The instant the elite Root operatives mapped Naruto's exact trajectory, they deployed their high-speed tracking parameters, lunging forward in a synchronized pattern to forcefully detain him.
However, the mindless toddler standing before them was completely operating under a vastly superior evolutionary matrix now. With absolute, fluid nonchalance, Naruto slowly lifted his right hand and executed a casual wave of his fingers. Dozens of hyper-compressed ki light-beams shot violently from his palm, charting frame-perfect vectors that instantly pierced straight through the skulls of every single incoming assassin.
Before Danzo Shimura could even register the spatial threat, his elite vanguard had already collapsed into a pile of a dozen headless corpses, their blood pooling rapidly onto the cold stone floor.
Danzo ground his teeth so violently they threatened to shatter. Realizing his survival was on a razor's edge, he violently ripped away the thick bandages sealing his right arm, exposing a deathly pale, engineered prosthetic limb.
At this specific point in the timeline, this arm was a highly unstable, unfinished project; it was entirely incapable of channeling Wood Style ninjutsu, nor had it been transplanted with a single Uchiha Sharingan yet. It functioned purely as a biological extension of his torso.
Biting into the thumb of his left hand until it bled, Danzo violently smeared the blood across his pale right palm. His fingers blurred through a rapid sequence of hand signs before he slammed his hand heavily against the concrete floor.
"Summoning Jutsu: Baku!" [1]
BOOM!
A massive, suffocating cloud of white smoke erupted through the vault, and a colossal, nightmare-inducing elephantine proboscis monster materialized directly within the subterranean base.
The Baku was an absolute titan of a beast. The very second its hooves anchored into the dirt, Danzo bypassed all conventional tactics and ordered it to launch a reckless, full-scale destructive assault against the structural foundations of the Root base itself.
That was his ultimate gambit. The old vulture was far from naive; he understood with absolute certainty that his summoning beast stood zero chance of actually defeating a monster of Naruto's caliber in a straight-up fight. His single, calculated objective was to trigger an earth-shattering cataclysm that would vibrate straight through the bedrock of Fire, forcing the high-ranking powerhouses inside Konoha to detect the anomaly and sprint to the coordinates for immediate military reinforcement.
Faced with the mountain-sized beast that had suddenly locked its vacuum-like gaze onto his perimeter, the crackling green aura enveloping Naruto's body suddenly exploded into a violent, blinding vortex of energy, and his cellular anatomy began to undergo an catastrophic, world-altering transformation...
Meanwhile, on the pristine roof of the primary Hokage Building, the legendary Toad Sage, Jiraiya, stood leaning against the decorative railing, taking in the sweeping panoramic view of the Hidden Leaf Village.
Hiruzen Sarutobi stepped up beside his star pupil, exhaling a soft cloud of smoke from his pipe. "Every single time I stand at this precise vantage point and look over the complete architectural canvas of Konoha, I feel a profound, unyielding surge of emotion well up in my heart. I imagine you harbor the exact same sentiment, Jiraiya."
Jiraiya internally cringed, shifting his weight uncomfortably. Over the past few decades, his old master's theatrical, deeply administrative political tone had become an absolute addiction. The old man couldn't just recall him across the border to talk direct, unvarnished business; he always had to initiate these long-winded, philosophical monologues first. For a rogue scout who spent his entire life traveling the world and executing missions with absolute, clinical efficiency, this bureaucratic fluff was incredibly grating.
Cutting right through the Hokage's speech, Jiraiya interrupted bluntly, "Sarutobi-sensei, let's skip the poetry and get straight to the operational data. Word on the espionage network states that the actual Nine-Tails somehow materialized inside the Land of Thunder. What exactly is the truth behind that report?"
Hiruzen let out a long, heavily burdened sigh. Leaning his back against the railing, he finally unveiled the classified reality of the tragedy from three years ago.
Jiraiya's jaw dropped, his mind completely stunned as the data registered. Minato... didn't seal the entirety of the Nine-Tails? He physically executed the beast?
The revelation completely shattered his historical baseline. In his memory, his star student Minato Namikaze had always operated as a specialized, speed-reliant combatant. Standing on a field and waging a prolonged war of attrition to completely sever the life force of a mountain-sized entity like the Kyuubi should have been a tactical impossibility for his build.
But a second later, a wave of melancholy washed over his chest. The boy was already dead and buried; what was the practical utility of debating his combat metrics now?
He cast a sharp, knowing glance at his master. "So, you ordered my immediate return because your administration expects me to head out and capture the Nine-Tails?"
Hiruzen took a slow drag from his pipe, his eyes narrowing. "Correct. It is my executive hope that you will organize a highly specialized task force, infiltrate the Land of Thunder under a total blackout, and successfully re-bind the beast to our village."
"Give me a break, sensei!" Jiraiya flatly scoffed, throwing his hands up in refusal. "The intelligence reports state that Kumogakure deployed a literal army of hundreds of elite Jonin alongside the Fourth Raikage himself, and even that entire military apparatus failed to subjugate the Fox. If I march an infiltration squad into their territory, we'll be thoroughly annihilated. You are drastically overestimating my combat ceiling, Sarutobi-sensei."
Jiraiya's refusal was absolute. He hadn't lived nearly enough yet; more importantly, his sacred prophecy regarding the Child of Destiny remained unfulfilled, and he had zero desire to throw his life away in a suicidal military gamble.
Seeing his student push back so aggressively, Hiruzen immediately pivoted to an encouraging, high-stakes political compromise. "I would never expect you to navigate an S-rank liability of this caliber without sufficient leverage. I have already authorized Orochimaru to deploy alongside your unit, and the entire elite roster of the regular Anbu black ops will be placed under your direct operational command! I am entirely confident that when the two of the Sannin join forces, capturing the Fox is a guaranteed success."
Jiraiya's brow furrowed, a deep sense of suspicion settling into his mind. If Orochimaru is actively participating in the deployment... why am I being designated as the Supreme Commander of the unit?
Historically, whenever the legendary Sannin operated as a collective task force, Orochimaru was automatically granted the captain's mantle due to his flawless, calculated tactical efficiency; even before Tsunade abandoned the village, that hierarchy had been hardcoded into their dynamic since childhood. Furthermore, unlike Jiraiya, who spent his life running around foreign borders, Orochimaru had remained nestled inside the village infrastructure, making him the logical choice for the Hokage's trust.
Assigning Jiraiya the supreme authority over his old rival was a massive, intriguing political anomaly. What exact administrative games was his master playing behind the scenes?
BOOM!!!
Before his brain could parse the political subtext, a cataclysmic, earth-shattering shockwave tore through the horizon, erupting from the precise coordinates of the isolated wilderness where the Root base was hidden.
The structural vibrations grew increasingly violent, rattling the foundations of the Hokage Building itself. Jiraiya and Hiruzen locked eyes for a single fraction of a second before simultaneously executing a high-speed Body Flicker, blasting toward the source of the detonation at terminal velocity.
An elite squad of the Hokage's personal Shadow Guards materialized instantly, flanking the two Sannin as they crossed the rooftops. Leaping through the canopy, one of the guards pressed, "Lord Hokage... those coordinates... if my mapping is correct, that is the exact location of Elder Danzo's subterranean Foundation base, isn't it? Do you possess any immediate intelligence regarding what could cause an explosion of that magnitude?"
Hiruzen shook his head grimly, his face tight as he kept his eyes locked forward. He didn't know the exact parameters of the crisis—but he knew with absolute certainty that whenever Danzo was involved, absolutely nothing good ever came of it.
The apocalyptic rumble didn't just alert the Hokage's office; it violently reverberated through the estates of every prominent noble clan in Konoha. Even the Uchiha Clan, whose compound sat isolated on the absolute opposite side of the village perimeter, felt the tremors vibrate through their floorboards.
The senior officers of the Military Police Force rapidly assembled in the main courtyard, their voices an angry, chaotic blur as they debated whether to immediately deploy their clansmen to investigate the anomaly. A blast that massive—could it mean the village was undergoing a secondary Nine-Tails cataclysm?
As the younger hotheads vocally demanded an immediate deployment to claim the vanguard, Uchiha Fugaku brought his hand down firmly against a stone table, his voice cutting through the noise with absolute finality. He commanded every single member of the clan to remain strictly within the perimeter of the estate and hold their positions.
With their current political standing inside Konoha sitting on a permanent razor's edge, any unannounced, heavily armed Uchiha deployment toward a classified military zone would be instantly interpreted by the Hokage's council as an open rebellion or a coordinated coup. To preserve their survival, they would sit tight and wait for an official executive order from the Hokage.
Though the younger factions harbored deep, simmering resentment toward Fugaku's conservative methodology, his authority as the Patriarch was absolute. Furthermore, given the vast geographic distance separating their compound from the blast radius, they ultimately stood down, weapon handles tightly gripped as they waited inside their walls.
Within minutes, Hiruzen Sarutobi and Jiraiya breached the perimeter of the "crime scene."
The area was a dense, heavily scorched forest, but the terrifying acoustic rumbles and structural shifting were clearly projecting upward from deep beneath the forest floor.
An elite Shadow Guard ninja flickered directly up to the colossal, ancient oak trunk, extending his hand to manually override the security matrix and throw open the heavy hidden entrance leading down into the bowels of the Root base.
Before the Shadow Guards could manually bypass the final layer of the security array on the ancient oak, a sudden, catastrophic tremor ripped through the bedrock beneath their boots. The forest floor violently fractured, and a colossal, orange-yellow entity resembling a mountain-sized elephant was forcefully launched straight out of the earth like a massive, kinetic missile, tearing into the sky.
Under the completely stunned gaze of the gathered shinobi, the legendary Baku rolled its massive eyes back into its skull, hurtling through the upper atmosphere to an altitude of several hundred meters. Before its gargantuan weight could even begin its descent, the summoning contract violently severed under the sheer trauma of the impact, and the titan dissolved into a monumental cloud of thick white smoke, vanishing from existence.
Hiruzen Sarutobi recognized the legendary dream-eating tapir in a microsecond, a wave of profound, paralyzing shock locking down his features.
While the baseline destructive capacity of the Baku didn't quite achieve the apocalyptic standards of a true Tailed Beast, its physical mass and raw resilience were completely on par with legendary boss summons like Manda or Chief Toad Gamabunta. What unholy, concentrated mass of raw physical force does it take to punch a creature that massive straight through hundreds of feet of solid earth and launch it hundreds of meters into the stratosphere?
Before the smoke could clear, one of the Shadow Guards pointed a trembling finger toward the upper atmosphere, his voice crackling with alarm. "Look up there! That silhouette... that looks like Elder Danzo!"
Everyone locked their vision onto the coordinate. Drifting directly amidst the violent vortex of white smoke where the Baku had just evaporated was indeed the physical container of Danzo Shimura.
However, the image the elder presented now completely fractured the historical memory of the administration. The heavy layers of medical bandages that had sealed his right arm for decades had been completely incinerated, exposing a deathly pale, engineered prosthetic limb that resembled the flesh of a reanimated corpse. More egregiously, his right eye socket sat completely exposed in the night sky—and it was anything but blind. A sharp, ominous crimson light flashed brilliantly against the dark canopy.
The Shadow Guard gasped, his voice echoing with absolute military panic. "That's... that's the mature three-tomoe Sharingan! The hidden eye beneath Elder Danzo's bandages is a fully realized Sharingan!"
Jiraiya's jaw dropped, his mind completely reeling at the immediate political fallout of the revelation. He had never anticipated that an elder of the civilian council would possess the absolute audacity to forcefully transplant the sacred bloodline of their most volatile noble family. The second word of this treachery leaked back to the precinct, it would trigger an absolute, irreparable civil war between the noble shinobi clans and the central administration!
Hiruzen stood frozen, a deep wave of personal betrayal washing over his wrinkled face. While his tactical mind had harbored various suspicions regarding Danzo's hidden anatomy over the years, he had never possessed conclusive, empirical evidence, and his political standing made it highly embarrassing to forcefully demand a supreme elder unravel his bandages just to verify a rumor.
Now, the evidence was laid bare before the entire vanguard. Dealing with the fury of the Uchiha clan after tonight was going to be an absolute bureaucratic nightmare!
Before anyone could parse the administrative disaster, Danzo—flailing wildly as gravity reclaimed his body—bellowed down at the ground with a voice dripping with unadulterated panic: "Stop standing around gaping like a pack of brainless idiots! Move your asses and save me! I am actively about to be splatted to death!"
The command snapped the strike team out of their stupor. Flailing from a trajectory of several hundred meters meant the supreme commander of the Foundation was mere seconds away from being reduced to a fine block of meat paste on the grass.
Jiraiya's fingers instantly blurred through a rapid sequence of hand signs, his long, wild white hair expanding with terrifying velocity as it shot across the sky like a cluster of unyielding steel cables. The thick mane securely enveloped Danzo's midsection mid-air, bleeding off his terminal velocity before gently lowering the hyperventilating elder onto the grass directly in front of the Hokage.
The moment his boots touched the dirt, Danzo collapsed onto his knees, gasping frantically for oxygen, his chest heaving as pure, cold sweat drenched his robes. That specific aerodynamic experience was a visceral horror he never wanted to endure a second time as long as he drew breath.
Hiruzen opened his mouth, fully prepared to unleash an executive interrogation regarding the stolen Sharingan—but before a single syllable could leave his lips, a suffocating, dense kinetic pressure violently erupted from the gaping chasm left in the earth.
A single silhouette, heavily bathed in a brilliant, crackling vortex of vibrant green ki, slowly levitated out of the shattered bedrock, soaring into the open night air.
Naruto Uzumaki floated above the crater, his face locked in a grotesque, bloodthirsty grin as his stark white, completely pupil-less eyeballs swept across the field. The sheer, unadulterated body horror radiating from his presence caused the elite vanguard to shiver involuntarily, the atmosphere perfectly mimicking the climax of a psychological thriller.
The child's biological architecture had undergone a paradigm-shifting mutation. His tiny, three-year-old container had violently swelled to a height of well over two meters, his skeletal structure packed with explosive, hyper-defined muscle mass that looked entirely unnatural for a human frame.
Jiraiya subconsciously shifted his weight into a defensive stance, keeping his eyes glued to the floating muscular colossus as he whispered frantically to Danzo, "Is that glowing green freak our primary target? What on earth did your sector do to the Hyuga Clan? Why is one of their members hunting you down? Did your illegal laboratories kidnap a high-ranking Hyuga noble for live human experimentation?!"
Danzo's brain nearly short-circuited under the sheer, unmitigated stupidity of Jiraiya's analytical deduction. Which of this bumbling fool's eyes looked at this muscular anomaly and mapped him to the Hyuga bloodline?!
The Hyuga were an aristocratic family line reliant entirely on precise, elegant Gentle Fist taijutsu and internal chakra network occlusion. Where in their lineage had anyone ever manifested two meters of raw, explosive muscle mass?! Furthermore, the Hyuga possessed highly distinct, pale lavender pupils—whereas the terrifying engine of destruction floating above them possessed absolutely no pupils whatsoever! How could this idiot look at blank white space and conclude it was a Hyuga?!
Danzo ground his teeth so hard a vein throbbed against his temple, his raspy voice tracking with immense dread as he barked the truth: "You blind fool... that is Naruto Uzumaki!"
The revelation struck Jiraiya like a physical hammer blow, and even Hiruzen's pristine political composure completely fractured. Naruto?! The boy was a literal three-year-old toddler! What unholy biological heresy could possibly explain a physical transformation of this magnitude?!
Danzo tensed, his voice shaking as he quickly briefed the Kage-level fighters on the rapid collapse of his base. He explained that his initial administrative directive had been to simply induct the Jinchuriki decoy into the Foundation's black-ops training program—only for the child's psychological network to completely fracture, triggering an immediate, cataclysmic rampage that resulted in a total massacre.
"And that's not the worst of it," Danzo added, his single eye darting toward the sky in terror. "Orochimaru was actively present inside the inner sanctuary when the breakout occurred. He attempted to suppress the asset—and was systematically vaporized by a single, unweighted punch."
Danzo delivered his final, grim assessment to the strike team: "This whelp's physical ceiling is entirely anomalous. A legendary, Shadow-tier fighter like Orochimaru was rendered completely powerless and executed within a matter of seconds. Do not treat this as a standard containment protocol."
With that final warning delivered, Danzo abruptly spun on his heel, preparing to sprint into the deepest thickets of the forest to save his own skin. He had absolutely zero desire to trade blows with that muscular god a second time. Whoever wanted to play the hero could stay and bleed; he was checking out of this disaster!
But he hadn't managed to clear three paces before Hiruzen Sarutobi's hand clamped onto his collar like an iron vice, forcefully ripping him back into the circle.
"Danzo, you treacherous coward!" Hiruzen roared, his professional grandfatherly facade completely burning away into a mask of pure executive fury. "You actually have the audacity to flee the field?! Your illegal insubordination manufactured this entire cataclysmic nightmare, and you don't intend to stay and utilize your forces to clean up the fallout after Naruto ran amok?!"
Having his path forcefully blocked pushed Danzo's stress levels past the breaking point. He violently slapped the Hokage's hand away, his face contorting into an expression of rabid, unbridled fury as he screamed directly into his old rival's face: "Clean up the fallout?! Hiruzen, are you completely out of your administrative mind?! With what forces am I supposed to clean up a damn thing?!"
He pointed a shaking, pale finger toward the smoking crater behind them. "That little monster has physically pulverized the entire structural matrix of the Foundation! My central headquarters is completely leveled, my elite black-ops squads have been reduced to headless meat pieces, and I have barely a handful of functional operatives left alive across the continent! You hand-delivered a ticking biological bomb to my doorstep, and now you expect me to throw my life away to patch up your administrative failures?! Go to hell!"
Hiruzen stepped into his personal space, his chakra flaring with dangerous intensity as he countered fiercely, "I explicitly warned your sector to handle the asset with absolute care! Your primitive, brutal methodology obviously provoked the child's psychological instability and triggered this biological outburst! If your group hadn't tried to pull some underhanded tricks in the dark, how could the village possibly be facing an S-rank existential threat tonight?!"
The two supreme elders of the Leaf stood chest-to-chest in the center of the clearing, screaming and trading insults with escalating vitriol, completely on the verge of launching a private civil war right then and there.
Standing a few paces back, Jiraiya felt an absolute, throbbing headache mount behind his temples as he watched his elders bicker like toddlers while a two-meter-tall, glowing green Super Saiyan entity quietly orbited above their heads, tilting his head with an eerie, amused grin as he calmly calculated which of the screaming old men he was going to execute first.