Chapter 97 - A Strange World
"The people of the village who once abhorred you, have begun to admire you. They think of you as a comrade. It's because you fought hard for their acceptance." — Itachi Uchiha.
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Itachi watched the four remaining Adjuchas, especially two – the ones named Choe Neng Poww and Ggio Vega – as compared to the other two, these ones have off a feel he was intimately familiar with.
'They are tricky opponents.' His senses went behind him where he could feel Lilynette away. 'She's sufficiently far behind.'
With that realization, they all sprung into action.
Two of the Hollows, Nirgge and Redder, came upon him – their movements easily perceived by the Sharingan – and behind them were Choe Neng Poww and Ggio preparing to blindside him.
Individually they weren't much of a threat to Itachi, but together he was sure they would pose even some trouble to a few Captains if restricted to only their Shikai.
Nirgge missed him completely, to the man's surprise, and Redder who he was about to cut into immediately dodged to the side to reveal a Cero blast behind him which was now a few inches from Itachi's eyes, aiming to blast his head off.
The smile on their faces drained when they saw Itachi's body flicker the moment before the Cero touched him and watched as it harmlessly sailed past him and exploded a good distance behind him.
The next time they saw him was in front of Choe Neng Poww which spurred them into panic and rushed them to their endangered companion.
Choe Neng Poww was already under a genjutsu the moment he came into Itachi's line of sight and when Itachi was about to repeat what happened to the first Hollow, a red bullet intercepted him in the form of Ggio who attacked him with his red talons covered in Reiatsu that Itachi's blade instantly burned away. Unfortunately he was fast enough to escape as he needed only a moment for his comrades to get to Choe Neng Poww.
"His eyes. It's his eyes. You'll get trapped in an illusion if you look at them."
Hearing what Choe Neng Poww said after breaking free, they all roused their Reiatsu in the only way they could to hopefully shield or break out of Itachi's illusions should they find themselves victims to it next.
Only for Itachi to prove their precautions futile.
They saw Itachi's form dissolve into a black puddle, which greatly confused them as to what he was doing, only for the puddle to open up like an eye and gaze at them with the familiar pattern of the Sharingan.
And that was all their efforts could amount to. Nothing.
Among the entirety of the Uchiha Clan, Itachi's prowess with the Sharingan's genjutsu was unrivaled. The only thing that could rival his application of illusions were the very few forbidden techniques of the Uchiha Clan, like Shinsui's Mangekyō Kotoamatsukami and the twin techniques of Izanami and Izanagi.
The moment they met the single eye's gaze, their entire world spun and turned black even as they tried to cover their eyes, which was a fruitless endeavor as eyes appeared in their own hands to stare at them.
One of Itachi's weaknesses concerning his illusions was that it wasn't suitable for affecting multiple parties at once. Doing that would only make it exponentially weaker and easier to break out of.
To combat this weakness, Itachi devised a way to efficiently interchange between weak and strong illusions between his targets.
Basically, it meant bouncing off the strong illusions from person to person, depending on who he wanted to attack, while keeping everyone else in a weak illusion. It wasn't foolproof either as anyone capable would be able to break out of it should the weak illusion be rotated to them.
The world they all found themselves in was a world of black sludge that were sewn to each other from every perceivable angle.
[A/N: Think Mahito's domain expansion, but with black sludge instead of hands]
Up in the sky of the illusion, the black clouds opened up to shine a huge eye down at them.
Black: Unfamiliar Haze.
The Hollows immediately condensed their Reiatsu over their body to prevent them from the foreign world they found themselves in. Including Itachi, none of them could tell if this was just an illusion or they were transported somewhere else.
The Hollows started feeling the tiniest hints of fear and that was enough for them to let loose and start bombarding the place with Cero, which was when Itachi went into action.
With how he was rotating the effects of the illusion among all of them, he reckoned someone would break out very soon.
The first one to receive Itachi was Nirgge, the behemoth that had first charged at Itachi, who had conjured up a giant Cero and shot at Itachi. Though he couldn't be faulted, had he looked up at the eye in the sky, he would have noticed that the eye immediately focused on him when he attacked.
— And the effect was both surprising and expected for the two parties involved.
The moment he shot his Cero, the huge ball of destruction disappeared and in its place was Itachi. Nirgge was surprised, but soon the surprise changed to an excited grin as he punched Itachi. Except that when he punched the Shinigami Lieutenant – at the moment of impact – Itachi changed into the surrounding black sludge, which then washed off like water to reveal a trapped Nirgge, greatly confusing Nirgge who was staring at his reflection.
An unfamiliar world.
"Kugh!" Nirgge coughed and gasped as his illusion punched him so hard that instead of flying off from the force, the black sludge under and around him were now holding him in place.
The others were just too gobsmacked to even start to understand how in the darkest inferno this hellish world of Black worked.
""Nirgge!"" Ggio and Redder screamed, unable to help out their comrade.
As if that was not enough, the Cero Nirgge had fired off started falling down from the eye at an immense speed that by the time it arrived above Nirgge's unmoving form, it was like a blazing black sun.
The collision made no explosion or sound, slowly and quickly engulfing Nirgge whose cries of torment were swallowed up by the black flames.
They watched with disbelieving eyes as the black flames coalesced together to a bound form from which Itachi stepped out.
They lost it.
Choe Neng Poww, the most silent of their group, roared in rage and an explosion of Reiatsu that swallowed up his body and when it receded, no longer was his slightly bigger huge form that was seen. Instead it was something akin to a humanoid whale that easily towered at 100ft.
The berserk Reiatsu clashed against the unfamiliar world like lightning, tearing holes into the black sky.
Itachi, ever impassive, saw all these and paid no mind to it as his mind was on his next target.
Even when the humongous whale started charging up the biggest and most dangerous Cero Itachi has ever seen, Itachi ignored it as his body slowly disintegrated into crows and flew towards Ggio who was sending wild wind slashes at the incoming crows and turning them to black sludge.
When Ggio finally got the last of the crows, Choe Neng Poww had finished charging up his Cero… and suddenly everything snapped into place.
Illusions were not something you fight, at least not in the traditional sense. Back in the Elemental Nations, ninjas knew that the first thing to do when someone was trapped in an illusion was to break out of it, regardless of how painful it might be. The Hollows had tried fighting it – which was their first mistake – which led them to the second mistake they made.
Black: Unfamiliar Haze was a simple technique to break out if it was cast on multiple people as that was when the rotation between strong and weak illusions applied, and if they had noticed the hints of these weak illusions, they would have noticed when Itachi completely dropped the illusion and simple used a simpler one that warped their surroundings.
That and Choe Neng Poww's transformation made the technique greatly unstable with how his Reiatsu rampaged.
The result?
Neither Choe Neng Poww, who was firing off a building sized Cero, nor Ggio who was too slow to move after the illusion dropped, noticed when the person they were intent on attacking was none other than each other.
If this had been a city, nothing other than a citywide canyon would have been left in the wake of Choe Neng Poww's Cero. This point was further proven when Ggio's Reiatsu disappeared when the Cero hit, nor was his body found when the dust cleared.
Itachi held his short sword in a reverse grip, eyes aiming for Redder who had lost an arm from the destruction of his comrade's Vero, when he felt Lilynette's Reiatsu flare along with the presence of a foreign hostile Reiatsu attacking her.
An Hollow, an Adjuchas based on the level of their Reiatsu, and Itachi would be damned if he let anything hurt Lilynette after he'd given Starrk his word.
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