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Killer B took a long swig from his water canteen, then sat quietly for five or six minutes, letting his breathing settle back to normal. Finally he turned to Midorima. "How are you progressing this fast?"
"What do you mean 'this fast'?" Midorima frowned. "I'm not following."
"I mean you and the Six-Tails. How did the two of you reach an agreement so quickly?"
"Mutual recognition. You get that, right? It's two-way. I respect its power, it respects my strength. That's all there is to it." Midorima shrugged casually. "We both have bright futures ahead."
In truth, Midorima and the Six-Tails could hardly be called "friends" after so short a time. But they had indeed forged a workable partnership.
The arrangement was straightforward: the Six-Tails would lend him its strength whenever necessary, and in exchange Midorima would do everything in his power to prevent the beast from ever being absorbed into the Ten-Tails.
The whole process had moved much faster than Midorima had dared hope. After all, everyone understood that truly perfect jinchūriki were exceedingly rare.
In the original story, only Killer B and Naruto ever achieved that level of harmony with their tailed beasts. There was some debate about whether Yagura had also reached perfection, but the manga devoted so little time to his tenure that it remained ambiguous.
Now the real work began: learning to wield the Six-Tails' power properly.
That part genuinely required patience and repetition.
Killer B had explained the most critical rule early on. When a jinchūriki drew on a tailed beast's chakra, the beast simultaneously siphoned away some of the host's own chakra reserves. In other words, during partial or full transformation, the host could not safely mix their personal chakra with the beast's output. Doing so accelerated depletion at an alarming rate.
Once a host's personal chakra hit zero, death followed almost immediately.
Finding the correct balance between drawing enough beast chakra for combat effectiveness while preserving enough of one's own reserves to stay alive was therefore the single most important skill to master.
Fortunately the Six-Tails understood the stakes perfectly. Though their alliance was temporary, their fates were now linked: if one perished, so would the other. Neither had any desire to become raw material for the Ten-Tails.
Under those circumstances the Six-Tails proved remarkably cooperative, offering guidance and feedback that saved Midorima a tremendous amount of trial and error.
Even so, gaining reliable control still took time and effort.
It wasn't until the evening of the third day that Midorima finally achieved stable mastery over the transformation. The fourth and fifth days were spent sparring almost nonstop against Killer B and the Eight-Tails, mostly to build muscle memory and instinctive reactions in tailed-beast form.
If there was one small disappointment, it was that Killer B flatly refused to let him fire even a single Tailed Beast Ball. "This is still Cloud territory," he had said flatly. "No way I'm letting you nuke the landscape just to test your aim."
"You're being serious, right?" Killer B asked now, studying Midorima carefully as the other man drank. "About the tailed beasts, I mean."
"About what?"
"Everything you told me earlier. About them trying to collect all nine and fuse them into the Ten-Tails."
"Why ask me?" Midorima set the canteen down. "The Eight-Tails knows far better than I do whether it's true."
Killer B fell silent for a moment. His eyes unfocused slightly—he was clearly conferring internally with his partner.
"What do we do if it's real?" he finally muttered.
Midorima didn't need to guess; he could tell Killer B was speaking with the Eight-Tails again.
"Do you think you have a realistic chance of stopping them?" the Six-Tails suddenly asked inside Midorima's mind.
"There's a chance. But timing is everything. If we drag this out too long… it gets extremely dangerous."
So long as Akatsuki's strength remained limited to Pain and Obito, victory was plausible—difficult, but within reach.
But if the conflict stretched on long enough for Kaguya Ōtsutsuki to awaken, then almost everyone would die.
As for Madara himself… an Edo Tensei–revived Sage-Mode Madara would already be nightmarish to face. The only realistic counter would be to summon Hashirama via the same technique and hope the First Hokage could match him.
While Midorima was lost in those grim calculations, the Six-Tails' voice cut through again, urgent this time.
"Midorima, be careful. I'm sensing several extremely powerful chakra signatures approaching us rapidly."
Midorima's brows snapped together. He turned toward the direction the Six-Tails indicated. At almost the same instant, Killer B rose from the boulder he had been sitting on, eyes narrowing as he tracked the incoming signatures.
Three figures appeared in a blur of high-speed movement and came to a halt directly in front of them.
Sasori, Itachi, and Kisame stood there, expressions unreadable.
"Who are you guys?" Killer B asked, arms already swinging in an instinctive rap pose.
"Quiet for a second," Sasori said without looking at him.
From the moment they arrived, Sasori's gaze had never once left Midorima's face.
"You're Asachi Midorima, correct?"
"Yes," Midorima answered evenly.
"And you're also Yoshida Shin?" Sasori pressed.
Midorima cleared his throat. When he spoke again, his voice had changed completely—deeper, rougher, carrying a lazy drawl. "Long time no see, everyone. Except for the guy circling overhead, the rest of you are old acquaintances."
Killer B nearly jumped out of his skin. He whipped his head toward Midorima, eyes wide.
"Just a voice trick," Midorima said with a small shrug. "Nothing special."
"That voice was perfect for rapping, yo," Killer B muttered automatically.
The Eight-Tails stayed conspicuously silent inside his mind.
"We should do a concert sometime," Killer B suggested brightly.
"I'd rather go fishing," Midorima shot back without hesitation.
Killer B deflated visibly.
"Hey," Sasori interrupted. "We're still standing right here."
"Wait a second…" Midorima pointed upward at the dark shape circling high overhead. "Can you ask him to come down? I really don't want him dropping random garbage on our heads."
Deidara's specialty was aerial bombardment. If he stayed aloft and started raining explosive clay from above, the fight would become extremely one-sided very quickly.
"He's staying up there precisely to stop you from running," Kisame said with a wide, toothy grin. "No way he's coming down."
In the next instant Midorima vanished.
Sasori, Itachi, and Kisame immediately scanned the surroundings—no sign of him. Then, high above, one of Deidara's giant clay birds suddenly lurched sideways. A second later it plummeted toward the ground, crashing in a spray of dirt and shattered clay. Moments after that, Deidara himself staggered out of the crater, limping badly and clutching the side of his face.
"Who the hell just punched me in the face?!" he roared.
"Didn't that high-speed descent feel especially artistic to you?" Midorima asked mildly.
Itachi's gaze snapped back forward. Somehow, without any of them noticing, Midorima had already returned to his original spot.
"How did you move that fast?" Killer B asked, genuinely stunned.
In the space of a single blink, Midorima had closed the distance to Deidara, knocked him out of the sky, and returned—all faster than most eyes could follow.
"Ever heard of a technique called Flying Thunder God?" Midorima asked lightly. "Lets me appear right in front of someone instantly."
Itachi rolled his eyes behind his cloak.
Flying Thunder God did not work that way.
The technique required a pre-placed technique formula on the target. What Midorima had just done—crossing the distance and striking Deidara in midair with no visible preparation—was far more convenient than the real thing.
Still, Itachi kept the observation to himself and simply filed the information away.
"Anyway," Midorima said, turning back to the group, "did you have something else you wanted to discuss?"
"Why did you deceive us?" Sasori snarled.
He had genuinely treated Midorima as a potential partner.
"I didn't set out to trick anyone. You invited me to join Akatsuki. Was I supposed to say no?" Midorima spread his hands. "Besides, I already had a grudge against your organization. Gathering a little intelligence isn't exactly unreasonable, is it?"
"But what you did was completely out of line!"
"Out of line?" Midorima actually laughed. "Was it out of line when you ambushed the Mizukage? Was it out of line when I was suddenly branded a missing-nin and had to fight my way out of the village just to survive? All I did was tell a few lies. You people, on the other hand… thanks to you, nearly half the Hidden Mist lies in ruins right now. Oh—and by the way, you didn't travel all this way just to have a friendly chat with me, did you? So what do you actually want?"
"The tailed beasts!" Deidara snapped, one hand on his hip. "Hand them over!"
"No, seriously—I don't get it." Midorima tilted his head. "If I decide I want to leave right now, are any of you actually going to stop me? Or did you already forget how you just fell out of the sky?"