Midnight arrived with deceptive calm.
The strategy room was warm from body heat and candlelight, twenty Uchiha crowded around a large table bearing maps of Konoha's key structures. Fugaku stood at the head, his finger tracing routes through the village with the practiced precision of someone who'd spent months planning this moment. Tekka and Yashiro flanked him, adding notes about ANBU patrol patterns and shift changes. Others listened with varying degrees of tension and anticipation.
Keisuke stood near the back, his three-tomoe Sharingan active but unfocused, reading the room's emotional temperature more than the tactical details. Anxiety mixed with determination. Fear wrapped in conviction. The desperate hope that maybe, somehow, this would work without the bloodbath everyone feared.
"The Police Force positions here and here," Fugaku was saying, marking locations on the map. "We use our legitimate authority to establish checkpoints, then—"
The guard at the door stopped moving.
Not dramatically. Not with a cry or a struggle. He simply... stopped. His hand halfway to adjusting his collar. His breathing ceased between one moment and the next. Then he crumpled, silent as falling leaves.
For one heartbeat, no one noticed.
Then Keisuke's Sharingan caught it — the absence where presence should be, the wrongness of a living person becoming a corpse without transition. "Down!" he shouted, his body moving before conscious thought completed.
The window exploded inward in a shower of glass and wooden frame.
Itachi Uchiha entered through the destruction, his ANBU mask reflecting candlelight like a second face, his movements carrying the fluid grace of someone who'd crossed every line that mattered and found nothing on the other side. His tantō was already drawn, already wet with blood from the guard whose death Keisuke had noticed too late.
For one frozen moment, everyone in the room stared at him.
Confusion preceded comprehension. Recognition preceded understanding. And understanding preceded the horror.
"Itachi?" Fugaku's voice carried disbelief, denial, the desperate hope that this was some misunderstanding that words could resolve. "What are you—"
Then he saw the blood. Saw the bodies visible through the shattered window. Saw his son's Mangekyo Sharingan activating beneath the mask, the tri-blade pinwheel spinning with cold precision.
Understanding crashed through him like breaking glass.
"Itachi," Fugaku breathed, and the word carried everything — betrayal, grief, rage, and underneath it all, a terrible resignation. "What have you done?"
"What you forced me to do." Itachi's voice was hollow, empty, the sound of someone who'd already died inside. "Forgive me, Father."
The Mangekyo spun faster.
And the room exploded into violence.
Itachi moved like death given form.
His genjutsu caught three Uchiha immediately, their Sharingan insufficient defense against techniques they'd never trained to resist. They collapsed, trapped in illusions that showed them their own deaths on infinite repeat, their minds breaking under the weight of Tsukuyomi's torture.
Tekka lunged forward with a kunai, his two-tomoe Sharingan tracking Itachi's movements. But Itachi had trained with Tekka for years. Knew his tells. Knew the way he favored his right side, knew the counter that would come after the initial strike, knew everything because he'd studied them all with the devoted attention of someone planning their murder.
Itachi's blade found the gap in Tekka's guard before the older shinobi realized he'd been read. The kunai clattered to the floor. Tekka followed a moment later, eyes wide with shock, one hand pressed futilely to the wound in his throat.
"You were always too aggressive," Itachi said, and it might have been a lesson from a training session except for the blood. "You telegraph your attacks."
Yashiro and two others attacked simultaneously, coordinated assault honed through decades of working together. Fire techniques filled the room with heat and light. Kunai came from three angles. A trap of wire glinted in the flames.
Itachi's Mangekyo spun, and the world bent.
Amaterasu.
Black flames erupted from his eyes, consuming everything they touched. The fire techniques were swallowed by darker fire. The wire became ash. Yashiro screamed as the flames caught his arm, spreading faster than he could react, burning with heat that couldn't be extinguished by normal means.
The screams lasted seven seconds.
Then silence.
Fugaku stood across from his son, his own Sharingan active, his face a mask of controlled devastation. "The village ordered this," he said, not quite a question. "The Hokage. The Council. They chose elimination over negotiation."
"They chose preventing civil war over allowing rebellion." Itachi's blade pointed at his father's heart. "The coup would have destroyed Konoha. Other villages would have invaded. Thousands would have died. This is—"
"Mercy?" Fugaku's laugh was bitter. "You call murdering your family mercy?"
"I call it necessity." Itachi's hand trembled slightly, the only visible sign of the war raging beneath his control. "I call it the only path that saves Sasuke. That preserves some future for—"
Keisuke's substitution technique activated a split second before Itachi's blade would have found him.
The log that replaced him split cleanly, falling in two pieces that clattered against the floor. Keisuke reappeared across the room, his three-tomoe Sharingan already spinning into something else — pupils reshaping, power flowing through genetic pathways forced open by desperate necessity.
His Mangekyo activated.
Four curved blades radiating from the center like a shuriken in flight. Different from Itachi's. Unique. His own curse born from his own loss.
"Itachi," Keisuke breathed, and the word carried everything that had broken between them. Horror and understanding and rage and grief all tangled together into something that hurt to speak. "No. Tell me you didn't—"
"I did." Itachi turned to face him fully, two Mangekyo users recognizing each other across a room filled with corpses of people they'd both loved. "The village ordered it. The coup would have destroyed everything. This is mercy compared to civil war."
"MERCY?" Keisuke's voice broke, his Mangekyo tracking the bodies falling around them. Cousins. Clan members. People they'd grown up alongside, trained with, promised to protect. "You call this mercy? You call murdering everyone we know mercy?"
"I call it preventing thousands of deaths!" Itachi moved, and only Keisuke's Mangekyo allowed him to track it — enhanced perception showing him the split second before attack became action.
Their blades met in a shower of sparks that lit the room like lightning.
"Stand aside, Keisuke." Itachi's voice was tight with controlled desperation. "You don't have to die here. You were never part of the coup planning. You can survive this. I can make sure—"
"By abandoning everyone?" Keisuke's counter-strike was fueled by rage and heartbreak in equal measure, his Mangekyo reading Itachi's movements with the terrible clarity of someone seeing their friend become their enemy in real time. "By letting you murder the Uchiha? By standing aside while you kill children and elders and people who never wanted this coup?"
"I've saved the village!" Itachi's composure cracked, voice rising. "Saved Sasuke! Prevented civil war that would have killed thousands! This is the only way! The only path that—"
"The only path you saw!" Keisuke's blade drove forward, forcing Itachi back. "Because you always think you're the only one who can calculate the cost! You and your fucking mathematics of suffering!"
Around them, Fugaku engaged other arriving ANBU, his experience and power buying precious seconds. But he was one against many, and the outcome was inevitable.
"Keisuke!" Fugaku's voice cut through the chaos. "Run! Warn the others! Don't let this—"
Itachi's kunai found his father's back.
Fugaku staggered, blood spreading across his shirt, his Sharingan still spinning as he turned to face his son one final time. "Itachi," he said, and there was no anger in it. Just sorrow. "Protect Sasuke. Promise me. Whatever else happens, protect your brother."
"I promise," Itachi whispered.
Fugaku smiled, small and sad, and fell.
The clan head of the Uchiha. The father who'd pushed too hard and loved too much. Dead by his son's hand in a room full of failed dreams and broken promises.
Keisuke screamed.
His Mangekyo flared, power flooding through him in ways he didn't understand but couldn't control. Afterimages of himself appeared throughout the room — not illusions, but temporal echoes, his Mangekyo's unique ability manifesting through trauma and rage.
Itachi's Sharingan couldn't track them all. His blade found only empty air as Keisuke's real form moved through the chaos, heading for the window, for escape, for anywhere but this room full of death.
"Keisuke, wait—"
But Keisuke was already gone, his Mangekyo-enhanced speed covering distance that should have been impossible, his afterimages confusing even trained ANBU long enough for him to break free.
He burst into the compound's streets and froze.
Bodies.
Dozens of bodies in the streets, in doorways, slumped against walls with expressions of shock and betrayal frozen on their faces. Children. Elderly. Civilians who'd never held a weapon. All dead.
All murdered while sleeping, while defenseless, while thinking they were safe in their own homes.
"You said the children would be spared," Keisuke gasped, his Mangekyo tracking the chakra signatures still moving through the compound — Itachi to the west, another presence to the east that felt wrong in ways his eyes couldn't quite process. "You PROMISED it would be surgical! You said—"
His enhanced senses caught it then. Screams. Dozens of screams erupting from different parts of the compound. Not the shouts of fighting. The screams of families waking to find death in their homes. Of children seeing parents murdered. Of the defenseless being slaughtered without mercy or hesitation.
This isn't surgical, Keisuke realized with dawning horror. This is genocide.
Itachi appeared behind him, breathing hard, blood on his ANBU uniform that wasn't his own. His Mangekyo was still active, but something in his posture had changed. Collapsed. As if he was only now seeing what he'd done, what he'd agreed to, what his "precision" had become.
"Keisuke," Itachi said, and his voice was breaking. "I didn't— This wasn't supposed to—"
"Wasn't supposed to what?" Keisuke turned on him, his Mangekyo spinning with rage and grief. "Wasn't supposed to become exactly what it always was? You agreed to murder your family, Itachi! What did you think would happen? That genocide could be done cleanly?"
"There's someone else," Itachi said, and he sounded lost. Young. Like the boy Keisuke had known before everything broke. "A masked man. Tobi. He was supposed to help me contain it, but he's—"
Another scream cut through the night. Close. Too close.
Keisuke's Mangekyo tracked it instinctively — residential district, three blocks east, where families lived who weren't involved in politics or coups. Where children slept and elders told stories and normalcy existed in the spaces between shinobi life.
"I won't let you finish this," Keisuke vowed, blood streaming from a dozen wounds he barely felt through the adrenaline and fury. "I won't let the Uchiha die without someone fighting for them. Without someone trying to save what you're destroying."
He flickered away, his Mangekyo's enhanced speed covering ground impossibly fast, leaving afterimages in his wake that confused pursuit. Behind him, Itachi stood alone, surrounded by bodies of people he'd loved, realizing with crystalline horror that his carefully planned "surgical strike" had become wholesale slaughter.
That mercy was a lie he'd told himself to make the impossible bearable.
That there was no such thing as precise genocide.
Keisuke arrived at the residential district to find it painted in blood and firelight.
Houses burned. Bodies lay in streets. And standing in the center of the carnage, his orange mask splattered with blood that looked black in the firelight, stood a figure who radiated wrongness in ways that made Keisuke's Mangekyo spin involuntarily.
Tobi.
The masked man was dragging a body — Keisuke recognized her as Izumi, the girl who'd loved Itachi, her eyes open and empty, her Sharingan stolen from their sockets leaving bloody hollows. Three more bodies lay at Tobi's feet, similarly mutilated.
"Oh good," Tobi said, his voice carrying dark satisfaction that made Keisuke's skin crawl. "Another Mangekyo to collect. This night just keeps getting better."
He dropped Izumi's corpse and turned to face Keisuke fully, his single visible eye through the mask's hole spinning with its own Sharingan — three tomoe, not Mangekyo, but ancient in ways that suggested power beyond mere evolution.
"You must be Keisuke," Tobi continued conversationally, as if they were meeting at a festival rather than standing in an ocean of blood. "Itachi's friend. The one he hoped would survive. How sweet. How naive."
Keisuke's hands moved to his weapons, his Mangekyo tracking Tobi's every movement, every shift in weight, every gathering of chakra. "You're collecting eyes. Harvesting Sharingan. This wasn't about preventing a coup. This was about—"
"Oh, it was about preventing a coup," Tobi interrupted. "Just not for the reasons Itachi thinks. Your dear friend believes he's saving the village through noble sacrifice. He doesn't understand that he's just a tool. A weapon I aimed at the Uchiha and pulled the trigger."
Behind them, another house collapsed into flames. Keisuke's enhanced hearing caught movement — survivors, hiding, terrified. Children. His Mangekyo tracked their chakra signatures in the rubble.
"Itachi said you'd help minimize casualties," Keisuke said, rage making his voice shake. "Said you'd assist with precision."
"And I am helping." Tobi's voice carried mockery. "I'm helping eliminate the Uchiha completely. Every man, woman, and child. Every last trace of the clan except Sasuke, because Itachi begged so prettily for his baby brother. And you, apparently, if you can survive me."
He moved.
Not Body Flicker. Not even Shunshin. Space itself seemed to twist, and suddenly Tobi was behind Keisuke, his hand reaching for his eyes with fingers that promised blindness and death.
Keisuke's Mangekyo saved him. His afterimage ability activated on instinct, creating temporal echoes that confused even Tobi's Sharingan long enough for Keisuke to dodge, to create distance, to process what he was facing.
He can phase through attacks, Keisuke realized, watching Tobi's form blur as a kunai passed through him like he was made of smoke. But he has to solidify to attack. That's the weakness. That's the opening.
"Very good!" Tobi applauded, sounding genuinely pleased. "You figured it out faster than most. Those Mangekyo eyes of yours are impressive. I think I'll take them next. After I finish with the survivors hiding in that building behind you."
He pointed to the collapsed house where Keisuke had sensed the chakra signatures. Where children were hiding. Where the last remnants of the Uchiha families were praying for rescue that wouldn't come.
Unless Keisuke made it come.
"You'll have to go through me," Keisuke said, his Mangekyo spinning faster, power flooding his body in ways that hurt but felt necessary. Right. "And I'm not Itachi. I don't calculate acceptable losses. I don't trade lives for peace."
"No," Tobi agreed, his mask somehow conveying amusement despite showing only one eye. "You trade your life for theirs. How noble. How pointless. But I'll enjoy watching you try."
The space between them compressed impossibly.
And Keisuke moved to meet him, his Mangekyo blazing, his heart screaming Shisui's name like a prayer and Itachi's like a curse, knowing he was overmatched but unwilling to run while people he'd sworn to protect were dying behind him.
I won't let them all die, he vowed silently, his blade meeting Tobi's phasing form in combat that bent reality. I won't let you erase the Uchiha completely. Some of us will survive. Some of us will live to carry forward what you're trying to destroy.
Behind them, the compound burned.
And in the flames, the last hours of the Uchiha clan played out in blood and betrayal and desperate stands that would be forgotten by everyone except those who lived them.
The massacre had begun.
But the survival had begun too.
And in the space between genocide and preservation, Keisuke Uchiha fought a god wearing a mask, buying seconds with minutes of his life, trading his future for other people's present, becoming in that moment what Shisui had always believed the Uchiha could be.
Not weapons.
Not tools.
But protectors who'd burn themselves to ash if it meant someone else survived the fire.