The rooftop fight had become a grind of breath and bone.
Enma lengthened and crashed down; the Kusanagi hissed up to meet it. Tiles shattered. Purple fire roared. Every clash rang with the weight of a lifetime—teacher and student, duty and desire—until even the wind seemed to hold itself back from crossing the barrier.
Below, the stadium churned. Genjutsu slept across swathes of benches like spilled ink while Sound and Sand shinobi threaded the aisles to turn panic into slaughter. The nobles in the viewing galleries pressed against carved railings, faces white with fear, guards dragging small children behind columns. Canton banners of Fire Country fluttered and tore.
A blindfolded man stood at the heart of it all, calm as a summer afternoon.
"Line up," Gojo said lightly, one hand in his pocket as kunai froze inches from throats and fell clattering to the stone. "If you're going to assault paying customers, at least form an orderly queue."
A Sound-nin roared and detonated a paper bomb against the floor where Gojo stood. The shockwave blossomed outward—then bent, rippling harmlessly around an invisible curve. A noble couple blinked, unscorched, while their toddler clapped at the "fire trick."
"See?" Gojo tipped his head toward the child. "Five stars. Would explode again."
He turned his wrist. An entire squad skidded backward as if the air had gone too thick to breathe. Civilians huddled behind him, and the nobles in crimson cloth found themselves shepherded by Eclipse Order soldiers who had appeared out of nowhere in the private galleries, cloaked and precise.
"Ma'am," one of Ren's men said to a shaking matron with lacquered hair, offering a steady arm. "This way. We'll take you to the inner corridor. Stay between us. Keep your eyes forward."
She stared at his mask, then at the child in her grasp. She nodded once and obeyed. The corridor to the daimyo's suites filled with these quiet shadows, moving nobles as if they were dignitaries at a ceremony instead of prey in a stampede. When a Sand shinobi turned the corner with a senbon fan, he hit the floor throat-first and did not stand again.
"Who are you?" the noble hissed, half-gratitude, half-terror.
"Today?" the soldier said. "Your answer to chaos."
A heartbeat of pause—then: "Thank you."
On the roof, Orochimaru's smile thinned as he felt his perimeter slipping. "You've invited wolves into your house, old man," he taunted, circling Hiruzen. "Do you think they will leave once they taste your halls?"
Hiruzen's chest heaved. He kept his staff up, eyes never leaving the masks at the edges of the barrier. The Sound Four's hands shook with the strain of sustaining the purple flames; sweat beaded under their hoods.
"I think," he said, voice gone rough with age and smoke, "that Konoha will survive wolves and serpents both."
He clapped his hands together. Chakra flared. Cold gathered that was not wind.
"Shiki Fūjin."
Only Orochimaru had the reflexes to leap back before the world grew cold. Only a few in the village felt the air thin as a white shape opened behind the Hokage like a second skin. The reaper's mask grinned without eyes. Its hand sank through Hiruzen's body and reached for Orochimaru with inevitability.
Orochimaru's sneer split. He leapt again, Kusanagi lashing to cut what could not be cut. The hand passed through steel and skin as if both were memory. It seized something that writhed inside his chest and pulled. Power stuttered. The flow of jutsu sputtered and fell flat.
"My… arms," Orochimaru hissed, horror ripping his voice raw as the reaper pinned him and the seal took hold. "You—old—fool—"
The Sound Four groaned, barrier quivering. Below, another squad of Sound shinobi hit an invisible wall near the east gate and dropped their weapons, scrabbling at the air like drowning men. Gojo's smile brightened as he stepped over them, shepherding a cluster of nobles through a shattered doorway and into the safety of the inner ring.
"Mind the step," he said. "Also the unconscious bodies. They're a tripping hazard."
A lord in green and gold stared at him as if he'd sprouted antlers. "Who are you?"
"A friend of the village on even-numbered days," Gojo replied. "Today's very even."
In the streets, Ren's voice moved through the chaos the way a bell carries through fog—never loud, always heard. "Shutters down. Carts to the walls. You two, with me—market square. No one touches the shop rows. If anyone loots, break fingers, not necks. We are not raiders."
Zabuza's bandaged eyes creased as he listened to a woman sob thanks over the body of the Sound-nin who had been about to cut her. "You're going to be a boring tyrant," he muttered, planting the flat of the cleaver against an alley mouth to block a fleeing invader. "All rules. No messy fun."
Ren flicked a wire trap and brought down two more without replying. He didn't need to say it. This was the messy fun: order in the middle of murder.
They rounded a corner into the trade quarter's main lane. A noble retainer stumbled against a toppled stall, robes smeared with soot, his master dragging breath and dignity behind him. A Sand-nin sighted along the line of his forearm, wind gathering. Zabuza stepped into the gap and the world went quiet for that man, permanently.
The noble stared up at the boy with red eyes. The tomoe spun once and stilled. Ren's tone never lifted. "North corridor is clear. Follow the men in black. Don't look back."
The noble swallowed. "Who commands you?" he blurted, sudden, urgent, as if grasping at the string of a falling kite.
Ren's gaze didn't move from the next street. "Eclipse Order," he said.
Then he was gone, a dark shape into smoke.
On the rooftop, the seal dug its fingers deeper. Orochimaru's breath went ragged, sweat running down his temples as he fought the pull with every scrap of will and madness he had left. The Kusanagi wavered, then fell from a numbed hand and clattered over tiles. He snarled, hissed, forced chakra down ruined channels—and found only emptiness.
"You won't leave this roof alive," he spat, lunging anyway with naked hands and teeth.
Hiruzen's smile was tired and kind. It hurt Orochimaru more than the seal.
"Perhaps," the Hokage said. "But you won't leave whole."
He pressed his palms together and drew the last of his life for the last of his work. The reaper's hand closed over Orochimaru's, and the sannin screamed as his arms went dead from the soul outward.
The Sound Four took a staggered step forward, nearly breaking form. One yelled, voice cracking, "Hold! Hold! Almost—"
A bell tolled.
It wasn't a temple bell. It was noon announcing itself to the world.
Light deepened across the stadium, the color of heat on iron. Shadow shortened. Somewhere beyond the litter of tiles and flame, a presence rose like something rolling its shoulders after too long crouched.
A silhouette landed on the parapet and the stone slumped under his weight. Heat rippled off him in honest waves. A massive axe—Rhitta—hung easy in one hand, as if it were a feather lost and found. His hair flared like a banner in the new brightness.
Escanor looked down at the crippled sannin and smiled like the sun choosing to notice a candle.
"How disgraceful," he said, voice carrying without effort across barrier and stadium and every ear that needed to hear it. "To let an old man stand alone at noon."
He took a step forward. Heat slicked the tiles.
"Allow me to remind you what true power looks like."
Orochimaru twisted, half-paralyzed, eyes dilated with something that was almost awe under the hate. "You—Eclipse Order—"
Escanor's heel crushed the Kusanagi where it lay. The blade shrieked and snapped like brittle ice. He didn't look at it.
"Serpent," he said, as if deciding on a label for a footnote. "You brought your fangs to a sunlit stage."
He moved at a speed that should have looked impossible for his size, simply appearing where the Sound Four stood. The nearest ninja tried to complete a seal and met an open palm that dented his chest so perfectly it seemed sculpted for that purpose. He folded and did not unfold. The second leapt away into air that chose not to bear him; Escanor turned his wrist and the wind changed its mind, slamming the man into the barrier with a crack that rang down into the village. The purple flames guttered. The third screamed, threw a jutsu, and watched it unravel under heat before Escanor's boot made the argument irrelevant. The fourth didn't run. He understood. He darted for Hiruzen with a knife meant to take a dying man's throat.
Rhitta drew a clean golden line. The fourth's hand hit the tile alone; the knife skittered into the sky and fell somewhere into history.
The barrier went out like a candle in a hurricane.
Gojo laughed once, delighted, and flicked his fingers. A cluster of Sound shinobi who'd been testing their luck at the nobles' corridor found gravity very persuasive and lay down to reconsider their choices.
Up on the roof, the reaper's mask cocked as if curious. Hiruzen looked smaller suddenly, as if the seal had consumed more than arms and taken thirty years of weight with it. He settled to his knees with the inevitability of water finding the lower ground.
Escanor turned toward him and, for the first time since he had arrived, the pride in his face softened. "Hokage," he said. "I intended to save you."
Hiruzen's mouth curved, an old teacher grading a final test. "You saved the village," he said. "Honor the rest of the lesson."
He exhaled and let the reaper take what it had come for.
Silence brushed the rooftop. Even the fire below seemed to damp itself, embarrassed.
Orochimaru surged on reflex, all snarl and wounded god, and met Escanor's shadow. Rhitta rose like a sunrise.
"You won't—" Orochimaru began.
"You won't," Escanor corrected, and came down.
Tiles shattered into powder. The roof dipped and groaned. When the dust cleared, Orochimaru lay broken in a crater that had not existed a breath before, arms dead at his sides, blood painting his tongue. He coughed it onto his own chest and laughed anyway, because a man like him could build a body out of laugh and hate and a jar of teeth if he needed to.
Snakes peeled out of his sleeves like thoughts he'd saved for a rainy day. They wrapped him and pulled. Escanor planted a foot to pin him and the snakes gave way like wet rope, but they had bought the heartbeat their master needed. A skin sloughed. A mouth split that had no business existing. Orochimaru slid through himself and was gone down a crack that had not been there when morning started.
"Run," Escanor said without heat, watching the hole as if considering whether to jump into it purely to prove he could keep sunlight under the earth. He looked up instead.
He lifted Rhitta one-handed, blade catching noon. Heat swelled out of him until the air turned to something you could lean on. His voice filled the village, effortless.
"Raise your heads, people of Konoha," he called. "The serpent is crushed. The sky is clear. And while the sun stands, the Eclipse Order guards you."
In the nobles' gallery, the lord in green and gold who had asked Gojo "who are you" found the answer uncomfortably obvious. He looked at the cloaked men who had carried his daughter through smoke and knives and down intact stairs that should have been rubble. He bowed—not to Gojo, who would have made a joke of it, but to the nearest soldier whose blade still dripped for strangers.
"Your Order has the gratitude of Fire," he said hoarsely. "Say the word and my house will carry it."
The soldier inclined his head once, nothing eager in it. "We'll carry you to the inner compound, my lord. Words can wait until your children sleep."
Konoha's jonin had stopped moving too. For a terrible, stretched minute the village existed between breaths. Hiruzen had died on the roof. Orochimaru had fled in pieces. A man who was not of their village stood where the Hokage had fallen and declared protection like a verdict.
Gojo broke the spell with a clap and a grin. "All right," he said, as if they were in a kitchen after a dinner party. "We tidy now. You"—he pointed at a pair of shell-shocked chunin—"check the east bleachers for injuries. You—" a medic-nin who'd frozen at the sight of Escanor—"with me. Anyone with a pulse gets a second one. Move."
The medic-nin moved. Everyone did. The moment cracked and became a hundred tasks.
On the streets, Ren raised two fingers. The signal ran like a twitch through his lines. Patrols widened, then thinned, redistributing from choke points to the circles around hospitals and water towers and the food depots he'd mapped two nights ago by lamplight. Zabuza ghosted at his shoulder, cleaver finally unwrapped and making a sullen, satisfied sound as it rested against his back again.
"You planned this tight," Zabuza said, half-admiration, half-accusation.
"I planned for what people need when they stop screaming," Ren said. "Water. Bread. Someone to tell them which way to walk."
He stepped into the shadow of a shrine and let his eyes close for one measured breath. The three tomoe spun behind his lids, red on black, the weight of what he'd just done settling into the bones beneath skin and pride. He felt Gojo's presence like a steady, amused star in the stadium. He felt Escanor on the roof like the noon itself had chosen a body. He felt Konoha held together not by banners but by the pressure of a chain he had wrapped around it without shouting.
Not yet, he told the part of himself that reached for the mountain with faces. Not the hat. Not the seat. We hold. We breathe. We make ourselves indispensable.
He opened his eyes and walked.
Past the market well where a boy filled buckets for neighbors because the grown men whose job it had been lay sleeping under genjutsu. Past a shutter where his soldier had tacked a note in neat handwriting: Medical triage moved to the south barracks. Bring water. Don't bring fear. Past a broken signboard where someone had scrawled, clumsy, THANK YOU, and someone else, more careful, had drawn the eclipse that wasn't their symbol but would do.
Up on the roof, Escanor stood at the edge of shadow and stared out across Konoha. The sun made a crown of his hair. For a moment, just a moment, pride's edge dulled into something like respect.
"You fought well, old man," he said to the empty air where Hiruzen had left it. "It takes a king to die like that."
Gojo appeared beside him in a blink of sunlight and the smell of dust. "Look at you," he said, breezy, "stealing my dramatic thunder. Noon was very generous today."
Escanor didn't look over. "Thunder is for storms," he said. "I am the sky."
"See?" Gojo told the city cheerfully. "He's fun."
They stood together a breath longer, two impossible men above a village that hadn't decided yet whether to fear them or hire them. Then Gojo hopped down into the bustle to tease medics into moving faster and fright into behaving like discipline. Escanor turned and walked toward the stairs like a king who had finished making his point.
The Sound and Sand remnants ran. Konoha's shinobi, piecing themselves back together, ran after them. The stadium emptied, then filled again—this time with stretchers and water pails and lists shouted by people who had decided they were in charge for five minutes.
By evening, Fire Country banners still hung in tatters, but their owners' children were alive to tuck beneath them. The nobles sent words—carefully couched, overly formal, yet unmistakably sincere—to the "Eclipse Order commander" whose men had carried them through the worst, asking for a meeting, a ledger of thanks, a way to repay.
Ren didn't answer those yet. He sent a single note instead: Sleep. We'll speak when your cooks light their fires tomorrow.
He stood with Zabuza at a narrow window, watching the last smoke unravel over rooftops. Haku passed silent beneath them, hair damp with sweat, a child on his back piggyback style because there hadn't been a stretcher left to spare. The child's mother trailed behind, crying with quiet relief that sounded more like laughter than grief now.
"Do you feel it?" Zabuza asked, voice low.
Ren knew what he meant. The shift. The hinge. The way a village's balance changes hands without a ceremony.
"Yes," he said simply.
"You going to put on the hat?" Zabuza prodded, not quite a tease.
"Not today," Ren said. "Not while I still need to grow into it."
Zabuza snorted. "You and your calendar."
"Someone has to keep score."
"Mm." The swordsman's bandaged mouth tilted. "Lion will be insufferable at dinner."
"Lion saved us time," Ren said. "Time is precious."
They watched as Gojo walked down the main avenue with a string of children at his heels, juggling three paper bombs he'd disarmed and telling a story about a fox who learned to bake bread. Soldiers in black shifted back toward the edges as Konoha's own stepped forward again, the handoff so smooth it felt like a dance rehearsed without music.
Night cooled the tiles where Hiruzen had fallen. On the ground, someone had already started a small ring of candles. A jonin knelt and added his headband to the circle. Another straightened a crooked wick. No speeches yet. Those would come when the shock turned into words and the words into vows.
For now, order held.
Ren put his palm against the stone and felt heat still in it from the noon. Cursed energy answered under his skin; a whisper of chains flickered and vanished.
"Tomorrow," he said.
Zabuza grunted. "Tomorrow."
"And after," Ren added, because he couldn't help himself.
"After," Zabuza agreed, because he was starting to like the taste of it.
Far above the sleeping market and the whispering nobles and the medics rolling fresh bandages, the stars began to show at the edges of the evening. The sun went down on Konoha, but its warmth lingered longer than it should have.
The village had survived a serpent and met a lion.
It would wake to find a chain coiled around it—not choking, not yet, simply holding. And when the Fire Country nobles sent for meetings at dawn, they would discover that a hand they didn't know they trusted had already arranged the chairs, written the agenda, and sharpened the pencils.
The Eclipse Order had not conquered Konoha.
They had made themselves necessary.