Chapter 23 - Smart Escape

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'He's stronger than before.' Soi Fon quickly realized as she watched the display Itachi was putting on against an unrelenting Yoruichi.

Yoruichi's Shunpo within such a small area was no different than teleportation to most people slower than her, and even with those that had mastered the art, keeping up with her was a hard, almost impossible, task. 

Itachi expertly used techniques that would ensure a distance between them anytime she stayed too close to him. 

What had been an initial surprise to him was how strong she physically was. She specialized in fast and hard hits and was clearly a master of both. 

She was stronger than Itachi, of that he had no doubt. Which was why he refrained from clashing with her head on, but she being smart and understanding her advantage pushed on unrelentlessly. 

The basis of their fighting was ridiculous, he knew that, she knew that but she didn't care. 

So he made his decision. 

Slowly and in a spinning pattern, his black eyes rotated and morphed under the astonished and cautious gaze of Yoruichi. 

Settling down with the familiar red eyed dojutsu of the Uchiha Clan, a complete 3-tomoe Sharingan sat as Itachi's eyes. 

'What kind of eyes are those?' Soi Fon wondered as this was the first time she was seeing eyes like that. 

For Yoruichi, her thoughts were different. 'Is that eye part of his Shikai's abilities? Quite a troublesome sword.'

She also noticed how his Reiatsu's presence seemed to stabilize even more, for lack of a better word. 

'Better to draw out their gimmicks.' This was such a refreshing activity for Yoruichi. She would never consider herself a battle fanatic, like the lunatics of the Eleventh, or even a very outgoing person seeing as how she would prefer lazing around most of the time, but fighting someone with new and surprising techniques was always a novel thing to experience. And Itachi, as it seems, was someone with extra bags of tricks behind that stoic expression of his. 

Brushing his intercepting hand to the side, she lowered her stance and the moment he reached in for another strike, she coiled around it and drove a fast knee to his chin's underside. 

"Mm?"

Seeing he blocked her perfect strike, she shifted her focus and landed some rapid blows to disorientate his focus but he perfectly deflected those too. 

"Huh?" Something was weird about him now but she could not put her finger on it. 

Itachi blinked to her front and started another series of attacks that she equally responded to, even retaliating some blows of her own but just as she deflected his, he also deflected hers. 

"What are you doing?" For the first time since meeting, a contemplative frown entered her face. It was weird because it felt as if she was fighting a shadow – her shadow. She smirked, "Heh, you really are something."

The stoic bastard was copying her blocks and deflections, even going as far as copying her counterattack. 

This guy was extremely dangerous, Yoruichi concluded but kept the bias to the side. He had dangerous abilities, sure, but so did all the Captains of the Gotei 13.

The flow of the fight changed, not because one took the advantage and pressured the other, but because like Yoruichi said, it became like a fight of shadows. 

Itachi didn't wantonly copy her fighting style, an ignorant mistake that most Uchihas made, no. He had copied the parts he needed to patch his own fighting style. 

Even as Yoruichi appeared a few centimeters from him, Itachi stepped back but Yoruichi gave no room and punched him, which he blocked or at least tried to. 

"Ikkotsu."

The seemingly simple punch that Yoruichi threw snapped both of Itachi's hands to different angles, causing his eyes to widen, and caved his chest in upon contact, destroying the ribs around where her hands landed. 

Before the inertia of the punch came into play, Itachi burst into crows that surrounded Yoruichi from all fronts. Before she could force herself out of there, the crows suddenly turned into fireballs and converged on her at once. 

As the explosion went on, Yoruichi jumped out, not unscathed at the surprising explosion. 

As she made to move forward, the world seemed to spin before her as the sky turned red. Shocked, she looked below and found herself sinking into the ground with all her limbs bound. 

She could see the sky getting farther away and a sense of dread came over her as thoughts of what would happen to her if the ground swallowed her permeated her mind. 

By the time she shook the irrational fear out of her head, she was already neck deep into the ground. 

"This is an illusion, Yoruichi! This is an illusion and you know it!"

She internally screamed at herself and roused her Reiatsu and it surged uncontrollably. At this point, real panic started settling in but she didn't let it take over her mind as she roused her Reiatsu again and again. 

This was different from any other past similar cases she's found herself in. Unlike the other instances of Illusions Yoruichi had experienced, this one felt complete – like it was an illusory world made real. 

"Aaarghhhh!" With a very haphazardly violent burst of her Reiatsu, the world of red lost its color and paused as it turned monochrome. A second later and glass cracks appeared everywhere before the world shattered and Yoruichi found herself standing in the same spot she had been, with Soi Fon passed out on the ground and Itachi nowhere to be found. 

From how there seemed not to be any new movements around her and also the explosion that was still raging, Yoruichi confirmed that only a few moments had passed since he put her inside the illusion. 

"Soi Fon." She shook Soi Fon but the girl remained unresponsive, making Yoruichi furrow her brow in concern. 

She carefully pushed her Reiatsu into Soi Fon's body and used it to disturb her calm Reiatsu, trying a few times before the girl woke up. 

"Lady Yoruichi!" Soi Fon woke up in alarm and only managed to get her breath in order when she saw that Yoruichi was alright. 

"What happened, Soi Fon?"

Soi Fon shook her head amidst heavy breaths. "After you escaped the explosion, you suddenly stopped moving like you were in some kind of stasis. I only knew something was wrong with how abnormally dormant your Reiatsu became, but when I jumped down…"

"He trapped you in an illusion too, huh?" Yoruichi frowned as she reviewed the fight in her head. "He's an exceptional fighter and a master tactician to boot. His goal from the beginning has always been to escape but he was likely contemplating how to go about it." 

To Yoruichi, this was a very surprising turn of events – losing to someone who was clearly weaker than herself. 

'The way he uses his illusions to aid his combat is not a proficiency one can accomplish in months, even with proficient fighting abilities. His way of fighting makes it almost impossible to tell when he's using an illusion and when he's not.'

"What do we do now, Lady Yoruichi?" Soi Fon asked tentatively. She could still feel goosebumps all over her body and a lump in her throat just from remembering the illusion she was trapped. 

Taking note of Soi Fon's state, Yoruichi pondered on her next action. "We'll hang out here for a while. If we can't find him after some time, we'll return back to base." She said as she patted her clothes to get rid of the dust and dirt. 

….. 

After escaping Yoruichi, Itachi hastily put as much distance between them while making sure he didn't leave any tracks. 

Luckily for him, he was able to pull her into a rather strong genjutsu before she could do anything. He was both curious and cautious on how genjutsu would work and its effects now that he was casting it in the mind of a soul rather than a human and the result was pretty what he had theorized. 

Stronger souls with stronger mental defenses could disable a genjutsu just fine but given how Soi Fon easily succumbed to it, he made a conservative conclusion and set the proficient mental requirements of disabling a genjutsu at the Captain level. Of course there will always be exceptions but Itachi wasn't worried about those. 

"… You did good, Tsukuyomi." He said after a while. 

"I see." Tsukuyomi's reverberating voice sounded in Itachi's ear. "You didn't utilize much of your genjutsu." It stated. 

Itachi nodded. "I was observing its effects and seeing how a strong Shinigami would react to it."

Tsukuyomi gave no other reply as its presence receded into the sword, leaving Itachi once more in silence. 

Right now Itachi was at a crossroad. 

Here Yoruichi was, a Captain of the Seireitei, offering him access to the place and absolving his crime of killing other Shinigamis, which he wasn't really worried about, and in turn he would join the Shinigamis under her 2nd Division. 

He could always leave the Seireitei if he felt it wasn't a place for him, that much he was sure of, but the question now was; then what? 

The afterlife wasn't a peaceful place or a haven for reincarnated souls. It was wrought with its own problems. 

No, the question was what does Itachi Uchiha want to do in his death?