Sukuna pulled himself out of the rubble without bothering to brush any of it off, arms rolling loose at his sides, and for the first time in longer than he wanted to admit, he actually felt something close to excitement.
"My, my, I have to say I'm impressed. I couldn't even react in time due to the shock. Finally, something interesting is happening." He grinned, tilting his head at the man standing amid the wreckage of what used to be the top floor.
Only now, as he observed keenly, did he notice the white armor-like shell covering most of Nagato's body.
'White Zetsu….' He nodded. It does make sense. That stuff worked for Obito, why not Nagato? It's honestly baffling that this didn't happen in the original story. But now that he thinks about it again, that too makes sense. Neither Obito nor Black Zetsu in the original series wished to make Nagato so strong that they couldn't control him later on, after all, he still held the Rinnegan with him.
As for now, since Obito is not around, Black Zetsu most likely is running out of pawns for his grand plan. Can't let this one die either.
'Let's see if I can get to that parasite as well while I'm at this.' Sukuna grinned, excited for the upcoming fight.
A fully healed Nagato with Rinnegan. How powerful would he be? It was truly interesting.
Nagato slowly lifted from his place on the top of the ruined building, his own making, by the way. Using his gravity manipulation, he hovered from his place and came right where Sukuna was, slowly stopping right above him, as if a god looking down on a mortal, still maintaining his usual aloofness.
Sukuna at that just smiled more.
"Say… how would you like to die for ruining my clothes? Would you like to get cut in half or chopped into pieces? Burning or getting beaten by punches is also an option." He grinned while asking, not something he usually said, but perhaps the Ryomen's memories were affecting him.
Nagato didn't answer him. He didn't need to, not really, since when do gods have to answer to just anyone?
Chakra receivers lashed out from both sleeves. The ground beneath Sukuna's feet buckled and split as Bansho Tenin dragged loose stone up and hurled it at him from three directions simultaneously.
'A reverse gravitational attack…' Sukuna wondered. It could be useful, but not when he had someone like Kamui. The moment he felt the pull, he already had his body entered into the Kamui dimension to completely resist it.
Rumble to big boulders, everything seemed to move towards Nagato but not Sukuna. Nagato's own Rinnegan was observing this closely. The earlier fight was too fast to honestly analyse the boy's powers, but now he was certain he was able to resist his gravitational pull somehow. And since this wasn't working, then Nagato had other tricks in his arsenal.
A summoning circle bloomed across Nagato's forearm, ink spreading fast, and something enormous tore its way up through the floor below.
A rhino. Then a second one, tusked and armored, snorting steam. Then something with too many legs that Sukuna didn't bother cataloguing because by the time it fully manifested, he was already moving, Cleave carving a line straight through the first rhino's skull before it even finished forming, the second one meeting Dismantle a half-second later and folding apart like wet paper.
"Not bad, but you'll need more than just house pets if you wanna win, you know." Sukuna said, mildly impressed despite himself, stepping over the collapsing summons without breaking stride.
He didn't get an answer to that either, of course. Nagato moved, launching himself at Sukuna.
What followed wasn't clean. It wasn't supposed to be. This was two people who'd both spent years being the last word in any room they walked into, neither one used to being pushed, and it showed in how ugly the exchange got — Sukuna's fists finding Preta Path absorption waiting on Nagato's palms, clearly not gonna work on someone who used curse energy instead of chakra. Nagato's counters coming faster than they should've been able to, Deva Path's repulsion snapping out at close range hard enough to crack the air itself, forcing Sukuna to actually respect the distance for once instead of walking straight through it.
The building didn't survive the exchange. Neither did the three buildings after it, all of them going down in a rolling collapse of stone and dust as the fight spilled out over the rooftops of Amegakure, the rain — of course it was raining, it was always raining here, Sukuna had clocked that within about ten seconds of arriving and found it faintly ridiculous — sheeting sideways off every impact.
"Huh… Konoha Standard Fighting Style we learn in academy. Seems like you have steal more than just a Jinchuriki, I wonder why." Sukuna mocked.
Nagato had learned under Jiraiya. It was obvious that his fighting style was similar to that of Konoha's standard military katas. Since this was Nagato's real body, the one which he hadn't fought with in ages, mind you, he used what his body was most used to, and it was immediately shown.
Nagato's eyes narrowed. That was a part of his life which he had long denounced and moved on from. And now this boy was bringing it back. He snapped at Sukuna immediately, and that was the original intention.
"You can either continue fighting like this or change it. In both cases, let me tell you, I have an advantage. If you use a new style which your body is not used to, you're already making more openings than I could explain, and if you stick with the one your body knows, then let me tell you, you're fighting a Konoha shinobi right now. We know how to fight that style."
Sukuna said, ducking under a clawed swipe of chakra rods and driving an elbow into Nagato's ribs, feeling something give under the hit even through the restored body.
Nagato felt the pain and almost bent over but backed off at the right second. "You talk too much," Nagato said back, low, not quite matching Sukuna's easy tone but getting there, close enough. He caught the follow-up strike on a forearm wrapped in chakra-hardened flesh, the impact rattling up through both of them.
That was about the point Nagato decided Taijutsu wasn't going to cut it, which, credit where it was due, there ain't many who can face Sukuna in Taijutsu alone. At least there are only two which come to mind; the third was personally beheaded by him not too long ago.
Nagato backed off, chakra gathering into his body by tons, even Sukuna could feel the gravitational force fluctuating all over his body.
"Ah… resorting to big moves already, don't you care about your sweet little village anymore?" He almost said it as a villain. It's really fun fighting on someone else's turf. Yes, they get an advantage, but if you pull it off right, all the destruction which takes place is also theirs to bear.
Nagato's face stiffened at that, but he didn't reply, just did what he was planning to do. The sky didn't so much darken as get replaced the moment a single black orb was released from Nagato's hand into the environment.
A crazy gravitational flux went underway around the area, almost sweeping Sukuna away, almost.
The black orb acted like a miniature black hole, attracting every and all things towards itself, and Chibaku Tensei bloomed outward from a point somewhere above the ruined district, gravity folding in on itself, and Sukuna felt the pull getting stronger—the technique reached for every scrap of debris and stone and shattered wall in the entire district and hauled it inward, himself included, compressing it all down into a slow-forming orb that swallowed the horizon as it grew.
He had his Kamui active the moment the orb appeared, and it wasn't stopping anytime soon. Definitely would hit the five-minute cooldown on his Kamui before this attack ended, so he just let it happen.
Being actually inside it was less fun when he was getting crushed from all sides by debris and boulders. The pressure came from every direction at once, stone and rubble and compressed earth grinding in against him with the patient, absolute certainty of something that had no intention of stopping, and for a fraction of a second — the smallest fraction, nothing anyone watching would've caught — Sukuna felt his ribs protest under the weight.
"No wonder this technique could capture even the likes of Kaguya." He knew, of course, that in front of the one which was used to trap the moon goddess by her own son, this technique here was nothing. That ended up making the entire moon, but it was still the same technique, with two different power outputs.
He knew how to appreciate a powerful technique when he saw one.
"Alright," he grumbled to no one in particular but just to himself, voice swallowed by rock and dust and rainwater seeping through cracks that shouldn't have existed. "Let's take this power for a test drive… after I perfected it."
He reached up with one hand and slicked his hair back, unhurried about it even now, buried under half a district's worth of collapsed stone, and the moment his palm passed over his scalp, something changed underneath his skin — black tattoos spreading out from where his hairline had been, crawling down across his face, his throat, his arms, unfurling across every inch of him like ink finally allowed to finish the picture it had always been meant to complete.
He looked exactly like Yujikuna from the Shibuya arc, just a year or two younger.
And it wasn't just cosmetic. The moment the transformation took place, curse energy mixed with natural energy and erupted inside his body.
Curse Sage Mode activated.
He didn't grow two more arms or another mouth on his stomach. With a binding vow, he had sacrificed that entire improvement to gain more control over the Curse Sage Mode. And it had done him quite an improvement.
Nagato sighed slowly from outside, looking at the hovering orb of mass in the air, his enemy trapped inside. He finally sighed in relief. It was finally over.
But that's when the orb trembled.
And then it simply came apart, a crisscrossing grid forming all over the orb before the entire structure erupted into pieces, chunks of it the size of buildings raining down harmlessly around the district because there was simply nothing left holding them together anymore.
Sukuna dropped out of the wreckage, landed on a slab of broken road, and rolled his neck, and the difference was immediate, obvious, the kind of thing that didn't need announcing.
His aura was different the moment when he appeared this time around.
"Well then. It's my turn, would you say?" He smiled, a rather terrifying smile with those tattoos around him and curse energy flaring, mixed with natural energy.
His one hand snapped at Nagato and he shouted, "Dismantle."
This was a different sort of attack than his usual, hundreds if not thousands of slashes rushing at Nagato at the same time.
Even Nagato's Rinnegan, able to see the upcoming attack, wouldn't find a way to dodge all of them.
For a second, even Nagato's normal calm was broken at the scale of this attack. An attack of that scale, he didn't have anything particular to defend against it.
He summoned all of his contracted summons to use them as meat shields. They did nothing, just cut open after seconds of holding back the barrage of the sea of slashes directed at him.
He erected a powerful Earth Style jutsu, only for it to be cut open the next second. Nagato even had one of his hands cut off as one of the slashes finally ended up connecting.
Nagato, for his part, was starting to realize that fight wasn't going in his favor. He cursed under his breath, wondering who this boy was. A boy who at best could be 15 years old. How can he be this strong?
Sukuna watched it land on his face — not panic, Nagato didn't seem built for panic even now, but something colder and more practical, the look of a man doing math and not liking the result. And then the ground began to shake again, harder this time, a pressure crawling up from somewhere deep beneath the ruined village, and when Sukuna glanced past Nagato's shoulder, he saw the source rising out of the earth in full: ten sealed eyes, a jaw hanging loose like something mid-scream, hands the size of buildings tearing free of whatever had been holding them down for who knew how long.
"A statue," Sukuna said, and laughed — because he knew what statue this was, this the husk of the Ten-Tails, the Gedo Statue. Nagato finally summoned even this thing. As for why, it was very clear: he used the statue as a shield to protect against his attacks.
Sukuna didn't get much more time to enjoy the observation after that since as soon as he stopped his continuous slashing attacks, knowing they wouldn't go past the Gedo Statue's tough surface, the Gedo Statue's hand came down toward him without warning, fast for something that size, and Nagato pressed the advantage in the same breath, a powerful gravitational push to keep him from escaping.
Kamui came in the clutch once again, but now this was getting slightly annoying. Fighting one of them had been interesting. Fighting both, at the same time, was starting to eat into the margin Sukuna liked to keep, and he found himself actually working now instead of just enjoying himself, weaving between a statue-sized fist and a lash of chakra rods in the same motion, cursed energy burning hotter through him with every exchange.
Sukuna observed the statue closely, something running inside his brain before he finally decided.
"Be it then, it's about damn time I test this out…" He grinned. Not to mention he had already spotted where the bastard he was searching for all during the fight was.
So he vanished and appeared at a short distance, making Nagato chase, until he was in the right position.
"Alright, expand, contract and lift…" He grinned.
Bringing both hands together in a familiar sign. A big smile appeared on his face. Nagato, who was still controlling the Gedo Statue, frowned, seeing Sukuna not running away from the incoming statue's path but making a hand sign.
"Domain Expansion…"
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