Chapter 8
Izuna's sandals skidded backward through bloody ferns, Sharingan whirling. That morning's breakfast—salted plums—rose in his throat. "That's impossible. You were—father said you died at the river crossing." Itama wiped Tajima's blood from his chin with Senju fingers that remembered snapping this boy's ribs three winters past. The scent of singed hair and wet earth clung to everything
.
Somewhere beyond the trees, Hashirama's mokuton groaned under artillery fire. Itama exhaled through Tajima's nose—smoke and iron, yes, but deeper, the ozone crackle of Mito Uzumaki's barrier seals detonating near the eastern front. Perfect. He'd always wanted to taste Uzumaki chakra. "Your brother's eyes," he told Izuna as his stolen Sharingan pulsed, "will look lovely next to your father's
."
The first kunai grazed his temple—not Izuna's throw, but a Senju patrol cresting the ridge. He laughed with Tajima's lungs as their horrified recognition hit. "Cousins!" His stolen face split into a grin too wide for human jaws. "Tell Hashirama I found his favorite knife." He spat Madara's childhood dagger onto the forest floor between them, still slick with someone else's dinner from twenty years ago. The third war hadn't even properly started yet.
Izuna's breathing hitched—not fear, calculation. Smart boy. Itama felt the minute chakra shift as the Uchiha activated a genjutsu he'd last seen annihilate an Iwa battalion. But Tajima's stolen synapses fired faster. His hands wove countersigns older than Konoha's foundations, crushing the illusion before it could take root. The backlash sent crows exploding from the canopy, black feathers drifting like ash
.
Cold metal pressed against his kidney. He glanced down at the tanto emerging from his gut—not Izuna's work either. The Hyuuga girl from the riverbank last summer stared up at him with Byakugan veins pulsing. "Rot in hell, revenant," she hissed. He tasted her chakra even before his fingers closed around her wrist—pear blossoms and lightning, exactly how her twin brother's had before he'd swallowed him whole at dusk.
Twigs snapped uphill. Hashirama's scent hit him—pine resin and that damnable optimism. Itama ripped the blade deeper into himself just to watch the Hyuuga's eyes widen as warm blood coated her hands. "Now you'll remember," he murmured through Tajima's lips, "which one of us is the monster here." The forest screamed as mokuton erupted beneath their feet.
Izuna's kunai found his throat a half-second too late. Itama's spine bent backward at impossible angles as the Hyuuga's stolen rotation technique sent the blade whistling past. He landed in a crouch, tasting copper and the girl's panic. Her chakra roiled like storm clouds—he could already feel it settling into his marrow alongside the Uchiha fire still licking at his synapses
.
Something massive tore through the canopy. Hashirama's wood dragon, but wrong—its jaws dripped with glowing Uzumaki seals that hadn't existed in the third war. Itama's grin split wider. "Mito-chan's been busy," he crooned as Tajima's stolen hands flashed through hand signs no living Senju remembered. The earth heaved, vomiting up skeletons still clad in Uchiha armor from the First War
.
The Hyuuga girl was running now, but her footsteps faltered—he'd left fragments of her twin's bones in the soil. Itama exhaled through three sets of lungs simultaneously as the dragon struck. The impact shattered Tajima's ribs, but he barely felt it over the exquisite burn of Mito's fuinjutsu searing through stolen chakra pathways. Somewhere beyond the pain, Izuna's scream cut through the chaos. The real battle was just beginning.
His mouth tasted like copper and lightning, limbs twitching with residual currents from the copied Storm Release. He'd underestimated how much it would hurt to stitch Uchiha eyes into his own sockets mid-combat, but the Sharingan's predictive sight was already compensating—calculating trajectories, mapping escape routes through the collapsing battlefield. When the first Senju reinforcements breached the tree line, their expressions curdled as his stolen Mokuton erupted in thorned vines
.
The copied Byakugan pulsed behind his left eyelid, revealing splintering chakra networks in the Hyuuga elder charging him. Itama grinned with Hashirama's teeth and let the man impale himself on a spike of crystallized blood. Devouring the corpse mid-fall was messy, but the clan's Gentle Fist secrets unraveled instantly in his veins. He could feel his stolen body adapting, tendons reforging themselves to accommodate alien rotations
.
Then came the smell—charred earth and ozone, unmistakable even through the gore. Itama turned slowly, copied Rinnegan spinning wildly as Madara landed in the crater. The Uchiha's susanoo flickered between skeletal and armored forms, unstable with rage. "You," Madara said, voice cracking like splitting timber, "are wearing my brother's face." The air between them turned to syrup, heavy with the promise of annihilation