While the thought that it might have been wiser to scope out the full extent of Sasuke's current abilities under the influence of the Cursed Seal he was tapping into did not elude Kiyomi, she made the decision to instead apply pressure on her opponent and prevent him from displaying any of those abilities altogether.

Normally it would have been silly to attack an Uchiha and a possessor of the Sharingan hand-to-hand though Kiyomi had a hunch that, just like the entirety of her abilities, the Dark Void also forbid Sasuke from using his Sharingan as well. After all, Sharingan was not a technique of some accursed darkness like the Cursed Seal, it was a bloodline visual technique that very much employed chakra in its activation as well as its sustenance.

Sasuke's body moved, turning sideways in avoidance of Kiyomi's rushing, vertical high kick. It was as if the Uchiha prodigy operated under entirely different rules than his opponent, his face spilled out the hatred swelling up inside him but his body moved without the brutality or stiffness that such feelings would have evoked.

A backhanded punch faltered Kiyomi, made her withdraw her foot right back to support her stance instead of pursuing follow-up attacks. The taste of blood persisted in the Yamanaka's mouth, vision got dizzy and Kiyomi staggered back. Another punch straight in her chest before Sasuke transitioned into a barrage of spinning uppercuts like a rising drill, his sword had been drawn from the sheath. Kiyomi could hear the steel whistling in the air though everything she saw was just the white of the inner void and Sasuke's blurry colors meshing together.

Something sharp made Kiyomi return to reality, she tore the veil of dizzy away only to see a flash of red emanating from her chest. Before it splattered across, the young woman had thought it to be light though once the picture of a cross-shaped slash on her chest etched itself into stone, she clutched at the wound to try and struggle with bleeding out.

"You've prepared quite well to face an Uchiha. But I am no ordinary Uchiha. My goals lie in the darkness, my power comes from hatred, and to defeat me your hatred must surpass mine," Sasuke postured at Kiyomi in a husky tone while showing her the bloody edge of his sword as he adopted an offensive fighting stance with his sword in hand.

Sasuke's body flickered, everything went dark while only a sharp feeling of pain persisted in Kiyomi's chin. By the time the young woman braced herself for a response, her opponent was gone and a sharp, back-spanning pain made Kiyomi want to bend her body backward so that she could feel the wide gash that Sasuke had opened on her back. As if just touching the wound would have somehow helped…

No, at the moment it felt like Kiyomi wanted to rip it, claw it away so that her back and the mark of shame that it carried was no longer a part of her body. The floor of the Dark Void felt rougher than a patch of grass to fall face-flat onto though it didn't break any bones. It was a more metaphysical sense of trauma and pain that lingered long after the stumble. Made it difficult to force one to ascend back.

"Your hatred is so puny, I'm not sure it's even real at all…" Sasuke mocked his opponent again. "Was it all just a show? Like a mantra to focus your thoughts? To make all of those constructs real? No, I can feel that you do hate me but you restrain that hatred, you fear it."

"If I give in…" Kiyomi grumbled in a voice seething with pain and torment as she rose from the ground, long splats of blood extended from her wounds to the small pools that they had formed onto the floor, "I might cross the line myself. I will destroy every criminal in my path but only as long as it will not make me one myself. I don't want to turn my mind against myself one day, after all…"

"Hmph…" Sasuke mocked his opponent. "That's pathetic. Let me show you the extent of true hatred, the wall of darkness that you can never hope to overcome."

In his elegant pose, Sasuke's entire skin turned to a darker, ash-colored shade while the whites of his eyes submerged into a total pool of black. Since his Sharingan could not activate within the void, Sasuke's eyes remained sunken in darkness as his hair lengthened to where they reached his lower back and turned teal. A visual cross-shaped scar etched itself onto the front of Sasuke's face as he fully gave himself into the seal of cursed hatred sealed inside him, drawing every last bit of its power.

Crackles of black lightning surged across each of his limbs, emerging from its top or bottom and then re-entering at the opposite end, creating an intense, crackling aura of evil. Two hand-shaped wings, connected by a thick, skinny membrane, colored similarly to Sasuke's skin spread behind him and turned sideways. Riding the aerodynamic swoop motion, Sasuke blitzed behind Kiyomi and flipped over himself, diving down with a double foot stomp to the back of Kiyomi's head.

The ash-colored dark angel spun in a dance of spinning, windmill kicks, keeping Kiyomi afloat as he delivered his hateful beatdown and sent the Yamanaka sliding across to the other end of the void. Before Kiyomi's floating vision could solidify, Sasuke had skid beside her, sliding on one foot as his wings aided in his surface-level skidding motion and tossed the downed opponent of his up into the air before smacking her with a backhanded slam and a back-flipping kick before swooping up and catching Kiyomi by the tatters of her dress and flipping her over so that her head stared downward and he could deliver his falcon drop successfully.

"This is the power of hatred of someone that's lost everyone in their life and chose to surrender everything they had left in pursuit of vengeance to that which took the first away in the first place. Someone who has everything, who still has subordinates, talent, intelligence, friendship and adoration, high status, and class has no hope of ever matching this kind of hatred. Someone who has not burnt down every last bit of reason for the empty, screaming void of revenge has no hope of ever claiming this power," Sasuke spoke in a softer, more civilized tone as he spread his wings out and sheathed his sword.

Soft taps of his sandals endlessly echoing throughout the Dark Void of his creation reached Kiyomi through the shapeless shrieks of insanity booming in her head. While she could not use chakra inside of this void, her own body was a void which she could use chakra inside of. She could augment it and wager her lifespan, her chakra network, and everything else she had for the sake of victory.

Letting her own chakra flood through her network without any floodgates inhibiting its rush, Kiyomi jumped to her feet. The tapping of Sasuke's sandals stopped and his eyelids twitched for a second, confused at the source of power that his opponent was displaying. Just for a second, Kiyomi could feel it, her own hatred beginning to define her mind. Her focus being entirely construed of her hatred for criminals and the Uchiha rogue standing in front of her.

Her mental blade of hatred, Sasuke will choke on it all.

But her opponent was no longer where her hatred had centered around him being. Sasuke's feet tapped lightly behind Kiyomi as the young woman felt the tight clutches of a white snake wrapping around her and squeezing all signs of hatred out of her, turning her into the same, powerless little girl that wept at her brother's funeral when he fell. The squeeze of the white serpent lightened a little bit, that was of Sasuke's command, without a doubt, the damned bastard was mocking her!

"I've made the same mistake you just did. I've tried attaining power in someone else's ways. I've tried making the same mistakes someone else had made, just because they led those people to the same plateaus of power that I craved for myself. That was not my path to power. Just like hatred isn't yours. Abandon it. You do not and cannot know hatred and it isn't worth for you to taste its emptiness. It is because you've tackled me on the path of hatred that you lost today," Sasuke's soft voice made Kiyomi struggle and kick in the snake's hold until eventually she overpowered it but before she could try and reform her blade of hatred, the entire void sunk in white, overpowering everything around it.

"W-What's this!? Something is happening to the Dark Void, the staff is retreating from the area. Is it safe for the audience to still be here?" Konohamaru laid a valiant siege on his microphone on commentary that appeared to make the audience unruly due to both the weight of his warnings and the volume at which he uttered them.

Stretches of rigid, angular, white lines expanded from the top and center of the dome of the Dark Void until the entire dome began to howl and bubble up with internal pressure. Upon reaching the zone of collapse, collapse the Dark Void did, blasting upward into a pillar of blinding light and leaving just two competitors standing before one another. One lying prone while the other stared at her with the reborn Sharingan eyes from a superior, standing position.

"Oh my! The examinees have emerged from the Dark Void and examinee Sasuke is completely transformed! Examinee Kiyomi isn't looking too good, on the other hand, just what had transpired within that void remains unclear but it is self-evident that the collapse of the Dark Void has caused examinee Kiyomi extensive damage," Konohamaru raced to do his one job in this exam and explain this utter chaos to the very confused and frightened audience.

"Blood…" Kiyomi grumbled, "There's no blood on me…"

Grunting and panting she rose on her feet. She didn't feel any signs of beatdown on her, no dizziness or concussion, none of the internal, crushed organs or damage to her chakra network from the abuse of chakra augmentations necessary to survive that beating she took inside. There were no slashes on her body or scarring to indicate that they had happened but were somehow healed. Her dress had taken a fair bit of damage, as did what the attire had covered as Kiyomi felt tormenting burns and bruises all over her body.

"The Dark Void takes us to a dimension outside time or space, a realm of pure hatred and darkness. The Void is too hungry and greedy to allow the hatred that leaks out there to escape its dimension so anything that hatred causes remains in that dimension. To put matters simply – your body only sustained the damage from the collapse of the Dark Void and not anything that my hatred had caused within it," Sasuke pointed out.

"In that case, our match continues," Kiyomi stated after cracking her knuckles and stretching out her aching muscles to get them to acceptable shape for fighting.

"You mean… You still mean to continue this pointless fight?" Sasuke bent his head to the side. Now that the Sharingan eyes returned to him, one could make out the disappointment on his face.

"You're not getting away from me this easily," Kiyomi clenched her fist and ignited her mental blade to appear before swiping it aside and pointing its tip at Sasuke's direction while she placed her palm at the end of where the hilt of the ethereal sword would be.

It was true that the Cursed Seal which Sasuke had adopted had provided him with a massive boost of dark chakra which he could utilize to put pressure on Kiyomi who was working with a far more human supply of it. Still, that sort of a malicious boost could not have come to him without a price. He struggled for the control over his body, he had to maintain a healthy balance of his own chakra and that of the seal's. Chakra was fundamentally the essence of the physical and spiritual parts of one's essence. If Sasuke ever became more Cursed Seal than himself – he'd succumb and transform irreversibly.

Kiyomi smirked and raised her hands up, just like before, Sasuke soared up, riding the gales with his wings as he escaped her line of sight and raced to avoid her Yamanaka hijutsu. He was suspicious of the fact that Kiyomi wanted to enter his mind, meaning that he feared it. Perhaps he suspected that she would attempt and cancel out his Cursed Seal while she was over his mind, perhaps he didn't, either way, he wanted to remain in charge of his body.

This was exactly the same thing he did earlier and in pulling the same evasive move twice he provided Kiyomi with a freebie. The Yamanaka raised the target of the tip of her mental blade and soared after her opponent. There they were… Kiyomi could almost see the flashes of foreseeable future flashing in Sasuke's eyes. His exalted set of eyes showing her blade penetrating his chest in the air, Kiyomi using mental avatars and clones to compensate for inferior aerial mobility and a lack of wings. He foresaw it all.

A spray of blood and Sasuke's rough grunt. Kiyomi couldn't see just where she may have injured the young man for his hand-shaped wings blocked the hit, absorbing the impalement and leaving only a narrow tip for the body cocooned inside of them. It was the wings that shed blood, not Sasuke's body and as the airborne agent of hatred fluttered his injured wings, slicing them up to regain some semblance of control, Kiyomi was forced to let her blade disperse so that her own body did not get redirected and controlled by the movement of Sasuke's impaled wings.

A crackle of black lightning intensified in Sasuke's right arm as he thrust it aside. White snakes slithered from his shoulder-blades and mended his torn up wings by becoming shapeless, white mush, and sticking the wings together before regenerating them instantly that way. With his Black Chidori, Sasuke thrust his arm forward as his wings sent him gliding across the aerial space, racing toward his opponent.

The mental blade reignited in Kiyomi's hand as she dragged her palm across its surface toward its tip and thrust it in a deflecting motion, driving it into Sasuke's forearm and forcing his Black Chidori to miss her chest and leaving it just grazing her shoulder and upper arm. Kiyomi dispersed her mental sword in perfect synchrony with Sasuke letting his corrupted version of Chidori disappear as well. The Yamanaka twisted her body to wrap her legs around Sasuke's neck and try to slam him into the ground but Sasuke repurposed her slam into a Falcon Drop of his own.

Kiyomi bent her body upward, extending her arms in the Yamanaka hijutsu position as she released her mental self floating above her, firing it like an arrow, instead of just a highly focused thought which it was. Sasuke braced himself and tilted his head upward, avoiding the mind-controlling projectile just narrowly and completing his piledriver before it returned to its mistress' body.

Had it not been for the pain, Kiyomi would have thought herself dead. Had it not been for the pain reverberating upward, sending agonizing electric impulses across her entire nervous system in a reversed direction, she'd not have realized that her head was driven into the ground and that she was in an unceremonious upward position.

"Oh! What an intense battle, both of these examinees are at the edge of their abilities and this match could end at any moment, any of these blows could be the last!" Konohamaru yelled out into the microphone. Faint traces of the noise interference reached Kiyomi's own ears as well.

"Hey, hey! Isn't examinee Sasuke overdoing it a little bit? He is cladding himself in his Perfect Susanoo armor again and he is entering a sword-drawing stance. Enough already, staff, examinee Sasuke, one of you might die if you don't stop it!" Moegi yelled out in distress, making the audience question why the fight wasn't getting stopped as well.

"Blaze Control: Kagutsuchi!" Sasuke yelled out as his Perfect Susanoo drew the supersized, ethereal representation of his Kusanagi blade and slashed at thin air, coating it in a layer of the black Amaterasu flames as he sent a ravaging projectile of them at Kiyomi's direction. The flames splashed at nothing but dirt, leaving a wide fissure in where they hit the ground but the absence of blood-curdling screams as Kiyomi's body burnt down to a crisp left a strong suggestion that Sasuke had missed his mark.

The Perfect Susanoo, that had turned ash-grey in color itself due to the corrupting influence of Sasuke's Cursed Seal took off, staring at the ground as if it had foreseen its immediate demise coming from that direction. One afloat, Sasuke maintained his position in the air and continued to look down with his sword-wielding arm still on the hilt of his ethereal Kusanagi.

"Your deception cannot escape my eyes, come out into the light already, it's useless to keep hiding…" Sasuke taunted his opponent.

"Damn, just when I thought I'd catch you off-guard, of course, you stupid eyes could see me…" Kiyomi couldn't help but smirk as she emerged from underground, clutching at her ribs and panting.

"You're the one to speak, that was very perceptive, how you managed to see my Kagutsuchi coming and evade it. I thought you missed that Mind Body Switch, though it appears you didn't," Sasuke complimented his opponent as well.

"Well, naturally, you weren't the one I was aiming for, it was the hawk flying over us. I figured that aiming it at you would have been pointless whereas entering the mind of a bird let me spy on your next move and return to my busted body just in time to not get obliterated," Kiyomi grumbled out.

"Give up. Your body is at your limit already, you'll die before my seal starts corrupting me. That was your plan, wasn't it?" Sasuke encouraged his opponent but Kiyomi just smirked and raised her arms up. It was a challenge, Sasuke commanded his Perfect Susanoo to put his hand onto the hilt of his sword as well. "This is useless, we already know my Susanoo is faster than your mental techniques."

Kiyomi's arms weighed down and clenched into fists before she was forced on one knee and clutching over her busted ribs while her other hand caressed her strained neck and shoulders. She had gotten too smart for her own good, she was beaten and she knew it.

"You're right, maybe I could have made your Sharingan work overtime with mental duplicates while I landed a Mind Body Switch on you and forced you to surrender, maybe I couldn't have. Honestly, I'm done…" Kiyomi raised her hand and declared her surrender before falling on her butt and letting go of the augmentations she was burning through that held her upright.

She had lost but that was never what made the definitive difference in who got promoted and who didn't. She managed to demonstrate that irksome thing called maturity in admitting defeat while at the same time making the Uchiha look good as a result. As much as Kiyomi hated to admit it, that was fundamental for Konohagakure as well as the Uchiha were their trademark, their big baby that they got to show off to the other villages.

Honestly, Kiyomi couldn't have felt more humiliated in achieving her promotion this way but that was the way things worked…

A fleshy hole lined up with sharp teeth on its edges burped before opening up on the floor of a dark office in the unknown though far-off reaches of the Fire Country. A pair of bipedal hounds with eight eyes scattered all over their black, slick fur ascended from the hole and breathed tongues of flame to repel the gigantic germ blobs racing after them. The hounds then pulled on a couple of burning chains that they carried tied across their necks and pulled in an obsidian coffin decorated with gold at its edges.

A gaunt man with a single streak of silver hair that fell into a ponytail after it reached the beginning of the man's neck approached the emerged coffin and pressed his hand onto the golden face in the middle. Nails shot out from the sides of the coffin with the upper seal of the coffin sliding off of it, revealing the contents of the coffin – a single, fragile figure restrained in dozens of leathery belts with a full-face leather mask over its face.

Alongside the sealing glyph on the top of the black coffin that the figure emerged sealed into, a similar glyph lit up on the chest of the feminine figure, snapping all of the belts holding her subdued inside of the coffin and letting the enigmatic shape sit up in her coffin. The feminine shape struggled out of the loosened leathery binds restraining her and emerged from her restraints in a suit comprised of leathery straps held together by a handful of rings and falling loosely in a way vaguely resembling a dress.

Once fully freed, the mystery person forced the gimp mask off of her face to take a couple of full breaths for the first time in a while. While the atmosphere of Kumobi Morino's office was remarkably oppressive what with all the lingering scents of tortured and disappearing forever souls weighing heavy in the air, these breaths were preferable to the long, dark-haired young woman emerging from her restraints and binders.

"I would very much prefer if you put that mask back on, ma'am, while your imprisonment is over, we take up the menial duty of delivering you right to the village's doorstep and while you are no longer the inhabitant of our fine facility, we would still very much like to keep the location of it a secret," Kumobi Morino smiled with that heinous twist of his middle-aged yet as wrinkled as the leather that the released prisoner wore on her body face.

The young woman sighed and looked at the mask that she grasped in her hand. She had spent more than a few months that, in this place, stretched out into infinity and beyond, imprisoned here and was forced to don it as a sign of her status in the most fearsome and tyrannical gang in entire Jigoku. She was but a dog in Nereigen's crew, a sniffer good only for her sensing abilities which, every time they were employed, made her beg for death but her master couldn't hear those pleads because of this mask which she wore.

Nothing of value would be lost if this cursed accessory burnt to cinders in her very own hands…

For the last time, Mana slipped the mask back on. It would have been foolish raising a ruckus when the very administration of Jigoku was rushing to get rid of her already. She was, after all, broken and reduced to rubble by the facility and therefore "reformed". Here she was, a notable and exemplary member of society with a gimp mask and strands that showed more than they hid…

The journey back home could not have taken that long. Mana was certain that the seals that prohibited her from using chakra and therefore made life in Jigoku a very real, living hell for any chakra sensor were taken off though she still remained sheltered off from all sensations just in case it wasn't. If she could choose to never see, never hear or taste or sense chakra just so that she would never feel that ever again, she would carve her own eyes out with a spoon herself.

"Well, there you go, back into society you go, ma'am…"

Mana was surprised by how gently the guards led her out of the caravan and even helped her wrestle out of that asphyxiating mask. It was almost as if they were looking at her all different now, after all, she was no longer their prisoner, she was now someone who indirectly paid their salary. The carriage turned around and rolled back off into the gloomy depths of the forest, never to be picked up on again.

"Our maximum-security correctional facilities still need work…" Mana summed up her past six months before taking the first bold steps in her old-new home.

She's back.