Eight Inner Gates — Death Gate, open!
Seven-Breath Method — seventh breath, open!
Kaio-ken x10, open!
Guy-sensei, an ordinary man, was now channeling power that exceeded the limits of his body by thousands upon thousands of times.
Under the torrent of that enormous energy, his bones groaned under the strain, and his cells began trending toward collapse. Ino kept one hand pressed against his back, cycling the Yang Seal at full speed, replenishing the deficit eating away at his cells.
"Guy-sensei — can you hold on?"
Might Guy had a rough sense of her plan. He glanced back with a grin, flashing his signature light-reflecting white teeth, signaling he was completely fine.
"Good. Then please push the Kaio-ken up one more level."
"Got it!"
External injuries were fixed-value damage — deal 300 HP here, lose 300 HP over there. Internal injuries were another matter entirely. If cell collapse on this side hit 90%, the damage on that side landed somewhere between 10% and 15%.
The moment Mechikabura realized the enemy was attacking his cells directly through the blood link, he responded immediately — wrapping himself in a thin layer of Dark Power. After that, it didn't matter if you opened eight gates or eighty; none of it could touch him.
Internal damage was off the table. So Ino switched to using external injuries as interference instead.
She watched from the shadows, roughly estimating the timing of Mechikabura's meditation sessions, and every time he reached a critical point in his focus, she'd have Guy-sensei slash himself with a blade — or grab one of those solid metal rods and smash himself over the head with a satisfying thwack.
The damage was minimal. But the annoyance factor was immense.
The Demon Realm Supreme Kai and Ino were cut from the same cloth — both were caster-type divine beings who relied on deep meditation. Having that meditation constantly interrupted was, to put it mildly, infuriating.
On top of that, every now and then, completely out of nowhere, she'd throw in a full Eight Inner Gates activation — Kaio-ken x10, x15 — which left the Demon Realm Supreme Kai thoroughly exasperated.
In the end, he had no choice but to produce the Scroll of Time and retreat into an alternate timeline to find some peace.
With the two of them no longer on the same timeline, the Divine Curse Art: Dead Demon Blood had no target to lock onto. The technique was effectively nullified.
Mechikabura had never imagined that Ino was still alive — let alone that she had returned to the Time Nest and inherited the title of Supreme Kai of Time. It threw his entire sequence of plans into disarray.
A million years of painstaking preparation, and the moment Ino took her seat, the demonically corrupted Kuronoa lost half her value. She wasn't useless — just unable to deliver the expected results.
As the oldest Supreme Kai in existence, Mechikabura simply couldn't throw caution to the wind, march in with his Demon Realm armies, and go all-in on a gamble. He wasn't some young hothead. Caution, composure, and relentless deliberation — those qualities had long since fused with the fabric of his very being.
When something happened, he would think it over and over again, plan every angle, and push for absolute certainty before acting.
Right now, Ino's methods were beyond his comprehension — and without understanding them, he had no will to dig in and fight.
With the target having vacated the main timeline, tracking him across countless parallel timelines would be extraordinarily difficult for Ino. So she sent Guy-sensei back to Konoha, fashioned over a hundred little effigies herself, split off a hundred time-clones, and dispatched them across multiple timelines to search — each one carrying an effigy to stab the moment it stepped into a new timeline.
The voodoo doll approach had been mostly countered. When one plan failed, Ino cooked up another.
At this level of power, eating was no longer a necessity. Just look at Whis and Beerus — meals were more of a pleasure than a biological need. But as Demon Realm Supreme Kai, Mechikabura had enjoyed fine food and luxury for ages, and he still indulged occasionally in culinary delights. That was Ino's opening.
Time to poison the food.
——
Agony. Humiliation. Fury.
Frieza felt like he was drowning in a sea of negative emotions.
Majin Buu had extracted the Majin cells from his body, and the Demon Realm Supreme Kai had used the magic of the Demon Realm to reconstruct half of his physical form.
The current Frieza was somewhat like Obito after losing half his body at the Nai-He Bridge — the replacement half functioned without issue, but he knew full well that the moment he made any hostile move, control over that half of his body could be stripped from him at any time.
And so he endured the indignity.
He'd thought he could slip through the cracks and play along. As it turned out, it wasn't that simple.
Every evening, the mages and sorcerers under Mechikabura's command would use the pretext of "amplifying his potential" to invade his will with their magic.
Frieza was not Vegeta facing Babidi. He had plenty of latent power to spare — he had already reached the divine threshold before, even if his body had failed to keep pace, leaving him with one foot across the line. What he needed now was a physical form that was entirely his own. There was no way he would surrender his identity and grovel for a meager scrap of power.
Faced with every variety of brainwashing technique they threw at him, he could only grit his teeth and endure.
He liked Hell — but he liked a Hell he could dominate. Not one that endlessly dominated him in creative new ways.
The Emperor of the Universe was suffering tremendously.
"My, my, Frieza — you're looking a little worse for wear." A soft woman's voice drifted to his ear.
If the Demon Realm Supreme Kai could reach through a seal and slowly erode Kuronoa with Dark Power, then the reverse was equally possible. A thread of Ino's will slipping through undetected was no great feat.
Frieza was spread-eagled, suspended in midair by pitch-black chains.
He went silent for a moment, expressionlessly scanning his surroundings.
Of all things, he despised women. He'd been burned by them more times than he cared to count in this lifetime.
And of course, this had to be a woman's voice.
His memory was extraordinary — he could put a name to any subordinate he'd met just once. He placed the voice quickly.
Strictly speaking, he and Ino had only crossed paths twice. The first time was on Planet Namek, after which he was blasted to pieces and spent ages drifting through the Sixth Universe. The second was just recently, at the end of time — he hadn't even figured out what was happening before he was finished off.
Each encounter worse than the last.
"You? You're the reason I ended up in this mess — what, you've come to laugh at me now?" The Emperor of the Universe was grinding his teeth in fury. What did I ever do to you? You've ruined me completely, and now you show up again?
"Heh heh." Ino gave a light laugh. "I'm here to get you out. You don't actually want to stay in the Demon Realm, do you?"
"No need. I'll be the King of the Demon Realm before long."
"Is that so? Best of luck, then."
Ino's voice faded. Frieza waited a good while — but ultimately, his situation was the worse of the two, and there was no room left for pride.
He lowered his voice. "...Fine. Name your terms."
He knew his own value perfectly well, and had never believed for a second that Ino had actually left. Sure enough, she hadn't.
"I need you, at a specific moment, to add a certain... seasoning to Mechikabura's food."
Frieza had a bad feeling about this. "Just seasoning? That's poison, isn't it."
"It's not poison. How would poison ever harm a Demon Realm Supreme Kai? It's more of a... substance that induces a certain property in his Demon Power — a kind of, mm, berserk quality."
"And does this substance have a name?"
"I'm calling it the Yin-Yang Harmony Powder."
Frieza: "..."
The name alone made clear it was nothing respectable.
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