Valley of the End! Clash of Susanoo (Part One)

The first ray of morning sunlight spilled through the window onto the sheet of letter paper.

Aunt Mihui stood in the empty room for a long while, dazed, clutching the letter whose ink had been dried somewhat by the night wind.

But her gaze was very calm. There was no hysterical crying, nor did she immediately rush out to search for him across the world.

She only gently folded the letter and tucked it into her robes. Then she turned around and briskly made Sasuke's slightly messy bed neat and flat again.

"He will come back," Mihui murmured softly. She walked to the doorway, took out a wooden plaque she had prepared long ago from her sleeve, and nailed it firmly above the doorframe. Two words were carved on the plaque in elegant script: Sasuke.

After that, she turned and left the courtyard, heading straight for Yuan's room.

In less than half an hour, news of Sasuke Uchiha's defection flew to the Hidden Leaf Village's administrative department as if it had sprouted wings. Shikaku looked at the Anbu report that had just been delivered to his desk, his brows knitting into a deep frown. At a critical juncture like this, one of the Uchiha clan's only two remaining bloodlines had defected, and it was highly likely he had gone to join Orochimaru, who had just destroyed most of the Hidden Leaf Village's foundations. To the village's morale, this was undoubtedly another heavy blow.

"Issue the order at once! Mobilize every available Anbu and jonin squad. Sasuke Uchiha must be intercepted at the Land of Fire border!" Homura Mitokado and the other old advisers slammed the table and roared, "We absolutely cannot let him take the Uchiha bloodline into Orochimaru's hands!"

"Intercept him? With those useless scraps under your command?"

The conference room doors were blasted open by a violent surge of air. Yuan strode in wearing an unmarked black trench coat. His bone-chilling eyes swept over every high-ranking official present, and that tangible killing intent made Homura Mitokado's mouth, which had just opened, snap tightly shut.

"He is one of my Uchiha. No matter how far he runs, it's not your place, you pack of trash, to point fingers." Yuan coldly dropped those words. "He won't get far. I'll go myself."

As he turned, Yuan glanced at Kakashi Hatake, who was following behind Shikaku, and Naruto Uzumaki, who was gnashing his teeth and so anxious he looked like an ant on a hot pan.

"If you want to come, keep up. Just don't get in my way."

Chakra erupted beneath Yuan's feet, and he vanished from where he stood in an instant. Kakashi and Naruto exchanged a look, then immediately turned into two afterimages and followed close behind.

At the Land of Fire border, the Valley of the End.

Two enormous mountainlike statues of the First Hokage, Hashirama Senju, and Madara Uchiha faced each other across a huge, roaring waterfall. Mist filled the air, refracting a tragically beautiful rainbow in the sunlight.

Sasuke stood quietly atop Madara Uchiha's statue, carrying a small bundle on his back. He heard the sound of something slicing through the wind behind him.

"You still came." Sasuke did not turn around. He only tilted his face slightly. The three-tomoe cursed mark at the back of his neck had already broken free of Yuan's suppression and begun spreading black flame patterns over the surface of his skin like a living thing.

Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!

Yuan, Kakashi, and Naruto landed almost simultaneously atop Hashirama Senju's statue, confronting Sasuke across the several-hundred-meter chasm of the waterfall.

"Sasuke! Are you crazy?! Do you know Orochimaru only wants to use your body as a vessel?!" Naruto shouted like a madman, even trying to charge forward without caring about anything else, only for Kakashi to press a hand down on his shoulder.

"Shut up, Naruto. This isn't something you can interfere in." Yuan gave Naruto a cold glance.

Yuan stepped forward, both hands in the pockets of his trench coat, his crimson Mangekyo Sharingan locked tightly on Sasuke across from him. "That letter you left—your handwriting looked worse than chicken scratch. What, you think following that dead snake whose hands were crippled will let you get the power to kill Itachi?"

Sasuke slowly turned around. The left half of his face had already been completely covered by the cursed mark's lines, and his originally pitch-black eyes had turned into blood-red two-tomoe Sharingan. But when he looked at Yuan, there was none of his former reverence in his gaze. Instead, it burned with an extremely twisted rage.

"What do you know?!" Sasuke suddenly pointed at Yuan and roared himself hoarse, his voice still clearly audible over the thunderous crash of the waterfall. "You destroyed everything I had! You trampled the Hidden Leaf Village underfoot, you killed so many high-ranking officials, and now the whole world knows Uchiha Yuan is a monster through and through! But what about me? I'm the last descendant of the Uchiha, yet in front of you, I don't even have the right to draw my sword!"

He paused, his chest heaving violently, the Sharingan in his eyes spinning wildly. "You even want to steal the target of my revenge! You said right in front of me that you were going to dig out Itachi's eyes. What gives you the right?! He is the man I'm going to kill! You took away the only meaning I had for living in this world!"

Yuan looked at Sasuke, who had sunk into madness, and the corner of his mouth pulled into an extremely cruel sneer.

"You think I stole your prey?" Yuan's voice was like a cold wind blowing out of the deepest hell, piercing through the roar of the waterfall. "Your brother slaughtered the whole clan and killed my uncle. It's only right and proper that I kill him. You want power? You think I shouldn't interfere with your revenge?"

Yuan suddenly pulled one hand out and pointed at Sasuke. "Fine. If you want to keep that pitiful right to revenge, then prove it to me. Come take it yourself!"

"Ah—!!!"

Sasuke let out an inhuman howl. At that instant, the power of the cursed mark was completely detonated by him. Black lines instantly wrapped around his entire body, his skin turning into a dead-gray hardened layer of horn. His hair became wild and long, and a pair of huge, demonic flesh wings tore through his clothes from his back and snapped open.

Cursed Seal: State Two!

But that was still not enough. Under the interweaving of ultimate humiliation, extreme hatred for his own weakness, and the despair brought by witnessing Yuan slaughter all before him, Sasuke's crimson eyes abruptly trembled.

The two tomoe that had been rotating steadily suddenly accelerated, rippling light patterns rising across the blood-red irises. In the blink of an eye, a third pitch-black tomoe surfaced at the edge of each pupil and locked into place, three tomoe unevenly circling the black pupils, all sharpness laid bare.

After only a few breaths, his ocular power still did not stop. Violent stabbing pain spread along his optic nerves, and the blood-red color at the bottom of his eyes grew even richer.

The three tomoe began to twist, intertwine, and merge. Their originally orderly forms were deconstructed layer by layer, and the flowing red light tore apart the old patterns.

In just a few dozen seconds, the tomoe all faded away, and an extremely complex pattern like a six-pointed star flower burst into bloom within Sasuke's pupils!

Mangekyo Sharingan!

Even Kakashi across from him was so shocked by the sight that his pupils shrank. "How is that possible... he actually awakened it at this age..."

"Do you see it?! This is my power!" A line of dark-red blood suddenly flowed from Sasuke's left eye. It was the price of using a Mangekyo eye technique for the first time. His gaze locked hard onto Yuan across from him, and a destructive ocular power erupted from his left eye.

"Amaterasu!"

No hand seals, no warning. A mass of inextinguishable pitch-black flames crossed several hundred meters directly and appeared out of thin air at Yuan's chest!

"Yuan!" Kakashi's expression changed drastically. He knew all too well how terrifying Amaterasu's black flames were.

However, Yuan did not even dodge. He simply stood where he was, the six-pointed star in his right Mangekyo spinning rapidly.

"Playing with fire? You picked the wrong person." Yuan sneered.

The cluster of black flames that had just ignited on his chest actually froze in an instant, like water hitting a sponge. Immediately afterward, a layer of extremely dense, berserk red chakra surfaced over Yuan's body. That chakra did not extinguish Amaterasu. Instead, like a gaping mouth, it forcibly sucked, stripped away, and finally completely absorbed that cluster of black flames into his body!

"Your flames... I'll take them." Yuan patted the clothes on his chest, where not even a burn mark had been left behind, a hint of mockery flashing in his eyes. "Unfortunately, the temperature is still a little lacking."

Sasuke was not surprised by this at all. He knew Amaterasu alone could never kill this monster.

"Kagutsuchi!"

Blood tears flowed from Sasuke's right eye again. This time, his eye technique did not release flames, but controlled the transformation of their shape.

Boom!

The cluster of black flames Yuan had just absorbed into his body, under Kagutsuchi's control, actually tried to reignite and run wild inside his internal organs. It was an extremely sinister internal detonation.

Yuan's brows furrowed slightly, and a trace of blood overflowed from the corner of his mouth. But he immediately mobilized the physical cellular resistance strengthened by the system and that unreasonable, tyrannical berserk chakra, forcibly suppressing and crushing the black flames going berserk inside him.

Yuan wiped away the blood at the corner of his mouth and licked his lips, his gaze instead growing even more excited. "Detonating it from the inside? You're much smarter than that fool Itachi, who only knows how to burn people."

"It's not over yet!"

Sasuke had gone completely mad. The flesh wings behind him beat fiercely, and his entire body flew into the air. Vast purple chakra erupted from his body like a volcano. A giant purple Susanoo with only a skeletal frame instantly condensed around him!

Sasuke's Susanoo raised a huge longbow formed from purple chakra in its left hand, while its right hand rested on the bowstring. Three thick purple-black chakra arrows instantly took shape, their tips aimed straight at Yuan below.

"Die!"

The bowstring was released. The three enormous purple-black arrows carried a terrifying sonic boom that ripped the air apart, turning into three streaks of purple lightning as they crossed the waterfall chasm directly and shot viciously toward Yuan's position. The power of the arrows was so great that even the air along their path was torn into a vacuum zone.

"Good!"

Yuan threw his head back and let out a wild laugh. The chakra inside him was held back no longer, and dark-red light soared into the sky. A semi-complete warrior god Susanoo clad in tengu armor, more than twice as large as Sasuke's purple skeleton, thunderously rose from the ground!

The red warrior god Susanoo raised the giant sword burning with thunder and flames and, facing the three incoming purple arrows, chopped down with one utterly straightforward slash!