Chapter 394: Thanks for the Assist, Black Zetsu
"Mother, watch out! That's Kamui — it's a space-time technique, it bypasses all physical defense!"
Black Zetsu's voice cracked into something close to a shriek.
"What?" Kaguya's composure broke for a real moment. She moved to dodge.
The gravity field she had built to trap Yasushi was still active. It trapped her too.
She could barely shift her own weight in it, let alone clear the attack radius. The same crushing force she had intended as a cage had become one. The vortex connected.
Half her face came apart.
She emerged into the lava dimension with one white eye gone, the flesh of her cheek and temple a ragged mess still trying to repair itself. Worse, the Rinne Sharingan on her forehead had cracked. Not destroyed, but damaged, the pattern disrupted, the eye flickering.
One miscalculation, and she had paid dearly for it.
Yasushi emerged from the space-time warp above the lava field, took one look at her, and started laughing.
"Without your Rinne Sharingan functioning properly, you're not so impressive anymore, are you!"
He came at her immediately, pressing the advantage, moving like someone who understands that the moment you let a wounded opponent breathe is the moment you lose everything you just earned.
Kaguya's response was instant. The silver hair that fell to her knees exploded outward. Every strand went rigid, extending and hardening and multiplying until the air between them was a dense wall of white needles coated in chakra, each one aimed at where he was, covering every approach.
Ash Hair Needles, blasting outward like a monsoon.
Yasushi didn't slow down. He didn't flinch. He ran straight into it, letting the needles hit him, letting them pass through him, because they passed through nothing at all.
Where his body should have been was nothing. The needles sailed through air.
Kaguya stared.
The needles had clearly struck him. She had watched it happen. He was standing right there and yet not a single point of contact had drawn blood or changed his trajectory by a fraction.
Something behind her perfect composure cracked sideways.
Black Zetsu's head shot out of her sleeve in a panic.
"Don't change tactics! That's Kamui's intangibility, he's shifted himself into the dimensional space! Keep attacking, keep covering him, don't give him a window to exit and engage! There's a time limit on the intangible state, he has to come back out eventually!"
Kaguya stopped her retreat. The hair needles spread wider, denser, building a continuous cage around Yasushi's position, every angle covered, leaving him nowhere to step out from without walking directly into a wall of penetrating chakra spines.
Yasushi stood in the middle of it with the relaxed posture of someone waiting for a train.
"Oh, so you're a god, right?" He sounded genuinely curious. "Here, let me hold a mirror up for you. Let's see how divine you look right now."
He reached for his belt buckle.
Kaguya went very still.
"What are you doing."
It was not a question. It was the voice of someone whose understanding of what was about to happen had just arrived and been immediately rejected.
Yasushi looked completely serious about it.
The shock on her face was absolute. A thousand years of power and immortality and the dignity of a divine being, and whatever neural pathway handles the concept of this was apparently not equipped. The disruption to her focus was total, her attention locked entirely on Yasushi and the sheer incomprehensible offensiveness of what was apparently about to happen.
Which was exactly the point.
A black receiver punched through her back and out through her chest.
Kaguya's body jerked. Her attacks stuttered and slowed.
She looked down at the tip of the black rod protruding from her sternum with the expression of someone whose model of reality has just had something inserted into it that does not belong there.
"Hahahaha!" Yasushi dropped the act entirely. "Who said I came alone?"
He stepped out of the intangibility, fully present again. "Black Zetsu, I owe you one. If you hadn't handed me all that intelligence about how Kaguya fights and where her blind spots are, Hiruko never would have gotten that clean a shot."
"Impossible. You came alone. Where is Hiruko?"
Black Zetsu shoved his head out of Kaguya's sleeve and looked behind her, searching frantically. There was nothing there. No figure, no trace.
More black receivers materialized out of thin air, appearing one after another in the space around Kaguya and driving into her from every direction, each one finding a different part of her body.
The sounds were wet and close together.
Kaguya became a pincushion. Her body, perforated from a dozen angles simultaneously, lost its stability in the air and began to fall toward the lava below.
"Mother!"
Black Zetsu screamed it, tore himself free from her sleeve, and lunged toward her, reaching to pull the rods out. The black receivers were products of Yin-Yang Release. Even Kaguya, pinned through by that many at once, could not simply will herself free of them.
Yasushi was already moving on the next thing.
The moment he exited the dimensional space, all nine Truth-Seeking Orbs merged into a spear in his hands. He was not aiming for the rest of her body. He was aiming for the Rinne Sharingan, already damaged from the Kamui strike, currently regenerating alongside the rest of her shredded face.
This was the only strategy that worked. He understood that clearly now.
Under the Infinite Tsukuyomi's active effect, Kaguya was functionally unkillable. The technique was continuously pulling chakra from every cocooned body in the shinobi world and feeding it into her. Every wound closed. Every lost limb regrew. Damage that would kill anything else was simply repaired, because the supply of healing chakra was essentially the entire living population of the world.
The only way to actually kill her was to cut the line.
The Rinne Sharingan was the connection point. The eye that maintained the link between Kaguya and the Infinite Tsukuyomi's endless chakra feed. Destroy it, and that supply cuts off. Force her to spend her own Ten-Tails chakra repairing it over and over, and eventually, without the Infinite Tsukuyomi constantly refilling her reserves, she would run dry.
One time, two times, she could absorb the cost. But there was a ceiling, even for her. Without the Infinite Tsukuyomi, she was not truly infinite.
Wear it down. Break it again and again. That was the path.
The spear drove toward the regenerating eye.
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