The silence following a Rasengan isn't actually silent. It's a vacuum. It's the sound of air rushing back into the space where a person used to be.
I sat on the edge of the jagged hole in the ceiling, my legs dangling over the room where Kabuto had been standing ten seconds ago. Now, there was just a hole in the outer wall, a lot of blood, and Naruto.
Naruto stood in the middle of the puddle, his chest heaving, his orange jacket splattered with red sludge. He looked wild. He looked feral. He looked like he'd just realized he could punch a mountain and the mountain would move.
I slid off the edge.
It wasn't a graceful landing. My chakra was bottoming out, and my knees buckled when I hit the wet floorboards. The small Katsuyu division clinging to my back tightened its grip, a cold, reassuring weight against my spine.
Gamakichi landed beside me with a wet plap.
"Heck of a shot, whiskers," the toad croaked, looking at the hole in the wall. "Guy flew like a bird. A very breakable bird."
Naruto wiped his nose with his thumb, grinning through the gore. "He talked too much."
I straightened up, adjusting my glasses. They were smeared with dust, but I could still see the adrenaline shaking in Naruto's hands. We were alive. We had won. The "Stillwater" gamble had paid off.
I looked down at Gamakichi. The orange toad was inspecting a piece of debris, looking entirely unbothered by the carnage. He wasn't a giant warrior like his father. He was just a guy. A guy who had listened when I told him to stick to the ceiling, who had sprayed water when I asked, and who hadn't questioned why the girl with the ribbons was giving orders.
Impulsively, I reached down and picked him up.
He felt cool and dry—or as dry as a toad could be in a flooded castle. I held him up to eye level.
"You're okay," I told him, serious as a heart attack. "I think I like toads now."
Gamakichi blinked. Then, to my absolute delight, he slapped both webbed hands over his cheeks. His orange skin turned a deep, dusty red.
"Aw, shucks, Boss Lady," he mumbled into his palms. "Don't make it weird."
"WHAT?!"
Naruto appeared at my elbow instantly, bristling like an offended cat. He pointed an accusing finger at the toad.
"Him?!" Naruto squawked. "He didn't even do the Rasengan! I did the Rasengan! He just spit syrup!"
"Syrup is very useful, Naruto," I said, putting the flustered toad down.
"But I like toads!" Naruto insisted, stomping a foot in the bloody water. "I'm the Toad Sage in training! You can't just steal my—"
The floor lurched.
It wasn't the battle outside this time. It was something closer. Something under us.
A low, resonant hum began to vibrate through the soles of my boots. It wasn't the jagged, violent shaking of Manda. It was steady. It was rhythmic. It felt like the castle itself was waking up.
Then, the voice spoke.
It didn't come from a throat. It came from the walls, the floor, the air itself. It was soft, polite, and absolutely terrifying in its scale.
"Structural integrity at 18 percent. Collapse of the central keep is imminent."
Naruto froze. The voice sounded like it was inside his head, but it was too polite to be the Fox.
"Who said that?" he yelled, spinning around.
Then he saw it.
From the hole in the wall, from the cracks in the floorboards, from the stairwell—white slime was pouring in. But it wasn't a flood. It was organized.
Hundreds—no, thousands—of small slugs poured into the hallway. They weren't mindless. They moved with purpose. Some jammed themselves into cracking support beams, their bodies hardening instantly to hold the weight of the roof. Others lined the floor, creating a smooth, glowing path toward the exits.
The voice returned, calm and absolute.
"Evacuation Protocol is active. All non-combatants proceed to the south garden. Do not panic. I will cushion the debris."
"Whoa," Naruto breathed.
He watched as a cluster of slugs flowed over a pile of sharp rubble, smoothing it out so a terrified family running down the hall wouldn't trip.
This wasn't just a summon fighting a monster. This was a system.
Naruto looked at Sylvie. She was watching the slugs with wide eyes, her expression somewhere between exhaustion and pure worship.
And there was one on her shoulder.
Naruto blinked. A small, white slug with blue stripes was perched on Sylvie's vest, looking around like a tiny commander.
"Uh, Sylvie?" Naruto pointed. "You got a... thing."
Sylvie reached up and patted the slug gently. "She's helping."
"The young kunoichi is correct," the voice echoed, though Naruto realized with a start that it was coming from the tiny slug on Sylvie's shoulder, resonating perfectly with the thousands of others. "I am stabilizing her chakra network. She is currently running on fumes."
Naruto felt a flush of embarrassment. He hadn't even noticed Sylvie was low. He'd been too busy high-fiving himself over hitting Kabuto.
"We gotta go!" Naruto shouted, grabbing Sylvie's sleeve. "If the roof comes down, we're pancakes!"
"Correct," the slug intoned. "Please exit via the window. The stairs are no longer an option."
Naruto grinned. "Window? No problem."
He grabbed Sylvie around the waist before she could protest.
"Hold onto the toad!" he yelled.
"Naruto, wait—!"
He didn't wait. He launched himself through the hole Kabuto had made in the wall, plummeting three stories down toward the garden.
We hit the ground hard, but we didn't break anything. The garden soil was soft, churned up by the chaos, and—I realized as I scrambled up—cushioned by a carpet of Katsuyu's divisions.
I stood up, brushing dirt off my knees. Gamakichi hopped out of my arms, looking relieved to be on solid ground.
"Okay," Naruto said, dusting off his jacket. "We're out. Now we gotta help Pervy Sage and Grandma Tsunade beat the snake!"
He turned toward the main courtyard.
I grabbed his collar. "Naruto. Look."
He stopped. He looked up.
We had been fighting in hallways. We had been fighting Kabuto. We had been fighting a human-sized battle in a human-sized box.
Now, we were outside.
Above us, Manda towered like a skyscraper, his purple scales blotting out the sun. He was wrapped around the remaining tower, squeezing it until stone turned to powder. Gamabunta was there, a mountain of orange warted skin, holding a sword the size of a city block, wrestling the snake's head away from the evacuees.
And below them, anchoring the chaos, was the main body of Katsuyu. She was massive—vast enough to swallow a house whole—yet she was seemingly everywhere at once, a living foundation keeping the earth from swallowing the civilians.
The shockwaves of their movements blew the trees in the garden flat. The sound was deafening, a physical pressure that made my chest hurt.
Naruto's mouth fell open. His fists unclenched.
We weren't players on this board. We were debris.
I watched Tsunade—a tiny speck of green against the gray ruin—leap fifty feet into the air and punch the giant snake in the jaw, rocking a creature that weighed as much as an aircraft carrier.
"They're huge," Naruto whispered.
"Yeah," I said, feeling the tiny slug on my shoulder pulse with quiet reassurance. "They are."
We had won our fight. We had survived the hallway. But looking at the Sannin tearing the landscape apart, I realized the difference between a ninja and a force of nature.
The gods were still fighting. And the best thing we could do was stay out from under their feet.
Anko leaned against the scorched trunk of a cedar tree, the bark rough against her bruised shoulder. She watched the orange blur and the pink ribbon tumble out of the second-story window, crashing into the soft earth of the garden in a heap of limbs, mud, and one very confused toad.
They were messy. They were loud. They were alive.
Anko let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding, the exhale turning into a plume of white vapor in the cooling air. She pulled a crushed cigarette from her pouch, straightened it with a snap of her fingers, and lit it with a tiny spark of fire chakra.
The smoke tasted like normalcy. It tasted like she hadn't just hesitated to kill a traitor.
"Super Frog Jackpot and Stillwater Domain..." she muttered, the ridiculous names rolling off her tongue like gravel.
She shook her head, a small, jagged smirk cutting through the grime on her face. A brawler and a mechanic. Chaos and control. They hadn't used her moves. They hadn't used his moves. They had made something stupid and new, and it had worked.
She looked down at her own hand.
There was no water there. No playful toad oil. Just the faint, oily residue of snake venom and the burning itch of the Cursed Seal on her neck.
"And a snake," she whispered, the smirk dying.
She sighed, the smoke drifting from her lips to join the dark clouds above. She tilted her head back, looking up, up, up past the ruin of the castle, to where the purple colossus writhed against the sky.
High above, Orochimaru stood on the head of the monster, his long tongue tasting the air, laughing at a world he was trying to swallow whole.
Anko flicked the ash from her cigarette.
"Teach me how to break it," she murmured to the brats who couldn't hear her. "Before I turn into him."