The barrier didn't feel like a wall.
It felt like a decision.
Four pillars of violet flame stabbed up from the corners of the roof, and between them the air went wrong—dense, hot, tinted like bruised glass.
The air inside the violet walls didn't just feel warm; it felt static-heavy, carrying a low-frequency hum that vibrated the fluid in Hiruzen's inner ear and made the fine hairs on his arms stand in defiance of gravity.
Sound shinobi clung to those corners with palms pressed to the seal formation, faces blank with concentration. They weren't guards. They were living nails.
Outside, Konoha screamed.
Inside, it was muffled into something almost polite.
Hiruzen Sarutobi had lived long enough to recognize that kind of politeness. It wasn't mercy. It was etiquette for murder.
Orochimaru stood across the roof tiles like he'd paid rent.
Not the Kazekage. That skin had already been discarded, folded away like a costume someone stopped respecting halfway through a play. Beneath it was the same elegant wrongness Hiruzen remembered: pale face, hungry eyes, a mouth too soft for the things it smiled about.
He smelled of cold formaldehyde and the sharp, medicinal scent of a laboratory—an sterile odor that felt like an insult to the open, salt-heavy air of the stadium.
Underlying the laboratory rot was the heavy, oily scent of shed skin and wet clay, a smell that didn't belong to any living thing under the sun.
"You've always loved your stages," Hiruzen said, voice steady even as the roof trembled faintly beneath his sandals.
Orochimaru's lips curved. "And you've always loved your audience."
He tilted his head, listening—like the barrier didn't just keep others out, but let him taste fear seeping up from below.
"Hear them?" Orochimaru murmured. "Your village. Your precious children."
Hiruzen didn't glance down. He couldn't afford to. His mind stayed split the way it always did now—one half watching Orochimaru's throat, shoulders, and hands for the moment before a strike, the other half reaching down through stone, feeling for the pulse of Konoha like a medic pressing two fingers to an artery.
Too many beats. Too many spikes. Threads running hot and snapping.
And beneath all of it… a deeper tremor. The wrong vibration again. Like the village had swallowed something heavy and it was shifting in its gut.
So it had begun.
Orochimaru saw the micro-flinch anyway, because Orochimaru always did. He smiled a little wider, as if rewarded.
"Still trying to be everywhere," he said softly. "It's a charming habit. And such a useful weakness."
"And you're still trying to prove something," Hiruzen replied.
Orochimaru's eyes glittered. "I already proved it."
His tongue flicked—quick, casual—tasting the air like a serpent. It made Hiruzen's stomach tighten with old memory. Not fear. Recognition.
"I'm just here," Orochimaru continued, voice almost gentle, "to watch you understand it."
Hiruzen's hands moved.
Seals snapped into place with the economy of a man who'd taught a thousand children to do the same. His chakra rolled outward—precise, controlled, and quiet in a way that didn't need to shout to be obeyed.
"Monkey King Enma."
Smoke erupted tight and clean.
The sound was a percussive thump-crack that displaced the stagnant air and sent a ripple of dust dancing across the scorched stone.
The sound wasn't a soft puff; it was a percussive thump-crack that displaced the pressurized air of the barrier and sent a ripple through the dust settling on the roof tiles.
Enma hit the roof in a crouch, fur bristling, eyes bright with irritation.
"You really know how to pick your moments, old man," Enma growled—and then his gaze landed on Orochimaru.
His expression flattened into disgust.
"Oh," Enma said. "It's that brat."
Orochimaru's smile sharpened. "Hello, Enma."
Enma spat to the side. "Don't talk like we're friends."
Hiruzen didn't let himself savor the relief of a familiar ally. Relief was a luxury. He turned it into motion.
"Staff," he ordered.
Enma's body snapped and elongated with a crack like a tree branch splitting under pressure. Fur became dark wood and metal.
The transformation carried a high-pitched metallic ring—sing-shhh—as the fibers tightened into a density that felt heavier than lead but balanced as perfectly as a heartbeat.
The wood of the staff didn't just harden; it groaned under its own weight, the dark grain tightening until it had the cold, unforgiving density of iron.
Limbs became a thick staff that slammed into Hiruzen's palm with a comforting weight.
Simple. Honest. Capable of becoming a hundred answers.
Orochimaru sighed, almost theatrical. "Always the same tools."
"Tools work," Hiruzen said.
He moved first.
Not because he was faster—he wasn't, not anymore—but because initiative was a blade in itself. The roof became an equation: distance, angles, the limitations of the barrier, the enemy's habits, and the one habit Hiruzen still possessed like a weapon—
He had seen more fights than Orochimaru had lived years.
Enma's staff swept low, then high, then snapped forward. Each strike wasn't aimed at Orochimaru's body so much as his options—forcing him off the clean line, denying the comfortable rhythm, turning the roof into a narrowing hallway.
Orochimaru slid back, robe fluttering, feet barely touching tile. He didn't retreat like someone afraid. He retreated like someone allowing a demonstration.
Hiruzen's staff slammed down where Orochimaru's ribs had been. Tile split. Dust puffed.
The stone didn't just break; it pulverized under the staff's mass, the gritty remains of the roof grinding beneath Hiruzen's sandals like coarse sand as he pivoted for the next strike.
Orochimaru was already gone, shifting sideways like a shadow being pulled.
Then his sleeve moved—
—and a blade slid out like it had been hiding there all along.
Not a normal sword. Something too long, too thin, too hungry. The steel caught the violet light and reflected it like blood in moonlight.
Kusanagi.
The sword didn't whistle through the air; it hissed, a sharp, air-cutting sound that suggested a blade with no friction and a hunger for something more solid than fabric.
Hiruzen's staff met it with a ringing shock that traveled up his arms and into his bones. The impact was clean, brutal, intelligent—Orochimaru didn't swing like a man. He thrust like an idea.
Hiruzen's elbows screamed. His shoulders protested. His body reminded him, for the thousandth time: You are not built for this anymore.
He used the pain anyway.
Orochimaru leaned into the clash, smiling like the strain was entertainment. "You could stop," he whispered, close enough that Hiruzen could smell the faint medicinal rot clinging to him. "You could let go. It would be easier."
Hiruzen's jaw tightened. "Easier isn't the same as right."
Orochimaru's eyes narrowed, just slightly.
Then his hands blurred—seals, fast and familiar and sickeningly graceful.
Hiruzen felt the chakra spike a half-second before the ground answered.
The roof tiles bulged.
Wood—no, not wood, something like wood's memory—surged up pale and root-thick, trying to grab ankles, bind, pin.
Hiruzen didn't waste chakra countering what he could avoid.
He vaulted.
Old knees complained. He ignored them. Enma extended the staff midair, turning it into a pole, and Hiruzen planted it into the tile seam and swung—using leverage instead of brute strength. The roots snapped against stone where his feet had been.
Orochimaru's blade flashed.
Hiruzen's staff caught it again, but this time the clash wasn't centered. Orochimaru angled the Kusanagi along the staff, sliding steel on wood-metal like a whisper turning into a scream, trying to reach Hiruzen's hands.
The friction sent a shower of white-hot sparks dancing across the violet barrier, the scent of scorched metal and ozone filling the narrow space between the two men.
Hiruzen released one hand and rotated the staff, letting the blade slide harmlessly past. The motion looked simple. It wasn't. It was a lifetime of weapon familiarity condensed into a half-second.
"Still teaching," Orochimaru said, voice light.
"Still learning," Hiruzen replied, and then he made it true.
He formed a seal with one hand—because age had stolen speed, but not economy.
"Shadow Clone Jutsu."
Two clones popped into existence—no fanfare, no army. Just enough.
One clone moved immediately toward the barrier corner nearest Orochimaru—not to attack the Sound shinobi (the barrier would eat that attempt), but to test the seam where violet flame met roof tile. Fingers brushed the heat, felt the geometry, confirmed what Hiruzen already suspected:
This wasn't a door you kicked in.
This was a lock you starved.
The second clone threw a fistful of shuriken.
Not at Orochimaru's face.
At his space.
The shuriken spread in a pattern that forced Orochimaru to choose: dodge back toward the barrier edge where Hiruzen wanted him, or dodge inward where Enma's staff would have room to swing.
Orochimaru didn't dodge.
He shed.
His body blurred—skin rippling—then he reappeared a step aside, perfectly placed, as if the shuriken had never been relevant.
A substitution without the obvious tells. No puff of smoke. No log.
Hiruzen's eyes sharpened.
Orochimaru had improved.
Of course he had.
"Your village is full of little geniuses," Orochimaru said conversationally, as if they were discussing weather. "So earnest. So desperate to be seen. You keep collecting them."
Hiruzen didn't answer.
He stepped in and swung anyway.
Enma extended, staff whistling. Orochimaru's Kusanagi stabbed forward again—aimed for Hiruzen's throat, not because it was dramatic, but because it ended conversations.
Hiruzen dropped his center of gravity, let the blade pass above his shoulder by a hair, and drove the staff's butt into Orochimaru's knee.
Orochimaru's leg bent wrong—just a fraction—then corrected instantly, because his body wasn't a normal body anymore. He flowed with the impact like a snake with bones it didn't fully respect.
Hiruzen felt something cold settle in his gut.
No clean win. No quick kill. This would be a fight of attrition.
And Hiruzen had less time than anyone on this roof.
Orochimaru's eyes flicked to the barrier corners, following the movement of Hiruzen's clone.
"You're thinking about breaking my cage," Orochimaru observed. "Adorable."
"It's not your cage," Hiruzen said. "It's mine."
Orochimaru's smile twitched. Interest.
Then he did something worse than attack.
He summoned.
The air went colder—not temperature-cold. Something deeper. Spiritual. The kind of cold that made old scars ache and made teeth want to chatter even if pride refused.
Orochimaru's palms hit the roof.
"Impure World Reincarnation," he said, voice almost reverent.
The tiles split.
Two coffin-lids punched up through stone like the roof itself was vomiting.
The smell of deep, sunless earth and wet clay suddenly overwhelmed the air, a heavy, damp scent of the grave that made the back of Hiruzen's throat go dry.
Hiruzen didn't breathe.
He knew those coffins.
He had spent years trying not to imagine them.
The first coffin shuddered, then settled—heavy, final.
The second rose beside it, slower, like it had to push through reluctance.
And a third—
A third started to emerge.
The wood dark and familiar. The lid marked with a single character that made Hiruzen's throat tighten around a name he carried like a bruise.
No.
Hiruzen moved without thinking.
Enma telescoped, staff extending with brutal speed, slamming into the third coffin's rising lip. Wood shuddered. Tile cratered. The coffin sank back down like the earth had been punched in the mouth.
Orochimaru's eyes widened—only a little. Not anger.
Interest.
"You still have reflexes," he said softly. "How sweet."
Hiruzen didn't answer. His attention locked on the first two coffins instead.
The lids rattled.
Then slid open from the inside.
Hands emerged—pale, cracked, dirt under the nails.
The skin didn't look like flesh; it looked like parchment stretched over stone, flickering with grey, ashen flakes that drifted into the air whenever they moved, as if time itself was trying to reclaim their shapes.
They carried the hollow, dry-earth smell of the grave, their eyes dull and flat like unpolished pebbles catching the violet light of the barrier.
Hands that didn't belong to time anymore.
The first figure pulled itself up: dark hair heavy, armor lacquered and scarred.
Hashirama Senju.
The second rose beside him with colder grace: white hair, stern face, eyes like winter water.
Tobirama Senju.
The First and Second Hokage.
His teachers.
His ghosts.
Hiruzen's chest tightened so hard it hurt—not grief yet. That would come later. First came the ugly shock of seeing them like this: eyes dull, faces slack with death held in place by a technique that spat on respect.
A war crime dressed up as a party trick.
Enma's voice came out low through the staff, furious. "He really did it."
Hiruzen's grip didn't loosen. "I won't let them touch the village."
Orochimaru watched him like a scientist watching a reaction. "You say that as if you're the only thing between them and the world."
Hiruzen tasted ash.
It was true.
And that was the point.
Orochimaru lifted two fingers in a lazy gesture.
"Kill him," he said, like ordering tea.
The dead moved.
Fast.
Hashirama lunged—strength wrong, chakra-packed, amplified by command. Tobirama followed like a blade behind a blade.
Hiruzen didn't meet them head-on. He couldn't afford pride.
He made space.
"Earth Release—Earth Flow Rampart!"
The roof heaved. A ridge rose and split the battlefield, forcing Hashirama's line to curve. It wasn't a wall—it wouldn't hold against that kind of power—but it was geometry. Geometry bought time.
Tobirama's eyes flicked, calculating like a machine remembering it had once been a man.
Then Tobirama vanished.
Not with smoke. Not with speed.
With absence.
He reappeared at Hiruzen's blind angle, kunai already mid-thrust.
Hiruzen twisted anyway, because he knew Tobirama's habits the way a student knows a teacher's voice. The kunai kissed his cheek—just a line of heat—before Enma snapped sideways and knocked the blade off course with a metallic crack.
Hashirama's hand slammed down.
Roots surged—thicker, angrier—trying to catch Hiruzen's ankles, climb his legs, pin him like prey.
Hiruzen didn't fight the roots with strength.
He fought them with the one thing he still owned in abundance.
Variety.
"Fire Release—Flame Bullet!"
He exhaled flame in a focused blast—not a wide inferno for spectacle, but a precise, concentrated jet aimed at the root mass. The fire didn't "burn away" chakra-wood like a normal campfire would burn rope. It fought it, turned it brittle, forced it to retreat from his legs.
Then Hiruzen pivoted seamlessly—
"Wind Release—Great Breakthrough!"
The gust didn't attack the Hokage's dead teachers.
It attacked the fire.
It fed it, threw it forward in a rolling sheet of heat and pressure that forced Hashirama and Tobirama to brace, to step, to react.
For half a breath, it worked.
Then Tobirama's hands moved.
"Water Release—Water Formation Wall."
Water exploded up, impossible without a source, forming a roaring barrier that swallowed flame into steam. The roof became fog. Hot, wet air slapped Hiruzen's face.
Orochimaru laughed softly behind the mist.
"Remember?" he asked. "The way they made the elements look like toys?"
Hiruzen did remember.
He remembered being a child, staring up at giants and thinking: If I learn enough, maybe I can be that too.
Now he stared at them again and understood what he'd missed back then.
Giants were just people.
And people could be dragged into coffins and turned into weapons.
The mist cleared in patches.
Hashirama was already moving again.
Enma roared—no longer a staff. He snapped back into his true form mid-motion, fur bristling, teeth bared, and launched himself between Hiruzen and Hashirama with a feral snarl.
Hiruzen didn't waste that gift.
He made a decision inside the fight.
He wasn't going to "defeat" Hashirama and Tobirama.
Not like this.
Not while Orochimaru watched and waited for the one mistake that would end it.
So Hiruzen stopped playing Orochimaru's game.
He played his own.
He formed seals slowly—not from hesitation, but from weight. Each motion felt like lifting a stone. Not because it was difficult.
Because it was final.
Orochimaru's laughter tapered off. His eyes sharpened.
"Oh?" he murmured, suddenly attentive.
Hiruzen drew a breath that hurt.
He bit his thumb.
Blood welled—warm, real, metallic on his tongue.
He slammed his hand onto the roof.
"Summoning Jutsu."
The air tore open behind him.
A presence loomed—towering, wrong, vast enough to make the barrier's violet light look childish.
The temperature didn't just drop; it died. A hollow, spiritual cold bypassed Hiruzen's skin and went straight into his marrow, turning his breath into a thick, crystalline mist that hung frozen in the air.
The presence of the Reaper felt like a block of ice pressed against the base of Hiruzen's skull, its breath smelling of frozen earth and copper pennies.
A figure rose out of nothingness: skeletal, monstrous, draped in spiritual cloth, a demon with a crown and a blade.
The Shinigami.
The Reaper.
For a heartbeat, even Orochimaru's smile faltered.
Not fear.
Recognition.
"…You wouldn't," Orochimaru said, voice just a fraction too tight.
Hiruzen didn't look back at the Reaper. He didn't have to. He could feel it behind him like a cliff at his spine.
"I will," he said.
Because someone had to.
Hashirama lunged again, as if the dead could sense the shift in stakes.
Hiruzen made clones.
Not dozens—he didn't have chakra for theatre.
Just enough.
Three Hiruzen Sarutobis moved at once, each with the same tired eyes and stubborn jaw, each grabbing a different thread of the battlefield.
Clone one intercepted Hashirama—arms locking around dead armor like grappling a statue.
Clone two caught Tobirama—hands snapping onto wrists, forcing the kunai hand wide, denying the clean kill.
And the real Hiruzen—
The real Hiruzen went straight at Orochimaru.
Orochimaru's Kusanagi flashed.
Hiruzen didn't meet it with the staff.
He met it with his body.
He slid inside the blade's reach—dangerous, deliberate—grabbed Orochimaru's robe, and drove his shoulder into Orochimaru's chest, turning the elegant strike into a collision.
Orochimaru's eyes widened in irritation more than surprise.
He tried to twist free—snake-smooth.
Hiruzen tightened.
Hold.
Not glorious.
Necessary.
Behind him, the Shinigami's hand plunged through Hiruzen's chest without tearing flesh—straight into the space where the soul lived.
Pain didn't come like a blade.
It came like being pulled.
Like someone had hooked a chain through the core of him and yanked.
Hiruzen's vision went white at the edges.
He didn't hear a voice, but he felt a rhythmic, heavy thrumming in his skull—the sound of the Reaper's attention locking onto the weight of his years.
He heard himself make a sound too small for what it felt like.
Orochimaru's composure cracked.
"Old man—!"
Hiruzen forced his voice out through clenched teeth. "You wanted a lesson."
The Shinigami's other hand reached forward through Hiruzen and into Orochimaru.
Orochimaru's body jolted like he'd been struck by lightning.
His mouth opened, but the sound that came out wasn't a taunt.
It was raw.
Animal.
Hiruzen felt Orochimaru's soul—slick, twisting, feral—caught in the Reaper's grip like a fish on a hook.
Orochimaru thrashed.
His body jerked with a frantic, uncoordinated violence, his skin turning a sickly, translucent grey as the Reaper's hand displaced the fluid and bone of his chest without leaving a mark.
The monster finally tore through the skin.
He thrashed like a wounded animal, his skin looking like thin, gray parchment about to tear under the pressure of a colder, older power.
His hand snapped toward his sleeve—
—and the Kusanagi shot out like spite given steel.
It punched straight through Hiruzen's side.
Metal bit flesh.
Heat bloomed.
Blood splashed hot against Hiruzen's ribs.
For a fraction of a second, his body wanted to let go.
For a fraction of a second, he saw himself clearly: old, bleeding, stubborn, foolish.
Then his other mind—the one listening to the village—caught something through the barrier's muffling.
A spike of panic that felt young.
A stubborn, blazing insistence that tasted like Naruto.
And behind it, another thread—finer, ink-and-iron, the kind of focus that only happened when someone was terrified and refused to admit it.
Sylvie.
Children turning panic into stubbornness.
He couldn't be everywhere.
But he could be here.
So he didn't let go.
"HYPOCRITE!" Orochimaru hissed, face twisting, rage trembling under his skin. "You made this village. You made me."
Hiruzen almost smiled.
He had earned that word.
He had sent children to war. He had made compromises that tasted like ash. He had let Danzō exist in his shadow because the alternative always seemed worse, always seemed like it would fracture the village.
He had been tired.
He had been human.
"Yes," Hiruzen said simply. "And I'm still here."
The Shinigami's blade lifted.
Clone one screamed—not with voice, but with chakra—when the blade sank into Hashirama's soul and tore it free. Hashirama's body sagged, puppet strings cut.
Clone one dissolved into smoke.
Clone two held Tobirama as the blade did the same.
For one heartbeat, Tobirama's eyes flicked—like a moment of awareness trying to surface through the mud of the technique.
Then it was gone.
His soul tore free.
Clone two collapsed into smoke.
The roof felt emptier.
Not quieter—the muffled chaos below still existed—but the pressure of two stolen legends lifted like a hand releasing a throat.
Orochimaru's breathing sharpened. His composure frayed.
He felt the window closing.
He did what brilliant monsters always did when cornered.
He adapted.
His hands tried to form seals—
and failed.
His fingers twitched, stuttering, like a musician reaching for a note that no longer existed.
Hiruzen felt it.
The recoil of consequence.
Orochimaru's eyes dropped to his hands.
Disbelief, pure and ugly, crossed his face.
Then fury flooded in to replace it.
"You—" Orochimaru rasped.
Hiruzen's voice went low, the way it did when he taught academy children who wouldn't listen.
"Watch," he said.
He shifted his grip down—clamping Orochimaru's forearms in place.
Orochimaru's pupils tightened.
"No," he breathed, sudden and real.
The Shinigami's blade plunged—
Not toward Orochimaru's heart.
Not toward his head.
Toward his arms.
Spiritual steel bit into something invisible.
Orochimaru screamed.
Not a theatrical scream.
A real one.
His body arched. His shoulders jerked. His eyes went wide with the kind of horror that only happens when a man realizes he has limits.
The Shinigami tore.
Two chunks of Orochimaru's soul ripped free—bound to hands, to weaving, to the art of shaping the world with seals.
The air snapped like a contract ripping in half.
A sharp, metallic scent of cooling iron and burnt ash flooded the roof, followed by a silence so absolute it made Hiruzen's ears ring.
Orochimaru's arms went slack.
His fingers twitched uselessly, trying to remember movements they no longer owned.
Hiruzen exhaled, and the breath tasted like rust.
He had done it.
Not enough to kill him.
Enough to matter.
Enough to change the shape of the future.
Hiruzen's knees buckled.
Enma caught him by the shoulder—grip fierce, careful in the way only an old friend could be careful.
"Old man," Enma growled, voice rougher than usual. "You're done."
Hiruzen's eyes flicked, briefly, to the barrier's edge.
Through the violet shimmer he could see silhouettes outside—ANBU masks, Kakashi's silver hair, elders moving like frightened birds.
And somewhere, in the corner where Danzō always preferred to stand, he could feel that cold, bright attention.
Watching.
Calculating what came next.
Even now.
Even here.
Politics.
Hiruzen turned his gaze away.
He refused to give that corner his last sight.
Instead, he let himself imagine—just imagine—Naruto's face when he heard.
The boy would shout. He would cry. He would refuse to understand.
And Sylvie—quietly feral, ink on her hands and fear in her throat—would anchor him. Keep him from sprinting into a coffin with his own name on it.
He hoped.
He hoped they would be better than his generation.
He hoped they would make different mistakes.
Orochimaru stared at Hiruzen with something like hatred and awe tangled together.
"This isn't a victory," he hissed, voice trembling. "You're dying. You're dying and the village is still burning."
Hiruzen's lips moved.
His voice came out quiet.
"Then let my death," he said, "be a lesson."
Orochimaru's eyes narrowed. "To whom?"
Hiruzen looked at him—at the student he failed, at the monster Konoha helped sharpen.
"To you," Hiruzen said.
And then his gaze softened—not forgiveness. Something older. Weary.
"And to them," he added, thinking of children and futures and the weight of a title.
His fingers loosened.
Enma's grip tightened once—like a goodbye he would never say out loud.
Hiruzen Sarutobi, Third Hokage, Professor—
fell forward onto the roof tiles.
The barrier shuddered.
The violet light flickered and died with a soft, electrical pop, the ionized air rushing outward and carrying the smell of the rooftop's carnage down into the stands below.
Violet flames flickered.
Then the Four Violet Flames Formation collapsed like a breath finally released.
Sound shinobi at the corners sagged, chakra spent, hands trembling. The air rushed in.
Noise flooded back—real noise, unmuted chaos, Konoha's screams no longer polite.
"Hokage-sama!" Kakashi's voice cut through, raw.
ANBU landed in masks and steel. Med-nin shoved forward.
Orochimaru stood over Hiruzen's body, shaking, face twisted like he couldn't decide whether to spit or mourn or bite.
His arms hung wrong.
His fingers would not obey.
His eyes flicked once—toward the village, toward the tower, toward the idea of what he'd come here for.
Then he moved.
Not a victory exit.
A retreat.
A wounded snake sliding away because survival was his only religion.
Enma crouched beside Hiruzen's body, shoulders hunched, teeth clenched so hard they showed.
"Don't touch him like he's an object," Enma snarled at the shinobi rushing in.
Kakashi stopped short, breath shuddering.
Outside the roofline's chaos, Danzō was already gone.
Of course he was.
The roof smelled like blood and smoke and hot stone.
The distant, unmuted roar of the village finally flooded back in—a chaotic percussion of screams, explosions, and the rhythmic thud-thud of the builders' hammers that would eventually have to start all over again.
And below, Konoha kept burning—
—but the shape of the future had shifted.
Just a little.
Because an old man had chosen cost.