Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Kirigakure was a burnt, annihilated ruin.

Through his telescope, Jiraiya surveyed the husk of one of the Five Great Shinobi villages in grim silence. Its cylindrical buildings, flat and pagoda-roofed, were either broken or slashed into hundreds of pieces as if a giant knife had hacked through them.

The bridges that once interconnected the towers had also been blown to pieces, their remains scattered across the nearby forests like a hundred giant stone teeth. The woods themselves had been slashed through or incinerated so thoroughly that Jiraiya could scarcely see the leftover charred stumps jutting out of a dozen craters littering the former streets and pathways of the village. The smoke from the recent fires still hung heavy in the air, turning the already muddy and foggy sky into a coal-black color.

No matter where he turned or how closely he looked, the scene was the same: it was a dead place. The few bodies he could find—suspiciously few—had been brutalized, hacked apart, and left to rot. Not even the birds had come down to touch them. Even the islands notorious, perpetually thick mists seemed to give the place a wide berth in the late afternoon sun.

That was what bothered him most of all. The dead silence, the complete lack of movement. Kirigakure was famed for its expertise in the art of Silent Killing, but Jiraiya had passed through the country with nothing more than calm precision, fully aware of its reputation. This? This left the Sannin frozen in place atop the southern cliffside where he and his ANBU unit overlooked the devastation.

"...Looks like the information we received from that deserter was right," Fox said quietly from behind Jiraiya's left shoulder. Jiraiya almost hadn't heard the faint note of cold dread in his voice.

Pausing for a moment, Jiraiya replayed the events of two weeks ago in his mind. Back to a village that was still alive and vibrant, despite the many who would have liked to see it end up like Kirigakure.

Lord Third had summoned him to the headquarters of Konoha's interrogation unit, to the deepest, darkest sub-section where their most valuable prisoners were held and interrogated. Jiraiya had entered, following all the usual protocols of secrecy, making sure nobody—not even other Konoha shinobi who weren't supposed to—followed him.

Through a maze of hidden doors and tunnels dug beneath the village, he went until he reached the sub-section. Its primary holding cell was a vast, dome-shaped chamber, easily large enough to host an underground Chunin Exams tournament.

Steel spherical podiums were built into its concrete floor, forming the bases for its special holding cells. These cells were half-spheres where special restraining bolts and injection tubes were placed, not only to restrain a prisoner's movements but, if necessary, to inject them with paralyzing drugs to prevent escape attempts. The only part of the prisoner's body allowed to protrude was their head, so the Yamanaka clan members could probe their minds.

Jiraiya walked past the two ANBU sentries at the entrance and immediately spotted his teacher watching a group of four individuals with his back turned. Jiraiya could smell the smoke from his pipe before he'd even entered the room.

Jiraiya approached silently and stood by his sensei's left shoulder to inspect the group his old master was scrutinizing so closely.

Four shinobi, judging by the nasty slash marks on their faces, Jiraiya concluded at once. And maybe the saddest bunch I've ever seen.

Two of them looked almost catatonic, their faces pale, and their otherwise black and brown hair showed heavy white streaks. The other two, despite the drugs and restraints on their bodies and chakra networks, shook uncontrollably inside their cells. They mumbled and moaned in their sleep like panicked children.

"Going a bit rough on these guys, aren't they?" Jiraiya asked, giving his teacher a side-glance.

"I assure you, this is the kindest they've been treated since our patrols found them fleeing across the Kanashii Sea four days ago. They were in such a pathetic state, their fatigue so great, our men barely had to put up a fight to restrain them," Lord Third said, letting out a puff of smoke.

"From the Kanashii? They're Kirigakure shinobi?"

"More specifically, members of their notorious hunter-nin unit."

Jiraiya stopped as if he had been punched in the face, then turned to stare incredulously at his superior. "You're telling me a whole squad of hunter-nin was not only detected by our patrols but that they practically ran into our men and went down without so much as a scratch?"

"I thoroughly checked the accounts and reports of all those involved. I can assure you, those are the facts, as unbelievable as they may seem."

Jiraiya blinked twice, then stared back at the four prisoners. Kirigakure had a terrible reputation, probably the worst among the Five Great Shinobi Villages. It was the kind of place where one's graduation present was getting to kill your classmates for a shot at becoming a genin. Their ANBU unit wasn't any more pleasant, and the hunter-nin were the cream of the crop—ANBU members selected to hunt down and kill their own rogue comrades. The reasons for fleeing or defecting didn't matter; if a hunter-nin wanted someone dead, they'd go to the ends of the world to find them.

Jiraiya had fought them a dozen times, and every time he'd been struck almost numb by their tenacity and icy determination to see their missions through, no matter who or what was standing against them. One time, he'd even set a hunter-nin on fire, but the man kept coming after the defector Jiraiya was tasked with protecting, even as he burned. Jiraiya had to snap his neck to finally kill him.

But these guys... Jiraiya looked them over again, unable to keep the incredulity from his face.

His teacher, ever perceptive of his mood, spoke up. "Even the strongest of shinobi can falter when faced with something terrible enough. You and I both know this very well."

Jiraiya glanced at him again, momentarily angry that he'd bring her up in that way. But after a moment, Jiraiya sighed and silently conceded the point. It wasn't wrong, loath as he was to admit it.

"So, what has the interrogation team managed to learn from them? What spooked them so badly that they ran like chickens without heads into enemy territory?"

"It won't surprise you to learn their mental states are far from ideal," Lord Third said. "Putting aside the techniques they would have learned to resist mental probing, even our best had to treat them with a soft touch. Still, we've learned much."

And none of it good by the way you're smoking that pipe, Jiraiya thought, waiting for the Third Hokage to continue. The older man chewed on the end of the pipe—gnawed it, really—then spoke after inhaling a mouthful of smoke. His gaze was deeply troubled, in a way Jiraiya had rarely seen before.

"If the information in their heads is correct, then Kirigakure is either destroyed or very close to it."

"D-Destroyed?" Jiraiya said after a moment's pause. "That's..."

"I didn't believe the initial report myself," Lord Third continued. "But every examination—and there were many—of their memories revealed weeks of troubling rumors and reports spreading throughout the land, of something destroying their border settlements. Killing civilians and shinobi with impunity. The latest and worst of these recollections showed our interrogators scenes of buildings being destroyed, forests on fire, and villagers in the thousands being slaughtered by... something."

"Something?" Jiraiya repeated, feeling a bead of sweat trickle down his neck. "The Yamanaka clan members didn't see what?"

"They tried. But every attempt to enter that particular corner of the four's minds ended... poorly," Lord Third nodded at the catatonic pair 15 feet away to his right. "From the scant flashes we could discern, it didn't appear to be their Bijuu, but a man. Or something in the shape of one."

"A man?" Jiraiya would have laughed if his teacher's already severe face didn't look like it had gained a few more lines around the eyes since they'd last seen each other. "What man could possibly take on—much less destroy—one of the Great Villages by himself? I don't think even you could do it, sensei, and you're the strongest shinobi I've ever known."

"I knew some men who could do it. Rather easily, in fact, but now's not the time to reminisce," Lord Third said, turning to look at Jiraiya then. "Speculation on what may or may not have happened will do us no good. We must ascertain the truth behind the memories of these shinobi."

Jiraiya understood at once. "You're worried about the war getting worse again."

The Second Great Shinobi War had dragged on for over a decade and was still not formally concluded. Formally, but in practice, very much so. The grand invasions, coups, and incursions into foreign territory had, in the past several months, significantly decreased. They had been replaced by brief border skirmishes and taunts, but nothing much worse than that. The Sannin had even heard whispers of peace talks, mostly between Suna and Konoha for now, but likely with others once the ball got rolling.

If Kirigakure was destroyed or severely damaged and word got out, any chance of peace would vanish. At once, all the other villages would make moves to usurp its territory, absorb its forces and infrastructure, and gain a potentially decisive advantage. The flames of war would burn again, brighter, and thousands more would die.

"You will leave within the hour. I've already assigned three ANBU to accompany you there," Lord Third said. "Find out the truth of this, Jiraiya, and come back to us with everything you learn."

"I will, sir," Jiraiya bowed to his sensei, then rose again a moment later. "And when I do, I hope I'll be able to tell you we were dead wrong about all this."

"As do I, my boy. As do I."

At first, Jiraiya's hope seemed justified.

The sea surrounding the island nation still appeared to be reasonably well-manned. Kirigakure had protected it for decades with obsessive determination and a multitude of ways to kill an intruder: perpetual mists to hide shinobi, booby traps in and under the waves, and even sea animals trained to kill on sight.

However, once they reached the shores, the situation grew bleaker. Throughout their journey to the heart of the island—greatly aided by geographical information procured from the deserters—they passed near patrol routes, camping spots, and settlements.

Everywhere they went, if it hadn't been abandoned in a mad scramble, reeked of fear and uncertainty. Shinobi and civilians alike spoke of no news coming from Kirigakure itself after a state of emergency had been declared, with many shinobi on the island recalled to the village. It was clear that whatever was causing the trouble, the border guard had been kept out of the loop; Kirigakure intended to resolve the matter internally, without letting anything leak to the rest of the world.

Some said the Bijuu had gone berserk, and they were still fighting to bring it under control. Others believed a foreign army had infiltrated the village and was being suppressed. Quite a few concocted stories about a conspiracy of kekkei genkai users who, after decades of plotting, had decided to strike at the village.

But one thing remained constant, Jiraiya noted: anyone who went to check what was happening never came back.

A sense of cold foreboding settled into his gut as they drew closer, tightening like a vice until at last, he laid eyes on Kirigakure's true state.

For a while, all four Konoha shinobi stood or knelt atop the cliffs without moving or saying a word. A cold wind carried the smells of burnt wood and the dead through the air. There wasn't any other sound except for its howling and the rustling of leaves and grass. The ANBU waited for Jiraiya to make the final decision as squad leader.

Beyond the obvious implications this had for the war—and none of them good—another question hung over them: should they go into the ruins? Doing so would risk detection by survivors potentially hiding in some secret area within the village. Or worse, discovery by whoever or whatever had caused this, assuming they were still in the area. If it came to a fight, it would be bloody, chaotic, and nobody would come out of it unscathed.

Not for the first time, Jiraiya wished Minato was there. He could ensure a faster getaway if things went poorly, but he was away on another assignment, and urgency meant they couldn't wait for his return. Orochimaru was off somewhere else, and Tsunade had left Konoha in no shape to help with any fighting ever again.

Jiraiya stared at the ruins of Kirigakure, weighing his options for several minutes. Screw it, he decided, rising to his feet. Wouldn't be the first time I've done something crazy like this.

"You three are heading back to Konoha," he announced as he turned to face them. "Report to Lord Third everything we've seen and heard here. The sooner he knows, the sooner he can prepare Konoha for whatever comes next."

"You intend to go in alone, sir?" Fox asked, a note of apprehension in his voice. "With all due respect, Master Jiraiya, are you sure this is a wise choice?"

"It's just about the dumbest thing anyone can do after seeing a catastrophe like this," Jiraiya said. "But we need more information about who's responsible. If I can run into them and maybe kill them here, that's one less problem to worry about. If I can't win, I'll get the hell out of here. But if this fight is as bad as I think it could be, I won't be able to go all out with you three possibly getting caught in the crossfire."

The three ANBU exchanged silent glances. Duty told them to stand with their leader, to help even in a small way. But duty also bade them to leave; if they failed to get word of this incident back to Konoha, the consequences could be disastrous.

Jiraiya recognized their struggle and smiled at them. "Don't worry, I'll have some backup to watch my back. Now go and tell the old man not to lose any sleep over me. I'll be back in no time."

They shared looks again, then bowed their heads in unison. "Sir, good luck, sir!"

"Thanks, same to you." Then they were off, their forms darting into the forest. Jiraiya waited until the faintest sound of their footsteps vanished before looking back to Kirigakure.

Drawing blood from his fingers, Jiraiya adjusted the tattoos running under his eyes and pressed his palms together. Otherwise, he remained perfectly still until the summoning was completed. Those two are gonna give me an earful for this, but I can't afford to go in there without them.

Sure enough, the Two Great Sage Toads of Mt. Myoboku appeared and fused onto his shoulders. The power of Sage Mode came with them, and while he was no fan of how it ruined his handsome face, the benefits were undeniable. At once, every one of his senses sharpened, his muscles and bones bulked up from the change in his body, and an inexhaustible source of chakra poured endlessly into him—though never enough to turn him to stone.

"You always bring us someplace awful, don'tcha lad?" Shima spoke from his left shoulder, more teasing than actually angry.

"Awful doesn't begin ta cover it, Ma," Fukasaku grumbled into Jiraiya's right ear. "What in the blazes happened here? Who coulda made this mess?"

"My apologies for bringing you here, but trust me, I wouldn't if I had a choice."

Bringing them up to speed, the toads and Sannin leaped from the cliffside and down into the outskirts of the village proper. Quietly, with their senses trained to perceive even the slightest movements or noises, they skulked, crawled, and leapt through and across two-story houses, ruined streets, and up the cleaved cylindrical buildings.

The stench of dead bodies was terrible; the sights were worse. Jiraiya's earlier scouting hadn't revealed just how bad it was. He spotted buildings burned almost to their foundations and scorch marks on the ground that seemed to have been made by lightning. They found footprints, claw marks, and hoof prints belonging to creatures neither Jiraiya nor the Toad Sages could recognize. Some were so massive they had crushed people into pulp.

Venturing deeper, he saw people cut into halves, thirds, and dozens of pieces. And that was if they hadn't been bludgeoned to death by what were unmistakably human hands. If they hadn't been killed by this mysterious attacker or his summons, then the destruction he brought to their homes did.

"What kinda man coulda done this?" Shima whispered as they passed a father who had tried and failed to shield his kids from debris. "It's a monster's work, I tell ya."

"We'll see soon enough. Look ahead." Jiraiya spotted a cylindrical building two blocks away at the village's eastern edge.

It too had been slashed to pieces and left toppled over. But there was a fire there, burning, shining off in the distance. The smell of blood was stronger in that direction, carried by the cold wind blowing into their faces. Sticking to cover whenever possible, Jiraiya noted that the bodies were far fewer in this area than in the rest of Kirigakure. Bloodstains weren't, and the closer they skulked to the fire, the more they noticed that the perpetrator had dragged bodies away, leaving red trails in the aftermath.

As they approached the fire, a terrible unease crept up and down Jiraiya's spine like a knife ready to stab him. Soon enough, he started to feel sick, nauseous. He glanced at the Toad Sages and saw them both grimly quiet, looking a touch greener than usual.

What the hell is this? Jiraiya wondered as he crept quietly into the floor level of an abandoned convenience store, taking care not to step on any glass. This isn't like me or them. Am I really that scared? No, no... there's something in the air, something—

He stopped when he heard a whistling sound. A tune, in fact. Stepping closer, they heard the sound of bubbling water, crackling firewood, and the smell of something cooking.

The Sannin and Sage Toads traded looks, then quietly leapt up the stairs to the building's higher levels. The store had been built under a pair of apartments, its inhabitants gone and their belongings scattered across the floor. Keeping his back pressed against the wall, Jiraiya saw the fire's glow illuminating the surroundings and crept up to the window of a third-story home.

Jiraiya peeked around the corner and saw the only living thing besides them in all of Kirigakure. The fire was built for a large black cauldron, apparently taken from the Kirigakure hospital, to mix herbs and plants. Great timbers burned underneath it, crackling and casting long shadows at the entrance of the Kazekage's demolished headquarters.

The person standing in front of it, whistling and cooking away, looked to be just a boy.

He was no older than 15 or 16 at most. Tall and slim, he wore a black haori over a white kimono and pants, secured by a black belt, and sandals of the same color. His spiky black hair was pushed forward, giving Jiraiya a clear view of his bizarre face. Not because of the tattoos, but because the boy had a second, smaller eye below his ordinary one.

But it was what Jiraiya felt from him that left him frozen, staring as if in a trance. The earlier feeling of unease poured out of the boy like a miasma. The air itself felt more tainted and poisoned than anywhere else in the village.

What the hell is he, their new jinchūriki? Did he go berserk and—

The boy leaned closer to the cauldron and, pulling up the right sleeve of his haori, revealed tattooed hands with black, talon-like nails. Without pause or hesitation, he plunged the bare arm deep into the sizzling water and kept whistling as he searched for something inside.

Jiraiya watched in stone-faced, blood-chilling horror as he took out a human body part, popped it into his mouth, and chewed it like candy. When he saw the blood trails earlier, Jiraiya had assumed the boy was collecting bodies to study their ninjutsu secrets.

But this? The sight of him standing there, chewing away at someone's brother, mother, or kid. If Jiraiya didn't kill him right then and there, the monster could do the same to his home if given the chance. A rage burned away the unease, and Jiraiya glanced at the equally disgusted Toad Sages. Wordlessly, they nodded and made ready to take the monster down.

"I was right, without Uraume here to freeze them, the bodies spoil too quickly," the monster spat on the ground with a grimace. Then, the second left eye swung away from the cauldron and looked directly at Jiraiya 200 feet away. "It's a good thing you're here then, I need some fresh meat."

Jiraiya's Frog Kata aura picked up the attack far sooner than his eyes. Without so much as moving a muscle, the monster sent a single massive slashing attack through the air that would've otherwise cut Jiraiya clean in two. It didn't stop there. With a shocked look, Jiraiya watched the slash travel on for more than a thousand feet, vertically bisecting roads and buildings alike with total ease.

His senjutsu aura flared again as more slashes came. At once, Jiraiya leaped out the top of the destroyed convenience store apartment and darted from rooftop to rooftop. The cuts kept coming, toppling everything as they nipped at his heels.

"That's not chakra!" Fukasaku shouted, watching the dust cloud of collapsed houses rising in their wake. "It's like... I don't even have the words fer it!"

A cackling laugh echoed through the empty village, first from where the cauldron was and then underneath them. Halting his momentum, Jiraiya perceived the slash coming from below and leaped back an instant before it could cut him. The rest of the building was slashed and crumbled under them.

Forced to ground level, Jiraiya rolled onto the blasted, fire-scorched road and got back on his feet just as the monster lunged at him through the nearby dust cloud.

Jiraiya took the punch with his raised left arm then stopped as the shockwave of the impact shook his whole body and the ground beneath. Even Jiraiya's own teeth felt like they were shaking in their roots. The monster, with a toothy, insane grin, smiled wider and came at him.

As Jiraiya first intercepted, then began dodging the attacks, he took note of the increasing speed and ferocity behind every punch, jab, and kick sent his way. With just a single blow, the monster toppled buildings or swung with such force and speed, he cut them with the simplest motion of his martial arts with no slashes needed.

One thing's for sure, Jiraiya thought as he avoided a series of swipes meant to claw at his face. If I hadn't turned on Sage Mode, this would have turned really bad, really fast.

Leaping backward out of the way of a follow-up double-fist hammer, Jiraiya nearly lost balance when the blow produced a crater at least 200 feet wide and turned the road into a messy heap of rocks. Before Jiraiya could try to jump away, the monster came at him again, leaping with perfect ease even on the ruined footing and lunging at him again.

Jiraiya chose to meet the hit and raised his own punch. Their fists collided, the impact sending a wave that snapped the wind and shattered glass across the entire block. The monster grinned, and so did Jiraiya when his Frog Kata punched him in his ugly face.

With no small bit of satisfaction, Jiraiya watched the smile fall away, replaced by clear surprise. He wasn't about to let up either. Grabbing onto the monster's kimono, Jiraiya slammed him into and through every wall that was within reach. Simultaneously, he used the aura of his Frog Kata to pummel away at him with punches to his face, stomach, and kidneys.

The monster tried to retaliate by swiping at Jiraiya's hand, but a Frog Kata blow swatted it aside while Jiraiya's real fist uppercut him dozens of feet into the air and sent him flying, then skidding across the scorched road like a human ragdoll.

Jiraiya pressed his advantage and charged forward. When the distance was close enough, he jumped and brought his foot down to where the monster's head was. His foot collapsed the ground and even tilted some of the surrounding houses toward him. But his opponent was nowhere to be seen.

"Well, this is a welcome surprise," a smooth, smug voice said from above. Jiraiya spun to see the monster sitting on the edge of a slanted, red pagoda roof. His head rested on his right knuckles, and his left leg lazily dangled off the edge. "I thought you were just another grunt stumbling around this place, but I must say, you're far and away better than the rest of the shinobi here."

Jiraiya didn't pay much attention to his words as he did his injuries—or the complete lack thereof. He should be coughing up bits of his own kidneys right now. But he looks fine, like I didn't even lay a finger on him.

"Quite an interesting technique as well," the monster said, grinning. "I would guess it's an aura of some kind, yes? A shroud surrounding your body within a fixed range, allowing you to hit me without moving a muscle, or react to attacks that enter it."

"Sharp one, ain't he," Shima muttered, eyeing him with unease.

"Still," he droned on. "If that's all you're capable of, then you won't amount to more than just a brief distraction for me."

"Why don't you come down here and try me?"

The monster chuckled then rose to his full height atop the roof. He extended both his arms forward and upward, fists closed. A large eight-handled wheel appeared just above and behind his head. Then, he started... stretching? Neck, elbows, wrists, the works, he popped them all for the next fight.

Jiraiya couldn't tell if he was insane or just that arrogant or both. At first. But he noticed something else coming from the monster. The same feeling of unease had come back, stronger than before. So powerful and so sudden that Jiraiya felt momentarily dizzy, scorching hot and impossibly cold all at once. It wasn't just the obvious bloodlust.

It was something thick, like the air had just turned poisonous. Like all the horrible things done to this place and its impossible had suddenly come alive again and were pouring in and out from the monster in a loop. Jiraiya, feeling beads of sweat fall down his neck stared at him and could almost see the force of whatever his power was swirling around him, faint and terrible. The fact he sensed similar, but smaller sensations exactly like this from when his slashes entered the boundaries of his Frog Kata only confused and agitated him more.

It was like someone turned every evil feeling in the world into an actual power. The only time he'd ever felt something remotely similar was when Kushina had lost control of the Nine-Tails over a year ago and put Minato in the hospital.

"Y-You," Jiraiya said, not quite managing to hide the fear he felt. "Who or what are you?!"

The monster's smile disappeared for a second, replaced by a confused look. Then he chuckled again and popped his neck. "Right, I keep forgetting the people of these lands don't call Sukuna. Or anything for that matter. I'm so used to maggots calling me that as they beg for mercy or resist before dying."

Sukuna grinned, his eyes glinting as whatever power he had was fully focused. Not a miasma suffocating the air but like a knife ready to cut Jiraiya's neck open. The wheel he'd summoned loomed in the air, unmoving in the late afternoon sun started setting behind it. It cast a shadow over Sukuna, made him look taller than he was.

"What're you thinkin' lad?" Shima asked. "We've got the means ta get away, but its yer call, Jiraiya-boy."

For a few heartbeats, Jiraiya listened to a part of him telling him to run. To get the hell out while he still could. But on the edges of his vision, he still saw the many dead of Kirigakure scattered all over the place. Enemy shinobi and innocent civilians, all cut down so a little psychopath could use them for food and entertainment.

The thought of letting him live even another second made Jiraiya's blood boil all over again. Screw it, we're killing him here.

The Sannin steeled himself and glared right back at Sukuna. He poured more senjutsu into himself until his teeth sharpened, his feet became webbed, and his posture slouched to mimic a toad's.

"You're not killing anybody else," the Sannin swore and crouched on all fours, barring his teeth. "Wherever you came from, you'll wish you stayed there."

Sukuna chuckled and bent his knees for an incoming leap. "Amusing, that's what every corpse here said to me too!"

Faster than Jiraiya had expected, Sukuna didn't so much jump as blast off with the force of a missile, the roof under him bursting into a thousand broken pieces. Again, Jiraiya thanked his good sense to go into this with Sage Mode and leaped to the right, half a second before Sukuna brought his fist down.

The smoke and debris were barely in the air before Sukuna followed up with another set of jabs and kicks. Jiraiya gritted his teeth and blocked each one. Even with the extra senjutsu powering him up, Sukuna's attacks were just on the edge of what he could withstand.

They fought through homes, street gates, and walls, toppling and stepping over the dead until they reached a park area near the westernmost edge of the village. The 60-foot-tall statue of the First Mizukage was at Jiraiya's back when he finally got a chance to strike back.

Jiraiya blocked a left hook and grabbed Sukuna's arm. Again, his Frog Kata sent a flurry of punches across Sukuna's ribs, stomach, and kidneys. Every one of them was far stronger than the hits that had previously knocked Sukuna enough for Jiraiya to wail on him.

This time, he might as well have been punching Enma's Adamantine form for all the good it did. The hits all connected—he felt it—it was just that Sukuna's body was somehow much tougher all of a sudden. A blow that should have snapped his jaw barely made his cheek twitch from the impact. All the while, Sukuna stared directly at Jiraiya, laughing at his attacks with an unblinking, maniacal smile.

The wheel that followed Sukuna suddenly glowed and spun once. Jiraiya tensed up, ready for an attack to come, but nothing happened.

"We're not finished yet!" Fukasaku shouted, and Jiraiya perceived the senjutsu molding around the toad's bulging throat. He fired his tongue out like a hyper-fast projectile that could cover a maximum length of over 3,000 feet.

Jiraiya had personally seen it cut through concrete, steel, and even summons hundreds of times bigger than Fukasaku himself. The Toad Sage aimed it at the wheel, and Jiraiya expected it to explode into a thousand pieces.

Instead, Fukasaku's ultimate taijutsu technique bounced off with an audible clank against the wheel and flopped harmlessly back into the toad's mouth.

Jiraiya stared, dumbfounded, and paid the price. At once, Sukuna headbutted him with enough force to break his bulged nose. Pain exploded behind Jiraiya's eyes, followed by agony in his ribs, mouth, and stomach as Sukuna wailed on him mercilessly.

His ears started ringing next, but not because of Sukuna. Shima, bulging her throat too, fired off a Sage Art: Frog Call. The croak went off like a bomb inches away from Sukuna's face. The technique targeted the inner ear of the target, leaving them dizzy, paralyzed, and vulnerable.

Sukuna wasn't any different. The ongoing croak forced him to stop for the span of two heartbeats, his smug grin finally wiped away.

Thanks, Elder Shima! Jiraiya recovered from the pain, leaped into the air, and spun with every ounce of strength he had to deliver a spinning high kick right to Sukuna's jaw.

Before he was done rag-dolling against the ground, Jiraiya jumped and landed atop the head of the Mizukage's statue, molding chakra into his chest.

"Honored Elders!" he shouted as the bubbling oil built up in his throat.

"Got it!" they answered, and then all three fired off the Sage Art: Goemon at Sukuna's lying form sixty feet away.

The jutsu, a mix of oil, Wind, and Fire techniques, exploded into a massive, superheated inferno. Benches melted in seconds, tree bark exploded and turned to cinders, and even the concrete floor turned into molten glass in the aftermath of the attack. Sukuna was nowhere to be seen.

"That was too easy, Jiraiya-boy..." Fukasaku said grimly. "No way we're done with him yet."

Jiraiya's senses flared again, this time from right below him. He jumped away from the statue just before a tattooed arm with razor-sharp nails shot out of his shadow and made a grab for his leg. Sukuna, looking no worse for wear, climbed out and stood atop the statue with the same smug grin.

The wheel spun again.

"Tch, you...!" Jiraiya snarled, then noticed Sukuna shoot his arms outward, palms pressed together. A thin but fast torrent of water shot out from his arms. Fukasaku fired his tongue at a nearby tree and pulled all three of them toward it. The water torrent that would have otherwise gone through Jiraiya's chest cut his cheek instead.

"Thanks!" he panted as he reached the tree and braced himself along its tall, ten-foot-high bark. Sukuna stared at him, smiling still atop the statue. After that last stunt, Jiraiya didn't dare let him out of his sight again.

"Slashes that can rip buildings apart, traveling through shadows, and now Water Style. Except none of it's with chakra and with no or minimal need for hand signs. I don't get it; what's up with this guy."

"That shadow technique, it must be how he was able t'spot us earlier. We gotta keep 'im in our sights," Shima replied. "We let him sneak off into the shadows again, there's no tellin' where or when he could attack us from and with what."

"Still, it's strange, don't ya both think?" Fukasaku said. "Why's he stopped throwin' them slashes around? Why fire at us with the water when he could've sliced us to bits with those just now?"

That is a good point, Jiraiya thought. It's not like he can only fire one at a time; the way he knocked down those buildings in the chase earlier and in the rest of the village clearly points to him being able to fire volleys of them.

"It could be that wheel," Jiraiya muttered. "Maybe he's got to reserve a portion of his power to fire off whatever it's capable of—a large enough portion for his slashes not to be an option."

"I say we use that jutsu, Ma," Fukasaku said. "We'll hafta ask Jiraiya-boy here to hold him off fer a while, but if we nail him with it, we'll win."

"No way! I'm not singin' with—"

"You got a better idea?!" he interjected, shouting into Jiraiya's right ear and making him wince. "We gotta do it, Ma. If we let this freak run amok, there's no tellin' who or what else he'll destroy!"

Lady Shima looked ready to argue, but suddenly, the wheel glowed and spun again. Jiraiya and the Toad Sages tensed and waited, but nothing happened for a second time. All the same, Jiraiya really didn't like the way Sukuna smiled at him from atop the statue.

"What do you two need for this jutsu?" he asked.

"Time, t'get it started and fer it to take effect," Fukasaku answered. "Yer gonna hafta take him alone fer a while, Jiraiya-boy."

"That's fine; I've got a few tricks up my sleeve!" Jiraiya smirked. Without another moment wasted, he tensed and leaped off the trunk. Lady Shima grumbled something, but the pair's throats bulged in tandem. Jiraiya left them to it; he had a disgusting little freak to pummel away at.

Jiraiya spun in mid-air and brought the heel of his webbed foot down onto the statue's head. Sukuna almost lazily hopped away and landed next to the statue's base. It crumbled into a thousand pieces as Jiraiya fell opposite his opponent. The two met in the forming dust cloud, blasting it away in another exchange of punches and kicks.

Jiraiya decided to set the terms of this next bout immediately. Ducking under Sukuna's jab, he used Frog Kata to smash the floor under the little creep. Sukuna lost balance for just a fraction of a second, but it was enough for Jiraiya to find an opening and uppercut him eighty feet into the air.

"Fire Style! Giant Flame Bombs!" he shouted as a ball of fire burst out of his mouth in a wide, fiery torrent.

Jiraiya heard Sukuna laugh as he spun, then watched in shock as his opponent not only suddenly stopped but also jumped out of the fire's way. Still cackling, Jiraiya saw Sukuna leap again, firing himself like a human missile directly at him.

The air—he's using it as footing?! Jiraiya thought, stunned, but quickly regained his senses and backflipped out of the attack's way.

He crouched and poured senjutsu into his hair. "Sage Art! Hair Needle Senbon!"

It was his fastest attack, covering the widest range. He'd seen it tear enemy troops to shreds in half a dozen fights. Sukuna didn't even bother dodging this time; he ran headlong at Jiraiya, even as dozens of spikes pierced his chest, face, and shoulders. They didn't slow him down at all.

Putting more distance between them and ignoring the brief flash of fear, Jiraiya molded his chakra again and fired off the Wild Lion Mane technique. His hair grew to a ridiculous size, a mess of spikes numbering in the thousands, all shaped like a lion's maw. The hair mass snapped its "jaws" at Sukuna.

Jiraiya spotted the shadow underneath his enemy change, turning into a wide, inky pool on the ground. He prepared his Frog Kata. There was no way he'd be caught off guard by an attack from his own shadow again.

The Wild Lion Mane closed the gap, Sukuna's shadow expanded, but he didn't sink in; something came out. Jiraiya recognized it as a long, thin, segmented sword handle. With complete ease, Sukuna grabbed it with his left hand and swung the blade with such speed and ferocity that his limb and the weapon turned into complete blurs in Jiraiya's eyes.

The Lion Mane had been sliced apart into thousands of pieces. Jiraiya watched them fall in stunned horror, then saw the weapon: a broadsword shaped like a butcher's knife, almost twice the length of Sukuna's entire body, with two notches close to the base of the blade and at the top. It was an infamous sword rumored to feed on the blood of its enemies.

The Executioner's Sword?! Jiraiya thought. He's even managed to kill one of the Swordsmen!

"Haven't gotten much of a chance to use this," Sukuna mused, twirling the hulking thing around his wrist like it weighed nothing. "But I think it suits me pretty well. Wouldn't you agree?"

Jiraiya said nothing, trading glances with the Toad Sages. He heard a faint, rhythmic rumbling in their throats, but the jutsu still wasn't ready yet.

"By the way, those little frogs of yours better hurry up," Sukuna chuckled, tapping the wheel with the tip of the Executioner's Blade. The wheel glowed and spun a third time. "One more time, and all three of you are dead!"

"We'll see about that!" Jiraiya bit his thumbs and drew blood, then smacked his palms on the ground. "Summoning Jutsu! Stone Frog Swords!"

In each hand, he received one of the fabled stone swords crafted from the sturdiest rocks of Mt. Myoboku. They weren't as long as the Executioner's Sword, but they were tough, and their cutting power was significantly enhanced by senjutsu.

Without another second wasted, Jiraiya dashed at Sukuna, who mirrored him. The two met halfway, their blades clashing in a series of swings, stabs, and slashes. Sukuna swung the broadsword with total ease, while Jiraiya kept it at bay and only gave ground when absolutely necessary. Their stalemate took them away from the statue's rubble, deeper into the forest, where their blades carved through trees, brush, and branches like paper.

The Toad Sages' mouths opened, and they both started letting out a loud, soothing song from their bulged, croaking throats. The sound carried far through the empty forest, and even the clashes of swords seemed to be drowned out by it.

"What's this? Trying to put me to sleep?" Sukuna laughed. Jiraiya took no small satisfaction in the fact that Sukuna wouldn't be laughing for much longer. If Fukasaku and Shima said an attack was devastating, then it would work.

Ducking under an overhead swing, Jiraiya made a slashing motion at Sukuna's face. The bastard watched the sword come at him without a care in the world. Then, shocking Jiraiya for what felt like the twentieth time that day, Sukuna's mouth snapped open and caught the tip of the sword.

The manic glint in his eyes grew worse, and Jiraiya saw muscles around Sukuna's jaw and throat tense an instant before his teeth snapped the sword in half. Jiraiya backed off as Sukuna's head jerked in a way that should have broken his neck, spitting the sword at Jiraiya like a makeshift kunai.

The Sannin sidestepped it, then saw Sukuna tense up for a follow-up attack. Suddenly, the Toad Sages' tune, frequency, and rhythm changed. It had been calming before, almost like a lullaby. Now, the croaks were louder, fiercer, and almost hypnotic in the bizarre way they gurgled.

Sukuna heard it, and the smug smile fell from his face. Jiraiya saw him stop, his sword arm twitching, his legs almost wobbling. Jiraiya didn't waste the opportunity. He charged forward, his remaining sword still drawn in his right hand.

Sukuna recovered somewhat from the growing effect of the song and tried to swing again. Jiraiya gripped his own sword in both hands, and with every bit of force he had, swatted the Executioner's Blade to the side. Then, using the momentum of the swing, he put everything he had into ramming the sword clean through Sukuna's right knee until the handle pressed against it.

It took far more force than he expected; cutting through Sukuna's flesh felt like trying to ram a needle through a steel wall without breaking it. But it worked. The croaking got louder, and Sukuna, who hadn't reacted at all to his leg being pierced, groaned when the croaking reached a new, higher pitch.

The shadow underneath Sukuna started to change again, but Jiraiya socked him straight in the nose, cracking it with an audible snap and breaking his already strained concentration.

The Toad Sages' song reached an even higher pitch, and with it, the jutsu was finally completed.

Jiraiya watched as the forest transformed into a massive, watery vortex surrounding him. In front of him loomed the statues of four gargantuan, armored, sword-wielding toads, each with an outstretched hand supporting a man-sized barrier cube hovering in the air. Inside the barrier was Sukuna, caught completely in the genjutsu.

From his shoulder, Shima coughed fiercely.

"Are you alright, ma'am?" Jiraiya asked, feeling the tension finally drain from his shoulders. "You're sounding pretty rough there."

"Nothin' to it, lad," she replied, her voice much rougher than usual. "Just age and bein' outta practice; this song's murder on our throats."

"But it was worth it, Ma," Fukasaku said, nodding at the trapped Sukuna. "We've got the nasty little bugger right where we want him."

Almost on cue, Sukuna, who had been disoriented, started laughing, his eyes examining his new surroundings like a child in a room full of candy he'd never seen before. In the real world, the wheel still hovered over his head, but it hadn't moved at all. Jiraiya took hold of the discarded Executioner's Blade and tried to break it, but just like earlier, it didn't budge or scratch in the least.

Well, whatever. He's paralyzed. Even if the power he's gathered so far hasn't dissipated, he's not gonna be able to fire it off while in the genjutsu, Jiraiya thought. Then, he addressed Sukuna directly. "Alright, creep. You've had your fun; now I'm having mine. You're gonna tell me everything: who you are, where you came from, and why you attacked this village."

"They called jujutsu sorcerers tricksters, you know," Sukuna said, his eyes still darting wildly around the imaginary plane. "Con artists, masters of deception. But they were wrong: in terms of variety of techniques, shinobi are in a league of their own. So many wonderful and interesting abilities, so many ways to apply them. I've experienced other illusions before, but this is truly without peer!"

Jujutsu sorcerer? Jiraiya thought, trying to recall if he had ever heard of the term before, but nothing came to mind. From the looks the Toad Sages gave him, they were drawing a blank too, which wasn't good, given their long lives and knowledge.

"I don't give a damn about your praise," Jiraiya snapped, pressing the Executioner's Blade against Sukuna's good knee and making a pointed cut across it. "I said I wanted answers. Why'd you do it, huh? Why'd you kill the people here? Did someone send you?"

"I suppose you could say he did. Though, certainly not on purpose." Sukuna chuckled again.

Jiraiya, tired and angry, gave him a kick to the stomach. "Cut the crap," he demanded. "Talk. Before I show you why Konoha's interrogation techniques are feared across the whole world."

"Konoha," Sukuna repeated, and from his tone, Jiraiya got the distinct and terrible impression that Sukuna had never heard of it before. "I see. The shinobi here mentioned other villages, but I was so ecstatic at the prospect of slaughtering an entire settlement of them that I forgot to ask before they all died. I'll be sure to dig up more information about the place, after I kill you."

Fed up with this, Jiraiya stepped forward, ready to pummel Sukuna into submission. Once he was bloody, beaten, and subdued, they could haul him away and rip the information from his twisted mind. Before Jiraiya's bare foot even touched the grass, a familiar sound echoed above Sukuna's head. Jiraiya stared in horror as the wheel turned once more.

Inside the genjutsu, Sukuna's grin turned predatory. "With this treasure, I summon Eight-Handled Sword Divergent Sila Divine General Mahoraga!"

Before Jiraiya could swing the Executioner's Blade to behead Sukuna, the shadow beneath Sukuna grew, turning into a black pool underfoot. From within it, a monstrous figure emerged, leaping between Jiraiya and Sukuna.

The creature was unlike any summon Jiraiya had ever seen. Towering over him, its muscles were larger than the Sannin's own head. Four wings jutted from where its eyes should be, and a tail ran down its head, hanging along its back. Its lower body was covered in black hakama pants and a white sash. Above its head loomed the same wheel that hovered over Sukuna.

Jiraiya saw something flash from its right forearm— a sword as wide as Mahoraga's own arm. He braced himself to block the swing with the Executioner's Blade, but as he raised the sword, it suddenly grew many times heavier in his hands.

It's not the sword! Jiraiya realized as he struggled to lift it. It's me! My Sage Mode, it's—

Mahoraga's attack struck, and though Jiraiya blocked it, he was sent hurtling through the air like a ragdoll. His body blasted through trees, branches, boulders, and even benches lining the park area. The forest around him blurred as he spun uncontrollably in every direction. Somewhere in the chaos, he lost his grip on the Executioner's Blade.

Fukasaku and Shima shot their tongues out, coiling them around a pair of trees. Like a springboard, they halted Jiraiya's momentum, bouncing him back to the ground. He landed on all fours, his breath labored and his back burning with pain.

"T-Thanks, you two," he managed to say, attempting to stand when a sudden, sharp jab of pain forced him back down.

"What was that, Pa?!" Shima exclaimed, panic in her voice— a tone Jiraiya had never heard from her before. "Ya felt it too, right? Our senjutsu, it—"

The sun dipped below the horizon, leaving only a faint red glow in the distance. The shadows grew longer and darker. From one of them, at the base of an oak tree over thirty feet tall, emerged Sukuna with the Executioner's Blade slung over his shoulder. Mahoraga stood by his side.

Jiraiya's eyes widened when he looked at the creature. His injuries, they're all gone?! He had pierced Sukuna with countless senbon needles and skewered his knee with a sword. Yet now, not a puncture or wound remained; the only sign of injury was the small, bloody cut on his pants.

It was as if their attacks had never happened.

"Mahoraga," Sukuna commanded with a grin, his gaze locked onto Jiraiya. "Do your thing."

Jiraiya expected Mahoraga to lunge, but it only smiled— a grin as unsettling as its master's— and simply stood there, its eyeless face staring directly at him. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, in an instant, the entire forest withered and died right before Jiraiya's eyes.

Leaves shriveled, wilted, and disintegrated. Mighty tree trunks collapsed like toy blocks and turned to dust. The grass under Jiraiya's fingers and toes sickened, darkened, and vanished. The ground itself cracked, splintered, and faded into a deathly gray. Even the air grew thin and rancid.

Every inch of the forest within a five-mile radius was drained of life. And with it, all the senjutsu that Jiraiya could draw upon.

The transformation struck Jiraiya immediately. His webbed hands and feet reverted to their normal form. His fangs turned back into molars. The strength, speed, and power of his Sage Mode vanished like a wisp of smoke.

"T-This can't be!" Fukasaku cried, struggling in vain to absorb natural energy.

"I-It's that thing!" Shima shouted. "It's suckin' all the natural energy! He's drainin' the world itself dry!"

"Correct," Sukuna said, his voice as cold as the dead forest around them. "At first, I thought you were like the fishmen of these lands. But then I considered those little frogs of yours and the sensation I felt when you attacked me. It was different from the usual jutsu I've encountered so far. So, I gave my shikigami here the means to break it all down for me."

The means? Jiraiya tried to piece together the battle in his mind, but the air was so thin he could hardly breathe.

"Now I know you were gathering power from your surroundings to strengthen yourself," Sukuna continued. "So long as you had a source to draw from, you had an endless supply of energy." He chuckled darkly. "At least, until now."

Jiraiya tried to rise, but his legs wobbled, and dizziness threatened to bring him back down. Sukuna and Mahoraga watched his struggle with matching sinister smiles, like predators savoring their prey's final moments.

"You smug little turd," Jiraiya growled, forcing himself upright despite the fatigue. "You think you've won? I'll show you why they fear me as the Toad Sage of Konoha. I'm not giving up just cause you've got the upper hand now!"

"Silly little frog," Sukuna cocked his head, his four crimson eyes piercing into Jiraiya's. "I've always got the upper hand."

Sukuna's finger twitched. Mahoraga lunged forward, and Jiraiya braced himself for the worst.

Chapter Text

“So there I was; stuck in the ruins of the Hidden Mist, the guy responsible for killing it? Smiling at me like a shark smelling blood. My Sage Mode? Gone. Sukuna’s creepy pet took it away—don’t ask me how. I wasn’t quite beaten to hell yet, but I wasn’t exactly in top form either. My only backup? A couple of old toads feeling the pressure just as much as me.”

Jiraiya leaned back in his seat; the leather cushions creaked. He snatched another cup of sake off the table, downed it, and paused for dramatic effect. Once it had lasted long enough by his estimate, he put the cup down and gave his captive audience a wry grin and a shrug.

“Yep,” he said, savoring the taste of good booze. “Things were looking pretty bad for us right then and there.”

“I knew you were going to do this.”

“Huh? Do what? I’m just telling you what happened!”

“With plenty of theatrics and exaggerations,” Orochimaru replied from across the table, crossing his arms. “You love the sound of your own voice almost as much as you love women.”

There was a round of laughter at the table. Sarutobi-sensei, to Orochimaru’s left, puffed out lungfuls of smoke into the air between chuckles. To Jiraiya’s right, Minato poorly tried to mask his amusement. Kushina guffawed, badly enough for her boyfriend to start patting her on the back.

After he’d returned from his mission to the Mist—alive, mostly in one piece, and with a very dead Sukuna in tow—Jiraiya decided to celebrate. He’d gotten everybody together and decided to treat them to the best food in the village. The bistro was an old family place frequented by shinobi, a place of rustic wooden walls, lanterns that gave the place a serene, orange hue at night and smelled of grilled meats that could drive a ninja hound wild.

Jiraiya let the laughter go on and smiled right at his old teammate. “True, but since your boring ass is still here, I’m thinking you’re either secretly having fun or so desperate to hear about my mission that you’re gonna suffer through all my theatrics to hear about it.”

“We all must make sacrifices for the sake of knowledge.”

“Now, now,” Sarutobi-sensei said. “Let’s not fight, you two. Jiraiya has accomplished an extraordinary thing for us and the whole shinobi world. I think we can allow him the luxury of basking in it.”

Snake-boy gave their teacher a sideways look, then frowned but didn’t say anything. Jiraiya just barely resisted the urge to stick his tongue out at him.

“What’s this?” a very familiar, very pleasing voice said from behind him—one he hadn’t heard in years. It left him stunned and speechless. “You got one over on Orochimaru? The world must be coming to an end soon.”

Jiraiya saw the others turn or stare at the figure before him. Sarutobi-sensei suddenly looked as if ten years had been shaved off him. Orochimaru, grouch that he was, smiled with rare warmth. Minato and Kushina gasped. The recognition on their faces told him his drunk head hadn’t just played a trick on him.

“I can’t believe it,” he said and smiled from ear to ear. “You’re back! When did you come home—”

Jiraiya stood up and spun around. He knew Tsunade would probably punch him for it, but he felt overjoyed enough to risk going for a hug. He never took the first step. The second he laid eyes on her, his blood froze.

Tsunade didn’t have a head from just above the mouth up; it had been cleaved off at a tilted angle as if by a large knife or sword. The almost-headless body of his teammate stared at him with eyes that weren’t there and gave him a bloody smile.

“What’s wrong, Jiraiya? Aren’t you happy to see me?”

She collapsed a moment later, a red and black pool formed around the wound and began to spread across the floor. Jiraiya couldn’t move, he couldn’t look away no matter how much he tried or wanted to. 

“I-Is something wrong, Sensei?” Minato asked.

The absurdity of the question was enough to wrench Jiraiya’s gaze away from Tsunade and toward an altogether new, horrifying sight.

Minato’s head stared back at him from the table, where it stood upside down. Kushina’s was next to it, rolled over on its side with a vacant stare at the ceiling. Sarutobi-sensei was bisected, his face buried in the rice bowl he’d ordered while blood poured from his waist. Orochimaru was split into dozens of pieces, and the parts peeled off one another before Jiraiya’s eyes, his mangled body spilled over the table, chair, and floor with wet squelches.

No, no! Jiraiya thought, the blood pooling around him as he stumbled back. He’s… He’s here, but how? I—I killed him! I killed him!!

The whole room spun before his eyes, and Jiraiya felt his face hit the pooling blood. Once the vertigo passed, he gasped and looked ahead. His own severed legs were sprawled on the ground. He grit his teeth and tried to crawl away, but his arms didn’t work. They’d been cut off, too—too fast for him to notice, too quickly for his body even to register the pain.

I’m not done. I’ve got to do something—anything. I’ve got to warn the—

As he lay there in the pool, a useless stump facing the ceiling, the blood darkened around him and turned pitch black. Jiraiya barely had a chance to perceive the full force of the malevolent energy when Sukuna’s hands reached out from the shadow beneath Jiraiya and grabbed him around the neck, covering his mouth in a tight grip. Jiraiya tried to struggle, to break free, but Sukuna didn’t budge. He just laughed.

“You can’t escape me that easily.” Sukuna chuckled and dragged Jiraiya into the shadow, into a deep black void where there was no escape. 

He fell for what felt like forever. Strong arms held him down; he couldn’t fight them off no matter how much he struggled. Eventually, Jiraiya broke free enough to scream. The shout burst from his throat with such force he felt as if his lungs were on fire.

A sudden light seared his right eye and left him almost blind. Jiraiya screamed again; it almost felt as if his arms and legs were attached, but they wouldn’t move. Strong arms were holding him down.

“Master Jiraiya, Master Jiraiya! You have to calm down—”

“No!” he shouted, seeing flashes of people he couldn’t make out. “Let me go! He’s here! He’s going to kill us all!”

“Damn it! Hold him down! I can’t get the needle in!”

“Jiraiya, Jiraiya! It’s me!” A voice that might have been Sarutobi-sensei’s called out to him. But he knew that was impossible; Sukuna had just killed him.

Jiraiya ignored it and fought on. In the crazed daze, he thought he felt his cut off right arm somehow hit something. He almost dared to hope, to think he’d get out of the pit, when a fist struck him across the face. In an instant, the muddy flashes of faces and the dim light vanished, replaced by black spots in his vision. Jiraiya’s body went limp; his throat burned from the screaming. Limp and useless, he floated in the void where Sukuna had left him, and soon enough, he let it take him away.

He almost felt at peace, for a while.

Eventually, Jiraiya started to feel again. In a dim daze, he cracked open his eye as though it weighed a ton. He blinked dozens of times until the haze and black spots in his vision mostly cleared. The thin beams of sunlight that peeked into the room through the cracks in the curtains were painful to look at.

The white room was sterile and quiet. The ceiling fan cooled the room, and Jiraiya found himself momentarily hypnotized by its rhythmic spinning. Slowly, he turned his head and saw the IV drip, sensors, and monitors connected to him by wires and tubes.

Where am I? He looked around the room again, but his fried brain and exhausted body made any coherent thinking impossible. Almost like a drooling idiot, he lay there, wondering what had happened.

I—I think I was on a mission? Yeah, yeah, that seems about right. But what was I doing?

Jiraiya tried to shift in the bed and flinched when a sharp rush of pain exploded from all over his body. His left arm, in a cast, especially protested any movement. He gasped for air, and it felt like sandpaper had been scrubbed on the inside of his throat. He didn’t dare try that again. Half his face was tied into a mask of tight bandages, and he felt a gause press against his left eye. 

What the hell hit me hard enough to do all this?

As he pondered that question and stared at the ceiling, the memory flashed before his eyes. The image of a massive, bone-white monster rushing toward him and kicking him like a human soccer ball in the left shoulder.

Mahoraga. Jiraiya remembered the name. That’s what it was called… Sukuna’s pet.

Jiraiya shivered as it all came back to him in a sudden rush: the ruins of Kirigakure, Sukuna eating the dead like broth, Jiraiya and the Two Great Toad Sages trying to kill him before the pinwheel finished spinning.

He shivered at the memory of Mahoraga ripping his Sage Mode away. He flinched at the echo of those two freaks chasing and beating him through a forest of dead trees. When he recollected the sensation of Sukuna’s palm brushing along his face, Jiraiya almost felt the cut slash across his skin and left eye all over again.

But the last memory hurt him more deeply than all the others.

“Pa! No!” Lady Shima shouted at her husband as he jumped off Jiraiya’s shoulder and fired off his Tongue Slash at the advancing Sukuna and Mahoraga.

“Get out of here!” the Great Toad Sage said without looking back. “You’ve got to warn everyone. They’ve got to know this monster’s on the loose!”

“S-Sir,” Jiraiya said. He tried to reach out, but his legs wouldn’t move. Half his vision was red. “You—”

“Don’t argue!” Fukasaku shouted, deftly leaping and avoiding the Executioner’s Blade and Mahoraga’s sword as they came down at him before blasting them back with a Frog Call. “Just go!”

Jiraiya would never forget that sight for the rest of his life: Lord Fukasaku standing alone against impossible odds, Lady Shima’s tears and cries for the husband she knew she’d never see again, and his own shame as he used the last shreds of his strength and chakra to Reverse Summon out of there.

He lay there, motionless for a short while. His one good eye stung, and a lump he couldn’t swallow down formed in his sore throat.

But Jiraiya knew he couldn’t spare more than a few moments to process the guilt and shame. He was a shinobi, and a threat to his entire home was still out there. Sukuna had shown an interest in Konoha; it was only a matter of time before he’d come for it.

I’ll make it count, Master Fukasaku, Jiraiya swore and focused on his duty. With his voice nearly useless, he touched the small chakra-imbued bracelet around his right wrist and poured chakra into it.

Moments later, a nurse stepped in, followed by two ANBU members with fox and owl masks, respectively.

“Master Jiraiya, how can I help—” The nurse, a pretty woman of about thirty with tied-back brown hair and a heart-shaped face, began, but he cut her off with a series of hand and finger gestures.

The message behind them was clear: Fix my throat, and you two? Get the Hokage. We need to talk. Now.

---

“P-P-Please, don’t… don’t kill me…” Akito stammered and bowed, pressing his face into the mud.

He had served over thirty years as a shinobi of Kirigakure. He’d risen through the ranks, was recognized for his skills, and was awarded the prestigious position in the hunter-nin unit. He’d tracked down traitors to their land across the Land of Water and dozens of foreign countries. He had braved countless battles, slain enemies of his village without mercy or hesitation. Age, gender, their reasons for leaving—irrelevant. They all died by his blade.

All his skills, all his decades of experience meant nothing in the face of this… thing.

His unit, returning to Kiri after a successful hunt, saw their home a desolate ruin. But they didn’t cry; they didn’t falter. They steeled themselves and rushed into the remnants of their home, vowing silently to kill whoever was responsible.

But he killed them first.

Heads, arms, legs, entire bodies—he witnessed them fall into dozens, even hundreds, of pieces. Their swords broke against the murderer’s skin, and their jutsu didn’t make him so much as flinch. He looked more annoyed than anything.

Akito kept his composure for a while. But as more of them died, and their blood and bodies joined those of the dead villagers, a voice told him to give up—not run, just stop and pray he’d be allowed to live. By the time he watched his squad commander be bisected, then cleaved into chunks like a fish on a board, he lost the will to fight.

“I’ll… I’ll do…”

“Idiots,” the murderer said with a huff. “I already said I’d let you live if you answered my questions. You’ve got no one to blame but yourselves for this.”

“P-Please,” Akito shouted, burying his head and deepening the bow. “I—I’ll be good. I’ll tell you everything you want to know!”

“Is that so?” Akito felt a hand grab him by the hair. The marked face was inches from his; the four red eyes glinted back at him, and Akito felt himself lose all hope before that psychotic grin.

“Alright then,” the murderer drawled and smiled even wider. “Tell me everything you know about a place called Konoha.”

Chapter Text

It was, by any estimate, a plain room.

Featureless, if well-made, wooden walls, a blue carpet that covered every inch of the floor, a low table, and four cushioned seats of red leather. In another place and under another man’s ownership, it would have been a meager private office for entertaining business guests and brokering deals. Instead, it was a highly secure, secret place buried deep beneath the grand Hokage Residence that towered over the rest of Konoha. The paths leading there were few, and none save him knew all of them—well, except perhaps one other.

Before speaking to the Fire Daimyo, before addressing the clan leaders or jonin, this was where Hiruzen held his most private councils, where he decided on matters of utmost secrecy and significance. It was where he had decided the fates of tens of thousands of men, women, and children across thirty years as Hokage.

He was starting to feel every bit of those years, especially with events as dire as those of late—especially after recounting what Jiraiya had told him, confirming and expanding upon Lady Shima’s original account of Kirigakure’s downfall and its perpetrator.

And we thought peace was near, Hiruzen thought with a mix of sadness and weariness as he leaned back in his seat and tried to find some comfort from the pipe he chewed on.

He looked between two of the room's four occupants, each seated to his right and left, respectively, and waited to see who would speak first. The fourth one, directly across the table from him, he knew would speak last.

“To think that one of the Five Great Shinobi Villages would fall,” Koharu said first. “Not since the First Hokage distributed the nine Bijuu has an event of such scale occurred.”

“And not to us, or any of the other Great Nations,” Homura spoke next, wiping at his glasses. “But to some… unknown attacker, one who, if Jiraiya’s account holds true, has no idea of what he even destroyed or what jutsu are.”

Hiruzen studied them both for a moment. Time had touched them both in its ways—wrinkles across their faces, gray hairs steadily outnumbering the black and brown, the almost imperceptible ways their movements had slowed. But one thing hadn’t changed: their frightening ability to speak of such matters as calmly as one might discuss the weather.

“Jiraiya exaggerates many things,” Hiruzen replied, eyeing the two of them. “But not matters like these. This new adversary, this Sukuna, is something we cannot ignore or leave alone, particularly since he showed an obvious interest in our own village. He will almost certainly make a move on the Land of Fire next.”

“No small bit of the blame must fall on Jiraiya’s shoulders for that,” Koharu replied, her black eyes meeting Hiruzen’s. “He was to go there and discover the truth behind Kirigakure’s fate, not fight the cause of it or draw its attention to us.”

“Jiraiya saw a threat to the entire shinobi world and chose to try and stop it before it could get worse. He risked everything for that, even though he failed,” Hiruzen said, a touch of coldness in his voice. “Besides, the battle wasn’t for nothing. We’ve learned much of Sukuna’s abilities, and we know his next target. Would you prefer this Sukuna to appear at random somewhere else, wreaking havoc while we are completely lost in the dark?”

“Setting aside the validity of Jiraiya’s actions,” Homura replied, defusing some of the tension. “We must decide how to prepare for this crisis. The border patrols at the eastern border must be strengthened at once. If Sukuna dares to cross the sea and enter the Land of Fire, word of it must reach the village immediately.”

“But we must be careful how we move our forces,” Koharu interjected. “The war is still not over. When the other villages notice our troop movements, they will strike at us while we bolster the east.”

Ohnoki wouldn’t make a move—not at first. That much was clear to all. Suna and Kumo were a different story entirely. 

The former, seen by many as the poorest of the Five Great Nations, had never forgiven Konoha’s shinobi for being chosen by the Wind Daimyo for missions over Suna’s, especially in the years leading up to the Second Great War. This, combined with a desire to claim vast portions of the fertile southwestern territory of the Land of Fire, resulted in decades of bloody back-and-forths across the Lands of Rivers and, particularly, the Rain.

Kumogakure was a different beast—one that always felt the need to prove its strength. Despite boasting the highest number of shinobi among all the villages and investing more in its military than any other, Kumo was never satisfied. They were always out to prove something, to take down a perceived threat before it could emerge. And if they couldn’t, they’d steal and use it for their own, as they tried to do with Kushina and the Nine-Tails some ten years ago.

Across the table, while Koharu and Homura discussed how to reorganize their forces without provoking simmering hostilities, Hiruzen watched the gears turning in Danzo’s head—and he knew he wouldn’t like the result.

“This Sukuna is a monster, my friends. We must fight him with one of our own.”

Hiruzen scowled, catching the fleeting smile on that scarred, bandaged face, but he remained silent.

“Kirigakure was home to many formidable shinobi, yet in their greatest time of need, their strongest weapon, the Three-Tails, wasn’t present. An inferior beast compared to our Nine-Tails, but powerful all the same. If they hadn’t let it slip through their fingers, their village wouldn’t have been destroyed, and their people wouldn’t have been devoured by a degenerate creature.”

The Three-Tails, like all Bijuu, was a constant struggle to control. Kirigakure had lost control of it—and its jinchūriki—many times. The most recent instance occurred half a year ago, when the beast rampaged across the islands between the Lands of Mist and Fire, setting many of them aflame before disappearing beneath the waves long before its intended strike force ever reached Konoha shinobi. Even so, their men had closely observed the event and confirmed that the Mist had indeed lost their deterrent.

He’s not wrong on that account, Hiruzen begrudgingly admitted, even as he anticipated—and disliked—where Danzo would steer the conversation next.

“For decades, the strongest of the Bijuu has been under Konoha’s control, just as the First Hokage intended,” Danzo continued, glancing at Homura and Koharu. “It’s no coincidence that he kept it here, even as he sold off most of the others. Yet, while other villages have had success using their deterrents as actual weapons, why is our jinchūriki kept in a gilded cage? Why is Kushina Uzumaki wasting her potential as an asset to our village, pining after that boy of Jiraiya’s, while Han the Steam Ninja and Roshi of the Lava Style lay waste to entire battlefields in an instant?”

“You’ve answered your own question, Danzo,” Hiruzen replied, watching him closely through the gray trails of smoke curling from his mouth. “The Nine-Tails is the most powerful of the Bijuu—a power that, once unleashed, would destroy not only our enemies but us as well. Only the First Hokage could control its might, and he is no longer with us. To throw Kushina at Sukuna would risk a catastrophe the likes of which hasn’t been seen in living memory.”

A pang of sadness struck Hiruzen. Despite all he had accomplished as Hokage, a small part of him couldn’t help but wonder how his predecessors might have fared in his place.

Danzo’s smile returned, and Hiruzen didn’t bother hiding his scowl in response.

“A strange thing to say, old friend,” Danzo pressed. “Have I been wrong, then, in assuming the seal work you and Minato have done was for nothing? As I understood it, your efforts to unearth the secrets of the Uzumaki Clan were meant to strengthen the seal. To allow Kushina to step beyond the barrier of Konoha and, perhaps, even gain control over the Nine-Tails?”

It was. After the near-breaking of the seal last year, there had been intense debate about what to do with Kushina. If not for Minato’s near-sacrifice, it was certain the Nine-Tails would have broken free and attacked the village. But the boy, clever and determined, had approached the elders before his wounds had even fully healed and began outlining his plan.

He had managed to strengthen the seal even as the Nine-Tails had punched a hole through his chest. Minato had studied the Uzumaki secrets tirelessly, and his prolonged recovery afforded him more time than usual to refine his techniques. His modifications, combined with Kushina’s own jutsu, had forced the fox back into its cage with greater strength than before.

Hiruzen had joined Minato in these studies, and together they had uncovered no small number of the Uzumaki Clan’s secrets—techniques of all-powerful sealing that could cost a man as much as his own soul.

“Minato has achieved great strides in his efforts,” Hiruzen said, smiling with pride. “He’s an incredible asset to our village. Not since Lord Hashirama himself have I seen a master of fūinjutsu like him.”

Koharu and Homura’s composed demeanors cracked, leaving them with owlish expressions. Danzo’s smile vanished, replaced by a deep scowl.

“But his work is far from complete. Kushina may now be able to leave the barrier, but true control of the Nine-Tails still eludes us. The sheer magnitude of its malice and the overwhelming force of its chakra are beyond what any ordinary human can manage. At best, you’d be sending a talented kunoichi to her death without achieving anything. At worst? You might destroy Sukuna, only for the Nine-Tails to turn on us next—and this time, we wouldn’t have a strong enough vessel to hold it anymore.”

The Uzumaki clan was scattered across the world. Some of their blood ran through Konoha still, but few in number, and none had the constitution of Kushina. Lord Hashirama understood the Nine-Tails power well when he chose Lady Mito to serve as its jinchuriki. 

“Then what do you suggest, Lord Third?” Koharu asked, her composure recovered.

Hiruzen chewed on his pipe thoughtfully, letting a pause linger in the air. I would convene a Kage Summit, if circumstances weren’t against me.

There had been internal discussions about this—not only in Konoha but in most of the Five Great Villages, as Hiruzen had learned from agents in other countries. The war had exhausted them all, and open fighting had given way to posturing standoffs at borders or small skirmishes. Hiruzen doubted peace would last long, but even a few years of it could have done them good.

Without an agreement between all five Kage, there’s no chance of that happening now. Even if the Mizukage’s total silence were ignored, organizing such a meeting would take weeks, if not months, of preparation and require a neutral land to serve as host. Hiruzen let out a quiet sigh. And they’d never take me on my word alone. Nobody will believe Kirigakure is annihilated until they see it with their own eyes. If they’d seen what Jiraiya had, we might already be leading a joint force against Sukuna.

“Lord Danzo said that we need a monster to fight this new threat. I agree—that’s why I’m heading to the eastern border.”

Koharu and Homura’s surprise was apparent but, as always, fleeting. Danzo’s single dark eye glinted across the room.

“You are powerful, Hiruzen,” Koharu said. “The strongest shinobi we’ve had in many decades. But even you could not destroy an entire enemy village on your own. Men of that caliber no longer exist in this world.”

“I may not be able to match Sukuna’s destructive power. But that doesn’t make it an unwinnable battle. He’s ignorant of the shinobi ways. If Jiraiya’s assertion is correct—and I see no reason to doubt it—he doesn’t understand even a tenth of what one can accomplish with chakra.” Hiruzen grinned. “And as you all know, I’ve got something of a reputation for having lots of tricks up my sleeves.”

Two of his former teammates smiled back. Danzo remained silent, as unmoving as a statue. He never did like people calling me The Professor or God of Shinobi. It makes me sound too similar to Lord Hashirama.

“Besides, when a threat of this magnitude encroaches on our lands, it is the duty of the Hokage—and no one else—to stop it. I won’t sit idly by while that creature cuts a bloody swath through the Land of Fire.”

“We’re leaving our forces where they are, then?” Homura asked.

Hiruzen nodded. “Exactly where they are. But I want our men stationed by the eastern sea to enter high alert. The squad commanders there are to be informed of Sukuna’s appearance and his threat level. They are not to engage him but to flee on sight. There’s no sense in throwing their lives away in a futile battle. Word of this may reach the other villages, but not quickly enough for them to cause trouble for us—something I’m counting on you to handle, Lord Danzo.”

His oldest, one-time friend raised an eyebrow. “Suppress the information? You surprise me, Hiruzen. I would have thought you’d be making moves to inform the other villages about Kirigakure’s fall. At the very least, you might let rumors and hushed whispers spread to turn them to our side.”

“Rumors would be ignored or, worse, embolden them and cause us further troubles. There’s…” He sighed. “No trust left between the villages. If they learned of Kirigakure’s fall, they’d trip over themselves to gain some advantage from it—especially Kumogakure. No, for the purpose of mitigating chaos, we keep what happened there to ourselves… for now. Once Sukuna is dealt with, we’ll decide what to do about the Land of Mist.”

The meeting persisted for several more hours. Commander Shikaku Nara, though only 23 years old, had proven himself a cunning, intelligent, and capable Jōnin. With his recent return to the village, he had been chosen to oversee day-to-day affairs in Hiruzen’s absence. Patrols around Konoha would be doubled, and preparations would be made to evacuate the villagers should Hiruzen’s fight against Sukuna go horribly wrong. Danzo’s ROOT forces would ensure that little to none of this information reached the other villages.

Hiruzen himself decided to leave the day after the meeting, at night to mask his departure. He wanted to reach the eastern sea garrison quickly and take Sukuna down before the monster could make any headway into the mainland.

He still had a few people left to see, though.

“I don’t like this, sensei,” Jiraiya said, glaring at some distant point only he could see. Sundown was fast approaching, and the otherwise plain hospital room was bathed in hues of orange and yellow. “If anybody can beat him, it’s you. But I still wish you weren’t going. There’s too much we don’t know about this guy. There’s no way he took down a whole village with just shadow tricks and that freaky pet of his.”

“Danzo suggested sending Kushina out to fight him.”

“Danzo’s a cold bastard who’d snap his own kid’s neck to get what he wants. He knows Minato’s got the potential to become Hokage someday. Getting Kushina killed would derail that. And if his scheme worked, you’d look like an idiot for holding her back all this time. I’d bet the only good eye I’ve got left that he’s rooting for Sukuna to kill you. Screw that old miserable bastard.”

Hiruzen would have laughed at that under different circumstances. Jiraiya had never hidden his feelings about Danzo, and the animosity was mutual. But at the mention of his eye, Hiruzen found his gaze drawn to the bandaged face of his student. He wasn’t a medical ninja, but he’d seen enough: behind that tight web of bandages, Jiraiya’s face was slashed across, his left eye still there but useless for the rest of his life.

Jiraiya would live. He’d heal. But he would never be the same. Hiruzen felt his chest tighten, another regret joining the mountain of them he had amassed over the years.

“Stop it. I’m fine.”

Hiruzen was sorely tempted to take out his pipe, but he could never bring himself to light it in a hospital.

“I said I’m fine.” Jiraiya turned his head, wincing at the effort, and tried to force one of his trademark grins. “I’ve been beaten up way worse than this. And besides, chicks dig scars.”

“So you’ve said,” Hiruzen sighed. “But it’s never easy for a teacher to see his students hurt like this. No matter how old or strong they get, that part of you that wants to protect them from harm never goes away.”

“Hey, if anybody’s to blame for this, it’s me. I should’ve taken that bastard Sukuna out right away, and I definitely shouldn’t have painted a target on Konoha’s back.”

They fell silent after that. Outside, the sun slipped further and further to the east.

“Jiraiya,” Hiruzen said after a while, “if things go poorly, I need you to take over from me. Konoha needs a Hokage.”

The two of them had spoken about this before, and Jiraiya always vehemently said no. He had no interest in the position, though Hiruzen believed he would make an excellent Hokage and made it plain. Orochimaru, despite being the most talented of Hiruzen’s students, had chosen a path far too close to Danzo’s. And Tsunade, who had pioneered and led Konoha’s Medical Corps, was lost, adrift in booze and regrets.

Jiraiya didn’t react immediately, his gaze distant again. Hiruzen almost thought he hadn’t been heard when Jiraiya finally spoke.

“I’ll hold the position until this mess is sorted out,” Jiraiya said, closing his eyes as if already weary from the task. “Then let some other sap wear the hat. Better me than some other people we know, right? That’s the best I can offer.”

Hiruzen smiled and placed a hand on his bandaged shoulder. “Thank you.”

“Just do me a favor, alright, old man?” Jiraiya’s gaze turned back to him. “Come back and win, so we can celebrate this over some drinks, yeah?”

“It’s a deal.”

Jiraiya wasn’t the only person Hiruzen intended to visit before leaving. His wife was out on field duty, helping with a crisis in the north of the Land of Fire after an earthquake had destroyed many settlements there. He wouldn’t see her, or their eldest, before going off to the battlefield. But he would see their youngest.

Despite it being close to midnight, Asuma was busy at the residence. His brother had gifted the boy a pair of trench knives as a gift for his enrollment in the academy, and Asuma wasted no time—or dummies in the dojo—practicing with them.

Hiruzen stayed hidden, watching the boy practice his swipes and jabs, his bare feet thumping loudly against the mat. The target dummy was steadily slashed, stabbed, and beaten through. Hiruzen smiled at the sight, noting Asuma’s stamina and strength despite his age.

“Asuma,” he eventually called out when the boy stopped to wipe the sweat from his forehead.

His son turned around, eyes widening. Hiruzen could understand why—it wasn’t every day he was dressed for war. Upon returning home, he’d put aside the robes of his office and donned his old war attire: a black jumpsuit of ninja mesh armor and gauntlets he’d worn through countless battles.

It felt good to wear it again, as though he were back in his own skin. The weight of years fell off him almost immediately.

“Woah,” Asuma said, rushing over to give his father a closer look. “I haven’t seen you wear that in a million years!”

“Two, to be precise,” Hiruzen laughed, then sobered and knelt before him. “I’m leaving on an important mission, Asuma. Very few know of it, and its importance is paramount to the village. You can’t tell anyone you saw me leave, understood?”

“Of course,” Asuma nodded, trying to mirror Hiruzen’s serious expression. “A shinobi always knows how to keep a secret!”

“Well said,” Hiruzen nodded in grave approval, then spread his arms. “But he also knows how to say goodbye to his father.”

Before Asuma could react, Hiruzen wrapped him tightly in his arms. Asuma laughed, struggling at first but eventually giving in.

“Come on, let me go! This is embarrassing!”

“Nobody’s watching us.”

“Yeah, but… come on.”

“Alright, alright,” Hiruzen said, releasing him and standing back up. “You know, some boys show a lot of concern for their fathers when they go out to fight.”

“Why would I be worried about you, Dad?” Asuma smiled, shrugging. “You’re the strongest guy in the whole world!”

Chapter Text

The boat creaked like an old, beaten animal. The worm rowing it was little more than a shaking sack of meat over bones. The former hunter‑nin had torn his palms on the oars hours ago, leaving slick blood across the wood. The smell of ichor hung in the air. Sukuna found it pleasing as he sat cross‑legged at the stern, one hand trailing lazily through the sea. The water was cold, and the salt chewed at his skin. He enjoyed the feel of it dragging over his clawed fingers and fingertips.

The sea itself was black like polished glass, and the moon’s light broke into crooked strips across its surface—on those parts it could reach, at least. Much of their surroundings were swallowed by thick fog. At many points during the day’s long voyage, it seemed the little boat drifted through nothing at all.

“How long until we reach the mainland?” Sukuna asked, eyes half‑shut.

“At dawn, my lord.” The worm stammered and paused his rowing. Without warning, he corrected himself and redoubled his efforts. “Won’t be much longer now.”

“So close to the Land of Fire and yet none of their shinobi are here? No patrols, no scouting forces?” Sukuna chuckled to himself. “Have I already frightened them off?”

“When an overwhelming force is on the battlefield,” the worm said, “a flee‑on‑sight order is issued. Standard forces aren’t to engage unless sufficient reinforcements arrive—or unless they have no other choice.”

“An overwhelming force, you say,” Sukuna murmured, rolling the words over his tongue like a fine blood wine. “Such as this… what did you call him? ‘God of Shinobi’? Were there even standing orders to flee from him too?”

“Of course! He’s one of the most powerful shinobi who’ve ever lived! One of the strongest beings to ever exist!”

“More powerful than even me?”

The worm almost forgot himself. The sudden spurt of energy in his voice died, and his mouth hung open. 

“O‑of course not, my lord!” He recovered moments later. “Why, not even Hiruzen Sarutobi could’ve destroyed my village single‑handedly!”

“So you’re saying I’ve foolishly wasted my time chasing him? That you misled me with all those stories of his prowess?”

Again, the worm froze. The bead‑like sweat glistened across his exposed, scarred face in the moonlight. Sukuna watched him struggle in panic through his half‑lidded gaze, with no small measure of enjoyment. Some men were natural-born squirmers; it was wrong to interrupt them in the middle of their craft.

Sukuna chuckled again and made a dismissive wave with his free hand. The scents of fear and blood were fine, but if he kept the worm like that for much longer, he’d make a mess of himself and that was something he could do without.

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and laughed. The sound rolled over the otherwise quiet sea and bounced off the surrounding fog. The hunter‑nin shook like a leaf at the sound of it.

“Relax,” Sukuna said in a low, thoughtful voice. “He doesn’t have to be as strong as me to give me a good time. So long as he doesn’t bore me, your life isn’t forfeit.”

“T‑thank you, my lord!” The worm bowed and tripled his rowing effort at once.

Sukuna had no interest in this one beyond his ability to row him to the mainland. He had no intention of hunting him down if the ‘Professor’ turned out to be a disappointment. The worm didn’t need to know that, did he?

Leaning back, Sukuna let one hand brush the sea’s surface again while the other tapped out the rhythm of an old Heian‑era tune he quite enjoyed. His opened crimson eyes stared at the moon as he thought over what he knew about his prey: Sarutobi Hiruzen, Hokage from the ripe age of 21. He made a name for himself by killing Ginkaku and Kinkaku—men who’d taken one of the Bijū and lived to tell the tale. Called the ‘Professor’ because he knew every single jutsu in Konoha. That bit of information brought a grin to Sukuna’s face.

The shinobi were a treasure trove of abilities and skills that’d be the envy of most sorcerers. While some were born with clan-specific advantages, even the lowest among them could be molded into fighters capable of dozens of techniques. 

And I’ve barely scratched the surface. It’s almost a waste that I annihilated Kirigakure so swiftly—I barely gave them a chance to showcase anything. He chuckled, remembering how their supposed best died like flies, erased by his Domain Expansion. Then again, if they had anything worthwhile to offer, they’d have slowed him down. Their worth died with the Bijū they lost before he came. A pity I didn’t fight Gojo sooner—maybe I wouldn’t have missed it that way. 

His fingers curled at the memory of that fight, how quickly Gojo had turned the tables, nearly ending in disaster. It had been a thousand years since anyone had unnerved him. Still, Sukuna didn’t mind leaving the fight unfinished. He’d gotten what he wanted out of it and a whole new world to enjoy himself in.

The rest of the crossing passed in silence, only the groan of wood and the wheezing breath of the worm interrupted it. Sukuna shut his eyes, savored the salty smell, and hummed his tune.

When dawn broke, the mists peeled away to reveal the eastern shores of the Land of Fire rising ahead: jagged rocks the size of elephants along the beach, and a wall of misty, tall forest beyond. The boat scraped the sandy shore, jolting to a stop.

The worm stumbled off first, dragging the hull higher up the beach with labored breaths. He gasped as if drowning. Sukuna ignored him, taking his time to rise. He stretched across the boat, savoring the pops in his neck, shoulder, and knee joints. Using the worm’s back as a stepping stone, his sandaled feet touched the wet sand. He drew in the air of this new land in a deep, deliberate breath.

The forest wasn’t aware of him—yet. He grinned and made himself known. His presence bled outward in waves, sweeping over the shore and curling across the treeline. He felt the forest shiver. Birds fell silent. Insects didn’t dare move. Boars held their breath, and he felt their blood freeze on his tongue. But his sharpened senses told him there were more than beasts prowling: there were men too, watching, reporting his every move. The only creatures not entirely petrified of him.

We’ll see how long that lasts . He grinned and began walking across the shore.

“You’ve served your purpose.” Sukuna said to the worm without so much as a glance. “Now get lost.”

“T‑thank you, my lord! I bid you farewell and… hope you have lots of fun!”

Sukuna barely heard him scurry back into the boat and row away. A branch croaked nearby, then a rush of air snapped it. The scouts were on the move.

“Running already?” He murmured. “Very well. Let’s see how far you get!”

Sukuna left the shore in a single leap. The forest whizzed past him. Sights and sounds skittered at his senses. Rabbits scattered at his approach. The first squad he glimpsed wouldn’t look his way. They fled through the canopy, flitting from branch to branch, as though not looking at him meant he wasn’t real. Sukuna followed close behind on the high treetops, where their footfalls barely registered. He was curious to see if any of them had teeth. None did. 

Flee on sight indeed.

He moved. The world blurred. Branches swayed in the wake of his passing. By the time the squad of Konoha shinobi landed atop another tree, he was already ahead. He stood in the air. Grinning.

The leader—the one who’d gestured to the others earlier—opened his mouth. His jaw split sideways before he could speak again, and blood sprayed, bright in the morning light. The man immediately behind him, a chubby fellow, gasped when his torso was torn apart like paper. The last of the four froze.

Sukuna narrowed his eyes. “Run or fight,” he said softly. “Come on. Make it interesting.”

They chose the former. They didn’t get far. The next squad he found, several miles north, smelled of steel and ink. Great scrolls hung from two of their backs. Their grips held drawn katana and kunai for dear life. Sukuna carved the trees in front of and around them. A sweep of his hand sent trunks as wide as temple pillars roaring to the ground. The forest groaned under the force of his Dismantles. The shinobi lost their footing and crashed into a small, grassy clearing.

The first to land barked a clipped order to move. But when his head turned over his shoulder, his eyes met Sukuna’s—who’d already landed among them. He was brave, at least. His sword arm swung—but the blade was severed at the hilt. The arm came apart at the shoulder next. The scream that followed was cut short as his head rolled off the bleeding stump.

The others launched a three‑pronged assault: one high, one low, one from behind. Sukuna hummed as he watched. The high one spat fire from his lips, setting his twin swords aflame. The low one smashed her palms against the dirt, collapsing the ground beneath Sukuna’s feet. The last unfurled a great scroll from his back and launched dozens of bladed weapons toward Sukuna.

The high one split open mid‑air; his ribs peeled like wet paper. He hit the ground and screamed as his own fiery swords lit him up too. The low one stared at her comrade and then at Sukuna, who was stepping on what looked like mid‑air. Before her shattered instincts reacted, her arms were gone. She collapsed, rolling on the cracked ground in bloody stumps.

The last shinobi watched his myriad weapons dissolve mid‑air into dozens of tiny pieces. Sukuna glanced sideways. A clean seam opened in the man’s chest from crown to ground, the two halves hitting the dirt still pumping ichor. The clearing reeked of iron. The crows would come for them later. They can have them, Sukuna thought, stepping on the survivor’s neck to silence her screeching.

“If I wanted sport, I’d go fishing. Where’s the real meat?” 

As the morning slaughter continued, a few interesting scuffles came his way. One woman had red eyes that seemed to track his movements well. Her head came off instantly when he put a little force and speed behind the punch. Another opponent grew to giant size and actually swatted Sukuna through treetops like a fly—but he was slow, and left a pool-sized mess in his wake. By the time he’d eliminated the twentieth squad, Sukuna was starting to feel bored. All rabbits. Not a single wolf among them.

He thought, as the final member of the twenty-first group collapsed to his knees before him. Tears of helpless despair streaked down his face. He didn’t even have energy to beg for his useless life.

Kirigakure at least put up something of a fight , he reflected. This is pathetic.

Sukuna scratched the back of his head, lips twisted in thought, ignoring the pathetic survivor before him.

I was going to take my time getting to Konoha. Now, I suppose I’ll have to rush over there for something interesting to—

“You’re not killing another one of my comrades!”

An explosion-like roar erupted from Sukuna’s left. The ground shook violently, dirt blasted above the treeline, and something green rocketed toward him. Sukuna was so surprised that he didn’t immediately retaliate when a heel drove into his face and sent him flying over three hundred feet. It didn’t hurt—but the display of backbone brought a laugh to his lips.

Sukuna spun mid‑air and landed into a crouch. The green man hurtled after him with greater speed. Sukuna caught one, two, then three punches in his palms. He retaliated with a left hook. His opponent ducked under and went for an uppercut. Sukuna let the fist land on his chin, grinned, and headbutted the shinobi with such force he flew twenty feet back.

He was a strange figure, and an ugly one too with a green jumpsuit, bowl cut, and caterpillar thick eyebrows. Blood dribbled from his busted lip, half-covered by a ridiculous square mustache. 

“Looks like there’s a wolf in your midst after all,” Sukuna chuckled, cracking his neck. “And just as I started thinking your kind were only good at screaming bloody murder.”

“The only screams that’ll be heard from now on are yours!” The shinobi clenched his fist, a fiery glint in his eye. “For the sake of my fallen comrades, and the ones who must escape—I’ll take you on here, Sukuna!”

“Go right ahead, thick‑brows,” Sukuna gestured to him forward. “Show me your Konoha shinobi aren’t completely worthless!”

Thick‑brows shifted into a strange but steady stance: arms crossing in an X before his face. No hesitation. No fear. His eyes burned across the clearing at Sukuna. He has spirit, Sukuna thought. Then the shinobi’s skin rippled and turned orange. A green haze bled from his pores; steam rolled off his body. His body temperature soared, and his black eyes became blank white.

Sukuna’s grin widened. No one had done anything like this to him so far. You’ve piqued my interest, odd shinobi. Show me it’s not for nothing!

The first blows came fast, a jab, hook, low kick. Each heavy enough to send booming shockwaves across the forest. Sukuna blocked with his forearms and elbows, teeth flashing. No elegance here. Every strike was aimed to maximize pain. To bludgeon.

Sukuna enjoyed it, the sensation of exertion after so long. 

“Good,” he said. Thick‑brows ducked under a slash—sandals scraping—and twisted under the cut. A knee smashed into Sukuna’s ribs, but he caught it on his arm, laughing. 

“Very good!” he said.

Thick‑brows didn’t reply. The green haze thickened; veins bulged, skin glistened with sweat. Sukuna thought he heard muscles groan.

The next blows came harder. Sukuna parried, blocked, slipped between attacks that landed with greater force and speed. A heel kick cracked the trunk behind him in half. Thick‑brows’ next punch landed on Sukuna’s jaw—a flash of pain shot from his cut mouth. Sukuna laughed through it, tongue flicking across the blood on his lips. “Better.”

“I’m not done yet!” Thick‑brows roared, and the haze guttered before reigniting, brighter than before. The heat seared nearby bark; the grass burned beneath his feet. “The Fifth Gate— Gate of Limit… OPEN!”

A crack split the air. Thick‑brows blurred and struck again. Sukuna was too slow, he failed to block the kick to his chin. The force propelled him dozens of feet upward. He grabbed onto the air, spun, and turned to face his opponent. Thick‑brows didn’t hesitate, he used the momentum to launch himself across the sky. Sukuna shifted mid‑air, and they clashed in a trade of blows, breaking apart, missing, reorienting, renewing across the sky. 

Sukuna’s face lit up with joy. Thick‑brows remained relentless despite the many cuts adding up across his entire body. 

“Yes!”

Thick‑brows jumped down, spun mid‑air, and brought the heel of his boot to the crown of Sukuna’s head. Sukuna flew downward, leaving a crater thirty feet across. Before he could dislodge himself, the shinobi rushed after him. Blood trickled down Sukuna’s face—but win or lose, he knew something interesting was happening. So he lay back and let it. 

Go on, show me what else you can do!

“The Sixth Gate!” Thick‑brows shouted. “Gate of View… Urgh… OPEN!”

The roar of air incinerated all nearby leaves. Sukuna’s mouth and skin went dry. The green haze flared into white‑blue fire. Flames burst from Thick‑brows’ fists. Bulging veins popped; the air groaned under his speed. 

“Midnight… PEACOCK!!”

The burning punches rained—dozens, hundreds, thousands—each faster, each more scalding than the last, striking Sukuna’s eyes, ribs, cutting and burning skin. Until finally, at the ten‑thousandth blow, Thick‑brows poured every ounce of force, tearing through Sukuna’s right arm muscles, and delivered the crescendo. Sukuna plummeted through the ground for hundreds of feet. A pillar of fire engulfed the burrow and likely shot skyward.

Above, Sukuna heard birds cry, trees aflame, bark crack, rocks split. But loudest of all he heard his own laugh. And he laughed long and hard. His Reverse‑Cursed Technique fixed the damage swiftly. He vaulted out of the pit and surveyed the annihilation around him with appreciative eyes. 

“Finally, someone worth the bruises.” Hands on his hips, he scanned the crater—Thick‑brows lay twenty feet away, leaning against a half‑melted rock. Breath ragged, sweat and blood dropping down his entire body.

Sukuna approached slowly, a smile splitting his face. “Not bad. Not bad at all,” he admitted. His shadow formed a pool beneath, the hilt of the Executioner’s Sword rising from it. “Out of the thousands of shinobi I’ve killed, you are one of the most impressive ones so far! All that power, and with no chakra behind it! Nothing but pure physical prowess!” 

“Save your praise,” Thick‑brows rasped. “I did it to save my comrades. You… won’t kill anymore of them.”

“Oh, I definitely shall,” Sukuna said, drawing the blade in a flourish. “But you’ve bought them some reprieve. Tell me… what’s your name?”

“…Dai…” Thick‑brows said. Somehow, he rose to his feet and adopted a sloppier stance. His shoulders sagged, right arm useless—but the fire in his eyes remained.

“My name is Might Dai, the Eternal Genin of Konoha!”

Sukuna stared, then burst into laughter, the Executioner’s Blade resting on his right shoulder. “What fools! They’re not good enough to lick your sandals, yet they condemn you to mere Genin status? Foolishness.”

“Don’t speak of them that way!” Dai shouted and took a shaky step forward. “They are my fellow shinobi! No one speaks ill of them!”

“Such loyalty to those who scorn you as a loser,” Sukuna shrugged. “Well… if those are your dying words, I won’t deny them!”

He swung but the strike never landed. A clang split the air, iron against something much more durable. A black staff intercepted the blow, telescoping out, shoving Sukuna back three paces without touching the wielder behind it.

From the crater’s edge, a figure emerged: brown hair tinged with gray, clad in black battle armor. A cold, focused eye met Sukuna’s as the new arrival stepped in front of Dai.

“You’ve done well, my friend,” the man said, not turning. “I promise, Konoha will not forget your bravery today.”

“L‑Lord Hokage!” Dai stammered, and more shinobi appeared beside him. They nodded to the Hokage, grabbed Dai, and leapt away from the crater. “W-Wait, I can still fight, I can still-”

Sukuna let them go, barely noticing Dai’s protests to stay and fight. He grinned at the lone man across from him.

“At last,” he said softly. “The Third Hokage.”

Sarutobi’s gaze hardened into a thin line. The desire to kill radiated off him—and Sukuna welcomed the sensation.

“Sukuna,” Sarutobi said quietly. “You’ve killed and maimed a great many of my people today.” His grip on the staff tightened. “Their deaths won’t go unanswered.”

Sukuna tilted his head, delighted. “By all means Lord Third, I’m right here!” 

He leapt forward, the Third Hokage mirrored him with exactly the same speed and power. When their blades met, and the entire forest shuddered in fear of the fight to come, Sukuna knew he wasn’t going to be bored again today. 

Chapter Text

Enma rang like a struck bell as adamantine met butcher's steel. The Executioner's Blade smashed across the staff's length. Hiruzen felt the weight of it in his wrists. A cleaver with a thick spine, deliberately misbalanced to throw off a victim's sense of its proportions.

He shifted his stance. Enma lengthened a handspan without a word. Sukuna's smile widened, his four red eyes shined as he blurred forward.

The next cut came diagonal, shoulder to hip. Enma met it square, skimming low to bleed its force into the ground. Hiruzen stepped into the arc, forced the blade aside and rammed his shoulder into Sukuna's sternum. The cleaver carved dirt and grass as it slid against the ground for fifteen paces.

Sukuna laughed the effort off then charged again. The wheel he'd summoned hovered overhead. Unmoving, for now.

Time to test if Jiraiya and Lady Shima were right.

Hiruzen readied himself for the next blow. He pivoted out, toes finding purchase in the ground, the staff ready for the next beat. Butcher steel roared across the clearing. The sword's broad face cut the air with its swing, the force launching discarded leaves and pebbles into the air behind it. Hiruzen hopped to a scorched tree stump jutting out of the crater. Enma snapped long to parry the upstrike, then contracted into his hands so it could plant the ferrule under Sukuna's wrist and lift, fouling the monster's grip.

Sukuna let the blade spin in midair. Then, planting his foot on the air itself, he caught the hilt mid-spin and launched forward in a flash of steel.Enma rang again; Hiruzen let the impact roll down his hips and spine. He slid off the rapidly collapsing tree and ran into the undergrowth.

The monster lunged after him, the cleaver hacking a bloody path through ferns and saplings. Sukuna attempted to cut off Hiruzen's brief retreat by leaping in and out of shadows. Hiruzen ducked, leaped aside and avoided each blow, whether it was a punch, kick or a cleaver blade thrown from one shade to another.

Soon enough, they reached an undisturbed streambed. Hiruzen went across in three light skips, sandals barely touching its crystalline surface. Sukuna chased after him like a thrown boulder. Hiruzen smashed Enma into the water, shooting a geyser into the air. Sukuna sliced it in too, and was rewarded by Enma's shaft cracking low into his shin.

The monster shoved through it, he was too tough to trip cleanly, but it bought Hiruzen half a moment. He filled it with pain. More jabs followed: butt-end into the diaphragm followed by a swift smack across the face that snapped Sukuna's head sideways.

Sukuna laughed it off, and spat a droplet of blood instead.

"Not a bad warm-up, Lord Third," He cackled. "But this big stick can't be all you've got, right?!"

Hiruzen ignored the taunt, his eyes flashed to the wheel instead. There was no reaction from it to Sukuna being struck by adamantine. I must be certain. There's enough unknown about this creature for me to take needless risks.

The Executioner's Blade came for him again. Hiruzen vaulted from the streambed and landed on the back of it as it hit. Enma slammed down on Sukuna's face, then on the spine near the handle. The leverage locked Sukuna's wrist for a breath, Hiruzen drove the staff's tip toward the elbow joint until a satisfying crack was heard.

Sukuna abandoned the grip entirely, hand opening, letting the sword's own weight drop the break the lock. Then, his wounded arm snapped again, caught the handle as it fell, and with an unnatural twisting and forceful upward force, heaved the Executioner's Blade up in a backhand that would've cleaved a man in two.

Hiruzen leapt upward, and found himself caught in an exchange of strikes that cracked the air with their speed, every hit echoing like a wardrum in the sky. Sukuna used the air as footing, and darted around Hiruzen to not only cut him down, but to use the force of his blows to keep him airborn as long as possible where he held the advantage.

He hadn't managed to land a cut, yet. But Hiruzen heard the blade whistle uncomfortably close to his air, felt the tip of it graze along the fabric of his suit. He couldn't afford to stay up there for much longer.

No slashes. Hiruzen noted, weaving handsigns as he and Enma pivoted in every possible direction to intercept the blows. He was able to cut Dai almost to pieces before, but he won't do it to me now despite the slashes' incredible speed and range. It must be that wheel. Could the summoning of that creature take up too much of his strange power to use any other technique?

Hiruzen concluded his handsigns and waited until Sukuna's grinning face was in-front of him. His lungs and mouth puffed up, and he allowed himself a small smirk at Sukuna's anticipatory gleam.

Wind Style: Air Bullets!

He aimed the concentrated bullet of air just past Sukuna. The force of the projectile, without any chakra moulding from Hiruzen to negate the inertia, propelled him back then down with incredible speed. Hiruzen watched Sukuna's upper left eye twitch, and smile falter as his feet found mud.

The wheel didn't turn. Jiraiya had judged its speed during his battle with this creature, and its allotted time had passed. Taijutsu and adamantine are safe to use, for the time being. Excellent, my next move might just finish this farce.

"You're very stingy, Lord Third," Sukuna landed twenty paces ahead of him, his legs buried to ankle depth in the stream. "Too scared of Mahoraga to use any of your techniques against me?"

Hiruzen didn't flinch. "Too frightened to face me without that creature ready to save you?"

Sukuna laughed, low and amused. He twirled the Executioner's Blade like a pen between fingers. "Let me be clear: Mahoraga is far from the worst thing I can throw at you. Bore me, and I'll be happy to show you what is!"

The monster charged forward with greater speed, Hiruzen jumped out of the way. The Executioner's Blade cleaved through seven tree trunks in a broad sweep. Leaves showered down, the air shook from the force.

Hiruzen landed atop a mossy stone, Enma braced in both hands. Sukuna pursued. Every swing was stronger than the last. Each block sent a powerful jolt shaking Hiruzen's arms and up and down his spine. He yielded ground in tight, controlled backflips. More trees fell, leaves rain down on them by the thousands.

Sukuna didn't notice the surprise waiting for him or didn't care. Either suited Hiruzen just fine.

Now!

Two of the many leaves changed into large puffs of smoke, and transformed back into their true shapes: copies of himself. Two more rushed out from the undergrowth, masquerading themselves as bushes. All four clones wielded kunai enhanced with the glow of chakra running through them.

His shadow clones wasted no time in rushing toward Sukuna. The monster took a quick glance at them all with his many eyes, and his grin sharpened.

You won't be smiling for much longer.

The first clone vaulted in high, heel whipping toward Sukuna's face. Sukuna tilted his head, catching the strike on his shoulder, then whipped the Executioner's Blade in a short arc to bisect him. The kunai, reinforced with chakra, withstood the blow even as the clone was tossed thirty paces back.

The second clone slid under the retaliatory cut, kunai flashing, carving for Sukuna's knees. He hopped back, grin wide, and kicked the clone square in the chest, sending him skidding through a leaf litter.

The third and fourth clones pressed their attack together, one high, the other low. Sukuna laughed and spun the cleaver in a wide, whirlwind arc around himself, pushing both clones back.

Hiruzen joined in just as the motion neared its end, sweeping Enma in a blur. Sukuna saw him coming, slipped aside, sword ringing sparks off the staff as the weapons met. The clones swarmed, two circling behind him, the others flanking in a perfect, synchronised movement.

Sukuna cackled again. "Better, but still not good enough!"

The first clone darted in with a thrust. Sukuna slapped the blade aside with the handle, then drove it into the clone's gut and hurled him into the dirt. The last thing the clone saw was Sukuna's foot stop into, then through its head before it vanished in a smoke puff.

The others didn't flinch. Another pressed high, jabbing at Sukuna's eyes with clinical precision, taking care to deactivate the chakra enhancement lest Mahoraga react to its presence. Sukuna caught the knife between his teeth, then with a sudden jerk of his head tossed the clone to the ground. Enma shot outward and deflected the spat kunai out of the air. The staff jabbed again for his throat. Sukuna swayed back, flashing that damnable smile of his again.

For several minutes more, the forest rang with their footfalls and the scrape of weapons, the falling of trees, the shockwaves of their strikes. Sukuna licked his lip, blood streaked from a blow courtesy of Enma. Hiruzen and his three clones stalked him in a circle, muscles tense, stances shifting.

They all halted for an instant, then renewed the fight.

Hiruzen took charge, weaving handsigns as he spun Enma between his fingers and clashed with Sukuna's Executioner's Blade again.

Chakra roared into his chest, hot and dangerous. He cheeks puffed again, Sukuna tensed, his full attention on the jutsu. Fire Style: Ash Pile Burning!

Hiruzen belched the choking cloud of gunpowder right into the monster's face. The cloud rolled across the clearing in an instant, filling the gaps between the trees. It hung heavy, glittering faintly of particles ready to burst into fire. Hiruzen could've done so easily with a spark, he had no intention of giving Mahoraga anything. The cloud was enough.

From the cloud, Sukuna called out to him. "Finally, something interesting out of you!"

Hiruzen grunted in-response then broke the weapon lock as his clones charged into the smoke cloud. He saw them battle Sukuna clearly. At the moment the Executioner's Blade swung and cleaved the undetonated gunpowder cloud, Hiruzen grabbed Enma with both hands and hurled him forward. He raced through the air, just a heavy staff, nothing more.

"Now!" Hiruzen shouted. "Adamantine Prison!"

The staff elongated mid-air, lattice after lattice snapping outward in an instant. Bars of black adamantine webbed together, forming a fifteen feet long and tall cage that slammed around Sukuna and the three clones.

The Executioner's Blade jarred against the adamantine. The bars were closed too tight, the cleaver's broad width wedging between them. Sukuna, denied the demonstration of the fireball jutsu, grunted. He yanked once, twice. The blade shrieked but refused to be unbudged. Too wide and the angle it was caught in too troublesome to bother with.

He released the hilt and turned his attention to the clones. He's not smiling now. Hiruzen noted with some satisfaction as he observed from afar.

"Clever little trick," Sukuna said. "But it won't hold me."

The shadow beneath his feet stretched out into a pool again, ready to let him escape. That was when the first of many flash bombs tied around the underside of the cage went off.

A shriek of white light filled it and the surrounding area in a blinding, ongoing flash. The shadow pool beneath him vanished. Sukuna grunted again, most of his eyes closing before the display. The wheel of Mahoraga hung dead above him. And Hiruzen's clones moved in.

One slammed into him with the weight of a brawler, fist hammering, shoulders driving, head low. Every strike was simple, brutal, the kind meant to crack bones in two. The may not have done that much damage, but Hiruze noted the many bruises mounting across Sukuna's exposed skin.

Another clawed at him with nails and teeth. Movements feral, fast and twisting. An approximation of the Inuzuka's clans fighting style of wild spins, slashing arcs, feet and hands cutting like claws and knives. He tore bloody lines across Sukuna's shoulders, snapped his head back with a clawed uppercut.

The third was pure precision. Two fingers jabs aimed at nerve clusters, pressure points. Nothing close to the devastating effect of a true Hyuga clansman, but good enough. A jab at the left armpit momentarily stole strength from Sukuna's arm, leaving him vulnerable to a strong left hook. Another to the side of his neck numbed his jaw, and cost him two teeth.

All the while, flash bombs kept going off, denying Sukuna the ability to have a shadow at all. Much less use to escape or summon anything.

Any other person would've been beaten dead by a tactic like that. Hiruzen had done it enough times to know. But Sukuna wasn't so easy.

Just as Jiraiya said. He watched cuts open then close, bones snap into place, even the lost teeth grew back. High speed regeneration on the level of jinchuriki.

"I'll admit it!" Sukuna shouted right as the bruiser clone slammed into his back. "This is a neat little trick, Lord Hokage!"

A feral claw raked his cheek open again. A jab to his solar plexus made his chest seize. The monster started to laugh again. Another flash bomb went off, the shadows beneath vanished, Mahoraga's wheel stayed still.

Before long, it vanished.

Hiruzen's eyes widened. The jabbing clone made a strike to gouge one of Sukuna's eyes out. Sukuna caught him at the wrist and gave a predatory smile. Lines appeared along the clone's arm, chest and face, then it shrieked in horrible agony as it was sliced to pieces before vanishing in a puff.

The remaining clones back off, Hiruzen tensed amidst the trees, his hands already weaving new signs.

Sukuna spread his arms out, and hundreds of omnidirectional slashes ripped out of him, a storm of highspeed, devastating blades that tore into the cage with overwhelming numbers. The cage groaned in the face of the onslaught, adamantine creaking against the high speed projectiles Hiruzen was able to discern, just well enough. Enma kept silent, not even allowing himself a grunt of pain. The remaining clones shouted in pain as they were carved into.

Soon enough, the cage shattered into many puffs of smoke, leaving only the original Enma. Sukuna stood amidst the smoke, chest heaving, remaining wounds closing. The Executioner's Blade clanged against the ground beside him, freed from the prison.

Sukuna opened his mouth to laugh, and then Hiruzen's clones exploded in his face.

Each one went off like a demolition charge. Their very chakra forms themselves ruptured at the moment of their destruction.

Flames and pressure hammered Sukuna from all sides. Burns blackened his chest, his skin peeled in red strips running down his arms. His grin slipped again, teeth barred as the force of the detonations sent him stumbling to the side.

More clones went after him at once. The wheel's gone. I can't let him summon it again!
The first launched himself at the monster. Sukuna ducked underneath his left hook and drove his knee into the clone's gut. Before it vanished, it headbutted Sukuna's throat, brutal and direct.

The second drove low with a kunai. Sukuna spat blood and spit from his bruised throat and met it head on. Thousands of tiny slashes circled around Sukuna's hand as he swung and cleaved the knife in two. His follow-up slash tore the clone in two, smoke bursting around him.

More clones pressed in, relentless. Two struck together, one feinting with a wide slash, the other spinning in a Inuzuka clan motion. Sukuna parried the first with his tiny slashes, grinned when the second raked him across the face, leaving bloody gouge marks along his left cheekbones. He threw his head back and laughed, his eyes shining red and bright.

Enjoy the fun while it lasts. Hiruzen sprinted low, weaving between trunks, heart hammering steady. The clones kept Sukuna occupied as he waited for the opening, the jutsu pulsed along the palm of his hand.

He watched the onslaught of clones against Sukuna. No wheel, slashes firing. Hiruzen noted the way Enma twitched and rolled himself closer to the skirmish. Time to join the fray.

Hiruzen's sandals tore divots of dirt as he surged forward out of the treeline. Sukuna, having dispatched another with a bisecting slash, pivoted to face him, teeth bared and eyes mad with anticipation.

And then Enma shifted.

The staff shot up on its own and spun like an adamantine wheel. Sukuna sidestepped it at the last moment, and tried to grab it. Enma swatted it aside, and from the staff, his natural right arm shot out and uppercutted Sukuna with such force the very ground quivered in the aftermath.

The clones jumped in, two each grabbing hold of Sukuna's arms, the last one sent jabs in his pressure points along the back. Hiruzen moved in a blur forward, his eyes and Sukuna's meeting in the crucial moments before the blow landed.

Chakra coalesced hot and heavy in his right palm. The spiral there flared. Hiruzen jammed his hand outward right into the pits of Sukuna's gut.

Sukuna froze, then shuddered as the spiral spread from Hiruzen's palm, Uzumaki clan symbols crawling outward like burning chains. They wrapped around his torso, glowing, pulsing, biting into the foul energy therein.Hiruzen completed the even numbered seal with a twist of his fingers, adding an odd numbered, five pronged seal on-top of it.

Sukuna's crimson eyes widened, then narrowed into slits.

With a pained grunt, then shout, his whole body tensed and his arms shot out, forcing the clones back. Sukuna made a grab for Enma who retreated fully into his staff form and allowed one of the clones to take him away.

Hiruzen, Enma and the five clones observed as he hissed in pain, his breathing labored for the first time since the fight began. Hiruzen kept his own breath under control. He'd lost quite a bit of chakra.

"You…" He gasped. "How did you…"

"Lady Shima, the wife of the sage you murdered, perceived that the source of your energy came from your stomach. I wasn't certain the seal would affect it, it not being chakra," Hiruzen accepted the Enma tossed over to him by a clone. "But it seems to have been worth it."

An Uzumaki clan seal was a powerful thing on its own. True masters were able to create ones of multiple effects at once. Hiruzen didn't number among them. But he counted on the odd-even imbalance closing Sukuna from a great deal of his power, and wreaking havoc on his ability to use what was left.

Sukuna tilted his head, eyes narrowed. For a moment, he was silent, save for the rasp of breath. Then he smiled, a mean, treacherous one that was far more viscous than any so far.

"Ah, the foolishness of youth," He said in a low voice. "I'll be sure to disabuse you of it in a few moments when I peel your skin off!"

A bloodthirsty aura surged from Sukuna, the air grew thick, heavy and suffocating. The ground beneath him cracked. Hiruzen swore he could smell and taste blood.

Sukuna didn't summon the wheel but made a handsign of his own. Middle and ring fingers erect, index and pinky fingers bent and touching each other. The sign of Enma.

Hiruzen and the clones charged forward without another moment's hesitation. Sukuna smiled and said: "Domain Expansion: Malevolent Shrine!"

The whole world warped red before Hiruzen's very eyes. A building rose and formed just behind Sukuna. A grotesque insult to a holy shrine. A monstrosity of rotted wood, cracked tiles decorated with the bones of hundreds of men and beasts. All surrounding four entrances carved into terrible, gapping maws.

Hiruzen didn't need to understand the intricacies of this technique, this Domain expansion to know what it meant. He'd been fighting since he was a boy. He'd learned before he could shave what it meant to feel death, and the struggle a shinobi had to undertake to face it.

And in those terrible instants that seemed to last for hours as he rushed forward, Hiruzen's every warrior instinct told him it was useless. He couldn't reach Sukuna, he wouldn't even be able to reverse summon himself away to the surveillance corp observing the fight from safety. He was a dead man the second that shrine appeared. He was already dead, and he didn't even know it.

Forgive me, Asuma. He thought, anticipating the slashes to come at any moment. I've let you and everyone else down.

The aura intensified, the end was close.

But it never came. Instead of slashes, the forming shrine cracked. It started as a small fissure on the shrine's facade. Then it spread like a spiderweb along the exterior. The gaping mouths groaned as they collapsed, their teeth crumbling. Bones bent then cracked. Finally, the entire shrine exploded into a heap of rock, bone and rotted wood.

Sukuna stood with his hands in the sign, his face marked by surprise, then irritation as he glanced back at the building disappearing behind him.

The overwhelming aura vanished, the red hue retreated, even the shrine's ruins disappeared as if they'd never been there.
"It worked," Enma said, his iron voice low, almost weary. A rare sigh of relief came from his transformed lips. "The seal stopped… whatever the hell he was about to do."

"Yes," Hiruzen answered, chest rising with a heavy breath. A monumental weight lifted from his shoulders. "But knowing this creature, that won't be the last surprise."

Sukuna's eyes slid down to the seal etched into his torso. His lower pair lingered on the spirals glowing faint against his skin. For a moment, his face was unreadable. Then his grin returned—not the vicious leer that promised slaughter, but something quieter. Almost… appreciative.

Hiruzen suppressed a shiver and hardened his glare.

"I'll admit it," Sukuna said, voice rasping with something that almost sounded like respect. "You got me good, Professor. In a thousand years, only one other man has ever destroyed my Domain Expansion like that."

A thousand years? The words rattled in Hiruzen's mind but he put them aside. He raised Enma again, his clones forming a circle around the monster. "That seal's just the beginning."

Sukuna tilted his head back in a hearty laugh. "Good, I can't wait to see what else you've prepared for me!"

The shadows bled from beneath his feet, spreading across the ground in a gargantuan pool. The wheel of Mahoraga didn't return. Instead, the shadow bent, twisted and came alive.

From the void rose the bulk of a towering elephant, easily four stories tall with hollowed eyes and great tusks curling like sabers. Its trumpeting shook the canopy like nothing else that day. From the sides of its skull sprouted deer-like antlers, glowing faintly. From its back, great leathery wings unfurled, with each beat, the shook apart the treeline and crackled with lighting along their length.

Finally, its tail bent to face Hiruzen, revealing a massive, slithering serpent with black slamming scales and eyes burning with a cruel intelligence. Its jaws opened in a hissed and snapped at the air thunderously.

Hiruzen watched the towering beast with cold, murderous eyes. Sukuna laughed, and he was sorely tempted to wipe that smirk off his face more than ever.

"Max Elephant Totality: Chimera Beast Shura," Sukuna declared. "Incinerate him."

The abomination bellowed, a discordant troar of trumpets, thunder and hisses. Lightning flared from its wings in a blue flash that incinerated everything in its path.

Hiruzen only had a heartbeat to brace himself before it reached him.

Chapter Text

Hiruzen lay half-buried under a pile of broken branches, his chest rose in ragged breaths, smoke curled from the scorched ground all around. Every blink sent a sharp sting down his cheekbones. He smelled of char, the plates of his helmet blackened and edges warped where the lightning had struck it.

The forest was obliterated. A dense canopy was a sprawl of splintered trunks and open sky choked by thick smoke pillars. Fires cracked here and there, some small, others tall enough to swallow a man whole. His clones were nowhere in sight.
.
It separates me from most of my support but isn't pressing down on me. Sukuna wants me all to himself.

He pushed to his knees, leaning on Enma's staff form, his ribs aching as if they'd been rattled loose. Hiruzen steadied his breathing. The burns were superficial but stung with every movement. His vision flickered at the edges. It took a moment to shut all the sensations out and refocus himself.

A shadow shifted to his immediate left. A branch snapped in two, Hiruzen moved. The Executioner's Blade whistled past his face by inches. Sukuna followed, his cackling voice booming across the ruined grove.

"Just us now, Professor!"

He blurred forward, blade whistling again.

Hiruzen braced Enma crosswise. The cleaver crashed down, sparks shrieking as adamantine and steel locked. The impact rang his arms, but lighter than before.

Hiruzen's eyes narrowed. He pivoted, sliding the cleaver aside, then jabbed the butt of the staff into Sukuna's chest. The blow landed solid, a rib cracked. The monster staggered half a step, his lower right eye twitched as he skidded back.

The seals are working. He saw my blow coming but couldn't react in time. There's less weight behind his strikes too…

Sukuna came again, sword dragging sparks across the blasted ground, carving trench through mud. Hiruzen met every blow with a rhythmic ease. His shoulders rolled with the weight of the impacts, feet twisted accordingly. And his counter attacks landed.

A thrust into the stomach. A sweep across the knees. A smack to the jaw. Not only were the hits landing, but cuts and bruises stayed. The seal managed to disrupt even his ability to regenerate.

Enma swept in a blur, iron shaft cracking against ribs and forehead. Sukuna gave ground for the first time. Hiruzen didn't give him a moment to counter attack or jump into another shadow. Mahoraga's wheel hovered overhead, motionless as ever.

Fine. If you want it so badly, I'll beat you dead instead.

He swept Sukuna off his feet in an arc, then swatted the grinning fiend in the air. Sukuna cackled and threw the Executioner's Blade. The cleaver, several heads taller than Hiruzen himself, spun like a windmill shuriken. Hiruzen braced himself against it, then used its momentum to carry the sword over his head.

Sukuna landed a hundred paces off, kneeling in a crouch. Hiruzen saw the way his shadows shifted into a shape and braced himself for what came next.

No more creatures came at him, Sukuna did. Hiruzen momentarily lost sight of him, and raised Enma on pure instinct. When the monster crashed into him, shoulder first, Hiruzen felt his whole body shake from the impact. He couldn't stop himself from being flung dozens of feet back.

Sukuna charged again, a straight line. The second impact was even stronger than the first, Hiruzen felt Enma rattle in his hands.

"Don't let him dictate the battle, Sarutobi!" Enma said as they flew back once more.

"I don't intend to!" Hiruzen answered and extended the staff downward. It buried itself into the mud, leaving a trench behind as it slowed him down.

Sukuna charged for a third time, vanishing out of sight. Hiruzen braced himself for the impact. But it never came. Sukuna used his sudden burst of speed to leap over Enma and land just behind Hiruzen. The shadows twisted again, and the Executioner's Blade whistled through the air.

Hiruzen ducked, the cleaver scraped the top of his helmet. He spun mid-kneel, Enma already in motion to counter attack. Sukuna's shadow came alive again. A blur shot out from it. Something fast and powerful. Hiruzen only saw the fist a moment before it hit him.

Pain exploded through his ribs. His body lifted from the ground, air torn out of his lungs in a violent gasp of spit and blood. The whole world turned into a blur. Broken trees shattered as he flew past and through them, one after another, splinters exploding against his back. Dozens of them broke before he finally slammed and rolled into the dirt, gouging a crater into it.

He lay there for a moment, gasping, vision blurred, chest on fire. At least two of them were broken.

Hiruzen didn't have time to count, because the monstrosity responsible jumped after him.

Mahoraga, recognizing it at once from Jiraiya's account, stomped where his head was a moment ago. The creature snarled and brandished a sword, swinging it. Hiruzen ducked and rolled in the dirt, avoiding blade, stomps and punches.

Enma extended into the mud and propelled them both to their feet. Mahoraga narrowly missed slicing at the adamantine staff and chased after. The shadow underneath it shifted and Sukuna joined the fray, launching swings, stabs and kicks of its own.

"Thought you'd solve me, Professor?" Sukuna cackled, redoubling his efforts. "There is no solving me. Now, what scheme do you have for getting out of this?"

I'll find a way. Hiruzen's body vibrated with fury and effort. And I promise you'll regret it when I do.

-------

The Chimera Beast shrieked, high, grating and wrong. Its wings snapped open with a thunderous crack. Not enough to let it fly, but enough to unleash powerful wind gusts outward. Lighting laced from their membranes, tearing across the ruined grove. Smoke twisted in the air. The ground buckled under the monster's sheer bulk. Its serpent tail writhed in every direction, smashing stumps into splinters, flinging boulders like dust.

The Hiruzen clone gritted its teeth, trying to get his breathing under control as the monster pursued him and his fellow clones. Shura was forcing them apart from the original Hiruzen.

Another bolt ripped from the Chimera Beast. The clones scattered. The impact scorched and blasted the ground where they'd just stood. Waves of water shot out from Shura's trunk, not fast, but wide and powerful in their force. Trees, earth and rocks were swept away with ease.

"We can't keep running away," One of his fellow clones said, dodging another blast. "We have to destroy this creature before we disappear."

"Agreed, and if we can return some chakra back to the original, all the better for it." The clone began to weave hand signs as its fellow clones moved into position. Divide and destroy, that's the way through this.

Shure roared again, trunk rearing, unleashing another tidal arc of pressurized water. One clone dashed ahead of the others, bounding up a rise of cracked ground. The hill collapsed beneath his feet under the water blast. He rushed upward anyway, chakra shooting down his legs, giving him strength. He launched himself high into the air just before the hill collapsed.

firing another water wave from its trunk. The first clone darted just ahead of it up a small hill. The blast shook then broke it down even as the clone weaved chakra into his soles to shoot across it as fast as he could. Once the hill finally collapsed under him, he leapt into the air, weaved handsigns and turned to face the creature.

"Water Style: Severing Wave!"

A lance of water shot from his lips, thin as a razor, focused tight. It shot across the clearing like a blade. The Chimera Beast tried to retaliate with a water wave of its own but it was too slow. The jet carved across its pink face first, tore a line running down the side of its neck until it settled and sheared its wing off at the base. The clone pushed on, made use of the creature's pain and through two of its front legs at the knees.

The second clone waited just for that.

As Shura staggered, beating its one remaining wing in fury, and toppled forward, crashing into the air. The stumps where it had legs and a wing moments ago bubbled, and threatened to regrow. The clone didn't let it. He slammed his palms into the ground. Chakra roared through his arms, bursting and molding into the soil.

"Earth Style: Bottomless Swamp!"

The ground liquified in an instant. Mud erupted, sucking the beast's bulk, dragging its massive frame until it was more than half buried. Shura struggled, wings beating, lighting and water shooting in every direction. The clone dug his fingers deeper into the ground, forcing the pit to widen, pulling the creature deeper.

The third clone moved next. He formed handsigns as his sandals skidded across scorched dirt, he narrowly avoided being hit by a lighting bolt.

"Wind Style: Raging Gale Wall!"

A tornado vortex burst from his mouth, and spun in a furious column directly at the mud pit. Lightning spat from the Chimera's half beating wings. The gale force scattered it, its wild, massive arcs of electricity snapping into harmless sparks. The wind slices tore across its exposed hide, shearing an antler, carving scales off the sinking serpent head.

The clone braced itself, body tense, every bit of chakra he had poured to maintain the vortex even as his lungs burned and very existence threatened to puff out.

The last clones made their move together.

One stood on the pit's left edge, the other mirrored him on the other side. Their hands moved in a blur, chakra gathering hot in their lungs.

"Fire Style," They roared together through the gale. "Great Flame Technique!"

Twin jets of fire blasted forward, circled the pit, then collided in the center of it. The gale caught the flames and fed them. What followed was an incineration. A flaming tornado exploded upward from the puit, ripped into the sky a mile high, turning the air into a column of fire.

The grove ignited. Trees at the edges of the battlefield caught fire. The sky turned orange. The Chimera beast, caught in the heart of it, roared and thrashed inside the rapidly melting mud pit.

Its hide cracked and peeled. Its trunk burned from the inside and peeled of its face. The serpent tail spasmed, its eyes bursting. The remaining wing burned to ash. Its antlers glowed in a vain attempt to heal the damage. But it was no use, the gale and fire sliced and burned at it relentlessly. Faster than it could regenerate.

The creature's screams became guttural moans and then pathetic whimpers. Its body disintegrated, scales, hide, muscles and finally bone. The clones watched it dissolve into millions of tiny burnt particles until even those were incinerated.

The firestorm roared on, then slowly died along with the gale. Ash fell down on the ground. The mudpit sizzled and cracked from its burnt surface. At the heart of it was a chasm, where Shura was trapped moments ago. There was nothing there anymore, they'd vaporized the Chimera Beast completely.

The wind clone collapsed first and vanished in smoke. The fire pair staggered, bodies shaking until they disappeared too.

Only the water and earth clones stayed. One clutches his knees, panting. The other stood on shaky legs. They both stared at the bubbling crater. They watched it a while longer, and saw nothing alive was coming out of there.

The two Hiruzen's looked at each other and nodded once. Then they dispelled, giving back what chakra they could to the original. They knew he'd need every bit of it.

--------

Sukuna pressed from the front, Executioner's Blade cleaving through the air, dirt and smoke. Mahoraga lumbered from the flank or back. Its fists pounded, its head tail snapped like a snake and cut off any means of retreat. Retreat? Hiruzen barely had room or time to catch his breath.

Every breath became a block, dodge, pivot or roll. Enma rattled in his hands, adamant clanking and shrieking as it caught fists or blades. His sandals skidded across mud. He didn't dare make a single handsign, there was no time. Any second spent doing anything but giving ground would've cost him his head.
Sweat stung his eyes. Blood ran down his arms and legs. Mahoraga's wheel turned once, after its sword struck and bounced off Enma's adamantine hide. But it hadn't turned again, despite the speed in which it did against Jiraiya.

Whatever the reason, I've got to get rid of it before its adaptation finishes.

From the staff side facing toward him, Enma materialized a single eye that glared at Hiruzen. Hiruzen made a momentary eye movement, masked under a flinch and grunting as Mahoraga's sword skid across the left side of his helmet.

It was enough. A lifetime of understanding passed in a moment.

Split them, and break them.

Mahoraga's head tail whipped out, Hiruzen ducked, sandals grinding. He flung the staff up, letting it spin. Enma's adamantine form vanished in a smoke cloud. The real monkey king burst out of it, all muscles and ferocity, glaring at the creature.

With a roar, Enma slammed into Mahoraga, fists pounding the creature's eyeless face, claws digging into its blank maw. When the creature swung to swat him, Enma leapt, flipped and caught its writing tail in both hands. He bellowed and heaved.

Mahoraga's gargantuan body lifted from the dirt, hurled in a wide arc, smashing dozens of paces away from Hiruzen and Sukuna. It crashed with an earthquake force, dirt geysered into the air. Enma pounced, wrapping arms and legs around its chest. His muscles bulged, his back arched and a roar shook the grove.

"Adamantine Prison Wall!"

From the smoke, a smaller version of the earlier lattice box appeared. Black wedges of adamantine erupted, snapping tight around Mahoraga's limbs and torso. The lattice's locked shut, compressing until even the colossus creature couldn't move an inch. It thrashed and roared on the ground, its wheel spinning once again, but to no immediate effect.

Flash bombs lined the prison's surface. They went off in sequence, drowning out a portion of the grove in a flashing, strobe of white light. Mahoraga's inhuman taunts echoed through the battlefield. It couldn't escape.

Sukuna, shielding half his eyes against the glare, snarled. "That trick again?!" His voice was a mix of irritation and admiration.

"You're about to see a great deal more!" Hiruzen wove dozens of hand signs in the span of a blink. Sukuna's glare turned to a look of surprise. "Wind Style: Vacuum Blast!"

The small bit of air he'd just inhaled, kneaded through chakra, exhaled into a massive, crushing sphere of compressed wind the size of Hiruzen himself. Sukuna's entire body shook and was blasted back against the near point blank strike. Even as he exhaled the sphere, Hiruzen's hands worked more signs.

"Fire Style: Fire Dragon Flame!" The wind sparked into a great fire. Hiruzen watched with a great deal of satisfaction as Sukuna just narrowly leapt out of its way. But the fire chased him.

The stream changed into the shape of a single dragon, then a three-headed one. The bottom head scorched the ground beneath Sukuna, denying him the ability to jump into a shadow. The middle chased him through the air. The third head cut off his retreats.

Now, let's see if my hypothesis of how his shadows technique works is right. Hiruzen wove more signs. He'd used a lot of clones already, he'd have to be careful how many he summoned now in-case this lasted longer. "Shadow Clone Jutsu!"

Two clones puffed into existence by his side. Another flash bomb went off, Mahoraga's wheel spun for a third time. Enma groaned but held on. Just a little longer my friend.

The clones dashed to Mahoraga's thrashing form. Sukuna spotted them and tried to use the sky as footing again to escape the dragons, but they cut him off. With an annoyed grunt, he flung the Executioner's Blade at the clone's backs.

One of them saw it coming, grabbed onto the handle and using the built up momentum tossed it right back at its own.

"Tch!" Sukuna said, and ducked as his own sword almost cut off his escape. One of the dragon heads singed his left calf, the air smelled of burnt flesh. More importantly, it distracted Sukuna from spotting the surprise Hiruzen's clones left along the handle of the sword: dozens of paper bombs.

They detonated at Sukuna's back. The Executioner's Blade shattered into a storm of sparks and shrapnel. Sukuna leapt through the air again as fire washed over him. First degree burns lined the right side of his face, he hacked and coughed as the dragons came for him again.

The two clones reached the thrashing Mahoraga. The wheel turned a fourth time, the adamantine groaned.

"D-Do it," Enma shouted. "I can't… Keep this blasted thing down for much longer!"

"Right!" The clones said in-unison. With a strong heave, they grabbed the prison, bent their backs and legs low. "One… two… three!"

The clones tossed the prison wall and Mahoraga fifty feet into the air. Another flash bomb was drawing to an end. A small shadow formed between the clones. A dot growing bigger the closer Mahoraga fell to the ground.

One of the clones weaved over fifty handsigns. A complex formula of kanji and old symbols formed around his palms. When the shadow got big enough, the clone shouted and smacked his hands against it.

"Contract Seal!" A ring of Uzumaki Clan symbols spread over the shadow in their usual, spiral pattern. The symbols shone white against the shadows' surface, until they spread all around it.

Mahoraga and the cage slammed down onto it, the two clones dashed to the sides. Mahoraga's wheel shone and spun for the fifth time. With a single, powerful roar, it flexed every muscle in its body and plastered apart Enma and the shadow clones he used to form the lattice box.

Hiruzen watched it from the side, worried he'd miscalculated. Then, two things happened that changed everything.

From the south, it looked like a second sun rise was coming from the treetops. Except, Hiruzen recognized it as the handiwork of his clones. A giant pillar of fire that blazed the sky orange and red. Distantly, he heard the death roars of the Chimera Beast Shura.

To his right, Mahoraga was screaming too. The creature swung and flailed its arms, bashing fists into dirt, cutting geysers of rock and grass with its blade. The Uzumaki symbols stayed fix to his shadow wherever it walked.

A crack appeared on its wheel, then another. Soon, the whole monstrosity began to peel and collapse right in-front of their very eyes. I was right. Hiruzen smiled. The shadow is what lets it appear, Sukuna is just the one who calls out to it. With its connection interrupted, it can't stay here.

Mahoraga fell to its knees, the ground shuddering under its weight. Its wheel cracked, once, twice then shattered in midair like broken glass. The creature roared one final time, guttural and primal. Before it unraveled into smoke and dust. It was gone. All the same, Hiruzen didn't let himself relax, not yet.

Sukuna, still leaping between the dragons, swung his arm in Hiruzen's direction. He saw the flashes coming and side stepped accordingly. More slashes came at the dragons, slicing them up too until their forms couldn't be maintained.

Hiruzen smirked, allowing Sukuna that small victory. It's the last you'll get today.

Sukuna landed in the middle of the blasted stumps and splintered trunks that used to be a forest. A wind bellowed from the sea, carrying the smell of sweat, blood and ash. Two of his lower eyes glanced at the clones that moved to flank him, the main pair he kept forward.
Every breath scraped his throat. His ribs pulsed with ache. Sweat dripped freely down his face, but he didn't mind it. It had all been worth it, he'd gambled and it paid off.

Enma leapt to his side, arms crossed over his chest. He couldn't quite keep his ragged breathing under control. "The seal worked, I was dubious it would."

"It's a different type of summoning from us," Hiruzen said, cracking his knuckles, letting some blood circulate into his wrists and legs. "I suspected the shadow was a conduit, giving shape to his creatures. If that was disrupted, perhaps they'd get sent back to wherever they came from."

"And if that hadn't worked?"

"I would've tried to incinerate it in a single blast."

"Of course," Enma chuckled, then stared hard ahead at Sukuna. "Nice to see that runt's smirk gone. How's about we take his head next?"

"That depends entirely on him," Hiruzen said. "Come, let's end this."

Enma obliged, transforming back into the Adamantine staff. Hiruzen noted how it felt heavier, but nothing he couldn't manage. He walked toward Sukuna who kept surveying his surroundings with an unreadable expression. His posture wasn't slack, nor was it taut.

"Your techniques have failed you," Hiruzen pointed Enma at him. "And your injuries mount. Surrender, and I'll make your death quick and painless."

"Oh, I don't doubt you've got the means to make anybody's demise painful," He chuckled, a note of appreciation in his voice. "I had my doubts at the start, but you've earned your reputation, Professor. No one's ever dismantled my Ten Shadows Technique like this. Despite our wildly different sources of power, it seems some overlap exists. Otherwise, your seals wouldn't have been able to affect me this way."

"Enough talk," Enma roared, one eye glaring across the field from the staff. "Choose runt: quick or painful. I know which I'd prefer."

"I'll keep that in mind when I make a pelt out of you, monkey."

Hiruze's knuckles whitened around the staff, his clones drew shuriken and kunai. Sukuna didn't so much as twitch at their movements.

"But don't take my mockery of the stick as an insult, Professor," A grin split his face. "I meant what I said: you were brilliant, one of the strongest men I've ever fought, in this world or mine."

"Cocky little creep," Enma grunted. "Talking as if he's already killed us."

"Most important of all, you've taught me a very important lesson," Sukuna's four eyes glinted, his fingers curled in a slow, steady motion. "That the Ten Shadows have outlived their usefulness to me!"

With barely any movement, Sukuna fired an omnidirectional wave of slashes at them. Hiruzen saw them cut through the air and weaved the staff between his hands. The projectiles struck then bounced off the adamantine, even if Enma himself grunted from pain. One clone dashed away, the spot where he stood exploding into hundreds of tiny pieces. The other cline, armed with chakra enhanced kunai, managed to intercept and block many of them, even as a dozen small cuts bit into his skin.

"I was saving this for someone else," Sukuna declared, cackling like a madman, his hands forming the handsign for his Domain Expansion. "But I'd say you've more than earned being its first victim!"

What the devil is he playing at now? Hiruzen tried to anticipate what it could be from what he'd seen so far. But if Sukuna's words were accurate, this was something else entirely. I can't afford to get trapped in something like his Domain Expansion again. I should keep the Reverse Summoning ready this time.

So he did, moulding chakra into the palm of his hand. His stance low to the ground. Sukuna stayed frozen in his stance, Hiruzen and his clones stood ready to move a counter attack. For the span of three heartbeats, nothing happened. Sukun's main eyes narrowed imperceptibly, out of concentration or frustration it wasn't clear.

Hiruzen watched him closely, for any slashes or shadows. Something cut air. Hiruzen's gaze snapped to the kunai clone. A seam opened across his chest, splitting him from armpit to armpit. The clone barely managed to gasp out a choke before it dissolved into smoke.

"One." Sukuna said, his voice low and predatory.

The second clone moved. Another seam just appeared, running down from his jaw to his hip. He disappeared in an instant.

"How the hell did he fire them so quickly?!" Enma barked, panic cracking through for the first time.

Hiruzen saw the difference, and his blood ran ice cold. His hands already worked to weave the escape jutsu he'd prepared. No arc, no travel, no wind. They're just getting cut down! His palm shot toward the earth. I've got to get out of here or I'm-

"Three."

A fraction of a moment before it landed, pain tore across his back. He vanished from the battlefield in a ripple of smoke and motion of Reverse Summoning.

Chapter Text

Hiruzen coughed hard into the back of his hand. Blood slicked across his knuckles. The gash from shoulder to hip burned. Every breath dragged needless through it.

Two ANBU medics rushed to his side. One's hands glowed green with moulded chakra, stitching his wound, slowing down the bleeding. Another held him up, rummaged through his backpack and began applying bandages and ointments to the gash. They murmured for him to stay still.

Hiruzen tried his best to not flinch or cough. He knew they were worried about him and this sudden turn in the fight.

"Report," He rasped, forcing his voice steady as the bandages wrapped around his chest like a spiderweb. The command was addressed to another ANBU situated at the edge of the cliff. Even through his tanuki mask, Hiruzen felt the piercing gaze of the Byakugan. "The slashes… they weren't thrown. They didn't travel, am I right?"

Tanuki came to Hiruzen's side, knelt and bowed his head. "Yes, my lord. I've watched the entire battle closely, they were different from before. No arc, no ripple through the air-" his voice momentarily faltered. "Even you, my lord. You were fine and then would just… started appearing. Almost the same time as you vanished."

Hiruzen's jaw clenched, his teeth pressed until they hurt. He'd fought all sorts of adversaries, some of which used space-time ninjutsu, but this?
If it wasn't for the seal and him toying with me, I would've been crippled before I even realized what hit me.

Hiruzen let the grim thought stir in his head, it settled into the pit of his stomach like lead.

The ANBU captain, Owl, stepped forward, voice clipped but urgent. "My lord, if this is true, then we must withdraw. If Sukuna can kill just with a look and handsign, engaging him further is suicide."

Hiruzen listened, then shut his eyes as the pinpricks of pain lessened over the gash. He steadied his breath, left anger and fear to the wayside. He retreated into himself, and looked at all that'd occurred with an analytical eye.

The seals are working. His regeneration is dulled. He can't summon those shadow creatures or use that attack called Domain Expansion. He took me by surprise with that space cutting slash, but his propensity for gloating demanded he terrorise me first. Now I've seen it, I've survived it, and I've a few ideas for how to make sure he can't use it again.

He considered the implications of allowing that fiend a week, a day or even an hour to roam to his heart's content. The Land of Fire would live up to its name: homes and families would suffer and burn. By the time he rallied more forces to fight Sukuna, the death toll would be beyond catastrophic. To say nothing of what the other villages would do to them once they learned of Konoha's weakened state.

Hiruzen knew he could die here. One wrong move and he wouldn't even see it coming. Jiraiya had been right and then some.

He weighed all these factors against one another. When his eyes opened, they were firm and his voice iron.

"No. I'm finishing this here."

There was a shift in the air atop the bare cliff five kilometers out from the annihilated grove. The ANBU didn't argue, but their silence was heavy, their hesitation palpable.

"He's on the move again," Trout said, a Yamanaka clan member spying the battlefield through the eyes of a recon bird. "He is closing in on the edge of the grove, it won't be long before I lose him in the treeline."

"Keep an eye on him for as long as you can. You as well Tanuki. I want you to commit every second of the battle to memory. Even the smallest detail may prove crucial."

"Yes, Lord Hokage!" Trout and Tanuki said in unison and returned to their duties.

Hiruzen took a pair of soldier pills from his pouch and swallowed them. They tasted worse than burnt mud, but they'd replenish a good deal of his chakra. In moments, some of the fatigue from the fight vanished, the pain from the gash became just about tolerable.

"Lord Hokage," Owl said again, softened this time. "If you're resolved to fight, at least allow us to-"

"No," Hiruzen cut him off. His voice was calm, almost gentle, but left no room for argument. "He'll kill you all in a blink. I won't have anymore Konoba shinobi die to that creature."

And if anyone else must die to stop him, let it be me. Hiruzen exhaled, allowing himself a few more precious minutes for the medical nins work, and for the soldier pill to reach its full effect.

In those minutes, he allowed himself a luxury he knew he couldn't afford once the battle started again: to let his thoughts wander.

Images of his students came to him first, as they often did in down time. He remembered Tsunade, strong-willed and with a boundless compassion for others. How many lives she had saved thanks to her medical ninjutsu reforms, he couldn't even begin to count.

But not the two who mattered most to her. Hiruzen had failed to give her comfort and guidance in the wake of those deaths. A shame he knew he'd carry forever.

Then there was Orochimaru. His most talented student, a true genius. Another damaged soul he'd hoped to show the Will of Fire too. But he'd taken a different path too, one Hiruzen knew the necessity of but couldn't allow to dictate the way of the village.

Lastly, he remembered Jiraiya as a boy, too brash for his own good and always trailing after Orochimaru. Then Jiraiya as a man, still eager for action but tempered with genuine skill, patience and a rare wisdom. A man of the Will of Fire if there ever was one.

"If I fall, don't try to rescue me. Return to the village, ensure the information we've gathered here today is put to good use."

"Yes sir," Owl nodded with the barest quiver in his voice.

"Jiraiya is to be my successor," Hiruzen continued, voice quiet but firm. He'd left his express wishes on this written down in the village, but he wanted living witnesses to hear them too. "Of all the other shinobi in Konoha, there is no one else I trust more to lead the village."

Hiruzen smiled. Jiraiya would grumble about the position, he would loathe the politics of it, the complete absence of any free time for his own pleasures. But he would do it, and well. He wouldn't shirk the responsibility for a second.

But he then thought of Asuma, and his mouth couldn't quite do it anymore. He won't understand, not for a long time. Hiruzen knew, remembering how badly the ache of his own parents' deaths at a young age ate away at him. He'll hate me for losing, for leaving him without a father, for choosing duty instead of coming back.

Hiruzen felt tears prick at the sides of his eyes. But he is a smart boy, wise and kind too. He'll grow. He'll see why I did it. He'll know it was for his sake.

He exhaled slowly, eyes drifting half-shut to the north-west. The village was far away but Hiruzen saw it clearly. The Hokage Monument rising over Konoha. The laughing, competing children in the academy yard. The smell of dumplings and boiling ramen on the streets. He saw the villagers, going about their lives. The many young shinobi who would inherit the world once he was gone.

In my life I've given them decades of war and tragedy. If I live past today, I hope I can give them more. And if I die, I pray they make something better of this world then I did.

Hiruzen drew one last long breath, let it steady the tremor in his eyes, and pushed back tears. When his eyes opened, it was with a shinobi's resolve honed through decades of experience. Enma's staff vibrated softly in his hand, a way of nodding.

The sky above had turned a dark grey. Fires, smoke and devastation from the fighting had drifted upward and gathered in a dark canopy of clouds. Heat from the burning grove far below churned with the wind, pressing up into the sky. Tall dense clouds gathered at a quickening pace. Thunder rolled far off, carried across the treeline like the growl of a furious Bijuu.
Hiruzen tilted his head skyward, the scent of rain carried by the cliffside winds. A nostalgic smile tugged at his lips. A plan formed in his head. He'd used one like it thirty years before, when he brought down the rampaging Kinkaku.

If it could kill that monster, it'll kill this one just as well.

He drove the staff into the ground and formed the first handsign of the next round.

Sukuna landed amidst bent, old trees several stories tall. Empty berry bushies of many colors surrounded him. The woods were still and quiet, save for the rumble of distant thunder, its denizens had long since fled. One pair of eyes observed his surroundings for any sign of the Professor. The other pair observed the mark ever present on his shadow.

Let's see if this works. Forming the Enma handsign, Sukuna focused his cursed energy into manifesting the World Cutting Slash. Easier said than done with the spiralling seal interfering.

Each attempt to draw out power from his stomach was met with constant, and strong resistance. A tug of war against every bit of his own cursed energy. Every time he gripped it, chunks slipped through like sand. Even now, when he could focus at his leisure, the effect remained persistent and pronounced.

All the same, the World Cutting Slash eventually fired. The ground beneath him split at once, the gash only fifteen inches wide yet well over a hundred feet long. Bushes fell over, a tree groaned and crashed ahead, split in twain.

The seal on his shadow was unharmed.

The World Cutting Slash was his most dangerous technique, devised to bypass Infinity, which it did. Mahoraga had not only used it to sever Gojo's arm, but to cut his omnidirectional Hollow Purple. Cleaved space and imaginary mass crashed into one another, and Sukuna was brought to this world in the aftermath of the clash.

Yet it couldn't cut these seals.

Whoever created this technique is a genius. The seal isn't a simple limiter as jujutsu ones tend to be. This is metaphysically woven into my cursed energy and body. Almost like a one way Binding Vow forced on me.

Sukuna clicked his tongue, fascinated, irritated and impressed all at once. These shinobi and their tricks.

Mahoraga wouldn't have been of any use if he could still summon. It adapted to attacks only when struck itself or if Sukuna bore the burden of adaptation. The Professor forcing him into the Shrine eliminated the possibility of both. And then he disabled the 10 Shadows entirely.

Sukuna watched the lynchpin shinigami thrash and rage when those symbols spread across its shadow. He felt the connection between them, became strained and then… not break, but close enough to it.

Would it answer if he called again? If the shadows ability to serve as the summoning means had weakened, how much energy would have to expend to call it back? Would it just collapse on him like Malevolent Shrine did thanks to his crippled energy efficiency?

"Troublesome Professor, you are very troublesome," Sukuna laughed low in his chest. "No matter, one way or another, I'll rip these shackles off and do as I please, like always."

The ground trembled beneath his feet.

A hairline fracture spread across the dirt five paces ahead of him. Sukuna's four eyes narrowed, the ground exploded, he avoided the uppercut aimed at his jaw by inches.

"There you are," Sukuna smirked and readied to slam his palm to Cleave. Halfway there, the clone was swallowed by a puff of smoke. Instead of striking anything, Sukuna's jab split a log in half, one covered in paper bombs.

The explosion rippled outward, bending trees and flinging leaves across the clearing by the hundreds. Sukuna darted to the side, fire licking at his hand. Two nearby bushes shimmered and shifted into more of the Professor's clones. Each held a katana crackling with lightning.

"Better!" Sukuna covered his hands with dozens of tiny, buzzsaw spinning Dismantle and met their blades.

Sparks shot out, setting some of the grass on fire. Sukuna kicked one clone high enough to slam it into a tree. Its partner dove between them, its sword crashing against the Dismantle's. The clone's mouth swelled, and Sukuna narrowly ducked under a rain of razor thin, water senbon flying toward him.

The senbon clone rushed toward him, striking at Sukuna with staccato burst attacks. The one he'd slammed into the tree leapt over them, knelt as it landed then launched itself at Sukuna's right side.

Sukuna smiled and shot one of his arms at each of them. The slashes cut into them, driving both clones back. But the attack wasn't as effective as it otherwise would have been. The clones withstood the glancing cuts along their makeshift bodies, the brunt of the cuts they managed to intercept with their blades.

Their next counter attack came with the rattle of steel links. The clones' free hands jerked in a sudden motion, and a whole length of chains shot up from the leaf pile Sukuna stood in. The metal glowed with blue chakra, each end wrapped in a tight vice around Sukuna's fore arms. The clones pulled at each arm with all their strength.

Sukuna resisted the effort just enough to keep his arms from being torn off. The brunt of his attention was on his frayed technique output, and the words to give Shrine some of its edge back.

"Dragon scales. Repulsion. Twin falling stars!"

Twin slashes rushed from his finger tips with a speed and force closer to their usual strength. The clones hadn't anticipated the move. Sukuna grinned as they tried to avoid them, only to end up bisected from head to ground and vanish in puffs of smoke.

Sukuna exhaled, slicing his wrists free. "Next."

A sudden wave of heat struck him. The ground to his right stood burned orange, red then burst apart from a blast of fire. A second came from Sukuna's left and a third behind him. Three fiery dragon heads tore through smoke hazed air, incinerating branches and trees, turning the grove into a furnace.

The wind howled with a sudden power from his front. Through a gap in the flames streaming around him, Sukuna caught sight of another clone before his air blast picked up speed.

The wind curved around him. Thirty feet wide, pulling everything in. The fire dragons joined it, coiled and twisted until a burning sphere erupted all around him. A furnace, closing in.

Sukuna grinned as the heat pressed against his skin. The fire wall was twenty feet out, and shrinking fast. Hungry, closing in.

Fine, let's try it this way! Sukuna ran toward the fire wall.

With his Reverse Cursed Technique and reinforcement sloppy, he couldn't brute force through the fire and heal. He'd have to make an exit.

His hands folded into the Enma sign. His mouth worked the chant for his Shrine to give the upcoming slashes as much power and focus as he could. The fiery wall was five feet away. Sukuna stared it down and jumped.

Just before the flames touched him, his World Cutting Slash tore loose. The air shrieked. Fire split in an orange gash carved through red glare. Sukuna dove through it headfirst, tumbled out the far side trailing smoke behind him. Embers sizzled on the hem of his robes. A superficial sting scorched the end of his left ear.

Behind him, the inferno crashed in on itself and detonated. A pyre rising dozens of feet burned in its aftershock, rising smoke plumes into the blackening air overhead. Sukuna barked a laugh at the dying technique.

"Is that all, Professor?! I've had steaming hot meals burn me worse than that!"

The adamantine staff extended through the fire like a guillotine. Flash bombs fell from inside, and Sukuna's eyes burned at their detonation. He moved to the side a hair too late and felt the staff ram into his right shoulder. It cracked, numbing pain shot down the length of the limb. His fingers slipped, breaking the handsign.

The setback was irrelevant, he swiped with his good arm toward the staff. It shifted in mid-air and slapped his hand away before he could Cleave it.

The rattling of chains and the whipping of air from behind caught his attention. A pair of chakra enhanced nunchuks whooshed behind him, and then snapped against his right forearm with a loud crash. The staff wielder struck from the other side, rushing to meet its counterpart.

Sukuna popped the shoulder back into place through raw force rather than his weakened reverse-cursed technique. His left hand hummed from a blur of slashes cutting the air in arcs. Sparks burst as the buzzsaws met the adamantine staff mid-swing. The attacks locked, grinding against each other.

The clones, for they were too slow to be the real Professor, struck at him on each side, intent on keeping his hands as far apart as possible. The sky overhead shook with thunder, rain began to drizzle down on them.

Sukuna ducked under a pair of blows, his left palm struck the ground beneath them. "Spiderweb!"

Lines cracked in a perfect, web-like circle around the three of them. The ground exploded beneath their feet. One staggered back, the other dipped a knee to catch its balance.

Too late! Grinning, Sukuna's leg shot out and kicked back the one wielding the staff. His free hand grabbed hold of the other clone's stomach, and poured a Cleave into its gut.

But the clone didn't burst into a smoke puff or another lag. Sukuna felt it shift against his palm, losing all tangibility. Then he heard it, crackling deep in the bones of his arm. His hand numbed first, the rest of him a breath later. The clone made of electricity locked his body up, igniting his nerves like fusses. Pain raced up Sukuna's spine, his head was on fire.

Sukuna's eyes snapped open, his teeth grit from fighting it back. The rain poured down by then, lightning streaked against the sky. His lower left eye spotted the surviving clone, panting but grinning at him. The monkey had disappeared someplace. Instead, it pointed both its arms upward to the clouds overhead.

The lightning gathered there, directly above Sukuna. Every clap of thunder shook the entire coastline.

D-Damn it!

"Lightning Style!" The clone smirked at him, then swung its arms down until his palms hit the dirt. "Final Flashing Funeral!"

Overhead, all the lightning shrank to a single, blazing point of white and blue, barely the size of a fist. The grove fell silent. Sukuna clenched every ounce of cursed energy he could into strengthening his body.

Everything went white. Time cracked. Sound vanished.

For a moment, Sukuna was gone.

When his senses returned, and his upper right eye snapped open, he found himself in a crater several stories deep and easily over three hundred feet wide. Sukuna laid on his back, besides his eye, he couldn't make anything else budge.

Hair burned. Teeth hung loose. His skin black and split like overcooked meat. His toes melted into each other. Only one of his eyes seemed to work, or be there anymore.

It was without a doubt one of the most devastating attacks he'd ever experienced. Awe-inspiring, overwhelming pain. He would've laughed and praised it, if his mouth hadn't melted shut.

A sudden change came upon the air then. Not hot, not heavy with smoke. It cooled, thin at first then creeping down the crater and up his spine until even the marrow felt brittle. The hairs he had left prickled upright.

What have you got planned now, you cunning fox? Sukuna's injuries hadn't lessened his anticipatory glee in the slightest. Come on, don't keep me in-suspense!

The Professor obliged. He landed in the crater with three of his clones. Their sandals scraped over burnt mud and rocks, eyes locked onto Sukuna's pathetic form. They moved without hesitation, weapons raised, chakra burning bright around their fists and blades.

Sukuna's lone working eye followed them. A grin twitched at the corner of his ruined mouth. He could feel it, their killing intent pressing down on him. Merciless, glorious. They meant to cut and beat him into a bloody pulp.

Simple and to the point. I like it. He chuckled from the depths of his ruined throat. I didn't think this world would force me into using this so soon. But you? You've more than earned to see me, Professor!

Sukuna made the command to continue his incarnation. At once, an overwhelming surge of cursed energy shot out from his temple and travelled through his ruined body. Flesh bubbled, tore then mended itself. Bones cracked, then healed and put themselves into place. Scorched skin split away, new muscles knitted under it. New arms sprang to life, his stomach was allowed to breathe for the first time in a millenia.

Four arms flexed, intercepting every strike the moment they fell. Staff, kunai, fist, all caught and turned aside like children's playthings. His laugh shook the walls of the crater.

With one mighty push he sent all his attackers flying. The Professor and his copies scattered through the sky and crashed back to ground level past the rims of the crater.

Sukuna rose, and in one swift motion leapt from the depths. He landed a heartbeat later, the impact force sent cracks spidering across the ground. Dust rolled out from the spot.

He stood tall, all scars and injuries gone, four arms stretching with ease, flexing muscles that hadn't existed since he first made himself twenty cursed objects. His lower mouth exhaled, slow and pleased. The seal still clung to his gut, but he didn't care. Sukuna's upper grin split with savage joy. His neck cracked left, then right.

"Ahh," Sukuna said, voice low and pleased. "Feels good to be back in my own skin!"

His four red eyes locked onto the Professor. His grin widened as he drank in the abject shock and horror on the Hokage's face.

Chapter Text

"Ahh," The abomination said, voice low and pleased. "Feels good to be back in my own skin!"

Hiruzen's breath caught in his throat. The figure standing outside the crater's rim was no longer the being he'd been fighting. All the damage forced on Sukuna was gone. The previously lean body swelled into a towering muscle mass, three heads tallern than Hiruzen. The second mouth grinned, salivating even as the seal he'd placed there continued to mark its flesh.

Hiruzen's grip on Enma faltered, then tightened again. Sweat stung his eyes. The air pressed down on him, thick with malice. The ground quivered beneath his sandals.

This is his true form. Hiruzen realized, his throat heavy with a lump. Everything I've fought thus far was just a disguise for it.

"You…" He forced the word out, his voice like gravel. "What the devil are you?"

Sukuna paused mid-stretch, his laugh rolled across the blasted landscape. Those four cruel eyes glinted at him.

"Devil is as good a description as any I've gotten."

Hiruzen's jaw clenched, his teeth pressed tightly together. "Enough nonsense! I've fought shinobi and creatures from across the world, even men transformed by the power of Bijuu! You're nothing like any of them! What are you, creature?!"

Sukuna tilted his head, as if pretending to consider. Then he stepped forward, the ground cracked under his heel.

"You'll know soon."

The malevolent power already emanating from him surged. It whipped the air around Sukuna into a storm of dust and ash.

Hiruzen drew a long, steadying breath, kneading his own chakra. The cut across his chest pulsed and pounded, almost coming alive from the sensation of Sukuna's power near it. The staff vibrated faintly, the monkey king's eye glaring up at him with grim resolve.

Three figures moved along the crater's rim, his clones, scattered but alive. Hiruzen gave a quick nod. They'd be on Sukuna in seconds. He just had to survive until then.

The silence stretched. Dust settled in motes between them.

For a few tense moments, no one moved. Then, Sukuna's grin turned utterly savage. He blurred forward, the ground exploding in the wake of his take off. His upper right fist came down in a hammerblow.

Hiruzen raised Enma high to intercept it. The adamantine groaned like a beaten gong when the fist struck it. Hiruzen suppressed a gasp as the ground underneath groaned then exploded into a thousand pieces. The shock travelled through the staff, shook the joints in his arms and dug into Hiruzen's teeth.

W-What power! Hiruzen pushed back. The ogre drove him deeper into the dirt.

The second mouth grinned, and spoke in the same voice as Sukuna. "Dragon scales. Repulsion. Twin falling stars!"

The upper-left hand swung for his ribs, dozens of tiny slashes carving the air around it. Hiruzen grit his teeth, adjusted the staff's angle and caught the attack before it sliced open his stomach. Adamantine shrieked. Enma groaned. Sparks flew, setting what little grass remained ablaze.

The third hand struck next. Hiruzen saw it thrust outward in his direction, perceiving the air snap from incoming slashes. He jerked his head aside, the cut grazing the left edge of his helmet, leaving a smoking groove in the steel.

The last hand never struck. It waited, fingers spread, poised to grab him if he tried to escape.

The difference in strength and speed is obscene! Hiruzen noted. It can't be just from his new body, it's that damned chanting! It's increasing his power!

Hiruzen momentarily pondered just what Sukuna could do to him in close quarters alone if it wasn't for the seal holding his abilities back, even in this reduced state. He didn't like the answer.

Sukuna pressed more attacks down on him. Enma rattled, sparks and shockwaves flew every time fists and slashes met adamantine. Hiruzen's arms ached as he forced the staff to bend and turn, blocking three hands just as the fourth fired off a Dismantle his way.

Mercifully, the first clone reached him. He leapt high, chains of steel and lightning wrapping his arms. With a cry, he flung the links forward, binding Sukuna's elbows. Sukuna barely flinched. He dragged the clone in, shredded the chains, and crushed his throat in one squeeze.

The second clone lunged with twin, wind-enhanced kunai, stabbing low then slashing up at Sukuna's chest. Hiruzen struck from above in tandem. Sukuna swatted Enma aside with simultaneous dual pack handed strikes, caught the kunai in his stomach, then tore the clone apart with his free hands before he could escape. He dissolved before his weapon hit the ground.

The last clone stayed back, weaving signs for a wind style attack. Hiruzen joined him, spewing fire to add to the gale. The merged jutsu struck out in a wide, tall inferno. Sukuna's chanting rose above the blast. With two hands pointed toward the blast, he formed a wall of high-speed, continuous slashes that cut away at the fire stream faster than it could get through them. Then with a smile and a thrust, he hurled the wall of slashes through it, carving the clones into pieces.

Unbelievable. Hiruzen's chest heaved. Three tactics, and not a single one of them worked….

"Guess that's it for your copies." Sukuna snickered, then came for him again.

Hiruzen blocked the kick at the last moment. His sandals skidded across scorched mud as he steadied himself. Sukuna's four hands crashed down on him like boulders. Hiruzen blocked one, ducked under another, and twisted from the third. The fourth grazed three cuts into his shoulder. Pain tore through him.

Every breath was difficult. Blood leaked down his chest, warm where the fresh gouged had split him. Enma felt heavier than before in his hands.

Sukuna pressed the attack. His upper right fist came down in a chopping motion, the upper left swung a fan of cuts that hissed through the air. Hiruzen snapped Enma crosswise, catching the chop. The shock rattled him, his insides shook uncontrollably from the impact. The lower right hand snapped like a viper, but not towards Hiruzen, to the ground.

The blasted soil under his sandals split, the trench opening with a sharp gasp. Hiruzen slid sideways, just ahead of it. The fan of cuts followed. He twisted, brought Enma down, and felt the air scream as the struck against the staff.

Another thrust came, faster this time. Hiruzen's helmet spat sparks and smoke where the slash cleaved off his entire left strap. He jerked his head away and felt metal shards bite into his cheek. More attacks came his way from too many limbs and too many angles. All the while, Sukuna watched him struggle with that damnable smile.

Pressed and with no time to conceive a way out, Hiruzen slipped. The ground betrayed him, his heel skidding on sliced mud. Sukuna stepped in, three hands moving together in a flurry of jabs, punches and point-blank slashing throws. The fourth hand carved another trench under his planted foot. Hiruzen chose to lose his balance over his leg and fell on his back.

He tried to roll at once, but the punch was faster.

Enma caught it. The shockwave flattened him. Dirt and smoke burst around him. Hiruzen shoved the hand aside, tried to rise. The foot came down first.

The first stomp missed his skull by inches. The second crushed where his chest had been. The third scraped his hip. Sukuna laughed and kept stomping. Hiruzen had no choice but to roll like an ape, elbows tucked, staff scrapping against the torn ground as he shoved, leveraged and bought himself precious seconds of time, and a little space to move.

"Up!" He shouted to Enma and thrust the staff between a tiny gap blasted between a cleaved rock, and burnt bush.

Enam obeyed, planting deep into the ground and hurled him away from Sukuna, several dozen feet into the air. Wind whistled past him. Sukuna's eyes never lost sight of him.

A fan of dozens of slashes came for him next. Hiruzen watched the slice of the air, retracted Enma and whipped his arms in wide, parrying motions. The slashes came fast and hard. Each deflect hurled Hiruzen higher.

That was when Sukuna went for him. The monster rushed forward with astounding speed, running on the ground past Hiruzen then hurling himself up to get from behind him.

He's faster than his own slashes?! The realization chilled Hiruzen to the bone. Even as he kept deflecting more of the remaining slashes, Hiruzen saw Sukuna propel himself off the ground, four arms raised high in a pair of hammer blows.

"ENMA!"

"Adamantine Prison Wall!"

Instantenously, his old comrade activated the jutsu. Staff forms shot up into a lattice that locked together around Hiruzen. The adamantine cage of black bars, each one an Enma clone transformed, deflected the last cuts. A dozen simian eyes opened, arms rushed from all sides, and took a tight hold of Hiruzen just as the four fists descended.

The blows landed. The cage didn't bend, but it shuddered in a way Hiruzen had rarely heard. The hands clutching Hiruzen's shoulders, and limbs braced him, preventing him from being pupled against the bars.

"Hold on, hold on!" Enma shouted to the clones. The prison held a breath longer in the air, then the force blasted the whole thing down.

Sukuna, the sky, the world, everyrthing vanished as the cage plunged deep, carving a wide tunnel. After what felt like thirty seconds of freefall, it stopped.

The prison wall vanished in a smoke, leaving only the original Enma. The fall left him rattled. Every bruise cried out at once, his shoulder and back felt warm where Sukuna's cuts had struck. The tunnel was black, dust rolling in waves. But it was safe, part of a tunnel system made by Konoha forces to aid in defending the coast.

But the respite was all too brief. Above, the ground shrieked. Hiruzen recognized the distinct sound, even through hundreds of feet of soil. Sukuna's slashes sent a quiver through the ceiling, rocks began to rain, support beams croaked and bent. Just fifty feet behind him, a whole section crashed, shaking the tunnel like a drumg.

Move! Hiruzen forced his body forward, feet dragging, then running. His sandals splashed through puddles. The air turned gritty in his mouth, he bent low under a falling slab, felt a rock scrape against his helm.

"Sarutobi," Enma growled from his staff form. He tried very hard not to sound tired. "I know you said you won't retreat, but the situation has changed. Sukuna's gained the initiative, we should pull back."
"All Sukuna's done," Hiruzen said in an iron voice. "Is confirm my worst fears. He has to die here, by any means necessary."

He kept running, collapsing hot on his heels. The network twisted, going up and down. He was closer to the coast. The ground rumbled, more tunnels fell but off in the distance. Hiruzen was glad he'd disabled Sukuna's shadow abilities. The prospect of fighting him in a space like this made his skin crawl.

Enma rumbled again, eye glaring from the staff. "So you are going to use it?"

"I have to," Hiruzen said. He met the monkey's single, tired eye. "You've seen him. He's like a cockroach. Every time I think I have him finished, he wriggles free. This is the only surefire way to kill him."

He found the chamber by memory. A wide intersection of five paths, meant to act as a supply depot for troops running to and from the sea garrison. Lanterns hung on the walls, the place reeked of mud, sweat and mold.

Enma eventually exhaled, a heavy, unwilling sigh. "Very well. If that is your will, I will walk with you to the end."

"Thank you." Hiruzen managed a smile at him, tired as it was. With his wound dressed, he drew focus back into himself.

Almost half my chakra is gone. The clones and full throttle elemental jutsu had taken their toll. But I've got enough for one more push.

"Multi Shadow Clone Jutsu!"

A great cloud of smoke engulfed the tunnel, and two dozen copies of himself emerged, crouched in the cramped space. Some remained as they were, others busied themselves with scrolls to summon the weapons, tools and instruments they'd need. All of them stared back at the original Hiruzen, their grim resolve matching his own.

Hiruzen ignored a wave of weariness that passed over him. Summoning that many clones by itself was taxing, but he had to distribute enough chakra between them as well. They'd never ever bit of it.

"Scatter. Use the tunnels. Harass him, bind him. If he has any more tricks up his sleeve, I want them all spent before I move in for the killing stroke."

They nodded once, then blurred away down the branching tunnels, sandals striking wet mud. They were gone in an instant, racing outward to meet the suicidal mission he'd entrusted them to.

Now is the time to prepare for my own suicide. Hiruzen took a steadying breath. His hands trembled not from fear, but sheer exhaustion threatening to drag him down. He forced them steady.

"Snake. Boar. Ram. Rabbit. Dog. Rat. Bird. Horse. Snake." His fingers moved through the sequence, slow at first, then faster. His voice became quieter with every word.
The tunnel's temperature fell sharply. A cold mist left his lips. The dripping water froze and stuck to the walls.

Hiruzen clapped his hands together. The world around him shuddered. An inhuman gasp echoed from behind him. Beads clattered like bells, and a chill air swept through the tunnel length. He turned his head slightly, enough to glimpse what his summoning jutsu had wrought.

Death looked at him, and smiled.

Sukuna stood on the air, dozens of feet above the ruined grove. Trenches, shattered trees, and heaps of stone stretched for miles around. His chest still smoked faintly from forcing Malevolent Shrine through the seal. The ache in his skull pleased him. It meant he had pushed close to his limit, and survived.

Then the air shifted. Not chakra, not quite. Something closer to cursed energy. He tasted it pulling from the east, closer to the coast. The Professor was stirring something new and interesting.

Before he could savor the thought, the earth below shook. Piles of stone and trees convulsed. A moment later, a gale screamed out of the ground. Whole slabs of debris lifted, hurled upward on spirals of wind. Shuriken, rocks, broken logs, all thrown with the force of a natural disaster.

Sukuna's stomach-mouth chanted. His upper hands spread, and with two arms he carved walls of slashes through the onrushing tide. Rocks exploded into dust. Trees shredded into splinters. The gale tried to drive the wreckage harder into him, but the walls of cutting air tore it apart before it touched his skin.

Then the debris that passed close to him erupted. Paper bombs hidden in the wreckage flared, dozens of blasts chaining one after another. The shockwaves rattled his frame, licked scorch across his shoulders and back. Minor wounds, nothing more. But the smoke from the detonations rolled in heavy, thick, black. Within seconds he was blind to the grove.

He readied his blades to carve through the smog when the sound reached him. A whistle. Thin at first, then repeating, folding in on itself until it filled his skull. His teeth clenched. Genjutsu, striking not the eyes but the ears.

Sukuna grinned. Mahoraga had taught him this trick after the toad sage. Refresh the brain, clear the illusion. He forced cursed energy into his skull, made a small cut in his own brain then healed it. Easy enough, even if the seal still interfered with his reverse-cursed technique.

But the illusion didn't die. A flute came next. Then a shamisen. Then the guttural growls of beasts that did not exist. Every note repeated, layered, bent until the noise swelled from every side. The illusions dragged claws across his mind. His body warped in his own sight. His stomach-mouth peeled into butterflies and drifted away. His head tongue coiled into a serpent that tried to throttle him. His arms melted at the elbows.

Clever. I break one illusion, then slip right into the next. Hear itself has become my weakness.
Sukuna crushed his auditory cortex in-response. Silence followed. The illusions fell away.

Then a great weight smashed across his face. His nose shattered, blood bursting down his lips. He spun, struck earth, and landed on all six limbs. Mud furrowed under his palms and toes. He enjoyed the taste of iron spilling into his mouth.

Chains ripped out of the earth, thick as his arms, lightning screaming up their lengths. Sukuna's upper hands severed two, his lower arms another pair, but more wrapped his ankles tight. Currents boiled his nerves, forcing spasms through his body. He bent low into the muck in-spite himself. Smoke burst from all around him, about twenty copies of the Professor launched at him in a storm of fists, blades, mallets and spears.

One among them flash handsigns. "Infinite Darkness jutsu!"

The chakra shot through his optic nerve into the brain. He was blinded instantaneously. Sukuna barked a laugh. It'd been a while since he fought blind. He sharpened the one sense left to him: touch.

A blade brushed his arm hair. He twisted, shredding steel and body alike, but not before a nick grazed his ribs. A hammer clipped his lower jaw, snapping two teeth loose. Kunai pricked his thigh, a spear dug into his waist, lightning burned up his calves until his legs threatened to buckle. More blades cut into him, searing two fingers from his upper left arm.

This takes me back. The Fujiwara and Sugawara alliance had tried the same tactics when desperation and fear set in. That was amusing. This would be better.

He sucked under a hammer, caught its shaft, and crushed its owners ribs with a bladed palm strike. He swung the stolen weapon into another's skull, savoring the crunch. Blood spat from his bleeding finger stumps, blinding one clone before he gutted it with a punch. A spear scraped his flank; he snapped it and rammed the broken shaft through its skull.

Lightning flared again, locking his knees. A kick came to his head. He caught the sandal in his teeth, grinned bloody, and whipped the clone into two others. The clones had lost the initiative. Sukuna used the momentary pause and fired Dismantles into the ground. The lightning vanished, the chains fell loose.

His nose streamed blood. Cuts rank across his chest and back. Stumps burned where two fingers used to be. His stomach-mouth resumed chanting through bruised lips and missing teeth. His legs shook with lightning afterburn. All the same, Sukuna straightened, flexing his hands, savoring every injury almost as much as the kills.

"You've already lost ten, Professor," He swatted aside two blades, voice amused. "What's your next move?"

The clone's answer was a shift in the air. But different from the one that'd left him genuinely befuddled. Sukuna felt it keenly on his suddenly perspiring skin. A sharp, boiling rise in the temperature.

Three more clones joined the two blade wielders. A hammer fell on him from above, pressing him into the ground. A gale of wind hit his back, cutting three gashes across it. The ground shook, shifting, and forming something around him. Walls, if he hazarded a guess.

Sukuna swung his arms in the direction where the ground shifted. Instead of perceiving the tumbling of sliced, collapsing stone hurled back to the soil it'd come from, nothing happened.

He must have erected something quite strong to withstand my slashes. Sukuna saw it clearly in his mind's eye: a pack of clones to keep him busy, while the rest poured all their chakra into the makeshift pit. The strong walls would keep the wide fire arcs from spreading, focusing as much of the flames as possible on Sukuna himself.

He's trying to cook me alive! Sukuna laughed even as he knew the Professor had put him in a precarious position again. A good effort, but wasted like all the others.

Sukuna thundered chants from his upper mouth, his lower hands formed the Enma sign while his free arms held the clones at bay. Cursed energy surged, not smoothly but in violent cracks, every shred of it was a tug of war against the effects of the seal still branded across his stomach.

Sukuna pushed harder. Blood ran down his nose, slid through his eyelids. The clones scored a few more hits on him. His brain ached in protest. The blasts were coming. He felt them in the heat, the air pressure shifting around him.

Sukuna grinned, he crystallized just enough cursed energy. For a moment, the seal's power bent in the face of his will.

Just enough.

Malevolent Shrine erupted into being for 0.2 seconds.

The steel walls disintegrated into dust. The clones vanished before they realized they'd been struck. Streams of fire broke apart into ribbons, torn mid-flight into millions of embers. The ground gouged open, a crater carved into an overlapping grind. The darkness itself was destroyed into nothingness.

Everything within 100 meters of Sukuna was utterly annihilated.

Then, just as quickly as it appeared, Malevolent Shrine collapsed again. The seal on Sukuna's stomach flared, the brief solid hold of cursed energy slipped through his fingers.
Sukuna stood at the center of the crater, steam rising from his back, skin and meat knitting itself slowly back together. His breath came slow, his skull throbbed in a way it hadn't since fighting Gojo. Sight, and sound steadily returned to him. His bleeding, clogged nose, he snapped back into place between two fingers.

"That was worth the price."

The cold sensation of before returned, much stronger than before. Sukuna's three eyes scanned the dust cloud still gathered around him. The fourth kept watch of the ground, the Professor had a proven love of attacking from there.

With his hearing restored, Sukuna heard the air shriek. Thousands of shuriken cut through the haze, some small, others almost as tall as him. Their edges spun keenly like a storm of razors. The ache to his brain was still troublesome, and his cursed technique hadn't yet come back on its own.

Sukuna leapt, small explosions of cursed energy lifting him safely above the storm of razors crashing beneath him by the thousands. Another movement caught his eyes, from above.

The monkey in his stock form fell on him. Sukuna raised his hands just in time to block the adamantine blow even as it forced him back onto the ground. The moment he crashed, the many shuriken detonated with explosions of varying sizes. More to obfuscate their next move than to hurt him, Sukuna guessed.

The stick struck at him again, Sukuna made a grab for it as it approached his leg. Then, its shape warped, fur bursting, claws digging around his outstretched arm as the ape climbed over him. Explosive tags slapped one after another on the arm, then his back.

The ape left away, leaving his little traps to detonate after him. Sukuna felt fire sing his back, shockwaves forced him three paces forward.

And then the Professor came.

Through the black smoke, his form closed in. Palms crackled with lightning around his fists. Sukuna saw the outline of something else behind him when the Professor's blow struck him into the bridge of the nose. Next, he struck out at Sukuna's ears, slapping the electrified palms hard against them.Lighting shot into his skull, his brain rattled again, the ache from Malevolent Shrine worsening.

The ape came back, roaring like the disgusting simian he was. In his real form, the creature seized Sukuna's upper limbs, wrenching them taut until his joints groaned and chest was forced forward. Fangs tore into Sukuna's neck, blood dripped down his chest.

Electrified hands clamped around Sukuna's lower arms, forcing them inward, twisting the wrists until bones creaked. The Professor shouted in a way he hadn't so far, his whole body tensing under the immense physical force of trying to hold Sukuna back.

What is this? Sukuna wondered, the icy sensation so close to cursed energy intense, his blurry vision clearing and focused more on the shape behind the Professor than breaking the holds.

Soon enough, he saw the source of this feeling.

It was taller than him, purple-skinned and gaunt, ribs like prison bars, a wild mane of hair flailing down its shoulders. Two red horns jutted above its brow. Its mouth of serrated teeth gripped a tanto, parted just enough to reveal a serpentine tongue. One of its hands, wrapped with red beads, rose above its head as black splotches spread over its skin and with a swift thrust, pushed itself into the Professor's very soul.

The shinigami reached through the Professor and drove its arm into Sukuna's chest. The grip was real, and expectedly powerful. Sukuna felt a vice-like grip over his soul, black nails dinging into it. The creature's black eyes glinted with a hunger Sukuna recognized all too well, its long tongue slobbered with anticipation.

The Professor coughed blood. The monkey snarled. Sukuna laughed harder than he ever had in his entire life.

"Ahhahahahahah! You would throw your own soul away just to drag mine down with it?! Magnificent! Splendid!" Sukuna's eyes burned with absolute delight, his smile splitting wider than his face allowed. "Among all the warriors I've fought, you stand head and shoulders above them all, Sarutobi Hiruzen! You truly are the God of Shinobi!"

The Professor's face contorted into a look of pure, delightful fury. His fingers dug into Sukuna's wrists, his eyes wide and bloody mouth clenched. "Die…" He snarled. "Shut up and die you vile monster!"

The shinigami pulled with such force a portion of his soul slipped out. But Sukuna was all too aware of its contours, and pulled right back. It snarled, straining with effort, Sukuna chuckled in its face, and the incredulous look of the Professor.

"A thousand years ago, you definitely would've killed me with this," Sukuna answered his silent question through gritted teeth. "What are you going to do now-"

The monkey's bite loosened then came back down with twice the force. Sukuna heard a chunk of his own meat snap off this time. "Either the Reaper eats your soul, or I'll bite your wretched head off!"

It bit down again. Sukuna tried to force him off but to no avail. The moment his concentration faltered on his soul, the Reaper managed to slip more of it out. His body became slow, then inert. The monkey's bite drove deeper.

At this rate, he really will tear my head off. Sukuna felt the blood gush down his chest, his Reverse-Cursed Technique completely disabled. He couldn't afford to jump start it, lest more of his soul be pulled out.

Sukuna glanced at the ape, the Professor and finally the Reaper. All he needed was one slash, one attack to break the hold and turn the fight in his favor.

And he figured out quickly how to make it in-spite of his predicament.

His grin widened. He knew how to win.

Sukuna felt chains close around him. A pact that would bind him forevermore. Tighter than the death grip of the Reaper. Stronger by orders of magnitude than even the Professor's seal.

One free World Cutting Slash at the cost of far harsher restrictions in the future.

The chains were sealed. The binding vow took hold. The attack went off.

The World Cutting Slash, fired without the required handsign, sliced space itself apart, and the Reaper most definitely felt it.

The shinigami was split cleanly in two. Its black eyes widened, the hewed tanto fumbled out of its gaping mouth. A shriek unlike any sound a human or cursed spirit could make burst from its cleaved throat, echoing in a pained death cry. Black fissures spread across its body, its wailing form dissipating until it vanished like mist into nothingness.

The pressure on Sukuna's soul vanished in an instant. The Professor staggered back, blood pouring from his mouth, his body shaking violently from the backlash of the Reaper's death. His soul slammed back into place so hard it seemed to physically rattle him.

"S-Sarutobi!" The monkey's grip wavered. Sukuna broke free of the hold. With a punch to the gut, he broke the simian's hold over his neck. Then, he lifted the troublesome creatures high overhead and slammed him into the ground. Before he could turn back into adamantine, Sukuna's heel stomped down on him. Bones cracked underfoot, the satisfying crunch like music to Sukuna's ringing ears.

"What was that about tearing my head off?"

He twisted the heel, listened to the ape howl then stomped on him again, cratering the ground beneath his back.

"G-Get away from him!" The Professor looked ready to collapse. And yet still, he still ran forward to continue the fight.

Sukuna couldn't help but watch the effort with pure admiration. Even if it was futile. Using the ape as footing, Sukuna rushed forward with an attack of his own.

One arm cocked back, Sukuna cackled once more as the distance between them closed, in anticipation of what was to come. The blow came down with absolute precision. His fist went to bury itself deep into the Professor's chest.

In one-millionth of a second before it hit, Sukuna's cursed energy enhanced it. The world shifted, space distorted. Sparks erupted at the moment of impact. Lighting cracked from the fist, the full force of the magnified power sent into the Professor's chest. His cursed energy surged with renewed strength, his reverse-cursed technique sharpened in-spite of the seal.

Sukuna smiled, relishing the rush of power and exhilaration from his first Black Flash in one thousand years.

Pain numbed his body in a way Hiruzen had never felt before.

The force of the black spark blow drove through his armor, and into every muscle, every bone. Something in his sternum protested with a hard click, his lungs went dead.

"I'd almost forgotten how good it feels to manifest one of these." Sukuna rasped, a cheerful look in his terrible eyes. Hiruzen saw the fingers on his upper-left arm grow back at an incredible speed. Right before they curled into a fist, and blurred forward.

Somehow, beyond even his own understanding, Hiruzen's arms crossed to block it. More black lightning erupted at the moment of impact. Hiruzen gasped, the world rolled in dizzying circles in his sight. His helmet fell off as he stumbled and skid across mud. A cut above his left eye stained half his sight red.

He tried to brace himself back up. But his arms wouldn't move, he realized. For a terrible moment, Hiruzen thought they'd been blasted off. They were simply broken, hanging useless at his sides. Somewhere in the distance, he heard Enma call out to him before the ground shook again. A geyser of dirt exploded, raining debris all over him.

Move… I-I must move…. Hiruzen knew Enma needed him. He couldn't accept simply lying there, while that monster tortured him. He rose on shaky feet, and turned in the direction he'd been flung from.

Sukuna's third blow came faster than the other two. An uppercut that fired pain and more black lightning through Hiruzen's head. Whatever shred of power he had left was pummeled out of him. The world was titled again. The next thing he knew, he was airborne, staring at a lone patch of blue sky before the dirt met him again and he was swallowed by mud and ash.

He couldn't even consider trying to move. He was hardly aware he was even alive.

Heavy, strong footsteps shook the ground. A tall shadow fell over him, his lone good eye stared up and managed a glare at the grinning ogre.

A strong hand clamped over his throat. Sukuna lifted him as though he weighed nothing at all, his evil face full of delight and malice. Hiruzen wanted to spit at it, if only his jaw still worked.

"Don't worry, Professor," Sukuna's voice was frighteningly cordial. "I'll fix the damage in no time."

The creature snapped a finger off his lower arm. Hiruzen watched with horrible, energizing horror as it was brought to his mouth. The severed blasphemy was jammed down his throat faster than he could try to spit it out.

It burned.

Not like heat, but acid. At once, it felt as though a furnace burned the inside of his throat. Hiruzen gagged, released by Sukuna. He thrashed onto the ground, banging his head against the dirt until it bled. He screamed until his throat tore.

"It appears I'll have to make the vow more costly to accommodate me," Sukuna said with a horrible calm. "Troublesome, but I think I'll manage fine."

The pain magnified. It was so thorough, Hiruzen froze, eyes wide enough to pop, mouth hanging open in a silent scream. Every molecule was in pain, his soul was being cleaved, burned… eaten.

He couldn't say how long the agony lasted. Only that he blacked out at some point, losing all sense of self.

Eventually, mercifully, it stopped.

He felt nothing. Not calm or relieved, but empty and somehow trapped.

His right hand moved.

He didn't raise it.

His head turned to the side.

He didn't turn it.

His body - wrecked, burned and broken - stood. Whole again, strong. And not his. He wasn't moving, he was being moved. He could only watch. A spectator trapped behind his own eyes, now numbered four.

"Ah," His voice said, savoring the air. "Looks like it worked."

A voice that sounded exactly like his, but talked like Sukuna.

No! Hiruzen felt his own mounting terror, the horrible realization of what consuming the finger was truly meant to do. No, no, this can't be happening… I WON'T ALLOW IT!

He moved with intangible fingers. Shouted with a silent voice. His anger, his efforts, were all impotent. Instead of fury, his voice let out a long, terrible crackle of pure glee. Sukuna rolled his shoulders, no, not his, Hiruzen's, flexed their, no, his fingers!

"What an arsenal, Professor," The voice of Sukuna said in mockery and appreciation both. "So much information, so many techniques!"

I won't let you have your way! He shouted in something far away that may have been his voice. I won't!

Hiruzen's attempt to speak resulted only in the barest tremor of the jaw, a tiny stutter in Sukuna's maniacal laughter.

"Don't worry," Sukuna cackled with psychotic elation. "I'll put this excellent body of yours to good use."

A movement at the periphery pulled his gaze. Enma…

Not the staff, but the monkey king himself. Beaten bloody, one eye a black lump, blood dropping down his lips. He sprinted forward. Hiruzen thought for a terrible moment he'd try to do battle on his own. Instead, he pivoted at the last moment, flinging dozens of shuriken, and leapt toward someone else.

Sukuna's prior body. The body of Megumi Fushiguro.

Hiruzen didn't have time to ponder how he knew that name. He had to act quickly. Sukuna swatted the shuriken aside with a dismissive handwave. Hiruzen perceived his evil grin, the way his fingers bent through a weave of handsigns, and the chakra kneading in his lungs.

"Time for a test run!"

With every ounce of willpower he had, Hiruzen pushed. Screamed, shoved from the inside.

It amounted to almost nothing, but just enough.

One finger bent at a poor angle on the last sign. The swelling fire that would have incinerated Enma and Fushiguro alike in a wave of three-headed dragon flames, exploded inches from Sukuna's face, sending him flying back.

Sukuna snarled. Hiruzen noted the way his own chakra… shut off. How it was replaced by something else, something dark. What he now knew to be cursed energy.

"Dismantle!"

The slash sliced through the air, but far too late. Enma succeeded at reaching Fushiguro, then with a final contemptuous sneer at Sukuna, vanished in a puff of smoke. The projectile cleaved it in half, but scored no hit besides.

Sukuna's - his - hands clenched. His body's lips peeled back in a sneer.

"Oh, Professor," Hiruzen's voice dripped with venom. "You shouldn't have done that. I think I'll roast your boy alive. Slowly."

Stay away from my son, you degenerate wretch! Hiruzen exploded in anger again. But the fury found no purchase. It filled him, but couldn't move a muscle. The evil energy of curses, it seemed to draw closer around him, deepening the void, suffocating his already pathetic influence.

Sukuna lifted his gaze upward to the sky. A lone bird flew overhead, long after all others had fled from the chaos.

"Run," Hiruzen heard himself say, cheerful and cruel. "Tell Danzo. Tell the frog fool. Tell every moron in a flak jacket in the world what's happened here! Make your little alliances. Send your armies. I'll slaughter them all and feast on their children!"

The bird jerked away mid-flight, wings thrashing, fleeing as fast as it could. The message would spread, and fear along with it. Alone it wouldn't stop the monster, Hiruzen knew. But someone, something, had to.

Because if they didn't… the world wouldn't survive what he had become.

Chapter Text

The dice clattered across the table. They landed on snake eyes.

Tsunade stared at them for a long time, then at the empty sake cup in her hand. The bartender refilled it without asking. He knew better than to ask questions when she was on a losing streak. And she lost very, very often.

The den reeked of sweat and cheap booze. Lanterns cast long, deep shadows across the red walls. Somewhere in the corner, a shamisen player butchered a well-known song about lost love. Tsunade downed the cup, slammed it on the table and reached for her coin purse.

Empty.

"One more game," Her voice scraped like gravel. "I'm good for-"

"Lady Tsunade," Shizune said from behind her. The girl's voice wavered, it always did whenever she approached her in the middle of a bad run. A kid her age wasn't even allowed to come in here, but people knew better than to argue with Tsunade. "We should go. You've been here since noon."

"It's barely evening."

"It's three in the morning."

Tsunade blinked. The lanterns did look dimmer than she remembered. Or maybe that was just her vision messing with her. The den had emptied out while she wasn't paying attention, or paying too much attention to her dice, she couldn't decide. Only a handful of die-hard gamblers remained, slumped over their tables or arguing with the house dealers. The shamisen player packed up his instrument with the resigned air of a man used to being ignored.

"Damn," Tsunade pinched the bridge of her nose. The drinks didn't numb the guilt. "Sorry, Shiuzen… I kept you up again."

"It's okay, my lady," The nine-year old smiled at her, helped her up from the chair. It didn't make Tsunade feel any better. "Let's just get you to bed, alright? I'll make some of that tea you really like."

"Yeah, that sounds good…"

Tsunade rose, ignored the way the room suddenly tilted and let Shiuzen take her hand. They were halfway to the door before a voice caught her attention.

"Did you hear? The Third Hokage's gone mad!"

Tsunade stopped on uneven feet and turned left. Two men sat in the corner booth, hunched over their drinks, their cheeks peach red. Merchants by the look of their clothes - high quality but road-worn.

"Killing his own people, they say," The merchant continued. He kept his voice low, but not low enough. "Whole towns destroyed, forests burning."

His drinking buddy shook his bald head. "Rumors. There's no way the Hokage would-"

"I'm telling you what I heard! My cousin came through a few days back, travelling with refugees from a town that got destroyed," The chatterbox leaned closer. "Said they were terrified, lots of them had slash marks. Like a maniac with a big knife, cut them up! But they all said the same thing: it was the Hokage who did it-"

Tsunade's hand moved before the rest of her caught on. She grabbed the gossipper by his yellow collar, hauled him half out of his seat. Sake and exhaustion made her grip sloppy, he almost slipped through her fingers. The man's cup clattered to the floor, spilling sake across stained wood. She hoisted him high, and glared.

"Say that again." The words came out flat and cold.

The man's face drained of color in an instant. His companion half-rose, hand moving toward something under his green, flame embroidered cloak. Tsunade froze him in-place with a momentary glance.

"I-I didn't mean-"

"What did you hear?."

He stumbled over his words, sweat poured down his wrinkled face. "E-Exactly what I just said! The Hokage's gone nuts, he's killing people left and right across the Land of Fire! He's murdering everyone he comes across, men, women and children, doesn't matter!"

"Lady Tsunade," Small hands pulled at her free arm. Shizune's eyes were wide, frightened. "Let him go, please! He can't breathe!"

She was right. The merchant's already pale face went sheet white, her fingers tightened like snakes around his neck. Tsunade dropped him. The man scrambled back the moment his ass hit the ground. His companion picked him up and the two fled, casting nervous glances over their shoulders. The bartened watched the scene with a carefully neutral expression of a man who knew better than to mess with a shinobi.

Tsunade stood in the middle of the den for what felt like hours, then stormed out without a word.

The night air hit her like a slap. Stars wheeled overhead, too bright, too clear. The coastal town sprawled around them, quiet at this hour except for the occasional drunks like her and the distant crash of waves against docks. Lanterns bobbed on fishing boats in the harbor, and somewhere, a pair of cats fought.

Tsunade got halfway down the block when she felt her feet wobble. She leaned against the wall, and tried to organize her thoughts. The merchant's words shouldn't have bothered her, she stopped caring about Konoha years ago. It'd taken too much from her: family, love, and damn near her sanity.

All the same, no one would make a rumor like that about her Master. They had their disagreements, but the Sarutobi Hiruzen would sooner eat his own arms and legs before doing what the merchant claimed. It was so preposterous, Tsunade should have laughed it off and been on her way to bed.

Why aren't I? The question hung over her head.

"Lady Tsunade," Shizune appeared at her elbow, small hands twisting the fabric of her black, travel-worn kimono. The girl looked up at her with those big, worried eyes that always made Tsunade feel like crap. "You don't believe that, do you? About Lord Third?"

"No." The answer came automatically. Easy.

Shizune bit her lip. The girl did that when she was thinking hard about something, and trying to work up the courage to say it. "Then why are you shaking?"

Tsunade looked down. Her hands trembled. She clenched them into fists, nails digging into her palms hard enough to hurt. But not to bleed. That absolutely couldn't happen.

Her stomach churned, Tsunade froze then emptied it against the nearby wall. The sake came up bitter, mixed with whatever she'd eaten for dinner, or was it lunch? She couldn't remember. When nothing was let, she slid down to sit in the dirt, back against the rough wood of a wide, fishing warehouse.

She looked at the stars again, wincing at the brightness of them. Shizuen knelt next to her, offering up a little remedy they'd made for situations like these. Tsunade downed the bitter concoction and waited for her insides to settle down.

"Get some sleep, kid. We're leaving at ten in the morning."

"Leaving? Where to?"

To see those refugees first… and the North. The thought made her skin crawl, for many reasons. But something about the merchants' fear, the certainty he had in his information even when one of the Sannin had him by the throat. It wasn't something she could dismiss as idle gossip.

She had to know.

Dawn was grey and miserable. Clouds pressed low against the southern coast, and a cold wind carried the smell of salt and rotting fish. Tsunade walked through the market district head pounding with each step. Merchants busied themselves with pushing their wares, calling out to customers, hawking fresh catches and bread.

She barely noticed them. All she wanted from her was information about that refugee camp. Her stomach bent again when multiple vendors confirmed its existence on the eastern edge of the town.

How did I not hear about this sooner? She shook her head, then sighed at the answer. She'd been too busy gambling most of her savings away in a rat hole.

The camp sprawled across what had once been a farmer's field. Dozens of makeshift tents crowded together - some actual canvas, most just blankets strung between poles or draped over carts. Families huddled around cooking fires that produced more smoke than heat. Children cried. The whole place reeked of misery and despair.

Guards watched the perimeter. They were local militia, not shinobi, armed with spears and wearing expressions that said they'd rather be anywhere else. One of them stepped forward as Tsunade approached the entrance. It took him a few moments to recognize her, he stepped back with a hasty bow.

"Lady Tsunade. We weren't expecting-"

"I'm here to help." The words came out flat. She walked past him into the camp.

Then the smell hit her.

Blood. She knew she'd see it, get close to it. But even three hours spent steeling herself for it did nothing to prepare her. It was everywhere. In bandages, on clothes, soaked into the dirt. Fresh and old, metallic and thick. Her chest was constricted. Sweat broke out across her forehead. Every instinct screamed at her to turn around, get out of there, by any means necessary.

"Breathe, my lady," Shizuen clutched at her sleeve. Her eyes still hold onto a child-like faith that should've been stamped out a long time ago. "Breathe. And if you can't, we can always leave."
I really don't deserve you, kid. Tsunade thought, not for the first time. Here I am freaking out, and bringing you to see… something you really shouldn't.

Tsunade's hands shook again. She clenched them into fists, using the pain of her creaking muscles and knuckles to focus through the panic. She forced herself to take a step. Then another. Each one against a paralysis worse than any poison injected into her across many battles.

An old woman sat on a nearby crate, bandages wrapped around her left arm. The cloth was stained dark red - aterial blood, from the color. Tsunade smelt burnt flesh too, second degree, maybe even third. Whoever had dressed them had done a poor job. The woman's face was gaunt, her clothes torn and travel-stained.

Tsunade barely worked up the nerve to approach her. It took all she had not to look at the bandage. Focus on her face. Just her face.

"What happened to you?"

The woman looked up. Recognition brought some life back into her eyes. But fear overwhelmed it quickly, real fear, the kind that settled into your bones and wouldn't leave.

"The east, Lady Tsunade," She clutched her injured arm. Fresh blood welled between fingers. Tsunade's stomach lurched. "He.. He came through our home, he killed everyone in sight. I only escaped because…"

The old woman shook her head, tears welled up. Tsunade wanted to reach out and comfort her, but the blood…

"It looked like Lord Hiruzen."

Tsunade's chest tightened. Her heart bounded like a war drum. "The Hokage? You're sure?"

"I've seen Lord Third before, ten years ago. He came to our village, he rested there after a mission for a time. A kind man. Gentle eyes," The woman started rocking, blood dripped from her arm onto the dirt. Tsunade's vision swam at even the peripheral sight of it. "That thing, it had his face. But his eyes had four of them. And when it smiled…" She trailed off, staring at nothing.

A man joined them, younger, mid-twenties maybe. He had a nasty slash across his shoulder that the bandage couldn't conceal. It'd been badly stitched with what looked like a fishing line. The wound was inflamed, angry red spread from the edges.

Tsunade's throat closed. The trembling worsened. She shoved them into her pockets before anyone could.

"She's right. I was there. That thing used, it used jutsu but… it cut everything too. I saw it flick a wirst and cut whole buildings like nothing!"

More refugees gathered as word spread that the Slug Princess had arrived to ask questions. Each had a story. All of them sounded worse than the last. All the storytellers were broken, damaged people. The smell of blood was thick enough to touch.

Another merchant described a three-headed dragon fire burning his entire caravan, and livelihood to ash. A fisherman described blasts of wind punch holes through people and houses alike. A widow described how her husband tried to fight back, before he was electrocuted into a heap of burnt bones and meat.

Tsunade listened as long as she could, then pushed through the crowd with Shizune in tow. People called after her, asking for help, what she would do about this monster. They were terrified, why had their Hokage, the strongest of the Five, turned on them?

She reached the edge of the camp before her stomach finally gave up. She vomited behind a supply cart, gasping and shaking. Shizune stroked her back. But it didn't give her a shred of comfort.

"Lady Tsunade," Shizune's small voice called out to her. "Are you alright?"
"Fine." The lie tasted bitter. "We're leaving."

"What? B-But those people, we can-"

"They can't be helped. Not by me." Her throat tightened. Not anymore.

The admission cut deeper than she thought it would. She'd given up on healing anyone years ago. But those people still hoped that she would. That their Slug Princess would help them. Give them some comfort, help them tolerate the atrocities done to them just a little more.

Tsunade walked away, refusing to look back at the camp. What she could do was get answers, find out just what the hell was going on in the world. What she would do once she found out was something else entirely.

They left the town within the hour. The journey north took them several days. Tsunade pushed them hard. Only stopping when Shizune couldn't take another step. The girl never complained, tried so hard to keep up, to be useful, to prove she deserved to be there. But she was still just a girl, talented, but not used to the gruel of shinobi life.

Tsunade found herself slowing more than she wanted to admit the farther they went. She wanted to know, but didn't dare let herself think about tomorrow.

The country changed as they traveled. Farmlands gave way to deep forests. And those gave way to a destruction she never thought she'd see in the Land of Fire.

The first signs appeared twenty miles from Konoha. A waystation, burned to its foundations. Only the stone chimney remained standing, blackened with soot. The walls were slashed through. She traced one with her finger. The stone had been cut like butter, the edges smooth and still sharp enough to draw blood from her fingertip.

Tsunade wrapped it at once, her hands shook all the while.

These cuts. I've never seen anything like it, not even from the Kusanagi Blade…

Ten miles out, they found a settlement. Or what was left of it.

Buildings cleaved apart at bizarre angles, their contents spilled across streets like gutted animals. From a distance, Tsuande saw corpses scattered outside. Pools of tried blood formed around them. Tsunade's legs locked up. Wouldn't, couldn't move.

"Lady Tsunade?"

"We have to… go around," She managed to say in a strangled voice.

"But the road-"

"I said around!"

They circled wide, keeping to the forest, keeping the settlement out of eyeshot. Tsunade focused instead on her surroundings, to catch clues if the murderer was close. Nothing pointed to that being the case, but she couldn't take a chance. Too many things had gone horribly wrong to be lax. Shizune stayed by her side, silent but composed.

The devastation worsened. Whole sections of woods burned to ash. Roads cratered, turn up by techniques powerful enough to reshape the landscape. In one place, the ground had been turned to glass, by a lightning strike, hot enough to melt sand and stone.

What really worried Tsunade was the fact nobody was there. No survivors, no fleeing civilians, and no patrols. She knew that this close to Konoha, they should have run into someone. Anyone. There was nothing. Even the forest animals looked like they'd vanished without a trace.

Tsunade tried not to think about it, even as it kept her up for night after night. Even as it slowed her step, and made her imperceptibly sloppier on their final approach. By the time they reached the final ridge, Tsunade was exhausted in ways she hadn't been for a long time.

The sun was setting when they wrested it.

Konoha spread below them. Tsunade froze. It was gone.

The great walls that had stood for generations had been torn down. Buildings, homes, shopes, the headquarters of the many clans where she'd grown up, where she'd learned what it meant to be a shinobi and became disillusioned with it, where she'd fallen in love and lost everything, was a pile of rubble.

The Hokage Tower, where she'd received missions, argued with the council and spent hours with her teacher and team was a heap of twisted metal and broken concrete, collapsed in on itself.

And the Monument. The mountain itself.

The carved aces of the Hokage had been cleaved away. Massive cuts ran through stone, reducing her grandfather's features into rubble. Her great-uncle, the Second Hokage's face was split apart. And her master's was split vertically down the middle, halves toppled onto each other into a mockery of how he looked. The avalanche of broken rocks had buried huge swaths of the village underneath it.

Tsunade's knees buckled. She caught herself on a tree, bark digging into her palm hard enough to draw blood. She didn't even notice it.

"No," The word came out small. "No, this… this can't be…"

"Lady Tsunade," Shizune's voice cracked. The girl was crying now, tears streaming down her face, snot ran from her nose. "P-Please…"

"They're dead…" Tsunade pushed off the tree, stumbled forward. "Everyone's… they're all..

"We don't know that, my lady! Maybe they evacuated, maybe they got out!"

Tsunade didn't say a word, she picked Shizune up and with no regard to checking her surroundings, she leapt and ran.

She hit the village outskirts at full speed. Leaped over fallen walls, dodged craters, ignored the way her vision blurred, or her palm ran red. It was almost impossible to recognize anything. The Academy, where she'd learned basic jutsu, taught medical techniques to bright-eyed genin, gone. So was the hospital, her hospital, that she designed and pioneered to save lives was just a scorched outline on the ground.

She ran faster. Past the training grounds where she sparred with her teammates. Past the destroyed market district where she'd bought dango, and hunted Jiraiya down when he'd pissed her off with his antics. Tsunade headed toward where the Memorial Stone stood.

Stood, not stands.

The stone had been cut apart. Great chunks of it lay scattered across the clearing, each one carved with the names of the fallen. Of heroes, of friends, family and loved ones. Some of the dearest people to her.

Tsunade dropped to her knees in-front of the largest piece. Her hands scrambled across the broken surface, searching. She tried to find them. She had to find them, she'd carved their names into the monument herself. But it was impossible, there were thousands of pebbles, so many names, so many people who'd been spat on after death.All of them had been obliterated like they'd never existed at all.

Something broke inside her chest.

She didn't remember falling forward or starting to cry. The sobs came from deep and primal, a kind of grief she hoped she'd never feel again. Her fingers dug into the stone, clutching at the broken memorial pieces for dear life.

Dan, Nawaki. Orochimaru. Jiraiya. Everyone…

"I'm sorry," The words came between sobs. "I'm sorry I wasn't here. I'm sorry I wasn't strong enough. I'm sorry I-"

Small hands touched her back. Shizune, crying too, pressed against her side. The girl said nothing. Just stayed there, shaking with her own grief. They knelt together, in the dead silence of annihilated Konoha.

This was it. The end. Everything she'd run from, everything she'd tried to forget, everything she'd drowned in smoke and gambling and pointless wandering to avoid. All of it was gone. Destroyed. And she hadn't been there. Hadn't fought. Hadn't died with them like she should have been.

Like she deserved to.

Hours passed, slowly and impossibly fast. Neither she nor Shizune moved even as the tears dried up. Tsunade only moved when he heard a footstep scrape behind her.

Her body reacted before the rest of her caught on. Her grief exploded into rage in an instant. Holding Shizune close with one hand, her right made a fist, moulded chakra into it then snapped in the direction of the noise. Primed to kill.

Chapter Text

The bandages came off in strips.

Jiraiya sat still as the nurse unwound them, her hands gentle but practiced. The room smelled of antiseptic and the faint copper tang of old blood. Sunlight streamed through the window, bright enough to make his working eye water. Medical equipment lines the walls, shelves stocked with bandages, ointments and other equipment that'd sped up his recovery.

"There." The blonde nurse said softly. She stepped back, letting him see.

Jiraiya turned to a mirror mounted on the wall. Three diagonal scars ran across his face, starting above his right eyebrow and cutting down to the left side of his jaw. The deepest cut had ruined his left eye. The iris had turned milky white, the pupil a dead grey.

He touched the scars. The skin was raised, still tender. They'd heal into something rough and permanent.

Tsunade would've healed it back to normal. He thought, suppressing a wince as he worked the sore muscles of his face.

"Well," Jiraiya said after a brief silence, flashing the nurse the best grin he could manage. "I'd say I'm even more handsome than before? What do you think?"

The nurse's cheeks colored. She ducked her head, fussing with the discarded bandages. "You should rest, Master Jiraiya. The doctors said-"

"They worry too much," He stood, testing his balance. The room stayed steady, good. "Besides, I'm feeling much better."

The door opened. An ANBU operative stepped in, wearing a tanuki mask. Jiraiya's attempt at levity died. An ANBU, not his teacher coming to check on him personally and debrief him about what happened.

He knew something had gone very wrong.

"Master Jiraiya," Tanuki said. His voice was carefully controlled, but something underneath it cracked. "The council requests your immediate presence for an emergency session. Are you well enough to attend?"

"Give us the room," Jiraiya said to the nurse, his voice coming out harder than intended. She glanced between them, gathered the bandages and left in a hurry.

Jiraiya turned to face Tanuki head on. "What happened, what did that bastard Sukuna do?"

The ANBU shifted his weight. "The council-"
"Can wait a few minutes," Jiraiya's working eye fixed on the operative. "You were part of the surveillance team. Tell me everything."

The operative's shoulders sagged. For someone trained to keep control at all times, in the worst circumstances, he might as well have collapsed. "Very well, Lord Hokage reached the eastern shores shortly after Sukuna himself…"

Jiraiya listened. At first, he told himself to breathe and let the words settle one by one. But they didn't. Every sentence came like a hammer, keeping him on the edge between anticipation and dread. By the time it was over, the latter froze his blood cold. Sound drained out of the room, replaced by the pounding of his own pulse. His throat went dry, nails bit into his palms.

He'd imagined plenty of bad endings to that fight. That his teacher would, somehow, lose, that Sukuna would get away and cause trouble again. But not this. Not this.

The idea of Master Sarutobi's body, his chakra, his skills and experience, all under the control of that psychopath was unthinkable. It was a catastrophe on the level of the Nine Tails breaking out. Worse. If his access to Master Sarutobi's knowledge was complete, Sukuna could practically waltz into Konoha and tear half of it to shreds before anyone even realized what was happening.

This is my fault. The words like a noose around his neck. I had that creep trapped in my genjutsu, I should've stomped his head into paste when I had the chance!

"My lord, are you alright?"

"Huh," Jiraiya said. Without realizing it, he'd sat down on the bed. Sweat poured down his forehead like rain. "Yeah, I'm fine… Just taking it all in."

"Should I tell the council you aren't well enough to attend?"

If things go poorly, I need you to take over from me. Konoha needs a Hokage. The old man had asked him that before leaving, and Jiraiya had agreed. He just never thought he'd see the day Master Sarutobi would lose, much less get used as a weapon against them.

He'd never wanted the position, never expected to hold it even temporarily. It was always supposed to go to Orochimaru. Instead, the Lord Third had picked him out as his chosen successor, even in the middle of his fight against Sukuna. Maybe his last command to anyone in Konoha.

Jiraiya closed his one good eye, steadying his breath. He allowed himself a few moments of grief, panic and anger at the situation, then set them aside as best he could. There wasn't room or time for it. He rose, straightened himself and looked back at Tanuki.

"No, I'm coming. Gimme a minute to get dressed, then we're going to the council chambers."

The journey took them past hidden corridors beneath the Hokage Residence, past numerous ANBU checkpoints and sealed doors. Narrow passages winded up and down, lit by blue chakra lamps.

Jiraiya approached the double doors to the council chamber, fatigue from his still freshly healed wounds making his movements heavy. He reached for the handle, striking it with his knuckles. It looked farther away than it really was. Jiraiya adjusted quickly and pushed through before any of the ANBU noticed his flub.

The chamber itself was dome-shaped, carved from solid rock and reinforced with steel bams that ran across the ceiling like ribs. More lamps hung from chains, casting pale blue glows on everyone's faces. The floor was polished stone, cold enough that Jiraiya felt it through his sandals. Clan emblems were carved into the walls, some dating back to the founding, others added in as Konoha's influence and power grew.

It was already full. Clan heads occupied the low seats arranged in a horseshoe pattern. All of them were young, younger than Jiraiya himself in most cases. The Second War had taken a great many seasoned shinobi from them. Hiashi Hyuga sat rigid and formal, in his usual immaculate white robes. Wicked Eyes Fugaku scanned the room with a sharp glare beneath in his clan's signature high collar. Shikaku Nara slouched in his seat, but his gaze was alert. Choza Akimichi's massive frame seemed diminished. Shibi Aburame stayed motionless as over, small insects crawled around his exposed knuckles. Tsume Inuzuka's scarred fast was already twisted into a nasty scowl. Inoichi Yamanka face was drawn tight from clear exhaustion.

At the table's head, in positions of honor flanking the Hokage's seat, sat Hokaru and Homura. They looked more ancient in the harish lamplight, adding to their severity. In the back corner, half-hidden in shadow where the lamplight didn't quite reach sat Danzo. The old war hawk's visible eye tracked Jiraiya the second he came in. His cane rested against his chair, his face revealing nothing as usual.

Soon enough, everyone was staring at Jiraiya. Some kept their looks carefully neutral, others showed flashes of worry, sympathy and fear.

"Jiraiya," Hiashi said coolly, he numbered amongst the unbothered ones. "We were told you were still recovering."

"I'm fine." Jiraiya walked along the horseshoe table, toward the seat at its center. The Hokage's seat. He focused hard not to screw up his sense of depth again and sat down into the red leather chair without incident or awkwardness. The moment he was in it, the chair was too big for him. He felt vulnerable, and exposed. The Hokage hat was placed just before him, he eyed it for a moment, judging whether or not to put it on.

He left it where it lay, then exchanged looks with everyone else there.

"I've been brief about what happened already. So let's not waste anymore time repeating what we already know," Jiraiya glanced at Inoichi. "You've been busy with the kid Enma brought, right? Sukuna's previous body? What has the Analysis Team learned from him?"

"... Some very… interesting facts," Inoichi said, struggling to find the words which were wholly unlike him. "While we've only conducted preliminary memory scans of him, what we've found may well change our understanding of…" He trailed off, shaking his head. "I'm sorry. I think it'll be easier for me to show you what I've experienced. I don't think my words could do it justice."
He moved to the center of the room, directly beneath the largest lamp. His hands came together, forming the ram seal. Chakra gathered around him, thick enough to make the air shimmer, then expanded out to encompass everyone seated.

"Mind Body Transmission Jutsu."

The technique activated, and the whole world changed.

Jiraiya gasped as the sensation crashed into him. The dive into someone's else' memories. What started as a black void became a dive through fragments of thoughts, sensations and emotions rushing before Jiraiya's head like a hail of shooting stars.

He began to see through the eyes of Sukuna's body. No, of a boy called Megumi.

A city of towering buildings of metal and glass reaching towards the sky, taller than any he'd ever seen. Vehicles like carriages moved without horses or chakra, their metal bodies gleaming under thousands of lights. There were people everywhere, hundreds of thousands of them dressed in strange clothes, speaking a language similar to theirs but in accents he'd never heard before.

Then came the flashes of monsters. Curses, that's what the boy's mind called them. Grotesque creatures born from the human negativity of… another world. There were people who fought them, jujutsu sorcerers, with powers similar and completely different from chakra. Jiraiya saw flashes of people, a spear wielding girl with glasses, a cheerful guy with pink hair, a white-haired man with a bandage over his eyes.

And then Sukuna appeared.

Jiraiya felt like he was back in his nightmare, falling into an abyss. Pure evil oozed from the memories, sticking to his skin, crawling through his mouth to choke his insides. Every act of murder, every gleeful detail Sukuna had done across two worlds rushed through Jiraiya's head.

But one cut deepest. His sister, taken over by some other maniac too and then killed by Sukuna using Megumi's own technique. The memories and sensations shattered like glass, and the black void came back. But it wasn't Inoichi ending the jutsu, it was Megumi's despair. It had swallowed everything.

He destroyed a kid's will to live just to complete control over a body he'd mostly taken over anyway. What depths he'd sink to, to try and bury Master Sarutobi's much stronger soul, Jiraiya couldn't dare to think about.

The Mind Body Transmission ended.

Jiraiya snapped back into his own body, gasping. His heart hammered against his ribs, sweat poured down his neck. Chosa looked ready to be sick. Tsume's hands shook. Fugaku's Sharigan had activated involuntarily, three tomoe spun slowly before fading away. Even Hiashi's composure cracked, his face pale and drawn.

Only Danzo seemed unmoved, though his visible eye had narrowed slightly.

"That," Inoich said hoarsely. "Is what we're dealing with: a being from another world. A butcher who's carved a bloody swath across two worlds, and a thousand years. Now he's loose in our lands with no intention of stopping."

"The boy's mind," Shikaku's voice was rough. "He's given up."

"Completely," Inoichi sat down, looking older than he had just five minutes ago. "His sister's death, his inability to stop it or the possession - it's too much. He's retreated so deep into himself we can't even wake him up. Just getting this information required a dive so deep we threatened to cause more damage to his psyche."

"But he's the only one who can end this?" Hiashi asked.

"Yes. According to his memories, if a sorcerer is slain by anything other than cursed energy, he can return as a curse. A vengeful spirit, more powerful than before too."

The implications of that settled over the room like an executioner's sword.

"So we're trapped," Choza said quietly. "We can't kill him ourselves. And the one person who can is catatonic."

Jiraiya's hands pressed flat against the table. "Where's Sukuna now?"

"Last reported heading inland," Danzo said. "Moving slowly. Our forces have noted he's… taking his time, testing his newfound abilities as it were. Based on what we've just witnessed, it is likely he will halt at one of the larger settlements in the south-east and make another one of those… baths to refine his control over Hiruzen's body."

"Then we should mobilize everything we have before he does," Tsume snarled, slamming her fist onto the armrest. "If he's even a little bit vulnerable, I say we hit him! Overwhelming force, we can't let him reach the village."

"It will accomplish nothing," Hiashi said next, crossing his arms. "You've seen and felt what we're dealing with. This Sukuna was able to lay waste to an entire village, one of the Great Five Nations, before he even got a taste of chakra. Now he has the strongest Kage alive, the Professor himself, as his vessel. He'll butcher us like dogs."

"So we do nothing? Let that thing walk into Konoha and slaughter us all?"

"An assault meant to seal, not kill, may be the most prudent option," Shibi Aburame interrupted in his usual, neutral tone. "We can't hope to kill him, but a coordinated assault could still put Sukuna away."

"The cost of that will be horrific," Shikaku spoke, all pretense of laziness gone from his posture. "We're talking about possibly using our whole military, and the Nine-Tails if things get really dicey. You think the other villages will sit back and do nothing while every strong shinobi we've got is taking on Sukuna? They'll come at us, and we likely won't have the strength left to fight them off. Assuming we even manage to get rid of Sukuna by the time we're done."

The room soon erupted into arguments. Danzo said nothing, neither did Jiraiya. He let them argue, shout, posture and propose strategies that he knew wouldn't work. He let them burn themselves out while his mind ran through scenarios, trying to find something that could work.

But the answer was always the same: Konoha wasn't winning this fight. Not now anyway.

That left only one option. It was unthinkable, it was impossible. It had to be done.

"We need to evacuate."

The room fell silent. Every head turned toward him. The lamplight cast his shadow long across the polished floor.

"What did you say?" Hiashi asked.

Jiraiya met his gaze. "We evacuate Konoha. Every civilian, every shinobi who can't fight. We get them all out of here before Sukuna arrives."

"That's…" Choza trailed off. "That's abandoning our home."

"That's saving our people," Jiraiya's voice hardened. "We can always rebuild a village. We can't bring back the dead."

"Absolutely not." Koharu's voice cut through the chamber like a blade, her expression severe. "Konoha has stood for generations against every threat. Invasion, rebellion. We do not run."

"Elder Koharu is correct," Homura added, adjusting his glasses with precise movements. "Total evacuation would be seen as surrender. All alliances would vanish, and our enemies would smell blood in the water."

"Our enemies will smell blood when they find our corpses." Jiraiya shot back.

"Then we die defending our home. As shinobi should," Koharu's voice was steel. "Lord Third would never abandon this village. Never."

"Master Sarutobi taught us to take care of our comrades. The people of this village are family, they are the village. If you think he'd want us all to stay and die in an unwinnable fight, you two don't know him at all."

"Abandoning the village may be the best course of action," Shikaku said, rubbing the back of his head. "I don't see any way to kill or seal Sukuna with the way things are now. Not without leaving ourselves extremely vulnerable to attacks from the other villages anyway. But assuming we decide to play dead, there are lots of things standing in our way: where do we put two hundred thousand people? How do we hide them, feed them, and provide medical care?"

"The organization alone would take months, years even," Homura added. "The logistics of it are staggering. Transportation, supply lines, security. We'd need an existing infrastructure to do as you say. It simply doesn't exist."

"What you're proposing is fantasy, Lord Jiraiya," Koharu said. Her tone wasn't cruel, just matter-of-fact. "Well intentioned, but impractical."

Jiraiya looked around the table. Some clan heads were nodding. Others looked more than ready to argue.

"My wife is pregnant," Fugaku said quietly. All eyes turned to the Uchiha clan head. "I'd rather my firstborn child grow up homeless than not grow up at all. If there's a way to ensure their safety, I won't let it be dismissed so easily."

"Nothing about this is easy," Koharu insisted. "Its about reality. Even if we agree in principle, we lack the means. Where would everyone go?"

More arguments erupted around the table. Shikaku's expression told Jiraiya that the Nara was thinking, calculating some way to solve the logistics issues Homura and him had brought up. He'd been running them himself, and the numbers weren't on their side.

Unless.

Jiraiya turned away from the table. Fixed his gaze on the shadows in the back corner.

"Danzo."

The room fell silent. Every head turned toward the war hawk.

"You were Lord Second's student," Jiraiya said with a steady, purposeful voice. "You worked with him on village security, then with Master Sarutobi. You've spent decades working in the shadows of Konoha, forming secrets within layers of secrets so too deep it'd make most men's heads spin."

Danzo's visible eye studied him, unblinking.

"Lord Tobirama and Master Hiruzen would've trusted you with information they wouldn't to anyone else," Jiraiya met and matched the one-eyed gaze with his own. "Maybe even information they wouldn't want themselves to know about either. Do any contingencies exist? Are there any evacuation plans no one here is aware of?"

Silence stretched. Koharu's expression sharpened.

"Danzo?" Her voice carried an edge. "What is he talking about?"

"If such facilities existed," Homura said slowly. "Surely, they would have been mentioned already. We would have been informed-"

"Yes," Danzo said.

The word struck everyone like a punch to the gut.

Jiraiya saw Koharu's hand clench on the table. "That's-"

"Impossible?" Danzo's mouth curved slightly. He rose, stepped into the lamplight. His cane tapped against stone with each step. "Lord Tobirama was a cautious, forward thinking man. He knew the possibility of a village falling was a danger that needed to be accounted for. Routes. Bunkers. Supply caches. An entire network spanning the Land of Fire, designed to hide our population in the event of such catastrophe."

"Lord Third never-" Homura started.

"He never knew the full extent, by design," Danzo finished. "Compartmentiliziation. A lesson we all learned when we watched Uzushiogakure's fall." He looked at his fellow Council members directly, and for once, Jiraiya was glad to have the old bastard around. "Our closest allies, destroyed in a single night. Why? Because a member of their leadership had been captured, interrogated and all their secrets laid bare."

"If this is true," Koharu's voice was strained. "What did Hiruzen know?"

"A handful of cache locations I deemed expendable enough to share. All presented as part of standard emergency supply protocols. But nothing of the full extent of the network. These are underground complexes, some natural caverns expanded with Earth Style, others built from scratch. Water supplies maintained with jutsu. Ventilation systems, Storage for months of supplies. Lord Tobirama created the initial designs, ROOT operatives have built upon and maintained it for decades."

Homura removed his glasses completely. He cleaned them with deliberate care, buying time to think. "This changes the calculus considerably. With such an infrastructure…"

"We could actually do it," Choza said, with some relief in his voice for the first time. "We could evacuate the whole village, and Sukuna'll never know where we've gone."
"How many people can these hideouts hold?" Shikaku asked, leaning forward.

"Total capacity across all primary sites exceeds one hundred and seventy thousand. Secondary and tertiary locations could absorb overflow." Danzō's tone was matter-of-fact. "The evacuation routes are designed for rapid deployment. We could have the village empty within forty-eight hours."

"Forty-eight hours," Fugaku repeated. "That's… actually possible."

"Only if we move now," Jiraiya said, picking up on the momentum of the conversation. He couldn't let it slip through his fingers. "Any delays buys Sukuna time to get here and end us all."

Koharu looked at Homura. More silent communication.

Come on. You don't have to like me or my idea, but for once just shut up and say yes! Jiraiya wanted to scream at them. He'd fought the urge plenty of times before, it took all he took not to do it this time.

"If we're wrong about this?" Homura asked.

"You really want to bet two-hundred thousand people's lives to answer that?"

Homura was quiet for a long moment. Then he replaced his glasses, settling them precisely on his nose. "No," he said. "I don't."

"Say we leave," Hiashi said. "What then? If Sukuna can only be killed by cursed energy, then we're placing the future of Konoha in the hands of a traumatized child who's lost the will to live."

"I've got an idea who can help us with that," Jiraiya knew that was going to be a pain in the ass all on its own. But it was their best shot. "But if Megumi can't recover, he's still a source of information for us. He can reveal to us more about Sukuna, some weakness we can exploit to win this. But we've got to live long enough to find it out, first."

"I support the evacuation," Fugaku's voice cut through the tension. His expression was grim and resolute. "Konoha is the people within it. So long as even one of us stands, the Will of Fire won't be snuffed out. In-fact, my clan will handle rear-guard duty. If Sukuna approaches, we will do our best to buy you time."

"You're not doing it alone," Tsume said with a grin. "Your eyes might be sharp, but we'll smell that creep long before any of your guys spot him."

"We mustn't forget about the other villages," Inoichi said, rubbing the side of his temple. "When they hear Konoha has fallen, they'll see an opportunity."

That's an understatement. The realities of war might've slowed down the fighting, but once it was known Konoha and Kirigakure were down, the remaining three's first reaction would be to claim territory, fight over scraps and try to absorb scattered Konoha forces.

But as he considered it further, maybe that was exactly what needed to happen.

"We'll tell them," Jiraiya said.

The room stared at him.

Jiraiya's mouth went dry for a second, then his voice found a steady, dangerous calm. "We tell them everything. Not hints. Not half-truths wrapped in diplomacy. We make Sukuna a real threat to all the villages. He's destroyed Kirigakure, and now he'll seemingly destroy Konoha. Two of the Five Great Nations down, who's next?" He paused. "We use our operatives abroad to keep an eye on their reactions to this news. If they take this seriously, we can use it to our advantage, help build an alliance to take that freak down."

"Or they will dismiss it outright. Trickery is the way of shinobi," Danzo replied.

"Then they'll learn the hard way," Jiraiya's voice went cold. "Sukuna will go after somebody next, especially once we deprive him of his fun. Whoever it is, they're going to see we weren't screwing around. Maybe after they've lost their own Kage, their own villages, they'll listen to us."

Danzo studied him, even deigned to open his one good eye.

"You're betting everything on fear," the old war hawk said. "In the hope our enemies will see the bigger picture before it's too late."

"I'm betting on survival instinct. Everyone wants to live," Jiraiya met his gaze. "Even our enemies."

"And if you're wrong?"

Jiraiya said nothing, a terrible weight settled on his shoulders. It twisted his insides into knots. But he didn't let it show. He couldn't. That wasn't a luxury he had anymore.

"Then Sukuna will wipe them all out, and we'll be the only ones left to stop him." And the only one of the Five Great Nations left after the crisis passed. Assuming they won.

For a long moment, Danzo said nothing. His expression stayed unreadable at first. Then, slowly, he smiled.

"Very well," He said, tilting his head. "I'll ensure the information reaches the appropriate channels. Quietly at first. Whispers and rumors. They'll become louder once Sukuna razes the village to the ground."

"Then let's get to work on emptying it before that happens," Jiraiya slammed his palm onto the table. Eager, desperate, to move the conversation back to something slightly less dreadful.

The remainder of the meeting passed as smoothly as could be. Duties were assigned, more question marks were answered to varying degrees of satisfaction. Jiraiya kept mental notes of all their duties, and one for himself to get a ledger or something as soon as possible. His head was already primed to explode from everything.

The councilors rose one by one. Some by themselves, others talking amongst themselves to coordinate efforts, pre-plan for issues they had to resolve without Jiraiya's input. Some gave curt nods, others bowed.

I should be lucky they're not lynching me. Abandoning the village isn't exactly a great start for any Hokage.

Koharu, Homura and Danzo lingered behind. Jiraiya watched them closely, already steeling himself for any biting remarks about his poor leadership.

"For what it's worth," Homura said quietly. "I hope your idea works. That this saves lives rather than costs them."

"You and me both," Jiraiya answered.

"Hiruzen chose you for a reason," Komura said. "I disagreed with that choice. I still do, but he saw something in you." Her expression was unreadable. "Don't make me regret supporting you."

The two left without another word, but bowed all the same. Tradition dictated one bows to a superior when greeting or bidding farewell to them, even if they hate that superior's guts.

And then there was one. Jiraiya tried to lean back into the seat, to relax. But it didn't work. Sitting there still felt wrong. Probably more so than when the meeting started. It didn't help Danzo stared at him with that calculating look of his.

"You've surprised me," He said in a quiet voice. "I expected hesitation. Doubt. Perhaps even refusal to accept the responsibility placed on you."

"I never wanted this," Jiraiya tried not to sound petulant. "Never."

"And yet you've made the choices a Hokage must make. Sacrifice the symbol to save the substance," Danzo smiled again, he looked almost approvingly at him from across the room. "Hiruzen would have agonized over abandoning the village for a while longer but you? You saw it needed to be done, and did it. No hesitation, or sentimentality."

"Don't mistake this for strength. I'm just doing what I have to."

"That's exactly what strength is, Lord Fourth Hokage."

Jiraiya almost recoiled as if struck. His breath caught. Danzo bowed his head then left the chamber too before Jiraiya could say anything.

The Hokage's seat felt more uncomfortable by orders of magnitude. The hat of the office, his teacher's just days ago, was still on the table. Jiraiya stared at it. Red and white. The kanji for "fire" emblazoned across the front. Three men wore it before him. Legends of Konoha, of the whole shinobi world.

He picked it up. The fabric was softer than he expected. But heavy too.

Too big. He thought, staring at it for what felt like hours. It's too big for me.

But he put it on anyway.

Chapter Text

Jiraiya stood on the Hokage Tower's roof, observing his home come apart piece by piece. The sun cast long shadows across Konoha's streets, painting everything in shades of gold and grey. Below, thousands of people in organized streams moved to hidden assembly points. Shinobi of all ranks and clans guided civilians, children cried, confused about why they were leaving their homes. Some of the adults agreed, and made their displeasure known for everyone to see.

The tower itself was a hive of activity too. Mission desks had been stripped, scrolls packed into sealed containers. The walls, usually covered with maps and assignments boards, stood bare. Even Master Sarutobis, no, his office, three floors down, was being systematically emptied.

Jiraiya's fingers drummed against the roof's edge. He stood slightly farther back from it than he used to. The scars across his face pulled tight when he frowned, and his milky white eye flinched from the sunlight. The Hokage's hat sat heavy on his head, the fabric warmed his face to an uncomfortable degree.

Below, a family suddenly stopped in the middle of the street. A mother knelt, tying his crying daughter's sandals. The father carried a pack nearly as big as he was. The girl pointed back at their house, a modest two-story building with blue shutters and a tiny garden. Even from this height, Jiraiya could guess her question: why are we leaving home?

The parents calmed her down, and miserable kept walking along.

Jiraiya turned away.

"Lord Hokage," Shikaku Nara appeared at the roof's access door with a scroll tucked under his arm. "The Nara compound is clear. We're moving to assembly point three?"

"Any issues?"

"The deer didn't want to leave," Shikaku's mouth twitched into a faint smile. "But we know how to make them listen. Everything else went smoothly."

"Good," Jiraiya turned back to the streets, his working eye scanning the crowds again. "What about the other clans?"

"The Hyuga not helping with scouting duty are already at their assigned point. The Uchiha not on guard duty are still packing up. Fugaku says they should be done in a couple of hours. Aburame, Inuzuka and Akimichi are in transit," Shikaku worked his way down the list, no major issues. "The Academy's being emptied, the hospital is close to it. They've got the most critical patients out already. Civilian sectors one through four are clear."

Four sectors down. Eight to go.

"How long until we're out of here?"

"At the current pace? Assuming nothing goes wrong, we're on track to have the evacuation done as per Danzo's estimate of fourty-eight hours. "

Shikaku unrolled the scroll, revealing a detailed map marked with routes and timetables. Red ink marked completed sections, blue were in-progress and black were the most critical.

"Northern districts are on schedule. But we're behind on the east, a lot of elderly residents are there. It's troublesome to move them quickly," He sighed. "A lot of them don't wanna go, they're pretty…"

"Pissed off?"

"That's an understatement. I've already told forces in the north to be pulled east."

Jiraiya knew it was a bad idea before even asking, but he couldn't help himself. "Maybe I should go there, try and smooth things over?"

"With all due respect, Lord Hokage, but I'd rather you didn't." He said, looking apologetic. "A lot of folks are understandably not taking this well. You showing up right now to try and convince them could backfire badly. I think it's better for you to… keep some distance for now. At least until people settle down in our new home."

Jiraiya felt like arguing against that. He was the Hokage, such as he was, the people needed to know he wasn't doing this lightly. That he was doing it for the long-term good of the village.

But who says they'll believe me. The fact stung as much as another cut from Sukuna. That they'll give a damn what my reasons are.

Jiraiya's shoulders sagged, his stomach growled. He hadn't eaten anything since yesterday. Not that he had much of an appetite.

"Alright, I got the message. I'll stay out of people's way. Gimme the rest of the report."

-------

The day passed in a blur of more reports, decisions and adjustments.

Midday brought complications too. A building in the western districts collapsed during the evacuation. Faulty construction that weakened the foundations finally gave way. Three people were trapped in the rubble. Jiraiya dispatched an Earth Style user and a medical team. They got everyone out within minutes. Minor injuries, no casualties. But it didn't improve people's mood.

Evacuating the east stayed miserably slow. The elderly residents and their immediate families still refused to leave in high numbers. Akimichi clansmen were re-routed from the almost vacant northern areas, helping to carry supplies and the infirm. Their expansion jutsu made them a formidable sight too, cooling a lot of tempers.

Fights had broken out at various points with the rearguard. Refugees from surrounding villages tried to enter Konoha, seeking shelter. The guardsmen had to turn them away, directing them elsewhere. Many didn't take kindly to this, and dozens had to be forced at sword or knife point to back off.

Jiraiya knew exactly who they were running from, and if Sukuna found them again, he knew they'd curse his name till the day they died.

They all took solace from the fact Sukuna hadn't moved an inch from the town he'd been last seen in. None of their scouting forces dared to get too close. The danger was too great and the devastation they saw from afar was sickening. There wasn't a living soul left inside, confirming Danzo's guess of another bloodbath.

The others assumed that due to having no cursed spirits, the bath wasn't as effective as it was on Megumi. But Jiraiya liked to think any delay was thanks to Master Sarutobi fighting from inside that monster. Whatever the reason, relaxing wasn't an option. If Sukuna decided to make a beeline for the village, he could reach Konoha within just a few hours.

By evening, Jiraiya descended from the tower as the sun touched the western horizon. His legs protested the stairs, muscles stiff from standing too long. His stomach growled louder than before. He ignored it on his way to the Hokage Office.

His sandals clicked against wood worn smooth by decades of footsteps. The walls, once decorated with the portraits of the previous Hokages, had been taken down. Only outlines remind where they'd hung hung, clean rectangles of paint against sun-fadded walls.

He pushed the door open to his teacher's - to his - office.

The place felt massive without the usual clutter. The desk stayed, but the bookshelves were empty. The large window behind the desk overlooked the village. Jiraiya stared through it, and witnessed its slow demise - lights turning off in houses one by one as families departed.

Jiraiya took the Hokage hat off and turned it over in his hands. The inside was stained with sweat. It was heavy.

"Still doesn't fit."

He set it on the desk and slumped into the chair. Or tried to. His hip caught the armrest before he adjusted. The leather creaked under his weight, worn smooth by decades of use. Just for a moment. Just to breathe without needing to handle something, or get stuck in his own head.

"Lord Hokage," An ANBU operative with a fox mask appeared, slightly out of breath. "My apologies. Urgent report from the eastern district."

Jiraiya suppressed a very heavy sigh. "What happened?"

"Arson, my lord. Three civilians deliberately set fire to their homes before evacuating. Their intent was to stop anyone from looting any belongings they'd left behind. But the fires spread, destroying several more homes and wreaking havoc with evacuation lines. No casualties reported, and we've apprehended the perpetrators."

Unbelievable. People are scared enough as is and now these morons try this- Jiraiya unclenched his jaw, forced himself to breathe.

"The perpetrators," He said slowly. "They're still evacuated?They didn't try to stay behind?"

"No, sir. Once we found them, they put up no resistance."

"Alright. Separate them, re-assign them to different hideouts, away from their families initially." Jiraiya stood, placing the hat back on his head. "Assign discrete supervision. No guards, just someone to keep an eye on them. We can't let something like this happen once we're underground."

"No formal charges?"

"Being separated from their loved ones is punishment enough. Once they look like they can behave themselves, they'll reunite with them. But I want them to sweat first."

With only a passing acknowledgement to the fatigue he still felt, Jiraiya walked back to the door, gesturing to the ANBU to follow. "What about the route, any problems there?"

The rest of the report followed, and many more would during the night.

-------

The next day didn't get any easier.

Jiraiya managed three hours of sleep. He'd returned to Master Sarutobi's office, collapsed on the desk and woke with a crick in his neck. Somebody had left water and rice balls on its corner. He misjudged where the glass was and spilled the water all over the desk. The rice he ate mechanically, barely tasting either. He could've killed someone for some sake.

Almost the moment he put his chop sticks down, more reports flooded in. Some sectors had been completely emptied. Others were still in progress. The eastern districts were close to being emptied, and everyone was glad of it.

The rear guard reported no enemy contact. Sukuna still hadn't moved from his last known location. Jiraiya took more comfort from that. Every hour he stayed there was another they got closer to saving everyone and pissing him off to boot.

Around midday, he got some time to himself. With a final look at a place he'd been assigned to and argued for or against certain missions, especially during his kid days, Jiraiya bade farewell to the office.

He decided to walk through the empty parts of the village, taking inventory of it all. The marketplace was a ghost town of stalls still set up but stripped of goods. A blacksmith's forge sat cold, tools arranged neatly on a workbench. Stands of food and drinks where he'd eaten and drank himself silly stood empty. The sounds of laughter, arguing and haggling were all gone.

The residential district was even creepier. Homes with their doors left open. Gardens still tended, vegetables growing in neat rows. He spotted toys, clothes and other belongings discarded on the streets and yards, swings hanging motionless from tree branches.

It was lunch time when he arrived at the training grounds. This was where he'd learned from his teacher, and taught Minato. The practice dummies were gone, weapon racks emptied. Even the memorial stone had been covered with protective seals.

He knew they wouldn't hold.

The field felt oppressive in its silence. Jiraiya almost thought he could hear the echoes of students shouting, weapons clashing, jutsu firing off in all directions. But it was just in his head. All of that was gone.

A footstep scraped behind him.

Jiraiya turned. His hand moved toward a kunai before he registered who made it.

Orochimaru.

His old teammate looked travel-worn. Dusty clothes from days of hard running, his pale face drawn with exhaustion. Those golden eyes swept across the empty grounds, the abandoned village off in the distance and finally settled on Jiraiya.

"You're back." Jiraiya's voice came out rougher than intended.

"Apparently I've returned at an inopportune time," He crossed his arms. "Care to explain why Konoha is being abandoned?"

Jiraiya told him everything. From Kirigakure to the eastern coast, from Sukuna's possession to the council's emergency session. He kept it clinical, factual. Left out his own doubts, his fears, the crushing weight of every decision. He had a feeling Orochimaru would pick at those. His old comrade always did know how to make him feel bad with words alone. Nevermind the skill disparity between them.

Orochimaru didn't snipe at him, and listened without interruption. His expression remained neutral, but something flickered in his eyes when Jiraiya mentioned Hiruzen's fate. Grief, maybe. Or rage. It vanished before Jiraiya could identify it.

"I see," Orochimaru's voice stayed emotionless. "And the decision to evacuate was yours?"

"It had to be done."

"That wasn't what I asked."

Jiraiya's jaw tightened. "Yeah, I made it."

"Interesting," Orochimaru turned away, studying the emptying village some more. "Almost as interesting as Master Sarutobi choosing you as his successor."

Jiraiya knew that was coming, but it knocked some wind out of his sails all the same. Everyone knew Orochimaru was the favorite of the three of them, the most talented. It was a foregone conclusion he'd be Lord Fourth.

"He-" The words stuck. "Look, we're still sifting through Megumi Fushiguro's memories. We know Sukuna can jump between bodies, there may be a way we can kick him out of Master Sarutobi."

"Perhaps we can, perhaps we can't. It doesn't matter at present. You're Fourth Hokage, Jiraiya. Not 'acting.' Not 'temporary.' The position is yours until you die or step down. Lying to yourself about it won't change reality."

"I'm not-" Jiraiya stopped, resisting the urge to try and punch him. "When this is over, when Sukuna's dealt with, we can sit down and choose a Hokage outside of a crisis-"

"Someone like me?" Orochimaru's mouth curved slightly. "How modest of you to suggest alternatives now that you've already accepted the hat."
"That's not what I meant."

"No. You meant you're hoping someone will relieve you of responsibility you never wanted." Orochimaru walked toward the memorial stone, examined the protective seals. "But they won't. You made the choice. You wear the hat. You gave the order to everyone in the village. Congratulations, Lord Fourth. You're stuck with it."

The title hit harder than any criticism. Because Orochimaru was right. The council had formalized it. The clan heads had accepted it. The people were calling him Lord Hokage, not 'acting Hokage' or 'interim leader.'

"Why do you say that like you're criticizing it then?"

"I'm not," But his eyes said otherwise. "You asked for my assessment. I'm giving it, you chose the populace over buildings. It's the logical call."

The distance between them felt vast, maybe wider than it'd ever been before. They'd been teammates once. Jiraiya even counted him as a friend, despite their many differences. But this was different. They were comrades still, but Jiraiya was now formally his superior. His boss when he wasn't even sure he could ever take him in a fight.

It didn't help that he knew Orochimaru was judging him. The fact he was acting detached only proved how much this bothered him. You always acted like this. Putting distance, or being an ass instead of showing some human emotion.

"What do you need me to do?" Orochimaru asked finally?

Telling me I've got this would help. Give me some encouragement. Jiraiya almost laughed at that. But there wasn't time for jokes or doubt. There was more to deal with.

"I know you just got back, but I need you out there again. First to help the rear guard in-case Sukuna comes. He hasn't moved from his last known location, but that doesn't mean we're safe. I'd feel better knowing you're around to help protect the village."

"And after that?"

"Megumi Fushiguro is a mental wreck and a trove of key information about Sukuna. If we're gonna win this, we need him well."

Orochimaru glanced back at the stone. He'd been there when Nawaki and Dan both died, two names cut into that rock by Tsunade herself.

"Where is she?"

"The last report placed her somewhere on the southern coast. Gambling, drinking, the usual."

"I'll find her."

"Just like that?"

"Would you prefer I argue about it?" His expression was unreadable. "We'll need all three Sannin to beat Sukuna. I'll get her back, one way or another."

Something in his tone made it sound less like cooperation and more like obligation. Like he was doing this despite Jiraiya, not for him.

"Thank you," Jiraiya said anyway.

"Don't thank me yet." He walked past Jiraiya toward the village. "You may not like what I bring back."

-------

By evening it was all over.

Jiraiya took one final stroll through Konoha. Alone.

The streets were dead silent. No footsteps, voices or sounds of life. Just the warm wind whistling through empty buildings and the distant creak of gates swinging loose on their hinges.

The Academy, the Hospital, the hot springs. Not a soul in sight anywhere. Just ghosts, memories of times that might not ever come back.

The Hokage Monument loomed over it all. Three faces carved into the stone, watching over the village they'd built and protected. Even in the dark, Jiraiya could make out the weathered features perfectly.

What would you have done? He asked Lord First and Second. Would you have fought instead and won? Would you guys have made the same call?

The stones were quiet.

At the gates, Fukage waited with the last rear-guard team. The Uchiha head nodded as Jiraiya approached.

"I've pulled everyone out. No sign of Sukuna anywhere."

"That's a relief," Jiraiya meant it, feeling at least a little better no one had been killed these past two days. "I guess there's nothing left to do here…"

Fugaku studied him for a bit. "For what it's worth, Lord Hokage, I believe you've made the right decision. My clan is safe. Everyone we're sworn to protect are too. What's what matters."

Jiraiya wished he could believe that with the same certainty. Instead, he flashed a smile. "Yeah, let's get out of here fellas. Time to… leave Konoha behind."

They walked through the gates together, the rear guard falling in around them. Behind them, the village sat dark and empty.

Jiraiya knew even if they won, and rebuilt, the Konoha of old had effectively died that day.

-------

The hideout was a cavern system eighty miles northeast of Konoha. Jiraiya arrived just after midnight, the reverse-summoning jutsu bringing him, Fugaku and the rear-guard there instantly.

The entrance was hidden behind a waterfall, accessible only through a narrow passage. Inside, the space opened up into a vast network. The first chamber alone could hold fifty thousand people, with smaller passages branching off into separate areas or sections.

It was nearly full.

Families by the hundreds crowded together in sectioned-off areas, marked by clan symbols. Children slept on bedrolls, exhausted from the journey. Adults huddled around small cooking fires. The air was thick with the smell of too many people in too small a space, but the organization was impressive. Earth Style users had carved out additional chambers. Water Style users maintained fresh water supplies. Fire Style users controlled the cooking areas.

Chakra lamps hung from the ceiling at regular intervals, casting everything in a clear light, reminiscent of the sun. Supply crates lined the walls. Clan heads moved through their sections, maintaining order.

Shikaku found him near the cavern's center. "Lord Hokage. Final count across all primary hideouts: full population evacuated. No one was left behind or killed in the evacuation. "

"Supply status?" Jiraiya asked.

"Better than expected." Shikaku pulled out another scroll. "Between stored supplies and what our shinobi can produce—Earth Style for expanding living space, Water Style for fresh water—we can sustain ourselves for at least nine months."

Nine months, living like this? Jiraiya knew it was a matter of a few weeks, maybe less, before it started getting to people. Holding order, and hope, down there wouldn't be easy.

"The council is requesting your presence," Shikaku continued. "We need to formalize your position as Hokage. Make it official."

"Can't that wait?"

"Not really. People need to know who's leading them. Especially now." Shikaku's expression was firm. "You're already doing the job. Might as well have the ceremony to go with it."

Jiraiya wanted to argue. Wasn't ready, wasn't worthy, wasn't the right choice. But Shikaku was right. People needed certainty.

"Where?"

"Northern chamber. The clan heads are already waiting."

-------

The place was smaller, maybe fifty feet across with smooth walls that showed signs of careful Earth Style construction. More lamps cast long shadows across the assembled crowd.

The clan heads stood in a loose semicircle. Members of the oldest ones at the forefront, with clans who'd joined later in the back. Koharu and Utatane, Homura Mitokado and Danzo stood on a pedestal at the center of the room.

Waiting to formalize him as Hokage.

Jiraiya's hand reached for the brim of his hat.

Koharu stepped forward.

"We've gathered here not in celebration, but in necessity," Her voice echoed off the stone walls with a power he hadn't heard before. "Our village is lost. The Professor has been… turned against us. But our people survive and look to a new leader."

She looked at Jiraiya directly. Eyes that'd seen three Hokages come and go now fixed on the fourth.

"You have worn the hat these past three days, Jiraiya of the Sannin. You've given the orders, made the key choices. You left the village behind, and brought our people here. These and more decisions will haunt you until the end of your days," Her voice softened slightly. "You've already done a Hokage's work. Now we ask you accept the title officially."

The hat sat heavy on his head. He'd been wearing it, acting in the role. But saying the words made it permanent. No more pretending it was temporary.

"I accept." His voice came out steady. "I'll protect them. All of them. Whatever it takes."

Homura nodded. "Then by the authority granted to us as advisors to three Hokages before you, and with the consent of this council, we formally recognize you as Jiraiya, Fourth Hokage of Konohagakure."

Koharu's expression was unreadable. "May the Will of Fire guide your decisions. May your strength protect our people. May wisdom grant you the judgment to lead us back home."

Silence.

Then Shikaku stepped forward and bowed. "Lord Fourth."

One by one, the others followed. Clan heads, jonin, civilians at the entrance. All bowing, acknowledging what had been true but was now official.

The ceremony ended. People dispersed. Somewhere, someone sang a lullaby—soft and sad.

Jiraiya adjusted the hat. Still too big. Still felt wrong.

But it was his now. Officially.

I hope you knew what you were doing, sensei. Cause I sure as hell still don't.