The mingled force of Yin and Yang Power spread through the air as a faint, peculiar fragrance — drifting across the vast banquet hall. Its effect on the ordinary Celestial Mages, sorcerers, and Demon Realm generals was modest at best: their eyes drifted toward the demon maidservants and female mages with a distinctly changed quality, every one of them fidgeting and breathing harder than usual.
Had the setting been even slightly different, they might have lunged.
Frieza, for his part, had absolutely zero reaction. He looked left and right in blank confusion. What in the world is going on?
Two ribbons of silken energy powder — one blue, one red — streaked straight toward the Demon Realm Supreme Kai.
"Dark Divine Body!"
The Yin and Yang Power slammed into the thick black miasma blanketing his surface and was repelled. A single isolated force, rootless and adrift like duckweed, could never punch through Dark Power's defenses on its own — but when Yin and Yang converged together, the result was far greater than the sum of its parts.
His energy barrier held — and yet the toxic mist still invaded his body. The next instant, Mechikabura felt something like a grinding millstone materialize inside him: two forces converting into each other, warring against each other, slowly wearing away at the Dark Power that formed his very foundation.
He began to cough violently.
"Cough, cough, cough, cough — Towa! You dare betray me?!" The towering Demon Realm Supreme Kai erupted in fury. With a single palm strike, he sent his trusted subordinate flying — she had been lurking half-hidden behind a curtain, quietly channeling her magic into the lamp's wick, filling the hall with the thin wisps of smoke that had carried everything.
Frieza: ???
What's happening? Is there even a role for me in this anymore?
Those three-toed feet of his normally tapped against the floor with a satisfying click-click-click that kept his subordinates on edge. Today, he moved with feather-light steps, tail tucked, doing everything in his power to reduce his own presence as he edged quietly toward the wall.
The situation couldn't have been clearer.
He'd been played like a clown — bouncing back and forth, and in the end, walked away with absolutely nothing.
He had been nothing but a decoy. The real killing blow came from behind. He seethed with bitter resentment. This adoptive father he'd so eagerly taken on had been a complete waste of the ceremony — worse, Mechikabura would almost certainly take his anger out on him any moment now. Better to start thinking about which direction to run.
"Young Supreme Kai, you have far more nerve than I expected. To provoke me so openly — even Kuronoa never dared go this far!" Mechikabura suppressed the rampaging Dark Power inside him, stood perfectly straight as though nothing were wrong, and delivered a sentence that seemed to come from nowhere.
Towa — the subordinate he'd just slapped to death — shook her head, blood pouring from all seven orifices, limbs jerking stiffly, rising back to her feet like a marionette.
Ino's voice emerged from the corpse's mouth: "At your age, and still no manners whatsoever. No wonder you got yourself sealed away. You should be addressing me as 'Lord Supreme Kai of Time'..."
Mechikabura's face remained cold. He showed no inclination whatsoever to acknowledge her new title.
Ino didn't press the point. She kept control of Towa's mouth and continued: "You had this gaudy little schemer sashaying in front of me every other day. Surely you didn't think that would come without a price?"
The Demon Realm Supreme Kai gazed down from on high, looking through Towa's vacant, unseeing eyes at Ino — separated from her by who knew how many layers of space.
In that moment, the most ancient of all Supreme Kais finally regarded Ino as a genuine equal. He no longer saw her as some lucky girl who'd stumbled into Time Power through the Super Dragon Balls. Once two people stood on the same level, pride became irrelevant.
He asked: "How did you take control of my subordinate? I'd rather not admit it, but the technique was elegant. I didn't notice a thing."
"Heh heh." Towa's right hand lifted like a puppet's. Look closely, and you could see something emerge slowly from beneath the skin of her fingers: an impossibly tiny purple insect, so small it was invisible without divine power to sharpen one's gaze.
"See that? It's a nanobug. There are quite a few more of them inside Towa. A subordinate of mine cultivated them — insects that feed on energy and nest inside living cells. You're probably thinking: what good could something this small possibly do? As the most ancient Supreme Kai, you sit above it all, and you'd never bother with life this low. But these little creatures have bred for countless generations inside Towa's body by now. Left uncontrolled, they could probably form a swarm, devour her entirely, devour the Demon Realm, and eventually devour the entire multiverses."
After finishing her lengthy explanation, and the moment she sensed Mechikabura quietly activating a spatial lockdown, Ino moved first — dissolving the nanobugs she'd obtained from Aburame Shino's stock, then withdrawing her own consciousness.
Thud. Towa's corpse toppled straight over. The nanobugs hadn't even finished crawling out before Mechikabura unleashed a searing fireball, incinerating the body and the insects alike into ash.
"I hate bugs! Kill them — all of them! There have to be more of those things somewhere nearby!" Mechikabura had reasoned correctly: Ino's lengthy lecture about the nanobugs' origins wasn't the rambling of someone who liked the sound of her own voice. There was a ninety-nine percent chance she'd used that time to scatter insects too small to see.
"Wow. You're smarter than I gave you credit for." Ino's voice drifted out from Frieza.
Mechikabura turned his cold gaze toward him.
Frieza patted himself down — top, bottom, left, right, front, and back. Honestly, he couldn't find where the bugs were hiding. If this had been his original body, his current divine-level perception could have detected even a nanobug no matter how small. But he was still saddled with that half-demon body of his, dulled and sluggish in every sense. How was he supposed to find anything like this?
Mechikabura didn't waste a single word. He went straight for the throat of the son he'd adopted barely a minute ago.
"You brought this on yourself!" Frieza had drunk the special divine water Ino prepared for him well in advance, so at least his body wouldn't seize up on him. But there was no way he was standing still with a massive black energy cyclone bearing down on him, and it was obvious Mechikabura had no intention of hearing any explanations. He had no choice but to shout aloud, enter his Golden Form, and brace himself against the Demon Realm Supreme Kai head-on.
"Hehehehe." Back in the Time Nest, Ino watched the scene unfold and laughed until she couldn't breathe.
She had never cared even slightly about the Demon Realm's propagation agenda. The Yin-Yang Harmony Powder had only been the opening act — exposing Frieza as a major card she'd been holding meant she had to squeeze out something worth taking in return.
The Yamanaka clan's secret arts ran in four tiers from lowest to highest: starting from the most elementary — yet most versatile — Mind Body Switch Technique, all the way up through the Mind Body Disturbance Technique, the Mind God Disturbance Technique, and the Mind God Transfer Jutsu.
For Ino, the Mind Body Switch Technique was like Goku's Kamehameha Wave — something she could pull out at any point, from start to finish. Its hallmarks were simplicity, speed, and sheer unpredictability.
The original clan secret arts had evolved further in her hands as her own mastery deepened, giving rise to even higher-tier techniques she had developed herself.
She had named them the "Mind Binding Rope Technique" and the "Mind Transfer Rope Technique" — her highest-tier secret arts.
These were not physical ropes of any kind. They were ropes of the mind itself.
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