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Time did something strange on the battlefield.
Not stopped. Compressed. The way time compresses when something happens that the mind needs longer to process than the body has available to give it.
Every eye on the field turned toward the same point.
In a fountain of scarlet blood, the enormous black giant that was the Third Raikage shook stone fragments from his shoulders, the Lightning Armor crackling and hissing as debris came apart against it. Several Konoha shinobi had attempted to close the distance during the displacement, reading the backward momentum as an opportunity. The hiss of lightning found them before their feet completed the approach. The screams were brief. What remained of them was not.
The Third Raikage looked across the distance at the figure who had thrown him back and shook his head slowly. Not in defeat. In the specific bewilderment of encountering someone who is both familiar and different in a way that cannot be immediately categorized.
"Danzo?"
"What," Danzo said, walking forward at the pace of someone who has already decided where this is going, "are you so surprised by my appearance?"
His right hand moved.
The twenty-centimeter blade came free of the belt with the ease of a motion that had been repeated until it no longer required conscious direction. A single wave released a gust of concentrated Wind Release that expanded outward from the blade's arc, invisible in itself but visible in its results. Seven Cloud ninja were divided at their midpoints before any of them had processed the threat. The path Danzo walked forward turned scarlet beneath his feet.
........
"Retreat." The Third Raikage's voice carried the specific quality of absolute authority choosing pragmatism without embarrassment. He waved his personal guard back without hesitation. "This old schemer is disgusting by nature, but his power approaches my own. We do not rush this."
........
Elsewhere on the battlefield, the situation was its own separate disaster.
Gamabunta moved through the Cloud formation with the efficiency of something large that had stopped caring about being subtle. Each sweep of the toad's blade, more than ten meters of cutting edge with the full weight of a summoned creature behind it, removed a section of the formation that could not be replaced quickly. In terms of sheer output, Jiraiya was achieving a rate of attrition that was difficult to match.
"Yo, big toad!" Killer B's voice carried across the battlefield with the particular enthusiasm of someone who had identified a worthy opponent and was pleased about it. "How about a clean sword duel with me?"
The words were barely finished when Ay's fist connected with the side of B's head with enough force to shake the ground beneath them.
"Idiot." Ay's voice was the voice of a man who has had this conversation before and expects to have it again. "Look at how many of ours he has already killed. This is a battlefield. Life and death. Not a venue for dueling."
"Hi, understood, brother!"
Jiraiya, standing on Gamabunta's head and tracking the two brothers as they repositioned simultaneously, felt the shift in approach before it completed. His white hair extended outward, lengthening into countless sharp needles that drove toward both opponents in a single unified release.
They moved through it.
A deafening thunderclap. Ay's crossed arms found Jiraiya's neck from one direction while B closed the angle from the other, the grip tightening in the fraction of a second between contact and response.
The white head left the shoulders.
Replacement.
Jiraiya reformed and put distance between himself and the brothers, reassessing. The exchange had been quick enough that he had not fully closed the gap before they acted, which told him something about how much they had grown since the last time anyone from Konoha had engaged them seriously.
........
"These troublemakers grew up when no one was looking," Danzo said, tracking both engagements simultaneously without taking his attention from the Raikage. Within a kilometer radius around the A and B engagement, the population of still-standing shinobi had dropped to a small fraction of what it had been.
"You would not understand pride in the younger generation," the Raikage said, and the contempt in it was genuine. "You have spent your life alone."
Among the Raikage's generation of Kage-level shinobi, his particular dislike for Danzo and Ōnoki occupied a consistent position. Danzo's reliance on manipulation and indirect methods. Ōnoki's fundamental willingness to be whoever the situation required. Both of them represented approaches to power that the Raikage found genuinely offensive in a way that went beyond professional opposition.
Their meetings had never ended without conflict.
"My love is all-encompassing," Danzo replied, his voice carrying the tone of someone making a sincere statement. "Every Konoha ninja is my child. You, in your simplicity, cannot understand this."
Behind Danzo, Nara Shikaku and the others present experienced the particular expression that crosses the face of people who have heard something they cannot quite categorize as either true or false.
The Raikage's patience, which had never been his defining quality, reached its limit.
His palm descended with a sound like a lightning strike finding a mountain, black electricity wrapping every surface of the enormous hand, the blow aimed at the space Danzo occupied with the directness of someone who has decided that discussion is finished.
"Wind Release: Vacuum Wave."
The seal sequence was rapid, the technique formed with the efficiency of complete familiarity. The Wind Release met the incoming taijutsu at the point of contact and the resulting shockwave moved outward through the battlefield in all directions with enough force to interrupt every engagement within range simultaneously.
"Disperse!"
Kage-level combat was never simply two individuals. It was the collision of everything each of them had assembled around themselves, the squads and the techniques and the prepared positions all feeding into a single moment of contact that affected everyone present.
........
"Thunder Illusion: Pillar of Light."
The battlefield turned white.
Not like a flash. Like a second sun had appeared at ground level and decided to stay. The Konoha shinobi in the area experienced the blindness as a physical weight, the light pressing against closed eyelids with enough force to make the darkness behind them feel unreliable.
Nara Shikaku had closed his eyes before the technique fully activated.
Not because he had anticipated it. Because in the instant before it triggered, he had read the positioning and understood what was being set up. The light technique created gaps in the enemy's defensive awareness. At the moment of activation, the caster's shadow reached maximum extension.
He snatched the kunai.
"If my memory serves, this is genjutsu. It opens their defense. But right now my shadow is at peak strength."
The refined defensive position assembled around him and his comrades with the practiced ease of people who had trained together long enough that formation movement had become instinctual.
Yamanaka Inoichi was not moving defensively. His eyes were half-closed, attention turned inward in the specific way that Mind techniques required, sweeping the battlefield's mental landscape with the thoroughness of someone who understood that information was the resource that decided outcomes. He found what he was looking for and distributed the picture to the four jonins and Danzo simultaneously, the enemy positions arriving in each mind as something between a memory and a perception.
These are the Cloud bastards. Our situation is not good.
When the light cleared, the distance between Danzo and the Raikage, Ay, and the third Cloud shinobi had collapsed entirely. Three techniques launched simultaneously, each aimed at a different target on Danzo's body. Head. Heart. Right hand.
"Guillotine Drop."
"Arcana."
"Overwhelming Horizontal Lightning Strike."
Three A-rank techniques from Kumogakure's premier combat lineage, delivered at Kage-level execution speed. Even the Third Hokage would have been forced backward by this combination. In the shinobi world as it currently stood, no one except the Raikage himself could have absorbed all three without consequence.
Nara Shikaku's hands blurred through seals at a speed that suggested the sequence had been rehearsed specifically for this situation. A black shadow burst from a crack in the ground and reached the nearest Cloud jonin before the technique completed, binding movement at the critical moment. Yamanaka Inoichi, operating continuously through his mental sweep, had already found the second target and subjugated him before Shikaku's shadow had fully extended.
Both of them understood their limits precisely. Against the Raikage directly, their control techniques would accomplish nothing. They left him for Danzo.
"Wind Release: Vacuum Orb."
Danzo drew a deep breath in the fraction of a second available to him, formed the single necessary seal, and released a massive projectile of compressed air directly into the descent of the Raikage's blow.
Cutting Wind met Swift Lightning at a single point.
Invisible circles of force scattered across the battlefield, tangible where they passed over surfaces, leaving marks in the earth and against the faces of everyone within range.
The Raikage's body lifted from the ground. Turned over. Descended with a sound that shook the terrain and carved a deep furrow through the earth, the displaced mass of it crushing several Cloud shinobi who had not found distance in time.
Danzo looked at the hemispherical depression that had formed in the ground around him. The Wind Release had not absorbed the force of the blow. It had redirected it, dissipating the monstrous pressure outward rather than allowing it to transfer inward. The alternative was burial.
He examined this fact with the calm of someone making a technical assessment.
........
The Raikage rose from the furrow.
He did not shake debris from himself this time. He stood and let the Lightning Armor re-establish itself across every surface of his body with the steady crackling of something returning to its natural state. His long hair began to rise, strand by strand, until it stood fully extended in every direction, the electrical charge in the air around him reaching a density that made the atmosphere in a radius around him feel different from ordinary air.
"Danzo." His voice carried something that was almost respect, delivered in the tone of someone for whom respect was not freely distributed. "As an adversary, you barely qualify for acknowledgment. But I will give you this warning: your Vacuum techniques will not harm me any further. Prepare yourself."
His chakra continued to climb.
Danzo looked at the Raikage standing in the furrow, hair fully extended, Lightning Armor at a density he had not shown yet in this engagement, and something in the quality of the air between them changed.
"Wind Release?" Danzo said.
He raised his right hand and unwound the bandage from his eye.
The Mangekyō opened.
"That was just a greeting."