Chapter 157: Sharingan Awakened, True Face Revealed
Wind against black rock. Waves. An overcast sky pressing down.
A seabird stood at the water's edge and looked for prey, then froze as an enormous shadow fell over it.
It tried to flee.
The Eight-Tails' body hit the shoreline before it could.
Sakura had pushed him from the battlefield all the way to the coast.
Mei stared at the trench carved into the earth behind them, stretching back further than she could easily see, and didn't say anything for a moment.
"Don't just stand there. Go."
The staff snapped back to its normal length and returned to Sakura's hand. She looked at Mei once and charged.
Moving the engagement to the coast served two purposes: keeping the Eight-Tails' tailed beast bombs away from civilian areas, and giving Mei terrain she could actually work with. A body of open water meant natural supply for her techniques, and Kakashi's chakra types included water as well.
Sakura had water affinity too, as a matter of fact — earth, water, yin, and yang according to official records. She'd learned exactly one water technique and one earth technique from Hiruzen and had never found them more useful than a fist. On any occasion where either might have been relevant, brute force had resolved things faster.
Today might be an exception.
All three of them moved along the carved trench toward the water, and then a bolt of lightning appeared in the corner of Sakura's eye — coming straight at them.
The Raikage.
Sakura's face tightened. Before she could act, Kakashi was already mid-seal.
"Lightning Release — Lightning Tiger Massacre!"
A ferocious lightning construct launched at the Raikage.
Sakura looked at it.
The name says tiger. That's definitely a dog.
She filed the observation and kept running.
Jiraiya, who had been on the Raikage's heels, caught up in the moment the lightning construct bought him.
"Sage Art — Ultra-Big Ball Rasengan!"
A sphere the size of a small building.
The Raikage, having just broken free from the construct, turned and saw it.
Moment between moves. No time to dodge.
The wind screamed. The ground shuddered. Sakura and Mei, on a different vector, saw the massive dark sphere in their peripheral vision and moved without discussion.
Tailed Beast Ball.
The moment the Raikage went into crisis, the Eight-Tails acted — launching a Tailed Beast Ball on a calculated intercept angle that would pass the Raikage and continue straight to—
Jiraiya.
Airborne. No foothold. No dodge available.
"Lord Jiraiya!"
Fukasaku's voice from his shoulder.
"I know."
Jiraiya assessed in the fraction of a second available.
Simultaneous. Three responses.
"Earth Release — Earth-Style Wall!"
"Sage Art — Adamantine Prison Wall!"
"Water Release — Water Formation Pillar!"
Sakura, Mei, and Kakashi formed and released simultaneously. The staff became dozens of linked segments forming an adamantine lattice. The lattice was wrapped in a sculpted earth wall. A water column erupted in front of both.
Then a fourth voice:
"Summoning Jutsu — Triple Rashōmon!"
Three enormous iron gates rose from the earth.
Sakura turned.
Orochimaru.
He was blotting blood from his palm with the air of someone who had done something slightly inconvenient.
"Don't misunderstand," he said, noticing Jiraiya's expression. He pointed at himself, then at the line of attack. "Self-preservation. I happened to be in the path. Don't make this sentimental."
The Tailed Beast Ball hit.
It dismantled all three Rashōmon, shredded the water column, broke through the adamantine earth wall, and passed over Jiraiya's head.
The impact against the distant mountain was a column of light first, then sound, then heat.
The snowfield in every direction between them and the detonation vaporized. Snow became rain became steam. At this distance the shockwave arrived as a warm gust — almost pleasant, like opening a door to a heated room.
Sakura's hair moved in it.
The staff returned to her hand. The adamantine wall had held up just fine despite taking part of a Tailed Beast Ball. Of course it had.
The Raikage pulled himself upright and looked at Orochimaru with the expression of someone who had something to say and was being prevented from saying it by circumstances.
"You—"
"Raikage. The Eight-Tails just tried to kill both of us." Orochimaru's gold eyes moved to him. "I'll accept your explanation after this is over. For now — the fight isn't finished."
The Raikage swallowed what he'd been about to say.
Sakura looked at Orochimaru for a long moment, then turned back without comment and resumed running.
Jiraiya exhaled once and followed the Raikage.
Orochimaru watched them go and looked at the seals he'd formed without consciously deciding to.
His body had moved first.
The Eight-Tails, having sacrificed a Tailed Beast Ball to buy the Raikage time, was roaring at the incoming threat — at Sakura specifically, who had just come back into range.
No wings to fly. No legs built for a sprint. Among the tailed beasts, the Eight-Tails had comparatively limited speed. Sakura had covered the remaining distance before he'd properly gotten moving.
"Die!"
She launched off the ground and drove everything into her foot, channeling straight down—
"Heaven Stomp!"
"ROAR!"
The Eight-Tails raised his fist to meet it. Tailed beast chakra against Sakura's full force — the collision sent her flying backward and knocked the Eight-Tails flat.
"Sakura!"
She corrected mid-air and landed clean. A large shape appeared behind her.
"DIE!"
"Lightning Oppression!"
The Raikage's voice from behind. She turned in the same motion, one hand already extended — and stopped the fist.
His fist was approximately the size of her head. Her hand held it.
"What—"
Before his fury could find a direction, Jiraiya was there.
The toad sage on his shoulder opened his mouth with both hands forming seals:
"Sage Art — Water Release — Water Gun!"
A thin, precise jet of water cut the air at extraordinary velocity.
The Raikage saw it coming and raised his bracer on reflex.
Crack.
The bracer split in half. He dove sideways, out of the jet's path, before it reached his arm.
Mei used the opening. The Eight-Tails was still on the ground.
"Water Release — Water Dragon Bullet!"
This one was different from her previous. Half her remaining chakra, loaded into a single technique.
The dragon was enormous. The sound it made coming off the water was audible over everything else.
Kakashi, chewing a soldier pill, watched its approach and formed seals — his Sharingan eye bright with focus.
"Lightning Release — Lightning Clone!"
Hundreds of lightning-formed bodies drove into the water dragon's mass, integrating, lighting the water with current.
"Combination Technique — Thunder Dragon Bullet!"
The dragon electrified. It bit down on the Eight-Tails as he was starting to rise.
The Eight-Tails went down again, roaring with the current running through him, and eight massive tentacles swept outward without direction.
Sakura's eyes lit up.
She formed seals:
"Water Release—"
A glint of light.
She stopped the seal sequence and tilted her head. Several strands of pink hair fell to the ground.
Orochimaru stood where they'd landed, Kusanagi held level, looking at her with something like amusement.
"I wouldn't have expected water techniques from you. I thought you only knew taijutsu."
He'd read her seals as she was forming them.
Sakura looked at the strands of hair on the ground. Then she looked at Orochimaru.
"You—"
From a distance.
Black-and-red cloud robes moving in the cold wind. A figure of unremarkable height watching the battle below without intervening.
"They're really going at it," Zetsu said.
"If you were here as 'Madara,' it would be trivial," it added, looking at the orange spiral mask beside it.
"Who can say."
The man in the mask neither confirmed nor denied.
"The Eight-Tails won't get a second Tailed Beast Ball. The Raikage is hurt. Orochimaru is coasting." Zetsu watched the Eight-Tails get knocked down by a slug Sakura had summoned at some point. "The situation doesn't look good for Kumogakure."
"The outcome of this battle doesn't matter. Neither does the body count."
The masked figure's gaze moved to a pink-haired shape on the far end of the field — just having put the Eight-Tails back down with one punch after the slug.
"What matters is her."
"She's not even thirteen."
Even with his history, the masked figure found something unsettling in that. Beating the Raikage, coordinating with Kakashi and a random Kirigakure missing-nin to suppress the Eight-Tails — at an age when he'd been a first-year genin.
He'd engineered the Nine-Tails incident at fourteen, but that had required Kamui. Without the technique, he couldn't have done it.
Even Itachi had been weaker at this age.
"The Eight-Tails can't fall into Konoha's hands."
"And—"
His words dissolved into the wind.
"Let her become Konoha's hero in this war."
Zetsu reached for him, and stopped.
The figure was already gone, twisted out of visibility like something pulled sideways through the air.
Zetsu said nothing.
Sakura looked at the Eight-Tails, who had finally gotten upright again and just destroyed Kakashi's Lightning Tiger Construct with one swipe.
She exhaled.
The Raikage was losing ground against Jiraiya. Orochimaru was visibly pacing himself. The Eight-Tails couldn't charge a second Tailed Beast Ball without giving them the time to respond. Right now he was a very large target.
If she kept him occupied while Jiraiya drained the Raikage down, the math worked.
She moved toward the Eight-Tails again—
A shadow behind her.
She spun and kicked on reflex.
Her foot passed through nothing.
Her eyes snapped.
Everyone else's eyes snapped.
A void. A physical space that should have been occupied — wasn't.
Red. She saw red in the corner of her eye.
Uchiha Tobi.
"Not bad for a little girl." A black rod appeared from his sleeve, driving toward her chest. "But this is where you stop."
Feint or genuine? She read both trajectories at once. She threw the full-force punch at his head.
Her fist passed through.
Feint.
She made the decision in the same instant.
She let it hit her.
Shk.
Red against white.
"SAKURA!"
"I'LL KILL YOU—"
The voice that screamed wasn't from the field.
It was from somewhere at the edge of the battle perimeter, where three people in mid-chuunin gear were physically restraining a fourth.
"Choji! Grab him!"
Shikamaru had one leg. Kiba had the other. Shino materialized on the torso.
Sasuke was face-down in the snow with three people on him, fighting all of them.
His eyes were wrong.
The blood in them wasn't just the usual Sharingan red. His eyes were bleeding. Literal tears mixed with blood ran from his Sharingan as the three tomoe twisted and merged into something new.
The masked figure, watching from distance, went still.
He knows who I am. He saw my face years ago.
And now he has a Mangekyo.
I made his Mangekyo.
A new enemy, created by my own hand.
"Hey."
The masked figure turned.
Sakura.
He had time to register that she was looking at him before the fist connected with the mask.
BOOM.
Wood-reinforced. Precisely engineered. His best protective material.
The mask shattered.
His body hit the ground some distance from where he'd been standing.
His face was visible to everyone on the field.
"Huh."
Sasuke stared at Sakura — who was standing there with one hand covered in blood from her own chest wound, pulling the black rod free from herself with the detached efficiency of someone removing a splinter.
"How—"
"How is she—"
Kakashi stood motionless.
He recognized the face.
(Chapter End)
☆☆☆
-> 20 Advanced chapters Now Available on Patreon!!
-> https://www.pat-reon.co-m/c/Hollowborn
(Just remove the hyphen (-) to access patreon normally)
If you like this novel please consider leaving a review that's help the story a lot Thank you