Chapter 51: A Lesson in Eyes
The mocking tone, the mention of a name that meant nothing to him, the reference to an eye that was now a throbbing, alien part of his skull—it all coalesced into a cold annoyance within White Fang. The enemy was stalling. Talking. That was a weakness.
He didn't respond. He simply shifted his gaze from Obito's masked face to a point just behind his left shoulder.
Blood Demon Art: Fang Severing Emptiness.
The invisible slash tore through the air. Obito, expecting another direct attack on his center mass, was a fraction slow. The slash didn't aim for him. It aimed for the space behind him, where his Kamui vortex would logically pull his intangible body if he phased.
Obito's Sharingan flared. He didn't phase. Instead, he lunged forward, the slash whickering through the space where his back had been. He felt the wind of it, a chilling kiss on his spine. The creature had learned. It was predicting his defensive patterns.
"You learn fast," Obito grated, landing in a crouch. "But you still don't understand the power you're wasting." He raised a hand to his own masked face, near the eye. "This eye, my eye, granted you a power beyond slashes and teeth. It granted you a power over space itself."
White Fang remained silent, but a flicker of something—not curiosity, but a tactical assessment—crossed his deadened features. The masked man's words were bait, but bait could conceal a hook of useful information.
"You've felt it, haven't you?" Obito pressed, slowly standing. "The strain. The pull. When you move too fast, when you focus too hard. That eye hungers for more than your demonic energy. It hungers for my chakra. For the connection we share." It was a bluff, partially. He didn't know if the mutated eye still craved its twin. But it sounded true, and truth was a potent weapon.
White Fang's left eye—the blackened, cracked-pattern kaleidoscope—pulsed faintly. A dull ache, one he'd attributed to the transformation, throbbed behind it. Coincidence? Or confirmation?
"Let me show you," Obito said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. He didn't make a hand seal. He simply willed it. The Kamui in his right eye activated.
The world around White Fang didn't distort. Instead, a single, small point in the air directly in front of his chest began to spiral, a miniature vortex of compressed space. It wasn't an attack aimed to kill; it was a demonstration. A tiny, harmless pinprick of spatial force.
White Fang flinched, an instinctive reaction. His own left eye burned in response, the ache sharpening into a piercing sting. For a split second, his vision doubled. He saw the clearing as it was, and he saw it layered with a ghostly, inverted afterimage—a glimpse into the Kamui dimension itself. It lasted a heartbeat, but the information was seared into his mind: a grey, pillar-filled limbo. The masked man's sanctuary.
Then the vision vanished, leaving only the pain.
"You see?" Obito said, a note of triumph in his voice. "It resonates. It remembers. You hold a key to a door, Kakashi, but you've been trying to use it as a club." He took a step forward. "That power could make you unstoppable. You could vanish from your enemies' sight, transport them to a silent dimension to die, tear them apart from the inside out. Instead, you… swing your arms."
The insult was deliberate, meant to provoke, to create an opening. But White Fang didn't feel insulted. He processed the data. Spatial manipulation. A secondary dimension. Resonance between the eyes. The tactical applications were immediately, blindingly obvious. If he could access that space, even partially, he could make his slashes appear from anywhere. He could evade any attack. He could be truly untouchable.
But the cost… The eye burned at the mere proximity of its twin. Using such a power might consume him, might weaken him at a critical moment. And it was a power offered by the enemy. A trap within bait.
He made a decision. He would not play the enemy's game. He would take the data and weaponize it in his own way.
He stopped trying to use Fang Severing Emptiness. He stopped relying on the Cutting Slash. He simply charged.
It was a brutish, direct move. Obito was prepared for another fancy slash, another psychic trick. He wasn't prepared for the demon to close the distance with feral speed, its hands elongating into black-taloned claws.
Obito phased, letting White Fang pass through him. As the demon's body was halfway through his intangible form, Obito solidified his right arm and drove a kunai—coated with a paralytic toxin derived from Hashirama's cells—towards White Fang's kidney.
But White Fang had seen the afterimage. He'd seen the arm solidify a half-second before it happened. He twisted in mid-air, an impossible contortion. The kunai grazed his side, drawing a line of dark blood, but not finding its mark. And as he twisted, his left eye, burning with stolen power and demonic fury, focused.
He didn't try to mimic Kamui. He couldn't. Instead, he pushed a surge of his own savage will and Ghost Qi through the aching connection, back along the resonant link, aiming not for the dimension, but for the eye on the other end.
Blood Demon Art: Eye of the Usurper.
It was an instinctive, brutal technique. A psychic backlash along a stolen bond.
In Obito's Kamui dimension, the world of grey pillars flickered. A wave of alien, consuming hunger—White Fang's core nature—echoed through the psychic connection and slammed into Obito's mind. He saw, for a terrifying instant, not the demon before him, but a vast, red maw, and felt his own chakra being leeched away, pulled towards the blackened eye in Kakashi's socket.
He screamed, a raw sound of shock and violation, and severed the Kamui link entirely, stumbling back in the physical world.
White Fang landed, skidding on the dirt. His left eye was weeping thick, black tears, the pain excruciating. But he had learned. He had hurt the enemy in a way the enemy did not expect. He had used the "key" not to open the door, but to poison the lock.
He didn't wait. While Obito was disoriented, clutching his own head, White Fang turned and fled into the forest, a grey blur vanishing into the predawn gloom. He hadn't won. But he had survived, and he had stolen a secret. The eye was not just a tool; it was a weapon that could hurt its creator. And with enough strength, with enough consumed lives, perhaps he could learn to wield its true, spatial power without the crippling backlash.
Obito straightened up, his breathing ragged. The psychic assault faded, leaving a profound sense of violation. He touched his own Sharingan beneath the mask. It was unharmed, but the message was clear. The demon wasn't just a beast. It was a cunning, adaptive student. And it was learning how to use his own gifts against him.
The hunt had just become infinitely more dangerous. He couldn't just retrieve the eye now. He had to annihilate the student before it mastered the lesson. The sun was rising. The demon would be hiding. But Obito now knew its new lair—the forest west of the ravaged town. And he would return at dusk with a new plan: not to teach, but to erase. Permanently.
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