Zero

Zero, written with the kanji for the numeral, serves as an antagonist organisation in the fighting game Naruto x Boruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm Connections. Its founder and commander is Merz, a shinobi once tied to Amegakure. The collective draws its identity from a single ambition: to reduce everything that exists back to nothing. Merz reasoned that if strife could be scrubbed away entirely, the very role of the ninja would lose all purpose, so the faction set out to dissolve the connections and shared history that bind people together.

Merz built the network by gathering people who, like himself, felt cast aside once the fighting stopped. Many had lost everything in earlier conflicts and found no outlet for vengeance in the calm that followed the Fourth Shinobi World War. Some operatives buried themselves inside positions of influence, planting listening devices in sensitive locations that reached as far as the Hokage's own office, while others bankrolled the cause. The faction's ambitions surged after Teguse abandoned Konoha, carrying off cutting-edge scientific ninja tools along with a duplicate of a text on Warring States sealing. Using that knowledge, Zero released Nanashi Uchiha from her seal and paired her abilities with Teguse's engineering to build Ninja Heroes, a game designed to blot out the world's memories and bonds and spark a fifth global war. They worked out of a base on Mount Higakure, situated to the northwest of Konoha.

That stronghold was leveled during the ensuing clash, and Nanashi perished after being compelled to fight, having passed a portion of her chakra to Boruto. The scheme unraveled completely when Boruto, aided by Toneri Otsutsuki, traveled into the past and rewrote Nanashi's fate so that she was never sealed in the first place. With that change, the group's designs never took shape, and its remnants were swiftly exposed and broken apart under Sasuke's direction.

Merz stands at the center of the organisation. In his earlier days he served Amegakure as a shinobi and became a fierce devotee of the village's ruler, the Akatsuki figurehead known as Pain, standing beside him through the village's internal war and losing relatives to the conflicts that raged between the great powers. When Naruto Uzumaki turned Pain from his path and Pain later died, Merz found himself cast off, and he clung to Pain's original vision of peace while warping it into something far darker. Though the Five Great Shinobi Countries had reconciled after the war, Merz saw that truce as nothing more than a gap of non-conflict propped up by memory and attachment. Among those he drew into his operation were Nanashi Uchiha, whose sealed powers proved central to the plan, and the Konoha defector Teguse, whose technical mastery made the Ninja Heroes scheme possible.