This punch.
The impact was beyond anything the Uchiha compound — or any part of Konohagakure — had experienced since the night the Nine-Tails attacked seven years ago.
A wall of dust and debris erupted outward from the point of impact, swallowing the street, the surrounding buildings, the collapsed houses, and every corpse-littered alleyway within hundreds of meters. The shockwave ripped through the air with a low, bass-heavy roar that rattled teeth and shook foundations, carrying with it a pressure wave that blew out lanterns and shattered roof tiles a full block away. The ground itself heaved, buckling and splitting as fissures raced outward from ground zero like cracks spreading through thin ice.
For several long seconds, the world was nothing but noise and dust and darkness.
Then, slowly, the air began to clear.
Itachi coughed violently, choking on the thick clouds of pulverized earth that hung in the air like fog. His fractured ribs screamed in protest with every convulsion, and fresh blood sprayed from his lips with each hack. He pressed one arm across his mouth, squinting through the haze with his Sharingan, trying to make sense of what remained of the battlefield.
What he saw stole the air from his lungs.
A crater.
Not the modest five-meter depression his own impact had carved earlier. This was something else entirely — a vast, circular wound gouged into the earth, more than ten meters deep and stretching dozens of meters across. The ground where Itachi stood had collapsed inward along the crater's rim, tilting at a steep angle, the packed earth fractured into massive slabs that jutted upward like broken bones. Several entire houses had simply ceased to exist, their foundations dragged into the depression, their structures reduced to scattered kindling at the bottom of the pit.
And at the deepest point of that crater — at the very epicenter of the devastation — lay Obito.
The masked man was flat on his back, his spiral-patterned mask cracked in three places, his black cloak shredded and caked with dust. He wasn't moving. Around him, the earth had been compressed so violently that it had taken on a glassy sheen in places, the raw heat and pressure of the impact fusing soil into something resembling crude obsidian.
But it wasn't the crater that made Itachi's blood run cold.
It was what loomed above it.
Sasuke floated at the crater's edge — no, not floating. Standing — standing inside the ribcage of a spectral colossus that blazed with dark blue light. Ethereal bones formed a massive skeletal frame around his small body — a towering half-torso of translucent, luminous blue, from the waist up, with two enormous arms ending in fists the size of boulders. A skeletal skull hovered above, its empty eye sockets burning with the same cold blue fire that pulsed through every spectral bone.
Susano'o.
Sasuke's own Susano'o.
The first stage — the skeletal frame — but unmistakably real, unmistakably his. Not Itachi's fiery crimson. This was a deep, cold indigo — the color of a winter midnight, of the ocean's deepest trench, of something ancient and merciless stirring in the dark.
And it was in motion.
Sasuke stood at the heart of the spectral construct, his Mangekyō blazing, blood streaming freely from both eyes in twin rivulets that traced down his cheeks and dripped from his jaw. His face was a mask of fierce, terrible concentration. The super-brain processor hummed at its operational limit, struggling to maintain two simultaneous computational loads: the vector calculations required for his ability and the staggering chakra output demanded by Susano'o. Each system taxed his underdeveloped neural pathways to the breaking point. Together, they threatened to tear his mind apart.
But together, they were something no one in this world had ever seen before.
Vector Manipulation channeled through Susano'o.
The concept was devastatingly simple. Susano'o's spectral fists were extensions of Sasuke's chakra — and chakra, in this world, was a form of energy. Energy possessed vectors. Vectors could be manipulated. By running vector calculations through the Mangekyō's secondary processing and feeding the results into Susano'o's construct, Sasuke could rewrite the kinetic energy of every punch the spectral guardian threw.
Not enhance. Not amplify. Rewrite.
A Susano'o fist, by itself, could level a building. A Susano'o fist with its kinetic vectors rewritten — its energy compressed, redirected, and multiplied by orders of magnitude through vector manipulation — could reshape geography.
Sasuke raised Susano'o's right arm.
The massive spectral fist clenched. The air around it distorted, compressing inward as vector manipulation began gathering ambient kinetic and thermal energy from a wide radius, funneling it all into the construct's knuckles. The temperature in the immediate area dropped several degrees as thermal vectors were cannibalized. Small stones and loose debris lifted off the ground, pulled toward the fist by the micro-gravity distortions created by the energy compression.
Then the fist came down.
BOOM.
The sound was beyond thunder. It was the sound of the world breaking — a single, titanic impact that sent a pillar of compressed air and debris rocketing skyward like a volcanic eruption. The crater that already existed doubled in depth instantaneously, the floor of the pit dropping another ten meters as the earth simply gave way beneath the force. The rim expanded outward by dozens of meters in every direction, swallowing the remains of houses, uprooting trees, cracking the stone walls of the compound's outer perimeter.
The entire Uchiha district shuddered.
Not metaphorically. The ground itself heaved and bucked, a seismic tremor rolling outward from the point of impact like a ripple in a pond. Buildings that had survived the massacre — structures that had stood for generations, bearing the Uchiha fan crest above their doors — groaned on their foundations, their walls cracking, their roof beams splitting. Dust billowed from every surface. The tremor was felt a thousand meters away, two thousand, spreading through the earth beneath Konohagakure like a heartbeat of destruction.
Itachi leaped.
His battered body screamed in protest, but training overrode pain. He bounded from one erupting chunk of earth to another as the ground beneath him fractured and collapsed, his Sharingan tracking stable footholds amid the chaos. Stones the size of oxen burst from the disintegrating terrain, and he wove between them with the desperate agility of a man who knew that one misstep would bury him alive.
All the while, his eyes never left Sasuke.
This is insane, he thought, the words forming with a calm that he absolutely did not feel. He's combining Susano'o with that unknown ability. The kinetic output is being multiplied exponentially — each strike compounds the energy of the last. If he continues—
If he continued, there wouldn't be an Uchiha compound left. There wouldn't be a district left.
Sasuke's hand clutched at his own face, pressing his palm against his bleeding left eye. The pain was extraordinary — a white-hot, searing agony that felt like molten needles being driven through his optic nerves into the center of his brain. Using Vector Manipulation and Susano'o simultaneously was a gamble his seven-year-old body was spectacularly unequipped to make. The Mangekyō's computational load alone was enough to cause hemorrhaging in his ocular capillaries. Adding Susano'o's chakra drain on top of that pushed his body past every safe threshold into territory that bordered on self-destruction.
But he wasn't done.
Not yet.
His Mangekyō spun, blood-soaked and furious, and Susano'o raised its second fist.
On the ground below — in the ruins at the bottom of the crater — Obito's body lay motionless. But Sasuke's eyes saw what others might miss: scattered among the rubble, half-buried in compressed earth, were fragments of wood. Not the kind that came from demolished houses. These were organic — fibrous, pale, with the distinctive cellular texture of artificially grown tissue.
Hashirama Senju's cells.
The wood fragments were regenerating even now, tiny shoots extending from the broken pieces, reaching toward each other like severed limbs trying to reconnect. The body grafted with Hashirama's cells possessed a vitality that bordered on the absurd — a regenerative capacity that could reconstruct entire limbs from scattered tissue.
The proof lay in the fragments themselves. Any ordinary human would have been reduced to paste by the first strike. Obito's body had been obliterated — and the cells were already attempting to rebuild him.
Just as I expected, Sasuke thought, his lip curling. Hashirama's cells. That stolen body of his is practically immortal.
The second fist came down.
This time, the impact was even more devastating. The vector calculations were refined — the super-brain had learned from the first strike's data, optimizing energy compression ratios, tightening the focal point of kinetic release. The result was a blow of such concentrated, surgical violence that the air itself seemed to crystallize for an instant before shattering.
BOOM.
The crater deepened again. The earth screamed. A shockwave tore outward, flattening everything within its expanded radius that hadn't already been destroyed. The tremor reached the main streets of Konohagakure proper, rattling windows in residential districts a full kilometer away.
At the bottom of the crater, amid the devastation, Obito's regenerating body — the scattered wood fragments, the reforming tissue — was caught directly in the blast.
The cells exploded. Flesh and wood fiber sprayed outward in a grotesque mist of organic shrapnel, scattering across the glassy floor of the crater like confetti made of meat. For one crystalline second, it looked as though nothing could possibly have survived.
Itachi, clinging to a slab of upturned earth at the crater's rim, watched the scene with an expression that had transcended shock and arrived somewhere in the vicinity of numb disbelief. His Sharingan recorded everything with perfect clarity — the scale of the destruction, the raw power behind each blow, the casual brutality with which his seven-year-old brother was reshaping the landscape.
The dust settled. The echoes faded.
And then, in the distance — well beyond the crater's edge, standing in the shadow of a partially collapsed building nearly forty meters away — Obito's figure materialized.
He was whole. Uninjured. His mask was intact — no, it was a different mask. The old one, cracked and shattered, lay somewhere in the rubble. This was a spare, pulled from a dimensional pocket. His cloak was pristine. His body showed no sign of damage whatsoever.
But on his left arm, partially hidden by his sleeve, a three-tomoe Sharingan — one of many he kept embedded in his transplanted Hashirama tissue — slowly closed its lid and went dark.
Permanently.
Izanagi.
The forbidden Uchiha dōjutsu that could rewrite reality itself — turning events that had already occurred into mere illusions, selecting only the favorable outcomes to become fact. In exchange, the Sharingan eye that cast it was forever sacrificed, its light extinguished.
Obito had used Izanagi to undo his own death.
He stood in the shadows, his single visible eye wide behind his new mask, his breathing rapid and unsteady. For the first time since the night he had stood before the Nine-Tails and directed its rampage against the Hidden Leaf, Obito felt something he had almost forgotten the taste of.
Fear.
What the hell is that?
The thought wasn't theatrical. There was no persona behind it, no exaggerated inflection. It was the raw, unfiltered reaction of a man who had just been killed by a child and had only survived because he happened to carry spare eyeballs.
He swallowed hard and looked up at the spectral colossus still hovering above the devastation — the dark blue Susano'o, its skeletal frame blazing against the blood-red sky, its empty eyes burning with cold fire. And inside it, cradled in the ribcage like a heart made of malice, the small figure of Sasuke Uchiha, bleeding from his eyes and smiling.
"You're telling me," Obito whispered hoarsely, "that that is a seven-year-old child?"
He swallowed again. His throat was dry.
"A monster," he breathed. "An absolute monster."
Across the ruined field, Itachi heard the remark. He said nothing. His face was expressionless — the same blank, unreadable mask he had worn all night. But behind those bleeding eyes, in the secret chambers of a heart he pretended not to possess, something shifted.
Two brothers, Obito murmured, looking from Sasuke's Susano'o to the battered form of Itachi. Both of them. Complete monsters.
Far beyond the Uchiha compound's outer walls, at the periphery of the sealed-off district, Danzō Shimura felt the earth move beneath his feet.
The old war hawk stood in the shadow of a stone wall, leaning on his cane with his bandaged right arm tucked beneath his robes. The tremor that rolled through the ground was strong enough to make him reach out and brace himself against the wall — an involuntary motion, reflexive, the body acting before the mind could suppress it. Dust sifted from the stonework above, powdering his shoulders.
The roar followed a moment later — a deep, resonant boom that rolled across the village like distant thunder, carrying with it a pressure wave that stirred his robes and sent loose leaves spiraling through the air. In the direction of the Uchiha compound, a column of dust and smoke rose into the night sky, backlit by the fires that still burned within.
Danzō's single visible eye narrowed. The killing intent that radiated from his gaze was cold, measured, and utterly devoid of mercy.
"This decision was not wrong," he muttered, his voice carrying the flat conviction of a man who had never once questioned his own righteousness. "The Uchiha were a plague — a ticking explosive tag at the heart of the village. Eliminating them preemptively was the only rational course." His grip tightened on his cane. "Power like that, left unchecked, would have destroyed Konoha from within."
He turned, intent on approaching the compound's perimeter — on seeing firsthand what was producing those seismic impacts.
A figure materialized before him.
An ANBU operative knelt on the cobblestones, appearing from nothing with the silent precision of a body flicker. Silver hair spilled from beneath a cat-faced porcelain mask, catching the faint moonlight. The operative's posture was rigid, formal — one knee down, one fist planted on the ground, head bowed.
"Danzō-sama," the ANBU spoke, his voice carefully neutral. "The Hokage has issued a direct order. No one is permitted to enter the Uchiha compound until dawn. No exceptions."
Danzō's eye hardened. A cold snort escaped his nostrils — the contemptuous dismissal of a man who considered the Hokage's authority an inconvenience to be endured rather than a law to be obeyed.
"Hiruzen's sentimentality will be the death of this village," he said flatly.
He turned and walked away, his cane tapping against the cobblestones with metronomic regularity. The ANBU remained kneeling until the sound faded, then vanished in a flicker of displaced air.
The silver-haired ANBU did not return to headquarters immediately.
Instead, he retreated to a rooftop several blocks from the compound's outer wall — far enough to comply with the letter of the Hokage's order, close enough to observe. He crouched at the roof's edge, his cat mask angled toward the Uchiha district, and slowly lifted the porcelain from the left side of his face.
Beneath the mask, a single Sharingan eye opened.
It was not his by birth. It had been a gift — a dying gift from the boy he had failed to save, given on a collapsing battlefield in the Land of Earth, pressed into his empty socket by the bloody fingers of a teammate who had smiled at the end and told him to see the future for both of them.
Kakashi Hatake gazed across the rooftops toward the Uchiha compound, his Sharingan spinning slowly, reading the residual chakra signatures that hung over the district like a bruise on the sky. Two massive concentrations — one fiery crimson, one deep indigo — pulsed in his enhanced vision, overlapping and clashing like storm fronts.
Susano'o. Two of them.
His breath caught.
What in the world is happening over there?
In that moment, watching the spectral energy flare and pulse against the blood-red sky, Kakashi thought of Obito. He thought of the boy who had been crushed under a boulder and had given him his eye with a grin. He thought of the memorial stone where he spent his mornings, tracing the carved letters of a name he could never stop reading.
Obito, he thought, a familiar ache tightening in his chest. I'm glad you're not alive to see what's become of your clan.
If only he knew.
His Sharingan closed slowly, and the mask settled back into place.
"Captain." A female ANBU appeared at his side, her animal mask marked with delicate painted whiskers. "There's been an anomalous disturbance in the Uchiha district. The seismic activity and chakra output are far beyond what was expected from the operation. Should we report to Lord Hokage?"
Kakashi was silent for a moment. The wind stirred his silver hair.
"Yes," he said quietly. "Go back. Report everything. The situation in the Uchiha compound has… changed."
The female ANBU nodded and vanished.
Kakashi remained on the rooftop, watching.
BOOM.
The roar that followed was louder than anything that had come before.
Kakashi's head snapped toward the compound. The female operative had barely departed when the night sky above the Uchiha district ignited.
Two spectral giants rose from the devastation like titans emerging from the underworld.
The first was Itachi's — a skeletal colossus wreathed in fiery crimson light, its bones blazing with the deep red of arterial blood. It rose from the ruins in stages: ribcage first, then arms, then a massive skull crowned with ethereal fire. Even in its incomplete, skeletal state, it radiated a killing intent so dense that Kakashi felt it pressing against his chest from hundreds of meters away, a suffocating weight that made his Sharingan ache behind its closed lid.
The second Susano'o rose to meet it.
Dark blue — midnight indigo — cold and terrible and vast. It stood opposite its crimson counterpart, its skeletal frame slightly smaller but no less menacing, its empty eye sockets burning with a pale, glacial fire that cast long shadows across the cratered earth. Inside its ribcage, barely visible through the spectral bones, Sasuke's small figure was wreathed in blue light, his Mangekyō blazing like twin stars.
Two Susano'o. Facing each other across the ruins of the Uchiha compound.
The sight was beyond comprehension. Beyond precedent. In the entire history of the Uchiha clan — stretching back centuries, to the days when Madara and Izuna had first unlocked the Mangekyō's power — there had never been a recorded instance of two Susano'o manifesting simultaneously within the village walls.
Kakashi stared, his single visible eye wide, his normally unflappable composure cracking like ice under pressure.
"What… what the hell is this?" he breathed.
Far below, from his vantage point near the compound wall, Danzō paused in his retreat. He turned back toward the district, and the killing intent in his single eye deepened into something black and absolute.
The Uchiha, he thought, his jaw clenching, must never be allowed to exist again. This power — this cursed, monstrous power — proves it beyond all doubt.
His bandaged arm twitched beneath his robes. Beneath those bandages, rows of stolen Sharingan eyes lined his flesh like jewels set into rotting wood.
I will deal with whatever survives.
Inside the opposing Susano'o, both brothers were dying.
Not literally — not yet — but the toll was catastrophic. They knelt within their respective spectral guardians, gasping for air like drowning men, their bodies pushed so far past their limits that continued consciousness was itself an act of defiance against biology.
Itachi's breathing came in wet, ragged heaves. Blood poured from his eyes in steady streams, soaking his collar, dripping from his chin to pool on the spectral floor of Susano'o's ribcage. His fractured ribs shifted with every breath, the broken edges grinding against inflamed tissue. The Mangekyō Sharingan in his eyes spun erratically — stuttering, losing coherence, the pattern threatening to destabilize with each passing second. He was thirteen years old, and he had used Tsukuyomi, Susano'o, and sustained massive physical trauma all in the span of a single hour. His body was shutting down.
Across the field, Sasuke was in no better condition. His seven-year-old frame trembled violently inside the indigo Susano'o, every muscle fiber burning with the acidic fire of chakra depletion. Blood poured from both eyes — not the thin trickle of earlier, but a steady flow that painted the lower half of his face in a crimson mask. The super-brain processor had been running at maximum capacity for too long; his neural pathways were overheating, the biological equivalent of a circuit board pushed past its thermal threshold. Spikes of blinding pain lanced through his skull at irregular intervals, each one threatening to black out his consciousness entirely.
The sustained dual output of Vector Manipulation and Susano'o was tearing him apart from the inside.
"Sasuke." Itachi's voice echoed across the devastated field, projected through the crimson Susano'o's skull. Despite everything — the pain, the exhaustion, the blood, the impossible situation that had deviated so catastrophically from every plan he had ever made — his voice was steady. Firm. The voice of an older brother. "Enough. This is enough."
Sasuke's bleeding eyes locked onto the crimson giant. The six-pointed stars of his Mangekyō spun with savage intensity, and a grin — hideous, blood-smeared, triumphant — stretched across his young face.
He didn't answer Itachi.
Instead, he looked past the crimson Susano'o — past his brother — to the figure that knelt in the open square beyond the crater's far edge.
Obito.
Still alive.
The masked man was on his knees, breathing hard, his posture lacking its usual theatrical looseness. His cloak was pristine — Izanagi had seen to that — but the cost was written in the darkness beneath his sleeve where another Sharingan had gone permanently blind. He had survived the second punch through the same forbidden technique: Izanagi, the reality-warping dōjutsu that could retroactively erase unfavorable events from existence, replacing death with continued life at the price of a sacrificed eye.
It was the ultimate cheat code — the Uchiha clan's most jealously guarded and most heavily forbidden kinjutsu. And Obito, with Hashirama's cells enhancing his body and a stockpile of harvested Sharingan embedded in his transplanted tissue, had the resources to use it multiple times.
Sasuke understood this perfectly.
Izanagi, he calculated coldly, the Accelerator's analytical mind processing the tactical implications even through the haze of pain. Each use costs one Sharingan permanently. He has multiple spare eyes, but not infinite. However, draining his stock through brute force alone would take more time and stamina than I currently have. My body is at its limit. Susano'o will collapse within minutes. The Mangekyō is hemorrhaging — if I push further, I risk permanent damage to my own eyes before I've even had the chance to evolve them.
And besides…
The grin on Sasuke's blood-painted face shifted. It softened, just slightly, from savage triumph into something colder. More patient. More cruel.
Simply killing him isn't revenge at all.
Revenge wasn't a quick death. Revenge wasn't a body in a crater. Revenge was suffering — the slow, exquisite, methodical dismantling of everything a person held dear, forcing them to watch as their world crumbled around them, denying them the mercy of ignorance or the dignity of a clean end.
Sasuke already knew exactly what Obito's weakness was. He knew the name. He knew the face. He knew the story.
Rin Nohara.
The girl Obito had loved. The girl whose death had broken him so thoroughly that he had abandoned his identity, betrayed his village, and set in motion a plan to enslave the entire world in an infinite dream rather than face a reality without her in it.
A thought formed in Sasuke's mind — dark, inventive, perfectly vicious.
If I master the Edo Tensei — the Reincarnation Jutsu — I could bring Rin back. Not to comfort him. Not to reunite them. To use her. To make her kill him, over and over and over, in an endless loop of the one trauma he can never escape. Force him to watch the person he loves drive a blade through his chest, again and again, with those same kind eyes and that same gentle smile, and know that he can never make it stop.