Chapter 557: The Sibling Who Couldn't Let Go
"What is happening... Sasuke, your eyes!"
Uchiha Itachi stared. His body shifted slightly backward -- a defensive posture he almost never allowed himself, even facing dangerous opponents. Something had reached through his composure and unsettled it.
"You're... no, you really are Sasuke, but this shouldn't be possible..."
He genuinely could not make sense of what he was looking at.
His first suspicion was that the person in front of him wasn't Sasuke at all. Because it was impossible for Sasuke to go from an ordinary Sharingan to this -- whatever this was -- in just the few days since they had last been in the same place.
Those purple and red interwoven patterns. The tomoe rotating slowly within them. That was not a Sharingan. Not even a Mangekyo. That was...
A Rinnegan?
No.
Itachi rejected the conclusion before it finished forming.
He had seen the Rinnegan. He worked alongside the person who carried it. Those eyes were powerful enough to elevate one person to something godlike -- but the sensation coming from the eyes in front of him was completely different from anything the Rinnegan had ever produced.
If Akatsuki's Rinnegan was a lake with no visible bottom, then what Sasuke had now was an ocean with no visible shore. Standing at its edge, looking out at that vast expanse of water, there was no way to measure its depth, no way to guess what existed within it, no reference point from which to even begin.
This was beyond the scope of what he could comprehend.
But one thing he was certain of.
The source of that ocular power. That chakra signature. The sensation of shared blood that resonated in him without any choice. He knew it too well.
That was Uchiha Sasuke's own essence. His brother's unique chakra, unmistakable.
His Mangekyo was telling him something that defied logic: the person in front of him was genuinely Uchiha Sasuke.
Just a Sasuke who had grown to a level he could no longer see through.
"You're questioning whether I'm really who I appear to be, Itachi?"
Satsuki spoke, unhurried. "Let me explain then. The reason I want to teach you a lesson is simple -- your habit of deciding other people's lives without their consent."
A soft sound, like a breath dispersing.
The Transformation Jutsu released.
Itachi's eyes widened again.
The face he was looking at resembled Sasuke, but wasn't quite Sasuke.
The curve of the cheeks was closer to another face he knew with a depth of familiarity that carried pain in it -- Uchiha Mikoto. The mother he had killed with his own hands. This face was something between Sasuke and Mikoto, a combination he had never seen, yet that felt as if it had always had a right to exist.
"...You are... Sasuke?"
Itachi's voice came out with a slight roughness in it. "From the future -- no, from another world's... Sasuke?"
He heard the uncertainty in his own voice. Even he thought the conclusion was absurd. He began to wonder if he had been caught in yet another genjutsu he hadn't noticed.
His mind turned it over quickly. What if Sasuke had been a girl? What if the child who had chased after him calling "big brother" hadn't been a little brother but a little sister?
What if the child their mother had carried hadn't been a second son but a daughter? Growing up, that girl would probably look something like this.
Blood connections didn't lie.
Satsuki was mildly annoyed.
She watched Itachi's face move through its sequence -- shock, reflection, comprehension -- and felt a faint irritation.
He had figured it out that quickly?
Well. Uchiha Itachi was, at his foundation, an obsessive sibling who had never learned to release his grip.
What answered Itachi's realization was a half-body purple Susanoo.
Purple chakra surged upward from Satsuki and rapidly condensed around her into a massive half-body silhouette. She stood at its center, wrapped in that violet light, her eyes resting on Itachi with cold attention.
This was Susanoo's second stage.
The great purple giant raised one arm under Satsuki's direction. Its palm opened. A colossal energy bow materialized from nothing. The bowstring was drawn back, a chakra-condensed arrow nocked against it, aimed directly at Itachi.
Itachi looked at the purple Susanoo across the space between them and moved without hesitation, driving his Mangekyo to respond.
Red light poured from his eyes and rapidly condensed around him into a half-body Susanoo of his own, red against the purple, facing it across the clearing.
Something surprised him as he activated it: there was no discomfort. None of the familiar grinding ache behind the eyes. The sensation was so long-absent that for a moment it disoriented him.
His red Susanoo raised its arm. Its palm opened. A massive tomoe-shaped projectile formed there, gleaming.
"Yasaka no Magatama!"
The great red magatama released from the Susanoo's palm, spinning toward Satsuki's purple giant.
Satsuki watched it coming. Her fingers eased.
The purple chakra arrow left the bow, shooting straight toward the spinning magatama.
The impact produced a flash that forced the eye away.
The purple arrow had not been stopped. It drove through the red magatama's center the way a heated needle passes through soft material -- straight through, splitting the spinning construct apart, red flame fragments scattering in every direction and dissolving before they reached the ground.
The arrow did not slow. It continued toward Itachi's Susanoo at full force.
The difference in scale was undeniable. The Yasaka no Magatama had not even managed to delay it by a single moment.
Itachi pushed his ocular power again -- red chakra flooded outward from the Susanoo's ribs, rapidly sheathing the entire upper body in heavy red armor.
Susanoo advanced from its second stage into its third. Armor encasing the full body, defensive capability increased substantially. A form he had almost never needed to reach for in past battles.
The purple arrow struck.
The collision sent the shockwave expanding outward in every direction. Trees swayed and bent. The earth was stripped back in successive layers. Purple chakra and red armor clashed violently in midair, the armor cracking and cracking under the impact, new chakra rushing in to seal the damage as fast as it appeared.
Itachi pressed a hand over his eyes.
Not the pain from overuse -- this was different. The violent shaking transmitted through the chakra connection when his Susanoo was struck, conducting directly into his eyes like a direct blow to each eyeball.
The third stage wasn't enough. That heavy red armor couldn't hold against what she was bringing.
Itachi set his teeth, lowered his hand, drew a slow breath. The light in his Mangekyo intensified.
There was no other option.
He drove his ocular power to the absolute edge of what he could reach. Red chakra tore outward from his body in a flood he could barely contain, and the Susanoo expanded under it -- from half-body rapidly extending downward, from meters to dozens of meters, the half-giant becoming a complete giant standing fully in the world. The red armor thickened, refined itself, a pair of massive wings spreading wide from the structure's back, the entire Susanoo radiating something solemn and enormous.
This was Susanoo's complete body form.
A form Itachi had almost never used.
For years, the body he carried had been too damaged to sustain this level of ocular consumption. Every attempt to push toward Complete Susanoo would have placed an enormous burden on his system, threatened his life directly. He had simply never been able to reach this form cleanly.
But now -- with Amaterasu Rei suppressing every illness and wound inside him, his body lighter than it had felt in years, his ocular power more abundant than he could remember -- he could push these eyes as far as they could go without holding anything back.