Chapter 102: Night Strike
The Village Hidden in Grass was the only official armed force in the Land of Grass — built on an open plain at the country's heart, four directions of flat ground, clear sightlines in every direction.
The clouds moved with the night wind, drifting across the moon a piece at a time, dimming the world by degrees. Ankle-high wild grass covered the plain and rustled in the cold gusts.
A cold flash of steel. A blade tore through the dark and through a life. A soft thud followed — a Grass shinobi with his village's emblem on his forehead hit the ground and stopped moving.
He never knew what happened. His hand reached out toward the shapes that had appeared from nowhere, a last involuntary reach for something that wasn't coming.
In the dim moonlight, two silver forehead protectors caught what little light there was.
Konoha. Iwa.
Why... why would Konoha and Iwa...
Why...
He was gone before the thought finished.
Kurotsuchi glanced at the body, then at the Uchiha boy beside her — composure maintained, barely. She looked away.
"Old man. All the sentries in this sector are down."
She kept her voice low, aimed at the darkness behind them.
Ōnoki walked forward. His black eyes moved to a face in the crowd behind Sakura — an unremarkable middle-aged man, Hyūga branch family, mid-thirties. Chūnin-level by any reasonable assessment.
If he weren't a Hyūga, he'd have been pure cannon fodder on a mission like this.
But because he was a Hyūga, eight hundred shinobi had moved across this plain and not a single Grass sentry had detected so much as a footstep.
And Konoha had dozens more like him.
Ōnoki stood in the rustling grass and felt, for the first time, what it actually meant to command a Konoha unit in the field.
Sensing. Strike force. Medical corps. Support and flanking. Every function present and coordinated. Aburame, Inuzuka, Ino-Shika-Chō formations — the full apparatus.
So this is how Konoha fights.
He wouldn't say it out loud. But it was comfortable. Genuinely, unfairly comfortable.
He raised one hand.
Shapes emerged behind him, moving through shadow toward the village gate — the carved grass emblem just visible in the dark — low and silent and fast.
The night wind moved through the old man's white hair. He watched his shinobi close in on the village, and then his body lifted, light as a seed on the wind, and dissolved into the darkness.
Sakura kept pace with the main column and reached over to tap Kurotsuchi's arm.
Kurotsuchi made a face. But she remembered the pre-mission arrangement, and reluctantly moved behind Sakura, wrapped both arms around her waist, and launched them both upward into the night sky.
At the front of the column, Kakashi glanced back once at the two girls vanishing into the dark overhead, said nothing, and kept moving. When the column drew close enough to the village wall, he raised a fist.
Stop.
He studied the wall sentries. His hand moved in quick signals.
Two Nara clan members — both with pineapple-bun hair — stepped forward and ran through seals.
Shadow Strangling Technique.
Their shadows stretched across the ground, moving silently up the wall, splitting into four dark tendrils. Each one found a sentry. Each one closed around a throat.
Kakashi's arm moved.
Four shuriken crossed the dark simultaneously.
"Move."
He said it quietly and went first, sprinting toward the now-unguarded wall—
And then stopped.
A sensing barrier.
He recognized it immediately. The signature was familiar — uncomfortably familiar. He'd felt this before, inside Konoha's own perimeter.
His mind snapped to Karin. The red-haired girl Sakura had pulled out of the Forest of Death. She'd been Grass before Konoha.
The sensing barrier design. Uzushio clan origin.
Grass has Uzumaki techniques.
He didn't have time to work through the implications. He called the strike.
He was already forming seals for a gate-breaching technique—
A column of white light fell from the sky.
It dropped straight down onto the Grass Village gate like a blade cutting through the night. The gate — solid, reinforced, built to hold — turned to powder in an instant.
The light swept sideways.
A long section of the surrounding wall vanished with it.
Kakashi looked up.
High above, a small silhouette stood with hands clasped behind its back.
Dust Release.
Wind, Earth, and Fire natures fused into something that transcended kekkei genkai — a kekkei tōta, the rarest category of bloodline power. The technique that could reduce matter to nothing.
"Kakashi. I think we're up."
Kitsuchi was beside him. He said it the way someone says something that happens every few years.
"We're up."
Kakashi pulled back the cloth over his Sharingan eye.
And ran into the village.
Eight hundred shinobi followed, hitting the breach like a wave hitting a gap in a seawall.
The village had been asleep. It woke fast.
Signal flares shot up the moment Kakashi's team cleared the gate — red light blooming over rooftops. And voices, ragged and furious, rising from everywhere at once:
"Intruders!"
"Intruders!"
"Level one alert!"
A small country has its own survival instincts. Play both sides. Defer to strong neighbors. Accept the nickname "weathervane" from the nations that have the luxury of choosing sides.
It wasn't what they wanted.
It was how you kept your home from burning.
But when the fire came anyway — when foreign boots crossed the gate — they picked up their weapons and fought. With everything.
The military fortress mobilized. Grass shinobi hit the invaders and didn't stop.
And then, somewhere in the chaos, a voice broke:
"Konoha!"
"Those are Konoha shinobi!"
"Damn them—"
Kakashi didn't feel what the word might have made him feel in peacetime.
He'd been here before. Not this village. This situation.
He was not the man who read Make-Out Paradise in doorways and arrived forty-seven minutes late to everything.
Right now he was the son of the White Fang.
That was all.
In the command building, a figure in a dragon-head mask looked out at the fires spreading through his village and screamed at the people around him:
"Kill them! Kill them all!"
"Kill every last one of those Konoha bastards!"
(End of Chapter)