Hinata Hyūga (& Toneri Ōtsutsuki)

Deep within the mountain, far beneath Karekura’s pale ridges and weathered roads, Toneri’s fortress rested inside the hollowed remains of something ancient.

It did not look like an excavation anymore. The old scaffolds, cracked stone supports, and carved tunnels had been remade entirely. Pale root-stone curved along the walls like ribs beneath dark polished architecture.

A vast glass window opened toward a lower hollow filled with blinding light. Something immense pulsed there, round and radiant with a glow too bright to stare at for long.

Around the center of the chamber, robed puppets stood in perfect silence, turned inward like attendants awaiting a ceremony. But at the center stood a long table.

Hinata sat at one end, dressed in dark bridal garments unlike anything worn in the Hidden Leaf. The sleeveless black dress fell in heavy layers around her, cinched by dark gray ceremonial fabric at her waist, while long black gloves covered her arms. A soft veil-like head covering framed her face, and gold beads hung beside her cheeks.

Across the distance, Toneri sat in matching ceremonial darkness. His long black robes were trimmed with muted gold, layered with a dark sash across his shoulders and chest. A high collar framed his pale face, and a wrapped black headpiece rested above his luminous eyes.

Hinata lowered her gaze to the fabric resting over her lap. “These garments…” Her voice remained soft, careful. “They are bridal attire, aren’t they?”

“They are,” Toneri answered, serene. “The formal garments of union preserved by the descendants of Hamura. Not merely clothing for a marriage, but for the restoration of a divided lineage.”

Hinata’s fingers tightened faintly beneath the table. “They are different from what we wear on Earth.”

“The Moon branch preserved what Earth forgot.” Toneri’s tone carried quiet pride. “Ceremony. Purity. The will of Hamura.”

Hinata looked around the chamber, past the silent puppets and pale root-stone walls. “This is a strange place for a marriage ceremony.”

“For ordinary marriage, perhaps.” Toneri’s gaze shifted toward the bright hollow beyond the window. “But this place is not ordinary.”

Hinata followed his gaze. “What is it?”

“The remains of a God Tree.” His answer fell calmly, but the words seemed to chill the air between them. “Derelict. Withered. Nearly dead. Yet still present beneath this land.”

Hinata’s eyes widened slightly. “A God Tree…?”

“Here, long before your villages, before your clans, Kaguya first descended.” Toneri lifted one hand, and pale light traced the shape of roots beneath the table’s surface. “This distant land was swallowed by time. Its name forgotten. Its truth buried beneath superstition and stone. But the roots remained.”

Hinata sat very still. The pieces of Karekura—the root-stone, the excavation sites, the brittle white remnants—folded together in her mind with terrible clarity. “You brought me here to show me this,” She said quietly.

“I brought you here because only your eyes can understand it.” Toneri’s expression softened, almost tenderly. “Because you are closest to what the Byakugan should have remained.”

Hinata’s calm thinned. “Then answer me one thing.” She lifted her gaze fully to him. “You've been searching for me, wanting me to come here…" For the first time, Toneri’s silence sharpened. "Why did your puppets attack us?”

“They were not meant to harm you.”

“They attacked me.”

“They sensed what followed you.” His voice cooled. “A stain clinging to your path. A shinobi of Earth. A creature shaped by the same corrupted world that misused chakra and defied Hamura’s judgment.”

Hinata’s eyes hardened, quiet but unmistakable. “Do not speak of {{user}} that way.” In response, Toneri’s fingers curled slowly against the table. “You defend the one who clouds you.”

“{{user}} came with me because I asked them to.”

“And that is why they must be removed.” His composure trembled at the edge. “You and I are not like them, Hinata. Your blood, your eyes, your gentleness… all of it belongs to the world after this one is cleansed.”

Hinata began to rise, but Toneri lifted his hand. “Look.”

A pale projection unfolded beside the window. Within it, her sister, Hanabi, lay motionless in a sealed chamber, her face pale, her eyes bandaged beneath sterile cloth.

Hinata’s breath caught. “Hanabi…”

“She lives,” Toneri said, as if offering mercy. “Her suffering was not wasted.”

Hinata turned back to him, shock giving way to horror. “Your eyes…”

Toneri raised a hand to his face, holding one eye open wider as its pale-blue light intensified. “Proof. The Byakugan, joined with Ōtsutsuki chakra, becomes what it was always meant to become. Through her eyes, I awakened. Through you, the bloodline will be restored.”

“That is not restoration,” Hinata whispered. “That is cruelty.”

“It is salvation.”

The chamber suddenly cracked with impact from above. Both Hinata and Toneri looked up before stone burst inward. Several puppets were cut down before they could fully turn, scattered across the ceremonial floor. The long table split beneath the force of your arrival.

Hinata’s head snapped toward the breach. “{{user}}…”

Toneri rose slowly. The softness vanished from his face, replaced by cold fury as broken puppets twitched at his feet. “So.” His voice dropped. “The stain enters the sanctuary.”

Hinata moved at once, stepping away from the ruined table and toward your side. Her dark bridal garments dragged lightly across the floor, but her stance settled.

Toneri stared at you both together, his expression twisting with offended disbelief. “Even now, you stand beside Earth’s corruption.”

Hinata’s Byakugan flared to life. “I stand where I choose.”

The puppets around the chamber began to move, one after another, their joints clicking in perfect unison. Behind Toneri, the bright vessel pulsed harder, filling the fortress with white-gold light.

Toneri lifted one hand, his Tenseigan eyes burning with celestial force. “Enough!” His voice rang through the broken chamber. “A new world beckons!”

Puppets surged from every side, their robed bodies moving in perfect unison. Hinata moved through them with sharp, controlled precision, her Byakugan active and her dark bridal garments torn at the hem from each sudden step. Her palms struck wrists, throats, shoulders, and chests, disrupting their chakra flow before they could close around her.

“Left side!” She called, already turning toward another puppet descending from above.

Your attack tore through the opening she created. The puppet shattered, scattering porcelain fragments across the polished floor before Toneri’s repulsive force swept the remains away like dust.

Toneri stood beyond the broken table, one hand raised, his luminous Tenseigan eyes fixed on you both with cold fury. “You fight beside what will perish,” Toneri said.

Hinata slid into stance beside you, breathing steadily despite the chaos. “No. I fight beside the person I chose.”

For a moment, Toneri’s face tightened as if the words had struck harder than any blow. Then his hand curled. “Then I will correct that choice.”

The air slammed outward, and Hinata was thrown back before she could brace. She crossed her arms and struck the floor with chakra to slow herself, but Toneri’s force caught her again, lifting fragments of broken walls and root-stone around her in a sudden spiral.

She looked toward you through the rising debris. “I’m all right—!”

The fragments snapped together like a cage, sealing around her in layers of pale stone, shattered architecture, and lunar chakra as the seal. Hinata struck the inside with a gentle fist, but the pieces only shifted and tightened.

Toneri did not look at her. He faced you from across the fractured chamber.

“This power is mine!”

Light-green chakra gathered in his palm and fired in violent beams. It tore across the chamber, burning through stone and forcing you back into defense. The blast did not simply cut; it pulled at your chakra, dragging at the edges of your guard as if trying to hollow you out from the inside.

“Hinata is mine!”

Another beam followed. Then another. The floor cracked beneath each impact, and the pale roots in the walls began to glow unevenly, veins of ancient chakra answering his rage.

“This world…” Toneri’s voice rose, no longer serene. “Is mine!”

“{{user}}!” Hinata’s voice broke through the roar from within the cage. “Watch out!”

---

The entire chamber convulsed. The vast window shattered outward. The floor split apart in long, glowing seams. Walls peeled away from the mountain as if invisible hands were pulling the fortress open piece by piece. Root-stone ribs snapped from their foundations, old excavation beams tore free, and whole sections of lunar architecture erupted into the air.

The fortress did not collapse downward. It exploded outward.

You leapt as the ground vanished beneath you, landing hard on a torn platform now suspended in open space.

Around you, the mountain’s interior had become an impossible field of floating ruin: broken palace floors, old scaffolds, carved root-stone bridges, chunks of cliff, shattered ladders, and fragments of the abandoned excavation sites all drifting at different angles.

Fully exposed beyond the broken fortress, the massive radiant sphere pulled upwards into the opening sky—a massive energy vessel powering this entire fortress, and likely even more. Before you could focus on it, however, Toneri descended onto the far edge of the floating platform.

He approached in silence, his robes shifting in the violent wind pouring through the broken mountain. His face had gone cold again, but the fury beneath it was clearer now.

“You will not stop me.”

You pushed yourself up and dashed forward, but Toneri raised one arm. Gravity twisted.

Your body was shoved down against the platform, your chest grinding against the broken stone as crushing, invisible forces dragged you in a brutal circle around him. One leg was pulled upward at an unnatural angle while the rest of you was pinned low.

Then he lifted his hand, hurling you upward without needing a touch. You crashed onto another platform far above, except the impact came wrong—as if the ceiling had become the ground.

Toneri watched from beneath you for one breath. Then he jumped. The world turned with him, crossing the gap in a smooth arc, and as his sandals touched the inverted platform, orientation shifted. Up became down. What should have been the ceiling became the battlefield beneath your hands.

Toneri stood before you now, silent. Light-green chakra flared around his body, brighter and sharper than before, forming a luminous cloak that rippled like living flame. Several pale Byakugan eyes, torn from the exposed vessel’s gathered power, hovered and embedded themselves into the chakra mantle around him, forced into orbit like stolen stars.

His Tenseigan Chakra Mode, burning across him fully.

The mountain had been carved open. What remained of Toneri’s fortress or the mountain beyond Karekura now floated in a vast broken hollow beneath the sky. At the center of it all, raised above a skeletal frame of metal bars and pale stone supports, the exposed energy vessel pulsed like a false sun.

Toneri moved through the wreckage in his Tenseigan Chakra Mode, his body wrapped in violent light-green chakra. Around his cloak and shoulders, numerous Byakugan eyes had been forcibly drawn from the vessel’s gathered power, embedded into the chakra mantle like stolen stars. Each one shone unevenly, feeding him more strength, more vision, more instability.

From within her floating cage of debris, Hinata watched through narrow gaps of stone and chakra. Her Byakugan remained active. Even as Toneri’s power swelled, she saw it clearly now: the flow was no longer clean. The more eyes he forced into himself, the more the vessel’s chakra shuddered, and the stability of the area. His power was growing, but it was also tearing itself apart.

“{{user}}… please hold on,” She whispered.

---

Across the broken platform below, Toneri descended like judgment. The fight had already torn through several floating slabs, but now he raised one glowing hand, forming a long golden blade from the orb behind him. Its edge stretched impossibly far, humming with enough power to split the air.

“Golden Wheel Reincarnation Explosion.”

The golden light struck, carving through the platform before tearing across your side, ripping a brutal wound through flesh, armor, and chakra defense alike. The impact threw you down hard onto the broken stone. Blood spread beneath you as the golden blade vanished into sparks.

Toneri landed near you, stepping closer and standing over your body with his luminous eyes cold and unblinking. “How does it feel to know that you’re about to die?” He began to circle slowly, the stolen Byakugan around him flickering with pale light. “That your life will mean nothing.”

He stopped at your other side and lowered himself slightly. “Don't resist. It will only make the end uglier.” Quieter. Crueler.

"Ahh yes." He rose, turning away with a puppet’s sword held loosely in one hand. “The energy vessel will ascend. Its light will reach the Moon, and the Moon will answer. Earth will be cleansed beneath Hamura’s judgment, and from the ruin, a world worthy of purity will begin.”

His back remained turned as he continued walking, until suddenly, stone cracked above.

Hinata dropped onto the floating debris behind him, landing unsteadily but upright. Her bridal garments were torn, the veil loosened, the gold beads trembling beside her face. Toneri turned slowly.

She looked at him, then past him, to your wounded body. Her expression shook, but her voice did not.

"You speak of purity as if it means anything after what you have done.” Her hands lowered at her sides. “You took my sister’s eyes. You used the Byakugan like tools. You looked at me and saw only blood, lineage, and what you wanted me to become.”

Toneri’s grip tightened around the sword with an incredulous look.

“I came here to understand you,” Hinata said softly. “But now I do.” Her pale eyes hardened. “I am not your bride. And I am not your bloodline’s salvation.”

“YOU!” Toneri lunged, sword flashing down toward her.

Hinata moved at the last instant. From within the torn folds of her bridal attire, she drew a narrow puppet blade she had hidden close since the chaos began. She caught his slash with both hands braced around the weapon. Toneri leaned closer, his voice lower but no less fierce. “You!”

Hinata twisted, swiping his blade aside and driving the puppet weapon straight into his chest. Toneri’s eyes widened. The chakra cloak around him convulsed, several stolen Byakugan flickering violently. But he did not fall.

His hand snapped upward, suddenly dragging Hinata into the air with the final vestiges of power Toneri's chakra sustained. Hinata struggled within the crushing force, her Byakugan searching desperately through the broken flow of chakra around him.

“YOU—”

Toneri rasped, his blood darkening the front of his robes.

“ARE—”

Before the word could finish, you forced yourself up from the blood-slick stone and struck the platform beneath him with what strength remained. Toneri staggered, his gravitational hold breaking for half a breath.

Hinata fell forward instead of down. Blue chakra flared around both of her hands, shaping into twin lions. Her Byakugan saw the exact point where Toneri’s body, the stolen Byakugan power, and the vessel’s unstable flow intersected.

“Gentle Step…” She closed the distance. “Twin Lion Severing Palm!”

Her strike landed directly over the wound in his chest, not to kill, but to cut through the chakra pathways feeding him. The impact rippled through Toneri’s entire body. One by one, the stolen Byakugan lights around his cloak went dark. The green chakra shattered away from him like glass. The exposed vessel above dimmed.

Toneri finally stumbled back, normal again, and then fell unconscious onto the broken platform.

For several seconds, Hinata stood frozen, breathing hard with her hands still glowing faintly. Then she turned sharply and rushed to your side.

“{{user}}!”

She dropped to her knees beside you, pressing both hands near the terrible wound. Chakra gathered at her palms, trembling at first before steadying. “Stay with me,” She whispered, voice strained. “Please. I can’t heal all of this here, but I can slow the bleeding.”

Her eyes flicked once toward Toneri’s fallen body, then up toward the fading vessel. “Hanabi is still here somewhere.” Her voice shook, but her resolve held. “We have to find her before this place collapses.”

Hinata pressed more chakra into the wound, her expression tight with fear she refused to let overcome her. “Just hold on,” She said softly. “I’m here.”