Not just Obito, but even Black Zetsu was stunned into silence.
Black Zetsu had followed Madara from beginning to end, understanding his every movement with absolute precision. There was no possibility that their plan could have been discovered by anyone else.
So how? How did the Fourth Kazekage know?
But before either of them could react, Yuji had already brought his hands together in a sequence of seals, dropped to one knee, and drove his palms into the earth.
The ground trembled.
Obito and Black Zetsu felt something cold move through them.
The earth split apart and overturned, and from within it, a coffin slowly rose.
"This is..." Black Zetsu's voice dropped to something low and careful.
The Second Hokage Senju Tobirama's forbidden technique. The Impure World Reincarnation.
A Leaf Village forbidden technique, and the Fourth Kazekage had somehow learned it.
With a heavy crack, the coffin door swung outward and fell against the earth. Through a billow of white vapor, a powerful silhouette came into view.
Obito narrowed his eye.
The reanimated figure had a mane of golden hair like an enraged lion, dark skin, and eyes that radiated an overwhelming and primal sense of threat even in the first moment of their opening.
The pressure that emanated from the figure was immediate and suffocating.
"The Third... Raikage."
Obito drew a sharp breath.
Against the Fourth Kazekage alone, even with Black Zetsu working alongside him, victory was far from guaranteed. And now there was the Third Raikage as well.
He could see from observation that Yuji's execution of the Impure World Reincarnation was still imperfect. The Third Raikage's reconstructed strength would be considerably diminished from what it had been in life. But even so, because the Third Raikage's base parameters were so extraordinary, a weakened version of him was still not something that could be handled with ease.
"You little bastard again."
As consciousness returned to him, the Third Raikage's eyes found Yuji standing behind him and his mouth opened in immediate reproach.
"Save your complaints for later," Yuji said with a calm smile, driving a chakra-marked kunai into the Third Raikage's head.
His eyes then shifted to focus entirely on Black Zetsu.
The Third Raikage had been summoned precisely to deal with Black Zetsu. To prevent it from interfering with what needed to happen between Yuji and Obito.
A single hand seal. The Third Raikage's pupils immediately dimmed as Yuji's control took hold completely, turning him into a fully obedient instrument of war.
"Are you ready?"
Yuji looked toward Obito.
"Stop thinking so hard about it. Kill me, and you get every answer you are looking for."
The moment the words left his mouth, the Third Raikage erupted with lightning-attribute chakra across every surface of his body, transforming into a bolt of crackling light that hurled itself toward Black Zetsu.
And Yuji simultaneously unleashed his full speed, every layer of his combat state deployed at once, launching himself directly at Obito.
"There is no other way."
Obito's mind went cold with clarity.
It was apparent now. This fight with the Fourth Kazekage could not be avoided or dissolved through words. And he could not run. Their plan had only just entered its earliest stages. If its existence became known to the entire ninja world at this moment, the difficulty of achieving it would increase enormously.
Furthermore, if the secret between him and Yuji were revealed to Akatsuki, the one who stood to lose more was him. Yuji was not an official Akatsuki member, but his reputation and influence within the organization was something no newcomer could hope to match.
No matter how he looked at it, the Fourth Kazekage had been right.
One of them had to die here.
The moment Yuji moved, a large number of White Zetsu clones suddenly emerged from the surrounding forest, surging toward him from every direction. But Yuji activated his technique simultaneously, and every White Zetsu clone was frozen completely where it stood in an instant.
On the other side, Yuji's speed was terrifying. But beneath the clarity of the Mangekyo Sharingan, Obito could still track his approach trajectory with enough precision to respond.
Obito dropped low and placed both palms against the earth. In the next instant, countless thick and powerful branches erupted upward from the ground like enormous reaching arms, wrapping and coiling toward Yuji from every direction. Simultaneously they formed a dense canopy of vegetation designed to obstruct and slow his advance.
For a moment, Yuji's figure was swallowed entirely by the surge of wood.
But a second later, dense red threads detonated from within the tangle of branches. Each strand condensed from fresh blood, sharp as blades, and in a matter of moments they had cut through every branch and root that had expanded outward between them, severing everything completely.
The raw power of the Blood Release had carved out an empty corridor of space directly between the two of them.
It made Yuji appear like something not quite human, moving through the devastation to close the distance until he stood directly before Obito's face.
Their eyes met.
Inside Obito's eye, the kaleidoscopic pattern of the Mangekyo shifted.
The movement of Yuji's threads, which had been precise and controlled an instant before, suddenly stiffened and faltered with a visible delay.
Obito let a length of chain drop from his sleeve, swinging it with tremendous force into his opponent's body.
He was deliberately testing something. He wanted to see whether, with the Mangekyo activated, his genjutsu could actually affect the Fourth Kazekage.
The result was clear.
It worked.
The effect had not been overwhelming, but it had been real. Even a single second of hesitation was enough.
But when the chain struck the figure standing before him, the man dissolved like smoke and dispersed into nothing.
Another illusion.
Obito's pupils contracted sharply.
Even with the Mangekyo Sharingan active, the opponent's eye technique could still produce interference strong enough to deceive him. The realization settled in his chest like cold water.
Then, in the same instant, he shifted into Kamui's intangible state.
He saw Yuji's actual body standing on a fallen branch some distance away, arms crossed, looking directly at him. A terrible beam of blood light erupted from his position, stretching nearly a hundred meters in length, and with a single sweep of his arm it cut through every obstruction across the surrounding forest in every direction. Every tree, every branch, every obstacle between them was severed cleanly.
When the eye could survey the full scope of it, an entire forest had been reduced to nothing but cut stumps standing in bare earth.
The destructive power was genuinely terrifying.
Obito phased through the ground using Wood Release to slip into a separate dimensional space and vanished entirely from sight.
Yuji landed and scanned left and right, finding not a single trace of the opponent's presence.
"Genuinely difficult," he thought, narrowing his eyes.
Any ability that touched the domain of spatial manipulation was never simple to deal with. But.
His gaze shifted toward Black Zetsu, which was currently under the Third Raikage's relentless assault. Black Zetsu had been using its ability to sink through the earth and hide while simultaneously deploying White Zetsu clones to consume the Third Raikage's attention, keeping him occupied. With Black Zetsu moving underground, a direct frontal assault from the Third Raikage was nearly impossible to land. But that same ability could not hide from Yuji's perception.
"Fire Release: Great Fireball Technique."
Just as Yuji was preparing to coordinate with the Third Raikage against Black Zetsu, a wall of searing flame erupted suddenly from nearby.
"He won't come close carelessly. He is being careful. I even deliberately left an opening and he still did not take it," Yuji thought, turning his head toward the direction Obito had reappeared from.
A second later, the staggering heat had evaporated every raindrop hanging in the air above them and enveloped Yuji completely in a rising sea of fire.
Obito had no expectation that a single Fire Release technique would injure the Fourth Kazekage. What he needed was time to observe and analyze through the extended exchange. He needed to study the opponent's combat patterns and capabilities, and from that analysis identify a weakness.
As he watched intently, the roar and crackle of the fire filled the devastated forest around them. But when the flames began to recede even slightly, his entire body tensed.
Because the Fourth Kazekage had not used his extraordinary physical mobility to evade. He had simply stood there and absorbed the Great Fireball Technique head on.
And he had not been harmed in the slightest.
The Fourth Kazekage's entire body was covered in a layer of hardened crystallized blood armor, its defensive force stretched to full extension. Meeting Obito's gaze directly, he stepped forward through the sea of fire one unhurried step at a time, walking toward him through the flames as though through rain.
"So that is how it is."
Obito's heart beat faster despite himself as he processed the sheer scale of the Kazekage's power. But even so, he had observed something specific and crucial during that exchange.
The crystallized blood armor covering the Kazekage's body appeared to be slowly dissolving under the extreme heat.
"His bloodline limit originates from blood itself. Although he can shape it into various forms, its fundamental nature is still a contest of chakra. Once the force of an opposing technique is large enough, or the chakra exchange reaches a certain threshold, his bloodline limit will be affected."
Obito had identified a weakness in the Blood Release.
Then a blood projectile tore through the air directly toward his forehead.
He phased into intangibility again just in time, letting it pass through him harmlessly.
In that moment Obito became certain of something. With Kamui available to him, this Fourth Kazekage, for all his overwhelming visible power, fundamentally had no way to actually wound him.
Because at the level of their core ability mechanics, Obito held an absolute structural advantage. And his Mangekyo Sharingan could track and capture every attack and technique the enemy used in full.
Those two points alone were sufficient.
"You want to die," Obito said, his gaze going cold and quiet. "Then I will grant you that wish."
...
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