Sharp pain.
Horrible, blinding, absolute pain — the kind that short-circuited thought and reduced the world to a single white-hot point of agony.
A small foot — a child's foot — connected with Itachi's abdomen with a crack that echoed through the ruined compound like a gunshot. The kick carried the full payload of Vector Manipulation behind it: kinetic energy gathered, compressed, and released in a focused burst that turned what should have been a harmless child's strike into something that hit with the force of a battering ram.
Itachi's body reacted on pure reflex. Even as the impact drove the air from his lungs and sent his fractured ribs screaming, his Mangekyō blazed — a desperate, final flare of crimson light — and the skeletal frame of Susano'o materialized around him in a last-ditch attempt to absorb the blow.
It shattered instantly.
The hastily constructed spectral defense — assembled from the dregs of Itachi's exhausted chakra, held together by nothing but willpower and desperation — crumbled like glass struck by a hammer the moment Sasuke's vector-enhanced kick connected. The crimson bones fractured, fragmented, and dissolved into wisps of fading red mist, offering no more resistance than smoke against a gale.
The kick punched through the disintegrating Susano'o and landed flush against Itachi's midsection.
BOOM.
Itachi was launched skyward — his body ragdolling through the air, arms and legs trailing limply, blood spraying from his mouth in a crimson arc that caught the firelight. He tumbled end over end, rising five meters, ten, fifteen, his battered form silhouetted against the smoke-choked sky like a broken bird thrown by a storm.
Sasuke watched him fly.
And felt nothing but disappointment.
Not rage. Not satisfaction. Not even the cold, analytical detachment of the Accelerator assessing a combat result. Just a deep, bitter, exhausted disappointment that settled over his chest like a stone.
I'm disappointed in you, Itachi.
The thought was quiet. Almost sad.
Between the clan and the village, you chose the village. You slaughtered everyone — men, women, children, the elderly, the infants in their cradles. You cut down Father and Mother with your own hands. You killed them while they knelt before you with their eyes closed, trusting you, loving you, making it easy for you. And you tell yourself it was for peace. For the greater good. For the village.
And now — between the village and your own brother — you choose the village again. You were going to use Kotoamatsukami on me. You were going to rewrite my mind, erase my will, turn me into a loyal puppet who would protect the very village that ordered the death of everyone I loved.
How far does it go, Nii-san? Is there anything you won't sacrifice? Is there anyone you won't betray?
You disgust me.
The moment Itachi reached the apex of his arc — body suspended for one frozen instant at the peak of the trajectory, gravity beginning to reassert itself — Sasuke moved.
A tap of his toes against the scorched earth. Vector Manipulation redirected every ground-reactive force through his legs, launching him upward in a blur of speed that left a small crater where his feet had been. He rose like a missile, the air screaming around his small body, closing the distance to Itachi's tumbling form in a fraction of a second.
His hand shot out.
The glass container — still clutched in Itachi's limp fingers, the preservation fluid sloshing inside, Shisui's Mangekyō Sharingan floating within — was plucked from his brother's grasp with surgical precision. Sasuke's Mangekyō tracked the container's position with perfect clarity, his vector-enhanced reflexes allowing him to snatch it mid-air without breaking stride.
In the same motion — in the same instant — his other hand balled into a fist.
The fist drove into Itachi's abdomen.
Vector Manipulation amplified the kinetic payload. The impact was devastating — a focused, surgical explosion of force that folded Itachi's body around the point of contact like a ragdoll bent at the waist. Blood erupted from his mouth. His eyes bulged. A strangled, airless gasp escaped his throat.
But the body that crumpled around Sasuke's fist didn't feel right. The texture was wrong — too soft, too yielding, lacking the resistance of bone and muscle. Sasuke's Mangekyō caught the telltale shimmer a microsecond before it happened.
Poof.
Itachi's body dissolved into a cloud of white smoke — a Shadow Clone, dispelling on impact, leaving nothing behind but a fading wisp of dissipating chakra.
Substitution. Itachi had switched himself out at the last possible instant, replacing his body with a clone in the heartbeat between the kick and the follow-up strike. Even battered, bleeding, half-dead, and running on fumes, the genius of the Uchiha clan had retained enough presence of mind to execute a perfect substitution under fire.
"Six hand signs in one second," Sasuke murmured, hovering in the air above the smoke cloud. His Mangekyō tracked the residual chakra trail — the faint, dissipating signature that marked the direction of Itachi's real body. "Impressive speed, Nii-san. Even now."
He dismissed his Susano'o. The indigo spectral construct flickered and faded, its bones dissolving into motes of blue-violet light that scattered on the hot wind. Maintaining the full construct was too costly — the prolonged activation had placed an enormous burden on his already overtaxed body. Instead, he held the Mangekyō active and kept the super-brain running, conserving his remaining resources for targeted strikes rather than sustained defense.
The glass container with Shisui's eye was safely tucked against his chest, alongside the scroll containing Fugaku's Mangekyō.
Three sets of Mangekyō Sharingan. His own, his father's, and now Shisui's. All in the possession of a seven-year-old boy standing in the ashes of his dead clan.
Obito had just finished reforming from his latest Izanagi when Itachi crashed down beside him.
The impact was unceremonious — Itachi's body hit the ground with a meaty thud, bounced once, and skidded to a halt in a cloud of ash and loose earth. The elder Uchiha brother lay on his side, coughing violently, each convulsion spraying fresh blood across the blackened ground. His ANBU armor was in ruins. His body was a catalog of injuries so extensive that the simple fact of his continued consciousness bordered on miraculous.
Obito looked down at him.
Then looked up — toward the sky, where a small silhouette hovered against the blood-red moon, Mangekyō blazing like twin crimson stars.
"What kind of monster is your brother?" Obito said flatly. The question was not rhetorical. He genuinely wanted to know.
Itachi spat another mouthful of blood and pushed himself to a seated position, his face a mask of grim determination overlaid on barely-contained agony. "I don't know," he admitted, his voice raw and hoarse. "But the more important question is — what is Sasuke trying to do? His proficiency with the Mangekyō... it's far too advanced. That level of control isn't something you develop in a single night. He must have awakened it far earlier than tonight."
The realization hit Itachi like a physical blow. His eyes widened fractionally.
When? When did Sasuke awaken the Mangekyō? He's not even eight years old. What could have triggered it? What trauma, what loss, could have been severe enough to unlock those eyes before tonight?
Or... was it something else entirely? Something I don't understand?
The questions had no answers. And there was no time to search for them.
"What now?" Obito asked, his single visible eye fixed on the approaching figure in the sky. His voice had dropped the bumbling Tobi persona entirely — this was the real Obito, cold and calculating, assessing threats with the clinical efficiency of a man who had survived decades of shadow warfare. "Do we retreat? Because I need to be honest with you, Itachi — I have absolutely no desire to fight that thing again."
"No." Itachi shook his head without hesitation. Pain lanced through his neck, and he suppressed a wince. "We can't leave. If Sasuke has this kind of power and we simply abandon him here... there's no telling what he'll do. He knows about the village's involvement. He knows the truth behind the massacre. If he turns that knowledge — and that power — against Konoha..."
The implication hung between them like a blade.
"Then we stay and get beaten to death. Wonderful plan," Obito muttered.
"Well, well," a childish voice called down from above, and both men flinched. "So this is where you two were hiding. I had to look for a whole minute."
The voice was light. Musical. Carrying the high, clear pitch of a child who should have been in bed hours ago, dreaming of Academy lessons and afternoon training. The incongruity of it — that innocent tone emerging from the blood-soaked, Mangekyō-wielding horror floating above them — was perhaps the most unsettling thing either of them had experienced all night.
Obito suppressed a shudder.
To be perfectly honest, this slightly immature, childish voice was a sound he never wanted to hear again for the rest of his life. The pain of being crushed by a boulder at Kannabi Bridge — half his body smashed flat, his ribs puncturing his lungs, his consciousness fading in a pool of his own blood — had been agonizing. But it paled in comparison to the memory of Susano'o's vector-enhanced fists hammering him into paste. Twice.
Sasuke descended from the sky like a falling angel — or a falling demon — touching down on the scorched earth twenty meters from their position with the lightness of a leaf settling on water. His feet barely disturbed the ash. His Mangekyō spun lazily, the six-pointed stars rotating with a casual menace that suggested he had more than enough energy left for what came next.
He walked toward them.
Obito tensed. His Sharingan flared. Kamui activated instinctively, his body already beginning to shift into its intangible state —
Sasuke's small fist punched straight through Obito's torso.
Or rather, straight through the space where Obito's torso was — and found nothing. The fist passed through intangible flesh like a hand through fog, meeting no resistance, connecting with nothing solid. Kamui's phasing was active. Obito's body existed simultaneously in two dimensions, the physical portion shunted into the Kamui dimension while the visual projection remained in the real world like a ghost.
"As I said," Obito declared, his composure recovering, his voice carrying the cold confidence of a man who believed himself untouchable, "as long as I'm prepared, you can't touch me."
A kunai appeared in his hand — drawn from a dimensional pocket with practiced speed — and he slashed toward Sasuke's throat in a single, fluid motion.
Sasuke didn't dodge. He didn't even flinch.
Instead, a smile split across his blood-caked face — thin, sharp, and deeply, disturbingly amused.
"You seem very confident in that ability of yours, Madara-san," Sasuke said, his voice dripping with mockery. He tilted his head, studying Obito with the Mangekyō's crimson gaze. "Let me guess the mechanics. When you activate that technique, the physical matter of your body is shifted into a separate dimensional space — a pocket dimension linked to your specific Mangekyō. Your projection remains visible in the real world, but it's nothing more than an afterimage. Attacks pass through you because your actual body isn't here."
Obito's kunai strike froze mid-swing.
Behind the mask, his eye widened.
How does he—
"Kamui," Sasuke continued, and the name landed between them like a dropped explosive tag. "That's what it's called, isn't it? A space-time ninjutsu tied to your Mangekyō Sharingan. Very impressive. Very powerful." His smile widened. "Very exploitable."
Because Sasuke's Mangekyō had been analyzing Kamui from the moment Obito first activated it. The super-brain processor — running in concert with the Mangekyō's perceptual capabilities — had been mapping the dimensional transition in real-time, tracking the exact coordinates of the spatial boundary between the real world and the Kamui dimension. The connection point was there — a seam in the fabric of space-time, invisible to ordinary perception but perfectly legible to a computational system designed to analyze vectors in multiple dimensions.
Sasuke couldn't enter the Kamui dimension. That required Obito's specific Mangekyō frequency — a unique spatial key that only the matching pair of eyes could generate. Without it, the door to Kamui remained locked.
But he didn't need to enter it. He only needed to send something through the seam.
And kinetic energy — pure, directionless, dimensionally agnostic force — didn't need a key.
At the moment Obito's kunai slashed toward him, Sasuke moved.
A single spectral arm materialized behind his back — one arm of Susano'o, manifested independently of the full construct. Not the complete skeletal warrior. Just the arm: a massive, dark blue limb of translucent chakra, ending in a clenched fist, blazing with concentrated indigo fire. It was a technique that required extraordinary mastery of Susano'o — the ability to selectively manifest individual components rather than summoning the entire construct. Itachi could do something similar, using only the skeletal ribcage for defense or the arms for offense. Sasuke had refined it further, reducing the chakra cost while maximizing the flexibility.
The spectral fist swung forward — not at Obito's visible projection, but at the spatial seam that the super-brain had identified. The point where real space met Kamui space. The dimensional boundary through which Obito's physical body had been shunted.
And through that seam, Vector Manipulation pushed.
Not matter. Not chakra. Just energy. Raw kinetic force, compressed and accelerated by vector calculations, channeled through the Susano'o fist and fired through the dimensional seam like a cannonball through a mail slot.
Inside the Kamui dimension, Obito felt something impossible.
Wind.
A breeze, where no breeze should exist. The Kamui dimension was a sealed space — a void of interlocking rectangular platforms floating in an empty expanse, devoid of atmosphere, devoid of weather, devoid of anything that hadn't been deliberately placed there. There was no wind in Kamui. There couldn't be wind in Kamui.
And yet his cloak was fluttering.
"How—" he began.
The fist hit him.
Not a physical fist — there was no matter to transmit through the dimensional boundary. But the force of the fist — the kinetic energy, the thermal energy, the compressed atmospheric pressure — all of it blasted through the seam and detonated inside the Kamui dimension with the full, devastating payload of a vector-enhanced Susano'o strike.
BOOM.
Obito had no defense.
Inside Kamui, he had no Susano'o. No substitution prepared. No Izanagi pre-activated. The dimension was his sanctuary — his impregnable fortress, the one place in all of existence where he was supposed to be absolutely, unconditionally safe. No one had ever attacked him inside Kamui. No one had ever even reached inside Kamui.
Until now.
The force hit him like a wall of compressed steel traveling at hypersonic speed. His body was picked up and hurled across the Kamui dimension, slamming into one of the stone platforms with enough force to shatter it into fragments. Blood erupted from every orifice. His Hashirama cells — already overtaxed from multiple Izanagi activations — struggled to keep his organs from rupturing.
And then the follow-up came.
Vector Manipulation fed more energy through the seam — a sustained, pulsing barrage of kinetic force that hammered into Obito's body like the repeated blows of an invisible giant. Each pulse was calibrated by the super-brain, optimized for maximum damage, directed at the precise coordinates where Obito's body had come to rest inside the dimension.
Obito was blasted out of the Kamui dimension entirely.
The dimensional boundary ruptured around him as his body was ejected — not through a controlled Kamui activation, but forcibly, his form expelled from the pocket dimension like a cork blown from a bottle by pressure buildup. He materialized in the real world already airborne, already broken, already vomiting blood, his eyes wide with a shock so total it transcended fear and entered the realm of incomprehension.
He hit me inside Kamui.
He HIT me INSIDE KAMUI.
That's impossible. That's IMPOSSIBLE.
Sasuke was already above him.
The boy had launched himself skyward the instant Obito was ejected, vector-enhanced acceleration carrying him upward in a blur of motion too fast for the eye to track. He hung in the air above Obito's tumbling form, his Mangekyō blazing, his expression savage with a cold, methodical fury that belonged on the face of a veteran killer, not a seven-year-old child.
Two spectral arms materialized behind his back — twin limbs of dark blue Susano'o, independent of any ribcage or skull, floating in the air like the disembodied weapons of an angry god. Their fists clenched simultaneously.
"Die," Sasuke whispered.
The twin fists descended.
Vector Manipulation rewrote their kinetic vectors — compressing, amplifying, multiplying the force until each blow carried the concentrated destructive energy of a small earthquake focused on a single point. The air screamed. The light distorted. The temperature spiked as thermal vectors were swept into the payload.
BOOM. BOOM.
The double impact drove Obito out of the sky like a meteor fired at the earth. His body plummeted — a hundred meters in less than a second, terminal velocity achieved almost instantaneously — and struck the ground with an impact that carved a new crater into the already devastated landscape.
He landed, by some cruel cosmic coincidence, less than three meters from where Uchiha Izumi was huddled behind her ruined fence.
The girl screamed.
Obito lay in the crater, twitching. His body was wrecked — limbs bent at wrong angles, mask shattered, the right half of his torso split open to reveal the pale wooden lattice of Hashirama's cells already struggling to regenerate the damage. Blood and splintered wood fragments scattered around him like grotesque confetti. His single visible Sharingan spun erratically — dazed, unfocused, the eye of a man whose brain was struggling to maintain consciousness through the fog of catastrophic physical trauma.
Sasuke didn't give him time to recover.
The boy descended from the sky — slower this time, savoring it, his small form drifting downward with the lazy grace of a falling leaf while the twin spectral arms of his partial Susano'o hovered behind him like the wings of some terrible, luminous angel.
He landed beside Obito's crater.
The Susano'o fists rose.
And came down.