Shisui had called him to their usual cliff.
It was already the middle of the night. The village and the compound were asleep. Still, the eyes of the Anbu who watched over the compound were open.
During Itachi’s work monitoring the clan, he had memorized the angles of all the cameras watching them. He had already devised a route that allowed him to move freely through the compound, slipping through the slight gaps that rose up in the angles between cameras. He had only told Shisui about the Anbu’s monitoring, and the route through their blind spots.
Shisui was the sole ninja he could trust. He definitely wouldn’t leak the information to anyone else. He should have been making his way to the cliff through the blind spot route as well.
No one knew about their meeting.
Once Itachi had slipped through the compound and escaped the eyes of the cameras, he ran. The moon, in its last quarter, glittered nearby in the center of the sky. Beneath shining stars that looked as though they would come tumbling down, he ran intently, keeping to the shadows.
The forest abruptly split, revealing his destination, the cliff, a human figure on the edge of the rough rock. Standing with his back to Itachi, Shisui was staring at the raging river that could be seen below the cliff.
Itachi raced over, and stopped behind him. “Sorry to make you wait.”
“I just got here, too,” Shisui said, turning around, exhaustion obvious on his face. He had faint bags under his eyes, and his cheeks were a little hollow. His jaw, significantly tapered down, looked more like a mark of overwork than growth into adulthood.
“You look really tired.”
“Things have been happening.” Shisui dropped his eyes, a shadow he couldn’t hide clinging to his face.
“I know I said we’d work together,” Itachi said in a gentle voice, as if sympathizing with his friend. “Sorry for always leaving things to you.”
“You can’t do anything that would cause you to neglect your missions. We’re both in the Anbu, but I’ve got permission from the Lord Hokage to move freely. It’s only natural I’d be working. There’s nothing for you to feel bad about.”
His friend was kind enough to say that, but Itachi keenly felt his own worthlessness. Even as they shared the same determination to prevent their clan’s coup d’état, what exactly had he done? Shisui had gotten the right to act alone to dig into the clan’s conspiracy, and was investigating their movements day and night. Unlike him. Itachi was always putting the clan off, swamped with his daily missions.
Even still, Shisui treated Itachi as someone of the same mind. Which was exactly why they had slipped away from the eyes of their monitors to meet outside the compound like this.
“Before I get into it, there’s something I want to tell you,” Shisui started, his gaze so sharp, it was painful. “The clan suspects you.”
“You don’t have to tell me that. I know.”
“A ninja of the clan’s been ordered to monitor you.”
“What?” The clan was watching Itachi. And Shisui was saying that the one accepting this role was a ninja of the same clan. Who in the clan was in a position to hand down orders to his brethren … ?
His father.
“I can’t believe he would—”
“It’s true, Itachi. I witnessed it myself, so there’s no doubt about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, the one given the task of watching you is me.”
Shisui’s words pierced his heart. His father had ordered Shisui to watch him?
“They’re using the fact that I’m close to you. Three senior officials from the Military Police Force came to order me to monitor you,” Shisui said, as if hearing Itachi’s voice in his head.
Three senior officials …
“Yashiro, Inabi, Tekka. They suspect you. And you and Yashiro did have some fierce words at the meeting.” Shisui was covertly telling him that it wasn’t his father.
But his father was in the position to give orders to those three. Even if Yashiro and the others were the ones who approached Shisui, Itachi didn’t know exactly where that order had originated. A black doubt rose up in his heart, the polar opposite of the love he had felt at his father’s kind words earlier. Exactly which one was his real father?
“I probably don’t need to say this, but I’ll make some things up, and report back to them. So you can relax.”
He didn’t doubt Shisui.
“But there’s no doubt that the radicals in the clan have their eyes on you.”
“I was ready for that.”
“That firmness is both a good thing and a weak point for you, you know,” Shisui said, smiling. “I like it.” His friend turned his eyes up to the sky, and took in the moon hanging in the dark.
“You have this strength, like no matter what happens to you, your way of thinking will never be shaken. If it’s to do what you believe in, you’ll stand and face whatever enormous force might rise up before you without flinching. Which is exactly why I can trust you. And …” Shisui turned his eyes away from the slice of moon, and slid his eyes along the ground before looking directly at Itachi. “I can tell you what I’ve decided.”
“What happened, Shisui?”
“You know what day tomorrow is, right?”
Itachi nodded silently. The regular meeting of the clan.
Last time, his father had said that this meeting would be critical: they would decide the schedule for the coup. In other words, at the meeting the following day, the consensus of opinion of the clan would be confirmed, and the resolve to act would become fixed.
“If everything goes as usual at the meeting tomorrow, we won’t be able to stop things.”
“What are you planning to do?”
“Tomorrow, I’m going to attack your father on his way to Nakano Shrine.”
Itachi couldn’t stop his heart from racing.
“Relax. I’m not going to kill Lord Fugaku or anything. I’m just going to trap him in a genjutsu.”
“The sharingan you used that time with Mukai?”
“Exactly.” Shisui’s eyes glowed red in the darkness. And then, the three magatama patterns in each eye grew larger, and merged into one. “Mangekyo sharingan.”
After that day, Itachi had looked into this himself. In old Uchiha documents, only the existence of the Mangekyo sharingan was noted; the record stopped with the mention that its power far surpassed that of the normal sharingan. It further noted that the number of people who had activated this sharingan could be counted on both hands, perhaps, and that even for members of the clan, it was a visual jutsu with many unknowns.
“Even Lord Fugaku, the fearsome ‘Wicked Eye,’ won’t be able to avoid these eyes.”
“But I mean, trapping him in a genjutsu, what are you actually going to do?”
“At the same time as I awakened these eyes, I got a certain jutsu. A jutsu called ‘Kotoamatsukami.’”
“Kotoamatsukami.” Itachi felt an indescribable unearthliness in the word.
“It puts the person trapped in the genjutsu into a state of total unawareness; then, you can make them do what you want.”
Itachi understood that this was basically what visual jutsu was; whether or not the target was aware of what was happening was determined by the ninja applying the jutsu. The ninja incited an awareness in the target that they were caught in a jutsu, leading the target to doubt everything, and get caught up in the jutsu. Or else the target unconsciously sank bit by bit into the jutsu, so that by the time they realized what was going on, there was nothing they could do about it. This Kotoamatsukami fell into the latter category, which wasn’t particularly uncommon for a visual jutsu.
“The advantage of this technique is that the effect and the duration are both multiplied because of the power of the Mangekyo sharingan,” Shisui added.
As if urging him to explain, Itachi stayed silent, and continued to stare at his friend’s strange sharingan.
“For the visual jutsu of a normal sharingan, your gaze has to intersect with the gaze of your intended target to some degree. You need that direct action, and the flow of chakra. But the Mangekyo sharingan allows me to sidestep all that a bit. I just have to look at my target’s eyes, and I can pour my chakra in, even if our gazes aren’t intersecting. And the amount of chakra is several times more than with normal sharingan. So the target falls into the visual jutsu instantly. They have no idea anything’s even happened.”
“So you mean by the time the enemy sees you, they’re already in the jutsu?”
“That’s it exactly.”
“And you’re going to use that on my father?”
Shisui nodded forcefully. “If I can just get him in Kotoamatsukami, I can make Lord Fugaku tell everyone the coup is off. And I can make Fugaku himself believe from the bottom of his heart that it was his own idea.”
“You can write over the mind of the ringleader?”
“It’s only the fact that it’s your father that makes me hesitate.”
“You don’t have to worry about that,” Itachi asserted. If it were to stop a coup d’état, he would gladly do anything, even if it meant reaching into his own father’s mind. It was just that the one who could actually execute this plan was Shisui.
“Don’t come to the meeting tomorrow, Itachi.”
“Why not?”
“The radical faction suspects you. If I make Lord Fugaku’s attitude change abruptly, you’re the first one they’ll point their fingers at. I don’t know what they’ll do if you’re at the meeting.”
“You’re saying they’d attack me?” Itachi thought that would be just fine. The few years since he became a ninja had taught him that in order to avoid a large fight, sometimes, you couldn’t avoid a small one. To rid this world of all fighting, a serious sacrifice was necessary. “If they attack me, I’ll just fight them off.”
“Yashiro and the rest don’t have a chance against you. But that skirmish would inevitably interrupt this important meeting.”
“So you’re going to take control of my father, and force everyone to go in the other direction, huh?”
“Yeah.” Shisui grabbed Itachi’s shoulders. “If I pull it off, the clan’s enthusiasm for the coup should drop. We knock down Lord Fugaku, create an opening, and gradually win members of the clan over to the anti-war side.”
“Isn’t there anything I can do?”
“Wait here until the meeting’s over.”
“But—”
“It’ll definitely work.” Shisui grinned forcefully. “I’ll come here to report the results of the meeting. Just wait ’til then. The next time we meet, the clan will have taken a step toward peace. We’ll need your strength after that. I know you’ll be critical, given how far beyond the clan you’ve gone. So you totally can’t die before then, no matter what happens. Leave everything to me tomorrow. Please.” His good friend bowed his head deeply.
“Sorry I can’t help at such an important time as this,” Itachi said, lowering his own head.
“Itachi.” His friend tightened his grip on his shoulders. “Our fight starts tomorrow.”
“I’ve been ready for a long time.”