A grabbed a tentacle thrusting straight at him and pulled with all his strength... but it was as tough as that strip of gristle in a steak that you could never chew through!
"Damn it!" A cursed as barbs sprouted from the tentacle and pierced his palm.
Luckily, he was still in his lightning-transformed state. What burst out was lightning, not his flesh and blood. Otherwise, judging by past precedent, hashirama cells would have been at risk of becoming commonplace again.
More tentacles stabbed toward him... A had no intention of bursting all over. He shifted from his humanoid lightning form into a free-flowing bolt, landed three hundred meters away with a boom, and reformed into a human shape.
He could not help exclaiming, "Well, I'll be damned. This is the first time I've ever seen a Susanoo this outrageous... Actually, is that really a Susanoo?"
Because... those bone branches and fascial tentacles had never assembled into the overall "humanoid" shape associated with Susanoo. Instead, they combined freely as independent units, like Lego bricks. What shape they took depended entirely on the caster's imagination.
On a distant hill, Orochimaru smiled in delight. "Sasuke-kun's talent for shape transformation has now been given tangible form through Susanoo. If he wished, he could even drape the earth in a cloak called Susanoo."
"Without a doubt, after the battle in the Konoha Wasteland, Sasuke's control over his eye power has reached even greater heights."
Standing beside Orochimaru, Itachi spoke with quiet pride.
His left eye, which had lost its sight when he activated Izanagi during the battle in the Konoha Wasteland, had long since regained its vision through Kagami's eye power, Amaterasu-Ōmikami.
The "pitcher plant" opened. As Sasuke advanced, bone branches blossomed like early bracken, and tentacles grew wildly like seaweed... spreading into a