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Sweat glistened on Charlotte Hikaru's face as the red light blooming from her body climbed skyward and solidified — a hundred-meter phantom rising above the desert floor. The presence it emanated was something older than flesh, older than fruit power: the birthright of the Mangekyō Sharingan, compressed into visible form.
The first stage of Susanoo. Only a skeleton, without muscle or armor — and still the sheer scale of it pressed down on the landscape like a second sky.
Hikaru's eyes were steady. Whatever it cost her, she had made her decision.
"Brother, now. I'll hold it up."
The Eight Thousand Spears hadn't released its grip on Charlotte Katakuri yet. He stopped fighting the power transfer and let it run — stopped containing it, stopped rationing it — and the Mochi Mochi no Mi responded. Rice cake erupted from every surface of his body at once, a white flood expanding outward in all directions. The Sweet Commander's human silhouette disappeared within seconds, swallowed by the sheer volume of his own fruit. What stood in its place was a mochi giant several hundred meters tall, a pale mass of flowing white matter, slow and enormous.
Against ordinary opponents, scale was a weapon. Against an Admiral, it was a liability — a larger target, slower movement, hit rate climbing exponentially in the enemy's favor. Katakuri knew this. He accepted the trade.
"Together."
Susanoo came down around him like a cloak.
The crimson skeleton lowered itself onto the mochi giant and the two structures merged — not fused, not layered, but joined, the spiritual construct and the physical mass finding a shared geometry. Red light spread across the white surface wherever they touched, and then accelerated. Scales emerged in the light's wake, rising from the mochi like something the body had always been capable of producing, locking together into a continuous shell of red armor that reshaped the monster's silhouette as it spread.
The ugly mass of rice cake became something else entirely. The armor gave it definition: limbs, posture, a face, proportions that suggested intention rather than excess. The combined entity was larger than either component had been alone, and carried itself differently — the weight of it was purposeful now.
At the center of the construct's brow, linked through their shared control, the siblings stood together. Three minutes. That was all Hikaru could sustain this. When the time ran out, Nakime would move the Big Mom Pirates out of this zone per the agreed terms — win or lose.
The Red Armor raised its hand. A blade of condensed crimson energy materialized in its grip, burning with a steady, furious light. The moment the sword was drawn fully, the slash came — not a swing but a release, a wave of compressed force that tore forward at a speed the eye couldn't properly track.
The air screamed where it passed.
"The Sharingan is genuinely unfair," Kisame said — and his body dissolved into water molecules before the wave reached him.
The slashing force hit the mountain beyond.
The mountain split. Two clean halves separated from each other with a sound like the earth cracking at the root, and rock cascaded down in thundering sheets, filling the ravine that had opened between them. Dust rose in a column that could have been seen from a hundred kilometers away.
The Red Armor stood in the settling chaos, blade still radiant. Its face, such as it was, showed nothing — the cold fixity that real Susanoo always wore.
Kisame reappeared in a dry patch of open ground, studying what remained of the mountainside. He was impressed, and not embarrassed to admit it internally. In the later period of the Uchiha clan's history, each member of any significance had driven their own Susanoo into battle. Fighting them had meant fighting walking fortresses. If their bloodline hadn't been so reliably self-destructive — generation after generation of internal betrayal — no outside force would ever have dislodged them. They were the chosen ones of some capricious god, and those red eyes were the proof.
But right now, the god's chosen were walking toward him, and three minutes was a short clock.
The Red Armor advanced. Kisame completed his seals.
Water Style: Water Cutting Wave.
He drew a breath and exhaled a column of ultra-compressed water, straight as a blade, moving faster than the eye could resolve. The technique was designed for penetration — it had cut iron, cut stone, cut things that had no business being cuttable. It struck the Red Armor's sword arm.
The arm tore.
High-pressure water sheared through the joint and separated it from the body entirely, the arm falling in a tangle of red energy and collapsed mochi. The Red Armor's sword stroke stopped mid-arc.
Kisame noted his own dissatisfaction with the result. Against anything other than Susanoo-clad construction, that technique would have cut straight through the torso. The combination had defensive depth he hadn't fully accounted for.
The stump of the arm was already rebuilding. Mochi filled the gap from within, re-establishing the limb's structure, and red light traced behind it — armor locking back into place over each new finger as the hand reformed. Within seconds, a fresh energy blade was burning in the restored grip.
Kisame set aside the idea of another direct water-technique exchange. Even escalating to a more powerful water shield would only delay the inevitable — Susanoo's coverage made attrition through conventional jutsu inefficient.
He had already prepared for this possibility.
I'm genuinely looking forward to meeting you again, old teacher.
He bit down on his finger, let the blood coat his palm, and formed the seals. The ground cracked where his hand slapped against it —
Summoning Technique.
A black barrier erupted upward around him, sealing in an instant, its surface absorbing the harsh desert light and returning nothing. The moment the barrier connected, black energy seeped inward from every edge and shot straight up through its center — toward the sky, toward something above.
The barrier pulsed. Breathed. An evil pressure radiated outward from its surface, carried on air that smelled of deep places and old darkness, the kind of presence that made the brain's more primitive structures want very badly to move away. The black vapor spread like a slow tide across the cracked ground.
In the center of the barrier, mist gathered around a shape that was not yet visible — enormous, blurred at its edges, breathing.
With each breath, the barrier expanded and contracted around it.
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