The last sliver of the sun had vanished, leaving the world in the deep, luminous indigo of high-altitude twilight, the first piercing stars glittering like scattered diamond dust overhead.
The jar felt unnervingly heavy, a condensed weight of possibility and peril. He traced the seal on its lid with his thumb, feeling the faint, dormant hum of preservation chakra within.
Renjiro set the jar down carefully on a flat rock. This was not its moment. First, he needed a baseline.
His hands moved with practiced, sharp precision.
Tiger
He focused a substantial portion of his chakra, and with a soft puff of displaced air and a faint scent of ozone, an identical copy of himself appeared at his side.
The Shadow Clone met his gaze, its expression a mirror of his own focused resolve. No lengthy explanation was needed; they shared a consciousness, a purpose.
"Do it," Renjiro said, his voice barely more than a murmur against the wind.
The clone nodded once. Its eyes snapped open, the familiar crimson of the Sharingan spinning to life.
Then, without visible strain, the tomoe bled and morphed, reforming into the complex, sovereign pattern of the tri-wheel Mangekyo—the design he had known since the bad news.
A visible surge of chakra erupted from the clone, a palpable, heat-haze distortion that made the very air around it waver. The ground at its feet cracked in a fine web.
Renjiro himself didn't wait. In a flicker of movement—shunshin—he was two hundred meters away, perched on a rocky outcrop, his own Sharingan active to record every detail.
The clone raised its head, its Mangekyo blazing. From its body, a torrent of emerald-green chakra erupted, so vibrant it seemed to cast its own eerie light on the darkening plateau.
The energy coalesced with a deep, resonating thrum that vibrated through the stone beneath Renjiro's feet. First, a ribcage of glowing green bones formed, encircling the clone.
Then, vertebrae snaked upward, a skeletal spine. A skull-like helmet manifested, followed by arms and legs of pure chakra construct. The process was swift, efficient, and within seconds, a humanoid outline of a Susanoo, about fifteen meters tall, stood silhouetted against the starry sky.
It was complete, stable—a skeletal giant clad in flickering green energy.
Renjiro watched, his brows furrowing. It was impressive, a testament to the clone's—and thus his own—proficiency. But a cold spike of dissatisfaction drove into his gut.
'This isn't enough,' he thought.
He formed the hand seal again.
"Puff!"
A second Shadow Clone appeared. This one's purpose was more delicate. Without a word, Renjiro sat on the cold rock, tilting his head back. The clone moved behind him, its hands glowing with precise, medical-grade chakra—a technique refined from years of obsessive self-study.
There was no hesitation, only clinical focus. With deft, painless motions, the clone carefully removed Renjiro's original eyes, placing them in a stasis-sealed container from Renjiro's pouch.
Then, from the jar, it retrieved the preserved, six-pointed star Mangekyo eyes. The transplant was swift, the chakra threads weaving optic nerves and chakra pathways together with microscopic precision.
A brief, hot ache flared behind Renjiro's sockets, then faded into a strange, cool fullness. He blinked, and the world resolved not through his own vision, but through the borrowed, potent lenses of his spare set.
"Thank you," Renjiro said, his voice slightly rough.
The clone nodded and dispelled itself, its knowledge of the procedure and the exact sensation of the transplant flooding back into him. He now saw the world through the filter of the usual Mangekyo.
Without pausing, he formed a third seal.
"Puff."
A third clone appeared.
"Opposite end of the plateau. Mirror the first test," Renjiro instructed. The clone flickered away, reappearing nearly a kilometre distant, a small, dark figure against the rocky expanse.
Renjiro remained seated, a conductor awaiting his orchestra. He reached inward, feeling for the connection to this foreign yet intimately connected power. He activated the Sharingan.
The world didn't just sharpen; it fractured into layers of perception. Through his own, newly transplanted six-pointed eyes, he saw the chakra flows of the island, the distant, swirling signatures of Tenjin circling high above, and the bright, focused beacon of his clone.
Then, he urged the evolution. The shift was different—not a surge, but a crystallisation. In his vision, the tomoe shattered and re-knit into the stark, geometrically perfect form of the six-pointed star Mangekyo. At the same moment, across the plateau, his clone did the same.
From the clone's position, the now-familiar eruption of steely silver chakra burst forth, the Mangekyo blazing as it once more constructed its humanoid, skeletal Susanoo with the same efficient thrum.
The chakra poured forth silently, without the resonating hum of the green one before, instead emitting a high, crystalline ringing sound, like a thousand slender blades being slowly drawn.
It coalesced not with violent energy, but with an almost serene, metallic certainty. Ribs, spine, limbs, helm—all formed from shimmering, argent light, creating a Susanoo of the same size and humanoid stage, but whose aura was one of cold, refined precision, not fierce vitality.
Renjiro rose to his feet, turning slowly to take in the sight. He stood midway between two towering chakra avatars, one a pillar of vibrant, living emerald, the other a statue of calm, radiant mercury.
The visual contrast was stunning under the twilight. The green Susanoo seemed to pulse with contained ferocity, its energy flickering like a bonfire. The silver one stood motionless and poised, its light steady and diffuse, reflecting the starlight like polished armour.
'Silver from the six-pointed star. Green from the tri-wheel,' he catalogued, the scientist in him filing the data even as the shinobi within reeled.
Activating his own six-pointed Mangekyo to its fullest analytical depth, he studied both constructs, his gaze darting between their skeletal structures, the density of their chakra, and their stability. A low, incredulous mutter escaped his lips, carried away by the wind.
"Now this is not fair at all."
His mind flashed back, years earlier, to the first, agonising time he had manifested the silver Susanoo. It had been a pathetic, fragile thing—just a few spectral ribs shielding his body, trembling with the strain of existence, more a cry for help than a weapon.
He had nursed it through countless conflicts, through the war. It had grown slowly: from ribs to a partial skeleton, gaining a limb, then a crude head. Each stage was a victory wrested from exhaustion and ocular agony.
Its journey to full humanoid form had been a brutal odyssey, culminating only after his climactic, defensive stand against the Third Raikage, where the sheer need to survive had forged the final connections.
Now, he watched as the green Susanoo, born of a different ocular lineage, manifested not as a struggling infant, but as a fully realised twin to his hard-won silver warrior.
It had skipped the painful infancy entirely.
Internally, he ran through the known, grim taxonomy of Susanoo development.
Ribcage: the initial, desperate defence. Skeletal: the addition of limbs and offensive capability, but fragile. Humanoid: stable, fully articulated, a true engine of war. Armoured: clad in chakra plate and weapons, a fortress. Perfect Susanoo* the legendary, autonomous titan, a tailed-beast-level entity of pure destruction. He was solidly in the Humanoid stage with both.
But the implication was staggering. If one Susanoo advanced—if, through battle or understanding, his silver avatar attained the Armoured stage—would that knowledge, that blueprint, be inherited by the green one? Was the progression tied to his soul, or to each individual pair of eyes?
His meticulous scan for differences finally pinpointed one. Clutched in the skeletal fist of the green Susanoo was a weapon. Not a sword, not a shield, but a long, straight staff of condensed green chakra, its ends tipped with sharp, spear-like points.
A bo staff.
A wry, almost amused breath escaped him. Of course. The weapon his own physical body had trained with for years, his preferred instrument for its versatility and control. His subconscious had armed its manifestation.
The realisation that followed was quiet but profound.
He looked at the silver Susanoo's empty hands, then back at the green one's staff. A small, genuine smile touched his lips, the tension of the unknown easing into the clarity of a new tool.
"Well," Renjiro said aloud, his voice firm in the emptiness. "It seems I won't need to rely solely on my chains anymore."
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