The air, still thick with the freezing residue of Hiroshi's Eternal Glacier Coffin, was suddenly torn apart. It wasn't a sound so much as a physical rending of the atmosphere—a boom of pure, static force that announced an arrival as undeniable as a thunderbolt.
The Third Raikage landed in the centre of the frozen hellscape, his form sheathed in a maelstrom of blue-white lightning so intense it cast sharp, strobing shadows across the ice.
Ayy, who had been desperately rallying the shell-shocked remnants of the Kumo sealing corps, instinctively flinched, his own, lesser lightning armour flickering in response. He hadn't sensed so much as a whisper of his father's approach—a humbling, brutal reminder of the chasm that still lay between them, a gap not just of power, but of sheer, overwhelming presence.
The Raikage's eyes scanned the tableau: the thrashing, partially frozen forms of Matatabi and Gyūki, the distant, silent mountain of ice containing Saiken. He wasted less than a heartbeat on the spectacle before his gaze snapped to his son.
"Report. What happened here?"
Ayy straightened, his own frustration and exhaustion shoved down beneath a lifetime of discipline.
"Matatabi's jinchuriki went berserk first. We contained her, barely. Then the Sannin appeared. They used a gas, some kind of aerosolized fuinjutsu. It targeted Bee. It forced Gyūki's transformation, broke their equilibrium." He gestured with a jerk of his head toward the raging form of the Eight-Tails. "Before we could even process that, the Six-Tails just… appeared. No warning. Erupted from the ground inside our own camp."
His composure broke for a second, a crack of pure, bitter venom seeping through. "Damn that Konoha… they've gone too far. This was an ambush. A coordinated strike."
The Raikage stood in silence for a long moment, his immense frame a statue of simmering power amidst the chaos. His eyes, however, were not still.
They darted from the raging blue flames of Matatabi to the corrupted crimson chakra of Gyūki, then to the pristine, silent tomb of ice Hiroshi had created. Ayy's assumption was logical, but the Raikage's mind probed deeper.
'Even Hiruzen seemed caught off guard by the news of Six-Tails' appearance during our confrontation,' he thought, the memory of the Hokage's genuine surprise cutting through the fog of war.
'If not Konoha… then who? A third party? Turning the six tails against us?'
"Whoosh!"
A fresh wave of sharp, killing cold washed over them—the aftershock of Hiroshi's technique, a final exhalation from the glacial prison. The Raikage's head snapped toward the icy mountain. The Mizukage had handled his problem. The rest, now, was his.
The commander reasserted himself, the thinker vanishing behind the mask of the warrior. He turned to Ayy.
"We're containing Matatabi first! Bee can hold Gyūki's mind... or he'll answer to me!" he barked, his voice a roll of thunder that brooked no argument.
Then, he moved. There was no blur, no tell-tale shunshin. One moment he was standing beside Ayy, the next he was a crackling nexus of lightning between the two rampaging beasts, his aura so violent it seemed to tear the frozen air itself.
With a roar that challenged the very heavens, he slammed his palms into the ice-shrouded earth.
"Raiton: Shichū Raijin Heiketsu!" (Lightning Release: Four-Pillar Thunder Prison!)
The ground erupted. Not with earth or ice, but with raw, incandescent lightning. Four colossal pillars of crackling blue-white energy shot up from the cardinal points around Matatabi, arcing into a domed cage of sizzling, roaring thunder.
"BRRRZZZZZTTT!"
The sound was a continuous, deafening zap that drowned out all else. Matatabi, caught mid-charge, slammed into the electrified walls. A colossal burst of blue flame erupted from her in pained reflex, washing over the Raikage.
He didn't dodge.
He took the full force of the inferno on his lightning-clad body, the energy dispersing over his armour with a sound like a forge god hammering steel. He grunted, his feet sliding back an inch on the ice, but his hold never faltered.
"Ayy!" he roared over the din. "Get the sealing corps in position now! You have thirty seconds before she shatters this cage!"
But as Ayy and the shinobi scrambled to obey, the other threat erupted. A roar, deeper and more guttural than Matatabi's screech, shook the very foundations of the frozen battlefield.
The Eight-Tails' instincts, predatory and ancient, overrode the last vestiges of Bee's control. One of its massive, chakra-formed tentacles, thick as an ancient tree, suddenly lashed out. But this was no wild, blind strike. It moved with a chilling, malicious calculation, not aiming for the Raikage directly, but for the space he would occupy.
As the Raikage pivoted to meet the new threat, a second tentacle swept around, not to strike, but to manipulate. It intercepted one of the raging lightning bolts arcing from the Thunder Prison, and with a surge of raw power, bent the living electricity.
The redirected bolt, now a spear of hostile energy, slammed into the Raikage's unprotected side.
The explosion was thunderous.
"KABOOM!"
A cloud of steam, ice shards, and lightning discharge bloomed outwards. The Raikage was thrown like a ragdoll, his body carving a deep, smoking trench through the frozen wasteland before crashing to a halt in a crater of his own making.
"FATHER!" Ayy's scream was ripped from his throat, a raw sound of terror and fury.
For a moment, there was only the sizzle of dying energy and the triumphant roars of the beasts. Then, from the heart of the smoking crater, a figure stirred. The Raikage rose slowly, painfully. His legendary lightning armour was cracked and sputtering, smoke rising from the point of impact. His breathing was a ragged, heavy thing, each inhalation a visible effort. But his eyes… his eyes burned with an undimmed fire, a mixture of towering pride and cold, killing fury.
Ayy called out to him again, but the Raikage waved him off with a sharp, dismissive gesture, his growl cutting through the air.
"I'm not finished yet."
His focus narrowed to a single, devastating point. He tightened his right hand, fingers pressed tightly together, thumb locking them in place. The air around his arm began to scream.
Visible lightning, thicker and brighter than before, condensed around his arm, shaping it into a razor-edged, coherent beam of pure annihilation.
"Hell Stab: Four-Finger Thrust of Hell."
He muttered through teeth clenched against the pain and the immense chakra drain, a justification, a belief, a father's desperate faith. "Bee can take it. He's strong enough."
With a final, thunderous "CRACK!" that split the sky, the Raikage launched forward. He was no longer a man, but a living bolt of judgment, tearing across the frozen plain toward the unstable, raging form of the Eight-Tails, a blur of righteous lightning aimed at the heart of the chaos.
Gyūki, its mind a swamp of poison and primal fear, saw the killing light coming. In a last, panicked instinct, it threw up a massive tentacle not as a shield, but as a flailing, desperate obstruction.
It was the worst possible move.
The Raikage's unerring thrust, designed to pierce and stun, glanced off the rising limb. The perfect, focused energy of the Hell Stab deflected at a catastrophic angle. The razor beam of lightning, carrying the full, unimaginable force of the Third Raikage's power, did not strike Gyūki.
It drove directly into the Raikage's own shoulder and chest.
The world turned white. A silent, blinding flash consumed everything, followed by a sound like the universe tearing in half. The lightning detonated inward, a star collapsing upon itself. The concussive force hurled the Raikage backwards with even greater violence than before. He landed like a broken toy, skidding across the ice before coming to a final, horrifyingly still stop. Thick smoke, smelling of ozone and seared flesh, rose from the gruesome, blackened wound. His body twitched violently, residual currents dancing across his skin as the brilliant light of the Hell Stab flickered and died, leaving only the cold, the smoke, and the deafening silence of utter catastrophe.
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