began drinking the ambient humidity.

Gamamaru's throat trembled.

So she intends to flood the field immediately…

Before he could shift the rhythm, the White Snake Sage moved.

Not quickly. Not dramatically.

Just a lazy slide of her titanic body, scales whispering across dust.

But the pressure doubled.

White, translucent serpents rose from cracks in the air itself, coiling out of nothing, senjutsu constructs twisting and hissing with soundless hunger.

Gamamaru's eyes sharpened.

The Sage's voice rolled like silk dragged over bone.

"I want your throat first."

Gamamaru's pupils thinned.

"So be it."

He inhaled.

Sage Art: Maelstrom Tone.

The sound was not a croak. It wasn't even a vibration. It was the world itself humming, rejecting corrupt chakra, rejecting unbalanced jutsu, rejecting foreign senjutsu philosophies.

The air shook.

Dozens of spectral snakes evaporated instantly.

Katsuyu's acid mist rippled backward, compressing.

Even Ryusei blinked.

"So this is why Jiraiya couldn't ever explain how their sound jutsu worked…"

Gamamaru didn't move. He just watched the battlefield settle from the shockwave.

Then he exhaled again.

Natural energy condensed around him, swirling like a miniature hurricane.

Elemental Convergence.

Water welled out of dry earth. Wind sharpened into invisible blades.

Dust rose from under his feet and braided itself into swirling currents.

The field bent toward him.

The White Snake Sage flicked her tongue.

"Harmony users are always so dramatic."

Her entire form shed.

Layer after layer peeled off her like sheets of silk, dissolving into white mist that floated toward Gamamaru in a cloud of fanged whispers.

Gamamaru's brow twitched.

Infinite Molt…

But Katsuyu moved first.

Dozens of her fragments swelled, merging and splitting, rising into towering shapes of soft, pulsing tissue.

A tidal wave of slug-mass rose behind her, blocked off by acid-coated membranes that shimmered like wet shields.

She didn't attack.

She simply let the field drown in moisture.

A swamp formed under Gamamaru's feet.

It wasn't mud.

It was chakra-saturated sludge, acidic enough to eat through even natural-energy constructs if they lingered too long.

Gamamaru felt his perch sinking.

He clicked his tongue.

"Oho… annoying."

He pulsed natural energy.

Chrono Croak.

Time bent.

Katsuyu's rising swamp slowed.

Her acid vapor thickened and nearly froze mid-air.

Even the White Snake Sage's coils stiffened slightly, their shed layers hanging in place as if pinned by invisible strings.

Ryusei whistled.

"You're really slowing the world itself. That's kind of crazy."

Gamamaru didn't look at him.

He stepped lightly on hardened air, rising above the battlefield. His throat swelled again.

He saw two futures.

One where he dispersed Katsuyu first.

One where the White Snake Sage devoured too much of him in return.

He chose the third possibility.

Destroy both apex threats simultaneously.

He opened his mouth.

The air warped.

Katsuyu felt the shift instantly.

She dissolved in an instant, her massive body exploding into hundreds of fragments that shot across the battlefield like rain, each fragment lowering itself into the earth.

Acidic fog surged.

She was preparing for total dispersal, the strongest defense.

The White Snake Sage did the opposite.

She struck.

Her body shot forward like a comet, teeth bared, a spectral serpent's head erupting over her own, fangs dripping with a venom that glowed like liquid starlight.

Gamamaru's throat expanded, and Katsuyu struck sideways.

Not physically.

Through moisture.

A wave of humidity condensed instantly into a barrier, a thick dome of chakra-laced water wrapping around Gamamaru's lower body, forcing his equilibrium field to flare and compensate.

Gamamaru grunted.

"You interfere in my sight—"

The White Snake Sage smashed into the dome.

Her fangs pierced it.

Wind tore.

The combined force of both techniques shook the entire plain.

Ryusei felt rubble slam into his feet.

"Yeah… good thing they're holding back," he muttered dryly.

The dome cracked.

Gamamaru's eyes widened.

He had predicted two trajectories.

Not three.

Katsuyu's fragment beneath him surged upward, a pillar of translucent slug-mass that wrapped around his ankle.

Gamamaru resisted instantly.

But her mist burned at his chakra layer. His natural energy recoiled.

"You—"

Another serpent smashed into his side.

The White Snake Sage whispered.

"Predict this."

Gamamaru roared.

The shockwave tore a trench hundreds of meters long.

Orochimaru's anchored body shook inside the Sage's core, but she kept her form stable, shedding another layer that hissed across the battlefield as living serpents.

Katsuyu's fragments were already reforming, stretching across the moisture-soaked crater.

Gamamaru landed heavily, the ground cracking beneath him.

His prophecy threads scrambled.

He was too slow.

Too surrounded.

His foresight frayed, not because he was growing weaker, but because two opposing natures, endurance and dominance, were interfering constantly, shifting probabilities every second.

The Sage struck again.

Katsuyu rose with her.

And for the first time in a thousand years, Gamamaru was forced entirely on the defensive.

He threw up a harmonization barrier.

Acid ate holes through it.

He unleashed Maelstrom Tone.

The Sage shed more layers, replacing what dissolved.

He stomped the ground, generating a quake of pure natural energy.

Katsuyu absorbed a chunk of it like water soaking a sponge.

Gamamaru croaked sharply, fury breaking through dignity.

"You are both… intolerable…"

Katsuyu tilted her large head.

"You were always dramatic."

The Sage laughed, low and amused.

"You relied too much on prophecy, frog. When the world stopped following your story, you were already finished."

Gamamaru's natural energy flared so hard the sky shuddered.

But it wasn't enough.

Not against two primal forces.

Endurance and dissolution.

Domination and evolution.

Gamamaru was harmony… but harmony failed when pressed by two extremes simultaneously.

Katsuyu wrapped him.

Not fully. Just enough to lock two limbs.

The Sage lunged.

Her fangs sank into his shoulder, not to kill, but to drink his natural energy straight from the root.

Gamamaru screamed, the sound shaking the village ruins.

He blasted her back with a pulse of pure time-shifted force, ripping a crater under them.

The Sage hissed, tasted by his power but not deterred.

Katsuyu climbed his back, dissolving a trail of senjutsu skin as she went.

Gamamaru bucked and fought, tearing her fragments apart, but every piece he destroyed regrew.

Every second he fought, he burned more and more essence.

The Sage coiled tighter, her true form glowing with venomous white.

"Still proud?" she hissed.

Gamamaru forced his gaze up.

"You cannot kill me…"

Katsuyu's voice answered softly.

"No. But we can remove your teeth."

The Sage's eyes burned.

"And your tongue."

Gamamaru froze.

"No…"

Katsuyu tightened around him.

"You abused your visions for too long."

The Sage's fangs dripped.

"You guided destinies you had no right to touch."

Gamamaru thrashed desperately.

Ryusei watched from the sidelines, arms folded.

"Wow. Getting lectured by both at once. Couldn't be me."

Gamamaru felt something crack inside him, his natural energy pool destabilizing as both predators fed from opposite sides.

Katsuyu dissolved pieces of him on contact, breaking down senjutsu flesh into harmless mist.

The Sage drank the natural energy she could reach, corrupting and assimilating fragments.

Gamamaru convulsed.

His foresight broke entirely.

His body collapsed to one knee.

Katsuyu's fragments wrapped him like a cocoon, leaving only his head exposed.

The Sage's coils tightened around the cocoon, pressing down with crushing force.

Gamamaru's voice trembled.

"You cannot… destroy me… The world… will collapse…"

Katsuyu's tone remained soft.

"We know."

The Sage added coldly,

"That is why we will not kill you."

Gamamaru swallowed.

"Then what—"

The Sage leaned close, fangs inches from his eye.

"We will strip you."

Katsuyu finished the sentence.

"For a thousand years."

Gamamaru's body shook.

"No—no, you cannot—!"

But they already had him.

Katsuyu's fragments sank deeper, dissolving natural energy patterns the way she digested chakra structures.

The Sage pierced the edges of his senjutsu core, siphoning the raw power inside, not enough to kill, but enough to cripple.

Gamamaru screamed, ancient voice ripping through the plains.

Katsuyu murmured softly, almost pitying.

"You manipulated the world. Now the world takes back what you stole."

The Sage hissed.

"Sleep, frog. And reflect."

Gamamaru's consciousness broke apart.

The cocoon tightened.

His senjutsu core dimmed.

His foresight threads snapped.

Katsuyu released him gently onto the ground, the White Snake Sage uncoiling with a final contemptuous flick of her tail.

What remained of the Great Toad Elder lay motionless, breathing, alive, but emptied.

Stripped of prophecy. Stripped of higher sight.

Stripped of the power that let him shape the future.

A thousand-year sentence carved into his essence.

Ryusei approached with a small nod.

"So you two did exactly what I expected."

Katsuyu exhaled lightly.

"He will recover. Slowly."

The Sage smirked.

"By the time he wakes, this world will belong to you or to us. He will not matter either way."

Ryusei looked at the unconscious toad.

"Well… that's what you get for watching other people's lives like they're episodes."

He turned to leave.

The two sages watched him.

And behind them, Gamamaru slept, powerless, his thousand-year punishment already begun.

The battlefield finally fell silent.

And Konoha, what remained of it, survived yet another apocalypse by the thinnest margin.

...

Ryusei watched the three titans move, and the pattern revealed itself almost instantly.

Gamamaru's power was born of harmony.

Order. Balance. Predictability.

The natural laws he was born into, embodied and enforced.

Maybe that was why he also despised Ryusei the most, the only one among the three who truly did, because Ryusei's very existence defied all order.

Maybe it all also explained why he'd invested so much in Hagoromo, his chosen vessel for the neat, orderly future world he could never build himself.

He guided Hagoromo's every step, whispering to him through the centuries, not from wisdom, but from obsession.

A craving for control. For a world that moved exactly as he envisioned, with himself as its unseen, omnipresent anchor.

And fittingly, he fought the same way.

Each of the three great sage realm lords did, wielding only what nature itself had granted them, channeling its essence through three distinct paths that reflected their evolved minds, their powers, and even their forms.

Hence, Gamamaru read the world's natural energy like scripture, moving to restore balance with every motion until the outcome itself became inevitable.

However, against Katsuyu and the White Snake Sage… that was increasingly impossible.

Katsuyu broke the battlefield just by breathing.

Thousands of fragments shifting, dissolving, spreading moisture through the air, twisting the terrain, eating chakra that touched her.

A walking contradiction of signals. No prophecy could keep up.

And the White Snake Sage was even worse. Nothing she did was linear. Venom, illusions, shedding, parasitic senjutsu, draining nature energy out of the air itself. Every movement she made rewrote the battlefield in a way Gamamaru's foresight couldn't pin down.

Harmony can't survive when the ground is melting under it and the air is full of lies.

Ryusei could see it clearly: every time Gamamaru tried to reset the field, they broke it again. Katsuyu from below, the White Snake Sage from above.

One dissolving stability, the other corrupting the flow before it even reached him.

Gamamaru wasn't weaker than them.

He just spent more energy per second trying to fix a world that refused to stay still.

He was burning out.

And that was why this fight would end the way it had to.

Not with a death, the world itself wouldn't allow that, but with the old toad stripped of everything he relied on and sent back into the dark for the next thousand years.

Ryusei exhaled quietly.

Even ancient sages couldn't fight two philosophies that could break their own rules.