“Sorry, got caught in rush hour traffic for a bit.” “Did I keep you waiting?” Dust and moonlight poured in through the collapsed window together.
Uchiha Ayato tilted his head slightly, a casual, unhurried smile on his lips.
The lightning-blue light was retracting into his palm inch by inch, and the air — previously reeking of blood — had been scrubbed significantly cleaner by the electrical storm.
Wakaba Mutsumi sat on the floor, completely blank.
Her gaze cut through the wreckage and locked onto the profile of this uninvited guest.
That was a face striking enough to blur the lines of gender — she’d only caught a brief glimpse of it from a distance yesterday.
What made Mutsumi shiver right now was the change in the boy’s eyes.
They were crimson.
Against the deep red backdrop, three black tomoe were rotating in a strange, rhythmic cadence.
Dangerous and unsettling.
Those red eyes — the ones that had sliced through the dead end at the edge of life and death like a blade parting clouds at dawn — had crashed into Mutsumi’s gray world with brute force, and then without any manners at all, taken root there.
She had a feeling she’d never forget these eyes for as long as she lived.
Thud.
Thud.
Mutsumi could hear her own heartbeat, pounding like a war drum against her ribs.
She opened her mouth.
Only a thin thread of air came out.
Uchiha Ayato had of course noticed the girl’s completely dazed expression.
He raised an eyebrow, slightly amused — though the situation wasn’t exactly ideal for small talk right now.
His mood was actually pretty good, though.
The smile pulling at his lips refused to be suppressed.
Right when he’d driven that single blow to shatter the thing’s right arm, the little system panel visible only to him had blinked quietly — [Random Event Mission: Rescue Uchiha Itachi.] [Mission Status: Complete.] [Reward Issued: Dōjutsu — Tsukuyomi.] Ayato caught the absolutely deranged classification in the panel from the corner of his eye, then let his gaze drift back down to the nervous little girl on the floor.
He barely kept the laugh inside.
Togawa Sakiko is Sasuke, and Wakaba Mutsumi is Itachi?
What kind of logic is that?
Uncle Ayato can tell this system is a hardcore Sakiko-Mutsumi shipping zealot.
Tsukuyomi — the most powerful mental attack in existence.
One look into the caster’s eyes and you’re caught, your mind dragged into the illusion space.
The user has complete control over time, space, mass — everything in that world — subjecting the target to suffering indistinguishable from reality.
A dōjutsu that normally required the Mangekyō Sharingan to activate, but if the system was giving it, it presumably had already downward-adjusted the requirements.
Crunch.
The sound of grinding bone from the front snapped Ayato back to the present.
The Kuchisake-onna, who had just taken catastrophic damage — her right arm blown completely apart by the lightning — came staggering back out of the rubble, swaying upright.
Black blood poured in thick streams down her tattered trench coat.
[Ryuchi Cave Summoned Beast Chakra: 50,000 / 90,000 Rank: Jōnin Level 3 (Lower Than Dirt)] Kuchisake-onna paid no attention to her arm hanging limp and useless at her side.
That face, twisted into something barely human by extreme agony, snapped toward Uchiha Ayato.
The moment those cloudy, bloodshot eyes locked onto his features — a face without a single flaw — hatred ten times more intense than anything she’d shown before detonated in an instant.
That was the ugliest jealousy from the very source of this urban legend.
This Imaginary Vengeful Cursed Spirit — condensed from humanity’s obsession with and terror of “beauty and ugliness” — had a bone-deep, compulsive urge to destroy anything perfectly beautiful, perfectly handsome.
And on top of that, this absurdly good-looking little punk had seriously hurt her.
“Die…
DIE!!
” “Too beautiful!
UNFORGIVABLE!!” Kuchisake-onna’s mouth — slit back to the hinges of her jaw, opened to a width no human mandible could ever achieve — gaped wide.
Her crimson tongue writhed madly, slinging thick drool in every direction.
Her remaining left hand death-gripped the enormous, rust-crusted shears.
The temperature in the room plummeted to freezing.
Suffocating cursed energy pressure materialized into a howling black gale, shrieking toward the black-haired boy and trying to cut him clean in half.
What happened next was not what anyone expected.
Uchiha Ayato didn’t move.
Kuchisake-onna let out a screaming laugh.
The shears, carrying enough cursed energy to shred the entire building, drove forward — unchallenged, straight through Uchiha Ayato’s chest.
Squelch.
The sound of flesh tearing was clearly audible in the dead-silent room.
The light that had just kindled in Wakaba Mutsumi’s eyes went out again.
She watched — helpless — as the black-clad boy’s chest opened up into a hole large enough to see through, blood spattering down across the broken glass on the floor like red camellias blooming in a ruin.
“Dead…” “Killed you…” “Beautiful things all deserve to be killed…” Kuchisake-onna’s face shuddered with ecstasy.
She could even feel the shears truly lodged in the boy’s ribcage.
What a glorious sensation!
The only pleasure in the world that matched it was the destruction of perfect beauty!
But the shriek she’d expected, the begging, the sound of a body hitting the floor — none of it came.
The boy standing in front of her still wore that infuriating, unhurried smile.
Uchiha Ayato tilted his head slightly, looked down at the shears impaling his own chest, and somehow — impossibly — the corner of his mouth curved into something even more satisfied.
He didn’t spare a glance at the “fatal wound.” He simply met Kuchisake-onna’s venomous eyes with his own strange ones.
“When exactly did you convince yourself you weren’t caught in a genjutsu?” Under Kuchisake-onna’s frozen stare, the boy’s body — along with the “Wakaba Mutsumi” who’d been cowering in despair on the floor — began to turn transparent.
No spilling organs.
No spurting blood.
The solid muscle and flesh dissolved without a sound.
The broken door, the torn curtain, the dust motes hanging in the air…
Every last thing was painted over in a heart-stopping shade of dark red.
Time.
In this moment.
Stretched infinitely.
“This is…
what…” Kuchisake-onna screamed.
She found in a panic that she couldn’t pull the shears back.
The hardwood floor under her feet had transformed in an instant into a surging sea of blood.
The ceiling split open.
A vast, eerie crimson moon — as if it had been marinating in fresh blood — hung there now in the ashen sky where it had not been a moment before.
The entire world lost its color.
Only black, white, and an red so thick it wouldn’t dissolve.
Kuchisake-onna was pinned to a cross — the Quasi-Special Grade cursed spirit who had been so formidable moments ago now found even twitching a finger beyond her.
“Your defeat was decided from the very start.” Uchiha Ayato appeared before Kuchisake-onna and pressed a finger to her forehead.
“Tsukuyomi cannot be broken.” “The only ones who can defeat me are Sharingan users.” “You have no Sharingan.
So — how long do you think you can hold out?” Ayato drew a ninja blade from the air beside him.
“In the world of Tsukuyomi, whether it’s space, time…” The blade drove into the cursed spirit’s shoulder.
Every sensation was amplified a thousandfold, delivering a soul-tearing sensation of being ripped apart.
Kuchisake-onna thrashed wildly, desperately trying to teleport, trying to break this bizarre space apart with raw cursed energy.
But here, her prized abilities were nothing but garbled static — burning uselessly through her soul without any effect.
“…or mass.
All of it is mine to control.” Thousands of Uchiha Ayatos rose from the sea of blood, each one holding a blade of a different length.
“For the next seventy-two hours, I’m not going to stop.” “Let’s see how long you last.
Ha.
Hahaha!” The red-eyed boy laughed in the dark.
The cursed spirit’s wail echoed under the blood moon.
[Long-Term Mission: Return one thousand summoned creatures to the Three Great Sage Lands.
(370/1000).
Reward: Sage Mode] [Combat Mission: Complete three Grade A Missions (1/3).] [Mission Status: Stage 1 Complete.] [Reward Issued: Chakra Capacity x2] To be continued…