Kakashi: Godless Ascension

Chapter 287 - 287: Ch287: The Uninvited Guest

Three months passed in a blur of quiet consolidation. The world, unaware of the celestial feast that had occurred above its atmosphere, enjoyed an unprecedented era of peace. The United Shinobi Federation hummed with productive energy, and Konoha basked in the golden autumn sun.Kakashi stood on the porch of the Uzumaki household, a modest but warm home nestled among others in the rebuilt village. Through the window, he could see the scene inside.

Kawaki, his posture less defensive than before, was setting the table under Hinata's gentle instruction. Boruto was animatedly explaining some ninja tool modification, his hands waving, while Himawari giggled at her brother's enthusiasm.

Naruto, still in his Hokage robes fresh from the office, was ruffling Kawaki's hair, earning a half-hearted grumble that held no real heat.

A faint, genuine smile touched Kakashi's eyes. The boy was integrating. The scars, both physical and spiritual, were still there, but they were being gently woven over by the stubborn, relentless fabric of Uzumaki family love. It was a good sight. A necessary one.

He didn't enter, not wanting to disrupt the domestic moment. After observing for a few more minutes, he turned and vanished from the porch in a silent flicker.

He had taken only three steps down the quiet street when the air behind him in the Uzumaki living room ripped.

Inside, the warm atmosphere shattered. A vertical slit of absolute darkness tore open in the center of the room. From it stepped a man of medium height, dressed in simple monastic robes, his head bald, his expression one of cold, impatient authority. Jigen. His eyes, dark and depthless, immediately locked onto Kawaki.

"There you are," Jigen's voice was a dry rasp, devoid of warmth. "It's time to come home, Kawaki."

The temperature in the room seemed to drop twenty degrees. Bowls clattered from Himawari's startled hands. Boruto instantly shifted into a fighting stance, a Rasengan flickering to life in his palm. Hinata moved in front of Himawari, her Byakugan activating with a surge of veins.

Kawaki's face drained of all color, his body trembling as he backed away until his back hit the wall. The Karma on his palm pulsed with a sickening black light.

"N-no…" Kawaki whispered, pure animal terror in his eyes.

Jigen's impatience flared. He could feel it, the dense, oppressive pressure of countless powerful chakra signatures throughout the village. This was the lion's den.

In his current vessel, weakened from millennia of waiting and imperfect symbiosis, every second here was a catastrophic risk. "Enough dawdling," he snapped, extending a hand. Black cubes began to materialize in the air around Kawaki, ready to encase him.

"Don't you think it's rude," a voice, deceptively calm, cut through the tension, "to come into someone's house with your shoes on?"

Jigen's head turned a fraction. Naruto Uzumaki was no longer by the table. He was a blur of orange and yellow, having crossed the room in the time it took to blink. His foot, sheathed in the blazing chakra of Kurama Mode, was already an inch from Jigen's jaw.

The kick connected with a sound like a mountain breaking.

CRACK-BOOM!

Jigen's head snapped sideways, his body lifting off the ground. But before he could crash through the far wall, another black portal, this one not of his making, yawned open directly behind his trajectory.

It was a perfect, seamless interception. Jigen vanished into the darkness, and the portal snapped shut, leaving the Uzumaki living room in stunned silence, save for Kawaki's ragged breathing.

Naruto landed lightly, his expression grim. "Right on time," he muttered.

….

Jigen tumbled out of the portal and into a landscape of stark, breathtaking desolation. He was in a gargantuan, naturally formed canyon somewhere in the uninhabited depths of the Land of Earth.

Towering rust-colored rock spires stabbed at a bleached sky, and a deep, silent river carved through the stone far below. The air was thin, cold, and carried no scent of life.

He righted himself in mid-air, landing on a narrow stone pinnacle, his jaw already knitting itself back together with a grotesque crackle of bone and flesh. Rage, cold and immense, flooded him. He knew he had fallen into a trap. A spatial redirect.

"What? Didn't like the way you came here?" A voice stated.

On a neighboring spire, thirty yards away, stood Sasuke Uchiha. He was not in his traveling cloak. He wore a simple, dark combat outfit, both sleeves intact. His left eye was closed, his right, the Rinnegan, was fully active, its six tomoe spinning slowly in the violet iris. He held his katana loosely at his side, but his posture was relaxed, utterly focused.

"Uchiha," Jigen spat, dusting off his robes. "The one-eyed wanderer. You've interrupted a family reunion."

"You have no family here," Sasuke replied, his voice flat. "Only a grave."

Jigen's lips peeled back in a snarl. "Arrogant insect. You have no idea what you're dealing with." He raised a hand. Dozens of black rods, sharper than any kunai and capable of suppressing chakra, shot from the empty air around Sasuke, aiming to pin him from all directions.

Sasuke didn't move his feet. His Rinnegan glowed.

"Shinra Tensei."

A spherical pulse of repulsive force exploded from his body. The black rods halted in mid-air as if hitting an invisible wall, vibrated violently, and then were blasted back towards Jigen at twice their original speed. Jigen waved a hand, disintegrating them into dust.

"A cheap imitation," Jigen scoffed. He clapped his hands together. From the canyon walls on either side of Sasuke, colossal structures of black cube matter erupted, growing instantaneously like malignant crystals, aiming to crush him between them.

"Amenotejikara," Sasuke murmured.

In the space between heartbeats, he swapped positions with a small pebble he had noted on Jigen's own stone pinnacle.

The crushing cubes slammed together where he had been, pulverizing rock into powder. Sasuke now stood where Jigen had been a moment before, his katana already in a blinding upward draw.

CLANG!

Jigen had manifested a single, short black rod to parry the blade. The impact sent a shockwave that sheared the top ten feet off their stone pillar. "Fast," Jigen admitted, shoving Sasuke back. "But speed is meaningless against true power."

He vanished, using Sukunahikona to shrink himself to near-invisibility and flash behind Sasuke. A fist, enlarged back to normal size at the last second and empowered with the density-altering might of Daikokuten, aimed to pulp Sasuke's spine.

Sasuke's Rinnegan saw the microscopic spatial distortion. He didn't turn. "Banshō Ten'in."

Jigen's own devastating punch was yanked off-course, his fist slamming into the rock beside Sasuke instead, obliterating it.

At the same instant, Sasuke's left hand, crackling with black Chidori lightning shaped into a spear, stabbed backward. Jigen contorted, but the spear grazed his side, tearing through his robes and searing flesh.

Jigen hissed, leaping back. He wasn't used to being touched. "You will pay for that."

The fight escalated into a cataclysm. Jigen filled the air with thousands of shrinking and expanding black cubes, creating a lethal, shifting maze. He used Daikokuten to summon giant stone pillars from his timeless dimension to batter Sasuke from above.

Sasuke met chaos with sublime control. His Rinnegan abilities flowed into one another. He used Deva Path to repel barrages, Asura Path to spratch mechanical blades from his shoulders to deflect cubes from blind spots, Animal Path to summon a giant hawk for aerial mobility, and a multi-headed dog for diversion.

He used Preta Path in a localized sphere around himself to nullify any chakra-based absorption Jigen attempted.

He fought with both hands. His right hand wielded the katana, its blade sheathed in Amaterasu's black flames that even Jigen's cubes couldn't easily extinguish. His left weaved signs or unleashed variations of Chidori, streams, nets, and needles of lightning that harried Jigen constantly.

"Planetary Devastation!" Sasuke roared, creating not one, but three miniature gravitational cores. They pulled at Jigen from different vectors, tearing at his body and disrupting his balance amidst the floating cube field.

Jigen roared in frustration. This wasn't the one-eyed, depleted opponent he'd anticipated. This Uchiha was fresh, whole, and wielded the Rinnegan with a mastery that rivaled the Otsutsuki themselves. His vessel, Jigen's body, was reaching its limit. Cracks were spreading across his skin from the strain of containing Isshiki's will.

"ENOUGH!" Jigen bellowed. He abandoned subtlety. Expanding to his full power, he grew massive black cube wings and fired a continuous beam of condensed cube matter from his mouth, a torrent of erasure capable of vaporizing mountains.

Sasuke faced the onslaught. He planted his feet on the air itself, his Rinnegan blazing. "Chibaku Tensei!"

He didn't create a planetoid. He inverted the technique. Instead of a gravitational pull, he created a focused, hyper-dense point of repulsive singularity directly in the path of the beam.

The collision was silent and terrifying. The beam struck the black point and was annihilated, consumed by its own reflected force. The backlash hit Jigen, shattering his cube wings and sending him crashing through three successive rock spires.

Jigen lay in a rubble heap, the body broken, smoking. The vessel was finished. "You… damned Rinnegan…" he coughed, black blood staining his lips.

There was a final, violent convulsion. Jigen's body arched off the ground. A brilliant, white light erupted from his chest. The flesh dissolved, not in gore, but in a shower of luminous particles. From the light emerged a new form, hovering above the wreckage.

Isshiki Otsutsuki in his true, original state. Taller, clad in white and black regalia, with horns curving from his brow and the stark, powerful markings of his clan on his face and arms.

His eyes were a piercing gold, radiating an aura of ancient, terrible authority that dwarfed anything he'd displayed in Jigen's body. The very canyon seemed to groan under his presence.

"You have forced my hand, Uchiha," Isshiki's voice was a resonant boom, devoid of the rasp, filled with omnipotent disdain. "To reincarnate fully in such an inferior environment… it is an inconvenience. But now, you will witness the true gap between us."

He raised a hand. Simply, casually. A single, ordinary-looking black rod began to form in the air before Sasuke. But Sasuke's enhanced senses screamed. This rod was different. It contained the compressed law of 'erasure.' It wasn't meant to pin; it was meant to delete whatever it touched from existence.

Before Isshiki could launch it, a third voice cut through the canyon, calm as a pond yet carrying the weight of collapsing stars.

"You talk too much for a man who's already been served."

Isshiki's eyes snapped to the side. On a flat ledge that hadn't existed a moment before, Hatake Kakashi stood. He wore no armor, carried no visible weapon. His hands were in his pockets. His single grey eye regarded Isshiki with the mild interest of a chef inspecting a particularly plump lobster.

Sasuke let out a slow breath, sheathing his katana. His part was done.

Isshiki stared, his supreme confidence faltering for a nanosecond. He sensed… nothing. No vast chakra, no dimensional ripples, no overwhelming pressure. Just a man. It was the most terrifying thing he had ever sensed.

"You… you are the native. The one who consorted with Kaguya." His voice regained its scorn. "You have come to die with your pet?"

Kakashi ignored him. He looked at Sasuke. "Good work. Clean, efficient. No property damage outside the designated area. I'll take it from here."

The dismissal was absolute. Isshiki's rage reignited. "YOU DARE?!"

Kakashi vanished.

He didn't use Body Flicker. He didn't use space-time ninjutsu. He simply ceased to be in one place and was in another. He reappeared directly in front of Isshiki, his face inches from the Otsutsuki's.

Isshiki's instincts, honed over millennia, shrieked. He tried to phase, to shrink, to portal away. Space around him felt like solid titanium. Time seemed to thicken, holding him fast.

Kakashi's hand came out of his pocket. It moved with a casual, almost lazy speed. It tapped Isshiki on the forehead.

The tap made a sound like a great bell being struck with a mountain.

DONG!

Isshiki's head snapped back so violently that it seemed his neck would break. He was hurled across the canyon like a discarded ragdoll, smashing through cliff faces, carving a trench miles long through solid rock before skidding to a stop in a cloud of dust.

Before the dust could settle, Kakashi was there again, standing over him. Isshiki surged up, his left golden pupil blazing, manifesting a storm of giant black rods and cubes infused with his full, devastating power. The very fabric of the canyon reality began to fray under the output.

Kakashi sighed, a whisper of boredom. He didn't block or dodge. He pointed a finger.

"Kamui: Erasure."

The storm of Otsutsuki weaponry, the very space it occupied, twisted in on itself. A perfect sphere of non-existence appeared where the attack had been, and then winked out. It was as if Isshiki's mighty assault had been a chalk drawing wiped clean from the universe's slate.

Isshiki stared, true fear dawning in his ancient eyes for the first time since facing the Otsutsuki King. "What… what are you?!"

"The check," Kakashi said simply.

He closed the distance. What followed was not a fight. It was a brutal, one-sided humiliation. A demonstration of such overwhelming disparity that it bordered on art.

Isshiki threw a punch that could crater a continent. Kakashi caught the fist in his palm without a sound, his arm not budging a millimeter. He squeezed. The bones in Isshiki's hand powdered with a dry crunch.

Isshiki screamed, trying to kick. Kakashi's other hand blurred, delivering a chop to Isshiki's thigh that shattered the femur. The Otsutsuki collapsed to one knee.

Kakashi grabbed him by the horn. He used it as a handle to slam Isshiki's face into the bedrock, once, twice, ten times, each impact creating a deeper, more precise crater.

He then lifted the dazed god and delivered a series of open-palmed strikes to his torso, blows that didn't bruise the skin but liquefied the organs beneath with perfectly transmitted force.

Isshiki, broken, bleeding golden ichor, could only gasp, his regeneration struggling to keep up with the systematic dismantling.

He tried to access Daikokuten, to flee to his dimension. The connection was severed, cleanly cut by a power that owned the very concept of dimensions.

"P-please…" Isshiki choked out, a word he had never spoken in his eternal life.

Kakashi looked down at him, his expression unchanging. "You came to my world to eat my people, enslave my wife, and kill my child." His voice was soft, final. "There is no 'please.' There is only the menu. And you… This is the final course."

He raised his right hand, palm facing the broken form of Isshiki Otsutsuki. No grand incantation, no flashy build-up. Just a simple, deliberate motion.

"Shinjutsu: Genesis Seal."

As darkness bloomed, a silent, infinitely deep vortex spiraled open in Kakashi's palm. It did not suck or pull. It simply devoured, its hunger an absolute law.

Isshiki had no time for a final scream. The black vortex touched him, and he flowed into it like sand into an hourglass.

His magnificent form, his consciousness, and his unparalleled power, were all drawn into the infinite digestive space within Kakashi. In moments, the last and greatest of the invading Otsutsuki was gone. The canyon was silent, save for the whisper of the wind over freshly scarred stone.

Kakashi lowered his hand. He closed his eyes for a moment, feeling the immense, complex, and potent essence of Isshiki join the others within him, beginning its slow, inevitable dissolution into his own being.

He opened his eye and looked at Sasuke, who had watched the entire spectacle with his characteristic stoicism. "Well," Kakashi said, brushing non-existent dust from his sleeve. "That's that. Tell Naruto the pest problem is handled. Permanently."

With a nod, he vanished, leaving Sasuke alone in the shattered canyon with the echo of a god's annihilation.