They arrived together, exactly when Orochimaru expected them to.
Not from the air, not in a dramatic descent, but through the rubble, stepping out of smoke and broken stone like they had always been there and the battlefield had simply failed to notice.
Four figures. Same masks. Same cloaks.
White porcelain faces, smooth and expressionless, carved into something vaguely demonic.
Thin red lines traced the eyes and mouth like ritual scars.
Black cloaks hung close to their bodies, trimmed with the same red, fluttering just enough to suggest motion, restraint, control.
They stopped a short distance behind Orochimaru.
No rush. No tension.
Reinforcements had arrived.
One of them inclined her head slightly toward Orochimaru.
Just enough to be respectful. Just enough to be unmistakable.
"The field is unstable," Reika said, voice calm through the mask. Cold, precise. "But favorable. Your survival probability just increased."
Saya laughed softly, tilting her head as she took in the carnage.
"Wow. You really made a mess this time. I like it." Her chakra rolled outward, wet and hungry, brushing over corpses like fingers testing wounds.
Emi's head tilted as she took in the ruined stands and scattered bodies. Her hands stayed clasped behind her back, posture relaxed, but her chakra carried a quiet edge.
"So this is Konoha," she said softly. "Funny. It looks a lot more honest when it's falling apart."
Akane still didn't speak at first.
Her gaze moved over the battlefield with open contempt, lingering on the shinobi insignia, the snakes, the blood-soaked stone.
When her eyes finally settled on Jiraiya and then Guy, her chakra flared, sharp and proud, refusing to bow to reputation.
"Hmph," she muttered. "That's it? All that loyalty, all that sacrifice… and this is what it buys them."
Jiraiya felt it hit him all at once.
Four signatures. Heavy. Refined.
Each one distinct, yet moving in sync, like separate instruments tuned to the same scale.
And then something else clicked.
"…They're women," he said before he could stop himself.
The elder toads on his shoulders stiffened.
"All of them," Fukasaku croaked. "And young."
Jiraiya frowned, eyes narrowing as Sage Mode dissected the details.
Height, posture, chakra circulation, gait. No disguises there. No tricks. Just absurd levels of discipline wrapped in masks.
"Since when," he muttered, "do people like this come in packs of four?"
Guy glanced at them briefly, then back to Orochimaru. "They feel dangerous," he said simply. "Very dangerous."
Orochimaru, meanwhile, was smiling.
Not wide. Not theatrically.
Genuinely.
"So you came," he said, voice smooth, pleased. "Good timing."
Inside, his mind was racing.
Their auras were different.
Sharper. Denser. More stable.
When they had fought him on Shumoku Island years ago, it had been desperation, raw talent scraping against survival.
Now?
Now each one of them felt complete.
Individually, they would be troublesome even for him now.
Annoyingly so.
Together?
Orochimaru's tongue flicked against his teeth.
If a few of them turned on him at once, he wouldn't ever see a path to win.
That realization didn't frighten him.
It fascinated him.
"How far you've come," he murmured, eyes gleaming behind his slitted pupils. "He's been busy."
Orochimaru hadn't sensed Kimimaro yet, but that didn't matter.
If the four were here, then so was he.
Kimimaro never moved without purpose. If he wasn't on the battlefield, then he was elsewhere in the village, extracting something worth far more than this spectacle. That thought amused Orochimaru more than it should have.
Konoha had become prey.
Its walls were breached, its systems exposed, its secrets pried open for anyone sharp enough, patient enough, or cruel enough to reach inside.
Old monsters, new monsters, ambitious ones all feeding at once.
And Orochimaru found himself enjoying the irony.
For all its talk of protection and legacy, Konoha was nothing more than a carcass when the knives came out.
The four masked figures said nothing to Orochimaru's previous words.
They didn't need to.
Their presence alone delivered the message from Kimimaro clearly enough.
At that moment, the air behind Reika warped.
From her back, chains erupted.
Not ordinary chakra constructs, but long, gleaming Adamantine Sealing Chains, gold-bright and heavy with pressure, bursting outward in a sweeping arc that nearly covered the entire arena.
For an instant, every Konoha shinobi around Jiraiya and Guy tensed, instincts screaming as the chains surged past them.
Then they realized.
The chains weren't aimed at the living.
They curved sharply, unerringly, plunging into clusters of fallen Konoha shinobi scattered across the rubble, bodies that were technically still alive, breaths shallow, chakra flickering like dying embers.
The moment the chains touched them, a red-black mist bled out, thick and ominous, as if something foul was being drawn from their very cores.
The bodies went still. Sealed. Drawn neatly into specialized compartments along the chains, each segment closing with a dull, final click.
It was fast. Surgical. Merciless.
Reika lowered her hand slightly.
"Easy," she muttered.
Her Kagura's Mind Eye, covering the entire area, had already sorted them.
Not sentiment. Not mercy. Value.
Chakra density, bloodline remnants, and sealing compatibility.
Only the worthiest had been taken.
A stunned voice broke the silence.
"Those chains…" an ANBU said hoarsely. "Adamantine… Uzumaki?"
The word spread in quiet disbelief.
"Uzumaki…?"
Jiraiya's eyes widened, Sage Mode flaring as he stared at the golden chains retracting back into nothingness.
His throat tightened.
"…Adamantine Sealing Chains," he said. "That technique should've died with Uzushiogakure."
Reika turned her masked face toward him.
"It didn't die," she replied coldly. "It was abandoned."
Her chakra sharpened, the words cutting deeper than the chains had.
"Konoha watched Uzushiogakure burn," she continued. "Stole what it could."
The arena felt colder after that.
And for the first time since arriving, Jiraiya had no immediate answer.
Orochimaru watched her with open curiosity, golden eyes narrowing slightly.
"So that's what it's for," he thought. "That peculiar Yin–Yang ritual in their possession… the one I never managed to fully dissect."
A slow grin crept across his face.
"Well then," he said aloud, voice light, almost indulgent, "consider this my generosity. If Konoha insists on providing materials so eagerly, it would be rude not to let you make use of them."
Saya's answer came first, as it always did, sharp and eager.
Her chakra flared violently, blood-tinged and restless, the Ketsuryūgan igniting behind her porcelain mask.
The air around her thickened, veins of crimson light crawling outward as she rolled her shoulder and let her scythe slide into her grip.
"Oh, don't worry," she said sweetly. "I'm very grateful."
The word gratitude twisted into something obscene as she shifted her stance, blade angling forward, ready to carve.
Jashinist habits bled through her posture, ritualistic, anticipatory, like she was already counting cuts.
Beside her, Akane's restraint cracked more quietly, but no less dangerously.
Her chakra surged, heavy with Yin, dense and pressurized, the kind that crushed rather than burned.
Behind her mask, the Mangekyo Sharingan spun, red and furious, reacting to the village around her, the streets, the rooftops, the insignia carved into stone that all belonged to the place that had erased her clan.
Her fists clenched.
"This village," she muttered, voice tight with contained venom, "still standing like it didn't drown itself in blood."
She took a step forward before stopping herself, pride warring with discipline.
Emi, by contrast, looked almost out of place among them.
She lifted her hands slightly, palms out, as if helplessly surrendering to the madness around her. "Wow," she said lightly. "You two are scary when you get like this."
But behind the mask, her Byakugan was open, veins faintly raised, her attention nowhere near Orochimaru or the battlefield immediately in front of them.
Her gaze was angled past the chaos, cutting straight through the village toward the Hyūga compound in the distance.
"There," she thought quietly. "Not yet…"
Kimimaro's presence wasn't there. Not yet.
Jiraiya took it all in, jaw set, expression grim.
Sage Mode sensing peeled them apart effortlessly.
He had the best sensory mode currently in Konoha while in this state.
Bloodlines, structure, chakra signatures layered like exposed anatomy.
Uzumaki. Uchiha. Hyūga.
And the fourth…
Something else.
A dojutsu he didn't recognize, warped, wrong, equally dangerous.
Four young women. Four monsters.
"Someone who gathered them must be an even bigger monster…"
The thought settled heavily in Jiraiya's mind.
Not out of prejudice, not some crude assumption, but simple deduction.
He had heard it earlier; every word carried cleanly by the senjutsu-enhanced hearing.
Orochimaru's tone.
The way they had spoken about "him."
Casual. Certain.
As if his presence was a given.
As if he was already here.
That disturbed Jiraiya more than the four standing in front of him.
He could feel it plainly now.
Even containing these four would be a struggle.
A desperate one.
Complete victory wasn't even on the table, only damage control.
So what kind of man did it take to gather them?
To temper them.
To point them in the same direction and have them obey?
Jiraiya's jaw tightened.
If this was just the vanguard, then whatever was moving through Konoha unseen was the real disaster.
He exhaled slowly.
"We're outmatched," he said flatly, not bothering to soften it.
But the evacuation was nearly complete. Civilians were gone.
Nobles were gone. What remained were shinobi and rubble.
"That's good enough," Jiraiya continued, voice steady as he turned to the remaining Konoha forces.
"Listen up. No heroics. No chasing. You move when I tell you, you pull back when I tell you. We don't win by clashing, we win by surviving."
Orders went out immediately.
Formation adjustments. Fallback lines. Medic placements.
Everyone obeyed.
Kakashi stood slightly apart, eye fixed on the four masked figures, mind racing.
"This isn't an invasion force," he realized grimly. "It's a demonstration."
And the worst part was that Orochimaru was smiling like he knew it too.
He watched the battlefield and felt a rare, unwelcome weight settle in his chest.
"If nothing intervenes…" he thought, "…Konoha might actually fall."
Not damaged. Not scarred.
Gone.
This wasn't a raid anymore.
It wasn't even a coordinated invasion.
It was predators converging on a weakened center, each taking what they wanted, each tearing at a different organ.
And there was no single hand left strong enough to close around the wound.
His eye drifted, almost against his will, toward the forest beyond the village.
Team Seven.
Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura.
They were out there now, chasing the Sand jinchūriki.
A monster of a different kind. Gaara.
In theory, that was the right call. If Shukaku fully manifested inside the village, the death toll would dwarf even this.
Stopping him outside the walls was the only rational option.
But logic didn't ease the knot in Kakashi's gut.
They were still genin. Talented, yes. Dangerous, even.
But this was a battlefield where jōnin were dying in seconds, and legends were trading blows.
If they failed… if Gaara broke free…
Kakashi tightened his grip on his kunai.
"I can't be everywhere," he thought bitterly.
If Team Seven succeeded, they'd save Konoha from one catastrophe.
If they failed, the village wouldn't survive long enough for anything else to matter.
He looked back at the stadium, at Orochimaru, at the masked girls, at Jiraiya standing alone against forces that shouldn't exist yet.
For the first time since becoming a shinobi, Kakashi found himself wishing, not for strategy or strength, but for something far less reliable.
A miracle.