Empty Stare

One hour into the confrontation...

Takara wordlessly gazed at Toneri's corpse at his feet, with open eyelids revealing empty eye sockets. There were no tears, cuts, a puddle of blood, or anything nearby that could betray how the last survivor of the Moon died.

He was just there, sitting on the ground with his back against the wall, wearing a confused expression as if he didn't understand how he ended up there.

...As long as one ignored the bullet hole in his forehead, next to the straight line of blood trailing from the back of his head and rising a few inches up the white lunar rock wall.

"I... thought he could defend against that," commented a puppet of Tania Degurechaff, averting her gaze with guilty behavior as she held her rifle on her back.

Takara glanced at her and then back at Toneri, repeating the process twice before simply ceasing to care.

Things had not gone as he had hoped at all.

Yes, the battle between puppets seemed destined to be a lasting confrontation, enough for Toneri to feel that things were awry and rush towards the Energy Ship, where Takara was waiting to confront him personally in a carefully planned ambush.

Even as he waited, he was planning on how to deal with the golem.

And then things went awry.

Setting aside the first... fifteen seconds, his puppets completely overwhelmed Toneri's puppets like tigers entering a flock of sheep in a small enclosure.

He could have used only a third, no, a sixth, and it still wouldn't have changed anything.

Too easy, but upon inspecting the remains of one among the pile now being gathered for further study, he realized the problem.

A problem for Toneri, for him, it was rather fortunate.

The puppets were old, quite old.

Yes, it was evident that whether it was the wood or the metal used in their creation, they were of high quality, undoubtedly imported from the planet since there were no resources to exploit on the Moon, at least, those must have been the thoughts of the ancestors of this place.

They really didn't realize the immense amount of metals, rare earths, and rare minerals they had around!

Did they really believe there was only stone and dust?

Takara couldn't help but laugh at the ignorance of those people, especially because now he could prepare to mine those juicy resources for himself.

After checking the seal.

He wasn't going to make a rookie mistake by digging thinking that it couldn't affect Kaguya's seal. He had to make sure of that at least.

Returning to Toneri's puppets, it seemed that as the clan's population dwindled, the experts in maintaining and making more of them fell.

So the puppets accumulated small amounts of damage and wear over the years, without receiving maintenance to restore them, and from the burns he located, it seemed that even Toneri was not familiar with the recharging process they had and made mistakes that only the unprepared would make.

So there was no grand battle.

Toneri realized that the puppets could barely buy him time, and at the moment he was going to use them as a shield and run to the Energy Ship, a shot hit him in the forehead, and he died.

No fight, no grand speeches, and no last words.

Bullet + Brain = Instant death.

Takara wouldn't even blame the puppet for managing to save him work; he was speechless at the fact that someone like Toneri, with his great backing and training, didn't even know or couldn't use such a "basic" technique as the Substitution Technique.

In fact, he didn't remember him using that technique in the movie; he was more about dodging using speed, but that was when he entered the convenient powered-up state due to the plot he subsequently achieved.

Or perhaps his reflexes couldn't catch up with his perception to avoid the bullet?

Takara checked; it was the real flesh-and-blood Toneri, not a counterfeit.

That, along with the fact that the golem he thought would give him trouble collapsed the moment Toneri died, also helped to secure his identity.

"Not what I expected, but I'm content," Takara said.

Takara opened the workshop door with a mental command to Nakime and summoned some puppets of Shizune and Tsunade, who took Toneri's body to see if it was possible to cultivate Otsutsuki wood with Hashirama's cells.

At the same time, Takara reserved some vials of his blood for later use.

Like using a drop to channel the Edo Tensei into Toneri, unconscious, and see if he could extract anything useful from his knowledge or if his chakra had any useful racial properties.

After all, while puppets and studying Kaguya's seal were important points of his journey to the moon, he didn't forget that he also had to study how to turn his Byakugan into the Tenseigan.

It was also a part for which he drained blood from Toneri's body, but first, he had to locate and check the library, check the Energy Ship...

An approximate image of his future passed through his head.

Using the combined power of Nox's abilities with Ryumyaku, along with the slug sage mode and the chakra mode of the Tenseigan, added to a state in which he would be the jinchuriki of the rebirth eggs of the biju...

He shook his head and refocused on the present; he had no time to waste.

The gears kept turning, and his actions caused a completely different flow of history; he needed to be prepared for the butterfly effect's outcomes.