"Ugh… Aaaaaah…"
"Kushina, relax. Relax. Try to keep your breathing steady and even. Do not let the rhythm break…"
Inside the temporary delivery room outside Konoha Village, Kushina Uzumaki's painful moans still continued.
Minato Namikaze had already returned to guard her side, holding her hand and using his body temperature to provide his wife with reassurance.
Beside them, Biwako Sarutobi had also drawn on her rich experience and was trying to help Kushina complete the final step of childbirth as quickly as possible.
But the Nine-Tails seal on her abdomen was constantly rioting, looking as though it wanted to tear through her skin and burst out of her body.
That made every effort twice as difficult for half the result.
"Lady Biwako, is it still no good?"
Looking at Kushina's still pale face, and her red hair and clothes almost completely drenched in sweat, Minato held Kushina's hand with heartache while asking uneasily.
"No. If the Nine-Tails does not quiet down, Kushina cannot exert any strength at all."
Biwako Sarutobi wiped the sweat from her forehead and looked with a worried expression at Kushina, whose voice was rapidly growing hoarse.
"Right now, she is effectively enduring two kinds of pain at the same time: the Nine-Tails' backlash and childbirth. If she were an ordinary woman, she would have already passed out from the pain…"
"Can't… can't we use… a more aggressive method?"
Kushina gasped heavily, her voice hoarse as she asked, "For example… use a knife. Cut open my stomach. Let Naruto first…"
"No. That kind of pain will let the Nine-Tails break through the seal instantly."
Biwako Sarutobi decisively rejected Kushina's idea, which was hard to describe as either too bold or too heartbreaking.
"And without Tsunade here, no one can heal such a large wound for you… unless you can borrow the Nine-Tails' power under these circumstances to recover from the wound. But that is completely impossible."
"Then… let me and the Nine-Tails… die together."
Kushina trembled in pain.
Then she spoke haltingly, causing everyone in the delivery room to freeze in place.
"The reason Minato must stay here… instead of going out to face the enemy as Hokage… is because he is worried the Nine-Tails inside me will go berserk and lose control, right?"
"Then, as long as I drag the Nine-Tails down with me… won't that free him?"
"If we assume… I die… then it should be relatively easy to protect Naruto too, right?"
"Y-You have gone mad, Kushina!?"
Biwako Sarutobi stared at Kushina in disbelief.
Kushina was clearly so weak that even her fingers could barely move, yet her eyes remained firm, like a mountain that had stood for ten thousand years.
"If you die together with the Nine-Tails, the Tailed Beast deterrence between us and the other major shinobi villages will no longer be maintained!"
"But if this… continues… it will only give the enemy more chances to destroy Konoha and take the Nine-Tails, right?"
Kushina slightly turned her blue eyes and looked at Minato, who had clenched his fists so tightly that blood was leaking from them.
Her eyes carried guilt and comfort as she said:
"Konoha… is the place that raised me… It is also the homeland I want to protect… I do not want my own powerlessness to force Minato into making such a… cough, cough… painful choice."
"Kushina…"
Minato held his wife's slightly cold fingers.
In his eyes, tears containing every pain in the human world were flickering.
"The one who is powerless… is clearly me. If I could control the Nine-Tails, or if I could single-handedly defeat all invading enemies as easily as that Rei Kaguya…"
"That is not true, Minato."
Kushina struggled to raise her hand and touched Minato's face, where he could no longer hold back his tears.
She forced out a weak smile.
"You are the village's Hokage… and I am the Hokage's wife… To protect our shared homeland, we should have been the people most willing to sacrifice ourselves for the village…"
"But you have not even seen Naruto once!"
Minato held Kushina's hand, trembling.
His eyes were filled with pain and regret.
"How can I… how can I make that kind of decision? If I make such a decision, what right would I still have to be Konoha's Hokage?"
"Silly… fool… this is not the time… to keep hesitating…"
As Kushina spoke, the shockwave created by the Seven-Tails crashing into the ground far away just happened to reach the place where they were.
Looking at the lights above the delivery room shaking from the impact and tremor, and feeling as though she were almost lifted from the bed, Kushina furrowed her brow and shouted at Minato with all her strength:
"Stop hesitating, Minato! Hurry and make your decision—"
Boom.
An even more violent tremor than the previous distant shock came from somewhere not far from the temporary delivery room.
It nearly shook Kushina off the bed.
Unable to know the situation outside for the moment, Minato supported his wife, who was crying out in pain, and his expression revealed an unprecedented struggle.
Suddenly, a pouch the size of a ninja tool bag broke through the glass of the temporary delivery room without warning and flew precisely toward Minato.
His gaze sharpened.
He instantly raised his hand and caught it, quickly shielding Kushina behind himself as he shouted in the direction from which the pouch had flown.
"Who is there!?"
No one answered.
But Kushina saw a note with extremely messy handwriting on the pouch.
Written on it were several words, almost illegible:
Emergency healing secret medicine. Nagato.
"Naga…to?"
Kushina struggled to recognize the words above.
Then she looked in confusion at Minato, whose expression had suddenly changed.
"Who… is that?"
"The leader of the Akatsuki. The reason I can stay by your side right now, Kushina, is because he helped block the Tailed Beast Balls fired at Konoha by those three Jinchuriki."
Looking at Nagato's name, Minato did not hesitate much before opening the item pouch that had been thrown in by an unknown person.
Then he took out something that looked like… a biscuit.
"What is this?"
"I do not know. But… perhaps it is another choice that has appeared before us."
Looking at the biscuit in front of him, Minato somehow recalled the first time he had fought Rei Kaguya.
Back then, aside from being troubled by the other party's extremely troublesome defense and vitality, what had left the deepest impression on him was the suspicious biscuit-like secret medicine Rei had occasionally taken from his clothes and stuffed into his mouth, causing his momentum to recover by several degrees almost immediately.
"But… we do not even know who sent this, do we?"
Kushina looked at Minato, who had fallen into memory, and spoke hesitantly.
"I do not want to choose to kill my own wife. So I think… I want to trust this person named Nagato a little."
Minato, already somewhat willing to try anything in desperation, fell silent for a moment before finally saying this.
Since Minato had made his choice, Kushina did not say anything else.
She simply opened her mouth quietly and struggled a little to chew apart this biscuit of unknown origin before swallowing it.
On a cliff not far from the temporary delivery room, Shisui Uchiha watched everything happening inside and let out a long sigh of relief.
Then he turned around, took off the mask and uniform of the Konoha Anbu he had knocked unconscious with his Sharingan genjutsu, and put them on.
He replaced that person, guarding this position from which all the areas below could be monitored.
Far away in Kirigakure, Rei's main body triggered the rune [Wind Speaker's Blessing].
He tore away the bandages covering his eyes and slowly opened them.
A pair of pure white eyes.
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