Pre-Chapter A/N: So here we are back on our regular upload schedule. Sunday and Tuesday/Wednesday. I've put systems in place to ensure we don't fall behind again so yay. I look forward to stress-testing them as the madnesses of life stack up (We're over two weeks in now and life is really hitting. We're still on schedule though(more or less– does this count as Wednesday or Thursday? I haven't slept so I count it as Wednesday), so things look good!). To celebrate the scale of our achievement, we've got a cheeky little discount for the whole month (code: MAY01) on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga). Next four chapters on my patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)— same username as here and link in bio.
Minato never quite managed to sense the Kazekage's chakra for himself. That was probably for the best, however. His senses were good but not astounding when compared to others of his rank. By the time he'd have been able to feel out the Kazekage's chakra for himself, there would have been no way to prevent a confrontation. And despite Uzume-san's seemingly recently acquired good sense and patience, he knew that if a fight like that one was offered to her, she would jump in feet first with no hesitation. And then they'd have to deal with Suna falling apart from a dead Kage years before Konoha would be ready to move on it. And for their mission, Sensei preferred it for the villages to be as stable as possible.
It made for more difficult foes to face on the battlefield, but it came with the advantage that the shards they would have to pick up when the time came would be theirs and no one else's. Returning a system to working order was much easier than trying to set up a working one from scratch, after all.
They covered ground in the desert at a rapid pace. The sand that had been such a hindrance on their way here was nothing but a minor consideration. Uzume's chakra washed over them as she took the lead. She was laying down a carpet of chakra that hardened the ground into something resembling stone between footsteps. The effect lasted for just long enough that both he and Mikoto could make use of the platforms before the sand returned to its normal state. It was an impressive display of earth release that would have been more expected if it had come from their sensei. The fact that Uzume could do this much without it even being one of her primary affinities said a lot.
"Slow down," Uzume said, reducing her pace. Minato's body was obeying before he even voiced his question. In battle, disobedience for even a second could spell the difference between life and death.
"Why? Are there enemies ahead?" he asked. She just scoffed.
"No. The Kazekage was being left behind. We don't want him to lose track of us, do we?" she asked with a smirk.
"You know, I kind of thought that was the whole point of this—running," he said. Of course, she wanted a fight. He still maintained the slower pace though. They were ostensibly the same rank as Special Jounin to be, and this was not an official mission so no one had been named Team Head. However, he had no doubts as to who was in charge here.
"Why did we come to the Land of Wind in the first place? We won't fight him, don't get your panties in a twist," she said, perhaps sensing Minato's worry. He did not fear facing the Kazekage. He feared the effects of disposing of the Kazekage before they were ready to take advantage of it. The first half of the sentence then caught his attention. Uzume-san was many things, but stupid was not one of them. Everything she'd been doing until now had to have been for a reason.
"You sent a clone to the temple," he accused once the dots connected in a way that made sense. That explained it. Her stillness during the fight with the puppeteer showing she had been willing to let it drag on for longer than it had, her willingness to run from the Kazekage rather than confront him, and then her decision to give those chasing them more of a chance of catching them by slowing down. She was leading their pursuers away to give a clone space to go in and get the chalice. It was just the kind of move Sensei would make. He should have seen it sooner.
"Wrong," she said and he stopped short. How?
"She's the clone," Mikoto said with a sigh.
"What?" He couldn't have heard correctly.
"The original is on her way to the temple. Her chakra is suppressed while I am flaring mine. We will take all the heat to allow her to move undetected and get what she needs," she said.
"Why not send a clone to—" he started, only to be interrupted.
"Don't be stupid, boy. The Head Abbots are equivalent to S-rank shinobi. Even the weakest one would be able to force a clone to either expend its reserves or deal enough damage to pop it. The original is needed there. I am needed here. I have enough chakra to keep drawing them in our direction, but the two of you will have to take on most of the fighting. Any chakra I waste is chakra that will not be spent giving the Kazekage a lead to follow," she said, and then she slowed down even further. The lack of an order to do so had caused Minato and Mikoto to move in front of her. It was easy enough for them to understand the intention there. She wanted them to take point. That meant there was a chance of combat in front of them soon.
Minato braced himself as he heard Mikoto's breathing shift slightly by his side. She had sensed those approaching then. That meant they were close. He felt their chakra seconds before they made contact. The first one shot from the sand with one of Suna's classic war fans hefted before him.
The second held a pair of serrated blades that he shot towards Mikoto with. The third one remained in the sand, and Minato felt foreign chakra as it tried to thread its way into his coils. He grabbed a hold of it, allowing it to interact with a small section of his chakra so he could test out what the genjutsu intended for him to do. It was a simple but insidious thing. It caused him to see the war fan wielding man as being two feet to the left from where he really was. He broke the genjutsu, allowing the first stage of his wind armour to form around him for a breath.
That was all he needed it for, after all. The wind armour formed and he shot towards the man wielding the fan. He had begun to swing already, hefting the massive fan with ease that belied his size. The storm of cutting winds that he unleashed parted before Minato's superior control over the element. With his wind armour active, few things could touch him. The jutsu of a chunin from the Hidden Sand was not one of them. He ripped through the metal of the fan, leveraging the enhanced strength conferred by the wind armour as his opponent tried to use it as a shield to hold off his approach.
He thrust his hand forward even as his opponent tried to jump backwards. There was nothing he could do to stop Minato's outstretched fingers from just barely brushing his heart. That was enough—the wind release that gathered around his fingertips sharpening and being shaped into a single lance. The man fell to the ground dead, and he could sense Mikoto overwhelming her own opponent with taijutsu. He had time to deal with the hopeful genjutsu master then, shooting towards his hiding position. The man shot from the ground on the opposite side, showing that he had managed to fool Minato's chakra senses. However, for all his skill, he clearly lacked good judgement.
The right thing to have done in the situation he found himself in had been to run. Escape and report what he had been able to glean of their capabilities to his superiors. He seemed to not have even considered that to be an option as he went right back into the attack. Minato shook his head. Suna had to do a better job with training their chunin. Risk assessment was one of the things that made the difference between a chunin and genin. That this one did not realise he was completely outmatched reflected poorly both on their training measures and the manner in which they decided shinobi were ready for promotion. With that in mind, Minato made it quick.
He did not need or even think the wind armour would show any true utility in this fight. He sprinted at his opponent, breaking four genjutsu as they tried to ensnare him. He was good at using them in quick succession, but his skill with each individual one left a lot to be desired.
Minato, with a flick of wrist, fired a kunai right at his opponent's left foot. Credit where it was due, he managed to avoid the task. It showed as his face was split in two with a smirk of satisfaction. That was the expression he died with as Minato accelerated at the last second, having used the thrown kunai as a distraction. One that worked even better than he could have expected. Minato was in front of his opponent before he could do anything else, and with a single clean swipe, he opened a second smile on his neck. He had carefully planned his angle so the blood that sprayed from the neck like a tap with a broken faucet—splashed to his side and on to the sand rather than on him.
The man with the blades jerked backwards, stabbing his own blades into his neck as Mikoto walked past his body. Minato nodded at her before beginning to sprint again. His body split in two as a shadow clone formed behind him to hide the evidence of the bodies. She matched his pace, and he felt Uzume's clone continue flaring chakra behind them as they moved. Uzume-san hadn't consulted them before making this move, and Minato found it difficult to be anywhere close to comfortable with it. They were acting as bait so the original could invade an on-guard temple singlehandedly and then escape with one of the treasured tools of the Sage of Six Paths. That alone would have been a risky plan, but then there was the additional bit of context that the man they were leading around by the nose was the Kazekage of all people.
If Kushina had been here, the three of them together would have been enough to match a Kage for a while at least. Long enough for them to figure out an escape at the very least. Short their heaviest hitter, and left with a clone who was expending the bulk of its chakra before a punch was even thrown, their situation was much different. If the Kazekage was even two-thirds as strong as Sensei was, then he and Mikoto would lose their lives here.
They'd either lose their lives or trigger the hiraishin and bring Sensei into the fight. They would bring two opposing Kage into conflict by their own actions. War between Konoha and Suna would be inevitable if Sensei killed the Kazekage, and Minato knew he would. The Kazekage was a Monk who little was known about other than the fact that he held the One Tailed Tanuki within his body. Sensei had killed two Raikage, two Tsuchikage, and several jinchuriki over his lifetime. It wouldn't be a fight.
And then if they decided not to involve Sensei in this and things went wrong and they died, Minato could not predict what would happen. He knew what a Kage was supposed to do in that situation—disavow their actions, declare them rogue ninja, and push back on any Suna demands for reparations. The problem was that Sensei was far from a regular Kage. He liked his vengeance and he would burn the world for one he called friend. If the Kazekage killed both Minato and Mikoto, Sensei would kill him. And the war would begin again.
He could feel his teeth begin to grind against each other as he contemplated the situation Uzume had forced them into. This was reckless. It was risky, and it gave them no choice but to hope she knew what she was doing.
They were ten minutes past their last confrontation when Uzume's chakra suddenly stilled.
"Oops," she said.
"What? What's happening?" he responded while keeping the pace.
"The Kazekage just reached the bodies we left behind," she said.
"What? I buried them," he said. He had received the memories from his clone.
"Well, he dug them up and he's coming for us. Faster than he was earlier. Much faster," she said.
"Let's go full speed then," he said, already beginning to accelerate further.
"No point. Contact!" she screamed the warning and Minato's world shifted.
Sand. That was the first thought he had. The Kazekage's arrival was marked by the sand at their feet erupting upwards. Minato twisted, using every ounce of speed he had to move away from his previous position but the second his foot touched the ground again, it was held taut by the sand. The Kazekage could control sand. Just like the Ichibi. Minato froze, keeping his second foot held above the ground before a sharp explosion of wind release chakra from his left caused the sand that had gripped him to disperse. He used the force to shoot himself into the air. Kaze no Kuni was one large desert for the most of its landmass. A fact that became disastrous when one considered that their opponent could control the sand itself.
He could no longer sense Mikoto's chakra, and could barely feel Uzume's. The Kazekage's chakra was oppressive as it blanketed them. No human could have so much. That was even more than a tailed beast could have. More than Sensei and the Nine Tails had when they were working together. It should have been impossible, but here it was. In the air, Minato could finally get a somewhat holistic view of the situation. Sand stung at his skin and his eyes from the storm that raged around them, but he bore the pain to get a glimpse of what was happening. Mikoto had been caught. She was held from neck downwards in sand. Uzume's clone had called forth the spectral armour of the Susanoo, and was doing battle with the desert itself. A battle he knew she could not win.
Perhaps if the original had been here, she would have been able to do something—they would have a chance. This clone had expended most of its chakra already and it was not like there was a way it could win quickly and cleanly. That meant the burden of ending this fell to Minato. Sensing the Kazekage's chakra made him certain of one thing. There was no way he was leaving this with that man still alive—could he even still be considered a man? No human had any business having so much chakra. It was kill or be killed now, and war would come to Konoha either way. That meant there was only one duty he owed as a shinobi of Konoha—victory.
The Kazekage's form was not visible with the sand storm that had been kicked up in his arrival; his chakra cloaked the field so thoroughly that he could have been anywhere. Vision was not in his favour. Neither was chakra sensing. That meant the only thing he could rely on was his brain. The Kazekage had come from due south. He would have taken a straight route to have been able to reach them so quickly. He had control over sand. So that meant it only made sense for him to hide where he had ample access to his element. He was underground. But Minato still had to narrow it down.
Uzume-san was in no hurry to free Mikoto who remained bound by the sand not too far from her. If her niece was dead, Minato doubted she would be so stable. There was every chance she would have started trying to set the desert on fire for the affront, clone or not.
No, she was still fighting like she was trying to buy time. Like the initial plan was still on. And that made him certain of Mikoto's continued life. That was only the second most useful bit of information he gleaned from the fight though. The more important bit was the fact that the desert did not want Uzume moving in a very particular direction. Whenever her spectral clad form began to take steps towards a particularly still stretch of sand, the desert fought her with everything it had. Uzume herself had surely noticed it by now. She was teasing at it, retreating and forcing an attack every once in a while. Buying time.
Minato was not interested in that though. Because this was a clone. She only thought about her primary directive. It was part of her transient nature. She was not thinking of how they would escape here when she eventually ran out of chakra. She did not need to. For Minato and his teammate though, that was a question of life and death. She would probably try to see to their safety before she popped, mostly out of affection for her niece, but Minato was not confident she would succeed, or even that it would be a true priority for her. She'd probably consider it some sort of test or something.
That was to say, Minato had one chance and he had to take it. His chakra was brought to bear, the wind release that he had been relying on giving way for his other affinity. The spark came first, the positive and negative charges being dragged away from each other by his chakra. Precise control was key here. One second of inattention and he would die. Sensei considered the jutsu too risky to even contemplate without his unique byakugan to aid the learning. Sensei was wrong. The charges strained against each other, the tension between them tearing apart the air itself. Ionisation. The pressure between charges built up until it was no longer pure lightning. It was even greater. Sensei called it plasma.
Now, there was enough chakra around Minato's body to hold up a mountain, and still he felt the heat of what he held. It would take seconds for it to strip through the insulation his chakra offered. Seconds was plenty enough: the alternative, a quick death. Creating plasma was step one. Step two was not dying and somehow still getting it to his opponent. Here he leaned on concepts long ago mastered—rotation and containment. The former making the latter possible. His chakra whirled into place, the vortex forming around the plasma. He shifted its shape from the instinctual sphere. Here he needed something different. The sphere elongated and narrowed until it formed a spear in his grip. At the head of the spear lay the delicate plasma. Wind cut so a shuriken was the best way to deliver it. Lightning though? Lightning struck. The spear's form finalised, and the second it did, Minato hurled it down at the still patch of sand. The containment began to fail the moment it left his grip. Minato pushed himself further into the air with a burst of wind release. The spear fell apart right before the plasma hit the sand.
"Spear of the Thunder God," he whispered before the world became white.
A/N: And so we get our first sort of confrontation involving Bunpuku. As for what is going on with him, enjoy the mystery for the time being. Next four chapters up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) (same username as here and link in bio), support me there and read them early. Discount available with the code MAY01– have fun.