"Megumi. Now. Right here!"
The Totsuka Blade's earth-splitting pressure was a heartbeat from crushing Makoto's skull when his voice rang out.
A blinding streak of white light erupted skyward from the far side of Konohagakure, tearing across the horizon and hurtling straight toward Itachi's third-form Susanoo, that towering monument to divine wrath.
Against the sword pressure rolling off the Totsuka Blade, the light was nothing. A firefly competing with the moon.
Itachi's Mangekyou Sharingan tracked the streak instantly.
He frowned. It was flying directly into the path of his sword strike.
Has someone lost their mind?
The thought barely formed before what happened next made his pupils contract to pinpoints.
The white light passed through the sword pressure like a mirage. Phased clean through it without slowing, and kept coming straight for him.
"What?!"
For the first time in the entire fight, genuine shock broke across Itachi's face.
Even Obito, who had watched the battle with cold detachment from start to finish, went rigid behind his mask.
That technique... it reminded him of his own Kamui. The same ability to phase through physical attacks.
"That's..." Black Zetsu, a thousand-year-old scheming bastard, was the first to realize what was happening.
But before he could finish the sentence, the white light punched through the third-form Susanoo and arrived in front of Itachi.
Only then could he see it clearly.
A girl. No feet. Her entire body translucent, shimmering, half-there and half-not. Like a ghost.
Megumi Kato.
"Spirit Transformation Technique?!"
The name tore from Kakashi's lips before he could stop it.
He'd heard about it once from his old classmate, Shizune. The Kato clan possessed a secret art called the Spirit Transformation Technique.
An S-rank jutsu, fiendishly difficult to learn.
It separated the user's spirit from their physical body, allowing them to phase through any physical attack or defense and strike from a distance. In that state, the spirit form was effectively invincible.
But power like that came with a price. The user's physical body was left completely defenseless. One hit, and they were dead.
Is that girl... a descendant of the Kato clan?
Kakashi was overthinking it. The shared surname was pure coincidence.
But when it came to stealth-type jutsu, Megumi possessed a terrifying natural gift. She'd mastered this S-rank technique in barely a month.
At that moment, her physical body lay face-down on the floor of Makoto's home in the Sarutobi clan's new compound, deep in a state of astral projection. Utaha Kasumigaoka and Ran Mouri stood guard on either side, watching over her.
On the battlefield, in the split second of Itachi's shock, the spirit-form Megumi slipped inside his body like a possessing ghost.
This was the Spirit Transformation Technique's method of attack: enter the target's body and tear their psyche apart from within.
Under normal circumstances, even this wouldn't have worked on someone like Itachi. His willpower was iron.
But after burning through one Mangekyou ability after another, his stamina and Chakra had hit absolute zero. The tank was dry. The fumes were gone.
Megumi's attack power was enough.
"Ngh..."
Itachi clutched his head, his face twisting in agony. He staggered and dropped to one knee.
The godlike third-form Susanoo surrounding him began to shed its armor in great slabs, collapsing from third form to second form in seconds.
It was about to regress further.
"Get... out!"
Itachi snarled through gritted teeth, and a raw pulse of willpower blasted the spirit-form Megumi out of his body.
By then, Susanoo had already crumbled back to the skeletal first form.
Megumi's translucent body was already fading. She turned to look at Makoto, her voice tinged with apology. "Sorry, Sensei."
"Don't be. That was more than enough."
Makoto laughed and charged toward Itachi, reaching out to ruffle the ghost-form Megumi's hair as he passed. His hand passed through, of course, but it was the thought that counted.
Itachi gasped for air, scraping together every last scrap of energy to hold even the first-form Susanoo together. The skeletal hand swung wide, swiping at Makoto.
Item: Mangekyou Sharingan (Fugaku Uchiha), activated!
Gray-black Chakra ignited across Makoto's body like dark flame, solidifying into a cage of ribs that caught the orange-red skeletal hand dead.
Every spectator on the field froze.
Obito and both Zetsus on the high ground. Kakashi and Kurenai tangled with Sound and Sand ninja in the distance. The Akizuki sisters, Mrs. Yukinoshita, and the other players who had pulled back to the perimeter.
Every single one of them stared, wide-eyed, unable to process what they were seeing.
Hachiman, still shielding Saika Totsuka, let his jaw drop wide enough to fit a fist. "That... that's..."
Eriri's voice cracked. "Does... does that mean..."
Yukino whispered, stunned. "He... he has one too..."
As her words faded, the gray-black ribs encasing Makoto erupted outward, forming a massive skull and skeletal arms.
Identical in shape to the skeletal giant wrapped around Itachi.
(A/N: Since Sasuke's Susanoo is dark purple and Itachi's is orange-red, blending the two creates a gray-black color. It just so happens that the protagonist's Mangekyou belongs to their father, so I went with this color.)
Susanoo. First form.
"You... how..."
Even Itachi could only stare.
Then it clicked. His mind snapped back to a night four years ago. His father's body on the ground. The empty, gouged sockets where Fugaku Uchiha's eyes had been.
"Yeah." Makoto grinned. "That was me."
Chakra roared through him. The gray-black skeleton sprouted a web of glowing pathways that thickened into muscle, then flesh.
Susanoo. Second form.
"Impossible!" White Zetsu's shriek split the air.
One of their primary reasons for coming to Konohagakure, beyond gauging the abilities of this kid who'd learned the Flying Thunder God Technique, was to find out who had stolen Fugaku's Mangekyou Sharingan on the Night of the Massacre.
If it was Makoto, that wasn't especially surprising on its own. Even at eight years old, the possibility wasn't unthinkable. Itachi himself had seen live combat at that age.
But here was the real question: how could he switch freely between the Sharingan and his normal eyes after transplanting them?
Anyone outside the Uchiha bloodline who received a transplanted Sharingan was stuck with it permanently active, bleeding Chakra at all times. Kakashi was living proof.
Obito didn't answer the question hanging in the air.
He launched Kamui and surged toward the battlefield.
Moments ago, he'd been content to let Makoto steal Itachi's Mangekyou. The way he saw it, the two of them tearing each other apart was a dog-eat-dog affair, and Obito Uchiha would be the one left holding the spoils.
Itachi's Mangekyou was nearly burnt out anyway. Even if Makoto took it, he'd get two uses out of it at best.
But now? Now Makoto already possessed Fugaku's Mangekyou. Everything had changed.
If he also acquired Itachi's, he could fuse the two into a new Eternal Mangekyou Sharingan.
And that would make Makoto Nishikado a catastrophic obstacle to the Eye of the Moon Plan.
Before Obito could close the distance, Makoto's gray-black Susanoo drove a fist into the orange-red Susanoo across from it.
One punch. That was all it took.
Second form against a first form that its user could barely sustain. There was no contest.
"Now then." Makoto reached toward Itachi's face. "Hand over your Mangekyou."
"I don't think so."
Obito materialized between them from thin air.
The distant onlookers flinched again. When did he get over there?
Makoto's eyes slid sideways to Obito.
Kamui. What a pain.
No getting around it. Kamui was the most dangerous Mangekyou ability in existence.
Kotoamatsukami was arguably more broken, sure, but it came shackled to a massive cooldown. Kamui didn't have that weakness.
And its versatility was unmatched. In the early days, Obito had used it to make fools of every heavy hitter in the shinobi world. In the endgame, transplanted to Kakashi, it had been useful against Kaguya herself. That track record spoke for itself.
Honestly, that ability would hold up even in the Dragon Ball universe.
There was a reason fans had a saying: It's not Wood Release that's strong, it's Hashirama. It's not Obito that's strong, it's Kamui.
Why had the early Obito been able to dance circles around every top-tier ninja alive, only to fight Kakashi to a dead heat after his mask shattered during the Fourth Great Ninja War?
It wasn't that Kakashi's legendary ability to go fifty-fifty with anyone had kicked in.
It was that Kakashi understood Kamui better than anyone alive. He knew exactly how to counter it.
Against Kakashi, Kamui's effectiveness dropped through the floor.
And without Kamui propping him up, Obito's true combat level was right there alongside Kakashi's. Nothing more.
Makoto didn't have a good answer for Kamui right now.
But that was fine.
Sometimes the winning move is off the board entirely.
"Obito."
He said it lightly, almost offhand.
"You wouldn't want others to find out your true identity... would you?"
The masked man, already coiling to strike, went dead still.
His hesitation lasted a fraction of a second.
That fraction was all Makoto needed.
His fingers plunged into Itachi's eye sockets.
"AAGH..."
Even someone with Itachi's legendary endurance couldn't swallow the scream when his eyes were torn from his skull.