Chapter 147: You're Awake? The Four Great Villages Have Declared War on Us!
Thunder rolled across a sky choked with dark, churning clouds. Lightning split the heavens in thick, jagged bolts, each flash briefly illuminating the devastation below.
Rain hammered the ruined streets of the Hidden Cloud Village without mercy.
Every drop struck the broken earth like a small fist, as if the sky itself was mourning. Streams of muddy water wound through the debris, slowly washing away the bloodstains and scorched stone left behind by the battle.
A — now the Fourth Raikage, though the title still felt raw and wrong — remained kneeling beside his father's body.
He hadn't moved.
His eyes burned with a grief so intense it had curdled into something colder and far more dangerous. He stared at nothing, jaw clenched, waiting.
Then, at the far edge of the ruins, figures began emerging through the curtain of rain. Dozens of elite Jonin, soaked to the bone, returned with heavy steps and heavier expressions.
Among them was Killer B.
A slowly raised his head.
One look at his little brother's face told him everything.
B's dark complexion had gone ashen. His usual boundless energy was completely gone. He approached with the posture of someone walking toward a punishment he knew he deserved, and when he finally stood before A, he couldn't hold his brother's gaze.
"Bee." A's voice came out rough and scraped, like gravel dragged across stone. "How did it go?"
B's lips moved. Nothing came out at first. Then, quietly, he bowed his head.
"...I'm sorry, bro."
Silence.
Not anger. Not an outburst. Just silence — heavy and absolute, broken only by the rhythmic drumming of rain against broken stone.
After a long moment, A rose slowly to his feet. His expression had gone completely still, like the surface of deep water.
Something about him was different now. B could feel it clearly. The reckless fire that had always burned behind his brother's eyes hadn't disappeared — it had compressed into something far more controlled, and far more frightening.
"Alright," A said quietly. "Tell me exactly what happened."
"We chased him all the way to the village border," B said, his voice low. "Then he just... vanished. No warning, no hand seals, no chakra signature. One second he was there. The next he was gone, like smoke in the wind."
A's brow furrowed. "Flying Thunder God Technique?"
"Negative, Lord Raikage," a sensory-type Jonin stepped forward, pressing a fist to his chest respectfully. "We swept the entire area. There are no residual chakra traces whatsoever. Whatever technique he used, it left absolutely nothing behind."
Vanished without a trace. Without chakra. Without warning.
It was, by every conventional understanding of ninjutsu, completely impossible.
And yet it had happened.
"Lord Raikage." One of the senior Jonin spoke carefully. "Should we seal the borders? If he didn't use a space-time technique, he has to still be somewhere in the Land of Lightning. With enough manpower—"
"No."
A's answer came immediately. He turned away from his father's body, his gaze fixing on the distant horizon — in the direction of the Land of Fire.
A flicker of something unhinged passed through his eyes, quickly swallowed back down.
"Whether we find him or not — Konoha comes first."
"Bro—"
B looked up sharply, alarm breaking through his grief. "But the previous Raikage said it wasn't our time to move yet. He always said—"
"He's gone now."
A's voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. The weight behind those three words silenced everyone present.
"I am the Raikage."
His fists clenched at his sides. The veins along his forearms stood out like cables pulled taut. When he finally spoke again, each word fell like a stone into still water.
"I will crush Konoha."
B's expression darkened. He stared at his brother for a long moment — at the grief wrapped in steel, at the hatred that had taken root somewhere deep and was already growing — and said nothing.
Neither did anyone else.
Some even nodded.
Meanwhile, somewhere far from the Hidden Cloud Village, in a narrow ravine carved through the rocky highlands of the Land of Lightning...
Uchiha Kazuki sat on a boulder, completely alone, and exhaled slowly.
The immediate crisis had passed. Minato and Kushina were safely en route back to Konoha. There was no pressing reason to rush.
He allowed himself a moment of stillness.
Then a thin line of blood ran from his right eye.
The crimson drops fell and scattered across the wet stone beneath him, blooming like small flowers.
Kazuki observed this with the calm detachment of a doctor examining someone else's symptoms. He pressed two fingers lightly to his cheekbone, feeling the dull ache radiating from his eye socket.
That quick?
He frowned faintly. "Only three uses and the deterioration is already this significant."
He catalogued them mentally. The first use had been during the analysis of the Tailed Beast Ball's chakra composition. The second and third had been deployed during the battle against the Third Raikage — reading the Lightning Release Chakra Mode in real time, then dissecting the mechanics of the Hell Stab: One-Finger Nukite at the precise moment of its execution.
Those analyses were what had made everything possible. In the span of minutes — time that would take ordinary shinobi years of dedicated study — he had grasped the fundamental principles underlying both techniques. Storm Mode: Infinite Instantaneous Roar and Wind Release: Vertical Guillotine had been born directly from that understanding.
The power was extraordinary. The cost was steep.
Fortunately, there's White Zetsu.
The First Hokage's cells carried regenerative properties unlike anything else in the shinobi world. With White Zetsu's assistance, the degradation could be addressed.
In the valley below, he could hear the distant sounds of Cloud shinobi conducting a methodical sweep — formations moving through the terrain, calling out to one another, utterly determined.
Kazuki watched them pass beneath his position without so much as glancing upward. Psychological invisibility worked precisely because it required no chakra — it operated on a level the shinobi world had no framework to detect or counter. He existed in the blind spot of their awareness, as invisible as a thought they hadn't yet had.
He stood, stretched, and turned toward the border of the Land of Fire.
Time to go home.
After that — digesting the Sequence 5 potion fully, and then preparing for the advancement to Sequence 4: Manipulator.
The war had already begun. He needed to be ready before the critical juncture arrived.
Konoha was a village transformed.
The warm, familiar atmosphere that usually defined the Hidden Leaf — children running through the streets, vendors calling out from market stalls, the smell of food drifting from open windows — had been replaced by something taut and electric.
Ninja in full gear moved through every district. The academy had gone quiet. The training grounds were empty. Every soul in the village, from senior Jonin to Academy students barely old enough to hold a kunai, had gathered in the central plaza.
Standing on the elevated platform at the front, Third Hokage Hiruzen Sarutobi wore his full battle armor for the first time in years. The sight of it alone told the assembled shinobi everything they needed to know about the gravity of the moment.
He waited for the crowd to settle, then spoke.
"Konoha is going to war with Kirigakure."
No softening. No preamble. Just the plain truth, delivered with the steady authority of a man who had led this village through more than one existential crisis.
He continued, "The Mist has mobilized a large force and they are already approaching our borders. This battle cannot be avoided."
Despite the fact that rumors had been circulating for weeks — that war was coming, that the diplomatic situation had collapsed beyond recovery — hearing it stated plainly by the Hokage himself sent a visible ripple through the crowd. Voices broke out. Some people looked at the ground. Others looked at the people beside them. A few young Genin had gone pale.
Hiruzen drew breath to continue.
An ANBU operative appeared at his shoulder, moving with the silent efficiency of someone trained never to interrupt at the wrong moment. But their expression said that whatever they were carrying could not wait.
They leaned close and spoke directly into the Hokage's ear.
The change in Hiruzen Sarutobi was immediate and unmistakable.
His eyes went wide. The blood drained from his face. His composure — the unshakeable stillness he had worn for decades, through assassination attempts and war councils and political crises — simply collapsed.
Thousands of shinobi watched their Hokage's face go white.
"Hiruzen!"
Homura Mitokado's sharp voice cut across the silence from the platform. Both advisors had stepped forward, Koharu Utatane at his other side, their expressions demanding.
"Control yourself," Homura said firmly, keeping his voice low enough that it wouldn't carry to the crowd. "You are the Hokage. Whatever it is, you deal with it without falling apart in front of every shinobi in the village."
"Hiruzen." Koharu placed a hand briefly on his arm, her voice quieter but no less urgent. "It's Kirigakure. We've fought the Mist before. We'll fight them again. Whatever expression that is — put it away."
"It's not just Kirigakure, Koharu."
Hiruzen turned to face her. The words came out slowly, as if he was still trying to convince himself they were real.
His lips moved carefully around each one.
"I just received word that Iwagakure, Kumogakure, and Sunagakure have all simultaneously mobilized large forces toward our borders."
He paused.
"All four. At the same time."
"They have declared war on us."
Koharu Utatane's breath stopped.
Beside her, Homura's cane struck the platform with a sharp crack as his grip tightened involuntarily.
The two advisors — veterans of the last great war, survivors of battles that had reshaped the shinobi world — stood completely still.
Koharu's pupils had contracted to pinpoints. The horror on her face was genuine and unguarded in a way that her face almost never was.
"What..." she said, her voice barely above a whisper. "What did you just say?"
Below the platform, the thousands of shinobi assembled in the plaza had gone absolutely silent.
They couldn't hear the exact words being exchanged. But they could read faces. They could feel the shift in the air on the platform above them — the way even the advisors had gone rigid, the way the Hokage looked like a man standing at the edge of something he hadn't known was there.
The silence that settled over Konoha's central plaza was not the silence of waiting.
It was the silence of a village holding its breath.
Author's Note
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