Chapter 393: Strike Hard
Back when Nagato used to go on about being a god, Black Zetsu had kept his face perfectly serious while quietly laughing himself to pieces on the inside.
He had always assumed that kind of delusion belonged exclusively to the ignorant and the arrogant. People like Nagato, who had mistaken power for divinity and never found anyone willing to correct them.
He had not anticipated watching the same thing happen to his own mother.
There was really nothing to say about it. He was still searching for the words when Yasushi arrived and rendered the whole problem academic.
Yasushi hit the brakes hard, hanging in the air a short distance from Kaguya, close enough that neither of them needed to raise their voices. He cancelled his complete Susanoo in the same motion. The blazing chakra armor dissolved, leaving just him, suspended in the red-lit sky, studying her with the focused attention of a hunter who has finally found what he came for.
The grin was still there, but quieter now. His eyes were sharp.
He licked his lips.
"So you're the grandmother of all chakra. A thousand years of sleep and your brain's gone completely stiff."
He was already moving before he finished talking.
"Here, let me wake you up."
He crossed the distance in an instant and threw a punch straight at her face.
Kaguya had power in abundance. What she did not have was combat experience. The kind of instinct built through thousands of real fights, against opponents who were trying to kill you, was not something divine ability could substitute for. Her strength had always carried her. She had never needed to develop anything else. Even Sakura had managed to land a clean hit on her once, in the original timeline, because Kaguya simply did not know how to read the rhythm of a fight.
Against someone with that kind of gap, the correct approach was simple: get close, stay close, move faster than she can think, and never give her room to actually use what she has.
Kaguya turned her head slightly. Her white eyes settled on him with the blank calm of someone watching a small animal make noise. Slowly, she raised one hand, palm out, chakra already condensing into a barrier.
"Ignorant creature. You dare raise your hand against a god"
"Go to hell with your god nonsense." Yasushi cut her off flat. "Hasn't your idiot son told you yet? Every scrap of your alien mystique has been completely exposed."
Just before their fist and palm were about to connect, something shifted in his eyes. A quick, sly flash.
The Truth-Seeking Orb he had been hiding up the wide sleeve of his Hokage robes slid out without warning. In the space between one breath and the next it compressed itself into something needle-thin and moved like a striking snake, arriving ahead of his fist, threading past the leading edge of his knuckles, bypassing the chakra-dense surface of her palm entirely and punching straight through the concentrated defense from underneath.
It buried itself deep in the flesh of her hand.
Blood hit the air. Liquid chakra, spraying outward, blooming across the white of her robes in vivid red.
The expression on Kaguya's face shifted. Just barely. A faint crack in that perfect, ageless composure. Surprise, maybe. Pain. Or the sheer disbelief of being wounded at all.
Yasushi did not wait to find out which.
He twisted his wrist. The destructive force compressed inside the Truth-Seeking Orb released all at once, shredding her left hand and forearm from the inside out. The arm separated at the elbow, trailing blood, and he caught it with the same hand and threw it downward without a second glance. It tumbled toward the ice field below like discarded garbage.
Clean. Efficient. Completely without ceremony.
"Watch out! He's treacherous and he doesn't fight straight!" Black Zetsu shrieked from somewhere inside Kaguya's sleeve. "Don't get complacent!"
What Black Zetsu actually feared was never Yasushi's raw power. It was the unpredictability. The way his mind worked, the angles he came from, the things he did that nobody had any framework to anticipate.
Kaguya's brow creased very slightly. She was not particularly concerned about the arm. She was already immortal and her body was already regenerating, the severed stump moving with visible, creeping biological urgency as bone and tissue rewrote themselves back into existence.
But Yasushi was not done.
The eight remaining Truth-Seeking Orbs floating behind him dropped simultaneously and converged with the needle already lodged in her palm, all nine fusing together in an instant into a single long black spear, dark as ink, radiating the particular energy of something that annihilates rather than merely destroys. The tip was aimed at her heart.
The Rinne Sharingan on her forehead pulsed once.
The world changed.
Ice. Everywhere, instantly. A vast frozen white expanse replacing the sky and the battle and everything else, the ground nothing but endless snowfield in every direction. Kaguya's dimensional space, invoked without effort.
Yasushi felt his body lock up. The cold hit him from everywhere at once, encasing him solid before he could finish a breath.
Kaguya began to speak, composed and unhurried, clearly intending to explain the situation to him at length.
The ice shattered.
Shinra Tensei detonated outward from his body in a single explosive wave, blasting the frozen shell apart in every direction. Chunks of ice flew like shrapnel, pelting Kaguya's body and sending ripples across the space around her. None of it seriously hurt her. All of it disrupted her balance and her timing.
Before she could recover, Universal Pull activated.
The same repulsion that had flung her back suddenly reversed, becoming irresistible attraction, hauling her forward through the air at speed.
She had just been pushed. Now she was being yanked back.
Kaguya felt it in her bones, the sensation of having absolutely no say in where her own body was going. Like a leaf in a gale. The indignity of it hit her somewhere deep, touching something that had been undisturbed for a very long time.
"Worthless mortal!"
The Rinne Sharingan fired again.
Gravity. Crushing, total, falling on both of them like a physical thing. The dimension shifted around them into something else entirely, the air thickening, the sky pressing downward, weight compounding until simply standing required full effort and flight became impossible.
Both of them came down. The pull broke. Kaguya landed and immediately started putting distance between them, using the gravity itself to anchor herself while it worked against him too.
The gravity in this space was enough to flatten steel. Even the two of them, at their respective levels, moved through it like they were wading through deep water. Every step cost something.
Kaguya raised her remaining hand. From the center of her palm, a bone needle began to grow. Slow in the gravity, but deliberate. The aura around it was wrong in a way that was hard to look at directly, a sense of total dissolution, the kind of energy that unmakes things at the level of matter and chakra both.
All Killing Ash Bones.
"Well." Yasushi was smiling. "That's exactly what I was hoping you'd do."
He triggered Kamui.
The Mangekyo Sharingan on his chest spun. A space-time vortex flickered open near Kaguya's head, and the needle that had been aimed at him curved toward it instead.
****
70+advance chapters at patreon.com/Eatinpieces