Chapter 396: A C-Section for Kaguya
The black cube took the hit and came apart.
The All Killing Ash Bones dissolved the Daikokuten cube's yin-yang structure down to nothing, the two forces meeting and the higher tier winning cleanly, the cube fragmenting into gray dust that drifted down through the lava-heated air. But the half-second it bought was the only thing Hiruko needed. By the time the dust settled he was already somewhere else.
Yasushi came back out of the dimensional space and immediately turned the Kamui vortex on Kaguya's head again.
She felt it coming.
The space distortion that preceded Kamui was subtle, but she had been on the receiving end of it twice now, and whatever Kaguya lacked in combat intuition she was making up for in raw, furious learning speed. The moment the spatial signature registered she was already moving, her body sliding sideways with a strange, weightless quality, like smoke pulling away from heat. She left nothing behind for the vortex but air and a fading afterimage.
The Kamui connected with empty space.
Hiruko fired from a distance. Black cubes dropped out of the Daikokuten storage dimension above her, accelerating downward one after another.
Kaguya did not even turn to look.
The skin along her spine split open in a dozen places simultaneously and bone spikes erupted outward, each one coated in that same dissolution energy, shooting upward to meet the falling cubes. Cube met bone, bone met cube, both forces tearing each other apart in midair, the collisions producing a series of deep resonant cracks followed by cascading gray-black dust that rained down around her in a wide circle.
She had neutralized the attack without breaking stride or changing her focus. That was new.
Her right hand extended sideways. The space beside it fractured, the dimensional fabric folding into a small distorted window about the size of a palm. A bone needle grew from her hand, slid through the opening, and came out somewhere else entirely.
Behind Yasushi.
It punched through the space at his back.
Yasushi caught the spatial shift with his Rinnegan a fraction of a second before it arrived and went intangible. The bone passed straight through him. Yomotsu Hirasaka, the dimensional portal technique, was genuinely the worst one to defend against in normal circumstances. No warning, no direction, no range limitation. Only the Kamui's phasing made it manageable.
He came down fast, closing the distance to Kaguya's face.
The hair responded before he got there. The silver mass behind her lifted and spread in every direction, hardening into thousands of dense white needles, the chakra-reinforced Ash Hair Needles forming a continuous blanketing cage that covered every approach vector simultaneously.
Yasushi pulled back. Getting through that the straightforward way was not happening.
Fine. Do it differently.
Both shoulders lit up green.
The Reincarnation Eye chakra surged through his body, vivid and alive, coating him in a second layer of energy over his existing output. Where it touched the air it moved like flame. Nine translucent green chakra beads materialized around him, joining the nine black Truth-Seeking Orbs already orbiting his body, the two sets of nine circling together.
The Reincarnation Eye had originally belonged to someone else. That had always been its limitation. But somewhere between becoming a Ten-Tails jinchuriki and awakening the Rinnegan and absorbing the all-encompassing power into his own body, the threshold had been crossed. What had once been borrowed had become native. The Reincarnation Eye now ran at full depth inside him, the same depth it had operated at inside Hagoromo.
Eighteen yin-yang constructs. Both types. All of it.
He thought it and they moved, the entire set collapsing inward and fusing together in one motion.
What formed in his hand was a sword. Dark gold, roughly a meter and a half of blade, with something moving along the flat of it that was not quite light and not quite darkness. The fusion of two peak-tier ocular techniques produced a weapon that carried both natures simultaneously, and even holding it felt like standing at the edge of something irreversible.
It still was not enough. He could feel that clearly.
He activated Sage Mode.
The nature energy hit him like a wave breaking inward. The marking appeared on his face. With one hand he drew the blade of the sword through the sage-saturated air, dragging the natural energy into the edge, and watched the dark gold surface shift. Purple-black energy ran down the blade like something alive, the kind of aura that made the space around it want to pull away.
Six Paths power. Reincarnation Eye power. Sage Mode. Three separate peaks layered into one edge.
He raised it overhead and brought it straight down.
No technique. No elaboration. Just a vertical cut.
The blade came down through the lava dimension's scorching air without a sound. Where it passed, space itself split briefly, a thin black line opening and closing in the wake of the swing, there and gone in an eyeblink. The heat and light of the lava currents below peeled apart to either side without resistance.
The hair needles came up to meet it.
The sword went through them.
Kaguya's silver hair, reinforced with Bloodline Encompassing chakra, dense enough and hard enough to stop most things cold, hit the blade and separated. Every strand the edge touched came apart cleanly, the chakra holding the needles rigid simply ceasing to exist at the point of contact. The cut hair lost its structure and drifted outward on the shockwave, thousands of silver threads scattering through the lava-lit air like snow falling sideways.
Kaguya saw the blade break through and made a decision that was already too late.
Her instinct reached for Amenotejikara. The dimensional shift that had saved her dozens of times, the technique she had relied on more than any other, the reflex that lived in the Rinne Sharingan.
The eye that was not fully restored yet.
It did not respond on time.
The damage from Kamui earlier was still working against her. She had leaned on that eye for a thousand years and never had to function without it, and the absence of it now was a gap in her that she had not yet learned to compensate for. Her other capabilities were there. But the habits her body had built around the Rinne Sharingan's constant availability made her just a half-beat slow in reaching for anything else.
By the time she moved, the sword had already arrived.
She felt it cross her body from front to back, the blade drawing a line from her chest to her lower abdomen, the three-way fusion of power parting her flesh and passing clean through. The wound that opened across her torso was enormous, deep enough to expose what lay beneath, blood rising and falling in a bright continuous stream.
She made a sound that was entirely unkingly.
Yasushi was already laughing before she finished falling.
"How about that, Kaguya! I just performed a C-section on you!" He looked absolutely delighted with himself. "Funny though, your son doesn't seem to be in there. Where's he hiding?"
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