Chapter 20: The Weight of Regret
Pain. Blinding, suffocating pain.
Shisui tore relentlessly through the dense forest, pouring every remaining ounce of his waning chakra into his legs. The physical agony of the neurotoxin ravaging his bloodstream and the gaping, bleeding hole where his right eye used to be threatened to drag him into unconsciousness with every step.
But what truly agonized him—what tore at him far worse than Danzo's poison—was the profound, shattering devastation in his heart.
He had never imagined that the very leadership he had placed his absolute, unwavering trust in would utter words that plunged him into such total despair.
It was all a lie. Everything he had sacrificed, every compromise he had made for the sake of the village... it had been nothing but the pathetic flailing of a clown performing for his executioners. He had surrendered every classified secret regarding his Mangekyo Sharingan to the elders. He had volunteered to carry the ultimate sin of brainwashing his own bloodline to preserve Konoha's peace.
Yet, despite his absolute surrender, they had never trusted him. They had merely waited for him to isolate himself so they could butcher him in the dark.
"The fool..." Shisui wheezed, his remaining eye wide with horror and self-loathing. "He was right. I am a profound, irredeemable fool!"
A choked, hysterical laugh escaped Shisui's bloody lips. In that moment of absolute clarity, the words of the blind doctor—the warnings he had so arrogantly discarded—echoed in his mind with devastating precision.
"As a shinobi, you should grasp a fundamental truth: relying on the benevolence of others is a fool's gamble."
"You are almost perfect, but when it comes to the darkness of the human heart... you know absolutely nothing."
"Even beneath the brightest light, there are shadows. Evil always thrives where we refuse to look."
"When a man conditions himself to only hear the benevolent words of his superiors, his capacity for independent, critical thought atrophies."
"I sincerely hope you never regret this decision, Shisui. Because when the illusion breaks... you will never be able to bear the weight of that regret."
Every single sentence now struck Shisui's fractured psyche like a sledgehammer, filling him with a tidal wave of crushing remorse.
If only he had listened. If he had humbled his Uchiha pride and heeded just one of Kei's clinical warnings, perhaps he would not be bleeding to death in the dirt.
But regret was a useless currency now. His right eye had been harvested. His nervous system was melting under the onslaught of Danzo's poison gas. He no longer possessed the dual ocular power required to cast Kotoamatsukami on the Uchiha leadership. He had failed. Internal strife was now unavoidable.
Once civil war erupted, the surrounding Great Nations would instantly scent blood in the water. They would invade, and both Konoha and the Uchiha clan would be ground into ash.
"What you cling to is nothing more than an impossible dream. Your choices, however noble, cannot prevent the coming annihilation."
Kei's original prophecy echoed in the dark.
The realization that his lifelong struggle would ultimately end in the exact annihilation he had desperately tried to avert overwhelmed Shisui. Despair seized his throat. He violently coughed up a thick mouthful of blackened blood, his momentum finally failing. He collapsed against the trunk of a massive tree, his breathing shallow and erratic.
He couldn't find hope anymore. Though he still possessed his left eye, he could no longer see a path forward. The world was already burning.
"Shisui-niisan! Are you alright?!"
The frantic, desperate shout echoed through the trees.
Through his blurring vision, Shisui saw the silhouette of Itachi Uchiha rushing toward him.
Seeing his best friend—his brother in all but blood—Shisui forced his dying body to rally. A final, desperate glimmer of tactical light ignited in his remaining eye. There was still one contingency left. One final, terrible play to temporarily stall the clan's coup d'état.
He possessed immense political sway within the clan. If he were to mysteriously die tonight, his supporters would demand a relentless investigation, plunging the Uchiha into a state of internal paranoia that would derail the coup's timetable. Furthermore, the radical faction would lose their ultimate weapon. Without Shisui of the Body Flicker, the clan's military strength would be drastically reduced, making a successful rebellion statistically impossible.
My death is the only deterrent left. Knowing what had to be done, Shisui steadied his breathing.
"Itachi... you arrived at just the right moment," Shisui rasped, forcing a weak smile. "What I am about to say is vital. You must listen to me carefully..."
In rapid, breathless sentences, Shisui briefed Itachi on Danzo's betrayal, the Hokage's true nature, and the poisoned reality of the village leadership. Then, without a second of hesitation, Shisui raised his hand.
Enduring the unimaginable agony, Shisui ruthlessly plunged his fingers into his own socket, gouging out his remaining Mangekyo Sharingan.
Blood streamed down his cheeks like scarlet tears. He held the crimson eye out toward his horrified friend. "Danzo will not stop hunting until he secures my left eye. You are the only person in this world I can trust. Take this. Take my will... and protect the village, and the Uchiha name."
"Shisui-niisan, no! There is still a way!" Itachi pleaded, his voice cracking with desperation as he stepped forward, refusing to accept the eye. "There must be a way to heal you—"
Shisui shook his head, his hollow sockets weeping blood. "All I can do now is leave you this final gift... and try my best to buy you some time."
Itachi shook his head vehemently, his face pale with horror. "No! I would rather die than accept a gift born of your death!"
"Itachi." Shisui's voice was soft, absolute, and impossibly kind. "If you still consider me your friend... do not stop me."
Shisui reached out blindly, finding Itachi's shoulder and giving it a firm, reassuring pat. "You know... I actually wrote my suicide note a long time ago. I suppose I always knew it would end like this."
Pressing the bloody eye into Itachi's trembling palm, Shisui stepped backward. He moved past the tree line, his heels touching the absolute edge of the towering precipice. Hundreds of feet below, the churning, violent rapids of the Naka River roared in the dark.
With a final, serene smile, Shisui leaned back, letting gravity take him. He fell backward into the abyss, his body swallowed by the mist.
"No... Shisui-niisan!"
Itachi lunged for the cliff's edge, but his hand closed around empty air.
Witnessing the suicide of the only person who truly understood him, Itachi collapsed to his knees. He squeezed his eyes shut, a soundless, agonizing scream tearing at his throat. His hand gripped the blood-stained eye tightly against his chest, still radiating the fading warmth of Shisui's life.
A moment later, Itachi opened his eyes.
A streak of pure, bloody tears tracked down his cheeks. The standard three tomoe of his Sharingan began to violently spin, warping and bleeding together until they locked into a terrifying, unfamiliar pinwheel pattern.
A shockwave of absolute, chilling ocular power erupted from the boy, permeating the fringes of the entire forest like a localized blizzard.
Hundreds of feet below, standing knee-deep in the freezing, rushing currents of the Naka River, Kei Hyuga tilted his head. Even without his sight, he could clearly feel the monumental, sorrowful gravity of the newly awakened Mangekyo Sharingan pressing down on the valley.
Shisui felt as though he were trapped in an endless, suffocating dream. In the dark, a voice seemed to be calling his name incessantly, an annoying, persistent drone trying to drag him back to the surface.
But he was so profoundly tired. His consciousness simply couldn't anchor itself. He wanted nothing more than to slip away and sleep peacefully in the dark.
Yet, every time he surrendered to the quiet, a violent, agonizing jolt of electricity would rip through his entire nervous system, forcing his heart to contract and his brain to scream in protest.
ZAP.
Another jolt tore through him. Shisui gasped, his eyes flying open in the dark. His thoughts swam, sluggish and fractured, but the void was slowly retreating.
As his senses returned, Shisui realized he was lying flat on his back. The surface beneath him was freezing, unyielding metal.
I... I didn't die? Shisui's mind reeled in absolute confusion. His throat felt as though it had been scoured with broken glass. He remembered it perfectly. He had given his left eye to Itachi and thrown himself into the Naka River. He had been practically dead from Danzo's neurotoxin before he even hit the water. He had plummeted into a raging gorge. In all measurable reality, his body should be a bloated, shattered corpse washing up on the shore.
Desperate for answers, Shisui tried to prop himself up on his elbows.
The instant he engaged his core muscles, an eruption of blinding, agonizing pain tore through his chest and abdomen. The little strength he had managed to gather instantly evaporated, and he collapsed back onto the metal table, gasping for air.
"You would be wise to remain perfectly still."
The voice was smooth, resonant, and entirely unmistakable.
"If you continue to thrash about, you will tear the fresh sutures in your chest cavity, and I will be forced to subject you to the excruciating process all over again."
"You... saved me?" Shisui rasped, his voice a broken wheeze.
"Who else?" Kei Hyuga replied dryly, the rhythmic tap of his cane echoing in the cold, subterranean room. "I assure you, dragging you back from the threshold of the Pure Land was a logistical nightmare."
After utilizing his sensory web to pinpoint Shisui's exact point of impact in the river, Kei had retrieved the dying prodigy from the rapids. The blunt force trauma from the fall had been severe, but the truly fatal complication was Danzo's poison.
The neurotoxin had heavily infiltrated Shisui's lungs and was rapidly spreading through his pulmonary vessels, systemically shutting down his major organs.
Fortunately, Kei had spent the past week rigorously studying the horrific, brilliant biological theories he had acquired from Orochimaru. Without the Sannin's fragmented research on cellular regeneration and toxin purging, Shisui would have been unsalvageable.
However, there was a minor caveat. Kei was a clinical psychologist, not a trauma surgeon. And this was his very first time performing practical, invasive surgery on a live human subject.
Consequently, the rescue operation had been somewhat... unrefined. The incisions were rough, the surgical methods were arguably barbaric, and Kei had heavily relied on the black-market electroshock therapy beds to literally jump-start Shisui's failing heart multiple times during the procedure.
Nevertheless, the patient was breathing.
Kei stood beside the metal table, a faint, satisfied smile touching his lips. He was incredibly pleased with the results of his first practical biological experiment.
He just idly wondered how the legendary Shunshin no Shisui felt about being his first guinea pig.