-Broadcast-
The black mist held for as long as the Gobi Desert would allow it, which was not long. Even the siblings at the Red Armor's brow went still — Charlotte Hikaru's Mangekyō Sharingan tracked the shape moving inside the haze, enormous and unhurried, and the sight of it alone was enough to make her set the temptation of a closer look aside. Her body and mind were already running on credit. She had no reserves to spend on curiosity.
She memorized the summoning hand seals anyway. Whatever Kisame had called, the technique itself was worth knowing.
Then the dry heat of the Gobi did what it always did: it pulled the mist apart. The black vapor thinned, shredded, and dissolved into the cracked air — and what it had been hiding came into view.
A whale.
Or something that wore the shape of a whale the way a thunderstorm wears the shape of a cloud. Its body extended backward into ambiguity — the full length of it was simply not visible from where the siblings stood. The head alone rose a hundred meters from the desert floor, blue-black scales catching the harsh light and throwing back something that wasn't quite a reflection — more like a warning. Dozens of eyes studded that massive head, each one cycling a slow, cold red, covering every angle simultaneously with no seam of blindness between them.
Its mouth hung slightly open. Two rows of small, sharp teeth framed the gap, and from somewhere in the vast darkness of its throat came the steady leak of saltwater — enough to form a trickle, then a stream, then a brief cascade that brought a few small fish flopping helplessly down onto the cracked desert floor.
The fish lasted a few seconds. The air was merciless.
Hoshigaki Kisame stood on the creature's head with the ease of someone standing on familiar ground, which was exactly what it was. Without the being beneath his feet, there would be no fish-men as a species — or at least, no path to where Kisame stood today, an outsider who had climbed to Admiral inside a human institution. That was not lost on him.
The dozens of eyes rolled and converged. A voice came from the whale's open mouth — vast, layered, the kind of sound that didn't travel through air so much as displace it.
"Kisame. You are genuinely rude. You summon me to a place without a single drop of standing water. Do you want me dead?"
Super Ancient Creature — Leviathan.
The voice didn't simply echo. It moved through the space as a physical force, rolling over the desert floor, pressing into chests and skulls with the weight of something that had been speaking for longer than most civilizations had existed. Those with softer constitutions would have staggered — the sound alone was sufficient to produce hallucinations, to hollow the mind and fill the vacancy with images of total destruction: endless dark, the collapse of everything, no shore on the other side. The kind of vision that became permanent for the fragile.
The siblings in the Red Armor ground their teeth and held their heads. Even for them, it required effort.
"You're experienced with complications like this," Kisame said from his perch. "And I think you'll want revenge."
Dozens of crimson eyes shifted from Kisame to the armored entity in front of them. Leviathan was still for a long moment.
Then the scales began to glow.
It was a subtle thing at first — a faint luminescence under the blue-black plating, like heat rising from deep water. It intensified as the eyes focused, as the ancient creature processed what it was seeing. The armor. The energy. The particular signature that the Susanoo carried, encoded in its light.
And the eyes behind the Red Armor's brow. Red eyes. That red.
"So they still exist." The voice shifted — still enormous, but something had changed in its texture. Not warmth, exactly. Something older than warmth. Recognition. "I thought those eyes had gone from the world. Kisame — you've actually surprised me. The years spent on you weren't wasted."
Leviathan knew the Mangekyō Sharingan the way a scarred man knows the blade that made the scar. The Uchiha clan, small and fragile and utterly dependent on the accident of their bloodline, had used those eyes to put Leviathan in chains for years beyond easy counting. Had bent the oldest living thing in the ocean to fight for human causes, to serve human wars, to exist at the end of a leash held by creatures whose entire lifespans were rounding errors by comparison.
Theoretically, super ancient creatures did not die. Certainly not of age. They simply persisted, outlasting everything — kingdoms, species, geological formations. There was no natural mechanism for ending something like Leviathan. The Uchiha clan had tried and eventually stopped trying, and settled for slavery instead.
Leviathan had survived. Had waited. Had eventually broken free of Uchiha Madara's control through sheer duration — long enough that even the illusion sustaining the binding degraded. And now here was a skeleton of that old power, incomplete and young, burning in the eyes of a girl who clearly had never once heard the name Madara spoken in conversation.
"Little girl," Leviathan said, the dozens of eyes settling on Charlotte Hikaru ally, "have you ever met Uchiha Madara?"
The answer was obvious from the girl's face. She didn't recognize the name enough to react to it.
Good. That meant the old man was truly gone. A human body was always the final limit, no matter how monstrous the power it contained. Time claimed them all. Even Madara.
"I don't know who your father is," Leviathan continued, something in its vast register settling toward the matter at hand, "and I don't care. I hate your blood on principle. Kisame — this one summons for free. But tell your apprentice: next time there are proper sacrifices, or I don't come. I won't be treated like Madara treated me. That era is finished."
Kisame absorbed this without expression. His master was not an easy relationship. Centuries of isolation had made Leviathan fundamentally indifferent to most things — life included, in the abstract sense. In Leviathan's hierarchy of value, almost everything qualified as either a minor inconvenience or a potential meal. The admiral carried real risk summoning the creature in anything other than ideal conditions. Leviathan was not, by any reasonable definition, manageable.
And yet — Artoria Pendragon was one of the few figures the ancient creature maintained active consideration for. A king of genuine moral character, Leviathan had decided. Reasonable. Consistent. Dealing with her was straightforward in a way that dealing with most humans wasn't. It was, in fact, Leviathan who had first suggested to the Marine's Fleet Admiral that the fish-man training in isolation might be worth a conversation — acting as an unlikely matchmaker between the new institution and Kisame.
"I haven't been on land in a long time," the creature said flatly. "I despise dry air."
The siblings had heard enough. Three minutes was the clock and it was running. The Red Armor raised the energy blade, the crimson edge burning at full intensity, and drove it down toward Leviathan's head — aiming to split the creature cleanly in two, fast enough that the sheer scale of the target couldn't save it.
Their information was incomplete. They knew Sea Kings could grow to monstrous size. They had catalogued powerful creatures across the seas. But the category of super ancient creature was not something either of them had ever encountered a real example of, and the gap between assumption and reality was about to demonstrate itself.