Danzō arrived without ceremony.
One moment, the edge of the clearing was empty; the next, it wasn't.
Hundreds of Root operatives fanned out behind him in silence, identical masks, identical postures, a wall of disciplined anonymity pressing into the battlefield.
He stood at the front, one hand gripping his bandaged arm, the seal beneath it pulsing faintly, his single visible eye fixed on the clearing.
On the mountain of black chakra towering over it.
The armored Susanoo.
Danzō froze.
Not at its power.
Power could be measured, countered, or stolen.
At its existence.
"That's impossible," he thought.
He had overseen it himself.
The purge. The orders.
The contingency lists.
The clean-up.
The Uchiha were finished.
Reduced to assets, corpses, or liabilities carefully accounted for.
Itachi, permitted to live.
The masked accomplice tolerated, for now.
Sasuke, preserved. That was all.
There should have been no one else.
Then memory stirred, slow and unwelcome.
An island.
Months after the massacre.
Half a year at most, perhaps.
Reports of a gathered outer Uchiha proper shinobi squad that hadn't been present in the village that night.
Led by the previous Outer Elder.
His young daughter with him.
He had sent Junsaku Yamanaka and Tatsuma.
Veterans. Loyal. Capable. His previous generation of vice-commanders and personal guards, before Fū and Torune. The kind of men who didn't fail.
They never returned.
Neither did the Root squads dispatched afterward to confirm what had happened.
It hadn't been Kumo. Not Kiri.
He understood that now.
What had happened back then was the outcome he had feared most, and the one he had also dismissed as too unlikely to pursue further.
Danzō's fingers tightened around his arm.
"So you really lived," he thought grimly.
He could already see it.
The pattern was obvious now.
The father dying to buy time.
The girl surviving just long enough.
Emotional shock tearing something open inside her.
Mangekyō awakening not from training, but from loss. From despair.
Junsaku and Tatsuma dead. The follow-up squads erased over time.
The girl vanishing into the underworld, hidden, protected, molded.
Not alone.
Danzō's gaze shifted, briefly, to the other three masked figures moving with her.
"So that's it," he concluded. "An organization. Rogue. Powerful. And ambitious."
There was no other explanation.
A newly awakened Mangekyō wouldn't have survived those men alone.
Wouldn't have remained hidden for years without support.
And then there was Orochimaru.
Danzō's jaw tightened.
They had always stayed in contact. Quietly. Pragmatically.
Even after Orochimaru defected, collaboration had never truly stopped.
When Orochimaru had told him of the invasion, of Hiruzen's death, Danzō had been… pleased.
No, ecstatic.
So, he had done nothing at first today as agreed.
Let events unfold.
Watched through his channels as Orochimaru proved far stronger than expected.
Hiruzen died, just as promised.
All paths had been opening cleanly.
Until now.
These four hadn't been part of the agreement.
Orochimaru had said he'd kill Hiruzen, cause some chaos, then withdraw.
Not grind Konoha's elite into dust.
Not invite annihilation.
Danzō's eye returned to the Susanoo as another hammer fell, erasing an entire formation.
If this continued, there would be no village left to rule.
And worse.
A surviving Uchiha.
That struck deeper than fear.
Deeper than strategy.
It touched his obsession.
And his greed.
If she lived, she was a threat.
If she could be captured, her eyes were an asset beyond measure.
Either way, inaction was no longer an option.
For all his pragmatism, Danzō still carried a warped sense of belonging to the Leaf. Not love. Ownership.
And if the Leaf burned to nothing, so did his future.
He exhaled slowly.
"So be it," he thought. "I move now."
Better to step onto the board while pieces still remained.
Before the village and his chance at power were both reduced to rubble.
"But I should conserve my true power as long as possible…"
Danzō's gaze flicked, almost unconsciously, to the bandaged arm pressed against his side.
To the secrets wrapped beneath it.
Shisui's eye.
Powers that couldn't be revealed without consequences, not here, not in front of the entire village.
There would be questions he couldn't answer. Suspicions he couldn't silence.
He would only use it if there was no other choice.
And if it came to that, Orochimaru was the obvious target for Kotoamatsukami.
He knew Orochimaru's mind better than anyone here.
His ambitions, his habits, his blind spots.
A single suggestion placed correctly could unravel everything.
And if Orochimaru truly wasn't completely aligned with those four, from the beginning, then turning them against one another would be even simpler.
After all, his Kotoamatsukami also didn't require eye contact.
Danzō allowed himself a thin, cold smile.
Danzō didn't hesitate any longer.
He raised his hand once.
That was enough.
Root moved immediately, hundreds of masked operatives flowing forward in disciplined silence, sliding into the center of Konoha's fractured formations as if they had always been part of them.
No shouting. No confusion. Just clean, ruthless motion as they filled gaps, reinforced collapsing lines, and began executing pre-planned suppression patterns.
Danzō stepped with them, measured, deliberate, positioning himself where he could see everything.
Fū and Torune flanked him closely, both of them young, barely sixteen or seventeen, but already moving with the calm precision of veterans.
Their masks hid their faces, but their posture betrayed focus, not fear.
"Stay close," Danzō said quietly, eyes never leaving the battlefield. "You intervene only if I command it."
"Yes, Danzō-sama," they replied in unison.
He felt their chakra at his sides, steady and obedient, and allowed himself a brief moment of satisfaction.
Tools refined properly did not break under pressure.
Ahead of them, Root began to clash with the chaos, black against fire and blood and chakra storms, carving controlled lanes through a battlefield that had long since slipped out of anyone's plans.
Orochimaru noticed him mid-exchange.
Not because of chakra flare. Not because of noise.
Because the battlefield shifted.
Black uniforms moving too cleanly. Too coordinated.
Cutting through chaos instead of adding to it.
"…So you finally crawled out," Orochimaru murmured.
A thin smile crept across his face as he spotted the familiar posture, the bandaged arm he gave to him, the way the man stood as if the field belonged to him by default.
Guy lunged again. Orochimaru parried with steel and serpents, but his attention lingered, amused.
"Sorry to disappoint your plans," he thought with quiet amusement, his smile sharpening as his gaze flicked back toward Danzō.
Akane felt it before she saw him.
That particular weight in the chakra field.
Cold. Ordered.
Familiar in the worst way.
The ones who nearly murdered her father and her at that time.
Root.
Her head turned slowly, Sharingan already spinning behind the porcelain mask as her gaze locked onto the center of the new formation.
Black uniforms moving with practiced cruelty.
And at their core, exactly where he always placed himself when blood was about to be spilled by someone else's hands—
Danzō Shimura.
Something inside her went very still.
So he was here.
Of course he was.
Among Konoha's rot, he had always been the sharpest edge aimed at the Uchiha.
Not the most visible.
But the most persistent.
The one who pushed and whispered and planned until massacre became "necessity."
Hiruzen had allowed it.
Itachi had swung the blade.
But without Danzō's pressure, without Root tightening the noose, the night of blood might never have happened.
Hiruzen was already dead now.
Orochimaru had unfortunately seen to that before she ever set foot here.
And Danzō stood above the other Konoha senior leaders in her mind.
So, he was the one she wanted broken most among Konoha's leadership.
Her chakra spiked violently, her massive Susanoo reacting to her pulse, its massive hammers tightening in its grip.
Above him still loomed Itachi.
That debt was even higher.
But seeing Danzō here, alive, commanding, still pretending to be the village's shadow guardian—
That almost made her smile.
Good.
She would remember exactly where he stood.
So, just as Root finished settling into the fight, snapping into coordination with the remaining Konoha forces, the battlefield reached another breaking point.
Akane's chakra surged yet again. The Susanoo responded instantly, its massive frame tightening as if drawing breath.
Behind the porcelain mask, her Mangekyō burned hotter, her focus narrowing down the center of the formation where Danzō stood.
She was seconds away from beginning to unleash her two unique Mangekyō techniques, carving a direct path toward him soon through whatever dared stand in between.
At the same time, Reika completed her work.
The adamantine chains tightened one last time. Ice fully sealed joints, chakra pathways locked, movement ceased.
The three giant toads vanished in enormous bursts of smoke, recalled just before permanent damage could be done.
All the while, she had been sealing bodies all around the battlefield for later sacrifices, but now she felt it was finally enough.
Reika didn't pause. She turned back toward the battlefield, already preparing to rejoin the slaughter of Konoha's elites and whatever remained of its fodder.
Guy was being pressed harder than ever.
Orochimaru and Saya had stopped holding back entirely.
Snakes, blood, blades, and traps layered relentlessly.
Guy was forced to burn deeper, edging closer to the Eighth Gate simply to stay alive long enough to choose when to open it.
Across from them, Emi stood alone.
Just her and Jiraiya now.
The space between them was tense, compressed, both of them knowing what came next.
Jiraiya's posture shifted, chakra cycling differently.
He was about to use the new Sage Arts, the ones he hadn't revealed yet.
And then—
Something changed again.
Not an attack. Not a flare.
Arrivals.
Three figures slipped into the edge of the perception of elites, so fast they were almost missed.
They moved across Hokage Rock like ghosts, closing in at impossible speed, their presence registering only to those with refined senses.
Jiraiya hesitated for a split second, Sage Mode finally catching the disturbance.
Emi was even more precise.
Her Byakugan vision sliced cleanly through distance, terrain, and distortion as she locked onto the source without hesitation.
She locked onto them immediately.
White cloaks.
Ancient ones.
Full-length kimono, pristine despite the chaos, each marked with a pattern of six black magatama circling a high collar.
As if it didn't belong to this era at all, for some reason.
Emi frowned behind her mask.
"What… is that?"
Their chakra felt wrong.
Not aggressive. Not benign.
Old. Heavy.
Friend or foe, she couldn't tell.
Only that their presence warped the battlefield simply by approaching.
If Kimimaro had been here, if he'd seen those cloaks, those symbols, that impossible calm, he might have understood immediately.
Where could they come from.
And more importantly—
Who had decided to move them now.