Chapter 21, Part 2: Lessons in Despair
Kakuzu's bisected body lay on the damp earth, his eyes wide with the final, shocking realization of his own mortality.
Hidan, still twitching on the ground where she had left him, a babbling, disabled heap, finally fell silent. His wild, fanatical eyes were fixed on the scene, a flicker of something beyond his usual sadomasochistic glee flickering within them. It was confusion. It was disbelief.
Unohana stood over Kakuzu's corpse, her serene smile having returned as if she had just finished a particularly satisfying tea ceremony. The blood-like liquid of her Bankai dripped from her blade, sizzled, and vanished before it touched the ground.
"Such a fascinating technique," she mused aloud, her voice a soft, analytical hum. "Earth Grudge Fear. To prolong one's life by weaving the hearts of others into your own soul. A crude method... but effective. For a time."
She nudged Kakuzu's lifeless form with the tip of her scabbard. "But you see, Kakuzu, the flaw in your philosophy was your reliance on a finite resource. You believed five lives made you a god, but all it truly made you was a man who had to die five times."
She then did something that defied all logic, all reason.
She knelt beside the corpse, and the crimson liquid of her Bankai, which had just acted as a solvent to erase his existence, now flowed from her blade onto his wounds. It was no longer acidic. It glowed with a soft, restorative light.
The two halves of Kakuzu's body began to stitch themselves back together, not with his black threads, but with threads of pure, crimson energy. His destroyed hearts began to reform within his chest, pulsing with a forced, unnatural life.
His eyes, which had been glassy and dead, snapped open. He took a ragged, shocked gasp, his body convulsing as life—unwanted, impossible—was forced back into him.
"Wh-What...?" he choked out, staring up at her in abject horror. "What have you done to me?!"
"I am a healer, after all," Unohana said, her smile gentle, yet utterly terrifying. "It is my nature to mend what is broken." She stood up, her blade once again dripping with the dark red of her Bankai. "And you, Kakuzu, are a lesson waiting to be taught."
Her blade descended again. A clean, effortless slash that cut him down the middle once more.
He died.
And then, the crimson liquid flowed, and he was brought back again.
He screamed, a raw, guttural sound of pure terror. This wasn't life. This was a nightmare. His entire existence was predicated on the control he had over his own life and death. He was the master of his five hearts, the architect of his own immortality. And now, this woman was treating his very existence like a child's toy to be broken and repaired at her whim.
"You see," Unohana explained calmly as she killed him for the third time, "true immortality is not about having spare lives. It is about being unable to escape this one."
She then turned her attention to Hidan. The Jashinist had finally understood what he was witnessing. The pain-loving fanatic, the man who reveled in his own unkillable nature, was watching a brand of immortality so far beyond his own that it bordered on godhood. And it terrified him.
"Now for you," Unohana said, her shadow falling over him.
She picked up his own triple-bladed scythe, which lay discarded on the ground. She examined it with the eye of a connoisseur. "A clumsy weapon. Designed to wound, not to kill. A tool for a drawn-out, messy ritual."
She looked down at him. "You worship pain, do you not? You believe your unkillable body is a gift from your god, Jashin. You find ecstasy in your own suffering."
Hidan spat a wad of bloody saliva. "Jashin will damn you! You will know endless—"
"Silence," she said, her voice soft, but it cut him off as surely as a blade to the throat. "You do not know what endless is."
With a single, precise swing of his own scythe, she decapitated him.
His head rolled to a stop, his eyes still wide and blinking, his mouth still forming curses. "See?! SEE?! This is nothing! Jashin protects me! I am forever!"
"Yes," Unohana agreed, picking up his head by the hair. "You are." She walked back to his writhing, headless body and, with a surge of Kaidō, reattached his head. The tissues and bone fused back together in seconds.
Hidan gasped, feeling his neck connect. And then she stabbed him through the heart with one of his own retractable spears.
The pain was exquisite, just as he always loved. But as he died, the familiar, orgasmic release of sacrificing a soul was absent. There was only the dying, and then... the healing. She brought him back.
And then she killed him again. And again. And again.
She alternated between them. Killing Kakuzu, reviving him. Dismembering Hidan, healing him. She was a whirlwind of death and restoration. For Kakuzu, it was the horror of losing control, of his precious lives becoming a meaningless number in an endless tally of his own demise. For Hidan, it was the horror of his greatest pleasure becoming an inescapable, monotonous torment. His god was silent. The ecstasy of pain had become the agony of repetition.
Inside the house, Fū and her guards were huddled together, pale and trembling, listening to the alternating screams of agony and terror. They could not see what was happening, but they could hear it. They could feel it. The Kenpachi was teaching a lesson.
After what felt like an eternity, the screams stopped.
Unohana stood in the center of her now-pristine garden. Kakuzu and Hidan lay before her, fully healed, but completely broken. Their bodies were whole, but their minds, their very souls, had been shattered. They were conscious, but they stared up at the sky with the empty, vacant eyes of dolls whose strings had been cut. The immortal fanatics had been shown the true meaning of eternity, and it had broken them.
"The lesson is over," Unohana said, her Bankai finally receding. She sealed Minazuki, its duty done.
She looked down at the two catatonic Akatsuki members. They were no longer threats. They were merely... specimens.
"Now," she said to herself, a glint of genuine scientific curiosity in her eyes. "The real fun can begin. I've always wanted to study the mechanics of Jashin's curse on a living subject."
Tbc