Tieba's Strongest! Healthy Itachi's Defeat!

Even with the Perfect Susanoo activated, the pressure on the eyes was still well within Itachi Uchiha's acceptable range.

He could feel the Mangekyō Sharingan rotating steadily in his eye sockets, without that familiar stinging sensation or the warmth of blood seeping from the corners of his eyes.

Given his original physical condition and the extent of damage to his eyes, let alone maintaining Susanoo for battle, even if he could only maintain it for half a minute, his body would probably collapse. Coughing up blood would be the least of his worries; he might even pass out.

Itachi Uchiha certainly hoped his body could be in better condition. Not because he was afraid of death, but because he needed his body to be healthy enough to support him in completing his final plan.

He was good enough that he could hold on to his last breath and die at Sasuke's hands.

However, Itachi Uchiha never imagined that the realization of this wish—this body whose disease had been suppressed and whose vitality had been restored—would come from his younger brother, the one whose life he had arranged for him. No, not his younger brother, but a blood relative from another world.

It was his sister, whom he had never met but was related to by blood.

After learning Satsuki's true identity, Itachi Uchiha felt not anger at being deceived, but rather a sense of kinship.

He had deceived too many people in his life, and had been deceived too many times himself. He had long been accustomed to examining everyone with a suspicious eye.

But Satsuki is different—in terms of blood relation, they can indeed be considered siblings. The chakra flowing in those eyes, that resonance of shared roots, is something that no amount of pretense can replicate.

His Mangekyō Sharingan was telling him that the person standing in front of him was family.

Itachi Uchiha had often thought this way before. When Sasuke was young, he looked a lot like their mother, Mikoto Uchiha. He wasn't the kind of handsome and dashing man, but rather had a gentler and more delicate appearance.

Sometimes he would stare blankly at Sasuke's face, thinking that if Sasuke were a girl, he would definitely be very cute when he grew up.

And now, Sasuke from another world stands before him. His sister. That cold yet stubborn look in her eyes—it seems his counterpart from another world has made the same decision as him in this world?

It was also the extermination of a clan, it was also defection, it was also pushing her younger brother into the abyss, it was also arranging everything and then waiting to die at her brother's hands?

Itachi Uchiha looked at Satsuki, a strange feeling suddenly welled up inside him.

He doesn't regret what he's done, but he's curious whether his counterpart in another world was thinking the same thing when making those decisions.

Uchiha Satsuki stared at the enormous red Susanoo before her, her expression unchanged. She had no intention of slowly torturing Itachi Uchiha; that wasn't her style.

She just wanted to teach this arrogant man a lesson, to show him that arbitrarily deciding other people's lives comes at a price.

"Boom!!!"

An immense aura of Dojutsu emanated from Satsuki's body, and the purple Susanoo began to rise at a visible speed—from half of his body to his entire body, from a few meters to tens of meters, and from tens of meters to hundreds of meters.

Satsuki also used the Perfect Susanoo, but the purple giant did not stop climbing. Instead, it continued to ascend, becoming higher and higher, more and more majestic.

As someone who possesses the same eyes as Kaguya Otsutsuki, the Progenitor of Chakra, Satsuki's Perfect Susanoo, when fully unleashed, is simply incomparable to the ordinary Mangekyō Sharingan.

That's not a quantitative change, but a qualitative one—like the difference between a drop of water and the ocean, a grain of sand and the desert, a Fire Fly and the sun.

Itachi Uchiha stared solemnly at the purple giant that was gradually rising in front of him. He tilted his neck up little by little, until finally he had to raise his entire head to see the giant's full appearance.

The sound of chakra gathering came from all directions, deep and powerful, like the roar of the Susanoo demon god.

A massive shockwave emanated from Satsuki's Susanoo, sweeping outwards in all directions. The air was compressed, emitting a sharp whistling sound. The ground trembled, trees were uprooted, and distant rocks were shattered, cracking into them.

This kind of chakra power could probably only have been achieved thousands of years ago, in the era of the Sage of Six Paths.

"Ugh!"

As Satsuki's Susanoo gathered power, it released a torrent of chakra outwards. This torrent was not an attack aimed at him, but merely the aftershocks naturally generated when the Perfect Susanoo was released at full power—just aftershocks. However, it was this uncontrolled aftershock that collided with Itachi Uchiha's red Susanoo like a tsunami.

Cracks began to appear on the red armor from the chest, spreading to every inch of the bones and muscles formed from chakra. Then, with a loud bang, the red, Perfect Susanoo collapsed, turning into countless red specks of light that dissipated into the air.

Itachi Uchiha's body fell from mid-air and crashed heavily to the ground.

His vision began to blur again; it was the exhaustion and weakness that welled up from his very bones after he had pushed his body to its limits.

He tried to stand up, supporting himself on his fingers, but his arms were trembling slightly, and he failed twice.

"... cough cough."

He covered his mouth and coughed twice, his palm feeling warm and damp.

After overusing his Dojutsu, the diseases that had been temporarily suppressed by [Amaterasu Ling] began to flare up again.

Ironically, even in this state of backlash, it's still much better than being half-dead before.

In the past, Itachi Uchiha would cough up blood Amaterasu just once, and he never dared to maintain Susanoo for more than a minute.

And now, even after unleashing the Perfect Susanoo, he only coughed up this little bit of blood.

This would have been unthinkable in the past.

"Sasuke... will your future... be just as powerful...?"

Itachi Uchiha collapsed to the ground, the light in his Mangekyō Sharingan completely dimmed.

His chest rose and fell slightly, each breath aggravating the backlash from the disease within him, but he kept his eyes open, staring at the figure standing not far away, muttering these words.

Uchiha Satsuki looked at Itachi Uchiha was completely powerless to resist. If her Susanoo fully formed, Itachi Uchiha would no longer exist in this world.

"Sasuke... no, what... should I call you?"

Itachi Uchiha's voice rang out again, and in his eyes, which had lost their fighting spirit, there was a softness that he rarely showed in front of others.

"That's unnecessary."

His reply was still the same heartless one.

"... I see."

Itachi Uchiha's voice carried an undeniable sense of loss, but he didn't press the matter.

"Sasuke... I... it seems you were right."

He continued, his voice growing softer, as images of that night flashed through his mind—the night he decided to transform into a demon, the night he believed he was carrying a great cause, wielding his sword for peace.

He stood on the Uchiha Clan's territory, watching his clansmen fall one by one, looking at the neighbors who had greeted him in the market, the aunt who had held him when he was a child, and the elderly couple who had handed him Three-colored Dango at the Summer Festival.

He told himself it was for the village, for peace, and to avoid an even more devastating war.

He told himself these people were beyond redemption, and their coup would cause even more deaths. He told himself this was a necessary sacrifice.

When the night is deep and quiet, the faces of those people will appear before his eyes.

He also considered that he might have really made a mistake. Not at a specific moment, but during many sleepless nights.

He watched Sasuke grow up day by Tenten, watched the child who used to follow him around calling him "brother" gradually become filled with hatred, and a voice in his heart said—you made a mistake.

People are not tools that can be discarded at will. Every one of those who died by his blade had their own name, their own story, and their own family and friends.

He remembered their faces as they died—terrified, confused, angry, desperate—every single one clearly, and even after all these years, they remained perfectly clear.

That night, the Uchiha Clan's Police Force was handled by the so-called "Uchiha Madara".

Those elite Ninja, those who would resist, those core members who were truly involved in the coup—none of them were killed by him.

Most of those he killed with his own hands were ordinary Uchiha civilians. They were girls working in dessert shops, old men repairing ninja tools, and children walking hand in hand with their mothers on the street.

He told himself it was a necessary sacrifice, for a greater peace. But those excuses became increasingly untenable in the face of those people.

He dreamt he returned to that night, looking at Sasuke as a child, watching the child's eyes change from admiration to confusion, from confusion to bewilderment, and from bewilderment to hatred.

The voice inside him grew louder and louder—you've made a mistake. But he couldn't stop. He had gone too far down the wrong path, so far that he could only keep going until he reached the end he had set for himself.

He died at the hands of the person he loved most, entrusting everything to him, and then disappeared along with his mistakes.

But now, lying on the ground, Itachi Uchiha suddenly felt that he was really ridiculous. He had arranged everyone's path, but never asked them whether they wanted to take that path.