Chapter 575: Danzo's Revival Coins
Young Sasuke had actually been carrying a quiet worry the whole time -- that Satsuki might suddenly move, might cut in ahead of him and deal with Danzo herself before he had the chance.
He knew he was not Satsuki's equal. Even with the strange new eyes he had just been given -- those intertwined purple and red eyes he hadn't even begun to understand -- his mind was still clear enough to tell him: the woman who shared his bloodline was not something he could oppose.
But Satsuki did nothing.
Young Sasuke let out a small, private breath of relief. At the same time he found himself slightly confused. Had Satsuki genuinely let it go?
Of course Satsuki hated Danzo. When she had learned the truth from Naruto -- learned that Danzo and Obito were the real architects of the Uchiha massacre -- the impulse to kill both of them with her own hands had genuinely risen in her. That was inevitable.
She had hated Obito. Hated him for unleashing the Nine-Tails on the village, for making the Uchiha clan a target of suspicion and exclusion, for cornering them into an inescapable position, for causing Naruto's parents to die. And then she had personally killed Obito -- in her own world.
As for Danzo: she had never gotten the opportunity to be the one who ended him. Naruto had been the one who moved. Without her knowledge, he had dealt with that threat on her behalf.
But she had never felt any regret about it. Because from her perspective, there was no line between herself and Naruto. His hands were her hands. His blade was her blade. What he did was what she did.
And beyond that -- compared to hating someone who was already dead, compared to spending her attention on people who were no longer in this world, she would rather keep that time for the people still beside her. She would rather love the living than despise the dead.
In the center of the clearing, Danzo's response was something else entirely.
He had already been quietly calculating a retreat -- and then, in the moment he saw those eyes, he threw that plan away entirely and cleanly.
He began slowly unwinding the bandaging from his arm, layer by layer.
He needed those eyes. Whatever the cost.
Was he blinded by greed? Or was it overconfidence in his insurance policy -- that arm loaded with Sharingan eyes, every one of them capable of sustaining Izanagi, his personal stockpile of second chances?
"Uchiha Sasuke."
Danzo's voice came from across the clearing.
"Since you have chosen not to understand the necessity of my agreement with Itachi, and have decided to move against me and against the Leaf's leadership -- I'm afraid I have no choice but to void that agreement. Which means I'll have to kill you."
He said it as though it were completely natural. As though he weren't doing this to seize those eyes, but because Sasuke had "moved against the Leaf's leadership" and left him no option but self-defense.
Adult Naruto stood behind the scene, listening to the phrasing, and found he no longer even had the motivation to tear it apart. The man was tiresome in himself -- the same handful of phrases, recycled indefinitely: "for the Leaf," "necessary sacrifice," "thankless duty done in the shadows." Once was irritating. Twice was nauseating. By the third time, the only thought it produced was an urge to push him into the ground and be done with it.
"Invisible work, self-sacrifice, service in the shadows -- that is what it means to be a shinobi..."
Danzo continued.
"Then stop talking to yourself!"
Young Sasuke's voice cracked the air. "So in maintaining your so-called peace, you can just sacrifice anyone you want?!"
"My mother! The civilians of the Uchiha clan! Were they only supposed to die so that this peace of yours could exist?!"
"For those who died innocently -- what does peace even mean?!"
"They were necessary sacrifices."
Danzo's voice held steady, his face showing no change in expression. "You call yourself a shinobi, yet you harbor these laughably naive ideas in your head. Someone like you -- who can't understand what Itachi was willing to become -- won't be able to understand."
His tone carried the weight of someone looking down from a great height. He found Sasuke's idealism childish.
The last of the bandaging came free.
What it revealed was a withered arm with no color of life in it -- pale and dry and bloodless. And across that pale skin, embedded in dense rows, a collection of Sharingan eyes stared outward, each one radiating the cold, distinctive chakra signature of the Uchiha clan.
None of those eyes were his. Every single one had been taken from someone else. Behind every one of them was a severed life.
Young Sasuke stared at this. His pupils contracted sharply. The things adult Naruto had told him came surging back -- how Danzo had persecuted the Uchiha clan, how he had operated behind everything from the shadows, how he had systematically driven the Uchiha to a point from which there was no return.
All of it had been so he could pry these Sharingan from their owners' eye sockets and mount them on his own arm. So he could reduce the Uchiha clan's power to something one man could use at will, whenever he chose.
"Let the battle speak for itself."
Danzo delivered his final declaration.
At the precise moment young Sasuke's killing intent spiked -- with the image of Satsuki's Susanoo still burning in his memory, with the urge to tear the man in front of him apart, to rip that disgusting arm off his body -- an irresistible gravitational force clamped down on Danzo without warning.
His body lurched forward. His feet gouged two deep furrows in the ground as they dragged. He discovered, with complete horror, that he could not resist at all.
"Almighty Pull."
Naruto's voice came from across the clearing.
A crack of impact.
In the next instant, a massive golden chakra claw extended from behind Naruto. Not a phantom -- a solid, physical construct of Nine-Tails chakra, radiating scorching heat, five thick fingers closing completely around Danzo's body from his shoulders to his knees, locking him inside a golden cage.
"We're not letting you do that."
Adult Naruto's voice came from behind the great golden claw.
"None of that belongs to you."
Danzo thrashed frantically against the grip. The claw did not move.
"This is -- Nine-Tails chakra! Impossible! How do you have the Nine-Tails' power! Who are you! Where is the Leaf's jinchuriki right now?!"
"I have no obligation to explain myself to you, Danzo."
Adult Naruto's voice stayed measured and unhurried.
"I've seen enough. You keep the word sacrifice permanently in your mouth -- and yet the only ones who've ever actually been sacrificed are your subordinates, whose identities you crushed, and ordinary shinobi, and civilians who never had anything to do with any of it."
"What you've done is force other people to be sacrificed. Other people can use that word. But you don't have the standing to."
His eyes moved to Danzo. To that withered arm covered in other people's eyes.
"You never once considered sacrificing yourself. If you had -- why would you be using the Sharingan this way?"
Those words landed like a blade in the exact place Danzo least wanted touched. He opened his mouth to respond. The words caught in his throat. Nothing came out.
Not because Naruto's argument was unanswerable. Because from the arm covered in bandages, from beneath the eye patch -- from the Sharingan buried in his eye socket -- a violent pain arrived without warning. The sensation of something trying to force its way outward from the inside. The kind of pain that made him want to scream.
"...Ugh--!"
A choked sound was forced out of Danzo's throat. His body seized inside the golden claw's grip, every muscle in his body spasming simultaneously.
The Sharingan eyes embedded in his arm began to come loose.
One by one. Like ripe fruit detaching from a branch, they rose slowly from the pale skin of his arm and floated in the air -- then fell to the ground, one after another.
One. Two. Three. Four. Each tomoe Sharingan left a bleeding crater in the flesh where it had been embedded. Bright red blood welled from each hollow and ran down his arm in thin streams, dripping from his fingertips to the ground.
And then the eye that had been taken so long ago -- the eye belonging to Uchiha Shisui, sealed away under the bandaging, his most guarded ace -- began to work its way free of the eye socket.
It slid through the gap in the bandaging. Then settled quietly on the ground alongside all the others.
Naruto had stripped every last Sharingan from Shimura Danzo.