With Batu at the helm and twelve thousand wooden warriors beneath his command, the tide of battle shifted like a blade drawn from its sheath. The Bodhisattva Legion marched without rest or fear or need, and Hashirama, ever behind and beside them, filled the world with his will. His Wood Clones moved like smoke through ruin, splitting and reforming, spreading across the ash-drenched sprawl of the Hive City. From their hands poured fire and root, stone and leaf, binding and sealing and breaking with equal ease. Jutsu cut through the enemy like wind through long grass.
And it was not long before the upper levels of the Hive were reclaimed.
They took it inch by inch, corridor by corridor. Enemy Astartes—clad in armor like bone gilded with filth, screaming laughter through vox-filters choked with incense and blood—fell beneath bludgeons and spears. Their mortal kin, those madmen who served their debased banners, broke like rotted wood when struck. The war machines roared but were silenced by rising root and clutching vine. The daemons shrieked and twisted and laughed, but they too died, unraveled by the fusion of spiritual and physical energy that only Hashirama and his Wood Clones could conjure. Some screamed curses, some sang hymns. A few moaned in ecstasy and delight. All were erased.
The battle had changed. It was no longer a clash of warriors, not even a siege. It had become a cleansing. A purging.
Cut off from the sky, the enemy fractured. Their support had come in the form of shrieking machines and wings of fire. Jets, bombers, gunships—metal birds and dragons that spat death from on high. But when the forest grew tall and the skies were sealed with leaves and branches thick as iron, when the upper reaches were wrapped in bark and shade, the enemy below found themselves blind. And once blind, they found themselves vulnerable.
Hashirama watched it unfold. From a high vantage on a ruined spire, he saw the pattern repeat again and again. Wherever his trees rose, the enemy floundered. Wherever his clones sowed confusion, the enemy fell. The Emperor's Children, for all their grotesque refinement and speed, faltered when denied their symphony of destruction. It became clear, then, how reliant they were on their war machines. On their logistics. On the weapons that roared for them from far away.
Their strength lay not only in their bodies, but in the arms of the beasts they commanded.
Hashirama took note.
Despite their armor, despite their weapons, despite their cybernetics and enhancements, they needed what every other army needed. They needed supply lines. They needed communication. They needed support. They were not omnipotent. They were not invincible. They could be beaten. Not easily, and never without cost, but they could be undone.
And so he pressed harder.
The clones doubled their efforts. The Bodhisattvas widened their sweep. Batu pushed forward, never halting, cleaving a path through the remnants of the corrupted host. The Hive shook beneath their feet. Once a city, now a graveyard.
Beneath the twisted shadows of charred buildings, children were found. Beneath walls blackened with soot, mothers and fathers buried themselves to protect their kin. Some dead. Some still breathing. Hashirama sealed them away one by one, pulling them from ruin like weeds from broken stone. Their hearts beat on inside scrolls of chakra, stored until they could be freed once more. Safe, if only for a time.
The sky did not clear. The air remained thick with ash and grief. But the ground—the ground belonged to them now.
And Hashirama understood something deeper then. This world, strange as it was, played by the same rules as his own. Power without balance was weakness. Might without support was noise. And every force, no matter how terrible, had a point at which it could be broken.
He turned from the battlefield and began walking again. Roots parted before him. The trees bent in quiet reverence. The war was not over. Not yet. The Hive had many levels, and the depths below still roared with the sound of fighting.
But for now, they had the surface.
Hashirama drew a slow breath and knelt on the broken stones. His eyes fell closed, and his palms pressed flat against the cracked ground. From deep within, he felt the pull of the air around him, thick with the grime and ash of a thousand fires. His senses reached beyond flesh, drawing the tainted natural energy, pulling it into himself. Like dirty water filtered through cloth, he strained the corruption from it, cleansing it until pure. He fed it into his chakra, careful and measured, forming the steady current of Senjutsu needed to sustain himself and the twelve thousand wooden soldiers he had crafted from bark and breath.
Their bodies needed the flow of that energy to endure. Without it, their forms would crumble into splinters, and what had been gained would be lost again. Each pulse of Senjutsu, carefully measured and balanced, kept their limbs whole and their strength endless. The ground around him shivered slightly, as if aware of the quiet power passing through it.
Batu stepped slowly across the ruin toward Hashirama. His armored boots crushed blackened stone into ash beneath their weight. He halted near the shinobi, his posture straight and grim as he gazed down into the smoke-choked abyss below. Distant sounds echoed upward through the winding chambers and tunnels that led downward into the belly of the Hive. Gunfire. Screams. The dull echo of explosions that shook loose more dust and rubble from above.
"Surface secured," Batu said in his rough, accented voice. "Lower levels still fighting. But most of enemy defeated. We go down?"
Hashirama opened his eyes, dark and calm, and rose slowly to his feet. His robes stirred gently around him, touched by a wind that did not reach the ground. He gazed around at the devastation wrought upon this place, at shattered towers and broken bridges and walls burned black by fire and bolt and daemoncraft. He knew, deep in his bones, that each city they retook would look the same, scarred and torn and blackened, filled with the dead and dying, but this knowledge did not sway him. He nodded once, his expression unyielding.
"We don't stop until the city is free," he said quietly. He raised his gaze toward the horizon, where dark clouds churned like ink spilled into water. "After this one, we save every single one that's between here and this Imperial Palace you mentioned before."
Batu's armored frame shifted slightly, the joints of his warplate grinding gently as he inclined his head. He hefted the long, curved blade at his side, its edge already notched from battle.
"Agreement," he said. "We save as many as we can."
Together, the two moved downward, deeper into the Hive's lower chambers. They descended beneath ruined arches and through caverns carved from metal and rock and bone. The darkness closed around them as the wooden legion marched behind, a river of unyielding timber and bark and chakra-driven strength. Their footsteps drummed out a steady rhythm, a pulse of inevitability that echoed against steel walls, reverberating in the dark.
Without the threat of enemy fliers raining death from above, their progress became steadier, quicker, but never easy. The fighting below was brutal and close, hallways clogged with rubble and corpses and pockets of the enemy that still lingered, unwilling to yield. Daemons, enemy Astartes, mortal cultists—each fought with desperate savagery, backed into the corners of broken rooms and tunnels choked with smoke.
Hashirama's clones spread through the halls and chambers like shadows made of wood and will. Where they found pockets of resistance, they met them with wood and wire, blade and root. They crushed armored foes beneath coiling branches. They drew daemons into themselves, flooding them with physical energy until they unraveled, screaming, into nothing. At times, they escaped as in-betweeners, Daemons turned corporeal, but they were slain all the same. The air filled with smoke and splinters and echoes of fading howls.
Survivors they found huddled in the dark, trembling against cold metal walls. Men and women holding children close, their eyes wide and bloodshot from terror and exhaustion. Some wept quietly, others stared blankly, unable to see beyond the nightmare. When they beheld the towering wooden legionnaires, many screamed, raising makeshift weapons and attacking in blind, confused panic. Clubs, pipes, bits of broken furniture—all swung against the towering, silent statues, only to rebound harmlessly from bark like iron.
Hashirama shook his head and moved quickly among them, calm and careful, with gestures gentle but swift. He placed a hand against their heads and sealed them away within scrolls inked in chakra—safe from the ruin, from the violence, from the terror of war. He conjured more paper as needed, pressing fingertips wet with his own blood to its surface, tracing symbols and lines of ink that glowed briefly with power before fading. These scrolls were tucked away into folds of cloth, heavy with lives preserved and futures kept from ruin.
Soon the lower chambers fell silent. Batu stood at the end of a long hallway, his sword wet with fresh gore, his armor streaked with black and red. Behind him, the legionnaires waited, silent and unwavering. He turned toward Hashirama, nodding once. There was still some fighting down below, but he sensed no more of the enemy Astartes. Their mortal servants were all that remained and they would soon be overrun and defeated. It was practically over.
"This hive," Batu said slowly, his words worn by weariness yet firm as steel and bearing just the tiniest bit of something that might've been happiness or hope. "Taken. Finally."
Hashirama nodded. He raised his face and closed his eyes briefly, feeling the vibrations of life and death and ruin and hope. Batu turned to him and fell to a knee. "Thank you. Hive fallen would've without you. Fallen brothers and I thank you."
He let out a slow breath, calm and steady, before stepping towards Batu and laying a hand on his shoulder. "I did what anyone would've done if they had what I have. Nothing to be thankful for. Stand up. We have more work to do."
Batu nodded and stood. "Yes. More hives to save."
One hive down.
An untold number left to save.
Lord Commander Cyrius crushed the messenger's head with one mailed fist. Bone cracked beneath ceramite. Blood spattered the floor like spilled ink. The corpse folded at his feet in silence, its limbs twitching once, then going still. No one moved to drag it away. No one dared speak.
He stood in the middle of a command chamber that pulsed with low music, a tremble of strings and screaming. The walls were paneled in flayed skin, still fresh, stretched taut over brass struts that moaned faintly when the air vents shifted. Incense smoldered in golden braziers, thick and perfumed, masking the stench of blood. The ground beneath his boots was slick with wine, or something like it, and the light was tinted rose.
A screen flickered to his left, showing grainy augur-readings, distorted by atmospheric interference and something else—something they had not yet named. Across the Hive known as Red Hope, great spires of biomass had sprouted, thicker than towers, older than stone. Trees, the tech-priests whispered. But not trees in any natural sense. Their branches reached miles into the sky. Their roots had split the foundations of the Hive open. And the leaves—damned things—interfered with every deep scan they attempted. A living shroud. A wall of silence and shade.
Cyrius turned from the corpse. His armor groaned as he moved. Gold plate chased in violet trim, lacquered in filth and polished with ash. A halo of blades circled his helm, spinning slow. His gauntlets bore the sigils of Fulgrim. His right pauldron was marked with teeth not his own.
The silence in the chamber pressed in.
"Five thousand Astartes," he said. The words echoed low, quiet. Not a question. A sentence. "Gone."
No one answered.
"And the tanks. The armored companies. The mortals. The slave-bands. All gone."
He stepped closer to the nearest terminal. A servitor's face blinked and shifted in response, trying to interpret the shifting data streams. Cyrius reached out and touched the screen with one finger. The image of the Hive pulsed. In place of structure and spire and ruin, only green now. Not the green of fields or gardens. The green of forest primeval. Of old things. Alien. Wrong.
He had fought on hundreds of worlds. He had watched suns fall and moons break. But he had never seen trees do this.
"Bombardment failed," another officer muttered. His voice filtered through a twisted vox-mask shaped like a screaming cherub. "The canopy absorbs impact. Regenerates within hours."
Cyrius tilted his head. "How."
"The biomass… unknown. Resistant to heat. Resistant to kinetic force. We've seen this before. In part. But never like this."
He looked down at the screen again. Rubbed a smear of blood across its surface.
"Then it grows," he said, "and it learns."
He turned back to the gathered officers. Sorcerers and warriors alike. Each draped in finery. Chains and silks and armor carved from bone and pleasure. They stood in a semi-circle. Not one met his eyes.
He took another step toward them. The floor shifted underfoot. The music grew louder.
"Someone," he said, "has made a mockery of us."
He paused. Looked toward the far end of the room, where the open viewport displayed the Hive in the distance—now a thing of branches and canopy and thorn. The city's highest towers were no longer steel and glass. They were bark. They were leaves. The sky above was thick with mist and falling ash. A faint light shimmered within the foliage like dying stars caught in a web.
Cyrius smiled without humor.
"The children of Fulgrim," he said. "The chosen of the Prince of Perfection. Humiliated by trees."
A soft chuckle came from one of the officers. It died instantly when Cyrius turned.
His fingers flexed. He reached up and removed his helm. Set it down on the altar beside him. His face was smooth and flawless. Skin stretched too tight over the skull. Eyes sharp and colorless. He looked younger than he was. Eternally so. And entirely without mercy.
"I will descend," he said. "I will enter that city of bark and rot. I will burn it from the roots."
The mortal stepped forward with caution, his cloth still stained by the soot and oil of some manufactorum long since emptied by war. Around him stood the survivors—men and women in ragged uniforms, a few in battered flak vests, others clothed in little more than tattered shifts. All of them looking to him for answers. He carried a lasgun, muzzle tipped toward the ground, more a burden than a threat.
"You're the one who saved us?" he asked, voice low, uncertain. He shifted his stance and glanced at Batu's war-plate, then at Hashirama. The markings on his tunic showed him as a factory worker once, not a soldier, yet clearly these people saw him as a leader. A dozen or so huddled behind him, eyes wide with a mix of exhaustion and relief.
Hashirama met the man's gaze, but as ever, he did not speak the local tongue. He turned to Batu, a curious expression in his dark eyes. "What did he say?"
Batu's helm inclined.
"He thanks you," he told Hashirama, in that old, near-forgotten language they shared. Constantly speaking with Hashirama allowed him to learn more of it than any old scroll ever could've done. And now, Batu dared to consider the possibility that his grammar was no longer atrocious. "He says you are the reason they still live."
Hashirama offered a small smile in reply, lifting one hand in a gesture of peace. The worker nodded, swallowing hard, his own relief evident in the way his shoulders sagged.
The man cleared his throat. "What do we do now, Lord Astartes?"
That brought Batu's thoughts to a hard stop. The Hive City called Red Hope was free, for now. The traitors were gone, or dead, or fled. But the planet was still burning in a dozen other warfronts, and he and Hashirama were bound for the Imperial Palace. They could not stay. And without Hashirama's strange power—his living trees, his unstoppable legion—there would be nothing to keep another wave of traitors from marching right back in.
Batu turned to Hashirama. "Could you… seal them as you've done to the other survivors?"
Hashirama folded his arms, glancing at the crowds in the distance. There were thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions in total. People from the lower levels, the gutters, the manufactorums, all saved at the last moment from what seemed certain death. He drew a long breath and nodded. "I'll have to craft something bigger. A new scroll. But I must release the Bodhisattva Legion to do it. I can't keep both the legion and the survivors sealed at once, not without losing control."
Batu said nothing at first, only studied the battered men and women clinging to each other. Some bled from half-treated wounds. Others cradled children swaddled in torn blankets. All of them watched with eyes too tired to hope.
He placed a hand gently on the worker's shoulder, gauntlet scraping tattered cloth. Then he turned back to Hashirama.
"It must be done," he said. "We cannot leave them here to face another onslaught. Better they rest within your seals than be slaughtered in their own streets."
Hashirama gave a slow nod, already forming a plan in his mind. And the people looked on, silent, waiting for a salvation stranger than anything they had known.
Hashirama brought his hands together, fingers weaving through a sequence of shapes that Batu had begun to recognize, though he could never quite grasp their purpose. The last shape lingered a moment, held steady. And in the space between breaths, every single one of the wooden warriors stilled. The great constructs, so recently awash in motion and blood, froze in place. Their limbs ceased to creak. Their roots stopped twitching. They became statues again—hulking silhouettes of bark and ironwood and quiet power, standing among the ruins like guardians from some long-forgotten myth.
The wind passed between their legs and arms and up through the city's broken towers, keening through the gaps with the thin voice of something ancient. And the people—those battered survivors who had lived beneath the shadow of the hive and the horror alike—watched it all in silence.
Hashirama stepped forward, knelt beside a clear space of scorched stone, and made a second seal. This one with just the right hand, fingers curled tight save for the fore and middle digits, which pressed together like the jaws of a needle. Then he placed his palm against the ground.
There was a flicker.
Then paper poured forth—an enormous scroll, thick as a man's thigh when rolled, but unwinding now like a serpent of ash-colored parchment. It unfurled over the debris and blood, curling through fallen beams and around the corpses that still lay broken and forgotten in the open. Symbols began to form across its surface, dark lines of ink that appeared as if etched by fire, shifting and growing with slow deliberation.
Hashirama breathed in deep. He did not speak at first. His hand remained against the scroll and his eyes shut.
"This'll take time," he said finally, voice low. "No sealing like this has ever been done. Not at this scale. Not by me or anyone. Give me fifteen minutes to formulate this whole thing."
He did not look away from the scroll.
"While I work," he added, "tell them. Tell them what must be done. I'd rather not force anyone."
Batu gave a sharp nod. His helm was still clipped to his side and the air bit cold against his skin. He stepped forward, the ground cracking beneath his boots, and raised his voice.
"Mortals," he called, and his voice rang loud and harsh across the square. "Listen."
The people stirred, shifting like birds startled from stillness. Some flinched. Some leaned closer. All of them turned to him, their eyes hollow and rimmed in soot. Men, women, children. Clerks. Scribes. Forge workers. The broken remnants of what had once been a city.
"You cannot remain," Batu said, and the words felt heavy in his mouth. "This place is not safe. The traitors we drove out will return. And when they come, we may not be here to stop them."
He let the words settle. The silence afterward was not empty. It carried the weight of everything they had seen and everything they feared still to come.
"My ally," Batu said, gesturing toward the kneeling figure beside the scroll, "has a power unlike any you've known. He can seal you all away. Not in death. Not in stasis. But in safety. You will not feel hunger. You will not feel pain. You will not know fear. You will sleep through the fire of this war and wake again when it is done. Alive. Whole."
Someone stirred in the crowd. A child coughed. An older man muttered something. The murmur began to rise, thin and uncertain.
"You will not die," Batu said again. "Not while he stands. Not while I draw breath."
He turned to Hashirama, who remained knelt with his hand upon the parchment, the air around him bending, shimmering slightly as if beneath a great weight.
The scroll had grown longer. Wider. Symbols now circled in rings, black script bordered by lines of red ink that gleamed with chakra. Paper rustled as it continued to unfurl, like dry leaves blown by a wind that did not move.
"Trust him," Batu said. "Trust us. And you will see the sun again."
And in that moment, they began to understand. Or at least, to hope. None among them raised their voice in protest. There were no shouted questions, no grasping hands, no wild-eyed refusals. The stillness that took them was not resignation, but something quieter. A kind of surrender. The tired kind. The kind born not from fear but from the slow erosion of everything else.
Fourteen minutes passed like the tolling of a distant bell. The wind pulled ash across the open square. Rubble settled. Smoke thinned. And Hashirama stood.
He brushed the dust from his hands, slow, methodical. His robe caught the breeze and curled gently around his legs. The scroll at his feet now stretched from one end of the square to the other. A river of parchment, pale and wide, its surface alive with ink. Symbols written in a script that Batu had never seen, curved and sharp, pulsing faintly as if they had breath of their own. Glyphs older than the city itself.
Hashirama turned toward him.
"It's done," he said.
Batu nodded once.
"Tell them to hold each other's hands. No gloves. Skin must touch skin. They all need to be connected. This seal—" he paused, his eyes narrowing, "—can only be used once."
Batu stepped forward and relayed the instructions. His voice carried through the square, not loud, but deep. He repeated the words as needed. Not everyone understood at once, but enough did. The rest followed.
Mothers took the hands of children. Workers linked arms. Soldiers removed gauntlets and pressed palms against palms. The wounded were helped by those who still stood. Fingers trembling, they reached for one another. Lines formed, knots of humanity strung together in makeshift chains. A broken people bound by nothing more than the feel of another's flesh. The air was heavy with silence. None asked what would happen next.
Hashirama walked to the nearest one. A boy no older than ten, face smeared with soot, eyes too wide. The shinobi moved with the calm of a man who had done this sort of thing before, though not quite at this scale. From his back extended wooden tendrils, thin and smooth, each one trailing from the edge of the scroll behind him. They twitched and flexed in time with his steps. Like roots seeking soil.
He knelt before the child. Reached out his left hand and placed his palm gently against the boy's forehead. The boy didn't flinch.
Then, with his right hand, Hashirama formed a symbol.
The motion was simple. Quick.
"Seal," he said.
The symbols on the scroll glowed. A pulse of light, faint but sharp, ran across its surface like a vein catching fire. The wooden tendrils snapped taut. For a moment, everything held still.
And then, as one, every single person linked to another disappeared in a great plume of white smoke. Hundreds upon hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, disappearing in a single instance.
Batu stood still. Watched it happen.
The scroll pulled them in. Folded them down into the ink.
Hashirama let his hands fall.
He stepped back. His breathing was slow and measured. His eyes lingered on the place where the boy had been. There was no mark. No shadow. The black symbols on his face, around his eyes, flickered and almost disappeared; instead, they dimmed in intensity, but were still present. The biggest difference, Batu noted, was in the sudden shift in the tone of Hashirama's skin as it became several times paler than it had been before the sealing. Did he use too much of his power for this divine act?
Hashirama's eyebags and cheeks darkened.
"It's done," he said again. His voice was heavy. Tired. All the survivors were gone. Breathing in. Hashirama rolled up the giant scroll and then sealed it in another, much smaller, scroll.
Batu nodded. "Do you need rest?"
Hashirama shook his head. When he did, the remnants of the black marks on his face disappeared entirely and he let out a slow breath. "Drained a good chunk of my chakra there. But, nothing to worry about. I can recover this on the move. I've been through way worse."
"As you say."
With the last of the survivors sealed and stored within the scroll, the Hive of Red Hope stood empty behind them. Not silent, not truly—fires still burned in its deeper levels, and the bones of ruined engines still groaned against the shifting wind. But the people were gone. The breathing, the broken, the barely-living—all of them folded away, their weight pressed into ink and will. There was nothing more to do here.
So they turned from it.
They left the city behind as the sun vanished behind the haze. No banners flew from its towers. No signal was sent. No message of triumph. Just the long shadows of trees that now grew from stone and metal, their branches brushing skyward in place of spires.
They passed through the gates and did not look back.
Ahead of them stretched the dead lands between the hives. A wasteland carved by fire and tread. Trenches carved so deep they swallowed men whole. Smoke curling from broken tanks like incense over a grave. The land here was churned black with the tread of ten thousand war machines. Hills flattened. Forests burned to their roots. Craters layered atop craters. Miles of nothing but rusted wreckage and the dead. No birds. No beasts. Only war.
They moved without rest.
Armies clashed across the horizon. Waves of flesh and metal driven into one another, guided by flags and vox-signals and the madness of gods. Lines of men marched into fire without pause. Regiments of armor rolled over the corpses of the last hour. Gunships screamed overhead, vanishing into clouds of ash. Titans moved in the distance, great machines walking like towers with legs, each step shaking the ground. They loomed like gods made of furnace and steel, flanked by lines of tanks and thunderous artillery.
And still the fighting never ceased.
There were no fronts. No flanks. No lines to hold. Only open slaughter. The war bled in all directions, a tide with no shore. Those who died were trampled by those who followed. Those who lived were already dying.
The wind shifted.
And then the world slowed.
Over the jagged rim of the horizon came a shape—massive and bent and terrible. A titan of blackened metal and scorched steel, its body warped by heat and war, its limbs fused with ruin. It moved on legs like siege towers, each footfall tearing gouges into the earth. Its frame was humanoid only in the barest sense, hunched and broad and bristling with armaments that no sane forge could have dreamt into being. Cannons jutted from its spine like bone growths. Rotating weapons groaned from beneath its shoulders. Its chest pulsed with something alive, a glowing red core half-seen through cables and rusted plating.
It came to a halt. One weapon turned. A click. A hum.
Then it fired.
What came was not light. Not fire. But something between the two. A beam that howled like wind through a broken canyon. It struck the ground a kilometer away, and where it hit, the stone ceased to be. A flash of white, a valley scooped from the world as though carved by the hand of some vengeful god. The crater glowed with molten light. Nothing within it remained. Millions must've died in an instant.
The ground shook as another giant lumbered forth from the horizon, shorter this time, but no less menacing.
And then came another.
And another.
And another.
They rose behind the first like ghosts from a mass grave. Dozens. Scores. Each a colossus clad in armor that had never known rust, only war. Their shapes varied—some with arms like battering rams, others bristling with guns from knee to crown. Their heads were domed and impassive, some crowned with horns, others flanked by emitters howling into the wind and sky. All of them moved in eerie synchrony, their joints grinding like millstones, their weapons heating the air until the very sky seemed to ripple with the pressure.
The world shook.
Their footfalls thundered like the drumbeat of execution. With each step they claimed the land, and with each volley they unmade it. Beams of light lashed the horizon. Plumes of flame turned soldiers to ash. The heat from their passing curled stone and set wreckage ablaze. The air itself screamed.
Hashirama stepped forward, eyes narrowing at the distortion in the space between them. The energy was familiar. Foul. Twisted. It was the same that bled from the daemons he had fought before. That cloying, unnatural presence that gnawed at the borders of perception. But here it clung to steel. To iron. It rode the hulls of the machines like rot on flesh.
He raised his hand, let the energy settle over his palm. Felt it shudder against his own. They were alive, in a way. Or rather, something lived within them. Buried deep in their cores. Dormant. Watching. Breathing through tubes and wire.
Jinchuriki. That was the word that came to him. Not perfect, but close. Tailed beasts sealed in flesh, bound into cages of chakra and skin. These titans, perhaps, were similar—spirits bound not into human hosts, but into machines. A question formed in his mind, unanswered. What sort of creature willingly caged itself inside iron and gun?
He stepped back.
There were too many. Not one or two. A legion.
Across the blackened plain they came, an army of death-golems. Each stride brought them closer. Closer to the Hive. Closer to whatever still lived beyond.
He turned his head.
Batu stood beside him, unmoved. His armor smoked from battle. The sigils on his shoulder still ran with blood.
"Legio Mortis," Batu said. His voice low and steady. "Titan legion. Traitors. Destroyers."
Hashirama said nothing for a moment. His eyes did not leave the advancing machines. He watched one of them level its weapons at a distant column of friendly armor—half a mile off—and then reduce them to nothing with a single pulse. Flames leapt a hundred feet into the sky.
"Dies Irae leads them," Batu added. "Greatest and most powerful of the Traitor Titans. If they reach Imperial Palace, no telling what damage they do."
Hashirama nodded. As he understood it, the government of this entire world was located in the Imperial Palace. It was from there that they coordinated their defenses and logistics, where their Emperor ruled. It was their final bastion. If it fell, then the enemy would win and the innocent would suffer. Hashirama did not like the sound of that. "Then we stop them."
Batu nodded. "How?"
Hashirama eyed the titans as they marched across the shattered plain. He could still feel the fatigue settling into his bones, his chakra reduced from sealing away the survivors of Red Hope. His reserves had dwindled to embers. Without proper cultivation—without an hour of silence to gather and refine the tainted air around him into something clean and useful—he would not be able to conjure his Sage Mode again. And without Sage Mode, his most powerful techniques would remain out of reach.
But an hour was something he did not have. Batu stood beside him, rigid in his warplate, his eyes locked forward with a grim and desperate urgency. An hour here could mean the deaths of another million souls. Another billion, perhaps. Time was not theirs to spend.
So he watched.
From behind distant ridgelines came scattered volleys of artillery fire. Shells streaked upward in arcs of smoke and flame, reaching for the towering colossi that lumbered like moving mountains of iron. Explosions flowered briefly across their surfaces—white blooms against rust-colored plating—but each time the shells drew close, something rippled in the air around the titans, and the shells seemed to vanish. Some invisible barrier flickered in and out of existence, a shimmering veil that defied Hashirama's senses.
He narrowed his eyes. Watched closer. A shield. Some barrier crafted by these traitors, a layer beyond mere steel. He had seen its kind before, but never on this scale. How strong was it? Could it be pierced by sheer force alone, or must it be bypassed through cunning and subtlety? All around the field lay the carcasses of fallen titans—giant heaps of blackened metal and twisted wire. Their barriers had been broken somehow. There was a limit, then. But what that limit was, he did not yet know.
He was gonna have to do this the old fashioned way.
"Do these things have crewmen inside them?" Hashirama turned to Batu.
The Astartes nodded. "Yes."
Hashirama turned away. "Alright, this is going to be a little dicey; so, stay back and away, unless you want me to seal you again."
"I'll stay back, just in case."
Hashirama moved. Fast. The ground shuddered with each distant step of the titans, but his feet were sure upon the rubble-strewn plain. He ran toward the largest of them, a creature of steel and hate, hunched like a dying god beneath its own arsenal. Cannons jutted from its shoulders, its arms, its spine. A beast shaped for siege.
Hashirama made a seal and light bent around him, turning him functionally invisible. Ninja Art: Chameleon Jutsu. Useful, because the titans were not by their lonesome. No, they were accompanied by convoys of armored vehicles, support units. None of them noticed him as he passed by them, unseen and unheard.
As he ran, his eye caught a small stone lying on the ground, half-covered in ash. He stooped once, quick and smooth, and scooped it up in one hand. Without pause, he flung it forward. A flick of the wrist. The pebble spun through the air and clinked against the metal foot of the titan with a sound like a coin dropped on stone. Then it bounced. Rolled. Came to rest in a curl of twisted metal.
Nothing.
He frowned.
Above him, a shell streaked from a distant line. High arc. Bright trail. It drew closer, whistling down like a curse from heaven. And then, a dozen meters out from the titan's bulk, it vanished. Not exploded. Not deflected. Simply… gone.
He looked up again at the towering thing. Its guns still burned from recent fire. Smoke curled from the barrel vents like incense in a temple desecrated long ago. The titan did not move. It stood firm, braced against the recoil of its own fury. Waiting, perhaps, for the next order. Or perhaps it waited for nothing at all.
Hashirama made a hand seal without thought. A single Wood Clone rose beside him, shaped from bark and chakra and will. The clone nodded once, then sprinted forward, its pace smooth, its path unwavering.
The clone passed the point where the shell had vanished.
Nothing happened.
No flicker. No ripple. No flash of burning light or snapping air. The clone simply ran through, unscathed, unbothered, unmarked.
Hashirama blinked once, then followed.
He crossed the line the same way, his stride sure, his posture calm. He felt no push of energy. No pressure. No pull. Only the sound of boots on broken stone and the distant thunder of war. The air was thick, but not heavy. Still, but not silent.
He slowed to a halt and looked up again at the titan.
Its surface was a cathedral of rivets and scars. Dozens of cannons perched atop its shoulders like vultures. Spires of sharpened steel jutted from its back. Its plating was carved with glyphs and runes, many glowing faint with some inner light. Corrupted symbols, perhaps. Daemonic. But what struck him most was that the machine had not turned to face him. It remained still, braced, its vast limbs locked.
"Huh," he said aloud.
He raised a brow.
He looked down at his own hand, flexed the fingers, and then turned his gaze back toward the towering beast. The clone had moved to its right flank and stood now beside one of the hydraulic struts embedded in the ankle. Hashirama followed, footsteps careful, deliberate.
"Convenient," he muttered. And meant it.
Because whatever shield this creature bore, it really didn't seem to care about him or what he could do. And that made it… uniquely vulnerable to sabotage by units or individuals that could slip right through the titan's support teams. Hashirama leapt high and held onto a platform close to the titan's left leg. There, Hashirama took a moment to study the hip joint. See, a machine this big would require a lot of components to work together at all times. Some components were more important than others, certainly, but they all needed to operate as one. The failure of a single component, especially the important ones, would cause utter failure.
In this case, destroying a single one of its leg joints entirely would mean the entire titan would just fall down.
But, what jutsu could he use?
Wood Style, unless supplanted with Senjutsu, was incapable of explosive bursts of power–the sort that was necessary to destroy the joint. He also doubted explosive tags for this sort of task as those were better suited for soft targets. Fire Jutsu was out as Hashirama did not possess an affinity for fire and could not call on the higher forms of Fire Jutsu.
He paused for just a moment and looked back. Didn't Naruto have that swirling chakra ball thing? What did he call it? Oh, yes, Rasengan, a vortex that spun in every direction simultaneously. Very dangerous. Also very destructive and, subsequently, perfect for his task. Hashirama held out his right hand and pumped and shaped Chakra into a vortex that swirled and spun in all directions, creating the familiar blue shape of the Rasengan.
Too small. So he made it bigger and bigger, until it was the size of a small boulder.
To increase its cutting power, Hashirama infused water chakra into the vortex and watched as it grew visible, interlocking rings and discs of water that spun so fast they were akin to blades. Perfect. Smiling, Hashirama hurled the Water Rasengan into the joint and watched as the Jutsu detonated and, in a spray of water, blasted apart the joint.
The titan rumbled as it lurched to the side, falling.
The titan fell like the ruin of a tower built too high. Its collapse sent a low quake through the crust of the earth, a deep groan swallowed by the dust that rose in sheets. The ground drank its weight and trembled beneath it. Metal shrieked. Pipes burst. Somewhere in its gut, something exploded. Flames licked through vents along its side like breath through broken teeth. Then came silence.
And the rest of them stopped.
Hundreds of titans. Towering, misshapen gods wrought from rust and chrome and daemonwork. They halted at the sight of the fallen one, their lines breaking like waves struck dumb. Their heads turned with mechanical grace, weapons still primed, engines still humming. But none moved.
Below them, their shadows lay long over the wastes.
Hashirama stood beneath that silence. The wind pushed at the hem of his robe. He could feel it—the confusion, the hesitation rippling out from the monstrous machines and their escorting host. The infantry and the armor that walked with them, the support teams and the cultist crews, all slowing in tandem, each one tethered to the titanic rhythm of the larger machines. It was a rare thing. A pause.
And that was all he needed.
They were large. Too large to recover quickly. A stagger in their line created ripples. One faltered and the rest had to shift. Adjust. Recalibrate. A hesitation of giants. And in that space was time. And time was everything.
He drew a breath.
Hashirama closed his eyes. He dipped into himself, hands loose at his side. Not gathering from nature, not yet. The air was too thick, the corruption too high. That would take longer. So he went inward instead. Body and mind. Cell and thought. He coaxed the chakra out with precision, not patience. He forced it.
The regeneration came fast. Unnatural. Painful. It pulled hard at his body, his living cells, and at his mind, the source of spiritual energy. Bringing it out in this manner was one of the worst things a Shinobi could do and Hashirama only had leeway because of his natural regeneration. But it came. He pushed through. It cost him more than he could pay again soon. But it came.
Ten seconds. And it was done.
He opened his eyes. Channeled the chakra and made the seal.
"Wood Release," he murmured. "Advent of a World of Flowering Trees."
The titans loomed like iron leviathans, each blast from their guns carving valleys in the earth, each stride turning stone to powder. In sheer ruin they neared the bijuu–at least, in the results. In combat, they were far weaker. He had already proved one simple truth: they could fall. And rather easily at that. They did not stand alone. They marched with screens of armor and swarms of infantry, cables of supply and vox orders threading back to field command. Strip that away and the gods of steel became towers of blind iron, slow to turn and slower to rise once forced to their knees.
Hashirama felt the hollow ache where chakra should have pooled and knew he could not tear the legion apart by force, not yet. But he did not need to. He need only break the lattice that kept them upright. Cut the arteries and let the colossi bleed themselves dry. Cut off from their support, the titans were vulnerable. For all their destructive prowess, they did not seem at all capable of defending themselves from infiltrators–at least, ones at his level.
He drew a long breath, the air tasting of scorched oil and pollen, and let his gaze settle on the tide of tanks and marching men that ringed the titans like worshippers at a shrine. They were the heartbeat of the host. Stop the heart and the body would follow. And he, tragically, knew a thousand quiet ways to stop a heart.
He placed his palms to the earth.
And the world answered.
It began slow. The dirt cracked. Stone split. Roots emerged, thin at first. Then thick. Then monstrous. Trunks exploded upward like pillars raised by forgotten gods. Branches tore through rusted carcasses and shattered the husks of tanks. They grew without direction or hesitation, fed by the chakra that surged from Hashirama's form.
They tore through and out of the ash-caked soil and slithered towards the titans faster than any man could outrun. Trees without leaves. Trees with thorns the size of swords. Trees that bore flowers the size of boulders. Screams and roars echoed, accompanied by explosions and gunfire, both of which were quickly drowned by the volume of wood and bark and root. But that was only the first effect.
The blooms unfurled.
They shimmered with color—reds and golds and strange pinks that glowed faintly under the haze-choked sky. Their petals trembled, then released clouds of thick yellow-green pollen that drifted low and slow like fog poured from a grave.
The wind took it.
It spread across the battlefield in waves. Over the tanks. Over the infantry. Toward the titans.
The ground split again. Not in fury. Not in thunder. But slow, deliberate. Roots as thick as cables coiled from the wounds in the earth, slick with sap and black soil. They moved without sound, rising like breath from lungs that had not drawn air in centuries. They found the feet of giants and did not strike. They held. Crept along armor-plate that groaned under the pressure. Wrapped around pistons and ankle-joints the size of towers. Bark scraped steel. Bark held fast. The titans shifted, some rocking back with the slow awareness of a thing being hunted.
One raised its leg and brought it down with force, cracking a highway of stone and ceracrete beneath it. But the roots held. They did not break. They rose with the foot and clung to it still, dragging across the surface like shackles made from the bones of the world.
The titans kept firing. Shells screamed overhead. The air tore apart in lines of light and heat. But each movement became a burden. Each shift of stance came slower. What once lumbered now labored.
Below, among the trenches and burnt-out tanks, the first bodies dropped. No flash. No scream. Just stillness. Men in ragged flak armor, their rifles lowered. Their mouths open. They staggered and then fell, one after another, as though caught in the hush of a lullaby that none of them heard until it was too late.
The pollen had settled.
It drifted like dust through the broken air, a golden mist carried on no wind. It coated lips, crawled down throats, nestled into the flesh of lungs like seeds looking for soil. Hashirama had made it for this purpose. A gift born not of poison, but of sleep. A Jutsu of silence. Of ending wars without needing to kill.
The traitor soldiers fell in clumps. Rifles slipped from their fingers. Some knelt before they dropped, others dropped like marionettes with the strings cut. No blood. No fire. Only the stillness of bodies that would not rise again that day.
Even the enemy Astartes were not spared. Their size, their strength, their gene-wrought defiance gave them minutes more, but no immunity. They fell with a rattle of armor. Their helms struck the stone. They lay in their finery like sleeping kings beneath a stormed sky.
And the titans—the great walking god-machines—shuddered.
The pollen found the cracks in their hulls, the hairline seams where armor met exhaust, where intake valves gaped to drink the air. No filter caught it. It was not dust. It was not gas. It was chakra, transmuted and formed of nature and will. It slipped past everything meant to block it, seeped into the lungs of the living and the gears of the dying. It reached crew chambers and reactors. It reached men at levers and women reading auspex, and it placed its hand upon them. And they slept.
Some titans froze where they stood. Some took a step and never brought their foot down. Their weapons hissed once more and then fell still. Engines rumbled low and guttered out. Their lights blinked, uncertain, then went dark.
The field was changed.
Hashirama stood alone at its center, still and silent as the trees he had willed to life. Around him the new forest stretched wide, roots coiled over craters and corpses, flowers blooming in the mouths of rusted tanks. The titans were statues now. Not dead. But dreaming.
Of the hundred that marched, more than half had been halted. The rest stood trapped behind their brethren, unable to move forward without crushing their own or carving new paths through broken ground and the fire-lit hills that bordered the battlefield. It would take time. They would scatter and reroute. It would slow them, disjoint them. And for machines of that size, whose every step was measured and deliberate, delay meant defeat.
The air trembled with the low, pulsing growl of the dormant giant. Where the other titans sagged beneath flowering roots and silence, this one stood wholly unmoved—its metal hide unscarred, its guns at rest, the faint glow of furnace-light dull behind armored slats. It was twice taller than any of its brothers, black metal burnished to a mirror sheen in the fires still burning across the plain. Hashirama could feel its gaze though it carried no eyes; an unspoken vigilance, steady as the north star.
Footsteps scraped through grit behind him. Batu drew up beside him, shadow stretching long in the dust. His war-plate was rent and blackened, yet he walked with the calm of a hunter who had tasted blood and wished for more.
"Dies Irae," Batu said. "It has killed many innocents. How help can I?"
Hashirama exhaled, thin and measured.
"I'm spent," he said. "No chakra left for a killing blow. That leaves one way."
"What way is that?"
"Sabotage," Hashirama said. "But you're too big to be stealthy–no offense. But they'll see you coming."
The shinobi pulled out a sealing scroll. Batu huffed in recognition.
"I seal you here," he said. "I slip inside the titan and once I'm inside I'll release you. We break it from within. If it has a heart, then we shall break it."
Batu turned his helm toward the towering engine. He studied the waking glow along its gun housings. After a moment he nodded once.
"Inside," he said. "Good. Let's do it. I will follow your lead, Hashirama."
"Let's go," Hashirama said, quickly sealing away the Astartes into the scroll, before breaking into a sprint towards the titan. An entity of that size and magnitude likely would not have the capacity to pick out individual humans from the chaos of battlefields. They were meant for bigger targets, for more obvious foes, which meant it could possibly see him during the approach. That was what its supporting units were there for.
Hashirama brought his hands together and shaped a seal. "Ninja Art: Chameleon Jutsu."
The light twisted. His form blurred and vanished. Not gone, but hidden—bent into the seams of the world like a thread pulled tight. The breath of chakra it cost was small. He could afford it. What he needed now was speed.
He ran faster than sound, faster than the eye, a blur across the scorched ruin. His feet struck stone and metal and root in turn. Dead tanks lay half-swallowed by bark. Men slumped beneath pollen-choked trees. Sleeping titans lay like monuments cast in slumber, their hulls glinting dull red in the haze of war still hanging low.
Ahead, the titan.
Dies Irae.
It moved without caution or care, stepping over its comrades with the slow, grinding arrogance of something too large to imagine death. One foot crashed down into a crater where a lesser machine still twitched, burying it beneath tons of groaning iron. Hashirama's eyes narrowed. He said nothing.
He leapt.
The air peeled past him. His feet struck the curve of the titan's shoulder, the metal warm beneath the soles of his sandals. Chakra surged to his legs and feet, rooting him to the hide of the monster. He climbed.
Up past its hull and plating. Past gun batteries long as courtyards. Past bristling cables thick as tree trunks. Higher still.
And there—set between the sweeping fins of its armored back—stood a temple. Or something close. A cathedral forged into the spine of the god-machine. It rose from the armor like a parasite grafted onto a giant. Spires like broken fingers reached for the sky, traced with gold and filth alike. A thousand stained-glass windows shimmered with images too grotesque to follow.
Hashirama crouched low.
He drew a kunai. Just one. He watched the doors. The windows. Dozens of them. Open. Unguarded. No sensors, no wards, no soldiers. Only heavy guns pointed upward, built to kill from afar. They had prepared for armies. Not for one man.
Their mistake.
He stood and stepped forward. No sound. No shadow. He passed through one of the tall, arched doors and into the dark, and no one saw him enter.