The dust was still settling over the crater when Obito materialized beside it.
He stood at the rim, gazing down at Itachi's broken form with the single visible eye of his spiral-patterned mask. The Sharingan behind that eyehole spun lazily — not with concern, but with the detached curiosity of a man observing an experiment that had yielded unexpected data.
"Itachi," he said, his voice carrying the exaggerated, sing-song quality of the persona he wore like a second skin. "What's going on?"
Itachi lay at the bottom of the crater, his ANBU armor cracked and blood-streaked, his breathing ragged and shallow. He didn't look up. His Mangekyō Sharingan had deactivated — whether by choice or from sheer exhaustion, even he wasn't entirely certain. The standard three-tomoe pattern spun sluggishly in his crimson irises as he stared at the smoke-choked sky.
"There was… a complication," Itachi said flatly.
Obito tilted his head. The playful cadence of his voice didn't waver, but beneath the mask, his expression was anything but amused. He had watched the entire exchange from the shadows. He had seen the impossible kick. He had seen the shockwave. He had seen Susano'o — Susano'o, the legendary spectral guardian of the Mangekyō Sharingan — shatter like cheap pottery against whatever force that child had unleashed.
"A complication," Obito repeated, rolling the word around as if tasting it. He crouched at the crater's edge and peered down with theatrical curiosity. "That's one way to put it. Personally, I'd call it getting absolutely demolished by someone a third your age, but sure — 'complication' works too."
Itachi said nothing. His jaw tightened.
Obito straightened and folded his arms, adopting the relaxed posture of someone watching a mildly entertaining street performance. "I have to say, I never imagined your father was hiding that much power. Uchiha Fugaku — who would have guessed? The stern, silent clan head, secretly a monster in hiding." He shook his head with exaggerated wonder. "He concealed it well. Very well. Even I didn't sense anything unusual from him during the operation. Quite impressive, really."
Itachi's face contorted — not with pain, though there was plenty of that, but with something far uglier. A dark, complicated expression that twisted his usually impassive features into a mask of bitter frustration.
"It wasn't my father," he said quietly.
The single word hung in the air.
Obito went still. The playful tilt of his head froze mid-motion. Behind the mask, his Sharingan stopped spinning.
"Isn't it?" he asked, the theatrical lilt dropping from his voice for just a fraction of a second before he caught it and layered it back on. "Oh? Then who—"
"It doesn't matter." Itachi cut him off. He planted one hand against the cracked earth and pushed himself upright.
The motion was agony. The instant his torso shifted, white-hot pain lanced through his chest like a blade driven between his ribs. He gasped — a sharp, involuntary intake of breath that hissed through clenched teeth. His ribs. More than half of them were fractured, he estimated. Maybe worse. The broken edges ground against each other with every movement, and each breath sent splinters of bone pressing dangerously close to his heart and lungs.
One more centimeter, he calculated with clinical detachment, and a fractured rib will puncture my left lung. Two more and it reaches the pericardium.
He stood anyway. His expression smoothed back into the blank, emotionless mask he had worn all night — the face of a man who had already decided that his own suffering was irrelevant. Blood trickled steadily from the corners of his eyes where the Mangekyō had burned through his optic nerves. More blood seeped from his mouth, staining his chin and the collar of his armor. He looked like a corpse that had forgotten to lie down.
Obito watched this display with something that might have been grudging respect, hidden safely behind his mask.
"Don't push yourself," he said, spreading his hands in a gesture of easy magnanimity. "If you can't handle this, I'll take care of it. That was our agreement, after all — you handle the clan, I clean up anything you can't manage." He cracked his knuckles with exaggerated flair. "Let me meet this 'mysterious enemy' of yours. I'm curious to see what could turn the great Uchiha Itachi into… this."
His single visible eye swept over Itachi's battered form with pointed emphasis.
Itachi's bloodied gaze didn't waver. "Sasuke is off-limits."
The name dropped into the conversation like a stone into still water.
Obito paused. Then, slowly, his head tilted again — further this time, the angle almost inhuman.
"Sasuke?" he repeated. "Your little brother did this to you? Your seven-year-old, Academy-student little brother?"
Itachi said nothing. That was answer enough.
Behind the mask, Obito's expression shifted through several phases in rapid succession — disbelief, reassessment, and finally a cold, calculating interest that had nothing to do with the bumbling persona he projected.
Interesting, the real Obito thought, the one who lurked behind the fool's mask like a spider at the center of its web. Very interesting indeed.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the ruined district, Sasuke knelt before his parents.
The wreckage of the Uchiha main house lay open to the night sky — walls shattered, ceiling beams hanging at broken angles, the paper doors reduced to confetti scattered across blood-soaked tatami. Through the gaping holes where windows had been, the moonlight poured in, and tonight that light seemed stained — tinted an unearthly red by the fires still smoldering throughout the compound, as though the moon itself was bleeding in sympathy for the dead.
Uchiha Fugaku and Uchiha Mikoto lay side by side on the ruined floor, exactly where they had fallen. Their eyes were closed. Their expressions were peaceful — almost serene, as if they had simply decided to lie down and sleep. But the blood told a different story. It had pooled beneath them in a wide, dark lake that crept slowly outward across the tatami, filling the gaps between the woven reeds, seeping into the wood beneath.
Sasuke knelt at the edge of that crimson pool. His small knees pressed into the wet tatami, and his parents' blood soaked into the fabric of his shorts, warm against his skin. He looked down at their faces — at his father's strong jaw, now slack in death; at his mother's gentle features, still carrying the ghost of the smile she had worn in her final moments.
He did not cry.
The Sasuke who would have cried — the frightened, innocent child who had walked through that doorway an eternity ago — was still in there, somewhere, buried beneath the layers of a soul that had lived and died and lived again. That child's grief was real. It burned in his chest like a coal that would never cool, and he could feel it pressing against the inside of his ribcage, demanding release, demanding tears, demanding the raw, howling anguish that the loss of parents deserved.
But Sasuke — this Sasuke, the one forged from the fusion of three lifetimes — did not permit himself to break.
This was his third time being human. He had died before. He had lost before. He had learned, through hard and bitter experience, that grief was a luxury the weak could afford and the strong could not. Tears changed nothing. Screaming changed nothing. Only action mattered.
No crying. No sinister grin. Just a quiet, terrible stillness that settled over his small frame like a funeral shroud.
"Father. Mother."
His voice was soft. Almost gentle. The voice of a son speaking to parents who could no longer hear him.
"Don't worry. Your hatred — I'll repay every last drop of it. For both of you."
He paused. The Mangekyō Sharingan spun slowly in his eyes, casting faint crimson light across his parents' still faces.
"I wonder," he continued, his tone shifting — growing colder, sharper, edged with something dark and vicious, "what Itachi will look like when he watches his precious village burn. What expression will cross his face when the thing he sacrificed everything for crumbles to ash right in front of him?"
A thin, humorless smile pulled at the corner of his mouth.
"And the Third Hokage — Hiruzen Sarutobi — that cowardly old man who allowed all of this. Who sat in his office and sanctioned the massacre of an entire clan because he lacked the spine to find another way. I wonder what he'll feel when he watches his son die. When he watches his beloved grandson — the one he bounces on his knee and tells stories to — crushed to death right before his eyes."
The smile widened. It was not a pleasant expression.
"Can they accept it, I wonder? Can they bear the weight of what they've done, when the consequences finally come home?"
The words dissolved into the night air, unanswered. The dead did not reply.
Sasuke looked down at his father's face one final time. Then, with steady hands that did not tremble, he reached forward.
His fingers pressed against Fugaku's closed eyelids — gently, precisely — and then pushed inward.
The extraction was quick. Clinical. The wet, soft sound of it was lost beneath the distant crackle of fires. Two orbs — dark and unremarkable to the naked eye, but containing within them the dormant pattern of Fugaku's Mangekyō Sharingan — came free in Sasuke's small palms.
He held them up to the crimson moonlight.
Father's Mangekyō, he thought. He awakened these eyes and never once had the chance to use them. Not even once. He carried this power in secret his entire life, and he died with it still locked away.
The timing had been nothing short of miraculous. Itachi had been reaching for these very eyes when Sasuke had arrived — intending to destroy them, to prevent anyone from ever using them to grant Sasuke the Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan through transplantation. Itachi had wanted to control every variable of Sasuke's future, to engineer a path that led exactly where he intended and nowhere else.
Sasuke's arrival had interrupted that plan by mere seconds.
He produced a small scroll from the storage cabinet in the corner of the ruined room — one of the standard sealing scrolls that every shinobi household kept for equipment storage — and carefully sealed Fugaku's Mangekyō inside. The scroll went into the inner pocket of his shirt, pressed flat against his chest.
He would not fuse them now. Not here. Not tonight. The transplantation process that evolved a Mangekyō into the Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan required recovery time — a period of temporary blindness while the new eyes integrated with the host's optic nerves and chakra pathways. In the middle of an active combat zone, surrounded by enemies, that vulnerability was unacceptable.
Besides, his current strength was sufficient for what remained of tonight's business.
And there was still unfinished business.
Sasuke rose to his feet. He looked once more at his parents — a long, silent look that held within it everything he would not say aloud — and then turned away.
He walked to the shattered window. The night air rushed in, carrying with it the smell of smoke and blood and burning wood. Far below, in the street outside, he could sense two chakra signatures — one guttering and unsteady like a candle in a gale, the other coiled and patient like a snake waiting to strike.
Itachi and the masked man.
Sasuke placed one bare foot on the windowsill. The Mangekyō blazed in his eyes.
Then, with the lightest tap of his toes, he activated Vector Manipulation — redirecting the gravitational vectors acting on his body, converting downward force into upward thrust, launching himself out of the window and into the open sky above the Uchiha district.
He soared.
Flight, after all, was the simplest application of vector control. Reverse gravity's pull, redirect air resistance, maintain equilibrium through continuous micro-adjustments to atmospheric pressure differentials — child's play for a mind that had once stopped the rotation of an entire planet for five seconds. The super-brain handled the calculations automatically, running them in the background like breathing. Sasuke simply willed himself upward, and upward he went.
The Uchiha compound spread out beneath him like a map drawn in fire and shadow. Row after row of traditional houses, many of them burning, all of them silent. The streets were littered with the fallen — men, women, children, elderly, all bearing the fan-shaped crest of the Uchiha clan, all lying in the stillness of death. The scale of the massacre was staggering even from above. An entire clan, hundreds of lives, extinguished in a single night.
Sasuke's crimson eyes swept across the carnage without flinching.
All of this, he thought, because of those two.
His gaze locked onto the street below, where Itachi stood swaying in the crater's shadow and the masked figure lounged with theatrical nonchalance.
"Then," Sasuke murmured to himself, the wind tearing at his words, "let's see what you're made of."
Down on the street, Itachi struggled to remain upright.
Every breath was a negotiation with pain. His fractured ribs shifted with each inhale, the broken edges scraping against inflamed tissue, sending electric jolts of agony through his nervous system. Blood continued to seep from his eyes — the Mangekyō's toll, compounded by the physical trauma of Sasuke's attack. His vision blurred and refocused in nauseating waves.
He pressed one hand against his eye, feeling the warm wetness of blood against his palm. Two consecutive activations of the Mangekyō — first Tsukuyomi, then Susano'o — had pushed his dōjutsu to its limits. The strain on his optic nerves was immense. If he used it again tonight, the damage might become permanent.
Not that it matters, he thought, with the grim fatalism that had become his constant companion. Permanence is a luxury I was never going to have.
Near the edge of the destroyed street, Obito spread his hands in a gesture of exaggerated helpfulness.
"Well then, don't underestimate me!" he declared, his voice carrying the bumbling, overeager energy of the "Tobi" persona — though his single visible eye was cold and sharp as a scalpel. "I'll go deal with your mystery attacker. Oh, and by the way — there's one more left." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, toward the shadows of a collapsed fence where a slim figure crouched, trembling. "That woman over there. Last surviving Uchiha besides your darling brother. You can handle that one while I'm gone, yes?"
Itachi's gaze followed Obito's gesture and found her.
Uchiha Izumi.
She knelt behind the splintered remnants of a wooden fence, her delicate frame pressed against the broken slats as if trying to disappear into them. Her dark hair was tangled and streaked with ash. Her face — fine-boned, pale, beautiful in the fragile way of porcelain — was streaked with tears and grime. And her eyes…
Itachi's breath caught.
Izumi's eyes were blazing scarlet. The three-tomoe Sharingan spun wildly in her irises, driven to full maturation by the sheer, overwhelming horror of everything she had witnessed tonight. The pattern was fully formed — perfectly symmetrical, spinning in tight, frantic circles — and as Itachi watched, he could see the tomoe beginning to shift. The shapes were elongating, stretching, the spaces between them warping as the Sharingan strained toward something beyond its current form.
She was on the verge of awakening the Mangekyō.
Izumi…
She was his closest friend. In another life — in the life he should have been allowed to live — she might have been more than that. They had grown up together, trained together, shared quiet moments on the Konoha rooftops watching the sunset. She had always looked at him with those warm, earnest eyes, always believed in him, always seen the best in him even when he gave her every reason not to.
And now he had to kill her.
I'm sorry, he whispered silently, his face betraying nothing. I'm sorry, Izumi.
He forced his battered body into motion, taking one step toward her, then another. Each step sent fresh waves of agony through his shattered ribs. Blood dripped from his chin onto the cobblestones, leaving a trail of dark droplets behind him.
But before he could reach her, Obito spoke again.
"Wait, wait, wait." The masked man held up one gloved hand, his tone shifting to something almost conspiratorial. "Hold on a moment. Let me think about this. If I help you take care of your 'mystery enemy' — and this person clearly isn't just some random clansman, given what they just did to you — surely you'd owe me a favor, yes? That seems fair."
Obito had already formulated his theory. In his estimation, the "mysterious attacker" who had nearly killed Itachi could only be Uchiha Fugaku. It made sense — Fugaku was the clan head, the strongest among them by reputation, and the only person in the compound who might feasibly possess the kind of power needed to overwhelm a Mangekyō-wielding Itachi. Obito assumed that Itachi, faced with killing his own father, had hesitated. Had gone easy. Had "released water," as the saying went. And Fugaku had capitalized on that mercy.
A reasonable deduction. Entirely wrong, but reasonable.
"No matter what the situation is," Itachi said, and his voice dropped to a register so cold and so absolute that even Obito felt a faint chill brush against the back of his neck, "you cannot kill him."
The Sharingan in Itachi's bleeding eyes blazed with sudden, fierce intensity — not the Mangekyō, just the base Sharingan, but charged with a killing intent so concentrated and so personal that it transformed the simple dōjutsu into something that felt almost alive. A promise. A threat. An oath sworn in blood and sealed with the weight of everything Itachi had sacrificed.
Sasuke is mine to protect. That is the one line no one crosses. Not Danzō. Not the Hokage. Not you. Not anyone.
Obito raised both hands in mock surrender. "My, my. Protective, aren't we?" He let out a theatrical sigh. "Fine, fine. Have it your way. I won't kill whoever it is. But honestly, Itachi — if you leave someone alive who can do that to you, I really don't see the point of this entire extermination. What was it all for, if you're just going to—"
He stopped.
His single visible eye snapped upward.
Something was falling from the sky.
Neither of them had sensed it coming. Not Itachi, with his Sharingan still active and his combat instincts honed to a razor's edge. Not Obito, with his own Sharingan and decades of experience reading battlefields. The figure had appeared in the sky above them without displacing a single molecule of air in a way that either sensor could detect — because it hadn't used chakra to get there. It hadn't used Body Flicker, or substitution, or any technique that operated within the framework of ninjutsu.
It had simply redirected vectors.
And now it was coming down.
Sasuke plummeted from the night sky like a missile — a small, dark silhouette against the blood-red moon, accelerating with every meter of descent. Vector Manipulation converted the entirety of gravitational potential energy into downward kinetic force, amplifying it exponentially, turning a simple fall into something approaching terminal velocity in the span of a heartbeat. The air screamed around his body. A cone of compressed atmosphere formed ahead of his outstretched fist, the shockwave visible as a rippling distortion that bent the moonlight into fractured halos.
His target was the masked man in black.
Sasuke knew exactly who hid behind that spiral mask. He knew the face. He knew the name. He knew the history — every lie, every manipulation, every string pulled from the shadows. Uchiha Obito. The man who had posed as Madara Uchiha. The man who had helped orchestrate the Uchiha Massacre. The man who bore equal responsibility with Danzō, with the village elders, with the Third Hokage himself, for the blood that painted these streets tonight.
The man who had unleashed the Nine-Tails on the Hidden Leaf seven years ago and murdered Sasuke's would-have-been godparents — Minato Namikaze and Kushina Uzumaki — in the process.
The man who would one day start a world war.
Not tonight, you won't, Sasuke thought, and his Mangekyō blazed like twin furnaces as he fell.
By the time Obito looked up, Sasuke was already there.
"What—"
The word never finished forming.
Sasuke's fist — small, childish, laughably undersized — connected with the space Obito occupied. But the fist itself was irrelevant. It was merely the delivery mechanism, the point of contact through which Vector Manipulation channeled its payload. Every joule of kinetic energy accumulated during the descent — the gravitational acceleration, the vector-amplified momentum, the compressed atmospheric pressure — converged on a single point at the front of Sasuke's knuckles and detonated on impact.
BOOM.
The street ceased to exist.
The cobblestones didn't crack — they vaporized. A crater erupted outward from the point of impact, ten meters wide and three meters deep, the edges glowing faintly orange from the thermal energy released by the compression. The shockwave tore outward in a perfect circle, flattening the nearest houses like they were made of paper, ripping roof tiles from buildings fifty meters away, shattering every window in a three-block radius.
Dust and debris erupted skyward in a towering column.
Sasuke stood at the center of the devastation, his fist still extended, his Mangekyō spinning, blood trickling from his eyes. His small body trembled — not from fear, but from the strain of channeling forces that no seven-year-old frame was designed to contain. His muscles burned. His chakra coils ached. The super-brain processor hummed at the edge of its operational capacity, struggling to maintain vector calculations while simultaneously compensating for the Mangekyō's drain on his neural resources.
But his expression was calm. Cold. The face of Accelerator, wearing Sasuke Uchiha's skin.
He showed not the slightest mercy.
The dust began to settle.