Chapter 398: Decapitation
The black cubes hit the orb's surface and vanished. No flash, no debris. The Bloodline Encompassing chakra took them apart so completely that not even ash remained. But the force inside each cube did not disappear with the structure. It passed through, landing on the orb like a steady drumbeat, each hit too small to matter on its own and together amounting to something that mattered very much.
The orb pressed downward by a fraction. Then another fraction.
Kaguya held her arms over her forehead and endured it. She was certain. The Expansive Truth-Seeking Orb's defense was absolute. No attack could break through it. All she needed was for the Rinne Sharingan to finish restoring itself, and the moment it did, every advantage currently held against her would evaporate. She could shift dimensions. She could reconnect to the Infinite Tsukuyomi. She could end this fight on her own terms.
She had survived a thousand years of sealed darkness. She could survive this.
"You think stalling is going to save you."
Yasushi's voice came through the energy chaos cold and flat, stripped of the manic energy it usually carried.
"It won't."
He divided a sliver of chakra from the main output feeding the sword, just enough to move. The Mangekyo on his chest turned once. Two additional chakra arms grew from his sides, formed seals between them at speed, and struck the ground.
White smoke.
An old woman appeared beside him. White robes, white hair, the mild and deeply pleasant expression of a grandmother who had seen everything and found most of it amusing. The energy storm hit her immediately, staining her robes red inside a second.
Her brow furrowed. The vertical pupils in her eyes spun and shifted, the pattern reorganizing itself into a Mangekyo Sharingan configuration. Chakra poured out of her body and assembled itself into a Susanoo frame, green-tinted, smaller than the full forms Yasushi deployed but more than solid enough to hold the storm outside.
The White Snake Sage looked across the burning lava space at Kaguya with the focused attention of someone evaluating livestock at a market.
"So this is your alien, little one?"
"That's her. She's Otsutsuki, and she ate the Chakra Fruit herself back when it happened."
The White Snake Sage's eyes sharpened. She looked Kaguya over with open, unabashed appraisal, taking in the regenerating body, the still-present vitality, the total absence of any deterioration across a millennium of existence.
"A thousand years and not one wrinkle." She sounded genuinely moved. A thin line of drool appeared at the corner of her mouth before she caught it. "The Bloodline Encompassing. Eternal life. What a supplement that would make."
"You're really willing to give this to me?"
"Half for you, half for Hiruko. If Hiruko didn't also need something from her, you could have had all of it."
"Done."
Two words and the negotiation was complete. The White Snake Sage pressed both hands to the ground.
White smoke again.
Neji stepped out of it with both arms raised, holding the giant Tenseigan above his head like an offering.
Yasushi reached out and took it. He pressed it against his shoulder and felt it lock in, the eye's stored power transferring immediately, the vast concentration of ocular chakra that had been accumulating inside that lens for longer than anyone present had been alive beginning to feed into him all at once.
"Everyone's here now." He was laughing again, the cold register gone, replaced with something that sounded like genuine joy at the scale of what was about to happen. "Let's finish this."
The White Snake Sage shed her human form.
The body she had been wearing dissolved, and what replaced it was a snake. White, pale as bone, small enough that the comparison to the Great Toad Sage was almost embarrassing. A thousand years of accumulated sage chakra lived inside that body regardless of its size. She launched herself at Yasushi, coiled around his waist, opened her mouth against the side of his neck, and bit down.
What she injected into him was not venom.
A thousand years of the purest natural energy ever concentrated in a single living being poured through the connection, and Yasushi's body received it like a drought receiving rain. The sage markings on his face extended, lines spreading outward across his skin down into his limbs, the concentration of nature energy reaching a density that changed the quality of the air around him. The energy storm that had been churning uninterrupted around the collision point stuttered and paused for a single moment, reacting to something that suddenly outweighed it.
He pressed the giant Tenseigan against himself and felt the three sources of power begin to find each other.
The Ten-Tails chakra he already carried. The Tenseigan's stored ocular power. The thousand-year sage chakra from the White Snake Sage. Three separate peaks, each one representing the outer limit of what its source could produce, and now occupying the same body simultaneously.
The shinobi world ran on chakra. That was the foundation of everything. And what was happening inside him now was not a refinement of that system. It was a forced escalation beyond the tier the system was designed to accommodate. Quantity pushed past the threshold where it stopped being quantity and became something else.
A quality the Six Paths level had no framework for.
The sensation that rose from him outward was not heat or light or pressure. It was something harder to name, the feeling of something that should not yet exist beginning to exist anyway.
Space around him bent in ways it had not bent before.
The sword in his hands ignited. The dark gold and purple-black of the blade blazed outward in every color at once, the output multiplied past what it had been by an order of magnitude, the edge now carrying an energy signature that sat at the same tier as the Bloodline Encompassing itself.
He looked across the collision point at Kaguya.
She was staring at him. The unshakeable composure was completely gone. Something that looked very much like fear was living in its place.
"Eyes open, Black Zetsu." His voice was quiet under the laughter, which made it worse.
"Watch closely while I cut your mother in half."
The stalemate broke.
A sharp clean crack sounded from the point where blade met orb. The sword moved forward. One step of progress into that surface, and the resistance that had held it perfectly static for the entire battle simply ceased to provide what it had been providing. The crack spread. It moved fast, branching across the orb's exterior in every direction simultaneously, the network of fractures covering the entire surface in seconds, then reversing direction and collapsing inward.
The blade accelerated as the resistance fell away. It went from slow to unstoppable in the span of a breath.
The dark star that could have rewritten the world split down the middle like something ripe, the two halves peeling away from each other and the energy inside detonating outward as they separated, a final white pulse of released force that expanded and faded.
The sword did not stop.
It came through the other side of the orb and found Kaguya's neck in the same motion. The edge touched, moved, and was past before the neural signal had any chance of reaching her to tell her what was happening.
Her head left her body.
It rose into the air above the lava dimension with an expression of absolute disbelief still occupying her face, blood arcing in a wide curve below it, her silver hair fanning out around her like a halo.
One more flash of the blade and her body came apart below the neck, separated cleanly, the two halves falling away to either side.
Yasushi watched it happen with his head tilted back and his arms spread wide, laughing at the top of his lungs.
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