The silence after Minato's vanishing was deeper than the desert night, thicker than the coppery stench of blood saturating the sand.
"Hiss-hiss-hiss!"
Then, from the shadows of a nearby rock formation, sand cascaded down as five figures emerged, clad in the distinct, earth-toned flak jackets and forehead protectors of Iwagakure. They hadn't been hiding with stealth; they'd been buried, using advanced earth-release techniques to meld seamlessly with the landscape, observers turned unwilling witnesses.
Jiro, the Iwa squad leader – a burly man with a face like weathered sandstone and eyes wide with primal terror – stumbled forward a step, his sandals crunching on blood-soaked grit.
His gaze swept the slaughterhouse, lingering on the unnatural cleanness of the decapitations, the sheer speed implied by the still-fountaining arteries that were only now beginning to slow.
"Sage's breath..." he breathed, the words a ragged gasp. "What... what manner of monster did this?" His voice trembled, stripped of its usual gruff command.
One of his younger scouts, Tetsu, retched violently, doubling over and spilling bile onto the sand.
"I-I saw flashes... yellow flashes... like lightning but... not..." he stammered between heaves, wiping his mouth with a shaking hand.
Another, an older chunin named Goro, clutched his kunai so tightly his knuckles were white bone.
"Which village?" he hissed, his eyes darting wildly as if expecting the golden flash to return for them.
Jiro swallowed hard, the sound loud in the awful quiet. He forced his gaze away from a headless Suna shinobi whose hand still clutched a half-formed mud wall seal. A memory surfaced, a briefing report passed through gritted teeth after a disastrous encounter near the Land of Rivers. "Konoha," he rasped, the name tasting like ash.
"It's Konoha. Minato Namikaze. The Yellow Flash." He spat the title, imbuing it with pure dread. "They said he moved faster than sight... that the Hiraishin wasn't just a legend... They weren't exaggerating." He recalled the clipped, terrified reports: Appears instantly. Kills before recognition. Vanishes. Only yellow light remains. Seeing it firsthand was a horror beyond description.
"But why attack Suna?" Tetsu asked, confusion warring with fear.
Goro, the pragmatist, found his voice, though it was strained. "Because Suna and Kumo are allies, idiot! Hit Suna hard enough, fast enough, and you cripple Kumo's flank. Sow chaos. Make them doubt their allies. Classic Konoha divide-and-conquer." He gestured violently at the carnage.
"This... this is a message. Written in blood."
Jiro nodded grimly, "Goro's right. And that message isn't just for Suna." He looked towards the looming silhouette of the Iwa encampment, miles away but suddenly feeling terrifyingly exposed.
"If Konoha is deploying that... deploying the Yellow Flash here... it means they're escalating. Radically. We need to warn the Captain. Now. Before that flash turns towards our camp."
The thought galvanized them. The horror of the scene was momentarily overridden by the imperative to survive, to warn their comrades. With one last, sickened glance at the Suna dead the Iwa squad melted back into the desert night, using earth-release to sink beneath the sand as swiftly and silently as they had emerged.
***
Miles away, the atmosphere was thick with tension of a different kind. Captain Sabaku, a stern-faced veteran with sun-bleached hair pulled back in a severe topknot and eyes the colour of flint, paced before a large map table etched into the cave wall.
Reports from various patrol sectors were trickling in, but one glaring silence dominated the room. The air hummed with the low thrum of communication seals and the anxious whispers of the twenty elite shinobi manning the command post.
"Still nothing from that Outpost?" Sabaku's voice was a low growl, cutting through the murmur. He stabbed a finger at a point on the map representing the now-silent unit.
A chunin manning a communication array shook his head, his face pale under the flickering glow of chakra lamps. "Negative, Captain. Last transmission was their perimeter alert, seventeen minutes ago. Full mobilisation signal. Then... nothing. Complete blackout."
A Jonin subordinate, Kaede, slammed a fist onto the stone table. "Crack!"
"Damn rock-brained Iwa savages! They must have launched a full assault! Overwhelmed them before they could signal details!"
Her voice vibrated with fury. "First blood to them! This isn't posturing anymore, Captain! This is war!"
Murmurs of agreement rippled through the command staff. Faces hardened, hands drifted towards weapons. The frustration of the standoff, the constant tension, found a focus in the presumed Iwa aggression.
"They've drawn the knife, Captain," another Jonin, Ren, added, his voice tight.
"We can't just sit here and bleed!"
Sabaku stopped pacing. His flinty eyes scanned the map, then the faces of his eager, angry subordinates. The logic was brutal, simple. Retaliation. Escalation. It felt inevitable. He opened his mouth, ready to issue the orders that would ignite the full-scale conflict they'd all been dreading and preparing for.
"Very well. Mobilise the—"
He froze. The words died on his lips. Every instinct, honed over decades on the sun-scorched killing fields, screamed a primal warning. It wasn't a sound. It wasn't a sight. It was a pressure shift. A sudden, terrifying void in the ambient chakra of the cave, as if the air itself had been momentarily sucked out and replaced with something cold, alien, and impossibly fast.
Before the first neuron could fire a conscious thought, before Kaede could finish drawing her kunai, before Ren could form the first seal, the world flickered.
"SCHLICK! THUD!"
Gold. Blinding, instantaneous gold. It wasn't a flash that illuminated the cave; it was the cave for a nanosecond, bleaching the sandstone walls, the maps, the terrified faces, into stark, colorless outlines.
The sounds were horrifyingly precise, almost simultaneous. Not the clash of battle, but the wet, terminal punctuation of death. Sabaku, mid-turn, his tactical mind still grappling with the sensory overload, saw Kaede's head tilt at an impossible angle, a thin line of crimson appearing across her throat before her body crumpled.
He saw Ren, hand halfway through a seal, suddenly slump forward, a kunai hilt protruding from the base of his skull. He saw a communications officer jerk sideways, his head impacting the stone wall with a sickening crack.
The gold flash didn't move; it manifested. Behind the chunin at the comms array, the body collapsed onto the glowing seals, causing sparks to fly. Besides a medic reaching for a field kit, a head separating.
In the centre of a trio of Jonin scrambling back-to-back – a single, impossibly fast horizontal slash, three heads tumbling like grisly fruit.
It was over in less than three seconds. The blinding gold vanished as suddenly as it appeared, leaving behind only the cave's normal chakra-lamp glow and a scene of unimaginable carnage. Twenty of Suna's finest border commanders and support staff lay dead or dying. No struggle. No raised defences.
Only the shocked expressions frozen on their faces, the widening pools of blood spreading silently across the smooth stone floor, and the lingering scent of ozone and iron.
Sabaku stood alone amidst the slaughter, his hand still half-raised from his aborted order, his flinty eyes wide with a terror deeper than any Iwa boulder could inspire. He hadn't even had time to draw his weapon.
Minato Namikaze stood near the entrance, his spiky blonde hair seemed almost white in the dim light. He held a simple, unmarked kunai, its blade gleaming wetly. His expression was calm, detached, analytical, as if surveying the aftermath of a complex equation solved. He didn't look at Sabaku; his gaze swept the room, taking in the positions, the silenced comms arrays, the map detailing Suna's border defences.
Then, he walked towards the centre of the room, stepping over bodies with the carelessness of someone avoiding puddles.
Sabaku found his voice, a strangled croak. "Y-you... monster... Konoha will pay..."
Minato didn't acknowledge him. He stopped, formed a single hand seal. "Poof. Poof. Poof. Poof. Poof."
Five identical Minatos appeared around him in puffs of white smoke – Shadow Clones.
"Store them," the original Minato commanded. He gestured with his clean kunai towards the bodies littering the command cave floor. "All of them in here. Use storage scrolls. We're taking them back to Konoha."
Intelligence on Suna's border command structure would be invaluable.
One clone, already pulling a large storage scroll from a pouch on its thigh, paused. It looked towards the cave entrance, then back at the original. "And the bodies outside?"
Minato didn't even glance towards the entrance. "Leave them," he stated flatly.
The clones nodded in unison and got to work with terrifying efficiency. They moved among the dead, unsealing scrolls with swift snaps, channelling chakra to activate the spatial compression seals.