"I'm coming with you!" Nawaki said before anyone else could open their mouth.
"So am I."
Tsunade, Minato, Mikoto, and half the tent said it almost in unison.
"A raid doesn't need an army," Natsuki said.
"Then the three of us, like when we took Yugito Nii!" Nawaki was already negotiating.
"That was different. Blue B is a long way above her." Natsuki shook his head. "I'm handling this one personally. You can come, but you won't be fighting."
"Doesn't matter, as long as Blue B goes down!" Nawaki grinned. "We'll cover you. Just in case."
"If Natsuki is handling it himself, there won't be a just in case," Tsunade said flatly.
She remembered what he could do — drag a target into a separate dimension and settle things there. If he was going in personally, Blue B was already finished. She and Nawaki would be along for the ride and nothing more.
"If anything goes wrong, it'll be this: the strongpoint is very close to Kumogakure's main camp. Reinforcements will be on top of us fast." Natsuki paused. "The other possibility is that the intelligence is wrong."
"How would the intelligence be wrong?" Nawaki shook his head. "Ours hasn't been wrong once since the war started."
Mikoto and Minato nodded along with him.
Konoha's advantage in this war had rested on intelligence more than anything else, and the whole army had grown comfortable with just how frighteningly good it was.
"It never hurts to check twice." Natsuki smiled. "The raid goes in three days. Nobody breathes a word."
"Yes, Lord Hokage."
The meeting broke up, and the tent emptied.
Natsuki raised a hand and opened a rift.
He stepped out inside Kumogakure's camp and took control of the head of their Anbu.
A short while later, acting on a suggestion he was certain was his own, that man walked into the Fourth Raikage's command tent.
"You're certain?"
A came out of his chair.
The Anbu commander nodded firmly.
"Hahaha!" A's face split open. "There it is. The opening we've been waiting for."
Since August, Kumogakure had been committed to killing Natsuki the way they'd killed Senju Tobirama.
The problem, for three straight months, was that Natsuki had not set foot outside Konoha's camp even once.
It had made them desperate. The war had gone badly from the first week, and every additional month of it cost them more.
Now, finally, a break. And not merely a break — a perfect one.
A convened his commanders immediately and started making arrangements.
At the same time, in a forest elsewhere in the Land of Moon, Uchiha Madara received the same intelligence.
It came from White Zetsu.
Specifically, from one of the replacements.
That was the whole point of Natsuki's arrangement. The substitutes went on transmitting Konoha's intelligence exactly as the originals had, which was the surest way to keep Madara and Black Zetsu from noticing anything had changed.
Natsuki didn't much care what those two knew. Every move they made was already being watched.
"I wonder whether the Cloud can actually manage it," Madara murmured, eyes narrowing. "We'll go and watch, when the time comes."
Success would be ideal. Natsuki was the largest obstacle in the world, for Kumogakure and for them alike.
Failure was acceptable too, provided it cornered him. Then they could step in and collect.
What Madara didn't want was the third outcome — Natsuki turning it around, killing Blue B and the Fourth Raikage both, and walking away clean.
Three days went by.
Night fell.
Natsuki arrived at Tsunade's tent to find her and Nawaki ready. He said nothing at all, just opened a rift.
The three of them came out a short distance from the strongpoint.
Natsuki activated Observation Haki, and his eyebrows went up.
Kumogakure really did think highly of him.
Better than seven thousand Cloud shinobi were already in position around that strongpoint. And with them — the Fourth Raikage, Blue B, Killer B, and every heavy hitter the village had left.
Natsuki reflected that his situation resembled the Third Raikage's rather more than Tobirama's.
Which was precisely what he'd come for.
"Barrier first."
He raised a hand.
Neither Tsunade nor Nawaki thought anything of it. He'd done exactly the same before taking Yugito Nii.
With it up, the three of them walked into the strongpoint.
And the night detonated into white light.
The flash was blinding. Tsunade and Nawaki both shut their eyes on reflex — fast, but not fast enough. Their vision went anyway.
Lightning Illusion: Flash of the Lightning Pillar. Lightning Style fused with genjutsu.
In the original timeline, its record had been remarkable. It had blinded Sasuke's entire Taka squad, and it had confused the Ten-Tails.
"Careful!" Tsunade shouted.
The ground heaved in answer.
Fissures tore open across the compound in no discernible pattern — not one or two but dozens, crossing and recrossing until the earth was a lattice of bottomless gaps.
The three of them scattered on instinct.
And as they moved, stone pillars erupted out of the ground — placed with obvious deliberation, one between each of them and the next.
Between the pillars and the fissures, the three of them were cut apart from one another in the space of two seconds.
Lightning flooded the compound.
Cloud shinobi poured in from every direction, splitting cleanly into three rings, one around each of them.
Tsunade's sight came back, and the moment she saw the Fourth Raikage and Blue B, her face went hard.
An ambush. Obviously.
And exactly as Natsuki had warned — Konoha's intelligence had been wrong.
But the bigger problem was standing right in front of her.
They weren't together.
Which meant Natsuki couldn't take all three of them out with the Doa Doa no Mi in one motion.
Kumogakure had left nothing to chance. Blind them with a lightning genjutsu, then use Earth Style to carve their formation apart. It was well built.
"Natsuki — go!" Nawaki said, taking in the sheer number of them without hesitation.
He was the Hokage. He could not die here. And with the Doa Doa no Mi, leaving would cost him nothing.
Natsuki opened a rift.
"Don't even think about it!"
A was already moving, Chakra Mode active since before the ambush sprang, and he crossed the ground to the rift in a single blink.
Lightning Style: Liger Bomb!
His leg came around at Natsuki's head.
Soru!
Natsuki slipped it and stepped through the rift.
"Abandon Tsunade and Nawaki here," A said, fast and loud, "and see how long you keep that hat!"
A heartbeat later, a rift opened beside Tsunade, and Natsuki walked out of it.
A stopped where he stood.
"Why didn't you leave?" Tsunade demanded.
"I don't think we need to." Natsuki reached over, took her hand, and winked at her.
"Is this really the moment for jokes?"
The three of them were strong. There were seven thousand shinobi on the other side of that line.
"Arrogant to the last." A's lip curled. "This is where you're buried. Blue B!"
Boom.
A hot wind rolled across the compound.
Dark red chakra swallowed Blue B whole, and eight tails lashed out behind him. Version 2, immediately.
A's concern was simple: Natsuki had already shown he could rift to Nawaki's position and take all three of them out together. He hadn't been able to stop it alone. With Blue B, he would.
Natsuki's rifts weren't instant. The longer the jump, the more chakra it took to open, and the more time it needed.
Behind the two of them, seven thousand shinobi shifted into combat stance at once.
The weight of that much chakra pressing in from every direction made it physically hard for Tsunade and Nawaki to breathe.
Even Tsunade had never stood in front of a number like that.
"Tsunade-sensei. Care to make another bet?" Natsuki let go of her hand, smiling. "Same terms. One request."
"This is not the time." Tsunade dragged in a breath. "We get out first."
Her one consolation was that all three of them had wide-area techniques, and Natsuki had Space-Time Ninjutsu on top of it. He could pull Blue B or the Raikage into the other dimension, and she and Nawaki could cut their way out through the rest.
And if they couldn't get out, they'd take as many with them as they could.
"Tsunade-sensei." Natsuki raised his hand. "I'll take that as agreement. You can settle up once this is over."
"You—"
She got one word out before something went wrong with the air.
The presence coming off the man standing beside her was beyond anything she had ever stood next to. Her heart lurched, and for a moment it genuinely felt as though lightning had struck her.
The instant A and Blue B saw that hand come up, they both moved.
Lightning Style: Double Lariat!
Everything they had, from the opening move — one from the front, one from behind, both elbows driving in at Natsuki's skull.
Version 2 on one side. Chakra Mode on the other. At those speeds, in those states, the technique was theoretically unsurvivable. Nobody in the shinobi world could have taken it.
Halfway in, both of them stopped dead.
A pressure like a mountain settling came down on top of them, and the world tilted.
BOOM.
A shockwave rolled outward from where Natsuki stood.
The ground split. The air itself bent.
"No—"
A's face twisted into something between shock and fury.
Around him, Cloud shinobi were dropping.
And the dropping spread, like a line of tiles going over. Wherever the wave reached, they swayed once and collapsed, rank after rank of them, until the sound of falling bodies was continuous.
Something overhead cracked, and the night sky itself seemed to tear, sparks running across it like lightning.
When the dust came down, every single person still conscious in that compound — Tsunade, Nawaki, A, Blue B — was staring.
Seven thousand Cloud shinobi were lying in the dirt. Only a handful of elites with genuinely unbreakable wills were still on their feet.
"Wh— what technique is that?"
Some distance away, Uchiha Madara pressed a hand to his head and asked the question out loud.
No White Zetsu answered him.
Every White Zetsu had gone down too. They had no will to break.
"This is..." Madara shook his head slowly, and found he had nothing to say.
One thing was clear enough. Kumogakure's plan had ended in the same breath it began. Whatever A and Blue B managed from here, beating Natsuki was not going to be part of it.
"Am I in a genjutsu?" A said, looking around him.
"Is it— is this a genjutsu?" Blue B asked, and he didn't sound certain either.
"You're a Jinchuriki. You can't be caught in one." A bit down on his lip until it bled, and the pain steadied him.
"There's no such ninjutsu," Killer B said. "There's no such ninjutsu."
"That actually happened?" Nawaki rubbed his eyes like a man checking for ghosts.
Nobody could possibly understand what the last thirty seconds had felt like from where he was standing. He had been bracing to die. Now he was standing in the middle of an absolute victory, and his brain hadn't caught up.
"Lord Raikage." Natsuki was still smiling. "Do you still think I'm arrogant?"
A said nothing.
Tsunade said nothing either.
She felt small, briefly, for having doubted him.
But — who could have believed this? Even watching it, she found it hard to accept. Seven thousand shinobi unconscious inside a single second.
Which meant that if he hadn't been spending the last year building reputations for Shisui and the others, he could have ended a hidden village by himself. Walk into their camp, put the overwhelming majority on the ground, and mop up whatever was left standing.
"You've still got the strength to run," Natsuki said, handing A his own words back. "But abandon seven thousand of your people here, and see how long you keep your hat."
Blood rose in A's throat and he spat a mouthful of it into the dirt.
Natsuki wasn't wrong, though.
They couldn't run.
Their position was Tobirama's — worse than Tobirama's. When he had stayed behind to hold the line, Hiruzen and the others had still been able to move. If A and Blue B held the line now, there was nobody behind them capable of walking away.
There was exactly one option left. Kill Natsuki, Tsunade, and Nawaki.
"We haven't lost yet!" Blue B roared, and his chakra surged again.
"Let's do this in the other dimension," Natsuki said mildly. "Otherwise the overflow from this fight will kill a great many people."
Something complicated moved across A's face, and Blue B's.
Natsuki wasn't being merciful. His intent was perfectly transparent: he wanted all seven thousand of them taken alive.
And underneath that lay a second message.
He didn't consider them a threat.
They had no other option regardless.
Tsunade and Nawaki exchanged a look.
Nothing about tonight had gone the way either of them expected, and Natsuki's strength had turned out to sit somewhere well past what they'd imagined.
But one thing was no longer in doubt.
Konoha had won this war.