He gathered his strength, then slashed.
The massive Susanoo moved.
It looked huge and cumbersome, but it was anything but.
The grass-green Spiral Sword gleamed silver-white as it spun rapidly.
A tremendous storm became wind blades that gathered around the Spiral Sword. At Shisui's command, they slashed toward Kazama Kaguya.
"Damn it, Danzo, you've really dragged me into a mess."
Seeing how things were going, Kazama Kaguya cursed Danzo and quickly flew to dodge.
The Otsutsuki Clan had a powerful ability to fly. Combined with the massive amount of chakra Kazama Kaguya released, his speed reached at least 200 meters per second.
But Susanoo moved almost as fast. Its enormous Spiral Sword carried the storm as it swept down from above, hot on his heels.
Kazama Kaguya's expression changed. His bones surged throughout his body and burst out, forming a three-meter-high, curved shield that firmly protected him.
"Shikotsumyaku: Bone Shield! Hold them off!"
Rumble!
The slashes tore through the air with sharp cracks. The earth was plowed open like tofu, trees flew through the air, and rocks split apart.
An attack this massive and powerful was terrifying.
One hit meant death; even a graze meant injury.
The storm clinging to the Spiral Sword was like a dense swarm of blades, striking the Bone Shield again and again. Its power was no weaker than a B-rank Wind Release: Vacuum Blade, and it tore crack after crack through the shield.
Bones formed by Shikotsumyaku were said to be the hardest things in the world.
Yet under Susanoo's assault, they now gave off sounds as if they were about to buckle.
Even at his top speed, Kazama Kaguya couldn't dodge every attack.
"Shikotsumyaku, repair them!" Kazama Kaguya continually used chakra to help his bones heal.
The Bone Shield hadn't been broken, since it hadn't taken a direct hit from Susanoo's Spiral Sword. But the tremendous impact was still unimaginable.
Kazama Kaguya was sent flying like a cannonball.
From Aburame Ryoma and Kisame Hoshigaki's vantage point, it looked as if Susanoo had struck once and sent Kazama Kaguya plummeting from the sky to the ground.
Boom!
The ground exploded into a huge crater. Trees and rocks flew everywhere, and dust filled the air.
At the center of the crater, a two-meter-tall sphere of pale bone was embedded in the dirt, motionless.
"Kazama!" Kisame Hoshigaki shouted anxiously and quickly used Body Flicker to close in.
Seeing a rare opportunity, Aburame Ryoma glanced at the towering Susanoo, which remained still, and immediately launched an attack.
"Secret Technique: Insect Sphere."
Countless Kikaichū flew out from beneath Aburame Ryoma's black cloak, spreading like a black net overhead.
"Get lost."
Kisame Hoshigaki couldn't handle Susanoo, but dealing with Aburame Ryoma was well within his capabilities.
He moved in front of the Bone Shield and rapidly formed Hand Seals.
"Water Release: Water Tornado."
A column of water that spun upward like a tornado appeared. Thanks to the massive amount of chakra Kisame provided, the Water Tornado reached twenty or thirty meters high and shredded all the Kikaichū in the sky within seconds.
Then the Water Tornado roared toward Aburame Ryoma.
"Secret Technique: Insect Wall."
A small number of Kikaichū flew out and spun rapidly to defend him. Aburame Ryoma took the opportunity to use Body Flicker and retreat.
The two moved quickly, separating after only a brief exchange.
Kisame Hoshigaki was worried about Kazama Kaguya's safety and had no interest in fighting.
He still had the additional role of bodyguard, and only wanted to make sure his employer was safe as soon as possible.
Aburame Ryoma, meanwhile, was running low on chakra.
At the center of Susanoo's forehead, Shisui Uchiha was panting heavily.
As he struck, he'd felt his ocular power pour out like water from a dam. The expenditure had been enormous.
Weakness washed over him. Blood streamed from his eyes as if it cost nothing, tinting his vision red and making the world around him even blurrier.
"That attack consumed too much ocular power. My vision has deteriorated badly, too. With what I have left, I can use Susanoo to attack at most one more time."
Shisui assessed the enemy's strength.
This time, he wanted to save his final attack for the "tailless Tailed Beast," Kisame Hoshigaki.
As for the person he'd just knocked out of the sky, Shisui didn't think he could still fight.
"He's probably barely hanging on," Shisui guessed.
He wanted to lock on to Kisame Hoshigaki and finish things in one go.
Just as he was about to move, he suddenly sensed the ground beneath Susanoo's feet trembling.
"An attack from underground." Shisui Uchiha reflexively raised Susanoo's huge foot and stomped down hard.
The foot, more than twenty meters long, came crashing down with the weight of half a mountain, as if to crush the hidden enemy like a mouse.
The moment Susanoo's foot hit the ground, it made a deafening sound.
The surrounding earth rippled like water, and the ground sank two or three meters.
"Earth Release? Heh..."
Attacking Susanoo, formed by Mangekyo ocular power, with a sneak attack?
Shisui Uchiha didn't care to say much about such a foolish tactic.
But at that moment, he suddenly felt something strange beneath Susanoo's foot.
It was like stepping on a nail, the sole pierced by something.
Although attacks on Susanoo didn't cause him pain, he could still clearly feel the sensation of something piercing it.
He looked down and saw that the ground beneath Susanoo had somehow become covered in dense gray bone spikes.
They were dull and gray, covered in cracks, three to five meters tall and about as thick as a fist. They looked like clumps of weeds sprouting from the earth in spring.
But they showed none of the vitality of living things. Instead, they were filled with an ominous aura, like the rotting bones of the dead.
A faint voice rose from underground.
"Shikotsumyaku: All-Killing Ash Bones: Sawarabi no Mai."
"What—" Shisui Uchiha was startled. He immediately tried to escape.
But before he could move, he saw countless gray cracks spread upward from below, covering Susanoo's entire lower body.
In an instant, Susanoo's legs became like porcelain about to shatter.
A terrifying sense of danger shot straight through him.
Shisui Uchiha's pupils contracted. The four-pointed pinwheel in his eyes spun wildly as he sensed a deadly threat.
The next moment—
Rustle, rustle...
The night wind swept across the land. The dense forest of gray bone spikes turned into a cloud of rotten bone ash in an instant.
The ash scattered lightly, and Susanoo's legs vanished along with it, gone from the world entirely.
Susanoo lost its lower body in an instant. The All-Killing Ash Bones reduced a massive amount of ocular power to dust, and the terrible backlash immediately struck the owner of the Mangekyo.
"Ah... my eyes!"
At the center of Susanoo's forehead, Shisui Uchiha let out a heart-rending scream.
Blood began spurting from his Mangekyo Sharingan.
The four-pointed pinwheel pattern flickered a few times, then vanished completely, like a lightbulb that had lost power.
Immediately afterward, Susanoo's grass-green upper body, armor, muscles, tendons, and bones disappeared in rapid succession. The imposing energy giant ultimately returned to nothingness.
Shisui Uchiha's Mangekyo Sharingan had been forcibly shut off.
He couldn't fly. With Susanoo gone, he fell from the sky, screaming as blood spurted from his eyes.
Beside Kisame Hoshigaki, a white bone burst through the ground and opened like a flower. Kazama Kaguya stepped out, pale and exhausted.
Watching Shisui Uchiha fall, he grinned. "That's what you get for showing off with Susanoo. You stepped on a nail, didn't you?"
Nearby, Kisame Hoshigaki stared at the boy before him, who looked completely different, and his expression changed entirely.
Kazama Kaguya no longer looked like a sickly invalid.
He had become a child of seven or eight, with pure, flawless Byakugan and white hair that nearly reached his heels. A pair of strange little horns, made of bone, were just visible on either side of his forehead.
Even more striking, a row of cracked gray bone spikes had grown from his back, pointing straight at the sky and radiating the deathly aura of something that could bring all things to an end.
They were clearly what had just destroyed Susanoo.
"You... what kind of ability is that? It's completely different from Shikotsumyaku."
He looked Kazama Kaguya up and down, growing more shocked with every glance.
"Your body is changing. Your Bloodline Disease is cured? Your physical strength and chakra reserves have both increased many times over. If I hadn't seen all of this happen right in front of me, I'd never believe it."
His face was full of confusion. As Kazama Kaguya approached, his muscles tensed involuntarily, and he instinctively leaped back.
He sensed a chilling threat from Kazama Kaguya, like a poisoned Senbon—sharp and deadly.
Goosebumps rose across his skin.
Kisame Hoshigaki suppressed his questions and remained on guard.
He hadn't forgotten the complicated, contradictory relationship between them.
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