Chapter 392: Black Zetsu, Have You Prepared Yourself to Watch Your Mother Die Again?
The people under the Susanoo's wings watched Orochimaru getting cocooned with rising panic, and finally someone broke.
"Hokage-sama, do something! Please!"
Yasushi waved a hand dismissively without turning around.
"Relax. Kaguya needs massive amounts of chakra to fully manifest — that's all the Divine Tree is doing right now. Harvesting it. The cocoons aren't lethal. You go in, you dream. When I've dealt with Kaguya, the technique breaks and you all come back out."
He said it with the breezy confidence of someone explaining a minor inconvenience.
"You can't just leave us hanging up there!"
"After I deal with Kaguya you'll be fine," Yasushi repeated, unbothered. He was already moving toward the next thing.
Yasushi was ready to simply drop the Susanoo's protection and let the remaining living shinobi get cocooned — they weren't going to die after all, and babysitting their comfort wasn't his priority right now. But then his gaze swept across the rows of Uchiha clan members standing in Edo Tensei formation behind him, still upright, still alert, still waiting for orders.
He paused.
Kaguya wielded the Bloodline Encompassing. Techniques at that tier could tear through Edo Tensei constructs just as readily as living bodies. He hadn't spent this much effort resurrecting these people only to lose them in the final minutes.
"Izuna." He turned to his Edo Tensei retainer. "Edo Tensei bodies can't be pulled into the Infinite Tsukuyomi — you're already dead, the genjutsu has nothing to grab. Take the Edo Tensei forces and start cutting people down from the roots. Anyone you rescue, shelter them inside Madara's Susanoo shell while I'm gone. Save what you can."
Izuna straightened sharply. "Leave it to me, Hokage-sama. Go and fight without worry."
Yasushi gave a single nod and turned away from all of it.
Through his Rinnegan, the world looked like a vast circulatory system — every cocooned body a dim point of light, chakra bleeding from it in slow thin threads, all of it converging along the root network's branching pathways, all of it flowing in the same direction. Toward the same destination. Feeding the same revival.
He had her location.
"Haha. Got you."
He said it quietly. Then the Susanoo's wings opened to full span and he was gone — a streak of chakra light crossing the blood-red sky, the landscape below collapsing into a blur.
He arrived quickly.
Beneath the blood moon, standing in midair with the composure of someone who has never once doubted they owned everything in sight, was a woman unlike anything the shinobi world had produced.
She was tall, coldly beautiful, her silver hair drifting in air that wasn't moving. Her wide robes fanned out around her like wings at rest. Two small curved horns rose from her brow. Her white eyes looked down at the world below her with the particular expression of someone surveying property they've come to reclaim.
Kaguya Otsutsuki. The Progenitor of Chakra. The Rabbit Goddess. Black Zetsu's mother.
The space around her bent slightly just from her presence.
Bad news: she had already fully revived. He was too late to prevent that.
Good news: Kaguya was supremely confident. In her mind, only her two sons had ever been capable of sealing her — no one else was worth serious concern. And so despite whatever her unexpected, inconvenient offspring was frantically saying to her, she had not moved. She simply stood there, taking in her recovered world.
Black Zetsu was circling her like a panicked satellite, trying everything.
"Mother. I'm telling you — the situation has changed since you were last awake. The Uchiha are not like the ones you remember. Yasushi defeated Isshiki Otsutsuki. He became the Ten-Tails jinchuriki and awakened the Rinnegan. His power approaches Hagoromo's level. Please — your body just revived, it needs time to fully adapt. Even a short withdrawal to consolidate —"
"Enough." Kaguya did not look at him. Her voice was flat and absolute, the voice of someone who has never been successfully argued with. "The chakra in this world has dispersed far too severely. Nothing alive today can harm me."
"But —"
"The Uchiha who defeated Isshiki defeated a weakened remnant in a failing vessel. He obtained the underdeveloped small Ten-Tails Isshiki was using as cargo. That creature cannot be compared to a mature Ten-Tails cultivated through a full Divine Tree cycle. A jinchuriki of that quality poses no threat."
Black Zetsu's expression shifted into something difficult to read.
He turned his face aside.
"Mother." The words came out carefully. "The mature Ten-Tails — Yasushi already claimed it. Your revival used Isshiki's small Ten-Tails. Obito located it independently and triggered the technique before I could intervene. I had planned to use it after dealing with Yasushi first, but Obito moved without my knowledge."
A silence settled over the air.
Kaguya's unshakeable certainty paused — just briefly — then reassembled itself.
"It changes nothing." Her tone was unchanged. "Even a mature Ten-Tails jinchuriki cannot surpass the Bloodline Encompassing. The elevation it grants is absolute and total — the ocular techniques it produces exist beyond anything a standard Rinnegan can conceive of. I am a perfect being. The upper boundary of what this world can achieve."
She raised her white eyes to the horizon.
"Without Hagoromo and Hamura in my way, nothing will stop me this time."
Black Zetsu stood in the red light and listened to every word.
And a feeling settled over him — quiet, creeping, deeply unwelcome — that he recognized from a previous era. From cold Akatsuki meeting rooms. From standing behind Nagato while Nagato explained, at great length, to anyone willing to listen, that he was God and that God could not be defeated.
The same cadence. The same absolute certainty.
That particular flavor of confidence that seemed to reliably appear just before everything went catastrophically wrong.
The sound arrived before the shape did.
Laughter — distant first, then closing fast, swallowing the intervening miles in seconds. A shape ignited against the blood-red sky, the complete Susanoo trailing chakra light like a comet with a personal grudge, crossing half the shinobi world in the time it took to draw a breath.
Yasushi's voice split the silence like a blade.
"Kaguya! I'm here!"
He arrived between one heartbeat and the next, wings spreading wide against the red moon, blazing with the combined radiance of the Ten-Tails and the Rinnegan and something that was purely, unmistakably Yasushi — the absolute delight of someone who has been waiting for this exact moment and intends to savor every second of it.
"Black Zetsu." He was grinning. He hadn't stopped grinning since he crossed the first mountain range. "Have you mentally prepared yourself to watch your mother die again?!"