The Deep Desert – The Bleeding Mountain Cavern
A hundred miles east of Suna, in a region of the desert where the winds carved stone into shrieking, alien shapes, a cavern hid beneath a bleeding mountain of iron-red rock. Inside, the air was cool, still, and thick with the smell of ozone and ancient dust. In the center of the vast, natural chamber, the Gedo Statue sat in eternal, agonized silence, its nine closed eyes like wounds in its skeletal face.
Gaara hung suspended in the air before it, held by chains of dark chakra emanating from the statue's mouth. His head lolled, consciousness a distant flicker. The suppression seal on his forehead glowed malevolently, a cork in the bottle of his power. Beneath him, a complex circular seal was etched into the stone floor, pulsing with the shared chakra of Itachi and Kisame.
Itachi Uchiha stood at one point of the seal, his Sharingan active, monitoring the flow. Blood had dried in twin trails from his eyes down his pale cheeks, and a deep, rattling weariness sat in his bones. The strain of the Tsukuyomi, the extraction seal, and the rapid desert crossing was immense.
Kisame Hoshigaki stood opposite, Samehada planted in the seal, the sword shivering with excitement as it fed on the ambient chakra bleeding from Gaara. "The little badger is still fighting," Kisame grunted, feeling the resistance through the ritual. "His beast doesn't want to come out and play."
Itachi: "The partnership is atypical. It will take more force. Increase the draw."
Itachi formed a series of hand seals. The dark chains tightened. The Gedo Statue's first eye—the one corresponding to the One-Tail—began to tremble. A thin, ghostly wisp of sandy, tan chakra began to seep from Gaara's midsection, streaming into the statue's gaping maw. A low, grinding rumble filled the cavern as the statue began to awaken, its hunger palpable.
Inside the prison of his own mind, Gaara was drowning.
Shukaku's voice, distorted and stretched, screamed in a shared void: BRAT! THEY'RE PULLING ME APART! THE STATUE… IT'S THE OLD MAN'S CAGE! IT HURTS!
Gaara, his consciousness a faint ember: Hold on…
Shukaku: I CAN'T! IT'S EATING MY MEMORIES! MY SAND! MY… MY LAUGHTER! The beast's terror was a childlike, profound thing. It wasn't just power being stolen; it was its very identity being unraveled and consumed.
The Gedo Statue's eye slit opened a fraction. 25%. 50%. A hurricane of sand and malevolent chakra swirled within the chamber, pulled from Gaara. The chains of dark chakra thickened, becoming viscous, tar-like tendrils.
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Kumogakure – The Heart Mountain – Predictive Analytics
The distress signal from Suna had turned the command center into a vortex of controlled panic. Raikage A was a storm cloud of contained rage. Darui was coordinating with Konoha and Iwa for a wide-area search. But at the central holomap, Indra stood perfectly still, his Rinnegan eyes seeing not the map, but layers of data, probability clouds, and chakra-signature decay rates.
Indra: "They didn't leave the continent. The extraction of a Tailed Beast, even a cooperative one, requires a stable, prepared location and immense focus. They cannot be moving him far. They need a sanctuary."
Rias, beside him, her fingers flying over a sensory console linked to Thunderhead's orbital eyes, nodded. "Satellite thermal scan shows a massive, anomalous chakra spike forming… here." She highlighted a coordinates in the deep desert, a place marked as "Bleeding Mountains." "The geomagnetic field is distorting. Something is drawing a colossal amount of energy."
Indra: "The Gedo Statue. It's begun. They're already extracting Shukaku." His voice was ice. "Standard reinforcement will be too slow. Even my spatial jump has a range limit, and I need a precise anchor."
Rias looked at him, then at the data. "You can't go. You're the strategic linchpin. But I can." She tapped her temple. "My sensory range, augmented by the Silent Wing Clan's harmonic perception and the data from the Skyhammer satellites… I can triangulate the epicenter of the distortion to within ten meters. I can open a gate."
Indra: "Rias…"
Rias: "You taught me the spatial principles. My Sonic Release can stabilize the harmonic frequency. I can take a strike team. We disrupt the ritual. We don't need to win; we just need to break their concentration. A disrupted extraction could kill Gaara and Shukaku both, but if we hit the precise resonance of the seal…"
She brought up a spectral analysis of the chakra spike. It had a rhythm, a foul, pulsing cadence like a dying heart.
Indra saw the logic, the necessity. His jaw tightened. He hated it. "Take Samui, Omoi, Karui, and the Twin Lightning Fangs squad. Maximum suppression. Your objective is not to defeat Itachi and Kisame. It is to force an abort. The moment the ritual breaks, secure Gaara and retreat. Do not pursue."
Rias: "Understood." She was already moving, her expression a mask of focused determination. The memory of the vibrant, singing forest she'd grown in Suna, now a battlefield, fueled her resolve.
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The Bleeding Mountain Cavern – The Point of No Return
The Gedo Statue's eye was three-quarters open. 75%. A maelstrom of sand and raw, bestial hatred filled the cavern. Gaara's body was now limp, a puppet with its strings cut. His skin was pale, his breathing shallow. Shukaku's roars in their shared mind had diminished to pained whimpers.
Kisame grinned, his shark-teeth gleaming in the eerie light. "Almost there! I can taste the desert in the air!"
Itachi, maintaining the seal with unwavering focus, felt a tremor of wrongness. Not in the ritual. In the periphery. The cavern's natural silence had a new quality. The howl of the desert wind outside had… stopped. Not faded. Been cut off. As if the mountain had been placed inside a soundproof box.
His Sharingan scanned the dark edges of the cavern. Nothing. But his instincts, honed by a lifetime of deception and bloodshed, screamed.
Itachi: "Kisame. We have company."
Kisame hefted Samehada. "Let them come! They're just in time for the finale!"
A point of space ten meters from the ritual circle rippled. It didn't tear; it unfolded, like a flower made of distorted air and harmonic vibration. Through it stepped Rias Uzumaki, her green eyes sharp with calculated fury. Behind her in rapid succession came Samui, Karui, Omoi, and four elite Kumo jonin of the Twin Lightning Fangs squad, their hands already crackling with blue-white energy.
They did not shout. They did not announce themselves. They had rehearsed this in simulations a hundred times.
Rias took a deep breath, her hands coming together in a single, precise seal. She didn't scream. She hummed. A note so pure, so low it was felt in the teeth and bones rather than heard.
"Sonic Release: Silent World."
The effect was instantaneous. The roaring maelstrom of the extraction… vanished. Not silenced, but disrupted. The complex harmonic frequency holding the extraction seal together met a counter-frequency of perfect, nullifying resonance. The dark chakra chains flickered, their rhythm broken. The Gedo Statue's eye, halfway to opening fully, shuddered and began to close infinitesimally.
The ritual stuttered.
Itachi's control wavered for a critical half-second. His eyes snapped to Rias. An Uzumaki. Not just sensory. Sonic manipulation.
Rias didn't give him time to think. "Samui! Karui! Suppress the shark! Fangs, lightning barrage on the statue's connections! Omoi, tactical intercept!"
The Kumo shinobi moved like components of a single machine. Karui and Samui shot towards Kisame, their swords leaving after-images of lightning. The Twin Lightning Fangs split, each jonin launching a coordinated "Lightning Release: False Darkness" spear at the dark chakra chains binding Gaara. Omoi positioned himself between the ritual and the main entrance, his mind running probabilities, his sword drawn.
Kisame met Samui and Karui's assault with a roaring laugh and a swing of Samehada that created a wave of water in the dry air. But the water, formed from his own chakra, met their concentrated Lightning attacks and conducted. The lightning snaked up the water, seeking him. He was forced to disperse it, wasting energy.
The lightning spears from the Fangs struck the dark chains. The statue groaned. The chains didn't break, but they sizzled and thinned. Gaara's body jerked.
Itachi knew the primary threat. The Uzumaki woman who had disrupted the ritual's song. He body-flickered, appearing before Rias, a kunai aimed at her throat.
She was ready. She didn't block with a weapon. She sidestepped, the movement eerily fluid, as if she'd heard the air displacement before he'd even moved. A small, black-furred bat—Echo, her summon—was perched on her shoulder, its ears twitching.
Itachi: "Your sensory abilities are impressive. But they will not save you."
Rias: "I'm not here to be saved, Itachi Uchiha. I'm here to make you remember."
She unsealed her spear, Gáe Bolg's replica, in a flash of crimson light. She didn't charge. She began to circle, her humming constant, maintaining the Silent World. "Your Tsukuyomi works on sight. My world works on sound. Let's see which sense fails first."
Itachi attacked. A flurry of shuriken, each one trailing an explosive tag. Rias didn't dodge them all. She flicked her spear, the tip vibrating at a specific frequency, and tapped each shuriken in mid-air. The vibrations traveled through the metal, disrupting the chakra in the explosive tags, causing them to fizzle out harmlessly before they reached her.
Itachi's eyes narrowed. She reads the chakra flow through sonic resonance. A direct counter to subtle genjutsu and precision tools.
He closed the distance, his taijutsu a blur of lethal efficiency. Rias met him, her spear-work defensive, using the longer reach to keep him at bay. Each time their weapons clashed, a subtle sonic pulse erupted from her spear, jarring his grip, muddling his rhythm.
Itachi: "You fight well for a non-combat specialist."
Rias, her voice cold as desert night: "I learned from a man who builds fortresses. He taught me that the best defense is understanding the weakness in your enemy's foundation. Your foundation is rotten, Itachi. It's built on the names of children."
Itachi's perfect composure flickered. A micro-expression of pain, swiftly buried. His attacks became a fraction more aggressive.
Rias pressed, her words as sharp as her spear. "Aunt Misako. Her calligraphy was famous in the compound, wasn't it? She made the festival banners every year. She taught the children, including a quiet, serious little boy with big eyes, how to hold the brush. Did her lessons mean nothing when you slit her throat in her kitchen?"
Itachi's Susanoo—a flickering, spectral ribcage of crimson energy—flashed around him for an instant, repelling a thrust of her spear he hadn't even fully registered. The shock of the name, the specific, intimate detail, had breached his defenses.
Itachi: "You… cannot know that."
Rias: "Uncle Jiro. Ran the sweet shop by the western gate. Gave free dango to the academy kids who did well. His honey-glazed ones were your brother's favorite, I'm told. Did his sweets not sweeten your heart enough… to spare a three-year-old clutching a stuffed toy?"
Another name. Another vivid, loving memory weaponized. Itachi's Sharingan whirled violently. His Susanoo flickered again, less stable this time. The relentless, silent hum of her Sonic World was a constant pressure on his psyche, and now her words were hooks in his soul.
Itachi, his voice a dangerous whisper: "Stop."
Rias: "Why? Does the truth of what you did finally hurt? Or is it just inconvenient now that someone knows the faces behind your 'necessary sacrifice'? Sasuke told us. He told Indra and me everything when we met. When we paid our respects at the Uchiha graves. He recited the names like a prayer. The ones he could remember. We helped him find the others."
The mention of Sasuke sharing this, of them visiting the graves together, was a wound salted with acid.
Itachi: "You know nothing of necessity! The coup was real! The clan's arrogance would have destroyed Konoha!"
Rias: "The coup Danzo Shimura manufactured! The isolation he engineered! We have the files, Itachi! The ROOT archives Indra recovered! We know how he poisoned the well, how he made the clan and the village see only monsters in each other! You weren't a savior making a hard choice! You were his perfect weapon, cutting down the people he had trapped! You killed Aunt Misako and Uncle Jiro for a lie!"
Her spear shot forward, not at him, but at the ground near his feet. The impact released a concussive sonic wave that shattered the stone and forced him to leap back. His Susanoo ribs flashed once more, now with a crackle of unstable energy.
Itachi's breath hitched. The Danzo files. The truth he had glimpsed but dared not fully believe, for to believe it would be to admit his life, his sacrifice, his brother's pain, were all for a madman's scheme. The psychological fortress he had built around his actions trembled.
Itachi: "Even… even if the spark was manufactured… the powder keg was real. The outcome… would have been the same. War. Death."
Rias: "And who loaded the powder keg, Itachi? Who stockpiled the hatred? You had the power to see the puppet strings! You had the Mangekyō! Yet you chose to be Danzo's blade instead of cutting his strings! You could have exposed him! You could have gone to the Hokage, to your father, to the clan elders with the proof of manipulation! Instead, you played the monster he needed you to be and made your little brother the final, tragic piece of his art!"
Her words were a brutal, tactical dismantling of his entire life's narrative. Each sentence was a sonic pulse targeting the fault lines in his resolve. His Susanoo flickered erratically, the strain of maintaining it against this psychological assault evident.
Across the cavern, Kisame was being overwhelmed. The coordinated lightning attacks from Samui and Karui were relentless. Every time he formed water, they electrified it. Samehada was feasting, but it couldn't absorb all the simultaneous, disciplined strikes. One of the Lightning Fangs got a clear shot at the Gedo Statue's chain connected to Gaara's left arm. The chain snapped.
Gaara's body dropped a few inches, one arm free. The statue's eye closed another 5%. 76% extracted.
Itachi saw it. The mission was failing. The ritual was collapsing. This Uzumaki woman was not here to kill him; she was here to break him, to make him doubt in the moment he needed certainty most.
He made a decision. His eyes bled anew. He would end this. "Amaterasu."
Black flames bloomed directly on Rias's spear. She didn't let go. Instead, she poured Sonic chakra into the weapon. The spear vibrated at a molecular frequency, the vibrations spreading to the black flames. For a brief, terrible second, the flames seemed to stutter, their relentless consumption disrupted by the chaotic resonance before they consumed the spearhead entirely. She discarded the now-melting weapon.
Rias: "You see? Even your 'inevitable' flames can be confused. Just like you."
Itachi lunged for her, his hand coated in chakra for a killing strike. Rias didn't back away. She met his eyes.
Rias: "I'm not going to kill you, Itachi Uchiha. That pleasure doesn't belong to me. Or to Indra. It belongs to Sasuke. To the little brother you orphaned and tortured for a lie. My job is just to make sure he gets the chance. To make sure you live long enough to look him in the eye when he knows everything."
Itachi's killing intent wavered. Sasuke. The thought of facing Sasuke now, with these words, this poisoned knowledge, was a terror greater than any enemy.
A massive explosion of water and lightning rocked the cavern as Kisame, bleeding from several lightning burns, crashed backward into the ritual circle, disrupting it further. "ITACHI! We're done! The ritual is failing! We have to retreat!"
The Gedo Statue gave a final, grinding shudder. The dark chains dissolved. Gaara's body fell the remaining distance to the floor, limp and pale. The statue's first eye snapped shut, but not fully. A sliver of sandy light remained trapped within. 76%. The extraction was incomplete, but massive.
Itachi looked from the fallen Kazekage, to the defiant Uzumaki woman, to his wounded partner. The mission was a partial success, but it felt like a profound, personal defeat. He had the chakra. But she had taken something else from him.
Itachi: "...Retreat."
He grabbed a smoke pellet from his pouch and slammed it at his feet. Kisame did the same, and in the billowing, chakra-dense smoke, they activated a pre-prepared reverse-summoning seal. In a swirl of ink and mist, the two Akatsuki vanished.
The Silent World faded. The sounds of the cavern rushed back in—the drip of water, the ragged breathing of the Kumo shinobi, the weak, shuddering breath from Gaara on the floor.
Rias immediately sprinted to Gaara's side, her medical training kicking in. She placed her hands on his chest, feeling the feeble, erratic flutter of his heart. His chakra was a ghost of itself, and a deep, sickening void where Shukaku's presence had been—now a ragged, incomplete wound.
Samui approached, her expression grim. "The targets have escaped. The secondary objective is secure, but his vital signs are critical."
Omoi, chewing furiously: "They got most of it. The beast is… crippled. Probably. This is a strategic loss, probably."
Rias, channeling healing chakra into Gaara, looked at the silent, brooding Gedo Statue, its one eye holding a stolen piece of a desert god. "No. They got a meal. But we just gave them a case of psychic food poisoning. And we saved the host. That's a win we can build on. Now, get me a trauma seal and prepare for emergency evacuation. We're taking him home." Her voice was steady, but her hands trembled slightly—not from fear, but from the lingering echo of a monster's shattered calm.
End of Chapter – 84.