The heavy, viscous coat of nitro-jelly clung to Sasuke's skin and clothing like a second, suffocating layer of sweat.
He stood in the center of the subterranean stadium, the sharp, chemical astringency of the gel burning the inside of his nose. The substance bubbled faintly against his body heat. He shifted his weight, his muscles tight and irritated by the sticky friction of his own clothes.
High above, partially obscured by the shadows of the viewing balcony, Orochimaru and Jirōbō looked down in absolute silence.
Then, the air pressure in the stadium collapsed.
A suffocating, paralyzing wave of pure killing intent slammed into Sasuke's spine. The air turned to ice in his lungs.
He spun around, his hand instinctively dropping to his kunai pouch.
His eyes widened. The breath hitched and died in his throat. The arrogant confidence he had painstakingly built over the last week of brutal conditioning shattered into dust.
Itachi.
ITACHI.
The black cloak with the red clouds hung perfectly still over his brother's shoulders. The dead, obsidian eyes stared right through him.
Sasuke's vision swam. He forced chakra to his optic nerves, desperate to awaken the Sharingan, but a violent spike of phantom pain lanced through his skull. The tomoe refused to spin. Instead, the cursed seal on his neck flared with a branding, searing heat. The black, flame-like marks immediately began crawling rapidly across his collarbone, feeding aggressively on his raw panic.
Sasuke let out a feral, wordless roar and lunged.
SNAP. A sharp, echoing crack fractured the acoustics of the cavern, bouncing down from the high balcony. Sasuke's eyes flicked upward in a microsecond of pure, instinctual confusion. The memory of Orochimaru's sadistic conditioning drills flashed behind his eyes just as his brain recognized the betrayal.
The chemical gel slathered across his body instantly ignited.
The oxygen vanished from the air around his face. Sasuke gasped, a reflexive breath seizure choking his lungs with superheated gas. The nitro-jelly bubbled and cracked, searing his skin through his clothes in tight, geometric burn patterns. A brilliant, roaring sheet of orange flame swallowed him. His vision narrowed to a frantic, heat-warped shimmer, his legs buckling as his muscles refused the command to run.
Sasuke screamed, a raw, tearing sound ripping from his throat.
His vision lagged slight as the intense thermal flash overwhelmed him. The orange flames shifted in his mind, darkening into the inescapable, consuming black fires of Amaterasu devouring the hallway in Konoha, burning his flesh, burning his mind, burning everything to ash.
Through the roaring, heat-distorted curtain, Itachi blurred forward.
"CHIDORI!" Sasuke shrieked the incantation through the blinding heat. Pure, electrical rage surged, violently parting the fire consuming his arm. A thousand birds chirped to life, driving the blue-white lightning directly toward his brother's heart.
Itachi caught Sasuke's wrist.
The momentum stopped dead. Sasuke gritted his teeth against the impact, but his combat instincts fractured as his nervous system processed the impossible grip holding him back.
Fingers overlapped fingers. Knuckles pressed against joints from the wrong angles. Sasuke's brain frantically tried to count the digits digging into his skin, but he lost all sense of where his own arm ended and the enemy began. He questioned wildly if his unawakened eyes were hallucinating. Three distinct pairs of hands locked completely around his right forearm. The unnatural torque misaligned his elbow, painfully twisting the joint while simultaneously compressing his radial nerve until his fingers went completely numb.
Sasuke didn't shrink back. The terror of the flames and the biomechanical impossibility of the grip fed the vile chakra pooling in his neck. The cursed mark surged, raging across the entire left side of his body, staining his skin dark brown and tearing the fabric of his shirt as a massive, webbed, hand-like wing erupted from his shoulder blade.
He wrenched his arm violently free, leaving ribbons of his own skin behind against the friction of the overlapping hands.
"ITACHI!" Sasuke screamed to the cavernous ceiling.
The massive wing dragged heavily against the stone tiles with a coarse, scraping echo. The asymmetrical mass shifted his balance, driving his momentum forward with terrifying, uncontrolled force. He launched himself, striking directly. A brutal, heavy punch smashed into his brother's guard. Sandal leather shrieked against the stone, kicking up a harsh cloud of dust as Itachi yielded a half-step backward.
Sasuke bared his teeth, a wild, manic thrill surging through his chest at the momentary yield. He backflipped, planting his feet against the stadium wall. Using the heavy wing as a compressed spring, he launched himself back in a devastating, spiraling dive to finish it.
Itachi simply sidestepped.
Sasuke crashed hard into the stone floor. The heavy wing whipped the air, kicking up a choking cloud of dust, while the shockwave of fracturing tiles shuddered violently up his shins. Ignoring the jarring impact, he instantly crouched, springing back up toward the Akatsuki cloak.
"Hng—" The air left Sasuke's lungs in a violent rush.
Itachi caught him simultaneously by the throat and both wrists. Before Sasuke could twist his wing to strike, the black fabric of the Akatsuki cloak stretched taut. A dull, ripping sound preceded a massive displacement of air. A fourth arm tore straight through the red clouds, burying a closed fist brutally into Sasuke's solar plexus. His ribs compressed inward with a sickening creak.
Itachi hoisted the gasping, immobilized Uchiha upward, pulling Sasuke's face inches from his own.
The Sharingan spun slowly in Itachi's eyes, but the flesh around the sockets violently warped. The pale skin turned a sickly, hardened grey-brown.
Riiiip. The slashed Konoha headband snapped under a sudden, grotesque internal pressure. A jagged, demonic horn grew straight through the center of the metal plate, pushing the fabric off his head. The defaced protector fell, hitting the stadium floor with a hollow, ringing thunk-tink.
Sasuke's jaw dropped, the sheer horror of the physical mutation paralyzing his vocal cords.
"You... are a monster," Sasuke choked out, his lungs burning.
Itachi laughed. The sound dragged across Sasuke's ears—a horrific, doubled, layered harmonic of two distinct voices echoing from a single throat.
Sasuke blinked, a sudden, violent wave of double vision warping the monstrous face before him. Spatial lag dragged at his senses. What is happening to his body? The grey-brown flesh of Itachi's chest suddenly liquefied. It bubbled, surging forward and violently sinking into the skin of Sasuke's sternum.
Sasuke thrashed wildly as he lost ownership of his own torso.
A crawling, invasive heat seeped directly into his chest cavity.
Unnatural pressure forced his ribs apart as foreign muscle and tissue displaced his own organs.
A wet, grinding sensation echoed between his ribs.
He tried to draw a breath, but the inhale caught halfway, blocked by a physical obstruction inside his own lung.
His heart seized into a frantic, arrhythmic stutter as the parasite ate directly into his bone, scrambling his nerve endings.
The cursed mark flooded his nervous system. A heavy, suffocating wave of emotional numbing washed over him. His ego thinned, his consciousness actively detaching and narrowing into a dark, dormant corner of his mind in a desperate bid for survival.
"Stop me, Sasuke." The whisper distorted, bleeding heavily into the edges of his Tsukuyomi nightmares. Time dilating into a sickening crawl, Sasuke couldn't map the sound; the voice vibrated not in his ears, but directly inside his own fusing collarbone.
Sasuke's incomplete, obstructed breaths hitched as the surface fire finally burned out, leaving only charred, melted remnants of clothing. He couldn't breathe. He was being overwritten from the inside out.
"Die, Sasuke," the layered, demonic voice chuckled, grinding directly against his lungs.
Sasuke's eyes snapped wide open.
The cursed mark's suppression halted instantly. The paralyzing terror of the black flames and the suffocating panic of the parasitic invasion incinerated under a sudden, blinding flash of absolute, unadulterated hatred. He refused to die. Not like this. Not to him.
The pupil in his right eye bled a brilliant, luminous red. A single tomoe flared to life, spinning furiously before locking sharply into place.
Sasuke screamed, a horrific, feral sound of pure, self-destructive vengeance. Adrenaline and lightning flooded his left arm, overpowering the parasitic lock. He wrenched the limb backward, his fingers closing around a standard iron kunai from his scorched back pouch.
A deafening heartbeat hammered in his ears. A violent flash of self-preservation screamed through his blood—this will kill me—before pure, unadulterated hatred crushed the reflex into dust.
"YOU FIRST!"
He slammed the blade directly into his own chest.
The iron bit deep, punching through the grey-brown mass of flesh currently fusing with his ribs. The friction of the metal grating against his own sternum sent a white-hot shock up his arm. He ripped the blade out. The heavy, metallic stench of fresh blood instantly spiked over the smell of scorched nitro-gel.
He slammed it in again. The blade popped sickeningly through cartilage, then deflected harshly off solid bone.
And again.
And again.
His grip strength degraded rapidly, his fingers slick with his own blood, muscle fatigue screaming up his forearm. He just kept stabbing. Tendons in his wrist trembled wildly as the iron slipped against the bone.
The blade caught, deflected, and tore, driving a wet, ragged rhythm of friction and crunching cartilage.