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The water array wall expanded in every direction at once, crushing the siblings' fighting space into an ever-tighter ring. Inside that rotating barrier of compressed water, Admiral Kaitora — Hoshigaki Kisame — narrowed his focus to a single target: Charlotte Katakuri.
This was not their first meeting. He had seen "Eight Thousand Spears" before, back on Cake Island, when Charlotte Smoothie drank her sister's blessing and her power multiplied several times over in the span of a breath. Even then, she had managed to hold the line against an Admiral-level opponent long enough to matter. The Uchiha bloodline, Kisame had decided, was a blind box — you never knew what you were getting until the eyes opened and the gift revealed itself.
Every true genius of that lineage eventually grew into something uniquely their own. "Eight Thousand Spears" was Charlotte Hikaru's answer. And lurking beneath it, still untouched, was the shadow of Shisui's Kotoamatsukami — a technique so absolute it could rewrite a person's will without leaving so much as a fingerprint.
Power like that being inherited through blood. It was extraordinary. And it was exactly why the Uchiha clan's fall from dominance had always been inevitable — not because they lacked strength, but because their strength attracted the kind of internal envy and betrayal that hollowed dynasties from within. If you rise by your bloodline, you fall by your bloodline.
Kisame intended to sweep these remnants of a fallen dynasty into the waste bin of history.
"I'm in a hurry," he said, his voice flat. "Time to end this game of house."
His hands began moving under the protection of the water wall — a sequence of seals more intricate than anything he'd used so far.
Water Style: Heaven's Cry.
The cloudless sky above the Gobi Desert went dark.
It happened fast — too fast to be natural. Black clouds piled atop one another with an aggression that had nothing to do with weather and everything to do with will. The arid air that had baked everything below for centuries suddenly turned cold and close. An oppressive weight settled over the desert, invisible and enormous, pressing down on the lungs and the nerves alike. Even the siblings, who had every reason to ignore the sensation, felt it.
The wind picked up. Dust erupted in pale curtains across the cracked ground, forcing both eyes shut. Lightning split the darkness in sharp, white flashes — the only light left as the sky sealed itself overhead.
Then the rain came.
What fell from those clouds was not rain in any normal sense. The droplets compressed mid-air, condensing into points as they dropped, until by the time they reached eye level they were needles — thousands of them, tens of thousands, a descending curtain of water sharpened to a killing edge. They struck the earth at speed that left small craters in the hardpan and shrieked against the last standing rock formations like a chorus of blades.
"Not good—"
Charlotte Katakuri was already moving. Amplified to his limits by Hikaru's Eight Thousand Spears, he let the Mochi Mochi no Mi (Mochi-Mochi Fruit) flood his body — expanding outward, swelling into a massive white sphere of rice cake that swallowed his sister whole. He wrapped Hikaru at his core, layers of dense mochi around her, and then coated the outer surface with every ounce of Armament Haki he could generate.
The first wave hit.
The Armament Haki held. Barely. The water needles pierced until they couldn't, hammering against the hardened mochi surface and embedding themselves in rows. Katakuri felt each one — not quite pain, but pressure, a thousand simultaneous insults to his defense. The second wave followed without pause, and this time the Haki cracked at the edges.
There was something else too. Something worse than the piercing force. Kisame was a fish-man, and the jutsu he used carried the memory of the ocean regardless of how far from the sea they stood. The rain tasted of salt. It carried the weight of deep water. And for Devil Fruit users, that particular quality was not a minor discomfort — it was a slow, grinding drain on the body's baseline. No matter how exceptional Katakuri's constitution was, he was not stronger than seawater. That was not a matter of training. It was physics.
Water Style: Heaven's Cry sustained itself for three minutes. Then the energy behind it faltered — the extreme heat of the Gobi Desert pulled at the water molecules, dispersing them, until the last of the needles dissolved into useless vapor on the way down. The dark clouds fractured and thinned. The suffocating pressure lifted.
The water array wall collapsed with them, its structure gone, spreading across the dry ground as nothing more than ordinary water that the cracked earth drank immediately.
Silence.
Then movement from inside the needle-riddled mochi sphere — a sound of effort, and an arm pushed through. Charlotte Katakuri emerged, holding his sister against his chest.
They had learned something from Cake Island. The moment Kisame began his seals, Katakuri had released the ground-level mochi as a decoy and pulled Hikaru underground — the actual attack had only caught the outer shell. The holes across his body now were real, each one left by a needle that had found a gap in his Haki, but he had kept the vital areas protected. Hikaru was unharmed.
Kisame looked them over and filed away the result.
So that's the ceiling, he thought. The transferred power has limits I can work with.
"Katakuri," he said, arms crossed, "you've kept yourself alive by borrowing strength. But borrowed strength has a shelf life. Look at her — she's losing it as fast as she channels it. The Uchiha are gifted, I'll grant them that. But the more powerful the gift, the heavier the cost." He let the words sit before continuing. "She's not even ten years old. The Mangekyō puts that kind of load on an adult body. How long can a child sustain it before she starts burning through things she can't get back?"
The blue luminescence wrapping both siblings was fading at the edges — not rapidly, but visibly. Hikaru's light bled outward at the seams, escaping rather than concentrating. She could supply, but she couldn't contain. The power she fed her brother was real, but temporary.
Kisame wasn't wrong, and Hikaru knew it.
She also knew something he didn't: she had one more option.
Why does he understand our eyes better than we do? The thought moved through her with quiet intensity as her small hands began forming seals behind her brother's back. Has he met other Uchiha? Fought them? Studied them?
"Brother." Her voice was steady despite everything. "If we use that combination — it decides this. Win or lose."
Katakuri looked back at her, a question and a warning both in his eyes. He saw her expression and knew the argument was already over.
"Ten minutes," he said, putting her behind him. "We hold for ten minutes. After that — win or lose — Nakime gets us out."
He bit down on his tongue to sharpen himself. The girl steeled herself behind him, focusing.
The Big Mom Pirates will not fall here.
Kisame felt the energy shift before he saw anything. A powerful aura was building behind Charlotte Katakuri — something dense and ancient in character, nothing like the clean water-element force he worked with. He recognized it. He had felt something adjacent to it before.
"A genuine genius of the Uchiha line," he said quietly, already adjusting his positioning, his mind cycling through countermeasures. "What a waste. Being born in this era."
A dazzling crimson light erupted from behind Charlotte Katakuri.