Akira blinked, then gave a helpless smile. "You've got the wrong idea, onee-san. I don't mean that kind of desire."
"I just don't like seeing beautiful things destroyed. Some people are obsessed with broken beauty, but I'm not one of them. If something good still exists in this miserable world, I'd rather see it last a little longer."
Yugito shot him a sharp glare. "What exactly do you mean by 'beautiful things'? Are you turning me into an object now?"
Akira was briefly speechless. This woman really had a talent for locking onto the most inconvenient part of a sentence.
"Beautiful things are usually fragile. I don't like seeing them shattered. That's all. You don't need to read more into it than that."
"It's just that if someone as strong as you died because of some twisted trick, that would be a real loss to the ninja world."
"In a straight fight, that immortal member of the Akatsuki wouldn't be your match at all."
"But if you walked into a trap like that blind and died to one of those bizarre first-time kill abilities, that would be a ridiculous way to go."
Yugito's face stayed cold, and she didn't answer. She simply followed behind Yugao in silence.
Akira found that just as well. He had said what needed saying. Whether she believed him or not was up to her.
The group crossed the wastelands for a full day and night before finally reaching the place where Mōryō had once been sealed in the Land of Swamps.
It was a massive dormant volcano.
The moment the four of them rushed into the heart of the mountain, Akira immediately spotted the fanatic named Yomi in the middle of breaking the seal on Mōryō's physical body.
Dark violet chakra erupted outward in an instant, merging with the flesh beneath the earth.
At that moment, Yomi stood above the boiling magma, trembling with excitement as terrifying tendrils erupted one after another from the crater around him.
"Hahahaha! Mōryō-sama, rise! Reduce the Five Great Nations to ash and build an eternal empire that will last a thousand years!"
Yomi's ambition was to use Mōryō's power to rule the world, but he had clearly overestimated his own place in the arrangement.
To Mōryō, he was nothing more than a key used to open the door.
The instant its soul returned to its body, Mōryō burst into laughter and swallowed Yomi whole.
"It's been a long time since I returned to this world. Hahaha! The air here still tastes better!"
After devouring Yomi, hundreds of tendrils dozens of feet long burst upward from the lava lake and twisted wildly through the air like a swarm of demons.
The magma below was hot enough to melt steel, yet it did not harm Mōryō in the slightest.
The sheer toughness of its body was monstrous.
Mōryō dragged itself up from the lava and onto solid ground, instantly sensing Shion's presence. It laughed wildly.
"Shion! So you've finally come! Hurry. Join with me. Once we become one, conquering this world will be effortless!"
...
Those words made Akira's brow tighten.
"This thing came from another world. Does that mean the priestess's ancestors were some kind of otherworldly travelers too?"
As far as Akira was concerned, this so-called other world was probably just another subspace attached to the ninja world itself.
Something like the Three Great Sage Regions, only more hidden and far stranger.
If he was right, then the priestess line probably came from that same realm. Otherwise, there was no way they would be born with the ability to seal Mōryō in the first place.
Shion stared at the countless writhing tendrils in front of her, her voice trembling.
"Akira-san... this monster is terrifying..."
Yugito frowned in disgust as well. She hated creatures like this, all slick movement and writhing limbs, repulsive and dangerous at the same time.
Akira gently placed a hand on Shion's head and said calmly, "Lady Priestess, just focus on sealing it. If the sky falls, I'll hold it up."
Yugito stepped up beside Shion and gave her shoulder a light pat. "Relax, Lady Priestess. As long as he and I are here, nothing is touching you."
Yūgao said nothing. She knew her limits. A battle on this level was beyond her, so the best thing she could do was stay out of the way and avoid becoming a burden.
Akira turned to her and said, "Yūgao-onee-san, guard the entrance. Keep the Phantom Army outside from breaking in."
Yūgao understood immediately that this was Akira's way of protecting her. She nodded in gratitude and ran for the cave mouth at once.
Inside the volcano, the atmosphere grew so heavy it felt suffocating.
The lava lake churned, and those hundreds of tendrils kept multiplying, as if they meant to split the whole mountain open.
As a fiend from another realm, Mōryō's chakra reserves were absurd. Aside from the Nine-Tails, there probably wasn't a single Tailed Beast that could rival it in sheer chakra volume.
While Mōryō continued trying to lure Shion over with its voice, Akira stepped forward and stood directly in front of her.
Faced with that sea of writhing tendrils, his expression never changed.
"Mōryō, this world isn't your playground. Since you've crawled out, go back where you came from."
Mōryō didn't even bother replying to the human standing in front of it. It simply sent more than a dozen thick tendrils crashing toward Akira with explosive force.
They were so fast that in the blink of an eye they were already almost at his face.
Akira looked at the incoming tendrils and let out a cold laugh. "You really are arrogant."
The moment those tendrils were about to pierce straight through him, an overwhelming surge of chakra erupted from his body.
Countless strands of blue-white lightning exploded across his skin, instantly forming a cloak of electricity.
Then that lightning gathered behind him and took shape as more than a dozen enormous lightning-forged hands.
"Bang!"
The unstoppable tendrils were caught in an instant, seized hard in those giant lightning hands and held completely still.
"Rumble!"
The clash of those two monstrous forces shook the entire volcano.
Crackling electricity raced wildly along the tendrils from Akira's body.
"Lightning Style: Thunder Bind!"
Wrapped in a cloak of lightning, with more than a dozen gigantic electric arms dancing behind him, Akira looked less like a human and more like some Tailed Beast in chakra mode.
The pain of the massive electrical surge forced a furious roar out of Mōryō, and it immediately severed its own tendrils.
Crunch.
More than a dozen enormous tendrils dropped away at once. The pain finally made Mōryō take the human before it seriously.
"You wretched little human! How can a mere human possess power like this?!"
But within seconds, the severed tendrils had already regenerated, restoring themselves as though nothing had happened.
Watching that, Akira gave a calm evaluation.
"Not bad. Looks like you're connected to your own world and using chakra from over there to rebuild your body."
Hearing that, Mōryō was genuinely shaken, and for the first time a note of alarm entered its voice.
"Boy... who are you? I can't leave you alive!"
Akira's eyes narrowed, and he smiled slightly. "So I guessed right. The principle is similar to sage chakra. You're pulling power from another realm, which is why you look like you have endless chakra and an immortal body. In that case, all I have to do is seal this body and rip your soul out so it can crawl back home."
"Looks like the priestess back then figured out the same weakness."
Once he understood that, Akira realized something important.
Even without Shion, he probably had a way to force this thing into a seal himself.
***************************
Read advanced chapters ahead of everyone else on my P@treon.
P@treon/GodDragcell