Chapter 222: The Phantom Body Transfer Technique
After the Iwagakure raid, Tatsuhata had put distance between himself and the village immediately. He had no intention of engaging Onoki on his return. The old man's Dust Release was one of the few Kekkei Genkai in the world that genuinely made him cautious — the sheer destructive reach of it demanded respect even from someone with his capabilities. He had gotten what he came for. Pressing further served no purpose.
He had already abandoned the idea of accelerating the Moon's Eye Plan. The previous engagements had taught him that lesson plainly enough. What he needed now was patience and accumulation — cultivating the Toyoakitsushihime to its absolute limits, then working alongside Nagato to recruit the right missing-nin and build Akatsuki into something capable of moving the plan forward properly. Step by step. No more rashness.
With that settled, he headed south, crossing into the Land of Taki — a country that bordered the Land of Earth, home to the Seven-Tails and a village that had once, in the early years after the great ninja villages were founded, been spoken of as the sixth-strongest power in the world. Those days were long gone.
Takigakure's early strength had been the achievement of a handful of exceptional individuals rather than deep institutional foundations, and when the missing-nin Kakuzu had carved through the village's senior leadership in a single brutal purge, those foundations crumbled. Traditions broke. Knowledge was lost. By now, Takigakure was an unremarkable place that most of the ninja world had largely forgotten.
Still, a thin horse was bigger than a dog.
There were a few capable veterans left, and the Seven-Tails jinchuriki had genuine combat value. Tatsuhata moved through the village the way he moved through everything — methodically, without announcing himself — and by the time he was done, the village's leadership had been eliminated, the jinchuriki was dead, and the Seven-Tails had been sealed into the Antler Cup, a tool he carried specifically for that purpose.
He left Takigakure in ruins and continued toward the Land of Iron.
He was perhaps an hour into the journey, moving through a canyon whose walls were thick with hanging vines and dense vegetation — the kind of isolated terrain where ambush was a theoretical concern and actual foot traffic was essentially zero — when the ring on his left middle finger pulsed.
Faint chakra vibrations. Mental-directional in nature. Nagato was reaching out.
Tatsuhata stopped and looked at the ring. He scanned his surroundings out of habit — the canyon was empty, as expected, the only movement a brightly-plumed bird cutting across the gap of sky overhead. No threats. No watchers.
He climbed the canyon wall and found a flat stone outcrop near the top, brushed the dust clear, and sat cross-legged. He let go of the mental resistance that kept outside chakra at arm's length.
In an instant, through the Magic Lantern Body Technique, his consciousness crossed the distance and arrived in the Hidden Rain Village.
He materialized in awareness at the corner of a tower's upper balcony. The village was on fire with activity. Pain stood nearby, robes torn, and not far below, closing at speed through the chaos of summoned beasts and scattered ninja, were two figures he recognized immediately.
White Yaksha. The Yellow Flash.
"Tatsuhata." Pain's voice was clipped and efficient. "No time. Konoha brought the other four villages here. I'm leaving Amegakure — that's already decided. But I'm not leaving without making them bleed first. I need your help to kill as many of them as possible before we're done here."
Tatsuhata looked around at the fractured battlefield below. "I'm in the Land of Taki. I can't get there in time physically."
"You don't need to. I'm using the Phantom Body Transfer on you. Don't resist it — it won't harm you."
"Understood."
He didn't ask what the technique was. He could see the situation clearly enough from his vantage point, and declining to help Nagato when Nagato was actively engaging five villages' worth of opposition wasn't something he had any interest in doing.
He severed the Magic Lantern connection. The two techniques were mutually exclusive.
A moment later, the Hell Realm arrived from the prison with a half-conscious jonin prisoner in tow — the sacrificial anchor the technique required.
Ninja Art: Phantom Body Transfer.
Pain's hands flew through the seals. He dropped to one knee and pressed his palm flat against the prisoner's skull. Enormous chakra poured in through the contact point, overriding the prisoner's own chakra pathways with systematic brutality, rewriting the body's architecture from the inside out. Solid chakra vented from the man's pores like steam. The transformation took less than four seconds.
When it was finished, the prisoner was gone. What remained wore Tatsuhata's face perfectly, down to the tiger-mask that covered the upper half of it.
The new body moved experimentally, flexing unfamiliar fingers, testing the balance of it.
"So this is the Phantom Body Transfer."
The voice that came out was Tatsuhata's. The Mangekyō Sharingan behind the mask was his. The crimson eyes turned a slow survey of the balcony, interested rather than impressed.
He could feel the constraints immediately. Chakra reserves at roughly thirty percent of his real body's capacity. Physical strength noticeably below his baseline. But the visual techniques carried across cleanly.
He spread his right hand and watched pale chakra threads unspool from the palm.
"Your visual ability doesn't seem significantly limited," Pain observed.
"There's some reduction." Tatsuhata curled the threads back in and looked up. "What's the plan?"
"There isn't one. You don't need my direction. Find your targets and hunt. I'll tie down as many of them as I can for as long as I can, and at the end I'll attempt something large-scale to clean up whatever's left."
Simple. Direct. Tatsuhata nodded, turned toward the battlefield, and formed hand seals.
He attempted the Mayfly Technique first. It failed.
He held the failure for a moment, genuinely surprised. The Mangekyō had transferred across. Why hadn't that?
He let the question go. Time was the commodity in shortest supply, and the Mayfly Technique was not the only tool available. The Iwagakure raid had loaded him with an extensive new library of Earth Style techniques. His infiltration capability had taken a significant step forward.
He formed different seals and sank into the ground like rain into a lake, vanishing from the balcony without a sound.
Pain watched the spot where Tatsuhata's duplicate had stood, then redirected his attention to the battlefield.
Ritsu had just finished cutting down one of the Animal Realm's largest summoned creatures — a bull-sized beast that had deserved the word "colossal," and Ritsu had taken it apart with the systematic efficiency of someone who treated large obstacles as problems to solve rather than threats to fear. Wind Release combined with Gentle Fist turned his strikes into something closer to bladed weaponry than punches: precise, surgical, each hit arriving with the finality of something designed to end the exchange.
And then there was Minato.
The Flying Thunder God Technique was architecturally maddening from Pain's perspective. Its movement was spatial rather than physical, which meant it bypassed every gravitational approach the Rinnegan normally used to control engagement distance. You couldn't lock him in place. You couldn't draw him toward an incoming attack. You couldn't force a committed exchange because he simply wasn't in the location you were reaching for.
The best Pain could manage was to identify where Minato had planted his coordinate markers and avoid clustering near those positions, which at least prevented him from materializing directly adjacent. The trade-off was that avoiding the markers constrained Pain's own movement. And Ritsu was pressing forward relentlessly from the other direction, forcing Pain to keep retreating.
Several minutes of this had carried him all the way back to the prison district at the village's edge without his ever consciously choosing to end up there.
"Difficult," he said quietly.
Two engagements with Konoha now, and both times he had fought without being able to use his full capability. Last time the Deva Path had been held in reserve. This time the Hungry Ghost Realm was absent and his own location had been compromised almost immediately after the battle started. The Moon's Eye Plan needed this arsenal intact, not worn down in attrition battles with nothing to show for it.
At least Tatsuhata was somewhere under the village now, moving through the earth on a hunt of his own choosing. His judgment in selecting targets was reliable. The other four villages would have something new to deal with.
The Animal Realm opened another summoning.
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