"Yejuan, I have to go."
Minato Namikaze looked at the middle-aged man with the stubble-shadow around his mouth. Mimura Yomaki was the commander holding the front line, a veteran jonin who had survived more battlefields than most men could count.
"Did something happen to the operation against Kannabi Bridge?" Mimura Yomaki asked, still breathing hard.
At his rank, he naturally knew this mission had been split in two. The main force was pinned down at the front, struggling against Iwagakure's advance, while a small team had been sent behind enemy lines to destroy the bridge and cut the enemy's supply route.
"Yes," Minato answered softly, his expression grave.
He had already slaughtered most of the Iwa ninja on the front line and stabilized the crisis there. But if Kannabi Bridge remained standing, reinforcements could still pour in from elsewhere. The bridge had to fall. Otherwise, everything they had won here would mean nothing.
"I'll be back soon."
The moment the words left his mouth, Minato's figure flickered and vanished from sight.
"The Flying Thunder God Technique... the lost jutsu of the Second Hokage?"
Watching him disappear, Mimura Yomaki could only shake his head. It was precisely that technique that had allowed Namikaze Minato to carve out a terrifying reputation in this war.
When Minato opened his eyes again, what greeted him was a collapsing cave.
Broken rock surrounded him on all sides. Dust rained down from above, and pieces of rubble nearly slammed into his body as they fell.
"?"
Minato's brows knit together.
No... where had he landed? Was this still the Grass Country?
In the next instant, he hurled one of his special kunai outward. The blade shot through a gap and stabbed into the ground outside.
Then, with another flicker, Minato teleported again, appearing at the cave entrance with the marked kunai already in hand.
"Ahead..."
He caught the traces of chakra in the distance. One belonged to Kiyohara. Another belonged to Rin.
The situation became clear to him almost immediately.
"It looks like the special kunai I gave Kakashi was left inside the cave. They must have escaped first, but once they were surrounded by the enemy, they had no chance to retrieve it."
With only a few scattered clues, Minato had already pieced together a likely sequence of events. His eyes sharpened, and he rushed ahead without another wasted second.
***
"Well, well. I didn't expect the lot of you to actually kill Huoguang and the others."
Suma Shi stared at Kiyohara's group, his tone half mocking and half genuinely impressed.
"To make it this deep behind enemy lines was already impressive enough. To still have the nerve to fight after that... you Konoha brats really are hard to kill."
Then, as though recalling something, his gaze settled on Kiyohara.
"According to the report from the scouts, you're the one who's been jamming our senses and covering for those rats sneaking through our rear, aren't you, brat?"
Suma Shi's eyes locked on him like hooks.
It was this boy's cooperation that had allowed the other Konoha team to slip so deep into the core of Iwagakure's defensive line. If Kannabi Bridge suffered any real damage, he would be the one held responsible by the village.
That bridge absolutely could not be lost.
So the moment he understood what was happening here, Suma Shi had personally gathered a squad and rushed over.
Kakashi forced himself to his feet.
He squeezed out the last scraps of chakra from the trillions of cells in his body, condensed it all into Lightning Release, and let azure arcs crackle in his palm. The chirping shriek of electricity filled the forest with a thin, murderous sound.
But only three seconds later, the jutsu began to sputter.
Kakashi's face turned deathly pale. The current in his hand wavered, then guttered out completely.
"So even this... won't work anymore?"
Bitterness flashed across his face.
His chakra reserves had always been too small. Or maybe Chidori was simply too expensive a technique for him to sustain right now.
Ever since Obito's Sharingan had been transplanted into his left eye, Kakashi felt as if he had become a punctured skin of water, leaking chakra every second of the day.
The problem was simple. The Sharingan belonged to the Uchiha. Kakashi was an outsider. He couldn't switch it off.
For a true Uchiha, the dōjutsu only consumed chakra when activated in battle. For Kakashi, it was active all the time.
A burden that never slept.
"Kakashi..."
Rin saw it too.
She couldn't tell whether Obito's eye was a gift or a curse. It was his final keepsake, yes. It was also the last thing he had entrusted to Kakashi. But that only made the sight of it all the more painful.
"Let me do it!"
Seeing Kakashi reduced to little more than three seconds of thunder and exhaustion, Genma Shiranui gave a low shout.
The senbon in his mouth flew out in a burst. At the same time, his hands flashed through seals, multiplying the needles into a dense, whistling curtain that blanketed Suma Shi's position.
But Suma Shi was a special jonin who had honed Earth Release to a vicious degree, and his movement was even faster than his techniques.
"Earth Release: Rock Pillar Staff!"
He slammed one hand into the ground.
A short, brutal rod of hardened stone shot upward and smashed through Genma's barrage, scattering the senbon formation apart. In the same breath, Suma Shi lunged forward like a striking beast. The hand he drove down next was already armored in rock.
Bang!
Genma's hastily raised defense shattered in an instant. He was sent flying backward and crashed hard onto the ground, unable to rise.
"Genma!"
Kurenai cried out, both hands already moving into seals.
"Kurenai, wait. Don't rush him."
Kiyohara cut her off sharply, his voice colder than usual.
"His Earth Release is too refined. Charging in carelessly would be suicide."
He understood this much very clearly.
Suma Shi being a special jonin did not mean he was weak. It only meant he was not perfectly balanced in every area.
To be acknowledged as a full jonin, a ninja needed to be competent across the board. A special jonin, by contrast, was someone whose ability in one domain had reached jonin level while the rest lagged behind.
In other words, they were specialists.
And specialists could be terrifying.
If Obito ever took the jonin exam, Kiyohara suspected he would end up with the same rank. Even if Obito possessed jonin-class battle strength, his head was still too empty. His so-called wisdom stat might not even beat some fresh academy graduates.
Suma Shi was the opposite kind of specialist.
He might not have been a complete jonin, but in the field he specialized in, he was lethal.
"But..."
Kurenai looked at the Iwa ninja closing in, then at the dozen or so enemies surrounding them, and her unease only deepened.
"Don't panic," Kiyohara said. "I'll handle this."
Minato Namikaze should already be on his way.
All he had to do was stall for time.
With that thought, Kiyohara popped a soldier pill into his mouth. The medicine dissolved quickly, spreading heat through his limbs and drawing a little more strength out of an already overused body.
Then, inwardly, he called out:
Future me, it's your turn.
Go show them what it means to get beaten by tomorrow.
The spirit of the rogue Kiyohara smiled faintly.
"It's been a long time since I properly stretched my muscles."
Before this, possessing Kiyohara's body had only been necessary against small fry. There had been no need to reveal too much. But now, with so many enemies gathered in one place, he suddenly found himself interested.
Maybe it was time to remind them that even jonin were not all created equal.
In the next instant, Kiyohara changed.
The youthful sharpness in his eyes vanished, replaced by something colder, older, and bloodier. A calm born from surviving too many wars. He rolled his neck once, producing a soft crack, then lifted his gaze toward Suma Shi and the ring of Iwa ninja around them.
A faint smile touched his lips.
Suma Shi's pupils narrowed.
The boy in front of him was still the same body, the same face, the same Konoha forehead protector. Yet somehow, the pressure he gave off had changed completely.
It was as if a blunt training blade had, in the span of a breath, become a weapon soaked in old blood.
That was absurd.
He was just a genin.
But the instincts that had kept Suma Shi alive this long did not care about logic. Those instincts were screaming at him.
Danger.
Kiyohara flexed his fingers once, as if reacquainting himself with the weight of his own hands.
"Special jonin, huh?" he said lightly. "That's enough."
There was no arrogance in his tone. That was what made it worse.
He sounded like a man measuring livestock.
Suma Shi's expression darkened.
"Don't get carried away, brat."
He kicked off the ground and rushed forward first, choosing not to give the strange feeling in his chest any more time to grow. Rock-hardened chakra coated one arm as he attacked straight on, the other already preparing a follow-up Earth Release technique.
He had decided to crush Kiyohara personally before the others could interfere.
But the moment he moved, Kiyohara moved too.
No—he moved earlier.
Not with the explosive recklessness of Kakashi's Chidori, not with Obito's emotional lunges, but with the frightening efficiency of someone who had already seen this exchange play out in his head.
His feet slid half a step to the side. His body turned just enough for Suma Shi's first strike to graze past him. His kunai came up at the same time, not to clash head-on, but to scrape along the opponent's wrist at an angle that disrupted the flow of chakra feeding the rocky armor.
Crack.
The stone coating split.
Suma Shi's eyes widened.
Kiyohara did not press forward immediately. Instead, he retreated by one measured step, forcing Suma Shi to adjust and follow. It looked cautious. It was bait.
The instant Suma Shi chased, Kiyohara's left hand snapped up.
Three shuriken flashed out, each carrying a threadlike current of Wind Release. They did not aim for the heart. They aimed for the blind spots created by movement.
Suma Shi knocked one aside and twisted past the second.
The third clipped his shoulder, cutting deeper than a normal shuriken had any right to cut.
Wind chakra.
His jaw tightened.
This brat really was troublesome.
Behind them, Kurenai and Rin both froze for a heartbeat.
They had all seen Kiyohara fight before, but this was different. The movements were too clean, the decision-making too ruthless, the timing too exact. It felt less like a talented genin fighting above his weight and more like an old battlefield killer wearing young skin.
Even Kakashi, pale as he was, narrowed his eyes.
He noticed it too.
Suma Shi backed off and slapped both hands to the ground.
"Earth Release!"
The earth split and twisted, jagged stone spears erupting upward in a wide fan meant to pin Kiyohara down and control the terrain around him.
Any normal genin would have been forced into panic.
Kiyohara only exhaled.
"Too crude."
His hands flashed through seals.
"Lightning Release: Earth Walk."
Azure electricity burst outward over the ground, racing through the moist soil faster than the eye could track. The stone spears shuddered and cracked. The Iwa ninja nearest the front cursed and stumbled back as the current bit into their legs.
The technique didn't seriously wound them.
It didn't need to.
It broke formation.
And the moment the formation broke, Kiyohara entered.
He blurred forward.
Not as fast as Minato. Not as explosive as a true Body Flicker master. But within the range of close combat, it was enough. More than enough.
He passed the first genin like a gust of wind, striking the boy across the throat with the edge of his hand hard enough to fold him. He ducked the second man's desperate slash and drove a kunai into the tendon above the knee instead of wasting time on a killing blow.
Someone screamed.
Someone else tried to form seals.
A senbon whistled past from the side and buried itself in that man's forearm.
Genma, still grimacing from the hit he had taken, had forced himself up enough to rejoin the fight.
At the same moment, Kurenai's genjutsu bloomed.
One of the Iwa ninja stiffened in terror, his pupils shaking as some nightmare only he could see swallowed him whole.
The battlefield lurched.
For the first time since they were surrounded, Konoha's side had seized the rhythm back.
Suma Shi saw it, and his expression turned ugly.
He had come here expecting to crush a battered team and wrap up the situation. Instead, the fight was becoming messy—and the source of that mess was still Kiyohara.
That boy had to die first.
He lunged again.
This time he abandoned finesse. Stone armored both arms as he drove forward with the brute confidence of a man who had broken too many opponents by force to fear doing it again.
Kiyohara met him head-on.
Metal shrieked against stone.
For a single instant, the two of them locked in place.
Then Kiyohara smiled.
Suma Shi suddenly understood.
This wasn't a clash.
It was a delay.
Far away—but drawing closer with every heartbeat—another chakra signature flashed into range.
Too fast.
Too bright.
Too familiar.
The Yellow Flash.
Suma Shi's face changed.
Kiyohara saw the realization hit and laughed softly under his breath.
"Too late," he said.
And in the next moment, the air behind the Iwa formation rippled.
Minato Namikaze had arrived.