Hiruzen landed with a soft, precise crunch of gravel under his sandals. He stood now, his back to the distant, frozen mist where his ally fought, his entire being focused on the two men before him. Opposite him, the geography of conflict had been rewritten. The ground was a patchwork of devastation: craters from Ay's fists, smooth, glassy patches where Particle Release had erased reality, and now, the creeping, malevolent expanse of black iron sand that pulsed with a low, magnetic hum.
In the near distance, the secondary storm raged. Hiroshi was a spectre of calm within his own wintry tempest. Opposite him, the Third Raikage was a living thunderclap, a being of pure, unadulterated violence. They crashed together not as two men, but as opposing weather systems. "CRRRRR-ACK!"
A lance of lightning met a shield of layered permafrost, the sound a physical blow to the air itself. There were no words between them yet, only the silent, calculating spread of ice and the roaring, relentless fury of lightning.
For a long, suspended moment, no one on Hiruzen's front spoke. The only sounds were the visceral surges of chakra—a deep, earth-shaking rumble from Onoki, a high-pitched, grating whine from the manipulating iron sand, and the whisper of the wind gathering itself, building towards the inevitable storm overhead.
Hiruzen's eyes darted across the new formation. Onoki floated a few feet higher, his small frame belying the immense, terrifying power that hummed around his outstretched hands. Simultaneously, Saitetsu, though pale from the grievous ice-wound, exerted his will. The black sand, slower than its golden cousin but infinitely more deadly, began to spread in a slow, deliberate radius around him, a creeping tide of microscopic blades. It wasn't an aggressive lunge, but a strategic placement, creating a death zone, a killing field that would shred anything that entered.
And they were working in perfect, chilling tandem. Onoki took the high ground, controlling the vertical space, while Saitetsu sealed the horizontal. It was a flawless pincer manoeuvre born of desperate necessity.
A slow, knowing smirk touched Hiruzen's lips.
"How curious," he mused, "War does have a way of… bringing old friends together." His eyes flicked from Onoki's tense face to Saitetsu's pained grimace. "Even ones who'd rather carve each other into sand dunes and gravel."
Saitetsu gritted his teeth. Onoki merely scoffed, his focus never wavering from the prism of light forming between his hands. "Save your psychoanalysis for your students, Sarutobi," the Tsuchikage bit out. But neither denied it. The irony hung thick in the charged air, a tangible thing—alliances born from necessity, not trust, a fragile bridge built over a chasm of ancient hatreds.
Hiruzen stomped a foot. "Doton: Doryū Sōheki!" (Earth Release: Earth-Style Wall!)
A massive wall of earth erupted not as a defence, but to stabilise the very ground under his feet, countering the magnetic pull Saitetsu was exerting on the iron-rich soil, trying to upset his footing.
Seeing Onoki adjust his angle for a clearer shot, Hiruzen's hands flew through another sequence.
"Fūton: Daitoppa!" (Wind Release: Great Breakthrough!)
But he aimed the gale not at Onoki, but at the air pressure around him. The howling wind distorted the atmosphere, creating turbulent pockets that made the floating Tsuchikage wobble, his flight becoming unstable, disrupting the pinpoint accuracy required for his Dust Release.
Saitetsu sent a wave of black sand, condensing it into a swarm of needle-sharp projectiles. Hiruzen responded without missing a beat, a tiger seal forming.
"Katon: Gōryūka no Jutsu!" (Fire Release: Great Dragon Fire Technique!)
A colossal fire dragon roared forth, its superheated breath not aimed to incinerate the sand, but to wash over it. The result was instantaneous—the leading edge of the iron sand glowed red, then orange, melting into sluggish, molten droplets. Saitetsu grunted, forced to pull back his chakra and reform his medium, his control visibly strained by his injury.
Onoki tested him with precise Dust pulses—thin, brilliant lines of light that lanced out, smaller than his full-powered technique, meant to probe Hiruzen's reactions and force him into a pattern.
"FZZZ-ZAP!"
A line of light erased a boulder Hiruzen had been standing on a millisecond before. The Hokage was already gone, using Body Flicker to reappear elsewhere, while a shadow clone he'd left behind was caught in another pulse, vanishing into nothingness without a sound.
It became a mental battle as much as a physical one. Saitetsu, drawing on a lifetime of desert warfare experience, adapted. His sand no longer formed simple waves or spears. It coiled into razor-edged serpents that could strike from multiple angles, or condensed into dense, interlocking defence spheres around Onoki, forcing Hiruzen to break his rhythm to dismantle them.
=====
Far away from the cerebral duel, the fight between Hiroshi and the Raikage was a primal poem of force and counter-force. The Raikage charged like a thunderhead given flesh—direct, overwhelming, brutally simple in its intent.
"BOOM!"
His footfalls cratered the earth. He was a blur of blue-white light, a living comet.
Hiroshi, in stark contrast, was the glacier meeting the comet. He did not meet force with force; he met it with angles, redirection, and total terrain alteration. As Ay blitzed forward, the Mizukage's hands barely twitched. The ground in a fifty-foot radius flash-froze into a complex, irregular pattern of slick black ice and jagged, rising pillars. The Raikage was forced to constantly adjust his footing, his incredible speed becoming a liability as he fought for traction.
"Kiri cowards always hide behind mist and tricks!" Ay bellowed, his voice echoing like god's own thunder. He didn't dodge an oncoming ice pillar; he simply lowered his shoulder and shattered it, the explosion of frozen shrapnel clouding the air around him.
From within the mist, Hiroshi's voice was calm, cold, and cutting as the ice he commanded. "And Kumo brutes always mistake volume for strength." Every word was a calculated barb, an attempt to enrage the already furious Raikage into making a mistake.
Every exchange between them was a cataclysm in miniature. A lightning-cloaked fist meeting an ice shield sent a shockwave through the mist and a shower of diamond-bright sparks spiralling into the darkening sky. The storm cloud above, a passive observer until now, began to churn in sympathy, growing darker, heavier, pregnant with a rain that had yet to fall.
=====
Back with Hiruzen, the battle was reaching its climax. Onoki and Saitetsu, realising their gradual pressure was being systematically dismantled, committed to a coordinated finisher.
"Now, Saitetsu!" Onoki roared, his voice losing its usual crotchety tone and filling with deadly intent. He brought his hands together, and the humming, prismatic light between them compressed into a terrifyingly bright, narrow line—a precision erasure beam that could bisect a mountain.
Simultaneously, Saitetsu, sweat and blood mingling on his brow, poured the remainder of his strength into his sand. The black iron sand coalesced not into a wave, but into three dense, tungsten-hard spears, each the size of a tree trunk, poised directly in Hiruzen's predicted dodging path. The moment he moved to avoid the Dust Release, the spears would fire, impaling him.
Hiruzen's mind calculated the odds in a fraction of a second. A direct defence was impossible. So, he gambled.
He created a single, perfectly crafted shadow clone. As Onoki's Dust Line lanced out with a sound like tearing reality—FZZZRRRRT!—the clone deliberately hesitated, making itself the perfect target.
The real Hiruzen moved. He didn't jump back or to the side. He went low, plunging through the disturbed earth and under the trajectory of the iron spears.
He emerged a breath away from Saitetsu, whose eyes widened in shock and pain.
"Too slow," Hiruzen stated, his voice flat and final. He slammed the butt of his Enma staff into the ground.
"Doton: Yado Kuzushi!" (Earth Release: Landslide!)
The seismic vibrations ripped through the sand field, not enough to harm Saitetsu directly, but more than enough to disrupt his delicate chakra control. The iron spears wavered, their forms blurring for a critical instant.
It didn't defeat them. But it broke their flawless, deadly coordination. And for the Professor, that was all he had ever needed.
=====
As Hiruzen's gambit paid off, so too did the Raikage's relentless pressure. The glacial field was now a testament to their conflict—half a beautiful, frozen cathedral, half a field of shattered rubble. Hiroshi, seeing an opening as the Raikage overextended on a punch, moved with elegant finality. He weaved seals, and the ice at Ay's feet erupted, not to pierce, but to bind, seeking to encase the Raikage's lightning-cloaked arm in a cocoon of absolute-zero ice.
But Ay, for all his brute force, was a veteran of a thousand battles. He anticipated it. Instead of pulling back, he committed forward with a roar, using the motion to spin. His other arm, sheathed in crackling lightning, came around not in a punch, but in a devastating, full-force clothesline.
The Mizukage's eyes widened. There was no time to reset his defences. The lightning-cloaked forearm tore across Hiroshi's side.
"SHKRKKK!"
The sound was horrific—a mix of ripping flesh, sizzling energy, and the bizarre crackle of blood flash-freezing the moment it met the air. Hiroshi was flung backwards, a spray of crimson ice crystals tracing his trajectory.
He landed hard, skidding across the frozen ground, his hand clamping over the grievous wound. He staggered to his feet, his breath, once measured and calm, now coming in ragged, pained gasps. The mist that had obeyed his every whim for hours now seemed to tremble with his uneven breath, the first real injury he had taken in this entire, long war.
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