"Domain Expansion..."
"Collapsing Orbit."
The world folded inward the moment Izumi's hands finished the seal.
Mei felt the change before she saw it. One heartbeat she was standing on cracked stadium stone, mist curling defensively around her ruined hand, and the next...
The stone was gone.
The stadium was gone.
She was now standing on something that looked like the surface of a dead star, black and cratered, under a sky full of collapsing constellations that pulsed faintly red with every heartbeat, as though the entire dome above her were something alive and dying at the same time.
"Genjutsu," Mei said quietly, more to herself than to Izumi, which was a valid assumption in her condition, considering who she was fighting—an Uchiha kunoichi with the Sharingan, and one who clearly knew how to use it.
However, she'd broken enough illusions in her life to recognize the shape of one forming around her, if any.
This felt... different.
She tried to break it anyway, chakra flaring in the pattern meant to disrupt any genjutsu, sharp and practiced.
Nothing happened. The dead-star ground stayed exactly where it was.
"That's not—" Mei tried again, disruption chakra flooding through her system a second time, and still nothing changed. The sky above her kept pulsing that same faint, dying red, entirely indifferent to her attempts to dispel it.
Izumi stood a short distance away, perfectly calm, hands loose at her sides. "It's not a genjutsu," she said. "So there's no point doing that. It won't work."
Mei furrowed her brows, the earlier dread her years of honed instincts had been screaming at her growing even worse.
'Space-Time Ninjutsu?'
She honestly considered that for a second. However, Space-Time Ninjutsu was more of the Fourth Hokage's specialty, and it looked nothing like this.
Mei's eyes darted toward Izumi's.
A normal Three-Tomoe Sharingan.
The Mangekyō pattern she had expected was nowhere to be found. She didn't know much about those legendary eyes, which even the most secret archives of her village barely contained any information about.
But it was stated that beyond the Sharingan existed another level of Sharingan called the Mangekyō.
It granted its user unimaginable power.
Mei hadn't known how much to believe that when she had first learned about it, but somehow it was starting to make much more sense now.
The only problem was that she couldn't see any difference in the girl's eyes.
They were exactly the same.
Three tomoe, even now...
So does that mean this isn't a Mangekyō ability?
As she was contemplating that, she suddenly felt something, and her mind jolted out of its momentary daze.
It was her feet.
They wouldn't budge.
"What—" she started, and then the weight hit her.
It came all at once, and it kept coming. Her knees buckled first, an invisible hand pressing down on her shoulders without there actually being a hand attached to it. She dropped to one knee before she understood what was happening to her own body.
"W-what... what's going on?"
"What did you do?" Mei looked completely baffled by the situation.
She wasn't in a genjutsu, couldn't feel any chakra affecting her, so how was whatever this technique was affecting her?
"You're gaining mass," Izumi said. Her voice stayed level, almost clinical.
"What?" Mei asked aloud.
Izumi didn't bother explaining it in a way Mei would understand. She was revealing her technique only to receive the boost from explaining it. Whether the Mizukage understood it or not wasn't her problem.
She simply continued...
"This is my domain. Inside it, you're affected by my technique. However, like me, the mass you put on is not imaginary in nature.
The mass you gain is real.
Right now you weigh perhaps three times what you did a moment ago. It's going to keep climbing."
Mei's eyes widened in shock.
She didn't understand what a domain was, or how something this absurd was even possible, but she understood the gist of it.
"How—" Mei forced out, both hands flat against the ground now, arms shaking under a weight her muscles had never been built to hold.
"It doesn't matter how. What matters is that nothing in your body was built to carry this much of itself." Izumi crouched slightly, watching with the detached focus of someone conducting an experiment rather than fighting a war. "Your bones will go first. Then your joints. Whatever's left will keep breaking until I decide to stop."
Mei tried to answer, but breathing had already become a battle she was losing, her ribs straining under a chest that suddenly felt like it belonged to someone ten times her size. Every inhale dragged against pressure that refused to let her lungs fully expand.
And it was increasing.
Then came the sound she'd remember for the rest of her life, however long that turned out to be.
Her knee gave way first, cartilage and bone folding under a weight that had no business existing, and the sound it made tore a scream out of her that she hadn't planned on giving anyone the satisfaction of hearing after becoming a kunoichi.
Her other leg went next, collapsing sideways in a way legs weren't meant to bend. She hit the ground completely, feeling like she had put on twenty times her own weight.
"S-stop this—" she managed, and hated herself for saying it even as the words left her mouth.
Izumi didn't answer.
She just watched.
"I'm... more valuable alive..." She barely managed to force the words out.
She tried everything—channeling chakra, attempting to break a genjutsu, trying to use her Kekkei Genkai.
Nothing seemed to work.
She was no longer even able to move her body, and only half a minute had passed since entering this place.
Another half minute, and she'd surely be dead.
No... she had to survive.
There was no one left in the Hidden Mist capable of keeping the village stable besides her.
She couldn't die here...
Her ribs came next, one after another, a series of wet cracking sounds that Mei felt more than heard, her own breath turning into something closer to a wheeze as her chest compressed under its own impossible weight. Her vision swam. Blood filled her mouth from somewhere internal she could no longer identify, everything blurring together into one continuous wall of agony that no longer had distinct edges.
Izumi watched it all with distaste.
Not because of her opponent's plight or pain, but because her technique was taking too much time. Her output had taken a nosedive after using Reverse Cursed Technique so many times.
Otherwise, ten seconds would have been enough to crush any Special Grade to death.
Mei's thoughts didn't have that luxury, though.
Crushed beneath her own body, trapped inside some Uchiha girl's nightmare of a prison she still didn't understand, an ocean away from anyone who would ever remember her fondly.
And then, impossibly, the pressure stopped.
Mei's vision cleared just enough to register Izumi's head snapping toward something behind her, genuine surprise crossing her face for the first time since the fight had started.
The dying-star sky above them cracked wide open, and stadium stone came flooding back into view through the widening fracture.
"Mizukage-sama... are you alright?"
A Kiri-nin stood just outside the collapsing barrier, both hands still raised from whatever technique he'd used to force it open, chest heaving, eyes locked on his fallen Mizukage with something between horror and desperation.
"Domains are strongest from the inside," Izumi muttered, mostly to herself, watching her own barrier disintegrate around her faster than she could stop it. "And just that much more fragile from the outside..."
"Should've accounted for them intervening... tch, I messed up." Izumi felt lightheaded for a second, her technique forcibly entering cooldown after her domain had been shattered like that.
Mei lay motionless where she'd fallen, breathing in shallow, ragged pulls, alive by the thinnest possible margin.
Barely, though...
She was a complete mess. Every bone in her body was shattered. Flesh had been compressed as though placed beneath a hydraulic press. Her organs were crushed.
The fact that she was still alive was nothing less than a miracle.
Izumi didn't get the chance to check on her. More Kiri-nin were already closing in from every direction, drawn by the sight of their Mizukage crumpled and barely breathing, a pool of blood forming beneath her.
Izumi's technique had nothing left to give her. Not for several more minutes, at least. She raised her fists anyway, Sharingan still spinning, prepared to hold the line with whatever was left in her tank.
It wouldn't have been a big deal, honestly. Even without her technique, she was a solid fighter.
However, she also happened to be running low on Curse Energy.
So giving it everything she had would have to do here...
Or she was very much dead.
She never got the chance to find out if that would have been enough, however...
A blur of pink cut through the closing circle of enemies before the first one reached her, and then there simply weren't any enemies left standing. Bodies hit the ground in a ring around her, cleanly and quietly, before Izumi's eyes had even finished tracking the movement.
Sukuna straightened from the last of them, glancing briefly at Mei's ruined, unconscious body, then at Izumi herself.
"Seems like you had fun..." he smirked.
She couldn't help but roll her eyes.
"You have no idea."
xXx
A/N : Ah.. what you guys think, did I did justice to her domain. This was the best I could think of knowing what her technique was all about.
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