Chapter 158: Mangekyo
The world had lost its color.
Everything was grey and white, and one bright impossible red, and the pink that the black rod had passed through.
Sasuke had reached the battlefield's edge with Shikamaru and the others, had just raised his head — and seen it.
His body stopped working.
The sudden weightlessness of standing at the edge of a ten-thousand-meter drop.
Sakura.
The Sharingan showed him everything in high resolution. The black rod's tip touched fabric, then skin, then went through — into flesh, through viscera, scraping bone, emerging from the back.
He thought he heard a muffled sound from her. He thought he heard the sound of the penetration.
Sakura.
He remembered the Academy. Running fifty laps on the field and catching her glare at the end of them. He remembered collapsing after the massacre and her finding him, and that quiet, composed attention that wasn't quite gentleness, and going home afterward feeling unexpectedly stable. He remembered that his goal had shifted, somewhere in those years, from defeating Itachi to defeating her — and that he'd accepted this as reasonable, because she was further ahead, and further ahead meant something to aim at, which meant something to be. He remembered the weapon he'd given her. He remembered her treating his wounds in the forest. He remembered the supply wagon, pressed together in the dark. One month ago. Snow. Her carrying him on her back, step by step, and his voice saying leave me and her voice saying nothing useful but keeping him moving anyway.
That color was about to go out.
The pink world is going grey.
Why does this world keep taking everything?
Father, mother, everything — and now—
Stay alive. Stay alive. Stay alive.
I want to build a world where Sakura—
"Huh?"
He watched through his bleeding eyes as she punched the masked man into the ground, and looked at her wound closing faster than seemed possible, and didn't understand, and couldn't move, and was still being held down by three people.
"Tobi."
Kakashi's voice came out barely above a breath.
He stood motionless. Everything had gone still around him.
The arrival of an unknown third party had briefly paralyzed both armies.
Only Kakashi was shaking.
A man with half his face covered in scar tissue pulled himself upright from the snow.
Uchiha Obito looked at Sakura, who had hit him without warning, with barely-contained anger.
The black rod's effect — disruption of chakra flow, sourced from combining yin and yang — had not worked. He had expected it to shut down the Yin Seal immediately. He had expected it to neutralize her.
She had removed the rod from her chest and discarded it.
He understood almost nothing about why.
Sakura looked at the rod lying in the snow and then looked back at him like a person who has found something new to pay attention to.
She knew the principle. In the original story those rods had been used to pin Naruto in sage mode — but that had been ordinary Naruto, after the timer ran out. Her own yin and yang were sufficiently developed that she'd counteracted the interference using her own chakra. She'd also made a deliberate choice to let the rod go through rather than dodge it, because the alternative was letting a phantom slip past her and not knowing where the next attack would come from.
She'd thought about it.
She'd made the calculation.
Including letting it pierce her.
"You're really alive," Jiraiya said, processing it. "You were in the files as KIA. Years ago."
He looked at the man he was trying to reconcile with a memory.
"He was Minato's student," he said, mostly to himself. "The one who—"
He stopped. It wasn't the time to finish that sentence.
"Ha."
The laugh that came from Obito didn't sound like relief. It shook through him.
The exposure was a problem, but not the problem he'd expected to feel in this moment. What he'd expected was crisis. What arrived instead was something closer to exhaustion that had been waiting a long time to surface.
Kakashi's expression — the shock, the loss, the grief visible in a single instant — had done something.
"Don't make that face, Kakashi."
His voice tightened.
"Don't stand there looking at me like that. It's disgusting."
"The Obito you knew is dead."
"I'm not him anymore."
He's worked himself into something, Sakura noted. Kakashi said his name and this is what happened.
She edged toward Kakashi's side, keeping Obito in view.
"Looking at your outfit — same organization as Zetsu," the Raikage said.
Everyone on the Konoha side heard it.
Obito's slight nod confirmed it before he said anything.
"That's right. And the priority is still dealing with Haruno Sakura."
Jiraiya's expression went cold.
Confirmed. He betrayed Konoha.
Kakashi made a sound that wasn't quite a word.
"Tobi—" he started. "Can you tell me why? Can you just—"
"Why."
The word came back hard.
"You don't have the right to ask me that."
"You lost that right the moment you killed Rin."
Kakashi's mouth opened.
"That was—" His voice wavered. "That was Rin's choice. She chose it herself, to protect—"
"Enough."
"If you care so much about Rin," Sakura said, watching Kakashi start to crumple and finding it frustrating, "then think about what she would think of you trying to kill Kakashi's current teammates."
Kakashi: I don't look—
Obito: How dare—
Both of them, simultaneously, stopped.
"Hmph. Sharp tongue for a little girl." Obito's expression sharpened. "Today is the day you die."
He moved.
The Raikage moved toward Jiraiya at the same moment.
Sakura made a quick decision.
"Kakashi — go help Mei with the Eight-Tails. I'll be there in a minute."
She'd been about to send him at Obito — let them have whatever conversation needed to happen. But she looked at Kakashi's face and reconsidered.
Kakashi wasn't going to be effective against Obito right now. And a Sharingan user against the Eight-Tails was actually the better tactical deployment.
She grabbed his shoulder before he could pass her, physically redirected him, and went at Obito herself.
"Sakura—"
"Battlefield. Be useful."
A hand landed on Kakashi's other shoulder.
"I don't know what you went through," Mei said, looking at him. "But he was someone important to you. And now he's standing across from you."
Her voice was even and calm.
"Don't bring that to the fight. Not for yourself — for the people trusting you to have their backs."
She smiled with her eyes.
This one's not bad.
Kakashi looked at her for a moment, then at Jiraiya tangled with both the Raikage and Orochimaru, then at Sakura already engaged with Obito, then at Mei.
"They're not your teammates."
"They're ours."
He went.
Mei watched his back and made herself stop smiling.
Very good man. She'd almost — no. Focus.
Sakura wasn't using the staff against Obito. She'd sent Enma to help Jiraiya — the sage mode timer was running long, the frog characteristics visible, and Jiraiya was going to become a frog if she didn't get him support soon.
The staff was wrong for this fight anyway. Large sweeping weapon against someone who could phase through anything — she'd just be handing him openings.
"Choosing to face me alone," Obito said, letting her pass through him, watching with mild contempt. "That's your biggest mistake."
"I don't think it will be."
The brass-knuckled fist went through his chest. As intended.
"Actually," Sakura said, not breaking rhythm, another punch, another, continuous — she needed to keep contact to keep him from slipping away entirely, "I'm more interested in whether Konoha actually did something to you. Whether there's a real reason you turned."
She struck through him again. He couldn't phase away cleanly if she was already passing through him, and the constant engagement kept him from reaching the ranged techniques he'd be more comfortable with.
"Betrayal?" His voice dropped. "You overestimate Konoha's importance."
"I just saw the world clearly. I want to change it. A cruel world."
"You're too ordinary to understand."
She spun through him with a kick. He tried to counter — her spin preempted the angle.
"And you are a stone in the road," he continued. "Join me and there's a place for you in what comes after."
Sakura's gaze passed through Obito and found the Raikage behind him.
"Arrogant."
"What could you give me that I don't have? I'm the Hokage's student. A missing-nin trying to recruit me is possibly the stupidest thing I've heard today."
"I have a better-than-average chance of becoming Hokage one day."
"What are you offering that competes with that?"
The word Hokage did something to Obito.
"Hokage."
His voice went flat.
"What a joke."
Sakura raised an eyebrow.
"You're bitter."
"You're jealous."
Silence.
Obito's expression, already not good, became noticeably worse.
Jealous.
Him.
Of Hokage.
He moved without more words, straight at her, clearly having run out of patience. The black rods were in his hands.
She charged to meet him.
His wrists — at some point both of them had acquired chains connected to each other.
She passed through him. She was looking at the chains.
"Idiot," she said, without inflection.
From the distance: "Idiot," said Zetsu, watching, without inflection.
"Gotcha—" Obito started his victory statement, and paused.
Wait.
The plan had been: chains catch her the moment she materializes from the phase-through, the instant of contact, Kamui pulls her into the dimensional space. The same thing that had nearly worked on the Fourth Hokage. Flying Thunder God had let Minato escape then — but this girl had no such technique. She had strength. She had—
Strength.
(Chapter End)
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