Chapter 61.2- Gamer of the Desert

He stared at him with no flinch in his body after his words. Like he had no reaction at all. That in and of itself was a reaction. With snake-like eyes , the Ichikage watched the man that had set all of this in motion as he began to digest what he understood had happened.

“So you’re not from the world, just like me” He finally said, making the Ichikage smile and nod. H had looked forward to this day for so long.. When he could finally meet someone like him- an equal. A fellow human in this world of characters. A god, so to speak.

“I should say that explains a lot. Over the past few years, I’ve spent many a sleepless night trying to figure out which one of my actions could have fucked up canon so severely.” He said next, looking like he was gearing up to say more, so the Ichikage allowed his rival to speak. He’d won, after all. He could at least afford to be magnanimous in victory.

“But that doesn’t answer my main question. How in the hell did Madara not just kill you the second you summoned him?” The red head asked, throwing the Ichikage off with the way he smoothly moved away from the topic of both of them not being native to this world.

“Oh. That was easier said than done. The first time, I barely managed to dispel the jutsu in time once he turned to me with aggression and it was clear the attempt to crush his will hadn’t worked. I could have done like Orochimaru and settled for summoning him at half or even a quarter of his power to make him easier to control, but my inner perfectionist would not allow it, and how could I when you were making history as the youngest kage of all time. I had to really study the jutsu and break it down to its basest components before my experiments could succeed. At first, I managed to summon him without his ego, but I found that that version proved to be a pale imitation. More powerful than me for sure, but not as strong as could have been. In a fight between that reanimation and a reanimated third Rakaige, he lost woefully. So I had to go back to the drawing board. There was something in the ego that made shinobi as powerful as they were. Beating my head against I didn’t work as it should have so I got the idea to recruit help. I summoned some Uzumaki clan heads after raiding Uzushio for what remains I could find- that was almost a failure on its own as well” Here, he stopped for a second as the thought of how he’d almost carelessly gotten himself killed came to mind.

“But I managed to run across the remains of the most recent clanhead completely by accident and then summoning him was easy enough. He managed to resist the control of edo tensei, but removing his ego was acceptable because I did not need him to actually fight. No, I just needed knowledge. And knowledge he had. He helped me open the other tombs, and I summoned more and more under my control until together we remade the edo tensei at its core. Now, I have a variant of the edo tensei that operates a lot like the shadow clone jutsu. It allows me to split my own ego and imbue that into the summoned shinobi. It’s much harder to maintain than the standard jutsu so I only used it for Madara and Norotoshi Uzumaki.”

“Norotoshi Uzumaki?”

“The maker of the death masks. He was the very first of the Uzumaki to solemnise their relationship with death and invent the reaper death seal” he explained.

“So that explains Madara, then. Now that we’re done talking, shall we begin?” He asked, standing up from the chair and beginning to stretch. The Ichikage smiled and prepared to humble the upstart.

A/N; Progress