Panting heavily, Momoshiki Otsutsuki and Ōtsutsuki Isshiki stared wide-eyed at the enormous sphere suspended high in the sky.
Of course, both knew it was unlikely that Planetary Devastation could trap Naraku.
Yet a lingering shred of hope still made them wish he would be unable to break free of the sealing within.
But the next second, a streak of blade light flashed through the air and vanished.
This was blade light Isshiki would never mistake, even in death.
An ink-black crescent-shaped blade light pierced straight out from inside Planetary Devastation's rocky sphere.
The instant its edge emerged from the side of the sphere, the entire mass of rock, a kilometer in diameter, shuddered violently.
The interlacing patterns and fissures across its surface burst open at once, and fragments flew to either side along the blade light's path.
A second streak of blade light followed immediately, bursting out from the sphere's other side and crossing the first at an acute angle, carving a cut hundreds of meters deep through the gray-white rock.
A third, a fourth... a fifth!!!
Streak after streak of blade light erupted violently from within.
At first, they were narrow, straight lines. As the figure inside the rocky sphere turned, the later streaks began tracing arcs, crisscrossing within the sphere and riddling its once-intact mass with holes.
Huge slabs of rock peeled off the sphere's surface and plummeted toward the ground with burning trails, pounding a dense scatter of craters and columns of smoke into the devastated basin.
It was as though the entire sky was collapsing.
Momoshiki looked up at the sight, and the frustration surging through his chest sent a bone-piercing chill through his limbs.
He could clearly sense Shihōin Naraku's presence inside Planetary Devastation. From beginning to end, it had not wavered in the slightest.