"Commander Sachiko!" Jiro's voice, raw and ragged, shattered the camp's uneasy quiet as he burst into the central command camp. Several Iwa shinobi, sharpening kunai or hunched over maps by the guttering lantern light, snapped their heads up, hands instinctively dropping to weapons. Commander Sachiko, a mountain of a man with a shaved head crisscrossed by old scars and eyes like flint chips, looked up from a scroll. "Jiro? Report. And lower your voice. You look like you've seen a desert ghost."
"It was a ghost, Commander! A yellow ghost!" Jiro gasped, bracing his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath.
"Suna… Suna's forward camp… it's gone! Obliterated!"
A tense silence descended, thicker than the desert dust. The other shinobi exchanged wary glances. One, a wiry woman named Emi with hawk-like eyes, stepped forward.
"Gone? Explain, Jiro. Ambush? Did Kiri finally show their hand?"
"No! Not an ambush!" Jiro straightened, his face pale under the grime. "It was one man. Minato Namikaze. The Yellow Flash of Konoha." He spat the title like poison.
"He moved… Commander, you wouldn't believe it. Like lightning given form. One second the sentries were there, the next… poof. Gone. Just… gone. He cut through their defences like they were paper. Tore the camp apart with Rasengans. It wasn't a battle. It was… slaughter."
He shuddered, the image of a Suna shinobi simply disappearing in a spray of blood and kunai flash burned into his retinas.
Instead of the expected shock or grim resolve, a slow, unsettling smile spread across Sachiko's broad face. It didn't reach his flinty eyes.
"Minato Namikaze… attacked Suna?"
A low chuckle escaped him, rough as grinding stone.
"Hah!"
"Well, well. Fortune smiles upon the Stone today, wouldn't you say?"
Jiro blinked, stunned. Emi frowned deeply.
"Fortune, Commander? The Yellow Flash just wiped out an entire Suna camp single-handedly within minutes! That's not fortune; that's a nightmare made flesh! What's to stop him from turning that speed on us next? We're barely twenty kliks from where he butchered them!"
Sachiko waved a dismissive, meaty hand. "You let fear cloud your judgment, Emi. Konoha deployed him for a specific strike – Suna. He achieved his objective. He's likely already halfway back to Konoha by now, basking in his victory."
Jiro felt a fresh wave of cold dread. "But Commander… the scale of it… the speed… he might have sensed my chakra signature, he could be–"
"Enough!" Sachiko barked.
"Thump!" He slammed a fist on the rough-hewn table, making the lantern flicker violently.
"Your nerves are frayed, Jiro. Understandable after witnessing… that. But we have a golden opportunity here. Suna's forward force is decapitated. Their supply line to this sector is severed. The Tsuchikage must be informed immediately!" His eyes gleamed with ruthless ambition.
"This changes everything. Konoha has effectively declared open season on Suna. We can press our advantage on the northern flank, maybe even force Suna to the bargaining table before Konoha capitalises further. We move now."
He turned towards a small cage in the corner where a sleek, dark-feathered messenger hawk ruffled its plumage, golden eyes watchful. "Kraa?" it croaked softly. "Fetch me a cipher scroll," Sachiko ordered a nearby chuunin. "Highest priority encryption. 'Suna's forward camp annihilated by Konoha Yellow Flash. Opportunity for immediate northern offensive. Await orders. Sachiko.' Make it fast!"
"Skritch-skritch" went the chuunin's pen on the parchment, the sound unnaturally loud in the tense silence.
Jiro exchanged a look of profound unease with Emi. The commander's logic felt flimsy, a castle built on sand. The sheer, unnatural power witnessed defied conventional tactics or assumptions about fatigue. Sachiko's arrogance, his dismissal of the existential threat Minato represented, felt like a death warrant signed in complacency. Emi opened her mouth, perhaps to voice their shared terror again, her knuckles white on the hilt of her kunai.
It was then that the air changed.
Not a sound, not a flicker of light. But a sudden, profound stillness. The guttering lantern flame didn't just flicker; it stilled, burning unnaturally straight for a fraction of a second. The faint sigh of the desert wind outside ceased utterly. It was as if reality itself took a sharp, indrawn breath.
"FWOOSH!"
And there, standing between Sachiko and the chuunin holding the half-written scroll, was a figure bathed in the dim, flickering light.
Yellow hair, impossibly bright even in the gloom, seemed to hold its own radiance. The Konoha forehead protector gleamed dully.
'I guess placing a mark on them was the right decision,' The Konoha jonin thought.
For Jiro, it was a horrifying instant of absolute clarity: the Commander's smug satisfaction frozen into slack-jawed shock; Emi's eyes widening in dawning, paralysing terror; the chuunin's hand trembling, a drop of ink falling from his pen to bloom like a black flower on the unfinished message.
"Plip!"
For Minato, there was a single, crystalline thought cutting through the operational haze:
'Witnesses. They saw.'
It wasn't malice, but a cold, devastating necessity. Konoha's advantage, the carefully sown seeds of distrust between Suna and Iwa, depended on ambiguity. These shinobi, reporting what they'd seen, would shatter that. They had to become part of the desert's silence.
'More work,' the thought flickered, a spark of weary regret instantly extinguished by duty.
'But the frame holds.'
His hand moved. Or rather, it was moving, had always been moving. A flash of polished steel, almost too fast for the eye to register, a trio of Hiraishin kunai embedded themselves in the earth wall behind Sachiko, the chuunin, and near the entrance, their special seals glowing faintly for a microsecond.
Sachiko's flinty eyes finally registered the impossible presence, his mouth opening to roar an order or a curse. But Minato was already gone from his initial position, reappearing in a blur of yellow light beside the kunai near the chuunin. His hand, wrapped in coruscating blue chakra slammed a Rasengan into the chuunin's back. There was no scream, just a sickening "CRUNCH-WHOMP" as bone and tissue compressed violently, the force lifting the man off his feet and smashing him into the earthen wall with the sound of a wet sack hitting stone. The half-written scroll fluttered to the ground.
"FWOOSH." Minato vanished.
Emi was already moving, kunai drawn, body coiling to leap.
"AMBUSH! SCATTER!" she shrieked, her voice high with primal fear.
It was the last sound she made. Minato materialised directly in front of her, having teleported using the kunai near the entrance. Her kunai thrust was a blur – but Minato's was faster. A simple, devastatingly precise lunge.
"Shink."
The blade pierced her throat, silencing her warning mid-cry. He was gone again before her body began to crumple, blood already welling dark and slick in the lamplight.
"Thud."
"FWOOSH."
Chaos erupted, but it was a slow, sluggish chaos for the Iwa shinobi, trapped in a world moving at normal speed while their enemy operated on another plane entirely. Men scrambled for weapons, hands forming seals, earth beginning to ripple beneath their feet. Too slow. Always too slow.
Minato appeared beside Sachiko. The commander, roaring with fury and terror, swung a massive fist wreathed in stone-hardening chakra aiming to pulverise the Konoha ninja.
Minato ducked under the blow with impossible grace, the displaced air ruffling his hair. Simultaneously, his hand shot out, fingers coated in a razor-sharp wind chakra scalpel.
A precise, horizontal cut opened Sachiko's throat from ear to ear. The roar became a wet, gurgling choke. Sachiko's eyes, wide with disbelief and the sudden, intimate understanding of his own death, locked onto Minato's calm blue ones for a fleeting second before life fled them. He crashed to his knees, then face-first onto the packed earth floor.
"FWOOSH. SHINK! VZZZT-CRUNCH!"