Chapter 10
Above them all, Kaguya's form finally coalesced—not from Zetsu, but from the sky itself, her hair unspooling like roots through the fabric of reality. When she spoke, it was with the voice of every person Itama had ever devoured: "You made me from your hunger." Madara's answer was to vomit a stream of Amaterasu that curved upward in worship, forming a spiral staircase of black flames. Itama watched his own stolen hands begin climbing without his consent.
The battlefield smelled like burnt copper and spoiled milk from the overuse of forbidden jutsu, the air thick enough to chew. Someone—maybe Hashirama, maybe a stranger—was screaming instructions that fractured mid-sentence as their ribs exploded outward into cherry blossoms. Itama realized his teeth were dissolving into mercury, pooling in his throat. His copied Mangekyō spun wildly, recording everything for the archive of stolen lives rotting in his gut.
Beneath his feet, the ground split open like wet paper, revealing Hashirama's mummified face sewn into the underside of the earth's crust. His lips peeled back around wooden pegs to whisper: "We told you not to eat things that scream back." Itama tried to apologize, but his tongue was now a thrashing tailed beast cub wrapped in barbed wire. Lightning Country weather patterns formed above them, pregnant with stolen storm-release techniques.
Then—movement at the periphery. A child's hand (his own? His brother's?) reached up from the mud to press a rusted senbon against his ankle. The metal hissed as it absorbed into his skin, carrying the memory of Senju Itama's original death at age twelve. The knowledge came with perfect clarity: this wasn't his first resurrection. The sky blinked. Kaguya's ribcage unfolded into a theater curtain. Somewhere behind his eyes, the original Itama laughed and laughed.
Madara's left arm detached mid-climb, transforming into a swarm of ink-black centipedes that burrowed into the staircase of flames. Each segment bore Hashirama's face. "Stop stealing," they chittered in unison. Itama's stomach distended violently—something inside was trying to carve its way out with his own copied bones. He tasted Edo Tensei ash and realized with dull horror that he'd accidentally consumed a fragment of Tobirama's soul during the last massacre.
The screaming instructions resolved into words—not Hashirama, but a woman's voice singing the Uchiha lullaby backwards. Itama's stolen Rinnegan pulsed in time with the reversed melody. His veins lit up with stolen lightning chakra, illuminating the grotesque fusion of DNA twisting beneath his skin: Senju wood release fibers stitched through Uzumaki sealing arrays, all bound by Kaguya's stolen teeth
.
A drop of mercury fell from his chin onto Hashirama's stitched lips. The moment it made contact, the earth's crust peeled back further—revealing an endless recursion of mummified Senju faces layered beneath. Their joined voices vibrated through his marrow: "You're still counting in the wrong direction." Itama's fingers began unwriting themselves from existence, each knuckle dissolving into historical revision. The child's senbon memory expanded—he saw himself dying at six instead of twelve, at three, at birth, before conception—
Kaguya's ribs flexed like a concertina, squeezing out a melody that warped the battlefield into a Mobius strip. Madara's climbing torso split longitudinally, revealing a hollow cavity where Tobirama's incomplete Edo Tensei flickered like a broken lantern. The centipedes reassembled into a single writhing brushstroke that painted forbidden Uzushio glyphs across Itama's ribs. He coughed up a live sparrow made entirely of stolen Hyuga chakra networks.
The backwards lullaby hit its crescendo as the sparrow's wings unfolded into a perfect Byakugan sphere. Itama's devoured memories inverted—suddenly he was the one being eaten by his own stolen techniques. A thousand phantom mouths bloomed across his skin, each whispering a different clan's annihilation in perfect unison. His original death senbon melted into liquid and trickled upward into the storm
clouds.
Somewhere beyond the unraveling sky, the original Itama stopped laughing. The sound that replaced it wasn't human. Kaguya's hair roots contracted violently, reeling the battlefield upward into her pupils like a scroll being rolled shut. Itama's last coherent thought was that he should have listened when the earth told him not to chew its bones. Then his teeth—all of them, from every devoured corpse—bit down in unison.
His skeleton unfolded like a fan, each rib splitting into fractal copies that rearranged themselves into a perfect replica of Naka Shrine's torii gates. Through them, he saw his first death properly: twelve-year-old Itama kneeling in the river, Uchiha steel in his kidneys, copying their chakra patterns with his dying breaths. The memory stuttered. Now he saw the Uchiha boy mirrored in pupils wide with mirrored recognition—another hungry ghost trapped in the
cycle.
The centipede-glyphs scuttling along his ribs began stitching his flesh to the blackened staircase. He tasted Madara's Amaterasu from the inside as his esophagus lined itself with obsidian. A new voice—soft, gelatinous—pressed against his eardrums: "You forgot to count the spaces between teeth." It came from the hollow where his stomach had been, where a miniature Kaguya formed from the condensed screams of everyone he'd ever
absorbed.
Lightning Country's stolen storms rained upward. Each droplet contained a warped reflection of his many stolen faces—Senju, Uchiha, even flickers of futures not yet lived. The sparrow made of Hyuga veins dissolved into pure white light. Itama reached for it with fingers that were no longer there, his body now just an outline drawn in reverse by the absence of everything he'd ever consumed. The last thing he heard was his own voice, twelve years old and terrified, whispering from someone else's throat: "I didn't mean to get so full."
Kaguya's ribcage snapped shut like a bear trap made of stars. Itama's fractal torii gates folded inward, each wooden slat revealing another version of his death—this time with Hashirama weeping over the body, his tears turning the riverbank into a sapling forest that grew through the corpse's eye sockets. The miniature Kaguya in his gut unspooled like a thread, stitching his shadow to the staircase of flames. Madara's remaining eye rolled back, showing the same spiral that had adorned the Uzumaki whirlpools now carved into the inside of his skull.
The battlefield inverted. Gravity became a suggestion. Itama's mercury tongue lashed against his own dissolving teeth, each impact sending ripples through the fabric of dying chakra that held reality together. From between the gaps in his rib-fan, the original Senju deaths bloomed—not just Itama's, but every child from every clan whose blood had ever watered these lands. Their small hands pushed against his shadow, pressing fingerprints of pure negation into his stolen chakra
pathways.
Then—silence. Not absence of sound, but the kind that comes from being inside a scream too loud to hear. The torii gates collapsed into a single point that was neither light nor dark, but the exact shade of a name forgotten mid-sentence. Inside it, something older than Kaguya uncurled one talon and scratched a single vertical line across the fabric of Itama's existence. The scratch bled backward in time, rewriting every meal he'd ever taken into an act of regurgitation. The child's voice came again, clear now: "Count properly this time." His teeth obeyed, clicking against each other in perfect binary. One. Zero. The space between.
Madara's staircase of flames crystallized into obsidian mid-step, trapping his climbing form like an insect in amber. The trapped centipedes inside burst from his eye socket in a geyser of ink, forming kanji that spelled "STOP EATING" in the dialect of the lost Whirlpool scribes. Itama tried to scream as his own copied Byakugan rolled upward to read the message—only to find his vocal cords had been replaced by a length of Hashirama's vine, flowering with mouths that sang the Uchiha lullaby in rounds. The miniature Kaguya in his abdomen began knitting with her own hair, stitching his large intestine into a perfect replica of the Naka River where he'd first died.
The battlefield flickered between realities—one moment a charred plain, the next a glistening esophagus lined with teeth that were definitely not human. Itama's mercury blood pooled upward into hovering spheres that reflected not his face, but the expressions of everyone he'd ever consumed at the moment of digestion. Their combined voices vibrated his remaining bones into a perfect facsimile of the Death God's summoning flute. Somewhere beyond the unraveling sky, twelve-year-old Itama's corpse sat up in its shallow grave and began plucking its own ribcage like a k
oto.
Final clarity came with the taste of iron and lotus root—the original Itama's last meal before the Uchiha blade found his kidneys. The memory unfolded like a paper crane in his skull: not stolen, not copied, but his own. As Kaguya's ribcage theater collapsed into a singularity, he saw it clearly—the Uchiha boy who killed him had the same cursed eyes as the man currently digesting in his stomach. The realization tasted like forgiveness. Then like blood. Then like nothing at all.