Treatment

Uchiha Izuna's treatment progressed unexpectedly smoothly. The medicine acted precisely on his compound injuries, and his wounds healed at an astonishing rate.

The tablet, originally used for remote consultations, now frequently carried the sound of laughter and conversation through its screen.

While recovering, Izuna loved finding all sorts of ways to tease his older brother, Madara.

Sometimes he pretended his wounds had worsened, sending Madara into a panic.

Sometimes he gave a lifelike imitation of Utsusemi's troubled expression when nobles pestered her.

Sometimes he deliberately tossed and caught a silver coin; other times he asked roundabout questions about the details of how the two had first met.

Amid the endless jokes, Utsusemi unexpectedly learned the Uchiha brothers' birthdays.

Madara's birthday had already passed, while Izuna's eighteenth birthday, his coming of age, was that very month.

Utsusemi solemnly promised to prepare a special gift, and the arrangement made the three laugh even more cheerfully.

Even the shadow cast by war was dispelled by those warm moments.

Then the full moon climbed into the night sky, and all that peace began to crumble.

The instant the pallid moonlight pierced the Uchiha Clan Crest, the gently woven illusion was finally torn to shreds by cruel reality.

Uchiha Izuna's body suddenly convulsed violently. The wound that had been on the verge of healing split open, spraying blood across the folding screen in a radial pattern.

More horrifying still was the pitch-black substance surging within the wound, coiling around the young man's chakra pathways as though it were alive.

All ten of his fingers dug deep into the tatami, while his rampaging chakra scorched five marks into the mat.

This was unmistakably a sign of Yin Release Chakra taking physical form.

The maids tried to hold down his twitching limbs, only to be thrown onto the tatami by the rebounding chakra.

This sudden deterioration came just as Madara was away on a mission.

When he had left at dawn, his younger brother had still been leaning by the window, poking dango with a Senbon and winking at him.

Now there was only the clan physician's trembling pronouncement: "Yin Release has eaten through the pathways to his heart... just as the ancient scrolls recorded... those previous cases of early death..."

Kneeling in a pool of blood, Madara Uchiha lifted his younger brother into his arms and found that Izuna's right hand was clenched tightly around the silver coin.

Finger marks marred the cold metal surface, the young man's last effort to hold on to their promise through his excruciating pain.

"Brother... take them..." Izuna's voice was mixed with ragged gasps, and his trembling right hand suddenly plunged toward his own eye sockets.

The moment the Sharingan were gouged out, blood sprayed like lava across the clan records, staining a thousand years of inheritance dark red.

The eye-transplant scroll placed at the head of the bed was soaked with drops of blood, and Madara saw the Mangekyō Sharingan being gouged out.

Madara Uchiha's Susanoo materialized beyond his control, its purple ribs wrapping around his younger brother's broken body like living things.

As he wound bandages around his brother with trembling hands, his raging chakra sent the oldest clan physician flying.

Inside the bottle of medicinal solution the new clan physician held high above his knees, the pair of eyes seemed to flicker eerily in the emerald-green liquid.

Madara tremblingly accepted the gift, and the Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan awakened in his eyes.

Cold air poured from the tablet, coating the warm stones with white frost. In the hot spring, Utsusemi abruptly snatched up a bath towel and wrapped it tightly around the ends of her hair.

She hastily knotted the towel over her chest, and the Yin-Yang Release tablet unfolded in midair. The scene on its screen made her pupils contract.

"That's impossible... yesterday's follow-up report showed..." Izuna's vital signs were deteriorating rapidly. "His injuries were clearly getting better. How could they suddenly..."

When her gaze fell on Izuna's heavily bandaged face, Utsusemi felt as though she had been struck by lightning.

Beneath the bandages, where his eyes should have been, were eerie sunken hollows, like a hollowed-out tree: "Wait! Where are his Mangekyō Sharingan?"

Madara Uchiha's newly evolved Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan turned in the darkness, their scarlet patterns like burning karmic fire.

"Izuna passed his Mangekyō on to me..." His words suddenly caught, and the sound of his throat working was unusually clear. "This time... he won't last until dawn..."

"What do you mean, he passed his Mangekyō on to you?" Utsusemi's roar made the tablet tremble slightly.

During the long silence, only the sound of drops falling onto the water's surface could be heard.

"The price of the Mangekyō is blindness..." Madara murmured. "He decided to have his eyes transplanted into me... before he died."

"What...?!" The shattering truth sent Utsusemi's thoughts into disarray.

She stared at the tablet screen. In the image, Izuna's thin body lay motionless on a bed of ice crystals, chakra chains sustaining his life wrapped around him like a spiderweb.

The young man's once-lean, powerful body was wasting away at an astonishing speed, as though an invisible predator were devouring his life force.

"Look at him again... didn't we agree to celebrate Izuna's coming of age...?" Madara's voice suddenly softened.

Like a drowning man clutching at a straw, his tone drifted as though he were talking in his sleep.

Madara Uchiha tremblingly placed his younger brother's growing-cold hand over his own intact eyes.

Half-conscious and near death, the young man called out his brother's name and hers in broken fragments, a relieved smile lifting the corners of his pale lips.

That smile pierced straight through Utsusemi's long-suppressed anger like a blade.

Why did these shinobi always take self-sacrifice for granted as their fate?

"Wait for me. I'm coming right now." Utsusemi snapped the tablet shut and leaped into the air amid an explosion of water.

She could not accept an ending like this, could not accept Izuna dying just like that.

Still less could she accept the Uchiha brothers' fated tragedy!

Chakra boiled through her pathways, and the radiance of Six Paths Mode was about to tear through the night sky.

Soon she would storm into the Uchiha Clan Compound and tear the script of this tragedy to pieces with her own hands.

This time she would enforce her will with absolute power and completely change the way these shinobi lived.

She would no longer merely improve a Ninjutsu, but wield violence powerful enough to rewrite the rules of the world.

In the most extreme way possible, she would sever the damned chains of fate binding this world!