"Shit."
The taste of copper and fatigue was thick on his tongue. "I'm blind again."
He brought his hands up, pressing the heels of his palms hard against his closed eyelids, as if he could physically push the darkness back.
No one immediately reacted. The silence stretched, becoming a tangible thing. It wasn't peaceful; it was the silence of three people collectively holding their breath, their minds struggling to process what had just been done to them.
Sama was the first to break it.
"How… how was that even possible?"
Her tone was shaken, disbelieving, and deeply disturbed. It wasn't a question aimed at anyone in particular; it was a plea for the universe to make sense again.
The 'how' wasn't about the mechanics of genjutsu—they all understood those—it was about the violation.
The sound of her voice, laced with a trauma he could now feel itching at the edges of his own consciousness, snapped Renjiro out of his self-pitying assessment. He stopped rubbing his sightless eyes.
The realisation arrived not as a thought, but as a cold jolt that spiked down his spine and clenched his stomach.
He had been so focused on containing Kushina's flare-up, on wrestling with the feral, immense consciousness of the Nine-Tails behind his own eyes, that he had pushed his new, unstable power too far, too wide. The genjutsu of the Mangekyō wasn't a precise lance; in his panic, it had become a shockwave.
"Ooh—"
He jerked upright, his head swinging vaguely toward where he sensed the densest, second-most-potent chakra signature—a calm, sun-warmed reservoir that now felt subtly frayed at the edges. He'd caught Minato. He'd ensnared the Yellow Flash, Konoha's fastest shinobi, a man of legendary will and intellect, in a genjutsu. The sheer, reckless impossibility of it made his gut churn.
And then, the feedback hit.
It was not visual. In his blindness, it was something worse. It was emotional, sensory memory bleeding into his psyche like ink into water. He didn't see their experience.
Renjiro's breath hitched. He looked unsettled, pale even in his own darkness, as these foreign yet now-intimate emotions settled into the crevices of his mind. He turned his head, aiming his sightless gaze first toward Minato's chakra signature, then toward Sama's.
"I… apologise. To both of you. That was not my intention."
"Kurama fought back," Renjiro began, his words deliberate, trying to stitch an explanation to the unpardonable act.
"When I used the genjutsu on Kushina, he was resisting it, fighting the influence. So I channelled more chakra. I just… didn't know the Mangekyō's reach would expand like that. I didn't know I'd lose containment." He swallowed, the admission bitter. "It wasn't intentional. Snaring you, Minato… Sama…"
Minato finally spoke. "I didn't even realise it was a genjutsu."
The statement hung in the air, more terrifying than any outburst. He wasn't boasting or accusing; he was reporting a tactical fact of the highest order.
"There was no dissonance, no 'itch' in the chakra. It was seamless," Minato continued, his gaze, which Renjiro couldn't see, was likely fixed on some middle distance, analysing the memory.
"It felt like a bad dream one has while still half-awake. My conscious mind was… lulled. I was aware of a narrative, of emotions, but I wasn't aware of me, of my body here, or that I was under an attack. I was simply in it."
The implication was clear: if you don't know you're in a genjutsu, you cannot think to break it.
Sama let out a shaky breath, "For me, it was less 'bad dream' and more 'nightmare.'" Her tone was dry, unsettled, faintly bitter.
Kushina, as if cold, turned slowly toward Renjiro.
"Renjiro," she said, her voice quieter than they'd ever heard it. "Was that… the first time? The first time you used that genjutsu? The Mangekyō's?"
Renjiro leaned back, resting his weight on his arms behind him, a posture of exhausted surrender.
"On a living person? Yes," he admitted. "I tested the activation and the basic… 'feel' of it on a shadow clone sometime ago. Just to see if I could do it without turning my own brain to mush. But this…" He gestured weakly around him, at the invisible aftermath.
"This was different. The scale. The… feedback."
"Feedback?" Kushina latched onto the word.
"I could feel it," Renjiro said softly, his head tilting down. "Not clearly, not like a memory. But echoes. The emotional contours of what you were experiencing. Your regret, your anger, your… loneliness."
Kushina's breath caught. "So you know? You know what we went through in there?"
"In essence," Renjiro confirmed, his voice heavy. "Not the specifics, but the heart of it. The pain of it."
Minato's analytical mind was turning over the horror. "I have trained against the Sharingan's hypnotic suggestions. I have protocols for disrupting chakra flow," he said, almost to himself. "But for that… I don't know if I could have broken free. Not without outside intervention, or you releasing it."
His admission was another stone of dread added to the scale. It reinforced the terrifying truth: this was a genjutsu that bypassed conventional defence by masquerading as the victim's own subconscious.
"It probably only ended because he passed out," Sama observed, her voice regaining some of its usual dry cadence. She nodded toward Renjiro.
"The strain of it, plus whatever was happening with Kurama… he collapsed, and the technique fell apart."
Kushina pushed herself up straighter, the kunoichi in her pushing past the personal shock. The emotional disturbance in her eyes began to solidify into a sharp, tactical focus.
"What control do you have over it, Renjiro? You say it feeds on our regrets. Then what? What are the parameters?"
Renjiro let his head loll back, facing the sky he couldn't see. "While the target is immersed, reliving that core trauma or regret, the genjutsu creates a… vulnerability. A hijacking of the sensory and emotional self. In that window, I have two options I can perceive. I can inject a command, a subliminal directive that they will follow without question, believing it to be their own will. Or," he said, his voice dropping,
"I can simply sever their connection to conscious thought. Knock their mind so far into itself that the body shuts down. A complete, non-physical knockout."
He said it casually, as if listing features of a new tool. The horrific implications hung in the quiet air: perfect interrogation, flawless assassination, or total, effortless domination.
Kushina and Minato exchanged a single, swift glance. It was a look that spoke volumes—of understanding, of alarm, of a shared, grim calculus.
Sama simply sighed, a long, weary exhalation.
"Well," she muttered, "that's a terrifyingly powerful ability. No wonder it costs you your sight."
'Didn't think it would work on Minato, though,' Renjiro thought, the words a silent ripple in his internal monologue.
His respect for the man's mental fortitude was so absolute that the success felt less like an achievement and more like a profound and dangerous accident.
"Too bad your eyes are ruined now," Sama remarked, her tone casual but pointed.
Renjiro gave a weak, one-shouldered shrug. "They'll be fine. Takes more than this. I'm getting used to being blind sometimes." He muttered the next part, almost to himself, a bitter, private joke.
"Hell of a thing. This is the shortest time I've ever had the Mangekyō active before they became useless."
Minato's sharp eyes caught the comment. He realised, with a start, that Sama had no context for Renjiro's rapid ocular regeneration. That was a conversation for another, more controlled time. He smoothly rose to his feet, brushing grass from his flak jacket, a clear signal.
"Looks like we're done here for today," he said, his voice returning to its usual, reassuring leadership tone, though the edges were still taut.
"The spar was… more thorough than any of us anticipated. We should head back to the village."
As the others began to move, gathering themselves with the stiff movements of people recovering from a deep psychological shock, Kushina remained quiet for a long moment. She watched Renjiro as he gingerly got to his feet, his movements cautious in his temporary blindness.
Internally, her mind was churning, not with personal hurt now, but with cold, shinobi logic.
'He feels what they feel. He knows the shape of their deepest regrets. If he can control them in that state… or simply knock them out…'
The reconnaissance applications alone were staggering. To walk into an enemy stronghold, to look a Kage in the eye, and to know their greatest failure, their most pivotal regret… and to either own them or erase them in the next heartbeat.
It was not a comforting thought. It was the thought of a weapon so precise and so cruel it could rewrite loyalties and end wars without a single physical blow being struck.
And it was housed in a boy who was currently blinking, his sight gradually returning to show eyes not of a cursed demon, but of a deeply tired, apologetic young man.
She said nothing. She just fell into step beside Minato, the silence between them now filled with the echo of a shared, unsettling revelation.
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