Chapter 555: Mangekyo vs Nine Tomoe Rinne-Sharingan
The Mangekyo genjutsu had produced no effect.
That fact set Itachi in motion. From every direction, black crows came converging -- one after another, overlapping, condensing in the air -- until they had gathered into the tall figure in the black-and-red-cloud robe, standing fully formed in the clearing.
"Sasuke."
Uchiha Itachi spoke with deliberate calm, his crimson Sharingan resting quietly on the boy in front of him.
"It seems you've finally obtained eyes like mine. Is that what gives you the confidence to stand before me again?"
His gaze settled on Satsuki's Mangekyo -- those eyes he had waited so long to see, the eyes he had paid such an enormous price to force into existence. Paid with his own hands. Paid with every life in the clan, with the blood of their parents spread across the floors of a home that used to mean something. Paid with everything, and now here they were.
"How far can those eyes see?"
Satsuki, wearing young Sasuke's face over her disguised Mangekyo, looked at the man standing across from her -- this man who looked so much like the sister she had in her own world.
Her expression was flat and cold. She was imitating the demeanor a young Sasuke would carry when facing Itachi. But the thing concealed beneath that coldness was something Itachi had no way to reach.
"I won't need these eyes to deal with you. Itachi -- I have a question."
Itachi's brow moved by the faintest margin.
Won't need the Mangekyo? Those eyes were the Uchiha clan's highest form of ocular power -- the proof of having passed through the deepest suffering the human experience could produce. They were the reason this boy could stand before him at all. And now he was saying they weren't necessary for this?
From a young Uchiha who had just awakened them, that kind of statement was either the fearlessness of ignorance, or there was some resource behind it that Itachi didn't know about.
"...Is that so." He shifted smoothly into the prepared lines -- the ones he had long since composed for this eventual conversation. "You want to know why I let you live. That would take going back to the history of --"
"No."
Sasuke's voice cut it off cleanly.
"I have no interest in that question."
Itachi nearly failed to hold his expression. And then Satsuki spoke, and the next words she said brought his composure to the edge of collapse entirely.
"Itachi -- if killing everyone around me would guarantee my safety, would you do it?"
The question settled between them. Into the slowly drifting black feathers. Into the stillness of the trees. Quiet as if the whole world had stopped breathing.
He knows.
The thought detonated in Itachi's mind and left everything blank.
He knows? What does Sasuke know? How much? How did he find out? Who told him? The questions swept through every available corner of his thoughts, and his heart was slamming against his ribs.
Does he know the truth of the massacre? Does he know everything that happened that night? Does he know that it wasn't madness or bloodlust that killed the clan -- that it was for him, to protect him?
No. Now was not the time for this.
Itachi breathed in deep. Held the breath. Let it out slowly.
He used everything he had to keep his face neutral, his eyes cold and distant, his voice completely flat.
Who could have told Sasuke? The number of people who knew the truth of the Uchiha massacre was small. The Third Hokage, Hiruzen. Shimura Danzo. And the man who called himself Uchiha Madara.
The Third was dead. Danzo would never have let Sasuke walk away after telling him. Which left Uchiha Madara...
"...You won't answer?" Satsuki's voice came again. "Then let me give you a lesson first. Tell me -- why did you agree to Shimura Danzo's proposal back then?"
In the next instant, Sasuke's palm blazed.
A blinding blue-white light erupted from it, crackling and violent, producing the sharp sound of ten thousand birds screaming at once.
Chidori.
Sasuke's form launched forward like a released spring, that Chidori-bearing hand driving straight toward Itachi's chest.
At the precise instant it would have made contact, Itachi's hand snapped forward with clinical precision. His grip closed around Satsuki's wrist. The force stopped the Chidori-laden hand dead in midair.
The impact that missed Itachi found the tree behind him instead. The trunk exploded from its center under the Lightning Release charge, splinters and branches erupting outward in all directions.
The crash of the falling tree rolled through the forest and sent distant flocks of birds spiraling upward.
Itachi held Sasuke's wrist and found himself genuinely puzzled. Why wasn't he using the Mangekyo?
Chidori was a solid technique. But deploying it against Itachi was naive. Against eyes at Mangekyo level, an attack of this scale registered as nothing.
What was Sasuke thinking? What was he testing? Or was he --
Slam.
Itachi didn't give him time to work it out. He torqued the arm he was holding and hurled Sasuke's entire body into the surviving tree trunk beside them.
Then his free hand closed around Sasuke's throat and lifted him off the ground entirely.
"My foolish little brother..." His other hand rose slowly. His fingers extended toward the eye socket, unhurried, carrying the composed cruelty of something that knew it had already won. "You still haven't grasped where reality stands, have you?"
"These eyes... I'll be taking them."
He meant every word. He was genuinely preparing to remove them from the socket. Not a threat. Not theater. This was the real intention. He'd always planned for Sasuke to receive his eyes in a transplant anyway, to unlock the Eternal Mangekyo. The mechanics were roughly equivalent.
His fingertips touched the edge of the eye socket. He felt the warmth of skin. The curve of the eyeball beneath.
And then --
A wet, soft sound. Flesh being moved.
Itachi's fingers withdrew from the eye socket with something in them.
A Sharingan eye. The black tomoe rotated slowly against the crimson sclera, beautiful in the way that forbidden things are beautiful.
Itachi looked down at the eye in his palm. Good. This would make Sasuke doubt whatever truth he'd been given -- he'd believe it was false, and then all that was needed was --
He raised his head sharply.
No scream.
The boy hanging in his grip, suspended by the throat, had made no sound. No pain. No desperate struggling. No reflexive violent reaction from losing an eye.
He was simply hanging there. Still and quiet, as if nothing had happened at all.
Itachi's gaze moved to Sasuke's face.
Both eyes. Completely intact. Sitting perfectly in their sockets, the bewitching Mangekyo still rotating, watching him with cold attention.
Impossible. He had just extracted one of Sasuke's eyes with his own hand. He could feel it in his palm right now.
What was the thing in his palm, then?
Was this a genjutsu?
The realization arrived like cold water.
One of Itachi's eyes had gone blind. Without warning. And the eye in his hand -- he looked at his palm -- was unmistakably his own.
He, who had spent his entire life as a genjutsu master. The one who used illusions against others, always, without exception. Right now, without any awareness, without knowing the moment it had happened, he had been pulled into a genjutsu so completely that he hadn't even noticed the entry.
Itachi's breath tore loose. The scene in front of him began to come apart like a mirror cracking, piece by piece peeling away.
When his vision reconverged, he was still standing in place. Sasuke had never moved. The Chidori had never been used. The tree in the distance was intact. His fingers touched his own eye socket -- both eyes were there. Both of them.
The terror of going blind, the sensation of holding his own eyeball in his palm -- all illusion.
"Sasuke... you've grown stronger."
Itachi said it quietly, and his voice came out hoarse. He had to acknowledge it -- Sasuke's Mangekyo was far more powerful than he had imagined. But what he didn't know, and what he couldn't have imagined, was that the Mangekyo eyes he was looking at were nothing but a disguise over a Nine Tomoe Rinne-Sharingan. He had no way to conceive of what those eyes were truly capable of.
"Now. Will you answer my question?"
Satsuki stood where she was.
"Is this your idea of protection? If killing everyone around me would guarantee my safety -- would you do it?"
Itachi was silent for a moment.
The mask of feigned coldness and cruelty dropped from his face.
"It seems you truly do know the truth." He spoke slowly, voice low and measured. "But you cannot accept the path I chose. The decision I made for our parents."
He was done performing.
If Sasuke already knew the truth, if the genjutsu and the lies couldn't hold anymore, then continuing the act served no purpose.
But there was one thing he still had to do.
Kotoamatsukami. He had to use it. Had to rewrite Sasuke's will completely, before this came apart. He couldn't allow Sasuke to seek revenge against Konoha. He had to make him go back, live safely, let the life Itachi had purchased with everything mean something.
This was what all the sacrifice had been building toward.
It couldn't fall apart now.