Accompanied by the near-collapse, desperate scream of the exhausted girl, the massive, blood-red Susano'o, like a raging god of war, suddenly raised its arm, covered in a tattered, cloth-like shroud of chakra. Crimson, blood-like condensed chakra surged violently in its palm, instantly forming three magatama-shaped chakra clusters connected end to end.
That was Yasaka Magatama, a universal technique usable only when Susano'o had progressed to its second stage or beyond.
No sooner had the three magatama taken form, carrying enough power to easily flatten a small hill, than they tore through the air and crashed down in a triangular formation toward the tiny figure of Hii Kōri below.
Huh… Looks like she really doesn't have any other abilities she can use right now. Otherwise, she wouldn't be resorting to something like Susano'o…
Thinking this as he faced the howling, destructive magatama, Hii Kōri's hands moved without the slightest delay.
He brought his hands together before his chest, his ten fingers blooming like a lotus flower and then closing again, in an instant becoming nearly countless phantoms as he formed extremely complex hand seals.
"Naming: Eight Million."
Vwoom – an uncomfortable buzzing sound rang out. The air between Hii Kōri and the incoming Yasaka Magatama seemed to freeze instantly. Countless barriers, glowing with a faint fluorescence, rose before him with dizzying speed, like spontaneously growing crystal walls.
Ten layers, a hundred layers, a thousand layers—each as thin as a cicada's wing yet immensely tough—formed in a single breath, compressing and overlapping into an immense, heaven-spanning wall.
Boom! Boom! BOOM!!!
The three blood-red magatama slammed violently into this nearly transparent barrier. Deafening explosions echoed, and a violent shockwave swept outward in a ring, ruthlessly churning up the already devastated scorched earth. Dust and smoke billowed skyward.
But none of it could cross that threshold.
"The hollow where you were sealed is a hundred meters underground. In the Senju's archives, all other information about this sealing location has been erased."
Behind the barrier, unmoved by the turmoil, Hii Kōri looked down at the girl sitting slumped within Susano'o, clutching her eye and gasping for breath.
"It's not that I don't understand your reaction to seeing my hair, but at least two hundred years have passed since you were sealed. Even the Uzumaki clan was wiped out two or three years ago, leaving less than a hundred people scattered across the ninja world."
"As fellow practitioners of Yin Release, I can sense the curses that fill your spirit. Surely, you experienced something very painful in the past, harboring hatred for someone. But the specific people and things you care about, hate, and want revenge for… have likely already turned to dust and scattered into the mud."
"So, how about thinking about how you want to live in this world from now on?"
The girl, collapsed inside Susano'o, showed no reaction to Hii Kōri's words.
In truth, she had already suspected as much from Hii Kōri's way of speaking—so different from a ninja of the Warring States Period—his unfamiliar abilities, and the very strangeness of the term "Warring States Period."
But so what?
From the moment her parents died before her eyes, from the moment she was dragged into a dark laboratory by her "clan," from the moment she was stripped of her name and turned into a weapon… her life had lost all meaning. Only the survival instinct, driven by hatred, remained.
Now, she was merely riding the scorching flames of her angst, venting her hatred of "ninja" at Hii Kōri, the red-haired shinobi.
Seeing her unresponsive, Hii Kōri shrugged indifferently.
He knew from his future self and his past life's memories that Kaguya, after a thousand years sealed away, emerged silly and easy to fool. He had intended to use this girl, also sealed for a long time, as practice, to gain experience for eventually seducing the Three-Eyed Alien Girl.
But who would have guessed this young Uchiha girl had such a temper? …Wait, maybe it was because of her hair color? Did she have a PTSD trigger?
"Tch!"
Seeing that Yasaka Magatama had accomplished nothing, the girl immediately urged Susano'o to draw its blade and slash.
The tachi, like the tattered shroud and unformed armor of Susano'o, was covered in damage, looking incredibly fragile. But that was only superficial. Susano'o takes on different forms depending on the user, and this raging-god-like residual image naturally symbolized the girl's own scarred, shattered heart.
Likewise, it was the crystallization of her killing intent.
Like a god of destruction from mythology, the terrifying pressure emitted by Susano'o here made the surrounding air thick and heavy. The scorched earth, already burnt by Amaterasu, cracked and sank again!
Heh… As a descendant of mountain folk who revered "Arahabaki," now I have to face a power called Susano'o. That's a dark joke that's
hard to laugh at.
Clay figures. Specifically, the shakōkidogū type.
These were "sacred images" modeled after Arahabaki, a fierce god widely worshiped during the Yamatai period and later belittled after Yamatai's fall.
Although the sacred images have a strange human form, Arahabaki itself was actually enshrined as a "snake god."
In the Japanese language, the earliest Chinese character for "snake" was "山spirit" (mountain spirit). And the manifestation of the mountain god in ancient beliefs dating back to the Jōmon period was the giant serpent.
Perhaps this snake affinity was also why Hii Kōri got along so well with Orochimaru.
Muttering this quietly, thinking he had seen enough of the girl's abilities, he prepared himself and opened all his chakra tenketsu.
Yin-Yang Cross: Ready.
While there were certainly simpler ways to subdue the girl, faced with this kind of… "karmic" encounter, Hii Kōri did intend to stretch his limbs a bit.
Besides, if he didn't put on a show of exhaustion, making it look like he'd used considerable effort, how could he get Senior Orochimaru—who had faked his death and escaped underground from the very beginning—to show his face?
And regarding the connection between the Snake God and Susano'o-no-Mikoto…
"Die!!!"
Without any flourish, the damaged tachi tore through the air, carrying a mournful shriek and an overwhelming, landslide-like momentum, slashing down toward the transparent barrier.
Even before the blade arrived, the rapid wind pressure had already carved a deep trench into the ground.
While Yasaka Magatama was a heaven-shaking, earth-shattering technique against targets of normal size, for a ninja with Susano'o or abilities capable of countering it, this move was essentially a common "hadouken"-type move in fighting games.
But that broken tachi was a weapon born together with Susano'o's form, unique to this manifestation.
The difference in power between the two was like night and day.
The thousand-fold barrier that had easily stopped Yasaka Magatama held out for only a moment against the heaven-splitting, damaged blade before being cleanly severed in two.
"Not Fear, Vajra, Snake and Scorpion."
The spider's thread spun between ground and space, plane and solid, appeared with Hii Kōri's incantation. The Triple Barrier: Six Paths Boundary, constructed from luminescent threads, took form once again.
The force of the damaged blade, burning with blood-red flames, suddenly solidified in the absolutely still barrier. It could advance no further, nor could it be withdrawn.
"What?!" Inside Susano'o, the girl stared in disbelief, her bleeding right eye wide. She never imagined that her all-out slash could be stopped in such an incomprehensible way.
A flicker of Yicai passed through Hii Kōri's eyes. Unable to move quickly while maintaining this static barrier, he released the Six Paths Boundary, shifted his body one position to the left, and then twisted to punch the continuing slash.
Yin-Yang Cross, Senju Monstrous Strength, Full Release!
The blade, nearly as tall as the girl herself, instantly shattered. Hii Kōri seized the opportunity, stepped forward, and charged. His figure blurred, leaving a faint afterimage as his true body, like an electromagnetic cannonball fired from a gun, tore through the air like a azure meteor, slamming directly into the nearly twenty-meter-tall blood-red fierce god.
BOOM!!!
The deafening roar echoed once more. The sturdy, half-bodied fierce god, under the heavy impact, involuntarily slid backward. Then, a storm of rapid blows suddenly rained down.
Crack, crack, CRACK!
The dense sound of shattering nearly overlapped. Countless web-like cracks instantly spread across Susano'o's chest. The girl sheltered inside desperately output chakra, trying to stabilize Susano'o.
But the violent force pushed the god fierce back over a hundred meters. Even though it barely halted its retreat, it had dimmed and weakened significantly, clearly about to degrade back to its skeletal form.
A horrifyingly deep trench was left on the scorched, barren earth, burnt black by Amaterasu's flames. The girl's bare feet were also covered in cuts and bruises from being dragged backward.
Hii Kōri, who had almost vanished from the girl's sight, converged the blazing chakra aura around him and lightly landed on Susano'o's shoulder, gently patting the cracks that were being repaired.
"How interesting… your abilities."
As easily as if he were admiring the sunrise from his own rooftop, he crouched down and held up three fingers to the girl, who hadn't yet caught her breath.
"As far as I know, Susano'o and Yasaka Magatama, like the Illusion: Sharingan, are innate dōjutsu. Usable as long as you've awakened the Mangekyō Sharingan. But besides that…"
"Amaterasu, which releases inextinguishable black flames." He folded his ring finger.
"Kagutsuchi, which freely manipulates Amaterasu's flames." He lowered his middle finger.
"And finally, Tsukuyomi, which constructs an illusion space." He finished with his index finger.
He made a fist and light
tly tapped it against his other palm, his tone growing meaningfully: "Just now, you've used three distinctly different Mangekyō dōjutsu."
"But usually, after awakening the Mangekyō Sharingan, an Uchiha gains one unique dōjutsu in each eye, or a pair to use one technique. Someone like you, who can use three in a row… do you happen to have a third eye? Or—"
Hii Kōri's gaze swept over the girl's damaged, worn-out robe and the heavy shackles around her ankles.
"Were these dojutsu transplanted posthumously?"
"After all, the Senju and Sarutobi clans sealed you on the spot after the war. I doubt they bothered to change you into new prisoner clothes first, right? Judging by your attire… could it be that you were used as an experimental subject by your own clan?"
"Shut up!"
Like a cat whose tail had been stepped on, the girl, her sore spot hit, ignored the stinging pain from her tear-streaked, bleeding eyes and bursts of her dōjutsu power and chakra, forcing Hii Kōri to jump back from Susano'o's shoulder. Then she launched indiscriminate attacks at everything around her.
"Don't you dare talk smugly! What do you know!"
"Senju! Sarutobi! Uzumaki! Uchiha!"
"All ninja! And this damned world! Every last one of you, go to hell! AAAAAAGH!"
But to Hii Kōri's ears, that heart-wrenching voice sounded less like a roar and more like a helpless wail.
Precisely because he had seen the scene she created within Tsukuyomi's illusion space, and felt the helplessness and confusion beneath the curses hidden in her spiritual energy, he could say this with such certainty.
Even wielding such immense power, she was still just a little girl.
"Ah, that's right. Just like that. You should let your emotions out. Keeping them bottled up inside won't lead to anything good. That's what I teach my son, too."
Hii Kōri's calm voice seemed to pierce through the blood-red maelstrom of raging natural disasters, clearly reaching the girl's ears.
That tone, a mix of tolerance and gentleness, caused the girl, already somewhat disoriented, to hallucinate her parents' faces, whose features she could no longer remember clearly. Susano'o's movements halted for a moment.
"Covering Heaven, Crown Sutra, King Revealed."
The next moment, the Triple Barrier: Six Paths Boundary expanded again. Hii Kōri walked step by step into Susano'o's attack range, until, separated only by the entity of blood-red chakra, he was face to face with the girl.
He raised his right hand, fingers spread, and lightly placed it on Susano'o's exterior. Then, with a sudden push—"Hah!" BOOM!
Yin-Yang Cross · Monstrous Strength · Palm Heel Strike!
A sonic boom even exploded from his elbow as he struck. The blood-red Susano'o shattered under his palm like an ice statue crushed by a giant hammer, instantly disintegrating into countless crimson chakra fragments and motes of light that scattered in the air.
Hii Kōri's form surged through the sky, seizing the girl's slender neck and slamming her viciously into the ground.
Dust billowed. A dull impact sounded as the girl's small body left a shallow crater in the scorched earth.
The intense suffocation from the grip on her neck made her pale face redden from lack of oxygen. Instinctively, she grabbed Hii Kōri's arm with both hands, her legs kicking futilely, leaving a few bloody, mutilated footprints on his clothes.
But in her daze, looking at Hii Kōri, his face blurred by the backlight, she inexplicably recalled the warmth she had felt from his earlier words of comfort.
Seeing Hii Kōri raise his right hand, fingers together like a knife, the girl suddenly gave up struggling.
Am… I going to die…
The thought clearly surfaced in her increasingly chaotic mind.
Unexpectedly, she felt little fear, only a kind of liberating relief.
If I die… will I see Mom and Dad again… Will they… blame me for becoming like this…
A clear tear, mixed with blood and dirt, silently slid from the corner of her eye. She closed her eyes slightly, releasing her grip on Hii Kōri's arm. From deep in her throat came a whisper, as faint as a wounded animal's cry, barely audible.
"…Dad… Mom…"
At the same moment, Hii Kōri's knife-hand fell without mercy, piercing through the earth beside the girl's head… and the body of Orochimaru hidden beneath the ground.
***
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