"Explosive tags?" The masked man's expression froze.
Intangibility functioned as a sustained-state ability.
Once activated, whenever an attack struck him, that specific portion of his body automatically warped into the Kamui dimension, allowing him to completely phase through the damage.
Compared to the Flying Raijin—which heavily relied on the user's raw reaction speed to keep up—Kamui practically functioned as an incredibly forgiving, wheelchair-friendly cheat code.
However, because it operated entirely on autopilot, Tobirama managed to ruthlessly exploit it earlier.
Now that the masked man had severed his own arm to ditch the Flying Raijin marker, he naturally kept his intangibility active.
He had to keep his guard up to prevent the two Hokage staring him down from launching an attack the exact second he tried to warp himself away.
And sure enough, the opposition truly lived up to their legendary titles.
Their reaction speed was terrifyingly fast.
'This must be the Second Hokage's signature forbidden technique, Mutually Multiplying Explosive Tags,' he thought.
The masked man slid his right foot back
. To initiate a spatial warp, his physical body had to remain completely tangible.
In short, he physically couldn't slip into the Kamui dimension while actively phasing.
Did that mean he had hit a dead end?
Not at all.
If he couldn't warp out, he would just haul ass on foot.
The second that thought crossed his mind, the masked man whipped around and sprinted for his life.
Along the way, he completely ignored any trees, boulders, or steep slopes blocking his path, letting his intangibility kick in so he could phase right through the terrain.
After a brief, calculated delay, the First and Second Hokage launched into pursuit.
The First Hokage spearheaded the chase.
Whenever thick trees or massive boulders stood in his way, he just pulverized them with a single, monstrous punch, plowing forward in a brutal straight line.
As for the small hills that couldn't be leveled with a simple fist? Hashirama slapped his hands together, and two colossal trees erupted from the bedrock, violently tearing the hills apart right down the middle.
"Tobirama, was that explosive tag yours back there?" Hashirama asked over his shoulder as he charged forward.
He had definitely cooperated with Tobirama to execute the trap against the masked man, but he remained totally clueless about the underlying mechanics.
Perhaps out of genuine concern that his older brother's brain couldn't process too much complex intel, Tobirama only fed Hashirama the exact steps he needed to execute.
That was exactly why Hashirama felt so confused.
He had witnessed Mutually Multiplying Explosive Tags in action before. Wasn't that jutsu supposed to trigger a massive, endless chain of explosions?
Why did only a single, lonely tag drift out this time?
Did the jutsu fizzle out? Or did Tobirama nerf it on purpose?
'Speaking of which,' Hashirama wondered, 'why isn't Tobirama just using Flying Raijin to catch the guy?'
The more Hashirama chewed on it, the more questions piled up.
Seeing that Tobirama refused to answer, Hashirama opened his mouth to press him again, only for Tobirama to flash a sudden, sharp smirk.
"We're here."
"Brother, that explosive tag had absolutely nothing to do with me. You could say it belonged to a disciple of mine." Senju Tobirama locked his gaze on the masked man—who they had successfully herded all the way to the "seaside"—and let his smirk widen.
"A disciple? You don't mean that kunoichi named Konan, do you? Isn't she the disciple of Monkey's student, Jiraiya? Tobirama, you literally just bumped her seniority up by two whole generations," Hashirama grumbled.
It wasn't exactly shocking that Hashirama instantly guessed his brother meant Konan.
Right after the Chūnin Exams wrapped up, Konan acquired the complete training scrolls for Mutually Multiplying Explosive Tags.
If that had been the end of the story, Konan would have just been another lucky beneficiary of the Second Hokage's forbidden jutsu library.
Just like Orochimaru, Naruto, Dan Katō, and Minato.
But later on, the Second Hokage realized that Konan's Paper Person of God Technique practically functioned as a living, breathing version of the Edo Tensei.
No matter how much brutal damage she sustained, as long as she burned enough chakra to maintain the jutsu, her paper body would seamlessly regenerate.
It was basically like a living person voluntarily transforming themselves into an immortal zombie.
Her total chakra reserves were the only real bottleneck.
Beyond that insane healing factor, the Paper Person of God Technique could seamlessly fold into hyper-realistic physical disguises that completely bypassed the sensory perception of the Mangekyō Sharingan.
Add in the fact that Konan remained fiercely hostile and deeply paranoid toward the masked Uchiha.
Even before Makoto dropped into the timeline, Konan had already begun obsessively hoarding millions of explosive tags.
'What a perfect successor.'
'She packed the raw talent, the explosive firepower, and a burning, deep-rooted grudge against the Uchiha!'
Jiraiya had only taught her the barebone basics of ninjutsu.
The Paper Person of God Technique was engineered from the ground up entirely by Konan herself, which perfectly proved her god-tier ingenuity.
Konan wanted bloody revenge against the masked man who slaughtered the founding members of the original Akatsuki and snuffed out the organization's first light of hope.
Given all those aligning factors, the Second Hokage naturally decided to lend a hand.
And so, Konan inherited the Second Hokage's complete, unfiltered archives on his forbidden explosive techniques.
Konan also clearly respected intellectual property a hell lot more than Naruto, so she totally embraced the massive boost in her shinobi seniority.
In fact, you could say she was downright thrilled about it.
Sure, the Ame orphans harbored deep feelings for Jiraiya.
But after reading ahead into the timeline's original future, Konan fully understood that, deep down in Jiraiya's heart, the three of them were ultimately just outsiders.
Or rather, in Jiraiya's mind, the Great Toad Sage's grand prophecy simply ranked higher on his priority list.
And that wasn't even touching on Uzumaki Naruto, the kid who inherited Jiraiya's will and effectively dug a massive, hopeless pit for them in the original future.
Even if you argued Uzumaki Naruto wasn't secretly malicious, and even if he genuinely just lacked the political talent to fulfill his promises—which ultimately caused Amegakure to rot and decline—the facts were still the facts.
If you judged a man by his actions rather than his intentions, you had to apply that logic across the board.
You couldn't just praise a guy's actions when things worked out beautifully, but immediately pivot to making cheap excuses like 'well, his heart was in the right place' the second his failures ruined an entire country.
Because of that bitter reality check, Konan actively resisted her old teacher-disciple dynamic with Jiraiya.
Now, everything was perfectly settled.
Konan had suddenly leapfrogged up the generational ladder, putting her on the exact same seniority level as Sarutobi Hiruzen's.
That effectively made her Jiraiya's.... senior!
Naturally, she was more than happy to accept the promotion.
At the very least, she no longer had to worry about Jiraiya pestering her.
And that lone explosive tag from earlier? That was a piece of paper Konan actively controlled and floated out to spook him.
To be perfectly honest, Senju Tobirama himself had absolutely no clue which specific objects around Amegakure were actually just hyper-compressed stacks of Konan's explosive tags.
Konan never bothered telling him, and he never bothered asking.
The only landmark he knew for a fact was this "sea," simply because he had reviewed the masked man's original timeline dossier and read about the massive trap in passing.
That was exactly why their current tactical objective was to herd the masked man directly toward the coastline.
Konan was currently hovering high in the air, actively running the Paper Person of God Technique to cloak herself in a perfectly invisible state.
The Second Hokage's plan demanded they drive the masked man into the sea, so they corralled him right into the water.
This specific sea was the very first massive vault where Konan had started stockpiling her apocalyptic payload of explosive tags.
In truth, ever since Makoto touched down in Amegakure, the village—or rather, the entire Land of Rain—had fully weaponized its existing heavy industrial steam and machinery sectors, entering an era of hyper-efficient mass production.
The sheer volume of cash they raked in completely eclipsed their old margins.
Kakuzu didn't even need to step outside to hunt down scrub bounties anymore. Just managing the daily cash flow already left the old miser completely overwhelmed.
Because of that infinite budget, the actual speed at which Konan acquired and pressed explosive tags morphed into an unsolved mystery.
Just how fast was she printing them? Nobody had a damn clue.
In fact, those small hills Hashirama casually pulverized earlier? Those were literally just massive, disguised mountains of explosive tags!
And unless Konan manually triggered the detonation sequence, these disguised tags absolutely wouldn't blow up if someone randomly attacked them—completely unlike the cheap, volatile "toilet-paper" explosive tags sold on the black market.
This fail-safe was incredibly reasonable.
After all, this was an entire ocean of explosives.
If they could be triggered by stray crossfire, then what happens if some idiot genin runs over and practices Fire Release near the water?
Wouldn't a stray spark accidentally detonate the entire payload all at once?
A godly physical transformation capable of blinding the Mangekyō Sharingan obviously couldn't be exposed by something that simple.
...
The masked man stood firm on the rippling surface of the sea.
Staring down the First and Second Hokage standing on the shore, a massive, throbbing headache immediately spiked behind his temples.
He had sprinted for so damn long, yet he still hadn't shaken these two monsters off his tail.
Fortunately, he had finally carved out a decent gap between them.
He could drop his intangibility for a split second to breathe and successfully reset the strict five-minute timer on his Kamui.