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"..." Such a brutally direct and crude method made the corner of Kisame's mouth twitch involuntarily. While he himself was undoubtedly a ruthless man, his ruthlessness was reserved for others. Treating his own body with such rough, violent disregard was something Kisame admitted he could never bring himself to do. As far as he knew, when that fellow Ao from his former village had obtained the Byakugan, he had undergone all manner of surgical procedures before the eye was successfully transplanted. But Obito? He simply dug it out with his fingers. And judging by his practiced, skillful technique, this was clearly not his first time performing such an operation.
Casually tossing the blood-soaked eye aside, Obito trembling with excitement picked up the Sharingan extracted from the glass bottle and brought it toward his empty eye socket. Perhaps due to the sheer intensity of his emotions, his hand was actually shaking. Soon, very soon, he would no longer have to live with his head bowed. He would no longer have to endure the cold, impassive face of the Deva Path. He had been rough and violent when tearing the old eye out, but his touch became considerably gentler when placing the new one in. In any case, Obito couldn't have cared less whether the spare Sharingan was damaged in the process. To him, it was nothing more than a disposable tool. If it broke, so be it. That old fossil Madara had collected plenty of them; he didn't have to worry about running out of eyes to use. Once he had replaced it with his own eye, he could even transplant the spare eyes to other locations on his body – much like Danzo's arm. Though Obito had no desire to make his arm look grotesque and unnatural, his back would serve as a perfectly adequate alternative site.
The eye sank into the socket, and a pale green glow enveloped the area, signaling that the Sharingan's optic nerves were connecting to the brain, initiating repair and healing. Without formidable recovery and regenerative capabilities, this kind of direct eye-gouging and insertion would only result in severe trauma to both the eye and the brain. But Obito, who had been implanted with the cells of the White Zetsu, had no need to concern himself with such trivialities.
"Ha ha ha ha..." As the eye underwent repair, Obito, his face still covered in blood, couldn't help but unleash another bout of the iconic mad laughter befitting one of the Four Great Mad Laughers.
Black Zetsu: "..."
Kisame: "..."
Enough was enough. He'd done it once before swapping the eye, and now he was doing it again after. Was he planning to go for a third round once the eye had fully settled in? How come they'd never realized before that Obito was the type with such flamboyant, ostentatious character? Could it be that he'd been suppressed by Nagato for far too long? But then again, shouldn't a dark-hearted lunatic be beyond caring about such things? Black Zetsu pondered this privately. Kisame, for his part, didn't overthink it. He simply felt that this sort of manic laughter looked... rather stupid.
"At last..." When the green glow in his eye socket finally faded, Obito ceased his maniacal cackling, though the corners of his mouth remained upturned, betraying his inner mood. "Now then..." Having painstakingly collected his own eye and returned it to where it rightfully belonged, the most natural thing to do at this moment was, of course, to test it out. So Obito began experimenting with the eye's adaptability.
What he hadn't expected, however, was that while his right eye functioned exactly as before with no adverse reactions whatsoever, and his left eye seemed equally problem-free, there was simply no connection whatsoever between the two. No matter how he tested it, the left eye remained stubbornly in its three-tomoe state.
No way. A chill ran through Obito's heart.
For an ordinary person, transplanting an eye in this manner would undoubtedly trigger some degree of adverse physical reaction. But Obito was different. The compatibility of the White Zetsu cells was so overwhelmingly strong that he hadn't been able to immediately detect the truth: this Sharingan did not belong to him. It was only when he attempted to access the power of the Mangekyo that he finally realized something was terribly wrong. Forget dual Kamui – he couldn't even brush against the edges of the Susanoo that a Mangekyo Sharingan ought to command.
The dawning recognition of a catastrophic problem hit Obito, and his expression instantly twisted in horror. It seemed the Sharingan he had expended such immense effort to seize was not, in fact, his own... but a counterfeit. A fake.
"AAAAARGH!!!" His overflowing joy disintegrated into boundless, crushing disappointment. Obito howled in fury, his enraged fists smashing violently against the rock walls of the base.
"????" What in the world was going on? One moment he'd been laughing with sheer delight, and the next he'd plunged into a berserk rampage, taking his anger out on the stones. Kisame simply couldn't fathom why Obito was oscillating so wildly between emotional extremes.
Black Zetsu, however, seemed to perceive what had happened. This Sharingan was a fake. No – the Sharingan itself was genuine, but it wasn't Obito's. In other words, the eye they had gone to such tremendous lengths to obtain was a counterfeit! It was nothing more than a completely ordinary three-tomoe Sharingan.
"..." Obito, you really are pitiful. Truly. Black Zetsu's gaze toward Obito now carried a trace of genuine sympathy. He had been wondering whether Obito, once in possession of his complete, rightful eyes, would stiffen his spine and openly challenge Nagato. Now, it seemed, he'd been wildly overthinking things. If Nagato ever learned that Obito had gone through hell and back only to retrieve a counterfeit Sharingan, he would absolutely die laughing.
"Bastard! The Cloud Village dared to make a fool of me!!!" He had been tricked! The eye wasn't his. Obito trembled from head to toe with incandescent rage. He violently tore the eye out and hurled it to the ground, stomping on it repeatedly, utterly indifferent as to whether this Sharingan might still hold some use for him. At this moment, he was consumed with fury, desperate to find somewhere to vent the raging fire in his heart. Soaring expectations had yielded nothing but crushing despair. Why was the eye a fake? WHY?!
"..." Black Zetsu remained silent for a moment, his gaze flicking to the shattered remnants of the Sharingan on the floor before he slowly spoke. "Perhaps this was a trap laid by the Cloud Village – deliberately placing an ordinary Sharingan inside to prevent us from taking the real one. Or perhaps... this was a scheme engineered by Uchiha Kazuki from the very beginning. He intentionally hid your true eye, then had a common Sharingan sealed in its place, luring you into attacking the Cloud Village to seize it and sparking conflict between you."
Only two explanations existed for this situation. Either the Cloud Village had deliberately pulled a fast one, or Kazuki had orchestrated the entire deception from the start. Because he had predicted with absolute certainty that Obito would come searching for his eye, Kazuki had purposefully used a fake to deceive everyone. As a result, everyone had mistakenly believed this eye to be Obito's, meticulously sealing it and hiding it away with the utmost caution, never once suspecting that the Sharingan was a complete fraud.
"UCHIHA KAZUKI!!!" Obito felt he was on the verge of losing his mind, screaming and roaring throughout the base. "I'll kill him! I'LL KILL HIM!!!"
Black Zetsu had absolutely no desire to go poking the hornet's nest that was Kazuki. He knew all too well how terrifyingly powerful someone capable of casually wielding the Complete Body Susanoo truly was – one misstep and he'd be utterly crushed. Kisame, for his part, simply had no wish to meet his end. He wasn't sure of the exact limits of Kazuki's strength, but having witnessed how Kazuki had chased and stomped the Fourth Kazekage into the ground like a common mole, Kisame knew with certainty that he was no match whatsoever. Going after Kazuki would end in one of two ways: either a humiliating, frantic retreat, or being swatted dead.
"I suggest you capture Kakashi," Black Zetsu offered. "Extract some intelligence from him. There's a possibility you might learn where your real eye is hidden."