Chapter 171: Kamui? I Can Do That Too! (7K3) (Patreon)

The next morning.

Tokyo Tower.

The Top Deck.

Thanks to a small indulgence of power, the whole of Tokyo Tower had closed its reservations to the public today. The only visitor in the observatory, hanging alone 250 meters above the ground, was a single man.

A light rain had started up again that morning. Raindrops streaked down the slanted glass walls and cut the city outside into fragments.

Uchiha Ayato stood before the floor-to-ceiling window. He wore a fitted honey-colored trench coat that fell to the bend of his knees, and in his right hand he held the hot latte little Miss Saki had made for him before he left. White steam curled up against the cold glass.

Looking down, Tokyo's vast steel forest lay wrapped in a haze of gray rain and mist, like a giant beast that had just woken and was still catching its breath.

Any random frame of this scene could have been an atmospheric wallpaper. Even London might not have been as melancholy as Uncle Ayato was right now.

A place with neither sky nor earth.

That was the reception room Uchiha Ayato had picked for himself and the poor relative from the old hometown.

He lifted his paper cup and took a sip of the coffee, which had already cooled a little. He felt troubled.

He and Hatake Kakashi had never even met. There was no deep-seated feud between them.

If he simply told the man that getting home meant fighting him, Kakashi would surely cooperate.

But how many performance points would the System give for a spar fought with the attitude of ticking a box?

They'd be outrageously low, no question.

To score high, to squeeze every drop of value out of this first battle of the "Ascent to Godhood," he had to make his opponent fight with the resolve of someone staking his life.

So what excuse could push a battle-hardened ANBU elite that far?

Uchiha Ayato tilted his head back and drained the last of the coffee.

With a flick of his wrist, the empty cup traced a perfect arc and dropped neatly into a sorting bin seven or eight meters away.

The next second, he released his Chakra without holding anything back.

With Uchiha Ayato at the center, the Chakra burst outward like an invisible storm.

There was no need to send a message. This was the most forceful proof of his presence.

The glass panes began to vibrate at high frequency. The decorative light tubes overhead flickered a few times and gave off an overloaded electrical whine.

Ordinary people nearby clutched at their chests. They had no idea what was happening. They only felt the air turn thick and sticky, and every breath cost them enormous effort.

"Strange… why did the air pressure suddenly drop…"

A young salesclerk in the shopping mall turned pale and swayed, leaning against a display counter.

For Jujutsu Sorcerers, the impact was far sharper, as if a knife had been laid directly against their throats.

"Such enormous cursed energy…"

At Jujutsu Headquarters, the rotten tangerines of the upper ranks stared in terror toward Tokyo Tower, their livers and gallbladders trembling, every scrap of courage ground to dust.

At that same moment, Hatake Kakashi, staying in a safe house at Jujutsu High, snapped his eyes open.

He sat up on the plain single bed and stared past the window at the distant sky.

That Chakra…

Kakashi's face darkened.

It was too enormous.

A Chakra this vast gave Kakashi a terrifying suspicion.

He had assumed the boy had merely used the Mangekyou Sharingan to control the Nine-Tails and was commanding it like a Summoning Beast.

Now it looked as though things might be a hundred times worse than he'd imagined.

That brat named Uchiha Ayato had most likely sealed the monster inside his own body and become a jinchuriki.

A Nine-Tails jinchuriki who wielded the Mangekyou Sharingan…

Kakashi's hand tightened on the kunai beside him without his noticing.

If a monster like that was one more link in the Uchiha bloodline of madmen, he'd be a catastrophe for any world.

He hesitated no longer and rolled out of bed.

He pushed the window open, and his whole body turned into a streak of afterimage that shot into the cold morning rain toward the source of the Chakra surge.

*

Five minutes later.

Uchiha Ayato was still gazing at the gray, murky sky outside.

Just then, an irregular dark shape suddenly blocked his view.

A figure with limbs spread wide was clinging firmly to the slick glass wall.

Anyone who didn't know better would have thought he was cosplaying Spider-Man.

Through the thick windproof glass, Kakashi smiled with his eyes and lifted a hand to wave at Uchiha Ayato, by way of a greeting.

Then a faint ripple of spatial distortion spread over Kakashi's body, and he seemed to melt into the transparent barrier.

The next second, he had landed steadily inside the observatory.

Kakashi straightened up, brushed the water droplets from his vest, and said casually:

"Yo, good morning."

Face to face now, Kakashi finally got a proper look at Uchiha Ayato's appearance.

It was a deceptively striking face.

His features were so refined they bordered on androgynous, yet there was nothing feminine about him. Instead, he exuded a natural, bone-deep coldness and world-weariness.

Kakashi sighed inwardly.

He had to admit, the Uchiha bloodline was almost unfairly strong in this respect.

On looks alone, the boy in front of him even outdid Sasuke.

"I'm Hatake Kakashi, a jonin of Konoha."

Kakashi slipped his hands into his pockets, tone easy.

"I never expected to meet one of the famous Uchiha, the great clan of the shinobi world, in another world. Fate really is a wonderful thing."

He took a small step forward, trying to close the distance a bit:

"Either way, you could say we're fellow countrymen meeting in a foreign land."

"In a place where we don't know anyone, let's get along well, shall we~"

In just a few sentences, Kakashi had already cast several layers of probing nets.

If Uchiha Ayato took the bait, Kakashi was confident he could pull out of the answer how Ayato saw the shinobi world, what period he came from, and what he thought of Konoha.

But Uchiha Ayato only looked at him calmly. In those black pupils there was no joy at meeting someone from home in a strange land, and no pleasure at being flattered.

After a brief silence, Uchiha Ayato let out a soft snort that sounded especially harsh in the empty observatory.

"The great clan of the shinobi world?"

He repeated the phrase as though he'd heard the joke of the century:

"You mean the 'great clan' that couldn't fill the fingers of one hand even if you dragged out every last member to make up the numbers?"

"Ah, but you're not wrong."

Uchiha Ayato turned his head slightly, and a disquieting cold light began to rise in his eyes:

"If you only count average combat strength, then the Uchiha really can be called the strongest family in the shinobi world."

Kakashi's hands tightened in his pockets. The instinct honed over years in the ANBU pushed him straight into the highest level of alertness.

Couldn't fill one hand…

This kid not only knew the Uchiha clan's situation, but he spoke of it in a tone that was cold, a mix of reason and madness.

"So you've realized it, Hatake Kakashi."

Uchiha Ayato took a step forward.

It was a casual step, yet it made the air that had only just settled turn thick again.

"That's right."

Uchiha Ayato tugged at the corner of his mouth, and the smile that appeared sent a chill down the spine:

"The one standing here is not the fellow countryman you wanted to claim as kin."

"I am a ghost."

"One who crawled out of that night soaked in blood, with nothing in his heart but hatred…"

"A ghost!"

As the words fell, the air seemed to be drained away.

Hatake Kakashi instinctively backed off half a step, his sole scraping harshly against the floor.

Uchiha Ayato gave him no chance to open the distance.

His black pupils had turned crimson at some point. A Mangekyou pattern slowly rotated in his eyes, locking onto the silver-haired shinobi in front of him.

"Even though ten years have passed, I still dream of that night."

Uchiha Ayato raised his chin slightly, and the flicker of flames seemed to reflect in his scarlet eyes:

"The wails of my clansmen as they were slaughtered still echo in my ears to this day."

"The feeling of blood draining away as cold steel pierced my chest…"

"Not for a single second have I forgotten."

As he spoke, he abruptly raised his hand and pointed straight at the Mangekyou Sharingan Kakashi had left exposed:

"Hatake Kakashi! That Sharingan of yours, was it also a trophy pried out of the pile of Uchiha corpses on that night?"

Kakashi's eyes flew wide.

He knew all too well what an Uchiha with that look in his eyes was capable of once he snapped.

He raised both hands and waved them twice in front of him in a placating gesture:

"Wait, calm down a little, Ayato."

"I can understand your hatred and your wish for revenge. What happened that night… was an irreversible tragedy."

As he spoke, Kakashi kept a wary eye on the flow of Chakra in Uchiha Ayato's body:

"But even if you want revenge, the first requirement is getting back to the shinobi world, isn't it?"

"This is another world, after all."

He pointed at the floor beneath them, then at the gray sky outside the window:

"Why don't we sit down first and talk properly about how to get back?"

"Once we're back in the shinobi world, I won't stop you from going after whoever you want, however you want."

The kid's strength was certainly unfathomable, but if he really did return to the present shinobi world, then facing the grown-up Naruto and Sasuke, even if he wanted revenge he'd probably struggle to stir up any real trouble.

Right now the top priority was to steady this bomb, who looked dangerously unstable.

Hearing this, Uchiha Ayato suddenly fell quiet.

He lowered his head, and his shoulders began to shake uncontrollably.

Then he laughed.

The laughter grew louder and louder, until it became uninhibited, raving laughter.

"Back to the shinobi world?"

Uchiha Ayato stopped laughing, madness glittering in his eyes:

"Kakashi, have you got something wrong?"

He opened his right hand, palm up.

After a slight warp in space, a shriveled brown seed covered in eerie patterns appeared abruptly in his hand.

The moment it appeared, the air around them seemed to grow thousands of times heavier.

"Why do you think you're here?"

Uchiha Ayato stared at the seed, his expression turning fervent and intoxicated:

"In this boring world like a pool of stagnant water, it was I who pulled you here with my own hands."

"Kakashi, the world is nothing but a huge, ugly machine, and everyone is just a gear wearing itself out for nothing inside it."

He closed his fingers and clenched the seed tightly:

"Only I…"

"Only I can command this machine!"

"Once I plant the Divine Tree here, it will drain all the sorrow and pain from this world."

"And I will become the one and only god of this world."

"As for you, the ones the Divine Tree has pulled over from the shinobi world…"

Uchiha Ayato turned his head toward Kakashi, and a cruel smile spread across his face:

"In time you'll naturally become fine nourishment for the Divine Tree."

"You are only the beginning."

"When the day comes that the Divine Tree is fully grown…"

"I will open the passage back to the shinobi world again, and burn that world of betrayal and slaughter, a world that should have been destroyed long ago, to ashes!"

Inside the sealed space, the Nine-Tails propped his chin on one paw and started to grumble:

"Hey, Ayato."

"Aren't you overdoing it? I can see the acting from here."

Shut up, Kurama, don't ruin Uncle Ayato's big moment!

You've never met the Uchiha, so of course you don't know that only this level of crazy fits other people's stereotypes of them.

In the real world, Kakashi's expression had already turned grim.

So that's how it is…

Not a single Uchiha who awakened the Mangekyou Sharingan had ever escaped that twisted curse of fate.

He had only just seen Madara and Obito off, and now here came another one, Ayato, planning to plant a Divine Tree and destroy two worlds?

Talking was pointless now.

With an Uchiha who had slipped into madness like this, there was only one way.

He had to be beaten down by force first, so that his brain, burned out by hatred, could clear up even a little.

The thought had barely crossed Kakashi's mind. His wrist twitched, and he was about to reach for a kunai.

Just then, he caught sight of Uchiha Ayato across from him, who had at some point put the seed away, his hands now a blur of afterimages in front of his chest.

Snake — Ram — Monkey — Boar — Horse — Tiger.

Kakashi knew this sequence of seals all too well.

But he'd never imagined the speed of the seals could reach this point. Every seal was finished in what felt like a single blink.

Uchiha Ayato drew a deep breath, and his vast Chakra converted into violent fire nature at his throat.

"Fire Release: Great Fireball Technique!"

A white fireball erupted from his mouth.

The blazing light exploded outward, and the terrifying heat and expanding shockwave swallowed the entire space in an instant.

The extreme heat swept in every direction with irresistible force. The glass walls all around shattered on the spot, and tens of thousands of shards fell toward the street below, glittering in the firelight.

The flames licked directly at the thick steel members supporting the top of the tower, and the steel began to glow red and soften under the abnormal heat.

With part of its support gone, the whole spire groaned and twisted in the morning wind with a tooth-grating creak, tilting dangerously to one side, ready to fall at any moment.

On the street below, early-rising pedestrians and cars were startled by the sudden roar and the rain of falling glass. Screams and the shriek of brakes merged into one, and chaos began to spread.

At the very center of the blast, Hatake Kakashi's headband had long since been pushed up from his left eye, and ripples of spatial distortion spread across his body.

Kamui: Intangibility.

The instant the Great Fireball swallowed him, Kakashi shifted his body into the other dimension and avoided all the damage.

In the gap as the wave of flame ebbed slightly, Kakashi didn't linger for a moment. He used the recoil of the blast wave to throw himself backward out through a gap in the shattered glass wall.

The cold autumn rain struck Kakashi's face and washed away the heat that had clung to him.

With no idea how many more trump cards this self-proclaimed "ghost" of an Uchiha was hiding, staying in that small enclosed space would be tantamount to suicide.

Enough distance meant more room for error, and more time to think and react.

Mid-fall, Kakashi twisted his waist neatly, thrust out both hands, and caught a thick steel beam jutting out at a slant.

He used his momentum to swing forward like a pendulum, gathering Chakra at the soles of his feet.

The next moment, Kakashi was standing steadily on the tilted steel frame, nearly parallel to the ground.

He quickly steadied his breathing, lowered his center of gravity, and fixed his eyes on the ruined gap in the observatory above.

The sight that came into view next made Kakashi's pupils contract sharply.

Uchiha Ayato, hands in his pockets as though strolling through his own back garden, was leisurely stepping on thin air as he walked out of that charred gap.

The gravity point above his head let him hover in the sky unhindered, and the cold rain was flicked away by the Limitless barrier the moment it came near him.

Once outside, Uchiha Ayato didn't rush to attack Kakashi.

He glanced at the spire, which was groaning in agony as its steel frame melted and slowly toppled, and remarked offhandedly:

"Not very sturdy, is it."

His eyes grew brighter for an instant, and the Mangekyou pattern rotated one notch counterclockwise.

Amenotokotachi.

Time began to flow backward within the localized space.

The twisted steel reinforcements straightened and hardened again with a scrape, and the charred surfaces returned to their original red and white.

The countless shards of falling glass seemed to answer a summons. They whistled back up into the sky against gravity and fit together seamlessly.

In just a few breaths, under Kakashi's gaze, the near-collapsed spire was restored as good as new.

Only after all this did Uchiha Ayato lower his head unhurriedly, his indifferent eyes looking through the curtain of rain at Kakashi clinging to the beam below.

Hatake Kakashi: …

Kakashi, still crouched in a defensive stance, felt the corner of his mouth twitch.

Repairing it while fighting?

This guy wasn't treating the battle, or Kakashi himself, as an obstacle worth taking seriously.

Just as Kakashi's mind raced, working out how to deal with Uchiha Ayato's time-type ocular technique, Uchiha Ayato's figure vanished from his sight.

"Crackle—!"

The next instant, a thunderous roar like a thousand birds screaming at once exploded behind Kakashi.

A blinding flash of lightning lit up the rain and mist, stabbing straight at Kakashi's back.

The hairs on Kakashi's body stood on end.

Danger!

He gave up his footing and let himself fall, and the formidable ocular power surged in his eye once more.

Kamui.

"Shhk—!"

The right hand, wrapped in high-voltage lightning, passed through Kakashi's chest at a sharp angle. The rain around it was electrolyzed by the raging lightning-nature Chakra.

Kakashi tumbled several times in midair, riding the momentum of his fall. His left hand hurled a kunai trailing a wire and snagged a crossbeam a dozen-odd meters below.

He swung around half a circle like a child on a swing, crashed heavily onto the beam, and dropped to one knee.

Kakashi snapped his head up, his chest heaving, his eyes fixed above him.

Uchiha Ayato stood exactly where Kakashi had been a moment ago. The lightning on the right hand that had just delivered the killing blow hadn't fully faded, and a few thin arcs still danced at his fingertips.

"Lightning Blade!?"

Kakashi's heart began to pound out of control.

That was a technique he had developed himself, and he certainly didn't remember teaching it to anyone.

"Who taught you that technique?"

"And besides…"

Into Kakashi's mind flashed the movement trajectory from moments ago, one even the Mangekyou Sharingan couldn't track:

"Your close-range method, is that the Fourth Hokage's Flying Thunder God Technique?"

But Flying Thunder God required a prepared marking to activate.

When had this guy left a spatial mark to serve as a stepping stone?

Uchiha Ayato shook out his hand and answered, utterly relaxed:

"Flying Thunder God? No."

"That's no hard-to-understand trick."

He pointed at the air between them:

"I simply deleted the time it took me to move from where I stood to your back."

"If your Sharingan's ocular power were strong enough, you could still barely make out the afterimage of that moment."

Uchiha Ayato looked at his own right hand, and the curve of his mouth widened a little, filled with a nastiness that cut straight to the heart:

"Oh, by the way, your reaction to that move just now was pretty good."

"Your 'Lightning Blade' is rather handy to use. Thanks."

Cold sweat slid down Kakashi's temple and mixed with the rain.

He could hear his own heavy breathing.

This was bad.

Kakashi quickly assessed the situation in front of him.

The effect of those eyes' ocular technique was clearly more than simply rewinding time. It was very likely complete control over time.

On top of that, he held in his hands powers like the Perfect Susanoo and the Nine-Tails, forces that could decide the course of a war.

This guy was practically a walking nuclear arsenal, and every one of his methods carried lethal destructive force.

If he was left unchecked, that mad plan to destroy the world with a Divine Tree was certainly no joke.

He had to subdue him here.

But how?

Kakashi glanced down.

The blast had taken place high in the air, but the falling glass and the blinding light had already set off panic over a very wide area below.

If he clashed Susanoo against Susanoo here…

The tower and the ground around it would be reduced to powder within seconds.

How many innocent people would be dragged into it?

It couldn't even be calculated.

What's more, from start to finish, Kakashi had never once had the thought of killing Uchiha Ayato.

In this unfamiliar other world, the boy was the only one who knew a clue to getting back.

He had to be restrained with the least possible collateral damage.

No large-scale ninjutsu trading blows.

Only pure close-quarters taijutsu to suppress him, and then, at point-blank range… use that one move.

His mind made up, Kakashi drew a deep breath and poured Chakra into his legs.

"Bang!"

The steel beam under his feet sank sharply downward.

Kakashi's whole body became an afterimage and shot up against the rain toward Uchiha Ayato above.

The two figures collided in an instant, and the dull thud of fists and feet meeting rang out.

Kakashi's assault was fierce beyond measure. With the dynamic vision of his Sharingan, every strike aimed at a vital joint.

Against such dense close-range strikes in such a perilous high-altitude setting, even an ordinary elite jonin would probably have lost his balance and fallen within three exchanges.

But Uchiha Ayato didn't retreat half a step. His feet seemed to have taken root in the steel beam.

Facing Kakashi's storm of attacks, Uchiha Ayato defused every one with nothing but his hands, blocking and brushing aside, and body turns that looked casual.

"Smack!"

Uchiha Ayato knocked aside, with the back of his hand and neither gently nor hard, a knife-hand strike aimed straight at his throat.

"What's wrong, Kakashi?"

Uchiha Ayato even had the leisure to tease:

"Why haven't you used a single technique and gone straight back to the basics?"

"Is that all the so-called elite jonin of Konoha has to offer?"

He sidestepped a sweeping kick, and his left hand pushed on Kakashi's shoulder in the same motion, breaking his balance.

Now!

Faced with Uchiha Ayato's taunts, Kakashi's expression didn't change in the slightest.

He seized the instant the other man's attention drifted and fixed his gaze on the arm Uchiha Ayato had not yet pulled back.

Kamui!

Space twisted violently at Uchiha Ayato's wrist, forming a miniature black vortex.

Kakashi's aim was clear.

Use Kamui to snap the opponent's arm in a split second. That would cripple his ability to perform complex ninjutsu without killing him, and then Kakashi could press the advantage, drag him into the Kamui dimension, and fight with no restraint at all.

The instant the black vortex formed, Kakashi's heart leapt into his throat.

He knew the power of this technique. If the opponent reacted even a little slowly, once the focus locked on, even the sturdiest defense would be torn apart by space itself.

Yet the expected crack of breaking bone never came, and no blood sprayed.

The spatial distortion vortex produced by Kamui had indeed settled over the joint between Uchiha Ayato's arm and shoulder.

But the spatial force that should have torn everything apart had no effect at all on Uchiha Ayato.

Space had been twisted, but that arm remained right there, completely intact.

Not only that, Kakashi's hands hadn't been idle while he activated Kamui.

He had tried to seize Uchiha Ayato's body in the confusion, so as to draw him into the Kamui dimension faster.

But the moment his fingertips touched the fabric of Uchiha Ayato's coat, a strange sensation hit him.

There was no resistance and no substance. Kakashi's hand simply went straight through.

"What?"

Kakashi's eyes widened in disbelief, and his usually calm mind went blank.

Nullified?

Not only had Kamui's spatial tearing failed, but even physical contact was impossible now?

This phenomenon…

This phenomenon was exactly like the thing he himself had used a moment ago to dodge the Great Fireball and Lightning Blade…

"Surprised?"

Uchiha Ayato's mocking voice sounded beside his ear.

Still in the pose of having been pierced through, he watched the stunned silver-haired shinobi with amusement:

"Kamui."

He spoke the word softly, and the corner of his mouth curled in contempt:

"I have to admit, it's a truly convenient ability."

"But unfortunately for you…"

"I know this ocular technique too."

Hatake Kakashi: ???