Chapter 399: Otsutsuki. Lab Rat. Kaguya.
Before the pieces of Kaguya's body had finished falling, Yasushi already had his hand out.
Universal Pull.
The gravity caught her head mid-tumble and dragged it straight back into his palm.
Even reduced to just a skull, Kaguya did not quit. The regeneration was already moving, new tissue threading downward from the severed neck, bone and muscle rebuilding the body she had just lost. Simultaneously her silver hair unfurled again, every strand going rigid and sharp, thousands of needles launching themselves at Yasushi with a sound like a thousand snakes hissing at once.
He was already swinging.
The sword moved through the hair the way it had moved through everything else, clean and without ceremony, the blade singing off each strand in rapid succession. He worked through it efficiently, like a barber with no patience for anything but the end result. Silver fragments scattered around him in every direction, drifting on the heated air of the lava dimension, catching the red light as they fell.
When he was done, Kaguya was bald.
He closed his hand around her skull, fingers locking into position, and with his other hand he cut away the small portion of neck and body that had managed to regrow below, disposing of it with the same casual motion he might use to trim something inconvenient from a piece of fruit.
The White Snake Sage was already moving. She came off Yasushi's body fast, crossing the distance in a single strike, jaws opening wide to expose the full geometry of her teeth. She caught the half-body in her mouth and swallowed it in one motion, the shape of it visible for a moment moving down the length of her throat before it disappeared.
The other half did not reach the lava. Hiruko materialized from wherever he had been waiting and caught it cleanly, fed it into the Daikokuten storage dimension without breaking stride.
In the space of a few seconds, all that remained of Kaguya outside of Yasushi's grip was a single head.
The coordination between them had the quality of something rehearsed. It had not been rehearsed. They simply all understood what needed to happen and moved accordingly, the actions flowing into each other without gaps.
"NO!"
Black Zetsu's scream came from inside the Reincarnation Eye chakra prison Neji had sealed him in. He was throwing himself at the walls of it, his form cycling through shapes at random, drawing out into spines, spreading flat into membrane, contracting into a single mass and hammering outward. The prison absorbed each impact with a ripple of faint light and gave nothing back. The yin-yang nature of the Reincarnation Eye chakra made the structure resistant to anything Black Zetsu could produce, and he could not find the threshold where it would break.
All he could do was watch.
Yasushi reshaped part of the Six Paths Convergence Sword in his free hand, reforming the material into something that fit over a head. He worked it down over Kaguya's skull and pressed it into place, the energy of the blade forming a sealed layer around her, conforming to every contour, locking the hair follicles beneath it so nothing could grow through. With that covering in place, the hair was neutralized completely.
He held her up in front of his face.
She looked back at him through the small openings where her eyes were exposed. The pale skin of her face was thrown into shadow by the material encasing her. Her eyes had everything that was left of her dignity in them, and what was in them was not dignity anymore. It was humiliation burning at a temperature that had no name, and underneath that, hatred old enough and deep enough to outlast anything the current world was capable of producing.
The lava dimension's red light moved between them.
"Now that's a look I can appreciate." Yasushi's smile went all the way back to his ears. He tapped the casing over her skull with two fingers, the sound coming back hollow and dull. "You look like a decorative piece. I could hang this above the gate at Konoha. Quite the statement."
"Shameless."
Her voice still worked. The fury in it was total.
"Absolutely." He agreed without any sign of caring.
Kaguya went still.
Not the stillness of defeat. Something older, something that had been underneath the fury the entire time and now that the fury had no more useful function, rose to the surface instead. The composure of a creature that had spent a thousand years sealed in the moon and come out the other side without losing the core of itself. The patience of something that genuinely believed time was on its side.
"Kill me or seal me. It makes no difference." Her voice came out flat and certain. "With the Bloodline Encompassing, no seal will hold me forever. I will return. That is not a threat. It is simply what will happen."
Yasushi's expression shifted. The grin did not disappear, but something behind it changed quality. He tilted his head slightly, like someone who has just been handed a better opportunity than they expected.
"Seal you?" He almost sounded offended. "Do you have any idea what you're worth?"
He turned her head so she was facing outward, toward the others.
Hiruko was looking at her the way researchers look at something they have been trying to obtain for their entire career. His fingers were moving without him appearing to notice, the unconscious fidgeting of someone who wants to begin and is only barely restraining themselves.
The White Snake Sage's tongue was going in and out rapidly. She had the focused, anticipatory stillness of a predator that has already committed to the strike and is simply waiting for the signal.
Even Neji, who approached most things with the equanimity of someone who had seen too much to be impressed by anything, was looking at Kaguya with an attention that went slightly beyond professional.
"Everyone here wants something from the Bloodline Encompassing," Yasushi said pleasantly. "Study it, absorb it, replicate it. If we can understand this body completely, every person present has a path to something that should be unreachable."
The Rinne Sharingan on Kaguya's forehead finished its regeneration. The eye was whole again, the pattern restored, the connection to the Infinite Tsukuyomi theoretically available.
The despair that moved through her white eyes when she registered this fully was something she could not conceal.
The eye was restored. She could connect to the Infinite Tsukuyomi again. She could activate Amenotejikara, shift dimensions, take everyone present with her when she went. Technically the tools were there.
But she had no body. The dimensional techniques she could still access would move her and everything around her together. She could not leave without taking all of them with her. And under this much direct observation, with her head enclosed and her eyes watched and Neji holding a containment structure already calibrated to her chakra signature, there was nothing she could do with any of it.
She was completely captured.
The eye that had once looked down on everything in the world turned its gaze inward instead and found nothing there that helped.
***
70+advance chapters at patreon.com/Eatinpieces