The world shifted around Deidara without warning — the ravine, the smoke, the burning wreckage of his clone, all of it dissolving into something pale and vast. He found himself in a completely different place all of the sudden, a platform of white flesh stretched in one direction, moonlight bleeding through architecture that somehow existed somewhere in the outer space and at the end of the platform, there he was, the Hyuga brat standing in front of a giant eye.
"Genjutsu," he muttered, already flooding his chakra outward to dispel it. Nothing happened. The palace remained.
"Not genjutsu," Naoya's voice came from somewhere close, though when Deidara turned to look, the boy stood utterly still, as if the concept of movement itself had been suspended around him. "You're not seeing anything false. This is real. You're simply not permitted to act within it."
Deidara tested that immediately, forming a hand seal for another clone. His fingers wouldn't complete the motion. Worse — the attempt itself sent a tearing sensation through his arm, muscle fiber twisting against itself as though his body were being unmade from the inside for the crime of trying.
"What—" He staggered, gasping, the pain retreating only once he stopped resisting.
"This is the very height of Jujutsu not something pretty as mind tricks you shinobi use," Naoya said, watching him with clinical detachment. "Every action inside this domain unfolds at exact 24 frames across time itself before it can complete. If you move outside this set parameters then…well. You already have experience ing what would happen then, don't you!"
Deidara's earlier bombardment hung frozen in the air around them — thousands of molecular-level detonations suspended mid-explosion, caught in a single unmoving instant, waiting for a command that would never come.
"Move if you like," Naoya added, no cruelty in the offer, only inevitability. "It won't end quickly, but it will end."
Deidara's jaw tightened, sweat beading despite the pale cold of the palace air. Even when he wasn't moving it was feeling like he was getting his body tore apart.
He tried anyway — a desperate lunge, some final flicker of hope that speed alone might outpace whatever this was.
His arm tore itself apart before his feet left the ground, sinew unraveling layer by layer, faster than any technique should have allowed, faster than pain itself could properly register before the damage had already consumed him entirely.
By the time his body hit the palace floor, there was very little left resembling a person.
"Hmm… I was expecting a little more fight honestly…" Naoya grinned.
-x-
Sasori's world changed just as abruptly — the tree line and ravine floor replaced by something colder, greyish-white, an oppressive dome of shifting light stretching overhead like a held breath.
"Domain Expansion ? Is this some sort of genjutsu ?," he muttered aloud, testing the word against unfamiliar instinct.
He tried to break free of course, thinking that it was a domain, just like his partner, but no success. He observed a little more, he wasn't finding anything else, not even something which pose threat to him. He was just here.
His first move was practical — deploy every remaining puppet simultaneously, overwhelm through numbers before whatever this technique intended could take shape. The puppets responded instantly, chakra threads snapping taut, blades extending.
Kiyomi didn't bother countering them directly.
Instead, a sphere began forming above her outstretched palm — smooth, seamless, unassuming in size, nothing like the tearing void she'd used earlier. No suction. No visible hunger. It simply existed, quiet and patient, drifting toward the nearest puppet with unhurried inevitability.
Sasori thought she was using that Mangekyo technique again, the black hole, but this wasn't it. He felt no suction from it. This was different.
Sasori recognized the danger too late.
The sphere made contact with the puppet's outer shell, and where it touched, the wood simply ceased to be — not destroyed, not vaporized, but erased cleanly along a perfect curved boundary, as if that portion of the puppet had never occupied space to begin with. The rest of the construct collapsed, structural integrity gone in an instant.
"What the..," Sasori said, voice taking sharp turn, already redirecting his remaining puppets away from the sphere's path.
"You like art right, tell me what you think of this… My perfect sphere." Kiyomi's breathing remained ragged from the poison still working through her, though her focus hadn't wavered. "A sphere which is only possible in theory, cause in reality making a perfect sphere with infinite pressure is impossible." She grinned.
And bring the genius craftmen he was, Sasori understood the concept of the sphere almost immeidately. However, just understanding how it works didn't mean he liked it, if anything he couldn't believe it.
Because he understood what a perfect sphere actually is, he knew as a craftmen himself that making something like that is practically impossible.
"There is no way." He said, still not believing.
At that Kiyomi just grinned, "Then test it out for yourself. It doesn't need to hit hard. Just need a touch. Come on, test it out."
She sent the sphere forward again, and this time Sasori understood the true horror of it. Wherever the giant sphere moved, it carved its way out.
Sasori of course tried to dodge however, inside her domain, dodging wasn't an option.
No dodge, no defense mattered here. The sphere simply arrived wherever she willed it, guaranteed contact the moment intent formed behind it.
He scattered his remaining puppets wide, desperate now, layering poison mist and senbon fire in overlapping barrages meant to force her into defense rather than offense. It bought seconds, nothing more. The sphere passed through two puppets in succession, erasing clean paths through wood and chakra strings alike, indifferent to the poison hissing uselessly against its surface.
"You could simply tell me what I want to know," Kiyomi said, voice quieter now, strained beneath the poison's grip but steady enough. "Would save us both the trouble."
To Sasori's horror, the sphere seems to be locking to him. No matter where he run off to, how many puppets he use as diversion, all were ignored by the black sphere and it only headed straight for him.
Sasori said nothing. Whatever answer he might have given died with him a moment later, the sphere finally closing the distance his puppets could no longer buy him, passing clean through his last defensive line and erasing a portion of his chest before his body — human core and all — even registered what had happened.
The domain held a moment longer, silent and grey, before dissolving back into the ravine's burnt and cratered floor, returning both fights to the same battlefield they'd left, minus one deception and one puppet master, and Sukuna already three-quarters finished with his own.
-x-
Sukuna hadn't bothered ending things quickly. There wasn't any reason to.
Yugito's Two-Tails form lunged again, claws raking a wide arc that tore through several trees before finding nothing but empty air where he'd been standing. He reappeared a short distance off, hands still in his pockets, watching with the mild attention of someone observing something moderately interesting rather than dangerous.
"You're not even trying," Yugito's voice came distorted, half her own, half something layered with the beast's growl beneath it.
"I am, actually," Sukuna said. "Just not very hard."
Her tail swept low, aiming to sweep his legs from under him. He simply stepped over it, unbothered, and drove two fingers into the base of her foreleg on the way past — not Cleave this time, not Dismantle, just enough curse energy to send a jolt of pain lancing through flame-wrapped muscle.
Matatabi's presence recoiled somewhere deep within the chakra structure, voice tight with warning. "Yugito, this isn't a fight you can win. Pull back. Now."
"I can't," she gritted out, another swipe missing entirely as Sukuna phased through it without visible effort. "If I retreat, Kumo—"
"Kumo will survive one failed raid," Matatabi cut in. "It won't survive losing its jinchūriki to whatever this thing is."
"You know calling someone a thing is rude…"
Both froze, this conversation was suppose to be happening inside their mind. And that when they realised where they were standing.
"This is my mindscape." Yugito was baffled, how was that possible, she didn't entered her mindscape.
Her eyes went to the caged figured of Matatabi and she as certain this was her mind scape. But how ?
No why she was here wasn't important, what was important was why he was here. Her eyes locked into Sukuna who was standing just a little away from her, staring at Matatabi.
"Yugito… his eyes. Those are not normal eyes. They are Sharingan." Matatabi called out, herself baffled at how the enemy could invade inside Yugito's own mind scape, but then she realised how. There was only one person who could do this in the past.
Madara Uchiha.
Its only possible with Sharingan.
"Smart cat," Sukuna let out a chuckle. "You might as well be the first who or maybe second to know about my eyes. I applause you for that."
And that also motivate him more to just kill her and be done with the matter, of course he didn't say it out loud, but it was clear by how his curse energy flare around him after that, Matatabi clearly sense that negative surge.
As for why, simple. He don't wish to left behind someone who knows about his powers, specially his eyes, its less troublesome that way.
"I came here just to see whether I can. Let say I know a brat who have done or let say would do something similar in future, and I wish to test it out. Anyways, let go out and finish this fight already."
And then he was gone.
Yugito followed behind of course. But not before hearing another plea to flee by Matatabi.
Outside her mind scape, Sukuna was standing still not attacking, waiting for her.
"Seems like they have done over there, It seems I can't delay this fight much longer either, good thing I have decided what to do with you. Get ready, I'm ending this fight now."
Yugito didn't answer, chakra flaring instead, a final desperate bid, mouth opening to gather a Tailed Beast Bomb even mid-transformation, raw and unstable given how incomplete her cloak still was.
He brought his hands together and then said.
"Curse Technique Maximum…
"Inter-Molecular Disruption."
xXx
A/N : Perhaps I could have cut the entire fight and it still wouldn't have make much difference, the outcome as clear already. But still wrote it anyways. Enjoy.
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