The air stilled as a suffocating silence descended upon the battlefield.
From the crumbling ridges and blackened dunes, a tremor surged — the ground splitting open like a wounded beast. Out marched the next wave: 1,000 Master-ranked Lizardmen. Their synchronized footfalls echoed like drums of war across the crimson desert. But this was no ordinary horde.
Towering brutes clad in volcanic steel and obsidian armor led the charge, their golden-trimmed axes dragging behind them with sparks. Dozens of flying Lizardmen soared above, wings glistening with molten veins, their talons laced with wind blades. And at their head — a golden Dragonoid Lizardman, nearly 20 feet tall, with four great wings, glowing eyes, and a spear carved from some abyssal bone — hovered in command. His very aura bent the air around him.
"Formations! Formations now!" he roared in a deep, echoing voice.
The army divided into four squads. The flying unit circled high, forming spirals of slicing winds. On the ground, a thousand Lizardmen released torrents of flame — each fire stream not a simple jutsu imitation, but a pure elemental force, intense enough to melt the earth. Their combined assault shaped into a massive 1,000-meter Flame Dragon, roaring into the sky.
Reizan's eyes glinted with curiosity. "Interesting… this might actually amuse me."
From above, the flying Lizardmen struck, slicing the skies with their wind-enhanced blades. Their wind merged with fire, fusing into a swirling vortex — a Flame-Wind Dragon. Then, the Dragonoid and his elite guard unleashed a surge of golden and dark elemental energy. A colossal black-scaled dragon with radiant gold eyes emerged from the impact zone, merging midair with the Flame-Wind Dragon.
The resulting entity — a 20,000-meter-high elemental maelstrom — spun violently. The sky dimmed. The ground cracked and lifted into the air. Space shimmered as if reality itself was being tested.
Reizan, floating miles above, looked down in silence. He extended his hand behind him. The five Truth-Seeking Balls began spinning, vibrating with intensity, absorbing the rising chakra density from the battlefield.
"This world is unworthy of witnessing such power…" he murmured. "But lucky for them, this is just a simulation."
He vanished.
To the Lizardmen's horror, Reizan reappeared far above their tornado, high in the stratosphere — so high the clouds themselves looked like rivers of light beneath him.
With a cold voice, he commanded, "Fall."
The five Truth-Seeking Balls shot down like meteors, piercing through the elemental tornado. Golden lightning sparked where they passed, colliding into the base of the storm in perfect unison.
BOOOOOOOMMMMM!!!
The explosion was deafening.
A massive white flash blanketed everything. A mushroom cloud of divine energy erupted, vaporizing hundreds of Lizardmen in an instant. The flame-wind-dark dragon was obliterated, shattered into particles. The earth buckled — a crater over 30 kilometers wide gouged into the ground, creating an abyss so deep it seemed to pierce into another realm. Space-time fractured, forming bleeding rifts of energy and collapsing dimensions at its edges.
Even high in the sky, Reizan was hurled backward by the shockwave, spiraling upward through the stratosphere.
His armor — made of compressed Truth-Seeking energy — began to crack at the edges. His eyes widened slightly. "Heh. So it can even tear at my defense. Noted."
Below, only ten remained.
The Dragonoid general, stripped of wings and bleeding golden ichor, crawled near the edge of the chasm, his eyes bloodshot with despair. His lieutenants were crippled or disintegrating, their elemental cores shattered.
Reizan hovered downward like an avenging god, five more Truth-Seeking Balls forming behind him. But this time, he changed their shape — long black rods reminiscent of the Six Paths' black receivers.
He fired them.
Pchuk! Pchuk! Pchuk!
One by one, the rods tore through the remaining Lizardmen like paper, skewering skulls, chests, and spines. Screams echoed briefly — then silence.
The Dragonoid, the last survivor, tried to crawl away. He turned, only to find Reizan standing over him, head tilted.
"D-Devil…" the Dragonoid wheezed. "You… you're a demon…"
Reizan's golden Byakugan flared. "Demon? No. I am your extinction."
He raised his foot, glowing with divine pressure, and brought it down.
CRACK!
The Dragonoid's skull exploded. His body shattered like glass, disintegrating into ash. The ground beneath cracked and split once more, forming a new pit where the commander once lay.
Reizan stood alone — not a single speck of blood touched him. The armor incinerated anything impure. He looked out over the battlefield. A scorched landscape of ruin. Nothing remained but craters, rifts, and silence.
"Stage Three… complete," he said, smirking.
A new notification blinked before him:
[Stage 3 Cleared — Time: 1 Minute 47 Seconds]
[Total Eliminations: 1000]
[Proceed to Stage 4: 10,000 Kage-Level Lizardmen?]
His eyes gleamed.
"Bring it on."
Soon after the devastation settled, Reizan hovered above the scorched battlefield, his golden-white Byakugan glowing with layered concentric rings. Around him, nine Truth-Seeking Balls now orbited in smooth, perfect harmony — each one pulsing with intensified yin-yang energy.
"A ninth one, huh?" Reizan muttered, his voice low and calm, yet crackling with divine energy. "So my yin-yang mastery has grown again… but I'm still not at the Advanced state. I'll need more pressure — more worthy prey."
Just then, an intense wave of elemental energy pulsed from the far end of the battlefield — like a thunderstorm crashing into a volcano.
Reizan turned his head, then vanished with a blur, streaking across the sky like a divine comet. Within seconds, he hovered before an awe-inspiring sight.
A vast army had arrived.
Over 10,000 Lizardmen, arranged in tight combat formations, stretched as far as his enhanced eyes could see. This was no ragtag force — they bore plated obsidian armor glowing with runes, and each radiated energy equivalent to a Kage-tier shinobi. Their auras melded into a churning vortex of primal fire, stone, wind, lightning, and something darker — death energy.
Among them, Reizan spotted hundreds of Peak Masters — creatures whose energy surged like Tobirama or 3rd Raikage A in their prime. One Lizardman, a towering crimson-scaled beast draped in ceremonial bone-gold armor, stepped forward. He stood at least fifteen feet tall, with curved horns and six swords mounted on his back.
"So... you're the one," the warlord rasped, his voice transmitted through the system's translation filter. "The outsider Devil... you will be erased for your arrogance!"
All the Lizardmen roared in unison, shaking the sky. The ground trembled from the sheer pressure of their killing intent.
Reizan hovered higher, staring down at the horde.
"You bring ten thousand to kill one?" He smirked. "That's generous. I'll return the favor... with extinction."
Without a single seal or chant, Reizan raised one hand — and the air cracked.
His nine Truth-Seeking Balls began spinning rapidly, forming a three-ringed orbit behind him. They shimmered with divine authority, their destructive potential humming louder than thunder.
Then, Reizan blinked — and vanished.
He appeared right in front of the first row of Lizardmen. One blink later, a black pulse erupted in every direction. The entire front line — two hundred warriors — disintegrated into ash instantly.
A split-second passed.
The army charged.
Flying Lizardmen launched coordinated lightning barrages from the sky, while the elemental troops below summoned massive walls of lava, cutting off Reizan's escape from all sides. Spears of hardened crystal shot up from the ground, trying to impale him midair.
Reizan rotated his body midair, slicing horizontally with a pitch-black blade forged from one of his orbs — a custom extension of the Sword of Nunoboko.
The strike didn't just cleave the attacks. It shattered the environment. The sky split with a ripple, and the terrain beneath erupted into a kilometer-wide trench.
Dozens of fliers were caught in the slash wave and vaporized.
Then came the real shock.
Reizan twisted his wrist, and the spinning orbs behind him pulsed as one. He didn't say a word.
Nine beams of compressed yin-yang energy launched outward in spirals, like divine serpents of annihilation, weaving through the army and colliding in a star-shaped explosion. The force alone flattened over a thousand Lizardmen, their ashes scattered like confetti in a celestial storm.
The crimson-scaled warlord roared, his swords unsheathing and glowing with black fire. He lunged forward, using speed that surpassed even some Supremes. For a moment, time itself seemed to flicker.
But Reizan — calm, godlike — raised a finger.
Ping.
A single Truth-Seeking Ball shot from behind and collided with the warlord mid-flight. The explosion was so dense that space folded inward. When the light cleared, all that remained was a crater within a crater.
"You had numbers," Reizan whispered, landing softly amidst the battlefield. "But not fate."
Only a few dozen Lizardmen remained, trembling.
Reizan looked down at them, the wind carrying ash across his black armor and divine cloak.
Then he raised a single hand again — and snapped his fingers.
The final Truth-Seeking Ball expanded, then imploded on itself — releasing a devastation wave that swept the entire field clean in less than three seconds.
When the light faded, Reizan stood alone, untouched, his shadow cast across an endless abyss.
"A bunch of unworthy ants… although you put up a fight, it was nothing in my eyes."
Reizan floated above the battlefield, his pitch-black armor gleaming beneath the flickering desert sun. Around him, the last remnants of scorched terrain still crumbled inward, collapsing into the colossal abyss — a sinkhole so deep, even his Byakugan couldn't see its end. The ground groaned, like the very fabric of space was still reeling from the destruction.
He folded his arms, cloak billowing behind him, the nine Truth-Seeking Balls calmly orbiting once again.