The vast black shape broke the surface, its dark-blue carapace drinking in what little light the sky still offered.
It rose and rose, a moving mountain in the middle of the lake. Water cascaded from its shell in crashing curtains; waves rolled outward in rings, hammering the ice and shore like a slow, relentless heartbeat.
"The Three-Tails… Isobu."
The Third Mizukage had to tip his head back to see the top. Even for him, something cold and heavy dropped into his gut.
The worst-case scenario… had arrived.
He had prepared himself for that possibility on the way here. He had forced himself to imagine it, test countermeasures, file off panic before it could grow teeth.
But even with all that, one thing refused to parse.
How, exactly, was Uchiha Sogetsu controlling a tailed beast?
Sharingan?
The Mizukage had seen the three-tomoe spin reflected in Isobu's huge yellow eyes. The implication made his skin crawl… but he still hesitated to believe it.
He'd fought Uchiha before. They were dangerous, yes. Unstable, yes. But he had never once seen one simply take hold of a tailed beast.
And if they could?
If the Uchiha clan truly held that kind of power, there was no universe in which Sarutobi Hiruzen would sleep easy. No Hokage in his right mind would let that bomb sit in the village square. All it would take was one collective psychotic break, one Sharingan turned toward the Nine-Tails—
Konoha would be rubble.
"Uchiha Sogetsu," the Mizukage said, drawing a breath that tasted of metal and storm, "you can control a tailed beast."
He swallowed hard. His eyes never left the youth standing on Isobu's skull. Killing intent thickened his voice until it rasped.
"Good. You've just given me another reason you cannot leave this lake alive. A man as dangerous as you must die for the world to breathe."
A shinobi who could casually steer a tailed beast…
There wasn't a village on earth that could afford to let him walk away.
"How terrifying," Sogetsu murmured. "What a dreadful threat I must be."
He stood on Isobu's head as if it were a stone in a pond, cloak snapping around his legs, gaze calm behind wet black hair.
"Given your reputation, Lord Mizukage," he added, mouth quirking, "I assumed you wouldn't mind if I brought a bit of backup."
Mind?
If he could have stuffed the Three-Tails back into its seal with his bare hands, he would have done it without another word.
The Mizukage's lip twitched. He was done talking.
"You think having a tailed beast at your heel means I'm helpless?" he said coldly. "Do you have any idea who sealed Isobu into this lake in the first place?"
His chest swelled. He blew a slow stream of chakra-laced breath.
"Water Release: Hidden Mist Technique."
Fog rolled out from his body in a suffocating tide, swallowing the lake in seconds.
Within the haze, sight collapsed. Even an arm's length away blurred; beyond that was nothing but white. Chakra threaded the mist, bending light, choking perception—it didn't just obscure vision, it ate it.
Even a Sharingan would find no purchase here.
With the shroud in place, the Mizukage bit his thumb and slapped his hand to the water.
"Summoning Technique."
BOOM.
Something massive dropped into the lake, displacing a wall of water. The surface heaved; the lake level climbed as if some new island had been dropped into its heart.
"A summoning beast?"
Sogetsu's brow creased.
Sharingan or not, even he couldn't see more than blurred chakra shapes inside this much mist. But the thing that answered the call lit his vision like a bonfire—huge, dense, and hungry.
"Hold the beast," a cold voice ordered from within the fog. "Leave the insect on its head to me."
The mist shuddered.
Then they came.
Several deep crimson shapes burst out of the white—tentacles thicker than tree trunks, lined on their undersides with glistening suckers. They whipped around Isobu's legs and shell with shocking speed, coiling tight.
"…Tentacles?"
Sogetsu blinked.
Beneath his feet, Isobu lurched, its massive body jerking as the new force yanked it sideways.
The tentacles snapped taut. Power surged through them, raw and immense—comparable to the tailed beast itself. With a groan that shook the air, the Three-Tails' body rolled, dragged off balance. More limbs surged from the fog, layering coil over coil until the great turtle was bound like a trussed boar.
Then the summon dragged.
Even the Three-Tails, caught off guard, couldn't brace in time. Its bulk slid, inch by inch, back toward the depths.
"ROOOAR!"
Isobu bellowed, rage boiling out of it in a gale.
Wind chakra condensed in its maw and spat outward, a compressed blast that tunneled a hole through lake and mist alike, carving a temporary corridor of clear air.
The strike vanished into the fog without resistance. The tentacles only tightened, their strength redoubling as they heaved. The lake groaned. Slowly, inexorably, the Three-Tails was hauled downward.
While monster fought monster, a shadow moved through the whiteness.
The Third Mizukage slid through his own mist like a knife through water, breath silent, killing intent narrowed to a single line.
Silent Killing—Kirigakure's oldest, ugliest art. Once, he had been bodyguard to the previous Mizukage. This was the first language he had ever learned.
He came up behind Sogetsu like a ghost.
Kunai in hand, he chose an angle no human spine should dodge, a line straight to the throat.
The blade kissed skin.
CLANG.
Not blood—sparks.
The metal scraped something hard and unyielding, shedding a spray of orange light. The kunai shrieked against it, throwing off the harsh ring of steel on steel.
"What…?"
For a heartbeat, the Mizukage simply stared.
Around Sogetsu's neck, under the tatters of his shirt, a thin layer of fine, overlapping scales gleamed faintly gold—like fish scales cast in metal, laid in tight, perfect rows. They had turned aside a killing stroke as if it were nothing.
"Did no one ever tell you," Sogetsu's voice said softly, right at his ear, "not to get this close to me?"
The Mizukage's instincts screamed. He began to move—
—and saw Sogetsu's fist coming.
Chakra boiled around the knuckles, dense enough to make the air itself warp.
"Iron Fist: Peerless Strength."
The punch landed like a falling mountain.
BOOM.
The world turned sideways.
The Mizukage's eyes bulged. Pain detonated through his ribs, his spine, his lungs. He rocketed backward, skipping off the surface of the lake once, twice, before slamming into the cliffside hard enough to crater the rock.
Stone shattered.
His body embedded half a meter deep before it finally stopped.
He coughed—once, twice, three times—each breath spraying red across the stone. For a few seconds he couldn't feel his legs.
Experience, not instinct, told him the count.
Seven, maybe eight ribs fractured. Internal organs… badly shaken, some lacerated. If he hadn't hardened his body with chakra at the last instant, that one blow might have simply pulped him.
"Tsunade's… monstrous strength…?" he rasped, prying himself free of the stone with a hand that wouldn't quite stop shaking.
He clutched his abdomen as he staggered forward, cold sweat breaking across his brow.
"This is bad. I got careless, and he… hurt me. Badly."
Every breath flared agony through his chest. Every heartbeat felt like it was trying to squeeze through cracked armor.
One mistake. One misread.
And now, every second the fight dragged on, his odds cratered.
A bleak weight settled somewhere deep behind his sternum.
"If I don't end this quickly…"
"Isn't it easier," Sogetsu said, "to just lie down and accept it?"
He stepped out of the mist with unhurried grace, as if walking onto a stage.
The top half of his shirt was gone, shredded by the earlier jutsu.
Underneath: smooth, hard muscle, proportions almost annoyingly perfect—less like a boy's body than a sculpture someone had labored over.
If you ignored the scales.
Dragon-Scale Overlay had fully surfaced now: a tight mesh of faintly golden scales covering every inch of exposed skin, from collarbone to wrist. They caught the light in dull, reptilian glints.
But it wasn't the color that froze the Mizukage's blood.
It was what moved on them.
Etched into each scale, in lines so fine they were almost hair-thin, crawled strange gray symbols—seals, sigils, runes from no system he recognized. They linked from plate to plate in shifting chains, pulsing faintly, slithering under the skin as if alive.
They didn't sit on Sogetsu's flesh. They sank into it, burrowing deep, anchoring into bone and marrow.
The Third Mizukage felt every hair on his body rise.
"You…" he whispered, pupils shrinking to pinpricks as he stared at the thing in front of him.
"You—what are you?"
His voice cracked on the last word.
"Monster" felt too small.
For the first time in a very long career, the Third Mizukage realized he was facing something that might not fit in the category of human at all.
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