Chapter 397: Taking Turns on Kaguya
The wound across Kaguya's torso sent her over an edge she had not crossed since before her sealing.
When reason goes, what replaces it is older and simpler. Pure destructive release, stripped of calculation, stripped of dignity. Her face twisted into something that had nothing divine about it. She turned and fled backward through the air, and as she went her arm came up and swept outward.
The Expansive Truth-Seeking Orb, still hanging massive and inert where she had left it, responded like something on a leash being cut loose. An invisible force seized it and hurled it forward at a speed that made the meteor from the previous battle look leisurely. Its trajectory tore visible white fracture lines through the dimensional space itself, the lava dimension's fabric cracking like glass under the gravitational stress of something that should not exist inside it. The heat and light of the surrounding lava bent and folded around the orb's path, unable to maintain their normal behavior in its presence.
The entire area around Yasushi's position began collapsing inward.
He looked up at it coming.
He was grinning.
"Let's find out which one of us is harder. Your Expansive Truth-Seeking Orb, or my Six Paths Convergence Sword."
All six of his eyes lit up simultaneously. Every reserve he had poured into the blade in his hands, and alongside the raw chakra came the combined ocular power of all three dojutsu layered together, the techniques of three different peak-level eyes feeding into a single edge at once.
The dark gold of the sword's surface swallowed itself. What replaced it was a deeper color, close to dark purple, the kind of shade that light enters and does not come back from. The blade's edge stopped being a clean line. The space immediately around it developed a continuous, fine distortion, a subtle ongoing folding and refolding of the dimensional fabric against the flat of the sword, as though the blade itself was perpetually cutting something that was not matter. Anything that contacted that edge would not simply be struck. It would be redirected into dimensional space, or shredded by the spatial tearing directly.
The Kamui's spatial destruction capability, made permanent and structural. Fixed into the weapon itself.
He swung to meet it.
The moment of contact produced nothing that normal senses could process cleanly. The sound was erased before it could form, absorbed by the energy displacement. The light at the collision point was not extinguished so much as bent entirely away, leaving a small sphere of pure darkness at the center of the impact that lasted for one instant before the pressure found its release.
Then everything expressed itself at once.
The shockwave that came out of it was not describable in terms of previous explosions. It was a different category of event. The sphere of energy that expanded from the collision point was several kilometers across before it finished, its interior a complete chaos of sage energy, Bloodline Encompassing chakra, Six Paths power, and dimensional shear forces all operating simultaneously. Every conventional form of matter caught inside it was reduced to component particles. The lava dimension howled around it.
Yasushi and Kaguya were both at the edge of the blast radius.
Neither of them was anywhere near safe at that distance.
The energy wind reached them as a solid wall of force laced with spatial shards, and it tore through their chakra coatings as though those coatings were cloth. The wounds opened across both of them in an instant, hundreds of cuts from every direction, deep enough that a normal body would have emptied itself in seconds. They were both soaked in blood before the first wave finished passing.
Neither of them moved back a single step.
The pain hit something primal in both of them and the result was the same in both cases. They leaned into it. Yasushi's grip on the sword tightened until the skin of his palms split, and he drove more chakra into the blade, squeezing it from reserves that were past comfortable, past sustainable, reaching into the deeper stores that the body keeps for the absolute last resort. He pushed the blade forward, trying to get the edge further into the surface of the orb, to find a flaw in it, to force it past the threshold where it would either crack or ignite.
Kaguya was doing the same thing from her side. She was bleeding from her eyes and her nose and she did not appear to notice. Her hands moved in the air as though holding something invisible, channeling everything she had left into the orb, driving it forward, trying to close the distance and simply erase him.
They held each other perfectly still.
The energy storm churned between and around them with no sign of ending. Wounds opened and sealed and opened again. The healing was happening, chakra spending itself continuously just to keep both of them functional enough to keep fighting, tissue reknitting at a speed that should not have been biologically possible and somehow remaining insufficient to keep up with the rate of damage.
This was not a fight anymore. It was an endurance problem. Whoever ran out first would lose, and losing here meant being consumed by the other's weapon entirely.
Yasushi was not alone.
Hiruko could not operate at the center of that storm. The energy levels were too extreme for his current body to survive in close proximity. But he could work from the outside.
The Daikokuten dimension opened. Black cubes dropped out of the sky in sequence, aimed at Kaguya's position, each one substantial enough that individually it would not be decisive but collectively they accumulated like weight on a scale.
Kaguya had no free attention left for additional threats. Her entire output was committed to the orb.
"Worthless insects!" She screamed it raw, with nothing composed left in her voice. She stepped forward, placing herself underneath the orb, using its mass as a shield against the cubes raining down from above.
It worked. The cubes hit the orb's surface and were dissolved immediately, the Bloodline Encompassing energy taking them apart without effort. No debris, no fire, nothing.
But the kinetic force transferred anyway.
Each cube dissolved cleanly but the energy it carried still arrived, landing on the orb's exterior as a continuous series of small pushes. Not enough to stop it. Each individual hit was negligible. But Hiruko kept sending them, relentless, one after another, and the cumulative effect of dozens of impacts began to register. The orb, already in balance against the sword, started to move. Slowly, incrementally, pushed down toward Kaguya by the weight of unceasing bombardment from above.
She felt it.
For the first time since her revival, Kaguya recognized the specific quality of this situation. Being surrounded. Being calculated against from multiple directions simultaneously, with no angle she could cover that did not leave another one open. She had experienced this once before, a thousand years ago, and it had ended with a millennium of sealed darkness.
The recognition of it did something to her that the pain had not.
She protected her forehead. Both arms came up in front of her face, covering the Rinne Sharingan behind them, and she kept them there even as the energy storm cut through them repeatedly, even as the bone showed through, even as the damage accumulated faster than it healed. She would not expose that eye. Without it she was losing. With it restored, she could end this, could switch dimensions, could reconnect to the Infinite Tsukuyomi's chakra supply, could rebuild the advantage from nothing.
She just needed time.
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