The fight erupted without warning.
One moment, the air was taut with words.
Next, it tore.
Obito seemingly moved first.
Space folded at range, Kamui locking onto Yagura again, not clumsy, not hurried, a clean, practiced extraction aimed straight through the mist and the chains.
Akatsuki surged forward in the same instant.
"Now," Akane snapped.
Her Mangekyō flared, Shōmetsu biting into the distortion, entropy gnawing at the warping space itself, disrupting the pull the same way she had before.
But Kimimaro's focus sharpened instead of relaxing.
"No," he said sharply. "Not good."
Something was wrong.
This wasn't just Obito's long-range Kamui.
He felt it then, faint but unmistakable.
The pressure wasn't coming from this side alone.
The Kamui dimension itself was still converging at the point of extraction, not just brushing against reality, but overlapping it, and through that overlap, something else was acting on Yagura from the other side at this moment.
"Destroy Yagura," Kimimaro ordered instantly. "Now."
Saya and Emi reacted without hesitation.
Saya's Yin–Yang curse art bloomed outward, intent layered thick enough to suffocate reality itself.
Emi struck with externally molded natural energy, her blows precise, invasive, aimed to shatter structure rather than surface.
"Reika," Kimimaro continued, already moving. "Step back a bit, just in case. Keep the chains on him."
Reika didn't question it. Her physical form slid back, ice chains remaining locked, pinning Yagura in place even as distance widened.
Too late.
Yagura's body began to darken in patches, black spreading unnaturally across flesh and chakra alike, not corruption, reinforcement.
"So this is their plan," Kimimaro realized.
Deva Path.
From within Kamui's dimension, a second force asserted itself, not erasing space but pulling through it.
Gravitational attraction layered atop spatial extraction, stabilizing the pull where Akane's Shōmetsu weakened it.
And there was more.
Black Zetsu.
Kimimaro understood it all in a flash.
Obito had also placed inside his overlapping Kamui dimension beforehand, alongside Deva Path, anchoring the transfer from the other side this time.
From within that overlap, Black Zetsu latched onto Yagura mid-extraction, reinforcing him, warping his structure on the fly to endure the collision of such force, space, concepts, and imposed intent.
That was why—
Emi's strikes failed to break him.
Saya's curse mist wrapped, crushed, imposed reality, and still, Yagura's body held.
"What a strange material," Kimimaro thought coldly.
"So he really is indestructible."
Not Yagura.
Zetsu.
Space snapped inward.
Chains tore free as the pull completed, Yagura vanishing into Kamui in a single violent collapse of pressure.
The Akatsuki had secured him.
From within the Kamui dimension, the Black Zetsu likely stayed behind, still latched onto him, stabilizing Yagura through the aftershocks.
Outside, the Animal Path raised her hand.
Summoning Jutsu smokes ignited.
One by one, the remaining Paths of Pain emerged, including the Deva Path, in question, stepping back into the world as if he'd never left it.
Kimimaro exhaled slowly.
Akatsuki had taken the first move.
And they'd executed it perfectly.
This wasn't like he'd expected.
Obito had adapted in real time, pivoting off their first encounter instead of repeating it, far more shrewd than Kimimaro had initially given him credit for.
The original plan had been simple. Siphon what they could, then let Yagura die.
Not this.
Just as Kimimaro was about to finish him in Tenseigan Chakra Mode, Obito's pre-prepared warp activated, snapping the battlefield sideways before the killing blow could land.
Later, the spatial distortions and Black Zetsu-like matter protected him further.
Not a contingency that allowed them to stabilize him, and possibly proceed with the tailed beast plan as intended, despite everything his side threw at them.
Kimimaro didn't have time to think further before the first clash erupted.
Akane had already moved.
He'd given her the green light earlier, permission to take Itachi alone, and she hadn't hesitated for a second.
He knew their strength was roughly even.
He'd warned her about the danger of Itachi's large Susanoo weapons, the Totsuka Blade and the Yata Mirror, and exactly why they were lethal in ways brute power couldn't ignore.
One capable of negating nearly any attack, the other able to seal almost anything with frightening speed.
But more than that—
He couldn't deny her this fight.
This wasn't just another opponent.
Itachi was the wound that hadn't closed, the name that burned hotter than any strategic concern.
Whatever the outcome, this confrontation had to be hers.
And so, before the rest of the battlefield fully ignited, black and orange chakra rose to meet each other, and Kimimaro watched without interference as Akane collided with the enemy she'd been waiting for.
Chakra met chakra with a thunderous crack, the ground buckling outward in concentric fractures as their weapons collided.
Itachi's Susanoo wielded its spiritual armaments with clinical precision, the Totsuka Blade sweeping in arcs meant to seal, not cut, looking for an opening, while the Yata Mirror shifted and angled, concepts of defense made manifest.
Akane met it head-on.
Her Susanoo carried twin chakra overflowing hammers, dense, compact, humming with restrained violence.
Enmetsu bled outward, destabilizing the space the weapons passed through, while Shōmetsu gnawed at the spiritual cohesion of whatever it touched.
"…Interesting," Itachi said, voice calm even as he withdrew the Totsuka Blade mid-swing, forced to reposition before it would be completely compromised.
"You've learned to resist things you shouldn't be able to touch."
Akane's Susanoo answered with a downward smash that sent a shockwave ripping through the wetlands, mist exploding outward in a roaring wall.
"Funny," her voice echoed from within the construct, sharp and furious. "That's exactly what I was thinking about you."
The Yata Mirror flared, catching the blow, but even then the impact drove Itachi's Susanoo back a full step, earth grinding beneath its feet.
Itachi adjusted immediately.
Tsukuyomi was useless at this range, eye contact impossible through layers of chakra and distance.
Amaterasu followed the same logic, perfect for human flesh, inefficient and wasteful against a massive chakra avatar.
He knew it.
She knew he knew it.
Their Susanoo circled, each movement warping the battlefield, trees crushed, stone reduced to powder, the very air screaming under the strain of their presence.
Itachi struck again, the Totsuka Blade thrusting in a precise, linear attempt, sealing her Susanoo's chakra bit by bit, looking for an opening toward her real body, while the Yata Mirror rotated to intercept a counterblow from hammers.
Akane twisted with it, Enmetsu blooming wider, Shōmetsu carving entropy into the contact point.
The blade slid, failing to fully assert its sealing dominance, forcing Itachi to pull it back once more.
Not retreat.
Correction.
For a heartbeat, they simply stared at one another through their giants.
"You survived," Itachi said quietly. "And grew dangerous."
Akane's vengeful laughter cut through the roar of colliding chakra.
"You missed your chance, traitor," she said, her voice edged with certainty.
"Now you get to pay for all of it. Konoha is about to lose one of its most precious, blindly obedient assets."
They collided again.
The clash lit the battlefield like a second dawn, black and orange tearing into each other, neither yielding, neither gaining ground.
For now, it was only the opening exchange.
Itachi wielded superior spiritual weapons, refined, absolute in concept.
Akane answered with overwhelming Mangekyō force, her twin abilities fused so tightly with her Susanoo that even legends bent around them.
Evenly matched.
In theory, Itachi could have won this through sheer eyesight attrition, or even by grinding her down through chakra exhaustion.
Akane's twin entropy-based Mangekyo abilities were heavier, more demanding, and far costlier than his already-formed spiritual weapons.
But that would only be true if his body were healthy, and his Mangekyō not already worn thin.
In practice, that advantage didn't exist at all.
His illness gnawed at him constantly, his eyesight no longer reliable, the strain accelerating the deeper he stepped into danger.
Every extended exchange carried a price he couldn't afford.
Even a single minute of maintaining Susanoo shaved something off him that he couldn't easily replace.
He also had to preserve what little vision remained, saving it for the final confrontation with Sasuke, which he still intended to engineer in the future.
That mattered more.
So he couldn't go all out.
And he hadn't expected this.
Some peripheral Uchiha, living outside the village, scraping by through merchant work and forgotten bloodlines, should never have produced something like this.
A monster with Mangekyō abilities so absurdly potent and so cleanly integrated that, in some ways surpassed his own.
Then a half-forgotten clan detail finally surfaced.
A girl raised far from the village, loosely connected to an old grand-elder lineage through her mother's side.
"…So that's where it came from,"
Itachi realized, adjusting his stance as their Susanoo collided in the open again.
Itachi had long known he was meant to die, even before his incurable disease ever fully caught up with him.
That much had never been in question.
His death was the price, the final act meant to wash away the sins he had committed against his own clan.
At least in his own mind.
But it could never be here. Not like this. Not at the hands of this unexpected Uchiha woman, no matter her grudge, her history, or the story she carried.
For him, that role belonged to Sasuke alone.
He had never intended for Sasuke to learn the truth.
He believed that killing him, cleanly, decisively, would sever that chapter forever.
Sasuke would be hailed as Konoha's hero for slaying the traitor, free to live a long, unburdened life afterward.
That outcome still mattered.
He also had to ensure Sasuke's rescue from Orochimaru, who had been growing increasingly, inexplicably stronger since their last encounter years ago.
And even now, he didn't know how much that snake had taken, what marks it had left on his brother, or how strong Sasuke would ultimately become.
For that future, Itachi needed to preserve what remained of his body and his Mangekyō.
Not waste it here.
Not on this vengeful Uchiha.
From the beginning, that had been the choice he made.
The entire Uchiha clan had never outweighed even a single hair on his brother's head.
He didn't feel the need to explain anything to her now and blow his cover even more.
Someone like her would never understand the so-called bigger picture anyway.
She would see everything through a clan-centric lens, no different from those elders in the past.
Explanations were pointless.
Apologies, even more so.
Uchiha Itachi had abandoned both the moment he chose the path he believed was optimal.
What he felt now wasn't guilt.
It was apprehension and revulsion.
Not at her pain, but at the danger she represented.
A living grudge like hers would inevitably turn its fangs on Konoha one day.
That much was obvious.
And yet, even that was no longer his concern.
He had already paid more than enough to that village.
Let the younger generations deal with that.
Just a little longer, he told himself.
He would see Sasuke again.
And that would be the most fitting end he could allow himself.
As for Sasuke believing her story and side of things, in the future, if she lived?
Did she really think that Shisui's eye, the one he planned to plant remotely before his death, was just a decoration?
That failsafe existed for one purpose only.
To reach Sasuke someday and prevent him from being led astray by anyone, in this world, who might know the truth, the masked Uchiha in Akatsuki, this Uchiha embedded in a Jashinist cult, anyone at all.
At the deepest level, Sasuke would then be compelled to protect Konoha.
Always.
And someone who truly believed that could never bring himself to destroy it.
That was why Itachi didn't feel particularly concerned about her survival.
Whatever she became, whatever hatred she carried, Sasuke would never follow her down that path.
Itachi justified it the same way he justified everything else.
Choice was a luxury Sasuke couldn't afford.
Not in a world like this.
Not with powers, grudges, and manipulators circling him from every direction.
Freedom would only get him killed, or worse, turned into something irreparable.
If Sasuke's will had to be bent so he could live, then that was mercy.
If his future had to be narrowed so he wouldn't fall into darkness, then that was protection.
Itachi told himself that a brother who survived as a tool of peace was infinitely preferable to a brother who died chasing truth.
Not to mention that Konoha was his other fixed point. The axis around which everything rotated most of the time in his whole life.
He couldn't imagine a future where Sasuke's will existed independently of it, because in his mind, a Sasuke who didn't protect Konoha was already lost.
So reshaping his brother's beliefs wasn't cruelty.
It was alignment.
If Sasuke loved the village above all else, then the village would never abandon him, never brand him a traitor, never force him into the same corner Itachi had been pushed into.
That was his conviction.
So he wasn't preserving Sasuke's freedom.
He was preserving Konoha's version of a future, and convincing himself that it was the same thing.
And most importantly, he didn't want his most precious brother and that village, the two things he cared about above all else, to ever be driven into conflict, something he believed was inevitable if Sasuke ever learned the full, so-called truth of what he had done back then.
...
Meanwhile, as the battlefield fully tore itself apart, Kimimaro spared Itachi a few more thoughts.
Not out of anger.
Out of disdain.
He watched him deliberately restrain himself against Akane, throttling the fight down to a survivable rhythm, carefully budgeting damage, eyesight, and chakra.
Calculated. Controlled.
Pathetic.
Kimimaro didn't despise Itachi for what he'd done.
He despised him for lying to himself about why he'd done it.
Because what kind of man kills his own parents, parents who had never wronged him, and then convinces himself he did the right thing?
Worse, parades it internally as some kind of tragic heroism.
However, even that act of killing one's parents wasn't the most shocking.
Power demanded sacrifices.
Kimimaro understood that instinctively.
What repulsed him was the delusion layered on top of it.
The insistence that it had been necessary.
That it had been optimal.
That it had been righteous.
That was a weakness.
From a purely practical standpoint, Itachi's decisions back then were inefficient to the point of absurdity.
The coup would fail?
Based on what?
Shisui possessed a Mangekyō ability tailor-made to seize control without bloodshed.
A power any conqueror, tyrant, or ruler in any era would have considered perfect.
The village would be temporarily weakened by a coup, inviting external trouble?
Then why had it never occurred to him that erasing its strongest clan would weaken it permanently as well?
He killed everyone to "protect" Sasuke?
Kimimaro almost laughed at that.
Leaving a valuable asset inside enemy territory, surrounded by predators like Danzō, was not protection.
It was negligence dressed up as sacrifice.
Sasuke survived as long as he did by coincidence, not design.
If Kimimaro had chosen to preserve something precious, he would have removed it from danger entirely.
Isolated it. Controlled its environment.
Not abandoned it to a nest of vipers and hoped ideology would keep it safe.
And that was the core of Itachi's failure.
He believed loyalty was stronger than hunger.
That belief was false.
He believed Sasuke would never turn against the village because he shouldn't.
Reality didn't care.
Itachi wasn't evil.
He wasn't even cruel.
He was worse.
He was a man who sacrificed everything, then pretended it had meaning beyond his own fear of choosing differently.
Itachi was supposed to be a genius of a generation.
And yet he had missed truths so simple they were almost embarrassing.
Kimimaro understood Danzō's logic far better, for example.
Danzō was honest about power.
Itachi lied to himself.
And that, more than anything else, disgusted him.
"Thinking like a Hokage at seven," Kimimaro thought flatly. "My ass."
Hiruzen had been right about Itachi, just not in that most obvious way.
Itachi really did think like a Hokage.
Not like an Uchiha. Not like a weapon. Not even like a survivor.
Like he was Hiruzen, only without the privileges that came with power.
Every decision filtered through the village's chair instead of his own blood.
The village first, the clan second, himself not even on the list.
That was the real defect.
Why he turned out like that, Kimimaro couldn't say for sure.
It wasn't Fugaku taking him to a battlefield at four.
That explanation was laughable.
Any normal child exposed to that would've been desensitized, hardened, shaped into a more efficient tool of violence.
That was likely what Fugaku had intended.
A more refined shinobi, shaped for their kind of world, not a philosopher.
But Itachi hadn't reacted like a normal child.
No four-year-old was supposed to stand on a battlefield and end up obsessing over abstract peace, over moral responsibility, over burdens he shouldn't even be able to conceptualize for decades.
That wasn't depth. That was miswiring.
Itachi hadn't been shaped wrong.
He'd been wrong from the start.
Fugaku couldn't have known.
No one could have.
You don't expect your son to be born already thinking like some kind of Buddha.
And the more Kimimaro watched him, the more a familiar suspicion settled in.
Another chess piece.
Kimimaro seriously considered the possibility that Itachi was yet another of Hagoromo's engineered chess pieces, his mind actively rewritten through certain Six Paths techniques from some point, just like Shisui's.
A brain reprogrammed to preserve the system at any cost, that exaggerated compulsion then mistaken for personal conviction and free will.
That would explain everything. Itachi's mind was wired backward from the beginning.