Chapter Sixty-One

Pre-Chapter A/N: More chapters on my patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)— same username as here and link in bio. 

I buried the urge to bury my head in my hands as I stared at the map of Hi no Kuni and began to consider my next options. Somehow, Iwa had managed to figure out that we were the ones behind the attack. That was the only thing that could explain their sudden expansion into our borders. I'd spoken a big game about being ready for the war when it came, and now that it was here, I found myself at a crossroads. Kumo was supposed to be the first to strike—that was the whole point of everything. They were supposed to either be attacked by Iwa and forced into the Land of Fire as a result, or to lose their patience with the waiting and rush in. Iwa was supposed to wait in every model I'd calculated. Onoki was known as the fucking fence-sitter for a reason. 

"So what do we do?" Uzume asked to my side. I could already tell that she was spoiling for a fight. I could see it in the glint in her eyes that she just wanted a name and a place, and she'd be off. 

"We say fuck it and commence Operation Geneva Convention," I said with a sigh. Kumo had the greater numbers. This would be worlds more effective against them than it would against Iwa, and now that Iwa was essentially testing the waters for Kumo, I had to work under the assumption that Kumo would be ready for my tricks. 

"I already had those traps set up on the route between Frost and here. It will be even harder to bury traps to use against Iwa since Earth Release is their whole thing," Uraume said instantly. 

"I know, I know. That's why we'll only be burying the less important traps. As for Mindbreaker and Soulcrusher, hide them in the trees. We're the Hidden Leaf Village for a reason, and if we guarantee that they spend all their time looking at the ground for obvious traps, then they won't notice the more insidious means being employed against them," I said. 

She nodded. 

"Good, now assemble a team of seven of your best," I said to her. I had never officially granted her the position, but I could never forget the way Uraume had walked into this office, seen the condition of things, and just decided to take one massive problem off my plate—the Anbu. I still had no idea how she managed to convince those notoriously stubborn arseholes to listen to her. I'd been dealing with a small mutiny within their ranks that disappeared once she got her hands on them. Those loyal to Danzo seemed to have either been forced into anonymity or made to see the error of their ways. 

"Wait, I have another idea" Uzume said. 

"What do you have in mind?" Uraume turned to her. 

"We meet their charge" 

XXXX- KITSUCHI 

The Iwa army moved as a single column. They walked ten abreast and fifty deep. Five hundred shinobi marching in file. They were only half of the force that would be making their way into Konoha. It was his father's idea: split the approach into two. One led by him, and the other led by Takeshi the Immovable Mountain, called up from his pacification of the Land of the Grass and the insurgents therein to help manage the invasion of Konoha. Kitsuchi had a fair idea where his father's own force was—they would approach through Waterfall. Shorirama's Senju retreat on all fronts would bite him in the arse there, as they were going to hit the Hidden Leaf from two sides and leave them struggling to respond. 

Their retreat told their best analysts that Konoha didn't have the numbers to contest them on the field, so they were going to sit in their village—behind walls. Ha. Walls. Walls against Iwa. They would be fools if they did not sally out to face them on the field, and that was the point of their splitting up their force. Shorirama Senju would have to face one army or the other. If he went for his father's force, then he would die against the Tsuchikage himself. 

If he came here, then he would face Takeshi the Immovable Mountain, Kaen of the Explosion Release, Hikari and Tsubasa of the Lava Release, and Kitsuchi himself. Any one of them was enough to qualify as an S-ranked shinobi. The five of them working together? Kitsuchi wagered that they would kill the Sage of Six Paths himself. And then their column came to a sudden stop. 

"What's going on again?" He heard Kaen's sharp voice from his side and sighed. If only their team of S-ranks had less grating personalities, then everything would be perfect. 

"Probably another trap," Hikari said with a sigh of her own. 

"One must wonder what the point of all this fanfare is. If we can feel the traps, then we should just skirt past them and move on," Tsubasa added. 

Kitsuchi was tempted to agree. But he knew that this was his father's idea. Every trap was unearthed and then carefully contained before their people continued, giving it a wide berth and making sure none touched it. His father was paranoid about Shorirama Senju, and Kitsuchi did not understand it at all. Until there was a sudden feeling of space to his side. 

"What the fuck?" Kaen's voice sounded. Kitsuchi whirled to the side and found nothing. Hikari had fallen to the ground, shaking. What was going on? Not just her, he noticed as chunin and jonin all around their camp seemed to begin to fall at random, shivering and shaking like there was a frost none but them could feel. 

"What happened?" He found himself asking. 

"They just fell like this. What the fuck could have happened?" 

"Shorirama Senju," He said, feeling a sense of dread building within him. 

"That doesn't even make any sense. We dispatched all his traps." 

"Well, there's something causing half of us to fall to the floor at random. So we have to have missed something," he said as he watched the column around them begin to fall into disorder. 

People just kept falling, and strangely enough, it seemed that some of the people who fell would rise again seemingly at random. It was just chaos. People would fall. Some would rise, and the rest would remain down on the floor, shivering. Shivering like they were freezing. Tsubasa leaned down towards his twin sister, and after shaking her produced no results, he reached up to feel her forehead with the back of his hand. The only issue with that was that the second he touched her, he froze as well, falling face first a second later. 

"Don't touch them!" Kitsuchi found himself screaming at the top of his lungs. But it was too little and too late. People all around them were already reaching down to help their comrades, and where skin touched, they fell to the floor in a matter of seconds. It was pure chaos, and then to make it a dozen times worse, there was a rain of kunai from the skies around them. 

"Take cover!" he shouted, shrouding his arms in Earth Release chakra and bracing for the attack. Only for none of the kunai to fall upon him. The sun had disappeared for a few seconds until he opened his eyes to see that a massive earth dome had covered their entire army. Takeshi had his hands shoved in the ground, not even straining with the cost that came with a jutsu that massive. Their reprieve was short as the sound of cracking echoed within the dome for a second before it was cleaved in two. Above it was a woman—a girl, really. Younger than he was, and with a smug smirk on her face. In her hand was a war fan that crackled with Lightning Release. She was the one that had cut the dome open. 

Two shinobi, chunin he could tell from their vests, jumped at her as she fell downwards. It was a blur of motion. But the results were visible for all to see. She landed right in front of Takeshi, and to her side fell two bodies—the chunin that had jumped at her. 

"Hey, Iwa shinobi-san. Please do me a favor and make this interesting," she said with a smirk, red eyes spinning aggressively. He snapped his head to the side. That was the Sharingan. And in that second, she had closed the distance between herself and Takeshi, almost cutting his head in one swipe and forcing him to block with an earth gauntlet. 

Kitsuchi's problems were compounded as even more kunai fell upon them. This time without the dome to shield them. As they blocked the kunai from above, they were set upon by Konoha shinobi that peeled out from the treeline, from the shadows, from thin air, from everywhere. 

XXXXX- SHORIRAMA SENJU 

"For the love of all that is holy, can you just play?" I asked Kizuru as we sat in the middle of the road. We weren't alone, not truly. I had my team here. It was probably careless to the extreme to bring a team of genin out for what I was about to do, but Kushina was the Eight-Tails Jinchuriki, Minato was a genius without compare, and Mikoto was the herald of the next generation of Uchiha prodigies—Uzume's niece as well. 

"Look at the surroundings. We're in the forest, can you not just listen to the beauty of nature? If I start playing here, I'd interrupt the birds and the worms, and the fishes, and everything!" 

"What fishes, Kizuru? We're in the bloody forest!" I asked next, a tick building on my head. Somehow, between the time I spent busy with the village and with my own training, Kizuru had turned into a bloody hippy of all things. Mikoto looked like she was wishing the ground would swallow her while both Kushina and Minato watched the debate with interest. 

"The fishes in the streams, of course." 

"There's no streams anywhere near us," I said next, near shouting, and that was how they met us: the Iwa column of shinobi led by their ever-patient Kage. 

"Shorirama Senju!" His voice stretched out. 

"When they told me you were here, just sitting, I almost couldn't believe it. It had to be a trap of some sort. We spent hours digging and searching. No seals, nothing. You're really just here. Is your village in such a terrible state that you would deliver yourself into my hand like this? Alone and unguarded?" He asked. Well, that was just rude. Did he not see the genin by my side? 

"Can he not see you guys? Is he blind or something?" I asked the group by my side before I laughed. A long, booming laugh that brought as much discomfort to Kizuru and my genin as it probably did to our opponents. Even knowing the plan, Kizuru still thought I was crazy for signing up to fight the Tsuchikage and his Dust Release alone. Especially with the army behind him and the fact that I would have to be doing it at half capacity. Half capacity for me was quite different from what it was for most people, though, so that was not too much of a problem. The genin didn't know as much of the plan as Kizuru did. Only their role in it. 

"Are you insane? Genuinely?" Onoki asked, a sick amusement in his tone. An amusement that the people behind him did not truly share. 

"Have you heard what your people whisper about me when you make camp at night? Army killer. Tailed beast slayer. God of war. They've heard what those who survived my massacre in Taki had to say. They know you stand no chance here. So I wonder how many I have to kill before you yourself get the message?" I said with a smirk. 

"They fear none of that because you are nothing. Nothing but an arrogant boy I will put to an end right now!" He said. 

"Bold words, Fence-sitter. Someone ought to hold you to them." 

"Are you going to come die or not?" Onoki asked from his position, hands crossed. I smiled and shrugged before I began to stretch. 

"So you see, there were no traps around. I'm not really that much of a fan of overkill, you know. Maximum efficiency and whatnot. So when I hatched this plan up, there was only the need for a single trap. Can you guess when you walked into that one? I'll give you the answer—it was when you did not turn around and head home the second you knew I was here," I said with a smirk, and I lifted my hands up. I'd been preparing the jutsu internally for close to ten minutes at this point, so it was just waiting for me to unleash it. 

I pulled at Kurama's chakra, pretty much using it entirely for this jutsu—sure I needed Kokuo's for the main spark that would light the match, and even that small amount when it came to this jutsu was about a third of the tail's worth of chakra that I had left. Control was not the goal here. It was big, wasteful, and that was the point. Fire and Water Release came together in my body before erupting out of my lifted hand in steam. Steam that spun in on itself as it was contained in a shell of Kurama's chakra. 

"Don't let him fire that jutsu!" Onoki screamed, and I smirked at the panic he tried to hide from his voice as his shinobi raced at me. A mistake. I disappeared in a flash, and then I was right in the middle of them. My Hiraishin seal on the floor had gone without notice, just as I knew it would. It gave off no chakra, and I'd carved it on the bottom of a stone so nothing like a buried seal tag or kunai caught their attention. Just as I appeared in their midst, I left a second later. Only this time, I left the jutsu behind. 

The Steam Release Rasengan bubbled and swelled without me to keep it stable, and those next to it scrambled backwards, but it was too little and too late as it erupted a second later into a massive explosion of steam. 

"Ahhhhhhhhh!" A single voice echoed through the forest until it was gone, and then replaced by another. 

"My god," Kizuru whispered by my side, and I wondered what he felt with his chakra senses, because the steam was yet to clear enough for us to see. Even with my Byakugan, I could scarcely see into the Iwa column. I could hear the screams, though. The screams I could definitely hear. The steam cleared because of some Wind Release jutsu from within the Iwa group, and it was so bad that I almost wished I hadn't used that jutsu. 

Steam was uniquely gruesome in the damage it could cause. I could have used a Wind Release Rasenshuriken or a Lightning Release: Spear of Heaven to achieve similar results with nature chakra at my disposal, but I knew that neither of those would cause as much chaos and damage as my steam did. Because the bodies were still there. Just boiled to death from both outside and within at the same time. 

Their clothes were untouched. Perhaps the worst were those who only had limbs or certain body parts get caught in the steam. Those were the ones whose screams echoed through this clearing. The spotted trees that had been around them had withered into husks of themselves. Brittle little things with dead leaves that provided no shade from the sun. Their numbers—the Iwa nin—had at least halved, hundreds dead from a single jutsu. 

I could see Onoki's face as it began to redden. His hands came together, and I knew the Dust Release was coming before he even completed the jutsu. Three kunai flew from my hands, one in each direction—one straight left, another straight right, and the last straight upwards. As expected, the Dust Release took so long to shape that the kunai had almost gone out of range when he finally fired the jutsu. When he did, it was only sage mode-enhanced reflexes that allowed me to cast the formal variation of the Flying Raijin that forced the Dust Release into a pocket of space that formed at my command. 

The jutsu disappeared, and if I had a camera on me, I would have taken a picture of Onoki's shell-shocked expression. 

"Remember the plan," I said, and I molded my chakra into two clean halves, seamlessly forming a shadow clone by my side. As I did, I took the fact that I was standing still for a few more seconds to shove as much nature chakra into my body as I could before I shot at my opponent. The Tsuchikage's fist met mine, and shockingly enough, I was the one that got sent flying backwards. I Flying Raijined to a marked tree just as a barrage of stone bullets flew through the air I'd just occupied. 

On the ground, my clone wove seals, and Jinpei found himself in the human world for the first time since he'd lost to Ibuse, and this time he was spoiling to avenge that loss and clear his name. Water flooded the battlefield in a matter of seconds while I jumped at Onoki again. Another Dust Release jutsu came my way. I tossed a kunai to the side and teleported to it, dodging the prismatic lane of chakra that disintegrated everything it came into contact with. I fired two more kunai, one to either side before sending one at Onoki. He'd figured out the Flying Raijin at this point, so instead of aiming his next death ray in my direction, he aimed for the kunai. That was fine, as in that time, I had four more kunai in the air, securing even more escape spots for myself, as the Tsuchikage denying flying at me himself was probably the best way to end this. 

My clone atop Jinpei began to mold the water our summon helpfully provided into the ground for our own version of the Sad Man Parade, even as my genin team stood around his stationary form and Kizuru began to play his flute from behind him. 

A/N: And so we get the next phase of the war effort. We see Iwa make their move, and Shori's move to stop them. Next five up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)(same username as here and link in bio), support me there and read them early.