Chapter 127: Tsukuyomi
The Streets of Dressrosa
"WHAAAAAT!!!"
Usopp's scream echoed across the rooftops of Dressrosa, a sound of pure, existential horror that cut through the chaos like a knife. His eyes—what was visible of them through the swelling—were fixed on the projection screen with the desperate intensity of a man watching his own funeral.
"FIVE STARS?! FIVE HUNDRED MILLION BERRIES?! THAT'S MORE THAN LUFFY! THAT'S MORE THAN ITACHI! THAT'S—THAT'S—"
"God Usopp, we're counting on you!"
The voice came from directly behind him.
Usopp turned, very slowly, to find a group of pirates—the same pirates who had been weeping at his feet moments ago, the same pirates who had called him their savior—advancing toward him with weapons drawn. Their eyes gleamed with the particular light of men who had done the mental math and arrived at a very unfortunate conclusion.
"Your sacrifice won't be in vain!"
"Five hundred million berries... that's enough to retire forever!"
"Just hold still, God Usopp! This will only hurt for a second!"
"HELP! RETREAT! RETREAT! GET ME OUT OF HERE!"
The Tontatta beneath Usopp's feet—who had been carrying him on a platform of woven leaves—immediately scrambled into action. "PROTECT USOLANDO! DON'T LET THEM GET CLOSE!"
"QUICK! THIS WAY! THROUGH THE ALLEY!"
"AAAAAAH! WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING TO ME?!"
The Apex of the Birdcage
High above the chaos, Itachi Uchiha had reached the Birdcage's highest point.
From here, the full scope of Doflamingo's atrocity was visible. The white threads descended in perfect geometric formation, forming a dome of death that enclosed the entire kingdom. But Itachi's Sharingan had already identified the secondary structure—the irregular threads that branched from the main lattice, snaking downward into the city below. Parasite strings. Thousands of them. Each one attached to a citizen, a Marine, a pirate—puppeting them into Doflamingo's war of all against all.
The Wind-Forest Fire gleamed in his grip. He coated the blade in Armament Haki—the invisible armor hardening to a visible sheen of black along the sword's cutting edge. He raised the blade high.
And struck.
CLANG.
The thread vibrated but held. The impact echoed across the dome, a ringing note that sang through the entire structure.
"Sturdy."
In the palace, Doflamingo felt the vibration through his strings. His grin widened. "Someone's attacking the main control threads? At the apex? Fuffuffu! What a joke! My strings aren't something that can be cut by—"
SNAP.
The string in his left hand went slack.
SNAP. SNAP. SNAP.
One after another, the parasite threads dissolved. Every control line. Every puppeteer's strand. Every filament of Doflamingo's will that had been driving innocent people to murder each other—severed in the span of a single heartbeat.
Doflamingo's grin froze on his face.
"WHAT?!"
The Streets Below
All across Dressrosa, the killing stopped.
Civilians who had been strangling their neighbors suddenly collapsed, their hands releasing, their eyes clearing. Marines who had been firing on civilians dropped their rifles and stared at their own trembling fingers. Pirates who had been cutting down everything in their path stumbled to a halt, their faces slack with confusion.
"What... what was I doing...?"
"I was trying to kill my own son... why... why would I...?"
"Look! LOOK AT THE SKY!"
Every head in Dressrosa turned upward.
The Birdcage was burning.
Black flames—the absolute, unquenchable flames of Amaterasu—raced along the apex of the dome. They consumed the parasite threads first, chasing down every strand that had been used to control the innocent. Then they spread to the main lattice, clinging to the white strings with hungry persistence, wreathing the entire cage in a crown of dark fire.
And beside those flames, silhouetted against the inferno, stood a single figure in a black cloak.
"That's... that's the three-star prisoner!"
"Uchiha Itachi! The Hellfire!"
"HE'S BURNING THE BIRDCAGE!"
"The Birdcage is ON FIRE!!"
Itachi pressed his palm against his right eye, feeling the familiar warmth of blood trickling between his fingers. The Amaterasu had spread farther than he intended—the flame's hunger was difficult to restrain once unleashed. But the parasite threads were gone. Every last one.
He raised the Den Den Mushi to his lips.
"Fujitora. That was the first thing I needed to do."
"Follow your conscience now. Rescue the people who are suffering here."
The Admiral's voice cracked with emotion when he responded. "This old man... I had no idea how to counter that technique. So many innocents were about to die by each other's hands, and I was powerless..."
"Gratitude is unnecessary. We proceed as planned."
"Then let us begin, Itachi-san—"
The wind screamed.
Itachi hurled himself sideways, the Black Fire Crow banking hard as a razor-thin line of death carved through the space where his head had been. He spun, the Wind-Forest Fire rising to guard—
And Doflamingo crashed into him with the force of a meteor.
"YOU BASTARD! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!"
The Warlord's kick drove Itachi from the sky, the force of the blow sending him hurtling toward the ruined city below. Itachi's blade caught the impact, deflecting the worst of it, but the sheer power behind the strike was undeniable. He crashed through a crumbling wall, through a collapsed ceiling, through stone and wood and shattered glass, before finally arresting his momentum against a fallen pillar.
Doflamingo descended from above, walking on strings that materialized beneath his feet with every step. His pink coat billowed. His grin had returned—but it was strained now, stretched thin over something that looked very much like fury.
"Except for that damn Usopp..." His fingers twitched, and a dozen strings lashed out, carving through the building behind Itachi like a hot knife through butter. "YOU are the one I want to kill most right now!"
"He came out of the palace!" someone screamed from the streets. "Doflamingo himself! RUN!"
The civilians scattered. The pirates fled. Within seconds, the ruins were empty of everyone except the Warlord and the shinobi.
Itachi rose from the rubble, the Black Fire Crow dissolving behind him. His hands moved through a sequence of seals with the fluid speed of a lifetime's practice.
"Fire Release: Phoenix Sage Fire Technique."
A storm of flames erupted from his lips—dozens of fireballs, each one tracking, each one homing in on Doflamingo from a different angle. The Warlord leaped, twisted, contorted through the gaps between the flames with the inhuman flexibility of a man who had mastered aerial combat.
"You think—"
Itachi burst through the firestorm.
Steel met string. The Wind-Forest Fire, coated in Armament Haki, clashed against Doflamingo's razor threads in a shower of sparks. Itachi pressed the attack—thrust, slash, feint, thrust again—driving the Warlord back across the ruined plaza.
"Armed Haki!" Doflamingo's grin twisted. He pulled back his fist—Haki hardening to gleaming black—and drove it directly toward Itachi's face.
And then, mid-strike, he spun one hundred and eighty degrees.
His leg scythed through the "Itachi" behind him—the clone that had been poised to strike his blind spot—while his fist continued forward, crashing into the Susanoo's skeletal ribcage that the real Itachi had manifested at the last possible instant.
"HEY HEY HEY!"
The impact shattered stone and scattered black flames across the ruins.
"You think my Observation Haki doesn't exist?! A trick like that might work on small-fry, but I've been reading your movements since the moment this fight started!"
Itachi slid backward, his feet carving furrows in the rubble. The Susanoo's ribcage had absorbed the blow, but the force still resonated through his body. Doflamingo's Haki was formidable—not as overwhelming as Fujitora's gravity, but sharper. More focused. The kind of Haki that came from decades of absolute confidence in one's own supremacy.
"You're right." Itachi's voice was calm. "You did see through the clone."
"So what?! Clone techniques, transformation tricks—I don't need to understand them to destroy them!"
Doflamingo's fist crashed into Susanoo's skeletal arm. The construct held—but barely. Cracks spiderwebbed across the spectral bone.
"Fuffuffu! I think I've figured out your ability, Uchiha Itachi!" Doflamingo extended his finger, and a bullet-thin string coated in Armament Haki lanced toward the Susanoo's core. "Let's see how tough this thing really—"
The string shattered on impact.
Doflamingo's eyes widened fractionally.
"...Interesting."
His Observation Haki flared—tracking Itachi's movements, reading the flow of chakra, cataloguing every possible avenue of attack. And in that moment of analytical focus, his gaze drifted upward.
Directly into Itachi's eyes.
The Mangekyō Sharingan spun.
And Doflamingo fell into hell.
Tsukuyomi
Fire.
The smell of burning flesh. The sound of screaming. The heat—unbearable, inescapable, pressing in from all sides.
He was a child again. Chains bit into his wrists. The mob surrounded him, their faces twisted with hatred, their torches raised high.
"Father! FATHER! SAVE ME!"
"Please! I'm begging you! Let my children go! They've done nothing wrong!"
His mother's voice. His father's blood. The palace that had been his home reduced to ash and cinder.
"Why?! WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?!"
Doflamingo's mind reeled. This isn't real. This CAN'T be real. It's an illusion—it has to be an illusion—!
His Conqueror's Haki erupted. The spiritual pressure that had brought armies to their knees, that had made lesser men faint with a single glance, surged outward in a wave of absolute dominion. He would shatter this false reality. He would break through and make the illusionist pay—
And then a blade pierced through him.
Not his body. His soul.
The Haki he had gathered scattered like smoke in a hurricane. The Conqueror's pressure evaporated. And the nightmare—the nightmare he had spent forty years burying beneath layers of cruelty and conquest—continued to play out before his eyes.
The worst night of his life. The night the world had taught him what it meant to be a Celestial Dragon without the protection of the Celestial Dragons. The night he had learned that the only law in this world was power.
And the night he had sworn that he would never, ever be powerless again.
The Ruins — Reality
"Interesting."
Itachi's voice was quiet, almost contemplative. Blood trickled from his right eye, tracing a crimson line down his cheek. The Tsukuyomi had required more effort than anticipated—Doflamingo's will was monstrous, his mental defenses formidable even without Haki to reinforce them.
But he had found the cracks.
"I've discovered a method to prevent you from breaking the Tsukuyomi."
The Susanoo's skeletal arm reformed around Itachi's own limb, and he reached forward, closing the spectral fingers around Doflamingo's frozen body. The Warlord's eyes were glazed, unseeing, trapped in a nightmare that only Itachi could witness.
This man... he endured something similar to what I endured. And he became what he is because of it.
The Susanoo's grip tightened. Doflamingo's bones creaked.
I became an avenger who would die for his village.
He became a monster who would watch the world burn.
Was the difference between us always so small?
The Susanoo's fist began to close—
"TIGER...!"
Itachi hurled himself backward, the Susanoo dissolving as a wave of gravitational force carved through the space where he had been standing. The slash—compressed gravity shaped into a blade of absolute destruction—continued past him, past the ruins, past everything in its path, and detonated against the Birdcage's wall with enough force to shake the entire kingdom.
The dust settled.
Fujitora stood at the edge of the ruined plaza, his staff-sword extended, his blind eyes fixed on the motionless figure of Doflamingo.
"Tenyasha."
His voice was heavy.
"In light of the threat posed by the Straw Hat Pirates to civilian safety—and in order to ensure the protection of Dressrosa's innocent citizens—"
He planted his blade in the earth.
"This old man has decided to stand with you."
"Tenyasha?" He frowned, tilting his head toward Doflamingo's crumpled form. The Warlord wasn't moving. Wasn't speaking. Wasn't doing anything that Doflamingo was supposed to do. "Itachi-san... is he...?"
"He's alive." Itachi's gaze remained fixed on Doflamingo. "For now."
Inside the Tsukuyomi, Itachi had witnessed everything. The fall from Mariejois. The torture at the hands of the mob. The death of Doflamingo's mother. The awakening of his Conqueror's Haki. The pact with Trebol, Diamante, Vergo—the four of them against the world. And above all, the realization that the world had rejected him, so he would make the world his plaything in return.
"This man... actually had such an experience."
"What do you mean by that?" Fujitora's voice was cautious.
Before Itachi could answer, a sound emerged from the rubble.
"Fu fu fu."
Doflamingo's body twitched. His fingers clawed at the broken stone beneath him.
"Fu-fu-fu!"
His shoulders shook. His back arched. And from his throat rose a laugh that was entirely, terrifyingly genuine.
"FU-FU-FU!"
"FUFFUFFUFFU!"
He pushed himself upright. His eyes—no longer glazed, no longer trapped in the nightmare—blazed with something that went beyond fury into genuine, unhinged delight.
"Thank you."
The words were soft. Almost sincere.
"Thank you so much... for helping me remember such precious memories!"
His strings exploded outward in every direction.
(End of Chapter)
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