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"I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused."
The golden-haired young man bowed at a right angle with the particular sincerity of someone who understood exactly how serious what he had done was and was not attempting to minimize it.
Aburame Tatsuma and Uchiha Shisui looked at him from either side of the unconscious shinobi laid out between them, the Root operatives that Uzumaki Kushina had put down during the engagement. Neither of them had words that felt adequate to the situation. What they had instead was the specific exhaustion of people who had survived something that should not have been survivable and were still processing the details of how.
For the Root Four, the battle with the Nine-Tails' jinchūriki ranked second in sheer danger only to the encounter with divine eyes in the Land of Rain. The forest around them had ceased to resemble a forest in any meaningful sense. The trees that remained standing did so at angles that suggested they were reconsidering the decision.
Without Shisui and the Susanoo standing at the front, the remaining Anbu members would not have lasted long enough to form the second defensive position.
Even with Shisui's technique active, even with the full combat support of Hyuga Hizashi working in coordination to complete the Seal, they had come close enough to complete failure that the margin did not bear detailed examination. At one point Shisui had nearly broken Danzo's standing prohibition and reached for the power of his right eye, the technique he had not yet been cleared to use in the field.
Fortunately, Namikaze Minato had arrived before that necessity crystallized into action.
........
What Minato had done next had produced a silence from Aburame Tatsuma that said more than any words would have.
Single-handed application of the Seal of Four Symbols. A technique that required four jonin-level shinobi with advanced chakra control working in coordinated positions. Minato had done it alone, reinforcing the Biju's seal in Kushina with the casual precision of someone performing a task they had practiced until it stopped requiring effort.
The Konoha ninja present, including Tatsuma, had watched without speaking.
"Minato." Tatsuma found his voice. "You should be at the front in Hot Springs Country, not here."
"Forgive me, senpai." Minato was holding the unconscious Kushina carefully, her red hair spread across his arm. "I heard she had left the village and I was worried. She is kind by nature, but the Nine-Tails is a different matter. I was afraid it would hurt you before I could arrive."
Tatsuma's expression at the word kind was the expression of a man choosing not to look at the surrounding forest, which had been converted into something approaching a canyon.
The Root operatives and the Konoha ninja who had been sent to retrieve the jinchūriki maintained their silence. Several of them were outraged. None of them expressed it.
"You broke the rules," Tatsuma said. "You also saved our lives. Danzo-sama will receive a complete report of everything that occurred here."
He said it without apology because no apology was appropriate. He respected this young man. He also knew his employer's character with the precision of long service. The rules were not suggestions in Danzo's framework. Even the White Fang, a shinobi whose contributions to Konoha were not in question, had been expelled for a comparable act.
Minato was Hokage faction. Whatever Danzo decided when the report arrived, it would not be lenient.
"I understand and accept that," Minato said, without hesitation and without the performance of reluctance. "As a jonin of this village I abandoned my post without authorization and left my comrades facing the enemy alone. That is a serious offense and I will not argue against whatever punishment Danzo-sama determines."
He shifted Kushina's weight slightly, adjusting his grip with the ease of someone who had carried this particular person enough times to know exactly how she balanced.
"I should mention, however," he added, with the particular brightness of a man who understood timing very well, "that I anticipated this might happen. Now that I have found her, I can be back at base on a tag in ten minutes."
He and Kushina dissolved from the spot before anyone had fully processed the sentence.
The forest was very quiet for a moment.
........
Shisui's eyes had flashed crimson in the instant of Minato's departure.
He had tried to track the technique. Sharingan could follow almost anything that moved, catch the trail of speed that exceeded human limits, read the sequence of a technique in the moment of its execution. It was one of the eye's most reliable capabilities.
This had been completely beyond it.
Not fast. Not even a question of speed. The technique did not move through space in a way that could be tracked because it did not move through space at all. It simply relocated, and between the origin point and the destination there was nothing for the eye to catch.
"Danzo-sama said I had the potential to study the Flying Thunder God Technique," Shisui said quietly. He was not speaking to anyone in particular. "Was that a joke?"
No answer came from the ruined forest.
Shunshin was the fastest movement technique in the Uchiha clan's arsenal, and within that clan, Shisui had no equal in its application at age ten. To go further, to reach the next level of speed, required a breakthrough into space-time techniques. And in all of Konoha, the only person who could actually guide that development was Namikaze Minato.
Who had just departed in ten minutes on a tag.
........
"Tatsuma-senpai." Kyō, the only woman among the Root Four on this assignment, spoke with the practical focus that the situation required. "What do we do now?"
Of the Ten Heavenly Stems of Root, most concealed their affiliation entirely. Tatsuma was one of two exceptions, serving as Danzo's representative in external matters where a visible face was required. Orochimaru was the other, though his inclusion in the list was more a formality born of his fame than any active operational function.
"The mission was not completed," Tatsuma said. "It also cannot be called a failure. We proceed to the front, report the full situation, and allow Danzo-sama to determine the appropriate response."
Shisui had retrieved his short sword from where the fighting had knocked it. He sheathed it carefully. The motion was slow, deliberate, the kind of deliberate that has something underneath it being managed rather than expressed.
He had watched his father die on the front in the Land of Water. He had been present when it happened, and his father had died in the act of protecting him, which was the specific kind of loss that does not find a clean place to sit inside a person.
He gripped the hilt once after sheathing.
"This time I will protect the villagers with Sharingan."
He said it quietly and to no one in particular, which meant he meant it.
Tatsuma composed the report scroll with Hyuga Hizashi's assistance and handed it to Hizashi for delivery to the Third Hokage. Then he looked at what remained of the forest around them and began moving toward the front.
........
The Land of Hot Springs.
Thunder that had nothing to do with weather rolled across the sky above the front lines, the sound that enormous chakra reserves make when they are not being contained carefully. The pressure arrived before the sound finished, settling on the shoulders of every Konoha shinobi on the cliff as something physical.
Danzo stood at the edge of the cliff in his black cloak.
He was wearing a forehead protector, which was unusual enough that the shinobi nearby registered it as significant without fully understanding why. A standard Root short sword hung at his belt. He looked across at what Kumogakure had assembled on the opposite position and at the enormous figure at its center with the particular expression of someone making a final assessment before a decision becomes irreversible.
The Third Raikage.
Naked to the waist. Gray-black skin. Long yellow-white hair. The Lightning Armor already active, snow-white electricity wrapped around every surface of the enormous body with the steady, constant quality of something that was simply always on.
"Kumogakure's intelligence apparently did not disappoint them," Danzo said. His voice was calm in the way that very cold things are calm. "They knew Minato was not here. They gathered accordingly."
Jiraiya arrived at his shoulder, still not fully recovered, the wounds from the previous engagement visible in how he was carrying himself. He had put on his jonin vest when he saw the army moving and come to the battlefield anyway, which was either courage or the inability to stay out of situations that were clearly his problem. Probably both.
"That's my fault," Jiraiya said. "After the war I'll go directly to the cell for especially dangerous criminals."
"Obviously." Danzo glanced at the Ino-Shika-Cho personnel standing nearby. "Yamanaka." He addressed Inoichi directly. "After the wedding, have your clan techniques grown rusty?"
Inoichi straightened. He was not generally a man of dramatic declarations, but something in the moment produced words with more weight than usual.
"Do not concern yourself, Danzo-sama. I will locate Kumogakure's spy before you return."
"It is a rotten branch," Danzo said. "In circumstances like these, do not hesitate. Kill on the spot."
He unbuttoned his collar.
The black cloak moved in the wind coming off the cliff. His bandaged right hand found the hilt of the sword and settled around it with the ease of something that had been practiced past the point of thought.
He looked at the Third Raikage across the distance between the two positions and then stopped being present on the cliff.
His voice continued after he had gone, carrying among the Konoha shinobi with the particular quality of sound that has lost its source.
"Try to take those Kumogakure troublemakers alive. Give me the time I need to remove that thug's armor."
........
The silence lasted exactly as long as it took the shinobi present to process what they had just heard.
It was not empty silence. Danzo's power was not widely known in its precise details, but it was widely known in its general outline. Second in Konoha after the Third Hokage. A man who had fought the Third Raikage before and not lost his life, which was a shorter list than most people realized. His Wind Release had been refined past any currently living practitioner's comparable ability, and Wind Release suppressed Lightning Release in the fundamental accounting of elemental advantage.
The Raikage was still the Raikage.
But the match was not as one-sided as the size difference suggested.
"I will handle the summoning," Jiraiya said quietly. He coughed once and ran through the hand seals. Gamabunta arrived with the particular lack of ceremony of a toad who has been summoned into active combat enough times to have dispensed with the theater of it, and immediately proceeded to make the section of battlefield he materialized on considerably less occupied by Kumogakure shinobi.
"Move quickly against the guard formation," Nara Shikaku said, his voice carrying the flat precision of a man who has converted the situation into a tactical problem and is now executing the solution. "Wind suppresses Lightning at the elemental level, but the opponent is the Raikage himself. We cannot allow Danzo-sama to sustain another injury to his eyes."
He had barely finished the sentence.
An emerald green spiral flashed somewhere in the space between the two forces, the visual signature of Wind Release shaped to its absolute limit, and the Third Raikage, who had been advancing with the unhurried confidence of something that did not acknowledge the concept of being stopped, was thrown backward.
For the first time since the offensive began, the Raikage's forward movement had been reversed.