Two grotesque puppets burst from the scrolls, and near-invisible chakra threads snaked out from them to connect with the Hiruko body Sasori was controlling.
One puppet looked like a many-legged spider covered in spikes and holes, with a dozen-odd ninja blades jutting from those openings.
The other stood upright like a mantis: its arms were replaced by massive steel scythes, and a long tail trailed behind it, tipped with a small sickle.
In the blink of an eye, taut, highly condensed chakra threads sprang from Hiruko and latched precisely onto the key joints of both puppets.
"Let me see why you've managed to make a few people in the organization so wary of you."
Sasori's voice came through Hiruko. "You'd better go all out. I don't intend to waste time dancing around with you."
"I don't like waiting—nor making others wait. That's how I live. It's part of my ninja way."
The confident words had barely fallen when, under his exquisite control, the two misshapen puppets moved like killing machines given evil life.
Their joints rasped with clacks as they lunged forward at startling speed—one at Uchiha Chizumi's wood clone, the other at Biwa Jūzō.
Jūzō's eyelids twitched hard at the sight, his face turning ugly. Cold sweat soaked his back in an instant.
"Bastard! That guy's really treating me like an Akatsuki traitor? Didn't he see I was about to walk away?"
"He sent two puppets—one for Uchiha Chizumi and one to clean me up?!"
He cursed inwardly.
The spider-puppet came scuttling like a real venomous arachnid, its sharp legs tapping out a chilling da-da-da across the ground.
Jūzō didn't care whether that thing was aimed at Chizumi or at himself. He gritted his teeth, the muscles in his face twitching, and let the ferocity of a rogue from the Bloody Mist erupt.
"Don't underestimate a Bloody Mist ninja, you bastard!!"
With a roar, he snatched up the Executioner's Blade in both hands. It howled through the air with a heavy tear, carrying force enough to split rock as it hacked down at the spider puppet.
CLANG!!!
A shrill scream of steel on steel exploded with a shower of sparks.
Jūzō's powerful chop did shear off one of the many swords jutting from the spider-puppet—but the other blades, like an iron thicket, locked the heavy cleaver in place.
"Hmph."
Not far away, Sasori snorted, his voice flat and indifferent through Hiruko. "So you're really set on meddling. Fine—then I'll remove you along with the rest."
A heartbeat later, machinery whirred within the spider-puppet. The spot struck by the Executioner's Blade cinched tight, while other sections spun like high-speed saws.
A dozen keen blades became a cyclone of death, shrieking as they ripped the air and surged at Jūzō from arm's length.
Jūzō's pupils pin-pricked. A violent sense of impending death flooded him; adrenaline surged. He abandoned the deadlock without hesitation, slammed his feet into the ground, and threw himself backward in a ragged retreat.
Riiip—!
Fast as he was, the spinning edges still grazed his belly, slicing a long gash through his sturdy flak jacket as if it were paper. The cold wind off the blades made the skin of his abdomen tingle with pain.
He landed, shaken, glanced at the torn cloth, and felt sweat bead at his temple.
Damn it—
If he'd been even a tenth of a second slower, he'd have been disemboweled on the spot.
This bastard isn't kidding.
He clenched the Executioner's Blade tighter, eyes growing harder and more vicious as he fixed on the spider-puppet, which had already reset its stance like a coiled viper.
Meanwhile, the mantis-scythe puppet ignored Jūzō entirely and kept tearing toward Chizumi's wood clone, which still stood calmly where it was.
The shining steel scythes of its arms dragged behind it, carving two deep furrows through the grit.
Swish!
Swish!
As it closed in, the mantis-puppet crossed both arms in a sudden slash. The twin scythes keened, scything two lethal silver arcs through the air that crisscrossed toward the clone's neck and waist.
The wood clone's expression remained calm. At the instant the blades would have hit, it tapped its feet and floated back weightlessly, slipping neatly past a strike that could have hewn a boulder.
At the same time, its right sleeve writhed, and a scroll slid out from its forearm like a living thing. The clone caught it firmly.
Then—under Sasori's startled gaze from within Hiruko—the "Uchiha Chizumi" before him completely ignored the puppet behind it lifting its scythes for a second attack. The clone did something reckless—suicidal, even: it turned its entire back, wide open to the mantis-puppet, and sprinted straight at Sasori's true body.
"Trying to ignore my art and go for the head? Naïve."
Sasori snorted, offended that such a tactic would slight the art of puppetry.
The mantis-puppet blurred after the clone, its scythes cleaving down with terrifying momentum at the clone's back and lower spine.
Thunk!
Thunk!
This time the wood clone didn't dodge. Both massive blades bit deep without resistance, carving two savage wounds that nearly cut it into thirds. For any normal body of flesh and blood, that would have been instantly fatal—the spine and organs utterly ruined.
However—
"Hm?!"
Sasori immediately sensed something was off. The feedback through his chakra threads lacked the drag of slicing flesh and bone. Instead, it felt like hacking into something tough and fibrous—wood. And there was no blood.
"No blood? A puppet too?"
He snapped to high alert, then rejected it at once. "No—this feel… it's some kind of special kekkei genkai clone. Taking a hit like that without dispersing—this isn't an ordinary clone technique!"
In an instant, Sasori realized the "Uchiha Chizumi" before him wasn't the real body. He'd let a clone draw all his attention.
He'd been had.
And in that split second of realization, the nearly triparted wood clone, riding the last of its momentum, crashed into the twenty-meter range of Sasori's position.
It yanked the scroll fully open.
—A Fire Sealing Method scroll.
What was sealed inside was the Mangekyō Sharingan technique of Uchiha Itachi—
Amaterasu: the black flames.
Chizumi had sealed that terrifying fire into two scrolls: one he'd given to Uchiha Izumi, and the other he'd sent with this wood clone.
"Amaterasu!"
With the last of its strength, the clone pronounced the sentence.
At the same time, the mantis-puppet had already caught up and chopped down mercilessly once more—
—!!
The clone could hold its form no longer. It burst into a thick puff of white smoke and vanished.
At that exact instant, the center of the opened Fire-Sealing scroll flared—black sealing script lit as if ignited, and a fist-sized knot of jet-black fire, radiating pure omen and annihilation, tore free like a demon escaping hell and shot straight at Hiruko.
"Hmph. Parlor tricks."
Sasori let out a faint, scornful laugh through Hiruko. The clone and the strange method of attack had surprised him, but he had absolute confidence in his defenses and his puppets.
He didn't even move Hiruko's main body. With a thought, he snapped Hiruko's chain-like steel tail forward.
The tail telescoped out and stabbed directly at the oncoming black flame.
In Sasori's mind, that unimpressive clump of fire would be scattered or blocked by solid steel.
Sssst.
The black flame touched Hiruko's tail. There was no explosion, no crash of energy.
Instead, the flame clung to the metal like living tar, sticking fast.
"Hm?"
Sasori twitched the tail, trying to shake it off. No matter how he whipped and jerked Hiruko's tail, even smashing it hard against a rock, the black fire clung like a maggot on bone—unmoved, un-diminished.
Worse, it began creeping along the tail toward Hiruko's body. The metal reddened and warped under the heat.
"Sasori-sama! Chizumi used a Fire Sealing Method to release that flame. We can use the same to seal it again!"
Yakushi Kabuto rattled off the suggestion.
Hiruko's already shadowed face darkened further. Sasori ignored Kabuto. As the black flame was about to reach Hiruko's main chassis—
Click.
A small mechanism tripped inside Hiruko's chest. A scroll popped out of the torso and unfurled midair with a snap.
Bang!
White smoke bloomed, and a bizarre puppet wielding a giant broken blade appeared out of nowhere.
Its first act was not to attack the distant enemy, but—under Sasori's control—to swing that huge blade without hesitation straight at the joint where Hiruko's burning tail met the body.
CLANG!!!
Crack!
With a screech of tearing metal, the giant blade shattered a chunk off against Hiruko's sturdy frame—but it still severed the tail at the base, lopping off the section engulfed in black flame.
The flaming stump dropped into the sand and continued to burn quietly, melting and glazing the ground around it.
Sasori jerked what remained of Hiruko back a dozen meters in a hurried retreat, eyes fixed warily on the black fire smoldering on the sand. Only when it finally winked out did he draw his gaze away.
Then he said coldly to Kabuto, "Suggest something that useless again and I'll kill you first."
Kabuto: "???"
Seriously? He was trying to help. Don't tell him this guy never learned the Fire Sealing Method?
Kabuto's mouth twitched. Every Akatsuki member he'd met was a piece of work. If you don't know how to do it, just say so?
Orochimaru-sama's spy assignment is way harder than it sounds…
From the corner of his eye, Kabuto noticed something else: the puppet attacking Jūzō was in pieces, and Jūzō himself was nowhere to be seen. Likely, when Sasori was busy dealing with that eerie black flame, he'd had no time to control the other puppet, giving Jūzō a window to smash it—and bolt.
Kabuto thought about saying, "I think we botched the hunt," but decided against it. Otherwise… this prideful man really might kill him.
"Hmph."
Sasori watched as the black fire finished consuming half of Hiruko and finally vanished. He tossed out a cold order:
"Withdraw."
"Looks like that puppet master really is Sasori of the Red Sand of Sunagakure—and a core Akatsuki member at that," Jūzō muttered from far away, already in full retreat, giving himself a decent excuse. "As a taijutsu-type, nothing's worse than a puppeteer who hides and snipes. Not tangling with him was smart."
What else could he do? Chizumi's wood clone had already been chopped apart. If he kept fighting, he'd be taking on all of Akatsuki alone.
Jūzō had no death wish. His life mattered—especially now that he'd glimpsed a future where the shinobi world might truly be reshaped by Absolute Justice. He wanted to see that day with his own eyes—maybe even take part in it.
"Nowhere to go… I can't return to Akatsuki. And there's no point going back to the Blood Mist Kirigakure."
Shouldering the Executioner's Blade, he glanced around, then ran straight in one direction.
Toward the Land of Fire.
At this point, what choice did he have but to throw in with Uchiha Chizumi?
…
—The next day, in Konoha—
As usual, Uchiha Fugaku got up early, washed, dressed, ate, and headed out. Halfway down the road, he suddenly froze, drawing curious looks from passing clansmen.
He'd just remembered: yesterday, his own clan had forced him to step down. He was no longer the Uchiha clan head, nor the captain of the Konoha Police Force.
So… why was he up so early? Where was he going?
Awkward about turning back now, he walked out of the Uchiha district with a blank face, bought a bouquet at the Yamanaka flower shop, and went to Konoha's cemetery, stopping before Uchiha Itachi's cenotaph.
He set the white flowers down gently, straightened, and spoke to the stone with a stiff face: "It seems we both failed—father and son."
"You took an extreme path for Konoha's future; I swallowed my pride for the Uchiha's. In the end, both of us were defeated."
"And the one who defeated us was Uchiha Chizumi's Absolute Justice. His justice has even reached into our home and touched our family."
"Your brother. Your mother. One is a believer in Absolute Justice; the other… not opposed to it. They betrayed everything you and I stood for."
"They've both chosen a road opposite yours and mine. If you were still alive, perhaps it wouldn't have come to this."
"Hah…"
Fugaku let out a long, heavy breath. For a moment, a frightening thought flashed through his mind, and he realized the clan's old extremism was trying to take hold again.
Elsewhere—
Uchiha Chizumi and three Uchiha jōnin had already returned to Konoha.