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"Sorry for being late."
The golden figure appeared on the battlefield the way Minato always appeared, not traveling through space so much as concluding a decision he had made somewhere else to be present at this specific location. One moment the space was empty. The next it contained him, and the shinobi of Kumogakure in his immediate vicinity began dying before the battlefield had fully registered his arrival.
Jiraiya, on Gamabunta's head, was bleeding from enough locations that the green of his jonin vest had been substantially replaced by red. He looked pale in the specific way that people look pale when they are measuring the distance between their current state and the point where maintaining consciousness becomes a negotiation.
"A little longer," he wheezed, between coughs that produced more blood, "and you would only be arriving in time for my funeral."
He was sliding down Gamabunta's head with the slow inevitability of someone whose body had made a unilateral decision about what came next.
The accumulated damage from the Third Raikage's Hellspear, sustained before full recovery from the previous engagement, combined with the extended fight against A and B, had brought him to a point where what remained of his reserves was being spent on the conversation.
"An exhausted enemy is still an enemy," Ay said, his body wrapping in Lightning Element chakra with the ease of someone reaching for a familiar tool. He moved toward Jiraiya without hesitation. "Finishing this quickly is not dishonest. It is war."
He was fast.
Minato was faster.
The fist completed its arc through empty air. A thick cloud of smoke rose from the spot where Gamabunta had stood, and then the enormous toad was simply elsewhere, the summoning contract releasing and returning the creature to Mount Myōboku.
.....
"Where is Kushina?"
"At camp. Under Root's protection." Tatsuma had met him at the edge of the engagement. "Safer there than here."
Minato moved Jiraiya back through the lines, transferring him to the medical team that materialized around the injured man with the practiced efficiency of people who had been waiting for exactly this. Jiraiya was in their hands before he had fully processed the transition.
"Be careful." Jiraiya's voice came from somewhere in the medical team's activity. His eyes tracked Minato with the particular focus of someone communicating something important while their body was being managed. "You are faster than that one. But he has the Eight-Tails behind him. Do not underestimate the combination."
He knew Kumogakure's strength with the specificity of someone who had spent nearly three years fighting them. The Third Raikage stood at the absolute summit of individual shinobi capability, effectively unbeatable in single engagement. His partner Torui, who had carried the Kekkei Genkai of Storm Release and served beside him the way Danzo's right-hand served Danzo, had been reduced to dust by Ōnoki during this same war. That loss had not weakened the Raikage. It had clarified him.
Ay was the next generation. Battle-hardened, already carrying six or seven tenths of the Third Raikage's output at the same age as Jiraiya. Not there yet. Getting there faster than anyone had anticipated.
Killer B, still young, was the Eight-Tails' jinchūriki. In full transformation he became a force that battlefields could not contain in any orderly way.
Kurodai, the strongest of the Raikage's personal guard, had fallen to Danzo's blade in the opening exchange.
"I will become Hokage," Minato said. "I won't fall here."
He was already gone before the sentence finished.
.....
A and B claimed a dozen more Konoha shinobi in the moments that followed, moving through the formation with the coordinated ease of people who had trained together long enough that the partnership had stopped requiring communication.
"Bi." Ay's hair stood fully extended at the sight of the yellow light appearing in his peripheral vision. He shifted to maximum speed mode immediately, Lightning Element chakra wrapping every surface of his body in preparation. "Take the field. Clear their numbers and give us room."
"Got it, bro."
Both sides were pursuing the same objective through different means. Eliminate enemy personnel as efficiently as possible. Support the commander. Survive long enough for the engagement to resolve.
Everything else, the feelings and the reasons and the grief and the anger, had been compressed into a single operational directive by the weight of what surrounded them.
Kill and survive.
.....
In the rear camp on the mountain above the battle, a small boy watched.
Four, perhaps five years old. Black hair. Eyes that were taking in what they were seeing with the particular quality of children who absorb everything and process it later, when the adults are not watching.
He thought about peace for the first time. Not as an abstraction. As a question that the scene below was posing directly to him.
"Itachi. Watch carefully." The young man beside him, jonin vest, features precisely defined, was barely managing to keep the emotion from his face. He had believed certain things about the Uchiha clan's power, had arranged those beliefs into an architecture that had felt solid. The translucent emerald ribs visible on the battlefield below were introducing structural problems. "This is the greatest strength of the Uchiha."
The boy looked at his father with an expression of genuine uncertainty.
"Uchiha's... greatest strength?"
Fugaku composed himself. The pride he felt was the specific pride of someone who has just been reminded that the thing they love is more than they remembered.
"Mangekyō Sharingan, the ultimate power of the Uchiha, gives rise to two forbidden dōjutsu. Susanoo is the third force, awakening only after both preceding techniques have been fully mastered." He paused. "It is called the power of the gods. Absolute protection. Terrifying destructive power."
Young Itachi set aside his thoughts about war and peace and looked at the distant figure wrapped in divine power with the complete attention of someone who has just been shown a direction and recognized it as their own.
He was not alone. The entire battlefield had reorganized itself around two axes. Everything else had become background.
.....
"Four Fingers."
The Raikage had completed his assessment in the moment that Susanoo's ribs cracked from the Hellspear. Not broken. Cracked. Which meant the technique was extraordinary but not absolute, and the appropriate response was to push the advantage before it recovered.
He shifted into his strongest form without ceremony.
Thumb against palm. Four fingers extending into the blade configuration. Lightning chakra of Biju-comparable density concentrated at the fingertips with the focus of someone who had performed this technique often enough to have removed every unnecessary element from its execution.
The drill descended toward Danzo's position.
.....
In the observation area, the crack that spread through the translucent ribs produced a response in Itachi that preceded conscious processing.
"He broke through Susanoo's defense."
Not just Itachi. Even Fugaku, who had spent a lifetime developing the composure that clan leadership required, could not maintain complete stillness at what he was seeing.
The family scrolls were specific. The only force in the shinobi world capable of penetrating Susanoo's absolute defense was the Wood Release of the First Hokage. The scrolls did not provide for this scenario.
"Standard taijutsu broke through Susanoo," someone nearby said, the words arriving with the quality of a statement that does not fully believe itself.
.....
"A familiar sensation."
Danzo looked at the widening crack in the translucent ribs. The Mangekyō in his right eye was spinning with an urgency that had not been present before, responding to the structural damage the way a living thing responds to injury.
It was with the Hellspear that the Raikage had taken his original eye.
Whatever defense was placed in front of that technique, the technique found a way through. It had been called the strongest spear in the shinobi world without exaggeration. The title was accurate.
Dozens of seals assembled in a few seconds, the sequence moving through his hands with the speed of techniques that have been internalized past the point of requiring thought.
"Wind Release: Vacuum Blade."
The Wind Release chakra gathered and concentrated on a spiral blade that formed within Susanoo's hand. Seven to eight meters of edge, held by the bone structure of the colossus, angled toward the Third Raikage with the force of everything Danzo could currently bring to bear through the technique.
"That speed will not reach me." The Raikage watched the blade's approach, read its trajectory, began the movement that would take him out of its path. His body in this form was capable of displacement that matched Minato's speed.
Then his body stopped responding.
"What is this?"
The black seal runes had emerged from the earth while his attention was on the blade, crawling up his legs like living things, winding past the knee and rising, binding the movement he had already committed to making.
"Seal of Self-Curse."
The pre-arranged seals had been placed when he entered the engagement. Waiting for the moment of commitment, the instant when the body's momentum had been fully directed and the window for adjustment had closed.
The Raikage was fully extended, completely committed, and completely stopped.
A crash that moved through the earth.
Danzo brought the Vacuum Blade down through Susanoo's hand toward the Third Raikage's neck with the full combined force of the Wind Release technique and the divine armor's structural power behind it, and the battlefield held its breath.