Neoth leaned forward in his chair and rested his forearms on his knees. He looked tired, which was increasingly his default state these days.
"So," Neoth said. "These Otsutsuki are the same as you?"
Hashirama tilted his hand back and forth. "Kind of. Imagine me but bigger in capacity and power. The Dragon showed me one of them, an individual named Shibai, and the things he could do made my best techniques look like parlor tricks. Even the weakest Otsutsuki were capable of erasing entire mountain ranges on a whim. They used the same energy I use, the same synthesis of physical and spiritual, the same chakra. But the scale was... yeah."
He rubbed the back of his neck. "I don't have a comparison that does it justice."
Malcador's staff shifted against the stone. "Should we worry about them?"
Neoth answered before Hashirama could. "There were many gods and world destroyers in the ancient days, before even the Aeldari rose. The War in Heaven produced entities of staggering power on every side, and the galaxy itself was reshaped by their conflicts. Most of them are gone."
He sat back. "It seems likely that there are no more Otsutsuki. If there were, they would have conquered the galaxy long ago, or at least made their presence felt in a way that couldn't be ignored."
Hashirama nodded, because he couldn't refute the logic. The galaxy was enormous, and a species that could shatter planets and fold space and grow God Trees at the centers of worlds didn't stay hidden for millions of years without a reason.
"That may be true," Hashirama said. "But the Otsutsuki were never conquerors. They didn't care for territories or empires. They drained worlds of life to increase their own power. Plant a God Tree, let it feed on the planet's energy, harvest the fruit, move on. Even the other Old Ones apparently didn't get along with them; the Dragon's memories made it clear that the Otsutsuki nearly ended up fighting the other Old Ones as well, not just the C'tan."
He paused and looked down at his hands. "It is best, I think, that we operate under the assumption that some of them may still be out there, somewhere."
The vine near the ceiling shifted as a leaf turned toward the overhead light, and the soft rustle was the only sound.
"That's a significant assumption to build policy around," Malcador said carefully. "We already face the traitor remnants, the Orks, the remnants of the Rangdan, the Aeldari, and whatever else the galaxy's dark corners have been incubating. Adding a hypothetical species of god-tier chakra users to the threat matrix would require justification beyond one entity's recovered memories."
"Malcador's caution is warranted," Neoth said. "But Hashirama's instinct is correct."
He stood and walked to the wall of living wood and placed his palm against the bark. The vines curled toward his fingers. "We've been fortunate, in a sense, that the only chakra practitioner to appear in this reality has been an ally. If the Otsutsuki share the same energy system but apply it toward consumption rather than protection, even a single survivor would represent a threat that our current military infrastructure is poorly equipped to address."
"Because conventional weapons wouldn't work against them," Hashirama said.
"Would they work against you?" Neoth asked, turning to face him.
Hashirama thought about it honestly. "Unless you’re planning on blowing up the whole continent I was standing on? No. I'd survive almost anything your armies could throw at me, and I'm just one person. An Otsutsuki at Shibai's level could tank a sustained bombardment from an entire fleet and walk away. The only thing that reliably hurt them, as far as I could tell from the Dragon's memories, was other chakra users, specifically Senjutsu."
Malcador's eyebrows rose a fraction. "Then the children become strategically relevant beyond the original mission parameters."
"I wouldn't put it like that," Hashirama said, and there was an edge in his voice. "They're just kids. And, frankly, to fight even the weakest Otsutsuki would require an unparalleled genius, one in several generations, someone equal to me or higher."
Malcador raised a hand. "I suppose that makes sense. The children are a proof of concept, a foundation."
Neoth returned to his chair and sat. "Tell me more about what the Dragon showed you. Shibai Otsutsuki; what was his disposition? Was there personality in the memory, or just raw power?"
Hashirama closed his eyes and pulled the memory back. It had been days since the Dragon's transmission, but the images hadn't faded at all. The white plane. The silver body of the complete Dragon, mountain-sized and coiled. And opposite it, Shibai, standing with his eyes closed and his arms at his sides and enough chakra inside him to dwarf the Ten-Tails. “Not much of a personality for me to read, honestly.”
“And, if there was a personality, I don’t think we would’ve understood it anyway.” Neoth's fingers steepled and he looked at Malcador. "Have the Mechanicum archives yielded anything that might correspond to the Otsutsuki under a different designation?"
Malcador shook his head. "The surviving archives are fragmentary at best. The Aeldari myth cycles reference a number of entities from the War in Heaven, but their taxonomies are metaphorical rather than empirical, and cross-referencing them would require a collaboration with Aeldari scholars that we do not currently have access to."
He paused. "And may never have, given the state of our diplomatic relations with the Craftworlds."
"The Aeldari have their own problems," Neoth said. "Leave them to it."
He turned back to Hashirama. "You said the Otsutsuki traveled between dimensions."
"That's what the Dragon said. They weren't native to this reality any more than they were native to mine. They moved between dimensions and seeded worlds with God Trees and harvested the results. The Dragon called it traveling between realities."
Neoth stood again and walked to the center of the room and stopped with his back to both of them. His shoulders were tense, and Hashirama watched him stand there for a long moment.
"Then your arrival on Terra may not have been random," Neoth said.
Hashirama's stomach tightened. "I've thought about that."
"The Otsutsuki seeded worlds across realities," Neoth continued, turning to face him. "They practiced dimensional transit. And you, a practitioner of the same energy system they wielded, appeared on Terra at the most critical moment of its history without explanation or precedent. The coincidence is uncomfortable."
"It's uncomfortable because I don't have an answer," Hashirama said. "I died. I got brought back for the Fourth Shinobi World War as a chakra-wielding super zombie. And then I woke up in Red Hope. I don't know who sent me or why or how. I just woke up."
Malcador looked at him. "Has the Dragon offered any insight on that point?"
"No. The Dragon showed me the Otsutsuki because I asked, and then it clammed up. It talks now, which is more than I got for eight years, but it shares information on its own schedule. Pushing doesn't help."
Neoth nodded slowly. "Continue your conversations with it. Every piece of information the Dragon provides about the Otsutsuki expands our understanding of a threat we cannot afford to ignore. And continue Batch Sixteen. Whatever happens in the galaxy's dark spaces, our best defense is a population that can generate chakra."
Hashirama pushed himself to his feet and dusted off his pants. "I'll head back to the lab."
The world was called Ashura's Reach on no map that anyone in the galaxy had ever drawn, because the inhabitants had never told anyone its name, and no one had ever come close enough to ask.
It sat at the edge of explored space in a system with a yellow sun and two dead moons and nothing else of interest within three light-years. The planet itself was temperate and small, roughly two-thirds Terra's mass, with a single continent that stretched across the northern hemisphere and an ocean that covered everything else. The continent was mountainous and green and veined with rivers that ran from high glacial lakes down through forested valleys to a coastline of black volcanic rock.
It was unremarkable. Survey ships catalogued worlds like it and moved past because the galaxy held billions of them and the crusade had priorities.
The battlefield covered a valley between two mountain ridges that ran roughly east-west, their slopes dark with evergreen forest that thinned to bare rock near the peaks. The valley floor was wide and flat and had been, until recently, farmland. Irrigation channels cut straight lines across the earth, and the remains of a wooden fence ran along the valley's southern edge, its posts snapped and leaning where something large had pushed through them. A settlement had occupied the valley's eastern mouth, a cluster of stone buildings with thatched roofs and a central well and a granary with walls thick enough to double as a keep. The buildings were intact. The doors were open and the windows were dark and no smoke rose from any chimney.
The bodies started where the farmland ended.
They lay across the valley floor in a field that stretched from the broken fence line to the base of the northern ridge, and they numbered in the thousands. They were human. Men and women in leather armor and rough-spun cloth, carrying weapons that ranged from iron swords and spears to farming implements pressed into service. Some wore tabards bearing a heraldic crest, a green tree on a white field, that repeated across the dead in enough frequency to suggest an organized force. Others wore nothing identifying at all. They lay where they'd fallen, scattered across the churned earth in the postures of violent death, and the valley smelled of blood and turned soil and copper.
A child walked among them.
She was small. She was thin and pale-skinned, almost white, and her hair was the same color, white and straight and cut short and uneven at the jawline. She wore a grey robe that fell to her ankles and sandals that were caked with mud and blood from the field she was crossing. Her feet stepped over limbs and torsos and the occasional outstretched hand without changing pace, her stride steady and unhurried, and she picked her path through the dead the way you'd pick your way through a crowded market.
Her eyes were open and looking ahead, and they were pale lavender, ringed with concentric circles that rippled outward from the pupil.
Her name was Karin.
She reached the center of the valley and stopped and looked around. The mountains rose on either side, green and indifferent, and the sky above was clear and pale blue and the sun sat at mid-afternoon and threw long shadows from the bodies across the earth. A crow landed on a fallen man's chest twenty meters to her left, hopped twice, and began to feed. A second crow joined it. A third circled overhead.
Karin turned in a slow rotation and took in the scope of what she'd done. Three thousand, two hundred and fourteen.
A sound reached her from the eastern edge of the field.
Karin turned her head. A man was crawling toward her through the bodies. He was middle-aged and broad-shouldered and wore the green-tree tabard over leather armor that had been split along the left side by an impact that had caved in the ribs beneath it. His right arm hung useless. His left pulled him forward in increments, fingers digging into the churned earth and dragging his weight across the ground, and every pull left a smear of blood behind him.
He crawled for a long time. Karin watched him steadily.
The man reached a point three meters from where she stood and stopped. His breathing came in wet and labored pulls that hitched each time his broken ribs shifted. He raised his head. His face was pale and streaked with dirt and blood, and his eyes were brown and wide and wet.
"Monster," the man said. Blood ran from the corner of his mouth and dripped from his chin. He pushed himself up on his left arm until his chest was off the ground, shaking from the effort, and he looked at her with those wet and furious eyes. "You're a monster.”
Karin looked down at him. “I know.”
She held out her hand, palm facing the man.
"Shinra Tensei."