When the foreign chakra finally stopped rampaging, Neji fused it with his own and opened the White Eye. He didn't know he'd been chosen by an Otsutsuki as a vessel for a Wedge.
The gray mark on his palm was the proof.
All he felt was a new, overwhelming chakra asserting itself—bold enough to seize his body, even his thoughts and movements.
When he overcame it, he realized his eyes had changed.
The hollow white took on a water-blue glow, and for the first time Neji saw a sight no White Eye had shown him before. The White Eye pierces space—sees at distance, sees three hundred and sixty degrees, tracks the flow of chakra through flesh and stone.
Now he was seeing more than space.
He saw events along a time axis. He caught glimpses of another spacetime. He could predict what the timeline would do moments ahead—could erode or restore things as if turning a dial.
Because this was his first opening, he was limited: five minutes forward and back.
Five minutes ahead, he saw Gaara defeated by Mangetsu—and One-Tail ripped out of him.
Anyone who knows jinchuriki knows what that means. For a jinchuriki, losing the beast is death—especially for someone like Gaara, who had lived with his tailed beast since childhood. They were already welded together.
Neji saw Gaara's death.
He would not allow it.
He invoked his new sight for the first time—an incomplete eye, neither wholly Tenseigan nor wholly Samsara Eye. Because it came through the Wedge, and because the mark on his palm sat between black and white, this eye existed between the two—half blue Samsara Eye, half Samsara Eye—something singular in this world.
Neji closed his eyes for a beat—and in the next heartbeat stood before Mangetsu. The core of chakra the Twin Flounder Blades had been condensing… shifted out of this spacetime.
Gaara was already hurt, fighting on will alone.
The twin blades' stored chakra felt bottomless—and every time they hurt Gaara, the next strike hit harder. The damage was snowballing. Even One-Tail couldn't keep absorbing it.
By rough measure, Samehada can bully even the Eight-Tails' jinchuriki.
The Twin Flounder Blades are the strongest among the seven swords—and Mangetsu, the strongest of the Swordsmen.
By that math, Mangetsu beating One-Tail's Shukaku was inevitable.
Only Neji saw Mangetsu's true aim.
Kaede, like many, had assumed Mangetsu was here for Danzo. In truth, he was Akatsuki. From the start, his goal was never to shepherd Sasuke into the top ten for a face-to-face with Kaede.
It was Shukaku.
That last strike a moment ago could have ended Gaara's ability to fight—if Neji hadn't erased it and pulled Gaara back from the brink.
"From now on," Neji said quietly, eyes blue and terrible, "your opponent is me."
(End of Chapter)
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