Meanwhile, up until now, Kakashi had been holding the line alone.
For a while, he could manage it.
The Sound Four were dangerous, their abilities warped and unnatural, but they were still predictable.
Experience carried him through.
The Sharingan read patterns.
Precision and timing let him meet them head-on, dismantle formations, and force them back one by one.
Kabuto changed everything.
Even alone, he wasn't much weaker than Kakashi, and here he was anything but alone. His chakra scalpel was the most refined Kakashi had ever seen, sharp enough to slice into the chakra pathway system itself.
Only the Sharingan kept Kakashi from losing entire sections of control outright. Even then, near-misses burned.
Worse, Kabuto's medical ninjutsu was obscene. He reinforced his own body in advance, layering recovery and resilience so thoroughly that even clean hits failed to stick. Every exchange drained Kakashi while Kabuto adapted.
Five at once was impossible.
The only reason Kakashi was still standing was that a few Konoha chūnin and jōnin kept crashing into the fight, buying seconds here, minutes there, dragging him out of death again and again.
But exhaustion is patient.
Eventually, reinforcements thinned. Formations broke. Kakashi found himself isolated once more whilst his chakra hit rock bottom.
The Sound Four closed in.
All of them had shifted at once, bodies warping as Cursed Seal Level Two took hold once more after a short recovery.
His Sharingan's power barely disrupted the girl's flute genjutsu before it could settle again. He kept his distance from the grotesque twins, refusing to let them swarm him. But then the webs finally came again.
Sticky. Heavy. Chakra-drinking.
They caught his arm, then his leg.
Jirōbō roared as he powered up, muscles swelling, fist drawing back with killing intent.
Kabuto watched from just outside the circle, calm, calculating, already deciding where to cut once Kakashi hit the ground.
For the first time in the fight, Kakashi felt the margin disappear completely.
At that same moment, another presence was watching.
Not from the rooftops.
Not from the streets.
From the seams of the world itself.
Hagoromo's anchors were already in place. Shisui. The monk. The samurai.
Through them, his spiritual awareness of the battlefield was sharp, layered, almost intimate. He did not need to look directly at Kakashi Hatake to see him.
He felt him.
And that was why his attention lingered there.
Kakashi Hatake mattered.
Not for his strength. Not yet.
But for his position.
He was one of the load-bearing pillars of the long theater Hagoromo and Gamamaru had been staging for a millennium.
The sensei of Naruto Uzumaki.
A stabilizer. A guide.
A necessary constant in the first act of the blond child of destiny's story.
Others could bend, break, or be replaced.
Jiraiya was simply meant to fall later on.
Kakashi was not. That was not his role.
Not here. Not now.
At this point in the story, Kakashi was weak.
Exposed. Still forming.
And precisely because of that, Hagoromo had been keeping his awareness coiled around him like a shadow, monitoring his soul directly the entire time.
So he felt it the instant the margin vanished.
The instant Kakashi's trajectory tipped toward death.
There was no hesitation. No debate.
Letting Kakashi die here would fracture the future far more violently than intervening ever could.
The ripple effects were obvious to Hagoromo the moment he calculated them.
So he acted.
But not openly.
Never openly.
Revealing himself would have been catastrophic, the worst possible interference. Hagoromo did not rule for a thousand years by being careless.
He already had a contingency.
A very fitting one.
Sakumo Hatake.
Kakashi's father had never passed on completely.
Not out of strength, but out of attachment. Regret. Unfinished weight.
His soul had lingered in Purgatory long after death.
And Purgatory belonged to Hagoromo.
Not as a jailer.
As its sovereign.
Sakumo's soul had been in his possession for decades, held effortlessly within the overwhelming gravity of Hagoromo's own existence.
There was no struggle there. No resistance. A candle caught in a star's pull.
Now, Hagoromo reached for it.
Not to resurrect him.
Not to return him.
That would have been wasteful.
Instead, he did what only a being who had conquered the space between life and death could do.
He refined it.
Hagoromo stripped Sakumo's soul down to function.
Personality, ego, grief, hesitation, all of it peeled away cleanly.
What remained was distilled essence.
Skill memory.
Combat intuition.
Procedural mastery burned into the soul itself.
The legendary Hatake style.
Reflexive movement. Killing precision.
Tactical judgment honed beyond human limits.
Even his shinobi jutsu and affinities.
The parts that mattered.
Then came the transfer.
Hagoromo activated a mechanism older than shinobi history, born from Six Paths Yin authority and refined through centuries of dominion over souls.
One of many.
Soul Confluence: Inheritance Grafting.
Not possession. Not reincarnation.
A forced overlap.
At the instant Kakashi stood on the edge of collapse, Sakumo's refined soul mass was folded into his, threaded through the existing structure instead of replacing it, layered where the framework was already cracking.
It worked all the better because it wasn't truly foreign.
The source was his own father. The same blood. The same lineage. Skills shaped for the Hatake body, instincts carved for that nervous system, that posture, that rhythm of movement.
Nothing resisted.
Nothing rejected.
What Sakumo had forged over decades slid into Kakashi as if it had always been meant to be there, bloodline and memory aligning down to the smallest reflex, epigenetics completing what training alone never could.
What Sakumo had forged over a lifetime slid into Kakashi's frame as if it had always been waiting there, bloodline and memory aligning down to the smallest instinct, epigenetics completing what training alone never could.
Kakashi remained Kakashi.
But suddenly, his soul was heavier.
Denser.
Stronger.
The effect was immediate.
In the physical world, Jirōbō's fist never landed.
The pressure detonated outward instead, the impact dispersing as if it had struck something immovable.
The Sound Four staggered back, webbing snapping, chakra recoiling violently.
Kabuto's eyes widened a fraction. "—What?"
Kakashi didn't hear him.
Inside, time shattered.
His consciousness was dragged inward, into his mindscape that bloomed fully around him. Snow. Stone. A familiar weight at his back.
A presence.
Not speaking.
Not commanding.
Just moving.
Years poured into him in an instant.
Footwork refined beyond thought.
Angles he had never considered snapping into place.
A blade that was not there, yet felt perfectly balanced in his hand.
Muscle memory rewrote itself mid-breath.
His chakra thickened, enriched, flowing with a depth it had never possessed before. His body responded in kind, nerves sharpening, reflexes compressing, joints aligning to a style his flesh somehow already knew.
It felt like remembering something he had never lived.
Or inheriting something he always should have had.
The transfer completed in a heartbeat.
In the real world, Kakashi straightened.
The pressure around him changed.
Not explosive. Not flashy.
Settled.
Grounded.
Somewhere beyond sight, Hagoromo observed the result and calculated again.
Good.
This version of Kakashi would survive this battle.
More than that, he would be strong enough to shield the child of destiny from the anomalies now contaminating the story.
What to do with him later could wait.
For now, the line would hold.
And the play would continue.
Yet at that exact moment, just as Kakashi opened his eyes and was about to fully surface from the torrent inside his mind, something went wrong.
Space folded.
Not loudly. Not violently.
It simply… slipped.
A distortion bloomed directly behind him, silent and wrong, like reality briefly forgetting how to stay in place.
Hagoromo felt it an instant too late.
His awareness rippled, the thin soul-presence he maintained around his anchors shuddering in alarm.
This wasn't something he had calculated for.
Not because he was careless, but because he was constrained, bound, existing only as a partial imprint in this region.
And this intrusion did not announce itself through chakra.
It arrived through something else.
Kamui.
Obito stepped out of the warp.
Orange mask. Dark cloak.
One red eye burning through the slit, fixed squarely on Kakashi.