Konoha's camp.
Tsunade sat cross-legged on the carpet with a document in her hands. Natsuki sat across from her.
His attention drifted somewhere it had no business being, and stayed there.
"Why are you still here?" Tsunade asked, entirely aware of the staring.
"Nothing much to do lately." Natsuki shrugged.
"You're the commander of an army. How do you have nothing to do?"
"The war's stalled. Whether I'm in this camp or not makes very little difference right now."
"Why do I get the feeling you've been deliberately running out the clock?"
"Because I have. Chances like this don't come around often — I'm building Shisui's reputation. And the others'."
He said it without a flicker of embarrassment.
Tsunade blinked, then made a face. "Only you would say that out loud."
Before Natsuki, no commander in Konoha's history — arguably none in any of the five villages — had ever run a war this way.
"So you're already confident about beating Kumogakure." She set the document down. "What's the plan?"
"End the war before New Year."
"It's December." Tsunade's eyebrows shot up. "You're going to finish Kumogakure in two weeks?"
She had her doubts, and they were reasonable ones. Two weeks was nothing, and the Cloud still had the Eight-Tails Jinchuriki, the Fourth Raikage, and better than seven thousand shinobi.
"Then let's bet on it," Natsuki said.
"Bet what?"
"One request."
"Fine." Tsunade agreed easily enough. "You pull it off, you get one request."
It was a wager she was happy to lose. In truth she wanted him to win — the war had dragged on far too long, and she'd been ready to go home for months.
"Now go and do your job and stop interrupting my reading," she said, waving him off. "Or I won't help with your research."
"Yes, Tsunade-sensei." Natsuki stood.
Lately, between building reputations for Shisui and the others, he'd been working with Tsunade on a method for extracting a Tailed Beast without killing its host.
The justification he'd offered her was sound enough on its face: waiting until a Jinchuriki was near death to replace them carried real risks.
An aging Jinchuriki grew weaker, and a weaker Jinchuriki was far more likely to die on a battlefield with the beast still inside them. And transferring early meant the previous host got their life back, instead of being bound to the village until they were old.
The tent went quiet after he left.
Tsunade lay back on the carpet, sprawling without the slightest concern for her dignity, and let out a long breath.
She didn't know what to make of the way things had been shifting lately.
Though she'd grown used to it, in her way — letting the current carry her and declining to ask where it was going.
Natsuki returned to the command tent.
"Natsuki-sensei." Konan came to meet him.
Three months in the mask and uniform had made her indistinguishable from any other Anbu on sight. In practice, she had been running the entire organization for most of that time.
"Anything?" Natsuki patted her head.
The corner of Konan's mouth turned up.
She liked having her head patted. Only ever by him, and only ever when nobody was looking.
She didn't answer aloud, just produced a scroll.
Natsuki opened it and read.
It concerned Uchiha Shisui and Hatake Kakashi.
Three months of steady work had finally pushed both of them over the line. The titles Natsuki had assigned them were circulating through every village in the world.
Shisui's had come out exactly as it had in the original timeline: Shisui of the Body Flicker.
Kakashi's had not.
In the original timeline he'd been the Copy Ninja, a name he'd earned entirely because of the Sharingan transplanted from Obito. Without that eye, all he had was kenjutsu and Lightning Style.
So Natsuki had built his name off his father's instead. Konoha's Lightning Fang.
It overlapped slightly with Raiga Kurosuki, but Raiga had been dead long enough that nobody remembered him.
Kakashi was quietly delighted with it. Carrying a name so close to Sakumo's felt like inheriting something.
Kurenai, Shizune, Obito, and Rin had all performed well, but none of them had reached title level.
That didn't mean they were unknown. Fame came from more than one direction, and one of those directions was simply association — who you were, who you stood beside, and who taught you.
Natsuki rolled the scroll closed.
The reputations were built. Time to end the war.
Over these three months, Kumogakure had moved heaven and earth trying to pin down his position.
The clearest evidence was in their Anbu casualty figures. They'd lost a third of the corps in three months.
Which was unavoidable. Pushing agents deep into Konoha's camp was lethal work at the best of times — and Konoha now ran three overlapping intelligence networks. The Anbu. White Zetsu. And the serpents of Ryuchi Cave.
Even Madara and Black Zetsu had come away with nothing, repeatedly. Every attempt they'd made on Minato's squad had collapsed before it started.
Natsuki suspected they were thoroughly baffled by now, with no idea why they kept failing.
Whether they eventually worked it out hardly mattered. They wouldn't risk moving on him directly, and that bought him all the time he needed.
He'd deal with them after the war, with two more templates in hand.
"Konan, you're dismissed."
"Yes, Natsuki-sensei."
She left, and Natsuki walked to the sand table to think through the final battle.
[Gojo Satoru template awakened.]
The line of text unfurled across his vision, and his pupils contracted.
Gojo Satoru?
Gojo Satoru — from Jujutsu Kaisen. The strongest sorcerer of the modern age.
Though what he was arguably most famous for was getting cut in half, an event that had spawned an entire industry of memes.
Natsuki stroked his chin.
This had to be tied to Shisui and Kakashi earning their titles. More precisely, it was tied to teaching.
Gojo was a teacher in Jujutsu Kaisen, with a whole classroom of students. Triggering a teacher-archetype after making his own students famous tracked perfectly.
He simply hadn't expected the teacher in question to be that one.
A pleasant surprise rather than a shock, though. Gojo was the ceiling of that world's power scale.
Natsuki pulled up the template.
[Name: Gojo Satoru]
[World: Jujutsu Kaisen — The Strongest Showdown]
[Rank: S]
[Ability 1 — Six Eyes | UNLOCKED][Effect: 360-degree sight. Perceives an opponent's ninjutsu construction and chakra flow, and permits ninjutsu operation of extreme precision.]
[Ability 2 — Limitless | LOCKED][Effect: Interferes with matter at the atomic scale and asserts dominion over space. Includes the three applications Blue, Red, and Purple.][Unlock condition: Defeat the strongest shinobi.]
[Ability 3 — Reverse Cursed Technique | LOCKED][Effect: Converts negative energy into positive energy, producing the inverse of the original effect.][Unlock condition: Modify a ninjutsu so that it produces the opposite of its intended effect.]
[Ability 4 — Domain Expansion: Unlimited Void | LOCKED][Effect: Force-feeds infinite information into the target's mind, paralyzing them completely and leaving them helpless.][Unlock condition: Master the Six Red Yang Formation.]
Natsuki nodded slowly as he finished reading.
All those months spent building reputations for Nawaki, Shisui, and the rest had paid for themselves several times over.
Ability 1: Six Eyes.
Functionally, it was extremely close to the Byakugan — useful in combat, useful in support, and still useful at Natsuki's level, which was not something he could say about most things anymore.
The 360-degree field alone was worth it.
And like the Byakugan, obstacles didn't obstruct it. He could see straight through solid matter.
Ability 2: Limitless.
Gojo's core. The single ability that had made him the strongest sorcerer of his era.
Nominally one ability. Actually four.
First, the passive, which ran permanently. Almost nothing could physically reach him. The principle was relative motion — the closer an object came, the slower it moved, until at the boundary it effectively stopped.
Then Blue: absolute attraction. A crushing gravitational pull, near enough to a black hole, and capable of compressing space into a form of teleportation.
Then Red: absolute repulsion, the inverse.
Blue and Red were startlingly close in effect to the Rinnegan's Universal Pull and Almighty Push.
And finally Purple, an energy lance that severed space itself and left nothing whatsoever along its path.
All three were derivations of Limitless — active applications layered on the passive.
Unlock condition: defeat the strongest shinobi.
Which raised an obvious question. Who was the strongest shinobi?
Did the Otsutsuki count?
If they did, the answer was Otsutsuki Kaguya. If they didn't, it was Uchiha Madara or Nagato.
Either way, he'd find out by working through the list. Madara and Kaguya were both already his enemies; he'd cross paths with them eventually. Nagato was simpler still — a friendly spar would do it.
Ability 3: Reverse Cursed Technique.
Exactly what the name suggested.
In Jujutsu Kaisen, a sorcerer's cursed energy was negative energy, distilled from human negativity. Reverse Cursed Technique inverted it into positive energy.
Its most common application was healing — the only healing method that world had. It could regrow severed limbs, rebuild organs, and close wounds that should have been fatal.
Beyond that, feeding positive energy into an innate technique produced the exact opposite of its normal effect. Gojo's Red was Blue run backwards: attraction turned to repulsion.
Unlock condition: modify a ninjutsu to produce the opposite of its intended effect.
Natsuki's first thought was Yin Release and Yang Release. Nothing in this world sat more cleanly on opposite poles.
Converting a medical ninjutsu into a combat ninjutsu would satisfy the condition. So would the reverse.
Then a second possibility occurred to him.
Could it invert a technique's cost?
The Eight Gates, for instance. If Duy and Guy opened all eight, could Reverse Cursed Technique keep them breathing afterward?
Or — the exact problem he was currently working on with Tsunade. After extracting a Tailed Beast, could it keep the host alive?
That was worth testing.
Ability 4: Domain Expansion — Unlimited Void.
A domain that manifested as a black sphere. Everything inside it except the caster hung suspended, and the caster could pour an unbounded volume of meaningless information directly into a target's brain.
Once the brain stopped functioning as a brain, the target simply stopped — conscious, aware, and completely unable to act.
In practice it was mind control with no counterplay.
Unlock condition: master the Six Red Yang Formation.
That one was genuinely difficult.
The Six Red Yang Formation was arguably the strongest barrier in the original timeline. It had held against the Ten-Tails' Tailed Beast Bomb.
Natsuki already had the Four Red Yang Formation. But the Four required four casters working in concert; the Six required only one.
In the original timeline, exactly one person had ever produced it — Uchiha Obito, after becoming the Ten-Tails' Jinchuriki.
Konoha certainly didn't have it. Of that much Natsuki was certain.
Still, judging by the names alone, the Six was almost certainly a refinement of the Four. He could reconstruct it himself.
If Obito had managed it, he'd manage it.
Natsuki came back to himself and activated the Six Eyes.
The world unfolded around him all at once.
He could see the chakra circulating inside the bodies of every Konoha shinobi within range, clear as water in glass.
I could learn the Gentle Fist right now, he thought.
If he could see the flow, he could see the points. If he could see the points, he could strike them.
He shaped a little Ice Style chakra into a mirror and looked at himself.
His irises had turned a deep azure.
The Six Eyes. The Eyes of the Azure Sky.
A thought, and they switched off, his eyes returning to normal.
Good. His weren't like Gojo's, which had never had an off switch — the whole reason the man had worn a blindfold in the first place.
In that one respect, at least, Gojo really had been very like Hatake Kakashi.
Which was hardly a coincidence. Anyone paying attention could see who he'd been modeled on.
Natsuki set the template aside and returned to the actual problem: how to walk into Kumogakure's trap on his own terms.
The answer came quickly.
Since losing the Two-Tails, Kumogakure had been running a shell game to protect Blue B — several separate strongpoints, each dressed up to look like it might be housing the Eight-Tails Jinchuriki.
He wasn't in any of them. According to White Zetsu, Blue B had been at the Fourth Raikage's side the entire time.
So Natsuki would take the bait.
He'd assemble a force, announce a raid on one of the decoys, and let the intelligence leak to Kumogakure.
Which would let them do exactly what they'd been waiting three months to do — encircle that strongpoint, and him with it.
Natsuki had the Anbu summon the senior Jonin.
For a raid of this size, convening a full Jonin council made no sense at all. That was rather the point.
Tsunade, Minato, Nawaki, Mikoto, Hyuga Hizashi, and a dozen others crowded into the command tent.
"The Anbu have located the strongpoint holding Blue B, the Eight-Tails Jinchuriki," Natsuki said, straight to it. "I intend to lead a raid on it personally. Take him out of the war, and the rest of it follows."
Tsunade thought about their bet.
So this is how he ends it inside two weeks?
But what about the Fourth Raikage? What about seven thousand Cloud shinobi?
Was he planning to commit to a full pitched battle?