Chapter 395: Again and Again, Until She Runs Dry
Yasushi knew Black Zetsu would hand Kaguya every scrap of intelligence he had on him. That was a given. The moment they were reunited, Black Zetsu would have laid out everything.
The problem for Black Zetsu was that he had nothing on Hiruko.
When Hiruko underwent the fusion ceremony, Yasushi had been standing watch personally, and he had checked the surrounding area with care. No White Zetsu presence anywhere nearby. No observers. And after the ceremony, Hiruko had not seen combat once. No moves made, no abilities displayed, no information that could have leaked out.
When Yasushi flew toward Kaguya's location, Hiruko had shrunk himself down using Sukunahikona and hidden inside Yasushi's sleeve. Completely undetectable. Anyone looking at Yasushi saw one person coming.
They had already worked out their plan before arrival.
That was why, when the hair needle cage had neutralized Yasushi's intangibility and he had nowhere useful to go, he had not fallen back to regroup. He had stayed right there and done something genuinely deranged to hold Kaguya's attention, because the point was never him. The point was to give Hiruko the moment he needed.
It had worked exactly as intended.
Now Yasushi was pressing. Hiruko had punched through. The black receivers were inside her, the Rinne Sharingan was cracked, and the clock was running. If he could just drive his spear into her skull before the eye finished regenerating, this fight was effectively over. She would not be dead, but she would be functionally powerless, and the rest was just patience.
Then Kaguya's chakra went unstable.
It happened fast. The black receivers still lodged throughout her body began to lose cohesion, the yin-yang structure dissolving under the pressure of her output, the material turning liquid. That liquid did not disperse. It pulled together, drawn by something deliberate, merging with the chakra pouring out of her in a torrent.
The mass began to rotate in front of her, pulling in everything within reach, growing rapidly.
Yasushi recognized it in the same instant he saw it forming.
An Expansive Truth-Seeking Orb. The same thing the original Kaguya had used, a creation of the Bloodline Encompassing, something on a fundamentally different tier from the Six Paths techniques he carried. Not a weapon. A miniature end of the world.
The lava around it solidified and pulled back. The dimensional space itself groaned.
Yasushi felt the recognition hit and then felt something else follow immediately behind it: hunger.
Her Rinne Sharingan still is not restored. She cannot draw from the Infinite Tsukuyomi. Every time she uses something at this scale, it comes directly out of her Ten-Tails chakra reserves. She is spending herself right now.
Make her spend more.
The spear in his hands did not slow. He drove it forward harder, aimed directly at the expanding black sphere.
The impact was immediate and definitive about who outranked whom.
His spear hit the surface of the orb and the tip simply began to break apart. Not shatter in one dramatic burst, but peel away in layers, the structure unraveling from the point of contact inward, crumbling into scattered light and black fragments that shot off in every direction. The full-force strike of his best Nine-Orb weapon barely produced a ripple on the orb's surface, slowing its expansion for a moment before it resumed.
The shockwave from the collision hit him like a wall.
Yasushi went flying. The blast was large enough and violent enough that he had no elegant response to it, just raw momentum carrying him backward through the lava dimension with no say in the matter.
Hiruko, still reduced to a fraction of his normal size, had even less say. The chakra storm caught him like a scrap of paper in a gale and he was simply gone, flung somewhere into the churning heat and chaos of the lava dimension.
Kaguya floated behind the orb. Her face was pale, her breathing uneven. The wounds across her body were already creeping closed. But her eyes were cold in a way they had not been at the start of this fight.
She was not underestimating him anymore. Not even slightly.
Yasushi stabilized himself in midair the moment he could, ignoring the shockwave's remaining interference, and immediately raised his hand back toward her.
Universal Pull.
Kaguya's body was wrenched away from the orb and hauled through the air toward him. She had no more say in it than a pebble in a river.
Without her chakra feeding it, the massive dark sphere stopped growing. It hung where it was, rotating slowly, vast and ominous, but inert.
"Despicable insect!" Kaguya's voice came out raw with fury as she was dragged across the sky against her will. "Nothing but dirty tricks!"
Every one of Yasushi's tactics had stripped another layer of composure away from her. The last of it was gone now. She raised both hands, bone needles already growing from her palms with slow, deliberate intent, one aimed at Yasushi and one searching for Hiruko with the perfect, distance-ignoring clarity of her Bloodline Encompassing-level Byakugan.
Hiruko might be small and hidden somewhere in the chaos, but to eyes like hers, that was meaningless.
All Killing Ash Bones.
Yasushi stepped into the dimensional space without hesitation. The bone passed straight through the space he had been standing in.
Hiruko reappeared elsewhere, still small, and with a single-handed motion sent a large black cube materializing above Kaguya from the Daikokuten storage dimension, dropping it toward her at speed.
The cube blocked the bone aimed at him.
For about half a second.
The All Killing Ash Bones' dissolution energy tore through the Daikokuten cube's yin-yang structure and kept going, but Hiruko had already moved, and the half-second was what he needed.
****
70+advance chapters at patreon.com/Eatinpieces