The rain fell not as water, but as shards of glass, each drop a needle of cold reality piercing the fever-dream of battle. Onoki hovered above the morass, his small frame heaving with breaths that were more rage than exhaustion.
"Enough of this farce," he muttered as his preparations ended.
The air around him began to change. It wasn't just the presence of his chakra; it was the violation of physics. Dust motes, fragments of pulverised rock and ice, ceased their fall and began to rise in reverse, caught in an invisible, ascending tide.
The rain itself bent around him, streaming upward in shimmering curtains towards the focal point of his outstretched hands. Between his palms, a light was born—not the focused, precise prism of before, but something vast, chaotic, and hungry. It swelled, a churning cube of incandescent energy that pulsed with a sound like a dying star, a deep, resonant shrill that made teeth ache and bones vibrate.
"HMMMMMMMM"
Below, the world reduced to that terrible, growing light. Hiruzen's eyes widened, his mind, the library of a thousand jutsu, finding the only relevant page: 'Catastrophic Area Denial.' Something Onoki had used during the last war.
"Shield! Now!" he roared, his voice tearing from his throat, raw against the harmonic drone.
His hands were already a blur, slamming together in a sequence of seals so foundational yet so potent. Simultaneously, Hiroshi, his body screaming in protest, mirrored the action, his own seals forming patterns of crystalline cold.
"Doton: Doryūheki!" (Earth Release: Earth-Style Wall!) Hiruzen bellowed. The ground erupted not in one, but in three successive, colossal walls, each thicker than the last.
"Fūton: Reppūshō!" (Wind Release: Gale Palm!)
He didn't aim it at the cube, but at the space before the walls, creating a compressed, swirling barrier of air to disrupt the leading edge of the attack.
As Hiruzen built a fortress, Hiroshi built a sacrifice. "Hyouton: Gesshokuken no Jin!" (Ice Release: Lunar Crater Dome!)
He didn't have the chakra for finesse. He threw his hands down, and every molecule of moisture in the air, every sheet of rain, every puddle of mud and blood, was instantly ripped upward and flash-frozen into a dome of impossibly dense, milky-white ice that encased them.
The cube expanded.
It did not explode. It unfolded. A wall of silent, white light that consumed sound, matter, and reality itself. The world turned a blinding, featureless white.
There was no heat, no shockwave in the traditional sense—just a silent, inexorable erasure. Hiruzen's wind barrier vanished without a whisper. His first earth wall turned to dust, then the second. The third held for a fractured second, cracking into a billion particles before the energy slammed into Hiroshi's ice dome.
The ice did not shatter. It sublimated, turning directly from solid to a vast, billowing cloud of superheated steam that roared outwards, scalding everything it touched.
When the radiance finally faded, the sound of the storm rushed back in, a deafening roar after the silence of oblivion.
The aftermath was a vision of hell newly made. A perfect, concave hemisphere of smooth, glassy rock now dominated the landscape, fully half the plateau simply gone. Steam rose from the edges where molten stone met the pouring rain, hissing and spitting like a den of serpents.
From the haze at the edge of the annihilation zone, the survivors emerged, shaken and irrevocably scarred.
Hiruzen and Hiroshi stood shoulder-to-shoulder, their defences broken but their bodies whole. Hiroshi leaned heavily on one knee, the ice over his wound shattered, fresh blood mingling with the rain.
Further away, the Raikage was on one knee, his lightning armour flickering and sputtering like a dying lamp. The Dust Release hadn't fully penetrated, but it had 'eaten' at his chakra, scorching him in a way that was terrifyingly familiar.
A memory, sharp and unwelcome, flashed in his mind: a different war, a different enemy, Renjiro's strange flames that similarly consumed everything they touched. This felt the same—a violation of his ultimate defence.
Worst off was the Kazekage. Saitetsu was kneeling, one arm clutched to his chest. The elegant, protective armour of black iron sand he had woven around himself was gone, vaporised. Beneath, his skin was raw and blistering, burned in a bizarre, geometric pattern where the Dust Release had leaked through his defences.
Above them all, Onoki floated, his face a mask of grim efficiency. There was no remorse in his eyes, only the cold satisfaction of a problem simplified.
It was Saitetsu who broke the silence, his voice a crackling rasp of pure fury as he glared up at his ally. "You damn fool! That blast nearly took us!"
Onoki's reply was as even and cold as the polished stone below. "Collateral damage. You survived, didn't you?"
The Kazekage's entire body trembled. The few remnants of black iron sand that had survived, pooled around his feet, began to quiver and rise, shaking with his unrestrained rage.
It was then that Hiroshi stepped forward.
"It makes sense, really," he began, his tone almost conversational. "When you think about it. Iwa and Suna… your histories are written in each other's blood. You've been at each other's throats since before these old men were born." He gestured vaguely between himself and Hiruzen.
"Why not seize the moment? Strike when your supposed ally is already wounded, his guard down? Clean up two birds with one perfectly timed stone."
He paused, letting the venom seep into the soil of their alliance. Then he looked directly at Onoki, and his lips curled into a mockery of a smile. "Onoki… I commend your shrewdness. It's what I would have done."
The seed, planted in the fertile ground of centuries of hatred and fresh betrayal, blossomed into a venomous, spectacular flower.
Saitetsu's fury spiked, his sand erupting around him in a threatening cloud. But more importantly, Ay's head snapped toward Onoki, his expression twisting from pain to dawning, hate-filled realisation.
He had never trusted the fence-sitter. And now, a memory crystallised: the intelligence reports, the whispers that Onoki had played both sides in the war's earliest days, hedging his bets. Trusting him fully was a fool's errand. Had he just been used as a distraction, a blunt instrument to be disposed of alongside the Konoha and Kiri Kage?
"You… you planned this?" The Raikage's voice was a low, dangerous rumble, far more threatening than his earlier bellows.
Onoki's composure broke. "You dare twist my actions, you water-logged snake!" he snarled, his focus entirely on Hiroshi.
But the damage was done. The psychological trap was sprung.
"I should've known," Saitetsu rasped, pushing himself to his feet. "I should've known better than to trust a vulture from the mountains!"
The Raikage roared, "You used us!"
Onoki tried to reason, "Raikage, do not be a fool! It was a tactical necessity! They are manipulating you!"
But Ay was beyond reason. The evidence, as presented by Hiroshi, was irrefutable in his mind.
In the heart of this storm of suspicion, Hiruzen and Hiroshi shared a look. It was not a look of triumph, but of grim satisfaction. Hiruzen's analytical calm met Hiroshi's opportunistic aggression, and in that moment, they were perfectly aligned. Without a word, they moved.
As Onoki, frustrated and cornered, formed another, smaller Dust Release sphere to threaten the Raikage, the world exploded into motion once more.
"Doton: Doryūdan!" (Earth Release: Earth Dragon Bullet!) Hiruzen shouted, and from the glassy ground, a massive dragon of rock and soil erupted, roaring skyward to intercept the glowing cube.
Simultaneously, Hiroshi exhaled a "Kirigakure no Jutsu!" (Hiding in Mist Technique), but this was no simple mist. It was a thick, chakra-heavy fog that clung to Onoki, obscuring his vision and dampening his sensory perception.
And then, the unexpected. With a guttural cry of rage, Saitetsu joined them. His injured arm trembled violently, but his will was iron.
"Sable Sand: Drizzle!"
A whip of concentrated black sand, sharp as a monomolecular blade, lashed upward from the ground, not at Hiruzen or Hiroshi, but at the floating form of the Tsuchikage.
For the first time, all three—Hiruzen Sarutobi of Konoha, Hiroshi of Kirigakure, and Saitetsu of Sunagakure—coordinated a subconscious, simultaneous attack against the Third Tsuchikage. The once-clear lines of the battle had shattered, the "four versus one" war collapsing into fragmented chaos, alliances undone by suspicion, pride, and the masterful provocation of a wounded Mizukage.
Onoki, breathing heavily, deflected the earth dragon and dodged the sand whip, but the mist clung to him. His eyes, wide with a surprise that bordered on shock, weren't fixed on Hiruzen or Hiroshi. They were fixed on Saitetsu. A realisation, cold and bitter, flickered in his gaze.
'This bastard betrayed me.'
Below, Hiruzen looked up through the swirling haze of mist, steam, and dust, his mind already calculating the new, unpredictable variables of this fractured battlefield.
Beside him, Hiroshi wiped a fresh trickle of blood from his split lip, his smile faint but genuine, a predator finally seeing the herd break.
"Finally…" he breathed, the word a sigh of relief and anticipation. "A fair fight."
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