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"Get out!"
The Raikage's personal guard were not ordinary shinobi. Each of them had built reputations that extended beyond Kumogakure's borders, names that the shinobi world's intelligence networks tracked with the specific attention reserved for people who changed battlefield outcomes. At minimum, every one of them was an elite jonin. They had earned their positions through the particular combination of capability and loyalty that made personal guard assignments function at the level they needed to function.
Yamanaka Inoichi had been holding his mental technique across two of them simultaneously, which was not a simple thing. The moment the Raikage's order reached them, both subjects redirected every available resource against the technique holding them, and the pressure exceeded what Inoichi could maintain at this range under current conditions.
He was thrown out of both minds at the same moment, the mental connection severing with the particular unpleasantness of a technique broken by force rather than released.
It was precisely at this moment that Danzo removed the bandage from his right eye.
........
The Cloud jonin who had just broken free from Inoichi's control took his first free breath and found an enemy commander directly in front of him. Not positioned at distance. Not behind a defensive formation. Standing within reach, apparently open, the gap in the defense visible to any trained eye.
Lightning Chakra Mode activated around him with the crackling brightness of someone who had spent years developing the technique past the standard curriculum. His speed in this state exceeded what the eye could follow cleanly. His hand moved with the blade.
Fast enough that Nara Shikaku, standing nearby, could not track the movement.
Fast enough that B's speed would not have caught it.
Not fast enough.
"Danzo-sama!"
Danzo turned his head.
The fastest part of the human body was not the hand. It was not the foot. It was the eye. The eyeball could redirect faster than any limb could complete its motion, and the Sharingan moved with the eye.
When the Cloud jonin's vision found the three tomoe spinning in Danzo's right eye, the transaction was already complete. The blade stopped mid-arc. The arm stopped mid-extension. The body that had been moving with the confidence of unstoppable speed became a body that could not move at all.
"Damn it." The voice was somewhere between fury and disbelief. "My body won't respond. It's genjutsu."
The sound that followed was familiar to anyone who had spent time on battlefields. The specific note of a blade finding a throat.
It had always been a sound the Cloud jonin associated with work completed successfully. Hearing it from inside the experience was a different category entirely.
........
A dazzling lightning flash crossed the distance between the Raikage and Danzo in a fraction of a breath.
The enormous fist connected and Danzo moved backward, the force of it sufficient to have ended most engagements immediately. The Raikage caught the falling body of his shinobi before it reached the ground, pulling it away from Danzo's grip. The blade came free of the throat as Danzo retreated, and the blood that followed painted the space between them in broad arcs.
The Raikage held his fallen guard.
Danzo shook the blood from the blade and looked at the Raikage's face.
"Here it is," he said. "War." He let the words settle. "You still don't understand, do you? We both have one foot in the grave already."
"A creature without emotions will never understand what I feel for my subordinates." The Raikage's voice had changed in quality. Since the war's beginning he had not lost a member of his personal guard. For Kumogakure shinobi, who operated under a code that placed the lives of comrades above personal survival, this loss carried a weight that was not simply grief. It was something closer to a structural failure. "You cannot comprehend this."
"In this world," Danzo said, "things do not proceed according to desire. If victory exists as a concept, then defeat must exist alongside it. The desire to maintain peace generates war. The desire to protect generates hatred. These are causes and effects, linked and inseparable. This is the reality of the world." He paused. "Though speaking this to someone as immovable as you is probably useless."
The enormous figure appeared in front of him before the sentence finished.
Black lightning. Elbow strike. The speed of it was such that the distance between twenty meters and zero was not an event that could be tracked in real time.
Nara Shikaku, standing at the edge of the exchange, felt the involuntary response move through his nervous system. If that speed had been directed at any of the jonins present rather than Danzo specifically, the engagement would have ended in one contact. He began genuinely considering whether elemental advantage was sufficient to matter in a contest at this level.
When the smoke from the impact cleared, Danzo's face was visible.
He was smiling.
He had not moved.
Translucent emerald ribs had materialized in front of him, a partial structure of something vast and skeletal, covering half his body in the specific formation of a force that had decided to become armor.
........
The Third Raikage looked at Danzo's right eye.
"Uchiha Kagami."
He said the name the way people say the names of things they expected to have moved past but find have followed them forward through time. His knowledge of his own blow was not theoretical. He knew precisely what it should have produced. He was looking at evidence that the Mangekyō had intercepted that outcome.
"Your memory is intact," Danzo said. "When Kagami returned to the village, he told us about your battle together." A pause. "I am grateful to you for what happened in that battle."
The Mangekyō pattern in his right eye shifted slightly and the invisible current of genjutsu moved outward with it, reaching toward the Raikage's awareness with the subtlety that mental techniques required.
The Third Raikage looked away.
Not slowly. In the same instant the technique left the eye, his gaze redirected with the reflexive accuracy of someone who had fought beside a Mangekyō Sharingan user and had learned in that collaboration exactly what it cost to meet those eyes unguarded. The genjutsu dissolved before it found purchase.
Perhaps the richest combat experience in the current shinobi world. That was not an empty assessment.
"It was a worthy battle," the Raikage said. "Kagami avenged his teacher's death. I avenged my comrades." He paused. "Kinkaku and Ginkaku."
The names landed in the space between them with the weight of things that had not been resolved by anyone's death, wounds that had passed between the two villages across generations and accumulated rather than healed.
When Danzo had learned that the Third Raikage had killed them, he had felt something he did not often feel. Something close to regret that the act had not been his to perform.
"You are desecrating Kagami's eyes." The Raikage's voice had changed again. Something that was almost sacred in it. He reached up and tore the remains of his shirt away, letting it fall.
The transformation was visible.
The Lightning Armor that had been crackling across his skin shifted in quality and density. His extended hair collapsed back against his head. The black lightning that had been dancing across his surface burned brighter and whiter, concentrating rather than dispersing, pulling inward toward a state of compression that changed everything about how the force around him was organized.
Speed mode becoming strength mode.
"You changed your form," Danzo said. "From speed to power. You understand Mangekyō well enough to know that speed alone will not penetrate my defense." He was already moving through the memories of the original, finding what he needed. "You know that penetrating it requires force beyond what speed techniques produce."
The Third Raikage had brought Lightning Chakra Mode to a perfection that neither the First nor the Second Raikage had achieved. In speed mode, his movement matched Namikaze Minato. In strength mode, his output competed with Tsunade. In defense, his body could absorb the strongest Wind Release techniques Danzo commanded.
It was as close to an ideal combat configuration as the shinobi world currently possessed.
"You know this right eye," the Raikage said. He was completely calm now. The death of Kurodai, the personal grievances, the long history between them, all of it had receded behind the cold calculation that decades of surviving Kage-level combat had built into him. He moved through the memories of his battle alongside Uchiha Kagami, reconstructing what he knew and what he suspected. "Mata Furui Toriku. I can develop a response to that technique. What concerns me is the left eye. Tsuki-no-Kagami."
He had injured only the right eye when he fought Danzo previously. Danzo had transplanted only one Mangekyō. Which meant the question was which technique the right eye currently held.
That was the variable that needed to be understood before the decisive exchange.
........
Danzo had removed the bandage deliberately.
He had shown only the right eye, following a plan that had been developing since the engagement began. The Third Raikage had fought beside Uchiha Kagami. He carried knowledge of Tsuki-no-Kagami that most of the shinobi world did not possess, and he would approach that technique with appropriate caution regardless of the circumstances.
That caution was a resource.
The decisive blow required the moment of least expectation. Caution directed at the wrong target was an opening.
First, lull his vigilance with the apparent threat.
While Danzo was developing his approach, across the space between them, the Raikage's calculation had arrived at its own conclusion.
Quick victory. Punch through the Susanoo with the Hellspear.
The four fingers extended. The thumb folded against the palm. Lightning chakra of a density comparable to Biju-level output concentrated at the fingertips, forming the edge of something that could not be described as a technique so much as a law of force temporarily given direction.
The drill descended.