"I don't like the look that the eyes of examinee Kiyomi had taken one bit!" Konohamaru declared and exclaimed a sharp hum while his body shivered despite there being no physical reason for such a reaction.
"Well… I have a theory but… Let's just keep looking and see what happens…" Udon mumbled, shifting in between wanting to voice his thoughts and thinking them too mad to be let out into the public.
Down in the center of the stage, Sasuke's Susanoo emerged and formed around its master like a ghastly, skeletal specter. Its ribcage shut around its user while two, massive arms with oversized for the proportions of its size from the waist going up fists bashed the ground in front of Sasuke a couple of times just to demonstrate its might and give Sasuke a way in which to vent the frustration that his opponent brought out from him.
"That thrust again?" Sasuke growled. "It didn't work before, you almost got yourself killed using it yet you're charging right back in?"
"What can I say? When I see criminal scum standing right in front of me, it makes my blood boil…" Kiyomi answered with a hollow tone, devoid of spirit and humanity. Speaking like a machine, with all of a stamp that sealed a man's death sentence.
"Hmph…" Sasuke mocked his opponent with a scowl while his Susanoo opened up its center and spread its arms out, almost welcoming his opponent in as long as she was mad enough to be looking to dance the devil swing.
Kiyomi was not just mad enough, she was looking to lead that dance. Her front foot launched her entire body into a dash that she could not back out from without straining her ankles and knees to the point of breaking. Sasuke kept his eyes on the prize and wide open, while he acknowledged an unhealthy obsession with ending his existence in the attitude of his opponent, he also sensed that she was anything but crazy and would not just rush her head inside the guillotine.
All of the vanished vigor returned to Kiyomi all at once. Her eyes snapped open like a pair of voracious jaws and her mouth let out all of her pent up passion with a single exclamation of hatred. The drive and focus all flowed into her mental blade, transforming it into a weapon five times that same size though weighing just about the same as it did when she wielded it before.
The resulting pop dazed and confused the audience all the way to the middle rows. The whirling shockwave tore leaves off of the artificial trees that were meant to provide sanctuary to the stealthier combatants but were in term torn out with their roots. The ethereal shatters of the Susanoo smashed into Sasuke's face, leaving grazes across its youthful allure though the young man himself was not at all bothered by the slashes across his face as much as he was by the mental sword stabbing into his core and sending him flying straight backward.
Even with the Sharingan in place, even with its deadly luster and symbols gleaming in full display, Sasuke's expression was blank and void though not due to his trademark apathy. Instead it turned dull due to overwhelming force and pain that confronted him head-on and which even his Susanoo was incapable of handling.
The white, spectral sword around Kiyomi's arm vanished. The oversized sword reduced into a single beaming rod while the cloud shapes coiling around it vanished to cotton-like fluffs before becoming as immaterial as the thoughts of the observers looking at them. The sword returned to the length of an ordinary katana before fading away, unraveling in stringy flares into the mental void.
"I hope you had a good look at it. Good enough to realize that this is one technique you cannot just imitate," Kiyomi looked ahead at the unsettling dust, further aggravated by the falling blocks of limestone that took longer to dislodge from their position.
Sasuke appeared from the smoke, his forehead was busted open and sent a handful of thin, red streaks across his face. The young man panted as he without a doubt had experienced what Kiyomi told him by himself sheer moments before the passionate thrust and felt like she took a gander inside his mind without actually entering it.
"When I was studying this fighting style, I couldn't help but admire the irony that it would be used against you. It is a jutsu that pretty much anyone could pull off, all they need is someone skilled enough to teach them, show them the ropes of the technique and a mind focused enough. A stream of thoughts hard enough to drill through stone. Anyone could do it, though you, someone with a talent for stealing the fruit of other people's hard work cannot," Kiyomi mocked her opponent.
In a lot of ways, she reflected the mockery that she internalized ever since the days of the Ninja Academy. No Uchiha has ever said it out loud, but it was something that she herself felt them to be thinking. They never needed to work all that hard, everything came naturally to them and what didn't they could just master with a single look with their eyes.
"You're wrong…" Sasuke finally mustered a reply. "Unlike Kakashi, I do not merely copy the path to other people's power. I wasn't about to just copy jutsu like Kakashi nor was I going to inflict despair upon myself to awaken power like Itachi's. I've borrowed a little bit from different people but, just like you, only to make something my own. Just like with this jutsu…"
Sasuke's body flickered, his speed caught Kiyomi by surprise, she did not expect him to move this fast this soon after taking this much damage. Like a man possessed he raced at her, driving his elbow into Kiyomi's gut though the Yamanaka vanished, dissolving into shapeless, white flares just like her sword did previously. The confused Uchiha staggered back and looked around him.
"You've made yourself into a mental reflection?" he muttered in pain as his Eternal Mangekyou scanned the area for any traces of his opponent. He had put a great deal of stamina and invested some chakra into emulating the Shadow of the Dancing Leaf he once saw Rock Lee use on him and only managed to disrupt the mind trick that Kiyomi was putting him into.
"That's right. And it is no mere genjutsu, it is thought made into matter, which appears to trick even your awesome eyes. After all, my thoughts are indeed me so it won't look like some clone or a mere illusion," Kiyomi taunted Sasuke further by having another version of her appear from the cover of the barren and fallen trees and lobbing a handful of gleaming, white kunai at him as a distraction.
An indigo-colored arm deflected the mental kunai with a back-handed swat. The other arm punched the charging mental image while Sasuke's eyes remained free to track the battlefield and identify any follow-up attacks. He didn't need to be able to tell flesh and blood from a mental construct that seemed deceitfully real. His experience was enough to guide him through the battle, his instincts as an avenger.
"That again? I'll break it!" Kiyomi growled as she charged right at Sasuke and more and more mental doppelgangers began flickering into view around her. Each one of them possessing a blade of sharpened thought, ready to strike at the rebuilt carcass of the Susanoo together. All of them moving in synchrony like guided by some sort of hive mind.
"Art of the Crescent Moon!" Kiyomi chanted out as both her physical self as well as her mental avatars all thrust their mind-blades at once, striking at Sasuke together. Just as their blades seemingly made their way through the shattering ethereal bones, an invisible force, the intensity of the Susanoo's aura stopped them. The skeletal form began growing in size as more and more armor blazed on top of it until the armor took a complete shape.
The mental doppelgangers all dispersed into the thought-based images they started out as while Kiyomi put herself in a better range to prepare to deal with Sasuke's manifested technique. For someone that took the eyes of his deceased brother who was the sole obsession of Sasuke's vengeful desire, the eyes of an unmatched sage and a master illusionist in his own right, Kiyomi felt like Sasuke was far too skilled in and used the Susanoo far more than any illusionary techniques of the Mangekyou Sharingan.
"For someone who dismissed his brother, you possess a very peculiar set of eyes…" Kiyomi barked out in frustration of failing to injure her opponent in a meaningful way while observing him manifesting a frightening new form before her that awed the entire audience. A set of armor that ascended and loomed over the audience and left the entire Chuunin Exams arena reaching up only up to his waist.
"I wonder if examinee Sasuke can even hear her from up there…" Moegi leaned in closer to the window so that she could take a gander up at Sasuke who positioned himself in the helmet of his majestic suit of chakra armor.
"Maybe not, but don't forget that Sasuke possesses the Sharingan, which can read her lips even from up there…" Udon pointed out.
"Wow, the Sharingan really does have a frightening number of abilities, doesn't it?" Konohamaru pouted his lips before smacking his hands at the table and cheering up. "What a crazy battle though!"
"Your information betrays you. Maybe you're better off letting the old intelligence guy stay in charge?" Sasuke smirked from up above, his voice left the Susanoo like boiling vapor rushing through iron pipes, howling, and augmented. "The eyes that I possess are not Itachi's, I'd have never accepted to take his eyes. By the time that we caught up to Itachi, he had replaced his eyes with Madara's. Therefore, this Susanoo may be Madara's, though, as I've said earlier, the rest is all my own!"
Sasuke leaped up into the air, shaking the entire arena and sending a gale that locked every audience member to their seats, even Kiyomi had to clutch herself to stay upright as the intense draft almost crushed her to flat to the floor. Even with the heavenly soar of Sasuke's armor, Kiyomi could hear it - the dreadful chirping noise. The sources were too numerous for it to ever drown out and submit to the air resistance.
It was as if every volt of the Lightning Release technique was a separate bird with its own song with the total unison of the symphony connecting the heavens and earth alike. With the Chidori in hand, Sasuke dive-bombed the stage, thrusting his Chidori into the center of the arena and letting vicious lightning storms ravage the ground while they rushed to the skies, flipping the mechanics of thunder and lightning upside down in this chaotic show of strength.
The Susanoo towered over the exams arena, staring at the celestial devastation it had wrought while dark clouds gathered just over its helmet. The ground laid ravaged in fissures with infernal gleams shining from deep down wherever those fissures ended up in reaching. The Susanoo stared onward at the settling dust with a bottomless, black void, and near the center of the said void, only two discs duplicating the patterns of Sasuke's Mangekyou Sharingan lingered.
"Hmph… You can stop hiding, my eyes can see right through you. It's a bit embarrassing, all this effort ruined with a single Substitution Jutsu…" Sasuke's voice boomed over the wreckage.
"You'll have to give me more effort than that…" Kiyomi's thoughts caressed his mind, seeing how Sasuke's opponent was nowhere for him to be able to read her lips from. "That jutsu was mad. If I had not timed it just right and used just the right fallen tree to replace myself with, I'd have ended up hit by a stray bolt regardless of my trouble…"
"Your body is too strained to be able to use Substitution for a while and I've cleared out most of the debris you could use to replace yourself with. I don't see you being able to escape the next attack the same way…" Sasuke appeared stubborn to compliment his opponent any more than he had already done. "No matter how sharp and focused you think your resolve to beat me is, you won't pierce this Perfect Susanoo. You're too weak for it. You're weak because you lack hatred."
"It's you who lacks something and that's imagination!" Kiyomi pointed her finger in between two splitting layers of dust. Her black dress had a few rips and tears and her neatly tied hair now scattered loose in the wind, some exposed patches of her skin carried spots of dirt and bruising on them though she remained mostly intact.
The Yamanaka heiress lifted her hands up, touching her thumbs and index fingers and forming a circle between the pair through which to fire her very spirit at the enemy. It was a bold declaration, she pretty much exclaimed the way in which she'd attack before firing the decisive shot.
"I may not be able to pierce your shell of excuses physically, but your mind is feeble enough for me to reach right through the armor!" Kiyomi declared.
Sasuke would not even let her try. The iris of the Sharingan became drowned out by black as the concentrated beams of dark void zipped out of the Susanoo's eyes, expunging all of the malevolent chakra that Sasuke had been building up inside him in the shape of a field of dark void expanding throughout the arena. Starting from the center of the area that his dark eyebeams hit.
The dome of the dark void continued to expand, grinding against the outer reaches of the fighting stage and sending sparks as it collided with the wall separating the front rows of the audience from the action inside the arena. Shining lines, like breaches in the blackness of the dome expanded across its surface, Sasuke's Susanoo began shrinking down before fading away completely. Seemingly lifeless, the youth collapsed into the heart of the void of his own creation as well, becoming swallowed by it.
"Just what happened?! What is that dark blob swallowing the entire area!?" Konohamaru stood up so that he could see more of the arena, over the obstructions though those were aspirations too grand compared to what the reality had in store.
"I'm not sure, though we will not know until the void disappears. If it was a harmful technique, we can count on Sasuke taking its brunt as well. He appears to have miscalculated how much chakra he has left and fallen deep down into the void manifested by his own twisted chakra," Udon reported alongside his colleagues.
"What happened to examinee Kiyomi though? She was right in the center of that blast before the void began expanding?" Moegi turned to her colleagues, looking worried. "Look there, even the staff isn't sure if they should interfere or not…"
The green-vests pressed their hands against the edges of the dark void which spat out violet jolts upon contact. Despite not hurting the staff attempting to invade the Dark Void, all of them were kept away from its clutches even when they applied chakra to their touch or encased their fists in it. Not even barrier-busting techniques appeared to be effective against this phenomenon.
"Tsk… What the hell did you do?" Kiyomi looked right at Sasuke. With her being surrounded by a field of infinite white, it was easy to notice a kneeling, attractive young man right before her. It was so even when his heaven-shattering suit of perfect armor was no longer coating him.
"You did this as much as I did. It was your jutsu and its collision with the dark chakra from my Curse Seal that created this," Sasuke stated upon finding the strength inside him to stand back up on his feet. For the first time in a while his Sharingan was closed. He must have lacked the chakra to keep it up now.
"It doesn't matter, I bet your plan didn't include you getting gobbled up by your own destructive field, did it?" Kiyomi noticed the exhausted state that her opponent was in. It only made sense that after throwing his advanced Mangekyou Sharingan techniques around and dive-bombing everything around him into oblivion while clouding the entire half of the planet in gloomy weather and upwards lightning storms he'd begin running out of juice.
No man could sustain themselves with darkness alone. Darkness was a sword that still required someone of substance, flesh and blood to wield it.
"I hope you don't hold it against me if I finish you off now. I'm not much for fake honors and I won't back down just because you ran out of strength to fight back. I won't even shed tears if you end up dying for real, for all anyone knows – the Dark Void might have done it…" Kiyomi lifted her hand up and focused her willpower and thought into a blade that did not form.
Not a single flicker or a spark of white.
"Your thought has no power in here," Sasuke declared. "Taint is the only language that this world understands and while you do seem to possess a fair bit of hatred – it's not what gives your mental blade its shape and sharpness, is it?"
"I guess I can always just beat the shit out of you. Some stated that something akin to that act provides them an immeasurable amount of pleasure, I've never tested that myself…" Kiyomi cracked her knuckles and took a handful of steps closer to Sasuke.
"Unfortunately for you, my own darkness still has ways to go… My power does not end at the edges of my humanity for an avenger needs to leave that aside…" Sasuke declared as his hair fell over his sweaty and bloodied forehead, letting only his Mangekyou Sharingan emerge. The sudden re-emergence of Sasuke's chakra halted Kiyomi in her shoes.
She thought that Sasuke had no more chakra to spare!
As an intense, malevolent aura of deep purple flowed from Sasuke and black markings extended from his neck in all directions of his body, chakra comprised of sheer evil leaked out from the Curse Seal and gave the weary avenger his desired second wind. It was the emergence of a power that came from an ill-willed curse toward the possessor of the mark from its creator, chakra of malevolence incarnate which was currency accepted by the Dark Void.
It was something that should have been of little surprise for it was a spark of that very same Curse Seal chakra that gave birth to the void after all.