The village square had stopped being a square some time ago.
What remained was a shallow bowl of shattered stone, ringed by the skeletons of buildings that no longer knew what they'd been. The Hokage stood at its center, coat in tatters, and faced the two men who had made it that way — and if his hands were shaking inside his sleeves, well. There was nobody left close enough to see.
"Last chance," he said. "I've asked nicely twice."
The First Hand giggled. Lightning crawled up his arms and popped like knuckles. "You have! It's adorable. The great Hokage of the Hidden Leaf, negotiating. Tell me — does it ever work? In three wars, has anyone ever once said 'oh, alright then' and gone home?"
"Once." The Hokage rolled his neck. "You're about to be the second."
"Wrong answer," said the Fifth Hand.
He moved first — always him, always the ground — and the floor of the square exploded upward as his blade came down. Not at the Hokage. At the space the Hokage was about to occupy, because the Fifth Hand had fought jinchūriki before and had learned what every survivor of that education learned:
You don't swing at them. You swing at where they're going to be in half a second, and you pray.
The Hokage was already gone.
Golden chakra bled up through his coat seams, a thin cloak, a whisper of the fox — and he reappeared on the Fifth Hand's blind side with a sphere of spiraling blue light screaming in his palm.
"Rasengan!"
The Fifth Hand turned into it. Actually turned into it — met the technique with his shoulder pauldron and let the armor eat the rotation, metal screaming, buckling, and his counter was a headbutt, plain and brutal and faster than a man in that much armor had any right to move.
CRACK.
The Hokage's head snapped back. He grinned through the blood. "Good. You hit like a landslide."
"You talk like a man stalling," the Fifth Hand observed calmly, and drove his knee up.
The golden cloak flared — one tail, two — and the knee hit chakra instead of ribs, and in the same instant the sky screamed.
Lightning doesn't announce itself. This did, because the First Hand had learned that anticipation was a seasoning, and the bolt came down not white but blue, bent at the last moment like a hook, and speared the Hokage straight through the back.
The square lit up like noon.
When the light died, the Hokage was on one knee in a smoking crater, golden cloak guttering, the smell of his own seared skin in his nose. The lightning had gone through the cloak, through his shoulder, out the other side — held off his vitals by a margin he didn't want to measure.
"First question," the First Hand called out, strolling across the crater's rim like it was a garden path. "What do you think we want? Go on. Everyone guesses wrong, I want to hear your version."
"Easy." The Hokage stood. His left arm hung wrong. He popped it back in with a grunt. "You're not raiders. Raiders take things. You erase villages and leave the wreckage looking like wreckage — no looting, no slaves, nothing carried off. You're not conquering. You're clearing."
For the first time, the Fifth Hand's expression changed. A flicker. Interest.
"Clearing for what?" the Hokage pressed, golden light rebuilding around him, two tails, three, the fox's chakra audible now, a low growl that lived under the stones. "Every village you've erased sat on a ley line. I've had three years and a very clever librarian, and I mapped it. You're draining something. Or feeding something. So last chance, gentlemen — what does erasing my village accomplish?"
Silence.
Then the First Hand tilted his head back and laughed, delighted, sparks dancing in his open mouth. "Oh, he did his homework! Look at him, Fifth, he did the reading!"
"It accomplishes this," the Fifth Hand said quietly, and his blade came up into a stance the Hokage had seen in exactly one place before — in a history scroll, illustrated, labeled LOST. "It accomplishes you. On this field. Tonight. Everything else is gardening."
"…Right," the Hokage muttered. "I was afraid it'd be something like that."
They came together, all three, and the square stopped existing in any meaningful sense.
What followed, the scouts on the rooftops would later fail to describe in any two matching ways. Lightning fell in nets and the Hokage tore through them in flashes of gold, leaving scorched afterimages that detonated when the bolts hit them — shadow clones, dozens, seeded through the field in the opening seconds, and the First Hand screamed with laughter as he detonated them one by one like festival fireworks.
"AGAIN! Do it again!"
The Fifth Hand didn't scream. The Fifth Hand was work — he walked through the clone-chaos without hurry, blade moving in short, ugly, perfect arcs, cutting constructs in half, and every third swing was aimed at empty air that the Hokage, mid-flicker, arrived inside of, and every single time the timing was closer.
He's reading the flicker, the Hokage realized, ducking a horizontal cut that parted three buildings behind him. Not the body. The technique. He's had years to study flying raijin users and he's built a counter-clock in his head—
The lightning hit him again. Lower. Through the thigh.
The Hokage went down in the crater for the second time, and this time the golden cloak * guttered* — four tails becoming two becoming a candle-flame, the fox's growl thinning into a whine, and the First Hand strolled down into the crater's bowl to inspect him like a man checking a fish on a line.
"Do you know," the lightning wielder said conversationally, crouching, "what the Fifth meant? About you being the objective?" He tapped his own temple. "The Dreaming saw it. Years ago. The Zero Tails needs a door, Hokage — and your village has spent seven years raising us the perfect hinge for it. We're not here to erase the Leaf." His grin widened, trembling, ecstatic. "We're here to pick something up."
The Hokage's blood went cold — and the cold was useful, because cold was a fuel the fox recognized, and the guttering flame of his cloak roared.
"Get. Out. Of my village."
Golden light detonated out of the crater, four tails, five, the crater's walls shearing flat, and the Hokage came up out of it with a Rasengan the size of a cart-wheel in each hand and murder in his eyes—
And the Fifth Hand, who had been waiting at the crater's edge for exactly this, put his blade through the Hokage's guard.
Deep. Under the ribs. The kind of deep you don't walk away from without help.
The world went very quiet.
"Enough," the Fifth Hand said, almost gently, and twisted—
KSSSHHHHH.
Black flame hit him in the face.
Not fire as the village knew fire — this was absence given burn, blacker than the night around it, and it didn't spread so much as insist, and the Fifth Hand abandoned his blade — left it standing in the Hokage's side like a grave-marker — and ripped backward, armor and all, tearing free of the cloak of black fire one burning piece at a time.
Standing on the shattered rim of the square, one hand still raised from the throw, was a man in a high-collared cloak that no wind touched.
One eye was dark. The other was crimson, spinning, three tomoe wide with something deeper behind them — and the sword across his back had never once been drawn.
"…Took you long enough," the Hokage wheezed, around the blade still in his ribs.
"Traffic," said the Shadow Hokage.
"There is no traffic. You were watching from a roof. I felt you smirking."
"Smirking is free," the Shadow Hokage said, and dropped into the crater in one soundless step, and caught his rival as the golden cloak finally collapsed into nothing. He looked at the blade under the Hokage's ribs, then at the two Hands, and his expression didn't change at all, which was somehow worse than any snarl.
"The Nine Tails' host," he said flatly, "is off the board. Which means the village's defense now has a vacancy."
"Oh, wonderful," the First Hand breathed, new lightning already climbing his shoulders, eyes shining. "The shadow. They said you'd died on that mission, you know. Seven years ago. We toasted."
"You heard wrong." The Shadow Hokage settled into a stance the wind refused to enter. "I retired."
"From what?!"
"From being reasonable."
The Fifth Hand, stripped to scorched under-armor, drew his second blade — shorter, thicker, the one he used for work — and for the first time all night, his calm voice carried something that might have been satisfaction.
"Two of you," he said. "Good. The ledger will balance."
The lightning came down in a storm. The black flame rose to meet it.
And the village square, which had stopped being a square an hour ago, briefly became a second sun.