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.
"Snake?" 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. "Orochimaru 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 Eclipse 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.
Far from the stadium, another battle raged.
In the shattered forest, Naruto faced Gaara. Shukaku clashed against shadow clones. The trees shook with every scream, every strike.
Ren felt the storm of chakra even from a distance. Zabuza looked to him for orders, waiting.
Ren shook his head. His voice was quiet, absolute.
"No. Let them fight. That is their story, not ours."
Zabuza grunted, satisfied to keep his blade dry.
Ren alone watched the future. "Chains don't need to bind every battle," he whispered. "Some links must forge themselves."
And so Naruto and Gaara fought on without Eclipse Order's interference.
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 sky," he said. "I am the sun above 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 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.