The journey back to Kirigakure was a procession of ghosts. Hiroshi, the Third Mizukage, moved through the twilight forests not with the grace of a Kage, but with the heavy, plodding steps of a man carrying a world of grief.
Each flicker-step, usually silent and effortless, now felt like a monumental effort, his body a hollowed-out vessel. The physical weight of the sealed Six-Tails, contained within a smooth, cold orb of ice no larger than his fist, was nothing compared to the metaphysical burden it represented. It was Ayame's tombstone, and he was her pallbearer.
His mind, shielded from the external world by a curtain of exhaustion, was a tempest of silent fury and sorrow. 'Ayame… her smile, so rare in our bloody world, extinguished. Not by an enemy's blade in honourable combat, but corrupted, twisted into a weapon and then broken by my own hand.'
The memory of her, vibrant and determined, clashed violently with the image of the mindless, rampaging beast he had been forced to encase in a glacier. He had gone to save her and had instead presided over her execution.
He grasped for a sliver of solace, a brittle branch to keep from drowning. 'At least the war is over. The bleeding stops. My people can finally…' The thought faltered. What awaited his people? Kirigakure was a carcass picked over by vultures. The great clans—the Kaguya with their mindless bloodlust, the Hoshigaki with their shark-like ruthlessness, the Terumī and their subtle political machinations—circled the weakened central authority like sharks in mist-choked waters.
His power had always been a precarious thing, a delicate balance of ice and intimidation held together by his strength and the external threat of war. With the war ended, that balance was shattered. He was returning not to a victory parade, but to a nest of vipers who would see his exhaustion as weakness, his grief as an opening.
'No,' he thought, his jaw tightening despite the fatigue. 'I will rebuild. I will purge the rot. I will forge a Kiri that is strong, united, and free from the shadow of its own clans. This peace will be our foundation, not our epitaph.'
It was a vow, forged in the furnace of his rage, a final flicker of the defiant will that had made him Mizukage.
It was that very will, stretched taut and frayed, that screamed a warning a half-second too late. He halted mid-step, his foot hovering over a patch of ordinary-looking moss. Something was wrong.
The forest was too quiet.
Not the peaceful quiet of dusk, but the predatory silence of a held breath. His sensory instincts, usually a finely tuned instrument, were blunted by chakra depletion, returning only a faint, dissonant hum at the edge of his perception. It was a flicker of unease, a prickle on the back of his neck—but he was too tired, too focused on his own inner turmoil, to fully heed it.
The world erupted in silent, black fire.
It was not flame, but script.
"FWOOM."
From the moss, the bark of the trees, the very air around him, intricate, jagged black fūinjutsu marks flared to life. They did not burn; they crawled. Like a swarm of obsidian insects, they surged up his legs, their touch like ice and acid simultaneously. He tried to move, to shunshin away, but his muscles locked solid.
The paralysis was instantaneous and absolute. The marks swarmed over his abdomen, his chest, his arms, and finally, his face, sealing his lips and stilling his tongue, leaving only his eyes wide with shock and dawning horror.
'Juinjutsu…? A cursed seal…? Who…?'
The questions screamed in the prison of his mind. He pushed against the bindings, summoning the dregs of his chakra, but it was like trying to light a match in a vacuum. The seal not only suppressed his chakra flow; it actively strangled it, and with it, the very source of his power.
He felt the connection to his Ice Release, his Kekkei Genkai, snuff out like a candle. The familiar, comforting cold within him was replaced by a hollow, sterile emptiness.
From the shadows of the ancient trees, figures emerged. Not Iwa nin in brown, or Kumo in blue. These were his own. Twelve jōnin of Kirigakure, their faces concealed by the standard Kiri masks or the uniforms of elite Anbu. They moved with a chilling, synchronised silence, forming a perfect circle around his frozen form. The betrayal was a physical blow, more devastating than any enemy's technique.
His eyes, the only part of him he could move, blazed with a fury that could have flash-frozen a lake.
"What is the meaning of this?" the unspoken demand screamed from his gaze.
One of the jōnin, a tall man with a mocking tilt to his head, stepped forward. "Save your breath, old man," he said, his voice dripping with contempt. "No one can hear you scream in here."
Then, the circle parted. A smaller figure walked through the gap with an unnerving, calm authority. Hiroshi's blood ran colder than his own ice. Yagura.
The boy—no, the young man now—who he had once seen as a prodigy, a potential threat. His face was serene, but his eyes held the flat, dead calm of deep, still water hiding unimaginable pressures.
Yagura's gaze swept over Hiroshi's immobilized form without a flicker of emotion. His voice, when he spoke, was quiet, yet it commanded the very air.
"Retrieve the Six-Tails first," he ordered, his tone that of a technician discussing a tool. "Don't damage the seal."
Two of the jōnin moved forward. Their hands were efficient, impersonal, as they searched his robes. Hiroshi could only watch, a statue of rage and humiliation, as one of them found the icy orb containing Saiken. The jōnin handled it with reverence, turning and presenting it to Yagura on upturned palms.
Yagura took it, his small fingers closing around the vessel of immense power. He didn't look at it. His eyes remained fixed on Hiroshi.
A tremor ran through Hiroshi's paralyzed frame. Pure, undiluted fury warred with the absolute helplessness of his situation. He pushed again, straining every fiber of his being, trying to force a single spark of chakra, a single shard of ice, anything to break this profane stillness.
The seal responded not by resisting, but by consuming. It drank the attempted energy, the black marks glowing faintly, drinking his will like poison. The scope of the trap became terrifyingly clear.
'They prepared this. They knew my path. They knew I would be exhausted, vulnerable… They waited for this moment.'
Through the seal's suppression, he managed to force a single, strained, guttural whisper past his frozen lips.
"Are you… planning… to kill me?"
Yagura's serene expression did not change. "The war is over. Word reached us earlier." He stated it as a simple fact. "Perfect timing. Every nation is focused inward, licking its wounds, counting its dead. The world's eyes are turned away from the Land of Water."
He took a step closer, his voice dropping, not in volume, but in pitch, becoming something ancient and terrible.
"Our plans," Yagura said, his dead eyes locking with Hiroshi's, "must proceed now. A stronger, purer Kirigakure must rise from the ashes of the old. Your time… your way… is at an end."
The implication was a final, chilling clarity. This was not an assassination. It was a coup. Planned by the clans, led by this boy, executed with a cold precision that spoke of months, perhaps years, of preparation. He had been so focused on the enemies outside the village, he had failed to see the cancer growing within.
'I let myself get too exhausted… too careless… too trusting…'
The regret was a bitter poison in his mouth. He had survived a battle against the other Kage, only to fall to a knife in the dark from his own people.
He gathered everything that remained—not chakra, for there was none, but the final, defiant ember of his spirit. He focused it, a last, silent scream of protest against the betrayal. The black seals flared once, a dark corona around his body, and crushed the attempt into nothingness.
Silence. The twelve jōnin moved as one, their formation shifting from a circle to a spearhead. There were no battle cries, no wasted motion. Hands formed seals in unison. The air grew heavy with the intent to kill.
Hiroshi's final thought was not of his village, or his legacy, or even of Ayame. It was a simple, bitterly ironic observation, the last spark of a sharp and analytical mind.
'So this is how it ends. Not on a grand battlefield, but in a forgotten wood. Not by a god's hand, but by a puppet's.'
The world erupted in a symphony of precisely coordinated death. Water, sharpened to monomolecular points, shot from gathered moisture. Silent, invisible killing intent focused into a blade that severed the soul. Combined chakra techniques, dark and malevolent, converged on his single, paralyzed form.
He could not defend. He could not even flinch.
The fatal strike landed—a spear of water and dark chakra that pierced his heart with the sound of a shattering glacier. The pain was immense, but brief, a final, violent punctuation to a life of violence.
The Third Mizukage, Hiroshi, did not cry out. His body simply shuddered once, then fell forward, hitting the damp forest floor with a dull, final thud.
A soft, cold rain began to fall, as if the very sky were weeping for the ignominy of it all. The droplets pattered against the leaves, against the black fūinjutsu marks already fading from the corpse, against Yagura's impassive face.
He looked down at the body of his predecessor, then at the sealed beast in his hand. His voice, when he spoke his final command, was as cold and clear as the ice Hiroshi would never command again.
"Retrieve his body. We move. Time for my Coronation."
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