The rain, which had begun as a mournful drizzle, was now a relentless, diagonal downpour, sheeting across the broken landscape of what had once been a serene valley. It turned the frozen patches of Hiroshi's Ice domain into treacherous, slick glass and the churned earth of Onoki's and Hiruzen's exchanges into a clinging, heavy mud. The black iron sand, sluggish from Saitetsu's injury and the soaking rain, moved like a wounded serpent, its malevolent hum dampened.
It was in this waterlogged hell that Hiruzen Sarutobi's world narrowed to a single, catastrophic data point. His peripheral vision, honed by decades of war, caught the stumble. It was minuscule, a fractional break in the Mizukage's impeccable posture.
Hiroshi, his hand clamped over the sizzling, frozen gash on his side, failed to fully pivot away from a feint by the Raikage. His foot slipped on his own ice, his body twisting to compensate, a grimace of pure, undiluted pain flashing across his normally impassive features. It lasted less than a second, but for Hiruzen, it was an eternity.
'If Hiroshi falls, it becomes one against three.'
The equation simplified in his mind with brutal clarity. Saitetsu was wounded, yes, his control over his sand frayed and slow. But he was still a Kage. Onoki, floating like a vengeful, ancient god, held the power to erase reality itself. And Ay… Ay was a tempest of barely diminished fury. Hiruzen could perhaps hold two of them.
He could not hold all three, but not for long.
Externally, not a muscle on Hiruzen's face twitched. But internally, a dam broke. His chakra, which had been controlled, now surged. It wasn't a wild, explosive burst, but a deliberate, pressurised increase in output, like a forge being stoked to white-hot intensity. He was done reacting. He was done playing defence.
'I cannot allow isolated duels,' the thought was sharp. 'I must force all four into one field. We fight as one, or we die apart.'
Across the shattered field, the Third Raikage felt the shift. His eyes flicked from the wounded Hiroshi back to Hiruzen. The sight of the Mizukage's injury was a potent stimulant. It was not recklessness that filled him, but a cold, emboldened certainty.
Hiroshi, with his mist and his ice, was an annoyance, a frustrating puzzle to be solved. But Hiruzen Sarutobi? He was a threat. A killable threat.
'He can annoy,' Ay thought, 'But Hiruzen can kill me.'
This was no longer about his strategic objectives of the Third Shinobi World War. This was personal. A vow solidified in the Raikage's heart, as hard and unyielding as his own famed spear-hand. He would finish Hiruzen Sarutobi before this war's end. He would personally carve the Hokage's name into the memorial stone in this fight.
Lightning crackled around him with a new, vicious intensity like a thunderclap answering the one from the heavens.
"KRK-KRAKOOOM!"
He prepared to collapse all distance, to become the lightning bolt itself and seize the initiative before the old fox could enact whatever scheme he was brewing.
He never got the chance.
Hiruzen moved first. His hands blurred through seals—Ram, Snake, Tiger—so fast they were a mere suggestion of motion. He didn't aim at a person. He aimed at the space between them.
"Fūton: Daitoppa!"(Wind Release: Great Breakthrough!)
"Katon: Gōryūka no Jutsu!" (Fire Release: Great Dragon Fire Technique!)
But he combined them. The hurricane-force wind did not scatter the fire dragon; it wrapped around it, fueling it, whipping it into a terrifying, horizontal vortex of incandescent death.
It was a scythe of flame and gale, a hundred feet wide, and it roared not towards Onoki or Saitetsu directly, but in a great, arcing sweep that forced them to move. It was a shepherd's crook made of elemental fury, its intent not to burn, but to herd.
Onoki, with a grunt of irritation, was forced to cease his Dust Release preparation and flash-step backwards, his light-weight body carried by the concussive force.
Saitetsu, slower, had to pull his expanding field of iron sand into a dense, protective dome around himself, the superheated wind and fire screeching as it scraped against the magnetic metal.
The effect was immediate and profound. The battlefield, which had been two distinct arenas, suddenly compressed. The frozen terrain where Ay and Hiroshi had been clashing, now a landscape of half-melted ice sculptures and lightning-scorched earth, became the new, violent centre of the world.
In the lull, as the firestorm abated, Hiruzen took three calm steps, his posture deceptively relaxed, and came to stand beside the panting Mizukage. He didn't look at him, his eyes remaining fixed on their three converging adversaries.
"Can you still move?" Hiruzen's voice was low.
Hiroshi sucked in a sharp, pained breath as he tried to staunch the bleeding. He managed a weak, bloody smirk. "…I've taken worse in a Kiri council meeting."
Now, with all five of them in a single, pressurised kill-box, a new weapon was drawn.
Words.
"You know," Hiroshi began, his voice a strained but cutting drawl, even as he weaved a seal with one hand, sending a volley of ice senbon towards Saitetsu, "for a village that lives in a desert, Suna's defences are remarkably… unimaginative. The same old sand barriers. Where is the artistry?"
The ice needles crushed harmlessly against a shifting wall of black sand, but the barb landed.
"TING-TING-TING."
"And you, Raikage," Hiroshi continued, his eyes flicking to Ay, who was cracking his neck, lightning flaring. "All that power. All that speed. Do you ever tire of solving every problem with the same brutish charge? It must be simple, living in a world where every obstacle looks like a nail."
Saitetsu's composure, already frayed by pain and humiliation, snapped. "You're injured and bleeding out, you frostbitten fool! Spare us the arrogance!"
Hiroshi's laugh was a short, harsh bark. "We're outnumbered. What's your excuse, Kazekage? You and your two friends here, ganging up on two old men. Is this the glorious victory Suna will sing songs about?"
The insult, delivered with venomous precision, landed exactly where it was aimed. A visible twitch went through Saitetsu's jaw. Ay's scowl deepened, a fresh wave of lightning chakra causing the rainwater at his feet to boil into steam. The accusation of cowardice, of winning through mere numbers, struck at the very core of their pride as shinobi and Kage.
Enraged, Ay slammed his foot into the ground.
"BOOM!"
A web of lightning fractures spread out from the impact point, sizzling through the mud and ice.
"Then we end the old men here! Now!" he roared.
Saitetsu, his pride wounded more deeply than his body, responded not out of loyalty to Ay or Onoki, but out of sheer, burning necessity. The air itself seemed to thicken, saturated with a killing intent so potent it felt like trying to breathe tar.
And for a long, breathtaking moment, a terrifying, beautiful equilibrium formed.
Ay became a blur of lightning, aiming to blitz Hiruzen.
"FWOOSH!"
A massive, layered wall of ice, glittering and impossibly hard, erupted from the ground in his path, forcing him to veer. Hiroshi, leaning heavily on one knee, had intercepted.
As Hiroshi defended Hiruzen, Saitetsu saw his opening. A wave of black iron sand, condensing into a thousand spearheads, shot towards the immobilised Mizukage.
"SHIIING!"
But before they could find their mark, Hiruzen was there, his staff spinning.
"Doton: Doryūheki!" (Earth Release: Earth-Style Wall!)
A colossal rampart of earth, reinforced with chakra, swallowed the sand spears, the grinding sound of stone against metal a deafening groan.
Onoki, from his aerial perch, saw Hiruzen occupied and fired a precise Dust Release beam, thin as a needle, aimed to erase the Hokage's head. "FZZZ-ZAP!"
But Hiruzen was already gone, the beam instead vaporising a portion of the earth wall he had just created. In the same motion, Hiruzen, now flanking Saitetsu, unleashed a Fire Dragon. The Kazekage, with a grunt, pulled his sand back into a defensive sphere, the fire washing over it and turning the outer layer to molten slag.
It was a perfect, brutal stalemate. Sand walls checked lightning bursts. Mist illusions blurred the trajectories of precise Dust attacks. Stone constructs countered shifting iron. Fire and wind disrupted every formation. No single element could overpower the others; they were locked in a deadly, perfect, and exhausting balance.
Floating above this chaotic symphony of counter-play, Onoki's irritation finally boiled over into cold, pragmatic fury.
This was a waste of his time and power. His hands came together, palm to palm, and began to pull apart. A perfect, glowing cube of light began to form between his hands—not a small probe, but a vast, churning matrix of chakra, large enough to erase the entire central conflict zone.
"This has gone on long enough," he declared, his eyes burning with the reflected light of his own creation. "I will decide this field."
The shift was palpable. Everyone, from the bleeding Hiroshi to the enraged Ay, felt the cosmic danger spike.
In that heart-stopping silence, beneath the prism of annihilation, Hiruzen's eyes met Hiroshi's. No words were spoken. None were needed. Hiruzen gave a minuscule, almost imperceptible signal, a specific shift in his grip on the Enma staff. It was a code, a pattern from a different war, a lifetime ago.
Hiroshi's pained, weary eyes widened a fraction in understanding. He gave a shallow, almost invisible nod.
"Onoki is the fracture point," Hiruzen murmured. "If he's injured, then this alliance crumbles."
Hiroshi, pushing himself upright, managed a true, feral smirk. The pain was still there, but it was buried under a wave of grim purpose.
"So," he whispered back, ice already beginning to crystallise along his arms in a new, aggressive pattern. "The old men go hunting."
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