Uzumaki Kushina had known about the Uchiha clan before she ever set foot in Konoha.
Their reputation had traveled far enough that even a girl from Whirlpool Country had grown up hearing the name. The only force remaining in the shinobi world capable of restraining a Biju after the Wood Release had vanished with the First Hokage's generation. Formidable. Legendary in a specific and practical sense, the kind of legend that had military weight attached to it.
She had never been particularly impressed.
In her private accounting, there was one clan whose sealing arts could genuinely claim authority over the Nine-Tails, and that clan was her own. The Uzumaki. Everything else was a distant second.
Until today.
...........
The forest shook.
What appeared before her was not ninjutsu in any form she had previously categorized. An enormous hand, the color of deep emerald, assembled from what appeared to be bones of light, descended through the canopy with a spiral sword clutched in its grip, a weapon that carried in its shape the suggestion of something capable of splitting mountains along their fault lines and parting seas at their depths.
Her chains answered it.
Golden light erupted from her body, chains forged from the Nine-Tails' own chakra forming a net in the air between her and the short figure in the fox mask. The spiral sword and the diamond chains met at a single point, and the forest stopped being a forest for a moment and became something else entirely, a place where forces that should not have existed in the physical world had decided to settle their disagreement.
The shockwave moved outward from the point of contact like a held breath releasing all at once. The trees at the edge of the engagement simply ceased to be upright. The ground opened. A dazzling light burst at the collision point and forced every eye in the vicinity closed regardless of the will of its owner.
The stream of displaced air that followed carried enough force to lift the Konoha shinobi watching from the perimeter and deposit them further back in the forest without asking their opinion on the matter.
...........
Hyuga Hizashi found his footing against a tree trunk and held it, Byakugan active, trying to track what was happening at the center of the engagement.
He could not look directly at it.
In his entire life, in all the combat he had witnessed and participated in, his eyes had never failed him at this basic level. He turned them away from the collision between the spiral sword and the golden chains and accepted that there were things in this world that even Byakugan was not designed to witness directly.
So this is what Root's Danzo has cultivated. Truly terrifying.
Aburame Tatsuma and the other Root shinobi had channeled chakra to their feet, pressing against the ground with enough force to remain standing in the wind that was trying to move them. Their composure was professional and complete. Whatever they were feeling, it was not visible.
"That is Ren, the Root newcomer," one of the shinobi said, watching the short figure in the fox mask trade strikes with a jinchūriki operating near her limit. "Danzo-sama's judgment in accepting students has never been wrong."
...........
Root functioned primarily as a training ground for Anbu candidates, its output serving Konoha's broader security apparatus. Sarutobi Hiruzen had negotiated, with the particular discomfort of a man who understood exactly what he was agreeing to, that Danzo could retain ten Anbu shinobi as his personal guard.
Danzo had not refused the arrangement.
He had used the old system of Celestial Stems as names and maintained those ten at peak readiness with the consistency of someone who understood that elite capability required elite investment.
Kinoe was reserved for the boy with Wood Release.
Tatsuma held the name Tei.
Orochimaru had taken Noto for himself, characteristically.
Shisui, having accepted his grandfather's ideals with the particular seriousness of a ten-year-old who had received memories of a life he never lived and decided they were worth honoring, had been given the name Ren, the name that had belonged to a shinobi from the Rain Country now dead. He had been temporarily paired with Kyō.
The short figure in the fox mask landing hits against a jinchūriki carrying the Nine-Tails' chakra was Ren.
...........
"Too much noise." Tatsuma's voice was even, the assessment of the eldest present in the absence of Danzo and Orochimaru. He had the coolest mind in the formation and he was using it now, watching the edges of the situation rather than its center. "This exceeds what Danzo-sama's authorization covers for this engagement."
He had seen it before Shisui had. The Fox Cloak beginning to manifest across Kushina's skin. The red seeping into her eyes, the black pattern forming within it. She was approaching the threshold where the distinction between jinchūriki and Biju became difficult to maintain.
"Hei. Kyō. Intervene now."
He turned to Hyuga Hizashi.
"Hyuga-san. Your presence here gives us the numbers we need. The four of us can activate the scroll together."
...........
Konoha had prepared for the possibility that retrieving Uzumaki Kushina might require more than shinobi restraint.
She carried the Uzumaki clan's sealing heritage in her blood and her training, making her a legitimate Kage-level threat when the Nine-Tails' chakra was fully engaged. Danzo had requested the most powerful sealing scroll in the village's possession from Koharu before departing, and Koharu had produced it without asking questions that would have required uncomfortable answers.
Tatsuma opened the scroll.
Hyuga Hizashi looked at what was written inside and felt something shift in his assessment of what the Sealing Department was actually capable of.
"Seal of Four Symbols." His voice carried genuine surprise, the specific quality of someone who has spent their career believing they understood the boundaries of a field and has just discovered the boundary was further away than they thought. "I did not know the Sealing Department had produced something of this level."
"They did not," Tatsuma said. He pressed his right index finger against his palm, drew blood, and activated the first of the four seal symbols with a precise touch. "This was left by Mito-sama. She prepared it for exactly this kind of situation."
He looked at the three others.
"Four jonin-level shinobi with advanced chakra control. All four positions must be held simultaneously. Even the Nine-Tails cannot break through a completed barrier."
...........
A crash.
Shisui landed at the edge of a massive crater, the impact traveling through his feet and up through his spine in a way that made the world briefly white. He closed his eyes for a moment against the sharp pain. A drop of blood rolled down his cheek and found the snow-white fox mask, spreading into a small dark stain that slowly turned the white toward red.
He opened his eyes and looked at what was in front of him.
So this is the power of the Nine-Tails.
He had read about it. He had heard the stories. He had the inherited memories of a man who had lived through the era when these forces moved openly through the world. None of it had prepared him for the specific texture of standing in a forest that had been partially unmade by a single exchange of techniques.
Danzo had paired him with Kyō and sent him here. A newly awakened Mangekyō. A first real engagement. The sight before him was both exactly what he had wanted to see and exactly as terrible as it should have been.
War, he thought. It is much worse than the stories say.
Around the engagement, translucent curtains of light were rising from the four cardinal directions, north, south, east, west, drawing toward the center with the smooth inevitability of something that had been mathematically designed to converge. Ancient symbols and patterns scattered across their surfaces, language that predated any currently spoken tongue, assembling in the air into the shape of an enormous sealing barrier.
Seal of Four Symbols.
The smoke at the center thinned.
Kushina lay on the ground within it, the Fox Cloak still wrapped around her, her mind fighting against the pull of something vast and hungry that had been sealed inside her since childhood. She was losing the argument.
...........
"Kushina-senpai." Shisui's voice was quiet and genuinely concerned, the tone of a boy who had grown up in a village where this woman was a known presence and who had not yet developed the ability to treat people as tactical variables regardless of what Danzo's training was attempting to install in him. "Please come back to the village with us. Being delivered in this form would damage Namikaze-san's reputation."
Kushina looked at him.
Whatever she had been expecting from the fox-masked Root shinobi who had just survived an exchange with her at near-Biju output, it was not genuine worry delivered in a young voice.
"Using our Whirlpool Country seals against me," she said, and something that was almost laughter moved through the fury in her expression, "and you still say that." She paused. "That sullen old man is still holding a grudge because I once poured the water from under his feet into his tea when I was visiting Grandmother Mito."
The four shinobi maintaining the four positions of the Seal of Four Symbols twitched simultaneously.
A gap opened in the barrier.
For Uzumaki Kushina, one of three people in the world who could claim genuine mastery of sealing arts, a gap in a barrier was not a small thing. It was a door.
The forces of Yin and Yang assembled in her palm in proportions that should not have been combinable, collapsing into a small dense black sphere that she swallowed.
"If there were any other way," she said, "I would never resort to this form."
She looked at the four of them.
"You forced me."
...........
The Tailed Beast Ball detonated through the gap in the incomplete barrier with a sound that the forest would carry in its physical structure for years afterward.
Hyuga Hizashi experienced it as a sequence of impacts too rapid to count individually, a storm of force that hit every surface of his body at once. Red light filled his vision. The mortal threat registered in his body before his mind had processed the source.
Emerald light answered it.
Shisui moved.
Not quickly in the way that shinobi moved when they were trying to be fast. Quickly in the way that certain things move when the distinction between intention and arrival has been eliminated. He was in front of the jinchūriki before the Tailed Beast Ball had finished expanding, his right hand extended toward claws that could tear through structural steel, placing himself between Kushina and Hizashi with the particular recklessness of someone who is ten years old and has just awakened a technique he does not yet fully understand but is not afraid to use.
The second explosion threw them both back into the forest in opposite directions.
...........
Shisui found a tree. The tree held.
He coughed once and activated both eyes.
The emerald light that rose from him was not the same quality as ordinary chakra. It was the light of something that had agreed to take physical form temporarily, vast and translucent and ascending through the forest canopy like a figure that had stepped down from somewhere higher to resolve a matter that required a physical presence.
Susanoo.
Rising in the middle of the ruined forest like a colossal skeleton of light, it looked down at the clearing with the particular patience of something that did not experience urgency.
Funny, Shisui thought, from somewhere inside the enormous structure of chakra he was generating. A jinchūriki as the first real opponent after awakening. Danzo-sama has unusual taste in practical examinations.
He reached out with the giant hand toward Kushina, not to strike, but to contain, and the forest shook again with the weight of what he was attempting.
...........
At the front headquarters in the Land of Hot Springs, the command tent was quiet with the particular quiet of a space that has recently contained a very loud sound.
Danzo had just arrived.
He was looking at Jiraiya.
Jiraiya was pale and smiling in the specific way he smiled when he had information he needed to deliver and was aware that delivering it was going to produce a response he would prefer to avoid.
"What," Danzo said, "did you just tell me?"
Jiraiya's eyes moved around the tent with the reflexive search for an exit that had been instilled in him by decades of encountering this particular expression on this particular face.
He had been afraid of this man since they were children.
Some things did not change regardless of how strong you became.