The battle pressed on. Itachi and Kanon remained locked in a fierce clash of blades, yet Kanon was forced to wield her sword with only one hand. Even as a mere clone, she was determined to fight to the bitter end.
Boom!
With a sharp clatter, Sasuke and Itachi threw their Magatama beads in perfect unison, intercepting and neutralizing Kanon's Sage Art: Wind Release: Rasenshuriken.
At this very moment, Kanon's Shadow Clones were scattered across multiple war zones, most notably on the primary battlefield. Because her strength was heavily divided, this particular clone was severely limited, capable of deploying only Tsukuyomi and Susanoo from her visual arsenal.
Sage Mode remained her ultimate trump card, but taking on both brothers completely solo with a single Shadow Clone was proving to be an uphill battle.
Suddenly, Kanon moved. Forming hand signs with her feet, she pushed her remaining reserves to the absolute limit to manifest five distinct clones.
"Sage Art: Rasengan Fire Dance!"
A massive, crimson Rasengan encircled by a stellar ring of flame materialized in Kanon's hand. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth as she charged relentlessly toward Itachi and Sasuke.
Sasuke's eyes spun instantly. Black flames erupted, casting a wall of Amaterasu directly between them and the advancing Kanon. He stared grimly at her approach.
"Don't come any closer, Kanon! This is Amaterasu, you can't survive it!" Sasuke roared. Torn completely between his loyalty to his brother and his love for his sister, this was the only way he could think of to keep Kanon from reaching Itachi. He had already noticed that the other four Shadow Clones were wielding the exact sealing tags needed to suppress a reanimated body.
Yet, Kanon did not swerve or hesitate. She planted her foot directly into the black flames, allowing the horrific fire to consume her physical form.
Without letting a single whimper escape her lips, she pressed forward. She had accepted her resolve long ago. Clutching the Rasengan Fire Dance, she tore violently through the black wall, leaving Sasuke and Itachi wide-eyed with shock.
Her blue trench coat was already heavily engulfed in Sasuke's black flames, and the skin along her legs had been charred to a deep black, yet her momentum never faltered.
"Heads up! She's closing the distance too fast!" Itachi shouted.
Sasuke's eyes widened as the sheer ocular power of his Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan surged, manifesting the towering armored form of his Susanoo's fourth stage.
The Rasengan Fire Dance slammed directly against Sasuke's Susanoo. The resulting detonation was massive, drawing a furious roar from Sasuke as he pushed his visual prowess to its absolute threshold, forcing the shattered armor of his Susanoo to instantly reconstitute itself.
Itachi kept his eyes locked on Kanon's fiery assault, but a sudden sense of discord flared within him.
"Watch out! It's a diversion!" Itachi bellowed.
Sure enough, from Sasuke's blind spot, two of Kanon's clones materialized, hurling a pair of Sage Art: Ultra-Big Ball Rasenshuriken straight toward them. The overwhelming roar of the spinning wind and the concussive shockwaves of concentrated chakra tore directly into their position.
Itachi gritted his teeth, unleashing his orange-red Susanoo. The Yata Mirror slammed down, deflecting one of the Ultra-Big Ball Rasenshurikens, while he used the reinforced frame of his Susanoo's body to bear the full, devastating brunt of the second.
Finally, Itachi breathed a small sigh of relief. They had successfully defended against three catastrophic jutsu in rapid succession. Kanon's tactical intuition was terrifyingly sharp.
"Nii-san, where are the other two?!"
The moment the words left Sasuke's mouth, Itachi's pupils contracted in horror. The cavern floor beneath their feet suddenly ruptured violently, the result of the remaining two clones detonating standard Rasengans into the earth to generate a massive, localized shockwave.
The concussive blast launched both Sasuke and Itachi high into the air.
Seizing the moment, Kanon, her body entirely ravaged by the burning Amaterasu, gritted her teeth against the searing agony and loosed a desperate cry:
"Sage Art: Inorganic Reincarnation!"
Snap!
Countless sharp stalactites erupted upward, impaling Itachi's reanimated body through multiple points. However, Sasuke was violently blasted clear of the danger zone by Itachi, who had used his Susanoo to fling his younger brother away just in time.
"Kanon, you've lost!" Sasuke shouted as he skidded backward across the cavern.
True to his words, Kanon coughed up a heavy torrent of blood. The black flames of Amaterasu had thoroughly eaten through her garments, spreading mercilessly into her freshly opened wounds.
She staggered, dropping heavily to one knee. Although she was a Shadow Clone, she functioned as a completely unique entity, possessing her own consciousness, her own convictions, and a body that felt flesh-and-blood pain.
As Itachi's reanimated flesh began to piece itself back together, and the Amaterasu consuming her was extinguished by Sasuke's Kagutsuchi, Kanon collapsed weakly onto the stone floor.
"I can't lose yet... I still have so much more to do..."
Save for the delicate profile of her face, her body was a canvas of horrific burns from the black flames, with vast patches of her once-fair skin reduced to a bleeding, charred black.
Staring at the tragic sight of the broken girl before him, Sasuke felt his knees give way, dropping him into a half-kneeling position.
Blood-tinged tears leaked from the corners of Kanon's eyes, but her gaze was empty and unseeing. She had fallen entirely under the thrall of the technique.
"Izanami has taken hold."
Itachi knelt down, staring at his sister's battered, agonizing state. A sensation like a twisting blade pierced his own chest. No matter what had transpired, she was still their flesh and blood. Raising his hands against his own family was something Itachi had grown accustomed to, yet the sorrow of it never truly faded.
Noticing the violent trembling of Sasuke's frame, his expression twisted in profound anguish, Itachi placed a comforting hand on his shoulder and let out a soft sigh. To see Kanon brought to such a state of torment was a weight that neither brother's conscience could easily bear.
Kanon's eyes grew progressively vacant. In truth, the moment she had charged forward with the Rasengan Fire Dance, the conditions for Izanami had already been flawlessly met.
"She won't be able to escape the infinite loop of fighting and defeating us."
Sasuke stared at Itachi's left eye, which had already gone completely blind and milk-white. His entire body shook with tremors. Kanon lay there, broken and heavily burned on the damp stone, her gaze hollow and devoid of light. She couldn't even voice the agony she was experiencing, entirely trapped within the confines of the genjutsu.
And the perpetrators of this ruthless act were her own older brothers.
Sasuke cast a bitter, self-loathing glance at Itachi, then at himself. Is this truly what it means to be an Uchiha? Are we forever cursed to tear one another apart?
"Is this the forbidden jutsu that acts as the counterpart to Izanagi?" Sasuke asked.
"Yes. It is the jutsu that decides destiny," Itachi replied flatly.
"What did you mean when you said it doesn't rely on visual contact?"
"Izanami is a visual jutsu applied through the shared physical sensations between the caster and the target." Itachi began to break down the mechanics and history of Izanami. "The price of invoking this power is permanent blindness in the eye that casts it, just like Izanagi."
"So you're saying... Kanon's consciousness is trapped in an infinite loop, facing a phantom version of you and me forever?"
"No. Within this jutsu, an escape route from the loop has been deliberately laid out from the very beginning. Izanami was originally created to reprimand and save those who abused Izanagi."
"What do you mean?" Sasuke asked, frowning.
"It seems you're already familiar with Izanagi. It is known as the perfect visual jutsu of the Uchiha clan, capable of altering destiny itself. If an outcome proves unfavorable to the caster, the jutsu can erase it, returning reality to a state where nothing ever happened. In short, it allows a person to manipulate reality to achieve exactly what they want."
Itachi continued, giving Sasuke a thorough lesson on the dark history that birthed Izanami within the Uchiha clan.
After listening, Sasuke let out a breath. "To think that the distorted sense of reality born from using Izanagi would trigger the looping mechanism of Izanami... But if Izanami was meant to stop Izanagi, the path to breaking the cycle was intentionally built in from the start."
Sasuke stiffened slightly at Itachi's nod, as his brother continued:
"It was a technique designed to save the Uchiha from their own arrogance and complacency. It was meant to stop people from using jutsu as a cheap escape from the consequences of their actions. The moment the target chooses to accept the reality they were meant to face, the moment they stop running, the loop of Izanami will shatter. It is a jutsu meant to guide the target away from relying on illusions, forcing them to willingly embrace their destiny."
"An illusion that allows for an escape route is far too dangerous to use in an actual deathmatch. That is precisely why Izanami was branded a forbidden jutsu."
"Kanon's eyes are vacant right now because she has to accept her destiny. She must truly see herself for who she is before she can break free from her fate."
Suddenly, a threadbare, incredibly weak voice rasped from the floor:
"But... I saw through myself... and accepted my fate a long time ago..."
"Sasuke... in the end, you still chose Itachi over me..."
The pupils of both Sasuke and Itachi contracted violently as they looked down at the trembling form of Kanon.
With her hair disheveled and matted against the stone, two distinct tracks of clear tears ran down her face as she looked up at her brothers. Deep within her mind, a torrent of memories flashed by, moments of fleeting joy, of profound sorrow, of blinding pain, and of an indescribable, suffocating despair.
Her companions, her sensei, her parents, her clan... everything she was ever meant to have had been utterly wiped away.
If the criteria was to see oneself clearly, Kanon had done so from the very night her clan was slaughtered.
Kanon offered no grand declarations; she simply lay against the dirt, sobbing softly. Her limbs were broken and blackened by the fire, and her entire frame throbbed with excruciating pain, yet not once did she cry out in agony.
She merely wept. To Itachi, the sight of her sobbing on the ground mirrored the exact image of the battered, broken little girl crying out to him in the forest all those years ago, except back then, he had chosen to hand her nothing but deeper despair.
To Sasuke, her broken voice sounded exactly like the times she had wept bitterly in his arms. The memories of his life with Kanon crashed over him in relentless waves, leaving him trembling uncontrollably. His mind drifted back to that fateful day when he was seven years old. Standing behind the Uchiha stone tablet, holding his little sister tight, it had felt like finding life in a barren wasteland.
It was the agonizing pain of losing everyone, the sheer vertigo of falling from the peak of happiness straight into the darkest abyss of despair.
Sasuke's heart felt as though it were being carved into pieces by a thousand jagged blades, every single shard bearing Kanon's name.
Kanon's weeping was muffled and quiet, barely making a sound. This incredibly fierce, unyielding fifteen-year-old girl, who had possessed the strength to stand against the entire shinobi world by herself, had finally broken down and cried before her two older brothers.
She was powerless now; that final string of assaults had entirely exhausted her remaining reserves of chakra. Yet, for reasons she couldn't explain, she simply didn't want to fade away just yet. Perhaps, by holding on, she could stay with her family for just a fraction longer...
Kanon buried her face into the dirt, desperate to hide her tears from her brothers, because she no longer had a hand left to wipe them away.
"Onii-chan... it hurts so much..."
Finally, her muffled plea drifted out. That single, trembling sentence struck Itachi and Sasuke with a wave of absolute, crushing guilt.
Right at that moment, an explosion of pure, unadulterated fury shattered the silence of the cavern, echoing from right behind the Uchiha brothers.
"You absolute monsters! How can you just stand there and watch?! She is your own family!!!"
An overwhelming wave of concussive, repelling force detonated through the air. In a fraction of a second, Itachi and Sasuke were violently launched backward, crashing deep into the cavern walls and leaving two massive, fractured craters in the stone.
It was Nagato. Having just finished neutralizing the two shinobi squads that had ventured into the area, he had returned to consult with Kabuto and Kanon on their next course of action. Instead, he had walked into the sight of Kanon lying broken and battered before her own flesh and blood.
Nagato's fury had flared instantly, but his rational mind had initially held him back, wanting to gauge the situation first.
But the moment he heard Kanon's quiet sobs, followed by that final, heartbroken plea, he could no longer restrain himself.
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NOTE: This fic has been completely translated. If you want to read the whole story head over to my p-atre-on: p-atre-on.c-om/Overgod [Just remove the hyphen to access normally]