The air within the barrier was no longer mere air; it was a broth of distilled chakra and palpable dread, thick enough to drink. The [Four Crimson Mirrors: Eternal Seal Formation] did not simply enclose them visually—it pressed down on their very spirits. A low, sub-audible hum vibrated up through the soles of their feet, a constant, nagging reminder of their cage.
Hiroshi let out a wet, ragged chuckle that echoed in the stifling space. His smirk was a ghastly thing, stretched across his pain-paled face.
"Look at this," he rasped. "The mighty Kage of Earth, Lightning, and Wind… boxed up like common rogues caught stealing from the market. A fitting end for such towering pride, don't you think?"
He pushed himself upright, "All that number superiority. All that vaunted coordination. Three against two, a sure thing. And yet… you all walked right into this little snare with the grace of drunken bulls. It's almost pathetic."
The Third Raikage, Ay, turned his glare upon the Mizukage. "You think this changes anything?" he boomed. "You trap five men in a jar and shake it. So what? We are five men, yes. But our villages… our villages are the true giants. They are ideologies. They are war machines. Even if you shatter our bodies to dust here, Kumo, Suna, and Iwa will still march as one. Our wills are already embedded in the chain of command."
Saitetsu, kneeling as he tried to gather his scattered sand, added his voice, "The Raikage is correct. Our orders were given. The strategies are in motion. The war machine moves with or without its generals."
Onoki let out a weary sigh that spoke of centuries of political cynicism. "We are not children, Sarutobi. We knew the alliance was a blade that could cut both ways. We anticipated betrayal between us, calculated the risks. But the structure remains. This…" he gestured at the shimmering walls, "…this is a temporary inconvenience. A stalemate you cannot possibly maintain."
To their profound surprise, Hiruzen Sarutobi responded not with a counter-threat, but with a soft, almost agreeable laugh.
"You're right," the Hokage said, his voice calm, cutting through the tension like a scalpel.
"Villages are indeed larger than their Kage. The institution must always outlast the individual… I've known that truth for a very long time."
He lowered the Enma staff, its tip scraping softly against the scorched earth. The sound was unnaturally loud in the silence. He looked older in that moment than any of them had ever seen him, the weight of decades pressing down on his shoulders.
"I was supposed to step down from the Hokage's seat ten years ago," he revealed, his gaze turning inward. "The council urged it, even the Daimyoo. My own body begged for it. But I couldn't. I stayed, clinging to power not for the glory, not for the title… but because I was trapped by a single, paralysing question." He paused, letting the anticipation build before delivering the line that struck them with more force than any jutsu. "Which of my students was fit to replace me?"
The air changed. It was as if he had sucked all the oxygen out of the barrier. The names hung in the silence, unspoken but thunderous in their absence: Jiraiya. Tsunade. Orochimaru.
Onoki's face darkened, the wrinkles around his eyes deepening into crevices of dread.
He recalled the disturbing, whispered reports from Iwa's intelligence network: Orochimaru's insidious infiltration tactics, his villages swallowed from within by spies and saboteurs; the chilling experiments of the White Snake that blurred the lines between human and monster, life and death.
Saitetsu's blood ran cold, a different kind of fear seizing him. He remembered the detailed after-action reports from the front lines, the demoralising accounts of Suna's finest puppet platoons being rendered irrelevant. Not by overwhelming force, but by the unparalleled medical prowess of Tsunade Senju.
Her corps turned certain death into survivable injuries, her innovations in field medicine effectively doubling Konoha's fighting strength. She didn't just save lives; she shattered Suna's momentum.
Ay's jaw clenched so hard the muscle bulged. His mind flashed to the frantic, near-incomprehensible messages from the Western Front. Scouting parties were wiped out without a single body left for retrieval. Entire supply lines vanishing. All reports spoke of a yellow blur and a white mane—Minato Namikaze, the Flash, and his teacher, Jiraiya, the Toad Sage.
They all understood, with a dawning, horrifying clarity that was colder than Hiroshi's ice: 'If the Sannin and their prodigy are free to move unchecked while we are trapped here…' The balance of the entire war wasn't just shifting; it was poised to collapse into utter ruin for their alliance.
Even Hiroshi, Hiruzen's ally in this desperate gambit, felt a sliver of unease worm its way through his defiant resolve. He, too, had spent years fearing the day Konoha would unleash its legendary three without restraint. He, too, had nightmares of what their unchecked, matured power could do to the delicate political ecosystem of the shinobi world.
"Enough!" Ay roared, the word a physical shockwave. "Whatever psychological games you're playing, we'll end them here and now!"
He turned his furious gaze to Saitetsu and Onoki. "Forget your grudges! Forget the past! There is only this moment! We kill them, or we die here!"
Sparks erupted around him in a dazzling, furious display. The other two Kage, galvanised by his raw will, braced themselves, their own chakra flaring in response—sand swirling in a dark vortex, dust motes gathering around Onoki's hands.
The very barrier trembled slightly under the sudden, combined pressure of three enraged Kage, the hum rising in pitch to a distressed whine, but the adamantine seal held fast. It did not crack.
"Stop."
Hiruzen's voice was not loud. It held no thunder, no crackle of lightning. It was a simple, calm command, yet it carried an authority that had stilled battlefields for decades.
It cut through the Raikage's building fury and brought the gathering storm to an abrupt halt. Even Ay, a force of nature unto himself, paused, his head snapping toward the Hokage.
Hiruzen raised a hand, not in a seal, but in a gesture of focus, his gaze pinpointing the Raikage.
"You," Hiruzen said, his voice dropping to a deadly calm. "Raikage. You are the only one I have an issue with."
Ay's eyes narrowed. "What?"
"This war," Hiruzen continued, each word measured and precise, "it began with a lie from Kumo. You stood before the other kages and you said that Renjiro of Konoha murdered your Jinchuriki. They did fight, yes. A brutal, desperate battle. But he did not kill her, and you know this."
Ay immediately snarled, interrupting, his composure shattering. "It wasn't a lie! Your shinobi killed her—you're too shameless to even admit it! You hide behind technicalities and half-truths while my village mourns!"
Hiruzen exhaled, a long, slow breath. The look he gave Ay was not one of fury, but of profound, weary disappointment. That, more than any anger, seemed to strike the Raikage.
"I have never believed in using Jinchuriki as weapons of war," Hiruzen stated, his voice echoing softly in the dome. "To take a human life, to seal a beast of untold suffering within it, and to then send that tormented soul onto the battlefield… it is a practice I have always found to be the deepest failure of our shinobi system. A failure of our humanity."
The tension in the barrier coiled tighter, a spring ready to snap.
"But perhaps…" Hiruzen mused, his eyes glazing over with a terrible, poetic irony, "…it is poetic. Poetic that this war, which you started over the fate of a Jinchuriki, should end with us involving one directly."
His eyes snapped open. The warmth was gone, replaced by a cold, gleaming killing intent that seemed to drop the temperature within the barrier by twenty degrees.
"…by killing them."
He let the words hang, a naked, brutal threat.
"Kumo and Iwa have numerous Jinchuriki under your command. A pair of perfect, tailed beasts for your war machine. But I keep finding my attention drawn… to the Kumo ones."
The realisation did not dawn—it crashed over them like a wave of ice water.
Ay's face froze. The dread that carved into his features was more profound than any fear of personal death. It was the terror of a leader who sees the annihilation of his village's ultimate weapon, the horror of a man realising that his enemy has not only seen through his strategy but is prepared to counter it with a ruthlessness that surpasses his own.
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