Chapter 177: The Mangekyo Born of Love
Two voices. One technique.
The Tsukuyomi worlds collided.
What should have been a single black-and-red space split down the middle — Itachi's side bleeding crimson and shadow, Hikaru's side rendered in stark black and white. A boundary between them like a wound in the air.
Itachi had not been surprised in a long time.
He was surprised now.
Who is this person? She had a Mangekyo. Her technique was Tsukuyomi — the same as his, precisely, not a variant. And she was holding against him.
Since Shisui's death, Itachi had considered himself the preeminent genjutsu user in the ninja world. That wasn't arrogance; it was an honest assessment. And this girl, appearing without warning in his brother's training ground, was meeting him directly in the one domain where he had no equal.
What does she want with Sasuke?
He didn't have time to pursue the question. The two Tsukuyomi worlds were pressing against each other — not like techniques competing, but like two physical masses grinding together, each trying to claim the same space.
He pushed his yin chakra forward. Mountains rose in the red-black world, jagged and sudden, attempting to arrest the encroachment of the white.
They slowed it. They did not stop it.
"In your era," Hikaru said, her voice carrying across the divided space, "your genjutsu would be considered first-rate."
A pause.
"Unfortunately for you."
She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to.
Why had the Uchiha clan needed three great clans working in coordination to seal her? Why not simply kill her? The answer was straightforward: no one could. She had been a weapon forged through grief and forced transplantation and years of relentless combat, and the transplanted Mangekyo she carried had grown into something that reflected all of that.
Her own ability — Yachiho, the Eight Thousand Spears — was a separate technique, but the yin chakra required to use it was the same yin chakra currently pressing Itachi's Tsukuyomi into pieces. It was not ordinary.
The white world surged.
Itachi felt his mental foundation begin to crack.
He had one option. He took it.
His Tsukuyomi shattered — deliberately, violently, like breaking a mirror from the inside. The red-black world came apart in fragments. His own presence in the mental space dissolved with it.
Retreat.
"Decisive," Hikaru said to the empty space, and returned to reality.
In the physical world, the entire exchange had taken less than a second.
To Sasuke and Sasori, it had looked like the two of them made eye contact — and then Itachi was leaning against a tree, one hand pressed over his left eye, blood running between his fingers.
The Tsukuyomi eye. Capillaries burst from the strain of a mental battle he'd been losing.
"You—" His voice came out rougher than usual. The composure was mostly intact but the effort behind it was visible. "Who are you? There is no Uchiha like you. What do you want with Sasuke?"
He was pressing hard on the eye. Yin chakra depletion at this scale produced a specific kind of pain — not physical, exactly, but something deeper. His thoughts felt slightly wrong, slightly too bright at the edges.
Hikaru looked at him.
"I'm your great-great-grandmother," she said.
"..."
He processed this for a moment and decided it wasn't worth engaging with.
Sasuke had been watching with the focused intensity of someone who had been waiting for exactly this opening.
His Sharingan was already moving — three tomoe spinning faster, lines pulling together, the new pattern forming.
The Mangekyo opened.
Itachi went still.
Sasuke has—
Why does Sasuke have—
"You told me once," Sasuke said, and his voice was controlled in a way that cost him something, "that having these eyes was the only way to have the power to face you."
He drew his sword.
"I have them now."
The blade came out, and then Sasuke was gone — lightning crackling across his body as he moved, the technique Kakashi had given him, White Fang's edge married to borrowed thunder—
A tree fell.
Itachi had moved, but only barely. A breath of delay, the yin chakra depletion making his processing fractionally slower than it should have been.
He tried to form seals.
"Fire Release — Great Fire—"
"Too slow."
Sasuke was already back in close range, sword moving like weather, relentless and without pattern — each strike flowing into the next without the hesitation of someone who was thinking about technique. Just fury with precision behind it.
Itachi blocked, redirected, gave ground.
He learned this from Kakashi. I can see the foundation. But the intensity is his own.
A coat hem. Gone — sheared clean by a blade Itachi almost hadn't tracked.
He felt something he hadn't felt in a long time looking at his brother.
You've grown.
The iron spike came out of nowhere.
Sasuke registered it with a fraction of a second to spare and threw himself backward. The projectile punched through four trees in a line and buried itself in the rock face behind them, leaving a channel in the stone.
If I'd tried to deflect that with the sword—
He reassessed. Sasori had entered the fight.
The puppet moved with controlled precision, black iron sand drifting in geometric patterns around its joints, more spikes forming.
"I owe you one," Itachi said, breath slightly short.
"Save it." Sasori looked at him without warmth, then at Sasuke. "We should leave."
The calculus had shifted. Itachi's genjutsu capacity was compromised, Sasuke had a Mangekyo and appeared willing to use it, and there was an unknown variable in the training ground whose Tsukuyomi had just done what it had done.
Itachi looked at Sasuke.
"Did you lose someone to get those eyes? Someone precious to you?"
Sakura. The pink-haired girl — he'd seen her with the ninja cats, a close connection to his brother. He wondered.
"You think I'm like you?"
Sasuke's laugh was short and cold.
"I didn't hurt anyone."
He pressed his fist against his chest, over his heart.
"If gaining these eyes required killing my friends — my companions — I would tear them out myself."
"These eyes came from witnessing someone I care about in danger, and refusing to let that be the end."
"That is the power of love."
"Not the power of killing what you cherish most."
"I am nothing like you, Uchiha Itachi."
The Mangekyo pattern turned in his eyes.
Itachi stood very still.
Sasuke—
He had planned this. All of it. The massacre, the years of pursuit, the careful construction of the path that would drive Sasuke toward his own death and the awakening of the Eternal Mangekyo. He had laid out every step with precision.
And Sasuke had stepped entirely off that path.
Not toward weakness. Toward something Itachi didn't have a category for.
You were supposed to follow the road I built for you.
I planned your future.
I was right.
He looked at his brother — the fury still there, the grief still there, but something else underneath it that hadn't been there before — and for a moment Itachi Uchiha, who had decided everything alone at thirteen years old, had no response prepared.
"We're leaving," Sasori said, final.
Itachi came back to himself. He turned.
But in the moment before he moved — quietly, with no indication of what he was doing — Sasuke's right eye activated.
Kotoamatsukami.
The invisible force settled over Itachi like a second skin, and Itachi felt something — a subtle wrongness, a slight drag on the world's cooperation — and turned back to look at Sasuke.
The boy was standing still. Watching him go. Making no move to pursue.
"Not going after them?" Hikaru asked, beside him.
"Without you helping, I couldn't stop both of them." He turned to look at her. "You chose not to."
"...Fair."
She didn't explain. She didn't owe him an explanation.
What Sasuke wanted from that fight was his own business. Itachi was still standing. Sasuke was still standing. She had decided that was sufficient.
"Itachi's condition — with Kotoamatsukami running on him, shaking off the curse is going to cost him."
Sasuke sheathed his sword.
"He came to Konoha for a reason. Not just to check on me." His voice had settled back into something cooler, more deliberate. "I need to report this to the Hokage."
He was already moving.
"Sasuke."
He stopped.
Hikaru was looking at the space where Itachi had stood.
"You redefined what the Uchiha are."
She said it without looking at him.
"You'll be the best version of this clan there has ever been."
"..."
"I hope so."
She watched him go.
Different from every Uchiha she had ever known. Opposite, really — the whole orientation reversed. And his Mangekyo was different too. Not born from grief weaponized into hatred. Born from love refusing to become grief.
A Mangekyo of love.
If the Uchiha who came after him took after him rather than after everyone who had come before—
Hikaru found a flat rock by the river and sat down, watching the water catch the light.
Sasuke. Should I stay and watch whether your wind can actually turn that wheel—
Whether love can become the thing this clan is known for, instead of everything else.
She didn't have an answer yet.
The river moved.
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