Two days had evaporated into the frantic, grinding machinery of continental mobilization.
When the drums of war finally echoed across the Elemental Nations, Konohagakure did not scramble in blind panic; it shifted into a state of terrifying, calculated efficiency. With billions of Ryo injected into the treasury by Alaric's diplomatic extortion of the Fire Daimyo, the Hidden Leaf was a military juggernaut operating at absolute peak capacity.
At the epicenter of this sprawling logistical web sat Shikaku Nara. Given unprecedented authority by the Godaime Hokage, the Chief Strategist had arranged the shinobi forces across the map with the ruthless, flawless precision of a grandmaster playing shogi against an inferior opponent.
The northern borders were locked down tight.
In the damp, mist-choked valleys of Waterfall Country, a singular, terrifying phantom had been unleashed. Haku was stationed entirely solo, operating under a brutally simple directive: exterminate any individual wearing the earth-brown uniform of Iwagakure. He moved through the weeping forests like a ghost of teal and frost, an apex predator ensuring that no flanking maneuver from the Stone Village would ever breach the border alive.
Meanwhile, Team 7 remained conspicuously tethered to the heart of Konoha. It was a strategic grounding that Naruto Uzumaki had loudly protested, but both Tsunade and Shikaku were unyielding. They intimately understood the apocalyptic risk of placing the Nine-Tails Jinchūriki on the front lines when the Akatsuki were actively hunting the beasts in the shadows. Naruto was the ultimate prize, and he would remain behind the strongest walls the village possessed.
Out in the dense, towering foliage of Grass Country, Team 8 had been deployed under the command of a veteran Jonin, their unparalleled tracking abilities utilizing the very flora and fauna to monitor enemy troop movements miles before they reached the engagement zones. Team 9, led by the boisterous Might Guy, was held in strategic reserve deep within the Hidden Grass, a coiled spring of devastating Taijutsu ready to be released wherever the defensive line buckled.
Tying this massive, multi-front campaign together was the operational nerve center of Team 10. Positioned safely behind the primary vanguard, Ino Yamanaka and her father, Inoichi, maintained a continent-spanning telepathic network, relaying Shikaku's instantaneous, fluid tactical adjustments directly into the minds of the field commanders.
And then, there was Alaric Jonathan Kenway.
Alaric was not assigned to a specific border, nor was he tethered to a defensive trench. He was, for all intents and purposes, stationed absolutely everywhere.
Before departing the village, he had casually distributed dozens of his custom Hiraishin tags to the highest-ranking commanders across both the Grass and Waterfall battle camps. He was the ultimate, omnipresent fail-safe… a walking natural disaster waiting in the wings, ready to bend space and instantly materialize should any front face the threat of annihilation.
However, his actual, personal mission was removed entirely from the conventional war against Iwagakure. The Stone Village was merely a loud distraction; the true, existential rot threatening the world festered in the west.
Where was he? Well...
"Ugh, can't we slow down for a bit!?"
Alaric raised a platinum-blonde brow, tearing his gaze away from the endless expanse of clouds to look over his shoulder.
He and Jiraiya were soaring through the stratosphere on the broad, burning back of Emberis. While Alaric stood perfectly unbothered near the base of the Phoenix's neck, completely insulated by an aerodynamic bubble of Wind Release, he had purposefully allowed a fraction of the supersonic slipstream to leak toward the rear. It was a petty, highly amusing cure for his own travel boredom.
Jiraiya was currently plastered flat against the blazing feathers, his arms wrapped desperately around the base of a massive quill as hurricane-force winds threatened to peel his face off.
"Come on, ero-sennin," Alaric grinned around his cigar, his blue eyes flashing with a spark of sadistic mischief as he mentally communicated with Emberis to push the throttle just a fraction higher. "We need to arrive in Amegakure fast! Time is money, and we have a god to dethrone!"
"Hey, only Naruto calls me tha—"
Jiraiya's indignant protest was violently interrupted.
SCREEEEEE!
Emberis let out a piercing, triumphant shriek that rattled the heavens, his massive wings beating once with catastrophic force. The sudden, exponential spike in velocity broke the sound barrier for the fourth time, snapping Jiraiya's head back as the G-force hit him like a physical wall.
"FUUUUUUUUUUUCK!"
The legendary Sannin's scream was instantly swallowed by the roaring vacuum of their passage, his white hair whipping wildly around his head in a chaotic, tangled halo.
Alaric chuckled, a rich, dark sound of absolute amusement, before turning his head to look forward.
Through the parting veil of the high-altitude clouds, the atmospheric pressure suddenly shifted, growing dense and suffocatingly damp. The bright, unyielding blue of the sky was abruptly swallowed by a bruised, unnatural canopy of perpetual gray.
"We're here!" Alaric announced.
With a smooth, imperceptible shift in intent, Emberis decelerated from Mach speeds to a dead, hovering halt in less than a second. They floated suspended in the frigid air, several kilometers above the sprawling, industrialized nightmare below.
Jiraiya gasped, practically kissing the burning feathers as he greedily sucked oxygen back into his lungs. He slowly pushed himself up to a kneeling position, his hands trembling slightly as he followed Alaric's gaze downward.
"Amegakure..." Jiraiya breathed, his voice thick with a sudden, crushing wave of nostalgia and dread. He looked at the towering, brutalist skyscrapers of steel and concrete, all weeping under the relentless, heavy downpour. "...It's been a long while since I came here."
Alaric didn't immediately reply. He took a slow drag from his cigar, his piercing blue eyes narrowing as the Mind's Eye of the Kagura expanded outward, dissecting the environment with clinical precision.
From his elevated, omniscient vantage point, the anomaly was glaringly obvious. The rain bombarding the city below did not originate from the natural, atmospheric moisture of the upper clouds. The downpour began uniformly, manifesting a few hundred meters below the natural cloud line. Furthermore, every single drop of water was laced with a faint, continuous hum of foreign energy.
'It's an artificial weather system,' Alaric diagnosed silently, tracing the microscopic threads of chakra back to the central, highest tower in the city. 'A massive, continuous sensory net. He knows everything that moves beneath the rain.'
"I'm going to cast a jutsu that will violently grab Pein's attention," Alaric informed his companion, his tone shedding its playful edge, settling into the cold, absolute resonance of a commander. He glanced back at the kneeling Sannin. "If you value your life, Jiraiya, you will stay right here on Emberis's shoulder. Do not follow me down."
Jiraiya raised a thick white brow, his pride bristling for a fraction of a second, but he quickly swallowed the objection, nodding his head in solemn agreement. He knew his own limits. Without the time required to gather natural energy and fully synchronize with the Toad Sages to achieve his imperfect Sage Mode, dropping into the stronghold of a man possessing the Rinnegan was nothing short of elaborate suicide.
"Understood," Jiraiya muttered, gripping the feathers tightly as he prepared to observe the madness.
Satisfied, Alaric stepped casually off the edge of the Phoenix's back.
Gravity attempted to claim him, but he merely willed it away, descending through the frigid air with the slow, effortless grace of a descending feather. He floated downward until he hovered precisely ten meters above the artificial, chakra-infused cloud layer that blanketed the weeping city.
He looked down at the towering spires of Amegakure, the ember of his cigar glowing fiercely against the gray backdrop.
"Let's see exactly what your reaction to this is going to be, Pein," Alaric whispered to the howling wind.
He raised his right hand, extending his fingers before folding them into a single, solitary seal of his own design.
He channeled his vast, oceanic reserves, forcefully projecting a hyper-dense pulse of Water Release intertwined with a domineering thread of spatial manipulation directly into the heart of the storm. He swept his hand in a slow, upward, beckoning motion.
'Let's name this...' Alaric paused, his mind searching for a suitably terrifying moniker for the cataclysm he was about to unleash. "Rain Stopping Technique!"
A second later, his internal monologue grimaced. 'Ew... no, that sounds incredibly cringy. I really need to work on my naming conventions.'
But the aesthetic failure of the name did absolutely nothing to diminish the apocalyptic scale of the jutsu.
Below him, the impossible happened.
The relentless, driving rain that had battered the steel towers of Amegakure for years... abruptly ceased.
Millions of gallons of falling water, suspended mid-drop in the gray air, simply halted. The kinetic energy of the storm was instantly overwritten by Alaric's absolute, tyrannical command over the elements. To the citizens cowering in the streets below, the world seemed to freeze, the raindrops hovering like millions of tiny, glittering glass beads.
Then, the true horror began.
With a sickening, rushing sound that defied gravity, the suspended ocean of rain violently reversed its course. The water surged upward, tearing away from the rooftops and the flooded gutters, rushing toward the heavens in a massive, inverted waterfall.
High above the city, the millions of gallons of chakra-infused water violently converged. They slammed together in the sky, churning and boiling as they merged into a singular, titanic sphere that blotted out the meager light of the sun. The sheer mass of the water was staggering, a floating ocean suspended directly over the hidden village.
Alaric closed his fist.
The colossal sphere immediately began to collapse inward upon itself. It hyper-compressed, shrieking against the atmospheric pressure as it shrank from the size of a mountain down to the dense, concentrated mass of a large manor house. The water darkened into a churning, midnight blue, humming with an incomprehensible, localized gravity that threatened to tear the surrounding air apart.
Hovering just behind the impossibly dense weapon, Alaric casually raised his index finger, aiming the compressed sphere directly downward, locking the trajectory onto the highest, gargoyle-faced tower in the center of Amegakure.
He took the cigar from his lips, exhaling a thin, serene cloud of smoke.
"Heh..." Alaric smirked, his blue eyes flashing with the promise of absolute ruin. "...bang."
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