Following Isshiki's introduction, I was back to dodging his attempts to skewer my body with rods. Meanwhile, my body, driven by the synergy of merging chakras, had begun to visibly transform.
My height was closing in on six and a half feet as the muscles across my frame swelled and pulled taut like cables of adamantine steel. My clothes couldn't keep up with the expansion and tore apart, leaving only my pants, elastic enough to survive, now riding up like shorts. My skin deepened to a dull gray, hardening many times over and thickening slightly to cushion the blows I was about to deliver. Then, from my arms, legs, and back, protrusions began erupting, hollow at their cores and shaped like jet nozzles. They gave my chakra concentrated release points, instantly multiplying my maneuverability.
I fired a burst of thrust from them and shot upward in a jagged line, simultaneously projecting my chakra outward into the world.
"This leaden curtain just isn't doing it for me today," I said, spreading my arms wide, hanging directly beneath the canopy of dark, swollen clouds.
One moment. Then the sky shuddered and collapsed. The vast ocean of clouds crumpled inward like a blanket yanked from all sides, plummeting as one enormous sphere directly onto Isshiki's position, only to be ionized a second later by the lightning chakra I blasted into it.
The world was swallowed by the toll of thunder. Thousands, millions, of plasma discharges detonated the surrounding air with concussive expansions, breeding a chaos of overlapping shockwaves from within.
Had that storm sphere, crackling with lightning, materialized over a city instead of an empty wasteland, nothing would have been left but dust. But the one person standing inside the apocalypse didn't seem to care.
The sphere began to shrink before my eyes. Without so much as a flinch, the Ōtsutsuki drank in every ounce of the lightning chakra.
Only when a small, chakra-drained glow, barely the size of a ball, floated in front of Isshiki did he bother to acknowledge it. With casual contempt, he flicked it away with a wave of his free hand.
"Shinjutsu techniques…" he murmured. "Your ninjutsu shares a resemblance to those abilities."
The cubes orbiting him had taken no damage either. Remarkable.
"What are you talking about?" I pressed, hanging above him. The Mangekyō flared in my eyes as my chakra, along with every sage-energy current I could command, surged into it.
What flooded toward Isshiki next wasn't a wave. It was a point-blank battering ram of Amaterasu, far more complex and potent than the eye technique in its base form.
But the cubes folded themselves into a funnel before their master and began rotating, dismantling my technique with pulses of chakra before it could reach him. The alien himself extended one hand and, once again, swallowed my attack whole.
Energy attacks are just wasted breath on this guy, aren't they.
"I have studied your human jutsu," he began, with the faintest trace of reproach in his voice, since I, being the uncivilized sort, had asked a question and then refused to let him answer. "They are nothing but pale shadows of absolute jutsu. Shinjutsu, the arts my clan wields. Shibai, however, stepped beyond the will of the Ōtsutsuki. He became a god."
This time, I actually let him finish. But, possessed of spectacular shamelessness, while Isshiki delivered his monologue I quietly extended an almost thread-thin probe of chakra behind his back. The probe was so fine and imperceptible it would have been nearly invisible even to a powerful Byakugan. Its purpose: to prep a particularly fast technique for what came next.
Another teleport, and I was behind him. My body and arm ignited with chakra as the thrust from the nozzle protrusions accelerated the strike, loading it with sheer, titanic force.
Closing in centimeter by centimeter, the space beneath my palm warped, unable to contain what it was carrying. But Isshiki's body flickered, the yellow dōjutsu in his eye socket blazing to life, and in an instant he shrank to a microscopic scale and vanished from the world entirely.
I yanked my arm back, but couldn't contain all the energy. The air beneath me ignited into plasma across dozens of meters, and the destructive wave that followed tore into the earth below, carving a trail of craters and leveled trees for kilometers in every direction.
"Damn it," I muttered, frustrated at not wrapping this up cleanly. Then I surveyed the damage, gave a quiet snort, and teleported across thousands of kilometers.
The transition took less than a breath, and beneath me the sand oceans of the Land of Wind stretched open. Above, instead of evening, it was so early in the morning that sunlight only showed at altitude, barely kissing the desolate desert below.
A pulse of sensor chakra swept across the earth, carrying frequencies I recognized. Then, close by, a spatial rift tore open in the darkness my eyes could easily pierce, and Isshiki stepped out of it. Wine glass still in hand.
"I regret to say it, but your existence threatens my plans," the dandy said, and he genuinely sounded regretful. "I have no choice. I will eliminate you."
"The feeling is mutual."
"Then let's not waste time." He drained the last of the wine in one clean tilt, let the glass fall spinning toward the desert floor, and raised both hands skyward.
The already-dark sky went darker still. Literally millions of black, sharpened columns materialized in it, along with an array of other bladed objects of every shape.
Looking up, my Mangekyō began autonomously tracking the staggering number of motion vectors for all of it. There was no outrunning it by simply putting distance between us. It happened faster than a blink, and the world was consumed in black lines as the Ōtsutsuki's attack came down.
I chose not to gamble. I simply stepped into the space within my own eyes. I stood on the gray prism there for a couple of seconds, then returned to the world.
"Not bad," I said, watching Isshiki lower his hands. Then I snapped sideways via teleport as a pair of cubes tried to crush me. "One-one. And I think it's time to play my trump card."
Black fūin markings spread across my hand as chakra ignited at my fingertips. Then they touched the seal that had just materialized on my stomach.
For the fragment of my consciousness that slipped inward, the world blurred and resolved into dark corridors stretching away into the distance. The squat walls around me gave off a faint, sickly yellow, while the ceiling was almost entirely covered in pipes that snaked down along the walls at intervals.
There were many passages here. But stepping down onto a floor sheeted in shallow water, my avatar in this inner world moved with purpose toward a specific, spacious chamber.
Soon, enormous iron-grated gates came into view, one panel bound shut by a slip of paper bearing kanji. Beyond the gate, the darkness showed nothing. Yet even now, a low rumble was rolling out of it.
As I drew closer, I was noticed. Something began moving behind the towering metal bars.
Two massive red irises ignited within the cage, pupils drawn to slits. Each one the size of a man.
"Rrrgh…"
A growl that deepened for a moment, and a gust of wind hit me like a wall. The figure inside the cage stepped closer to the bars.
"Wandered in all the way to the end of the road… You're finally here…" the deepest voice I'd ever heard rolled out from the Nine-Tailed Fox, measured yet thunderous. "Has another jinchūriki come crawling to me for my power?"
With mild irritation and far greater condescension, he lowered his massive head to get a better look at me standing some ten meters back.
"Worthless little human. Speak your piece."
"Got it in one," I said, my expression flat. To the Fox's visible surprise, the cage between us began to open.
At the same moment, with a few adjustments, my chakra moved to suppress the unsealing of Minato and Kushina's Shadow Clones. The Fox, being quick on the uptake, arranged his face into an expression of towering arrogance and raised one paw.
"Die!" His claws swung toward me.
But a flash of my Mangekyō, and the bijū froze. His arm stopped a bare few centimeters from my face. The shadow of visible strain crossed his features as he fought to complete the movement.
"Once, not by your own will perhaps, you caused me pain," I said, tilting my head up to meet the Fox's gaze. "Call it a contradiction to my stated principles, but I have never placed myself beneath this world. So accept my repayment. Know agony."
One second, and my chakra drove itself deeper inside the Fox. All to force his energy to begin literally breaking apart. It was a technique analogous to the Eight Inner Gates, the Hachimon, but not for me. For the bijū.
The Fox jerked. Bloody veins spread across the whites of his eyes from the pain. Then an unfathomably vast ocean of bright chakra tore out of him, with a pronounced tilt toward Yang.
Back in the real world, dark fūin lines spread across my entire body as the energy came flooding in.
"Hrrgh—" I bit down, fighting to hold the current.
But.
A blinding flash blazed across the still-dark sky and lit up dozens of kilometers of desert below as though a second sun had ignited. In its wake came pressure so crushing it was literally driving the sand down into the earth for kilometers around the standing figure, fusing it solid.
Nearby, shielding his face with one hand, Isshiki watched the spectacle with strained attention from inside the protective cage his cubes had formed around him. His dōjutsu, cutting through the searing light, saw not just a blinding flare where his opponent stood, but a clearly defined axis rising from the scorched, ashen sand all the way into the sky above.
But that was not the end. The axis faded, and in its place a radiant figure appeared, wrapped in white.
Energy. Power tearing me apart from within.
And at the same time, as it was being absorbed, something on the edge of my awareness began flickering. Something dimly familiar.
Something closer to Hashirama's sage-chakra than anything else I'd felt. Nearer. Stronger. Meaner.
"This… isn't… enough…" The realization crystallized, and my distorted voice cut through the relentless roar.
My arms shot outward, fingers driving into the very fabric of space itself, bending it. Then I pulled.
The world around me groaned.
With that gesture, two miniature black holes came spiraling into existence on either side of me, drinking in the light and spinning into radiant disks. The world below, which had been compressing under the weight of the pressure, seemed to inhale and then reversed itself. The ocean of sand that had been driven downward erupted upward in particles, swarming toward me, cocooning me in an ever-growing sphere.
Inside, scraping for scraps of conscious thought just to keep my own body from tearing apart, let alone to do anything else, I began drawing sage-chakra from everything around me. The Fox's power was crushing, but by absorbing specifically the Yin-spectrum sage-chakra, I was counterbalancing it.
As the energy approached its ceiling, by my will the breakdown inside the Fox ceased, leaving him to collapse, withered down to skin and bone. Then the gates in my inner world began their slow, grinding closure.
The sand sphere, which had by now grown to three kilometers in diameter, began to darken visibly for any outside observer, until within seconds it had become a mass of black, dry dust.
Just moments later, after a teleport, my feet hit the top of the sphere with a heavy crack as I landed on it. My body had transformed again, a distorted, shadow-drenched Yin-clad figure, five meters tall. A brilliance of white light, like the core of a supernova, had concentrated in my chest, illuminating everything around me.
The aura of uncontrolled power no longer poured off me. Only the space a few meters around me continued to warp.
The sphere beneath had contracted to roughly two and a half kilometers. Gathering myself, I seized it with my chakra, then sent it moving in a curved line. The little black planetoid ignited instantly from atmospheric friction, streaking at incredible velocity before being hurled toward Isshiki, who had been watching the whole spectacle.
But instead of destroying the alien, the "meteor," almost at its destination, shrank to the size of a small pebble in an instant, which the Ōtsutsuki casually caught between two fingers. We locked eyes. Then the "pebble" disappeared and reappeared directly above me in its full magnitude.
The deafening thunder of its superheated body, my instantaneous teleport to a high altitude, and from there I watched the meteor slam into the desert plain below. It unleashed colossal energy as it punched through the earth to staggering depth, generating a monstrous shockwave. The blast was so tremendous it left me ringing, and the distant red of dawn was painted a sinister crimson from the heat. The entire continent shuddered as though struck by a giant's hammer, and where the meteor had struck, a new mountain was rising from the rubble.
I didn't rush to move. Visions filled my head. I felt, or thought I felt, the emotions of everything around me. Of the planet itself. And one emotion stood out with startling force.
"Is that why you Ōtsutsuki need the Tree? Because you can't absorb a planet's chakra on your own?" My question cut through the air as the rumble of the sphere's impact began to settle.
Isshiki, watching the aftermath with his usual composure, gave a single slow shake of his head.
"Worlds do not simply accept outsiders. Harvesting genes through the Jūbi is more efficient. Even bearing one-ninth of it is an extraordinary burden," he said, pointing at me.
"Yeah…" My body was shaking now, shivering as though a fever had set in. My voice had dropped, rasping and guttural, far deeper and louder, carrying across the landscape like rolling thunder. "I can feel it. This energy, like a venomous snake whispering of my own death. But at the same time it demands your destruction with a force that won't be denied!"
Clenching my clawed hand, I channeled energy into it, and the space around me fractured with a grinding shriek. Around me, the shape of an enormous black dragon had begun to coalesce, its eyes blazing to life as twin white searchlights stretching off into the distance.
Seeing the technique taking form, Isshiki teleported to a safer distance and positioned his cubes in a funnel across what he assumed would be my path. But I didn't go straight. I went up, arcing high, then pivoted and came down vertically on Isshiki, who'd already reoriented his cubes upward to meet me.
The dragon, warping the space around it and tearing through it as it passed, didn't even register the cubes it erased from existence on its way through. Then it plunged dozens of kilometers deep into the earth, boring an opening more than a hundred meters wide.
The surface shook immediately. And with every passing moment, the tremors grew. The colossal energy the dragon had carried was transferring into the earth itself until the tectonic plates began to move, radiating shockwaves across the entire continent.
The gaping, lightless chasm left behind soon began to fill with red, as Isshiki, reappearing in the world, looked down into it. Understanding where this was heading, he teleported a couple of kilometers sideways, just in time to watch a torrent of magma erupt from the depths of the planet like a volcano, like another axis, blasting skyward. The molten sand around the opening was swelling on the spot, rapidly forming a massive volcanic structure with a new mountain beside it.
Watching the cataclysm unfold, Isshiki didn't immediately notice me materialize beside him, until my massive strike was already swinging for him.
The Ōtsutsuki barely managed to shrink away, and my blow sent a white-hot wave angling outward and down. The air along its path ignited from the friction on contact, covering the desert for a moment in a rolling sea of plasma. Another shattering peal of thunder cracked through the air.
In that same instant, Isshiki, regrouping, made another attempt to crush me with incoming cubes. I answered by detonating my energy outward in both directions, triggering a white burst of force from the impact. The cubes were disintegrated on the spot.
Need to wrap this up faster. I won't last long in this form, the thought lit through my mind, and I surged back into the attack.
"Dark emotions saturate every inch of this world's chakra. Concentrating it in myself, I feel it more clearly than ever. But is this just the world rejecting outsiders? Or does it have very specific reasons to hate you this much?!"
I pressed the question while landing blow after blow.
"You are perceptive," was all he offered in return.
The world buckled under the concussive exchange, and in the wake of my strikes, scorched canyons tore open stretching for kilometers in every direction.
Now feeling the dark emotions within the creature too, I was finding Isshiki even faster, while the Ōtsutsuki himself seemed slower. More powerful as I was, I was beginning to read his shrinking before he executed it, while Isshiki now needed to maintain distance just to have time to dodge at all.
My attention grazed over two more seals, two more tailed beasts. It felt like if I played every card at once, the fight would end on that same beat. But the real question was whether I'd survive that. I had serious doubts.
Isshiki kept trying to demolish me with cubes or trap me in waves of them, while I kept trying to close into hand-to-hand range, teleporting to him again and again.
In a short span, I'd thrown an enormous amount at him. Not just monstrous strikes that tore the world below into bare stretches of blasted earth reaching to the horizon, but other techniques too.
Enormous golden palms summoned through Hashirama's senjutsu slammed shut a fraction after Isshiki had managed to slip sideways. Rods I'd scattered in every direction to construct a cubic crimson barrier turned out to be useless when the Ōtsutsuki shrank down and slipped through a spatial technique, while inside the barrier a landslide of black columns, cubes, and rods erupted and blew it apart from within. A particularly close eye-lock and the Izanami I unleashed, which drained no small amount of my chakra, produced zero effect: Isshiki's body had moved before the chakra reached him. And I honestly wasn't certain it would have worked even on a direct hit, given the alien anatomy involved.
I ran combination after combination. Not one landed.
We were both getting tired.
At one point I misjudged, stepped into a massive rod, and lost an arm. It spun away ahead of me as I dropped back and down, putting distance between myself and the rods still angling to tear into me.
Isshiki, finally sensing my error, closed in. The nearer the range, the easier it was to direct his flying objects.
With cubes coming in from behind, I chose to go forward instead, reversing direction hard, back into territory where the rods had already cleared out, though Isshiki himself was closing that distance. My Mangekyō caught it: dozens of microscopic cubes erupting from Isshiki's space, arraying themselves in a wall between us, already waiting for the moment I'd close in. In answer, my remaining arm ignited in a coating of gray chakra, and my opponent clicked his tongue, annoyed I'd spotted another of his tricks. He decided to hold then, to grow the cubes and try to crush me with them regardless, since I'd apparently charged energy specifically to break them.
Except something black flickered, and just a moment later Isshiki looked down with a stunned expression to find a clean hole punched through the upper portion of his chest, while my own transformed limb came hurtling back toward me like a needle.
Desperation swallowed the Ōtsutsuki. And then uncontainable fury.
The cubes, with me already among them, expanded instantly. But all they crushed was the arm I'd committed to that strike, because once again I'd gotten out via spatial technique. Straight to Isshiki, who had begun to fall.
The energy concentrated in that limb surged back into me, and my claw-like fingers drove into the side of Isshiki's skull, wrenching it around and seizing hold of the unique dōjutsu. Then a kick from my leg sent him flying clear of the cubes beginning their own descent.
We came down onto the scorched sand.
My severed arm was already growing back before my eyes, wet with regeneration, lengthening into something with even longer claws than before. I began moving toward Isshiki.
"The Byakugan has a blind spot. And you have impressive regeneration…" I noted the obvious: that with a chest cavity punched clean through and pieces of his brain scattered across the desert, the alien was still alive. Still slowly pulling himself back together. "But it doesn't matter. Your path has no more meaning than your healing, Ōtsutsuki. Devouring worlds through the Tree to grow stronger. Being devoured by the Tree to be reborn. Repeating the cycle, over and over."
I raised my regenerated arm and drove it into Isshiki's chest. Wrapped in the energy of my soul, it reached inside and drew out the powerful, ancient core of the Ōtsutsuki's soul.
"Everything is dust if there is nothing left to be reborn into…"
My jaws opened wide, and a pulsing sphere hung above them.
The body of Isshiki, no longer alive, could only watch as the creature consumed the soul it had housed until now.
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