The world blurred around Fugaku Uchiha, a smear of charcoal-grey ruins and flickering orange embers. His body was a phantom, flickering from one vantage point to the next with the desperate speed of the Body Flicker technique. E
ach jump carried him deeper into the heart of the devastation, the epicentre of the cataclysmic battle he had been sensing from afar. The air grew thicker, heavier, saturated with the unique, acrid scent of spent chakra and crystallised earth, a testament to the unnatural forces that had clashed here.
His heart was a frantic drum against his ribs, each beat echoing a single, terrifying thought: 'The Susanoo is gone.'
He had seen it, that colossal titan of orange light, standing immutable against the night sky—a symbol of his father's invincibility. And then, in the space between one flicker and the next, it had vanished. The sudden absence of that immense chakra pressure left a void in the world, a silence more deafening than any explosion.
His mind, trained for tactical analysis even in the grip of fear, coldly presented the two possibilities, each an extreme pole of fate.
The first: his father, Daichi, had emerged victorious. The threat was neutralised, the enemy slain. The immense chakra drain of maintaining the Susanoo was no longer necessary, and so he had dispelled it, conserving his strength.
A logical, hopeful conclusion.
The second possibility was a cold knife twisting in his gut: the enemy, Gando, had found a way to breach the legendary defence. The disappearance of the Susanoo meant the death of its caster. His father was gone.
Fugaku forced a steel-like calm over his racing thoughts. This was the reality of war, a lesson beaten into every Konoha shinobi from their first day at the Academy. The Third Great War was a meat grinder, and it showed no favouritism. It took the weak and the strong, the common soldier and the revered clan head.
Loss was not a possibility; it was an inevitability.
To cling to individuals, even one's own father, was a sentimental weakness that could get you and everyone under your command killed. This harsh truth was why he had already begun planning for his own son's future.
Itachi, barely a toddler, would need to be hardened. Visits to the morgue, to the front lines, to see the true cost of their power—it was essential. The world was not kind, and the Uchiha could not afford kindness in return.
They could only afford strength.
He landed silently on the precarious edge of a vast, newly formed crater. The ground here was not merely broken; it had been vitrified, melted and cooled into a grotesque, glassy plain that reflected the hellish glow of the burning compound. The scale of destruction was absolute. This was the place.
His Sharingan, active and sharp, scanned the scene in an instant. It took him less than a second to find the figure he sought. There, near the centre of the crater, knelt Uchiha Daichi.
His posture was not one of victory, but of exhaustion. His head was bowed, his shoulders slumped, and his breathing was a ragged, uneven sound that carried across the silent battlefield. The powerful frame that had always seemed as immovable as a mountain now looked frail.
In a shunshin, Fugaku was at his side, his hand instinctively reaching out. "Father!"
Daichi lifted his head slowly. His face was a mask of grime and dried blood, but it was the eyes that stole the breath from Fugaku's lungs. The Mangekyo Sharingan was active, but it was wrong. Horribly wrong. The right eye still held the menacing, unfamiliar pattern of the Mangekyo, spinning slowly, leaking a fresh trickle of blood down his cheek.
But the left eye… the left eye was a dead thing.
The vibrant red was gone, replaced by a cloudy, lifeless grey. The pupil was fixed and dilated, devoid of any light or recognition. The Sharingan's glow had been extinguished forever.
"Father, your… your eye…" Fugaku whispered, his voice tight, the words catching in his throat. He stopped in his tracks, his own training and emotional discipline warring with a sudden, shocking surge of feeling.
Daichi had always been a hard, demanding father. Affection was a foreign currency in their household; praise was measured in silent nods and increased expectations.
Fugaku had understood. To lead the Uchiha, one had to be a paragon of strength and discipline. Emotions were a liability; love, a distraction. He had moulded himself into the perfect heir: strong, capable, emotionally reserved.
But this… this was different.
The loss of a Sharingan was not just an injury; it was a fundamental, catastrophic failure in the world of the Uchiha. For a shinobi of Daichi's standing, the Clan Head, it was a political death sentence.
The clan's power was built upon the myth of the Sharingan's invincibility. A leader who had lost one, even in a heroic battle, was a leader weakened. The hawks in the clan, those who already grumbled about Daichi's sometimes pragmatic approach to village politics, would seize upon this. They would see it not as a sacrifice, but as a flaw.
He could never continue to lead. The consequences were absolute. For the first time in his adult life, Fugaku felt a wave of emotion so powerful it threatened to breach his carefully constructed walls. He didn't cry—tears were beyond him—but a cold, sharp grief, mixed with a terrifying anxiety for the clan's future, gripped his heart.
"Father," Fugaku began, his voice low and strained, wanting to give voice to this monumental loss, to acknowledge the sacrifice.
Daichi cut him off with a weak, but still authoritative, wave of his hand. "You don't have to say it," he rasped. He took a painful, shuddering breath. "That man… Gando. For the first time since I last crossed jutsus with Jiraiya … he brought me to the brink. I was not sure… I was not sure I would emerge victorious." He coughed, a dry, hacking sound.
"He forced my hand. I had to rely on… Izanamii."
The name of the forbidden technique hung in the air. Fugaku's momentary grief was instantly tempered by a flicker of… not pride, but grim satisfaction.
'Izanami.' The technique that rewrites reality.
If his father had lost his eye to Izanagi, it was a failure of strength. To have been pushed to use such a forbidden jutsu against someone who was not even a Kage was, in its own dark way, was the highest disrespect to the clan. It was far more shameful than having his eye simply destroyed in combat. The enemy had been so formidable that reality itself had to be cheated.
Daichi then turned his head away, unable or unwilling to meet his son's gaze fully. The gesture was one of profound weariness, and something else—shame.
"I should not make it past this war," he said, his voice barely a whisper.
Fugaku nodded slowly, the motion heavy with understanding. There was no protest, no empty reassurance. He understood the cold calculus of power. A weakened Clan Head was a liability. The transition would need to be swift, seamless, and decisive.
"I understand."
With a grimace of intense pain, Daichi channelled a faint glow of chakra to the fingertips of his right hand. The air crackled with the intimate, horrifying sound of sizzling flesh.
Without a sound, without even a flinch, he plunged his fingers into the socket of his left eye. There was a wet, sickening pop. Fugaku watched, his own stomach clenching, as his father withdrew his hand, holding the useless, greyed orb in his palm.
Daichi stared at it for a long, silent moment. The eye that had once held one of the most powerful dojutsu in the world was now just a piece of dead tissue.
As a respectable Clan Head, he could not afford to carry any symbol of weakness. The empty socket could be explained away as a war wound, a badge of honour.
But keeping the blinded eye itself? It would be a constant, physical reminder of his moment of failure, of the time he was forced to sacrifice a part of his heritage to save his own life. It was a relic of vulnerability. It had to be purged.
With a final, contemptuous flick of his wrist, he tossed the eye onto the glassy ground before him. He formed a single-handed seal with his bloodstained fingers.
"Fire Release: Great Fireball Jutsu."
A compact, intensely hot sphere of fire erupted from his lips and engulfed the eye. It was not a grand, triumphant fireball, but a precise, funerary cremation. The flesh sizzled and blackened in an instant, turning to ash that was scattered by the heated wind. It was an act of utter, ruthless finality.
The deed done, Daichi turned his head, his single, bleeding Mangekyo Sharingan fixing on Fugaku with a sudden, fierce intensity that belied his weakened state.
"What we must do now," Daichi said, his voice regaining a sliver of its former command, "is ensure that you are at least the Uchiha Clan Head after this war. Whatever it takes."