Above, Emi pressed in.
She moved in broken vectors, Polarity Step chaining through the air, vacuum pressure collapsing around her strikes as she tested timing, angles, and interference points.
Not to break the Susanoo. To disrupt it.
Below, Saya advanced without slowing.
Kimimaro reshaped the forest beneath her feet, bone platforms rising, tilting, launching her forward in violent bursts.
Obito felt it then.
For the first time since the fight began, something cut through his composure.
"What a kekkei genkai…"
The waves rolling through the battlefield weren't just chakra.
He recognized that immediately. Dense, overflowing Yang Release, not crude output, but refined fuel, continuously feeding that grotesque construct. Bones shouldn't move like that. They shouldn't grow, interlock, and adapt at this scale.
And yet they did.
It was the first time he had ever seen a bone-manipulation bloodline.
And irritatingly, the scale reminded him of something else.
Hashirama.
The First Hokage had taken the most mundane element imaginable and raised it into an even more overpowering weapon that dominated an era.
This felt the same. Different medium and scale.
Same result. Absolute environmental control.
"My priority should be the core," Obito assessed coldly.
"That clone. That's the brain."
Destroy it, and the forest would lose cohesion.
Then his attention flicked upward.
The girl in the air.
She didn't move like a flier.
Her vectors shifted mid-motion with unnatural precision, angles correcting themselves as if the air itself obeyed her.
Worse, there was something riding her movements.
An additional fuel source layered over chakra.
Masked so cleanly even he couldn't properly sense with his modified body, nor observe it with his full Mangekyo Sharingan.
Annoying.
His gaze dropped again.
The one below.
Immortal.
Not theatrically like Hidan.
This was worse.
Reality simply refused to let her stay damaged.
Targeting her was pointless.
Even pinning her down would cost more than it gained.
Three problems.
A battlefield that fought back.
A flyer he couldn't read properly.
And a ground threat that didn't stay dead.
Breaking through would be difficult.
Which meant this wasn't a fight to rush.
It was a fight to overwrite.
Obito shifted tactics again.
The rest of Akatsuki had finally pulled back, regrouping through the corridors he'd carved for them.
He registered, distantly, that two figures were still pressing after them, the white-haired teen's real body and the plum-haired Uzumaki woman.
He dismissed it just as quickly.
Nagato was there.
Numbers were there.
That problem could wait.
This one could be a breakthrough.
His focus snapped back to the pale monstrosity dominating the battlefield from the opposite side, still smaller and way more imperfect than his Perfect Susanoo, yet far more fluid, seamlessly bound to the environment, and sharper, more adaptive, than even his own best construct.
"If I can break the core…"
Kamui shuriken tore loose from his Susanoo, space-warped blades screaming forward in staggered arcs, each one aimed to carve openings, to peel layers away, to reach whatever passed for a center.
Some never made it.
Midair, the Hyūga girl intercepted them.
Her movements were sharp, unreadable, giant fists of compressed polarity and natural energy smashing into the warped projectiles, collapsing their vectors outright. Space distortion unraveled under her evolved Byakugan-guided and enhanced pressure; the shuriken erased before they could finish existing.
The rest struck true.
They tore into the White Sovereign's ribcage, space vanishing in jagged chunks, a hollow opening briefly forming at its center.
Then the bones flowed back together.
Reformed.
Locked.
Seamless.
Obito clicked his tongue.
He pivoted instantly.
The Susanoo's arm snapped upward, a massive punch aimed directly at the girl in the sky.
It was caught.
Not blocked.
Caught.
Her response came in the form of enormous, spiraling translucent fists again.
The collision detonated the air between them.
Annoying.
Obito abandoned subtlety.
He stepped forward within the Susanoo, letting his real body surface just enough to act, chakra surging.
"Fire Release: Blast Wave Wild Dance."
The technique erupted outward, amplified by his Mangekyō and the most advanced Fire Release taught by Madara alike.
A colossal inferno surged skyward, hundreds of meters across, a rolling mountain of fire that swallowed the space she occupied entirely.
For a moment, even he expected her to vanish.
She didn't.
Instead, a massive Rotation bloomed inside the flames, smaller than the firestorm but infinitely denser.
Polarity twisted the airflow.
Natural energy reinforced the spin.
Wind, Byakugan pressure, and control fused into a single violent motion.
The fire didn't just fail to consume her. It bent.
The colossal rotation tore chunks of it free and hurled them back toward him.
At the same time—
The ground shifted violently.
From below, the red-eyed woman moved.
Massive blood constructs surged upward, Yang-enhanced tendrils thick as towers lashing around the Susanoo's legs, wrenching, binding, trying to trip the giant mid-stride.
Bone spikes erupted in tandem, driven up from the forest itself, locking around his ankles, anchoring him in place.
Then the White Sovereign changed shape.
Its torso twisted, bones screaming as they reconfigured into a colossal drill, spiraling forward with murderous intent straight toward the center of his Susanoo's chest.
Obito reacted on instinct.
Both Susanoo hands snapped together, catching the drilling mass barehanded.
The impact shook the battlefield, pressure rippling outward in visible waves as bone screamed against the ominous and dense chakra armor straight from Yin.
"Tch."
He made a decision.
The Susanoo's lower half detached, legs severed cleanly as he forced flight, regenerating them even as he rose.
The bindings fell away with the abandoned mass, crushed beneath the forest as he gained altitude.
His vision steadied.
Not perfect.
But stable.
White Zetsu's Hashirama-cell matrix flooded feedback into his body, continuously reinforcing flesh, nerves, and eyesight.
His chakra reserves remained deep.
Abundant.
More than enough.
Perfect Susanoo could fly.
And now he had space.
As he rose higher, Obito felt it settle again.
The balance.
He still had the upper hand.
Now it was time to reverse the roles.
Maintaining flight, on top of everything else, at the Perfect Susanoo stage was more costly, yes, but that was a price he could afford.
And that bone construct? It couldn't fly.
However, from the ground, the White Sovereign instantly answered Obito's ascent.
Its ribcage split open, the core within flexing like a living heart, and the forest beneath it screamed as trees, roots, and stone were forcibly rewritten into bone.
The construct didn't rise to follow him.
It grew upward instead.
Massive drills erupted from its spine and shoulders, spiraling skyward with shrieking force, while countless bone spikes tore free from the fused terrain, launching in dense barrages toward the air like artillery fire.
The land itself had turned hostile.
Obito wasn't being chased.
He was being shelled.
He clicked his tongue, irritation slipping back through his short composure.
"…Damn brat."
From the other side of the battlefield, Nagato observed everything in silence.
So this was the truth of it.
The masked man's power had always been an unknown variable to him.
Claimed lineage. Claimed history. Claimed inevitability.
He always wanted to see it confirmed with his own eyes.
Now he was.
A flying Perfect Susanoo, vast enough to dominate the sky itself, chakra density so extreme it bent the battlefield simply by existing.
That wasn't a bluff. That wasn't inheritance alone.
"So that's what he was hiding," Nagato thought.
Overwhelming. Crushing. Dangerous.
And now fully exposed.
But Nagato's attention didn't stay there.
It slid back to the ground.
To the bone.
It didn't feel like a technique. It felt like a system.
No fixed shape. No clean center.
A ribcage core commanding an entire environment, terrain rewritten into weaponized extension.
"Environmental domination without reliance on flight," Nagato assessed. "And no clear exhaustion curve."
Around him, the others reacted in their own ways.
Kisame grinned wider than before, eyes shining. This was the kind of fight he lived for.
Deidara stared upward, unsettled, muttering about scale and art and how this was cheating.
Sasori said nothing, but his attention had sharpened. New materials. New possibilities.
Kakuzu recalculated routes and survival odds, already discarding old assumptions.
Konan's paper stilled, her focus narrowing.
This wasn't a clash between factions anymore.
It was a collision between systems.
On that other side of the battlefield, Kimimaro also watched it all unfold while facing the remaining Akatsuki, a faint, private smirk touching his thoughts.
So this was it.
His own giant.
His own answer.
Once, he had been a background casualty in another life, a disposable side character written to die quietly so the story could move on.
And now here he was, fielding his own colossus, trading environmental domination with Uchiha monsters hand-picked by destiny itself to wield obscene, sky-breaking power.
'And this isn't even me yet.'
The irony amused him.
Briefly.
Then the smirk vanished.
This wasn't a game, and it wasn't over.
He didn't know if even his Tenseigan-boosted speed would be enough to crush Obito outright, not quickly, not cleanly.
Especially not when the one pressuring him now wasn't even his real body, but a clone operating at a fraction of his total potential.
And from the beginning, Kimimaro had never intended to spend his best cards on Obito first.
His Tenseigan's true value wasn't in prolonged god-duels.
It was in shock. In erasure.
In collapsing a battlefield's balance before the enemy even understood what they were losing.
Carve through the weaker Akatsuki.
Break cohesion. Trigger panic. Strip support.
Then, when the field was quiet and the numbers thinned, he would turn his full attention back to Obito and the remaining pillars.
One step at a time. That had always been his way.