Suna – The Kazekage's Tower – The Eye of the Storm
The dust of the main battle was settling, but the air in Suna remained thick with tension, pain, and acrid smoke. The northern district was a scar on the desert, littered with the splintered remains of puppets, craters from clay explosions, and dark stains where poison and blood had soaked into the sand. Medical teams moved through the ruins, their green glow a stark contrast to the devastation. The Emotion-Sensing Barrier, damaged by the seismic shocks of the battle, flickered erratically, its coverage full of blind spots.
Inside the tower's strategy room, Gaara sat on a stone bench, not on his throne. A medic-nin was carefully extracting shards of magnetized iron sand from his shoulder with tweezers. He didn't flinch. His teal eyes were fixed on a holographic damage report, but his focus was inward.
Shukaku's voice, a constant, irritable presence: Tired, brat? That little show with my arm took more out of you than you let on.
Gaara: (Internally) It was necessary. The village stands.
Shukaku: Barely. And now the barrier's coughing like a sick camel. Perfect time for scavengers to sneak in.
Gaara's eyes narrowed. He hadn't considered that. The Akatsuki's attack had been a two-pronged probe: one obvious and devastating, the other…
A cold, alien feeling slithered down his spine—a sensation of being watched by something ancient and predatory. It wasn't the barrier. It was the beast within.
Shukaku's voice dropped to a vicious growl: Uchiha filth. I smell that cursed chakra. And… the shark. They're here. In the village.
Gaara's head snapped up, dismissing the medic-nin with a sharp gesture. The sand in his gourd, which had been still, began to stir agitatedly.
Temari, leaning against the wall bandaging a cut on her arm, noticed. "Gaara?"
Kankuro, cleaning poison residue from Kuroari's mechanisms, looked over. "What is it?"
Gaara, standing, his voice low and urgent: "They're not done. Two more. Inside the perimeter. Shukaku senses them."
Baki, who had just entered with a casualty report, froze. "Who? Deidara and Sasori are in retreat."
Gaara: "Itachi Uchiha. And Kisame Hoshigaki. They used the main attack as cover. They're here for me."
A wave of cold dread washed through the room. Itachi Uchiha, the prodigy who had slaughtered his own clan. Kisame Hoshigaki, the Monster of the Hidden Mist. They were on a different level entirely from the attackers they had just repelled.
Temari: "The barrier… the eastern sector is still down for repairs. They must have slipped through there."
Gaara: "Sound the internal alert. Code Shadow. All non-essential personnel to the deep bunkers. Evacuate the tower. Now."
As Baki moved to comply, Gaara closed his eyes, extending his senses through the sand that permeated the village. In the bustling medical tents, in the rubble… there. Two pockets of profound stillness amidst the chaos. One, a cold, precise fire. The other, a vast, deep ocean of chakra. They were moving not like infiltrators, but like surgeons, cutting straight through the village's arteries towards the heart—the tower.
Shukaku: They're coming right for us. No games this time. The bird and the doll were the noise. These two are the knife.
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Suna – Eastern Rooftops – The Silent Advance
Two figures moved with preternatural silence across the sun-baked clay rooftops. Itachi Uchiha, his black cloak with red clouds flaring slightly in the hot wind, his eyes a dark, unfathomable obsidian for now. Beside him, Kisame Hoshigaki carried Samehada on his back, the bandaged sword writhing slightly with eager hunger.
Kisame, his voice a low rumble: "Quite the mess they made. The Jinchuriki boy must be tired. Makes our job easier."
Itachi, without looking at him: "Do not underestimate him. The intelligence suggests a level of cooperation with the One-Tail we have not seen before. He is not a frantic beast, but a commander."
Kisame: "Hmph. A commander with a drained army. The sensor barrier is patchy. They won't see us until we're at his door."
They dropped into a shadowed alley as a squad of Suna shinobi ran past, heading north to reinforce the perimeter. The village was distracted, looking outward for the next hammer blow, not inward for the dagger.
Itachi: "Our objective is extraction, not slaughter. Avoid prolonged engagements. Kisame, you handle interference. I will secure the target."
Kisame: "Understood. But if they get in the way…" He patted Samehada. "…the sword gets hungry."
They resumed their pace, a blur of movement that left no trace, no sound. Itachi's Sharingan activated, not the Mangekyō, but the three tomoe, analyzing the chakra flows of the village, pinpointing the dense, turbulent signature at the tower—a whirlpool of sand and beast chakra.
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The Kazekage's Tower – The Final Stand Preparations
The tower had been evacuated. Only Gaara, Temari, Kankuro, and Baki remained in the main chamber. The Konoha/Kumo team—Kakashi, Guy, Samui, Omoi, Karui—had been redeployed to sweep the village and secure the barrier nodes. They were minutes away.
Gaara: "Temari, Kankuro. You will not engage the Uchiha. Your target is Kisame. His water techniques are a hard counter to your wind and puppets. You must delay him, contain him. Use the environment. Suna is dry, but the aqueducts and the reservoir from the northern breach are full."
Temari, tightening the grip on her fan: "Understood."
Kankuro, sealing his puppets: "We'll drown the shark if we have to."
Baki: "I will coordinate with the external teams and try to get Kakashi and Guy back here. Hold until then."
A tremor ran through the tower. Not an explosion. It was the subtle vibration of the very sand in the foundation being… parted. A wave of dense, heavy chakra was approaching from below, through the ground.
Gaara's sand rose around him in a defensive swirl. "They're here. Positions."
The main doors to the chamber didn't burst open. They simply dissolved. Not into splinters, but into fine, wet sawdust. Kisame stood in the doorway, Samehada now unwrapped and resting on his shoulder, its scales rippling.
Kisame: "Knock, knock. Is the One-Tail home?"
Before anyone could react, a second presence made itself known. From the shadows in the far corner of the room, away from the windows, Itachi Uchiha materialized as if stepping through a curtain. His Mangekyō Sharingan was already active—a complex, terrifying pattern of black on red.
Itachi: "Kazekage Gaara. You will come with us."
The temperature in the room seemed to drop twenty degrees.
Gaara: "No."
The sand erupted.
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First Movement: Sand and Black Fire
Gaara didn't wait. He knew the lore. He knew what those eyes could do. A tidal wave of sand, infused with Shukaku's grating chakra, shot towards Itachi from all sides—floor, ceiling, walls—in a crushing, omnidirectional assault meant to engulf him instantly.
Itachi didn't move. His Mangekyō spun.
"Amaterasu."
A pinpoint of black flame appeared in the air before him. Then it spread, not like normal fire, but like spilled ink in water, consuming the very space in front of it. The leading edge of Gaara's sand tsunami met the black flames. The sand didn't burn; it was unmade, atomized into nothingness with a hissing scream of released energy. The black fire clung, spreading relentlessly along the sand constructs, eating its way back towards Gaara.
Shukaku, roaring internally: THE UCHIHA CURSE-FIRE! DON'T LET IT TOUCH YOU!
Gaara's eyes widened. He severed the chakra connection to the contaminated sand, letting it fall as dead dust. But the Amaterasu persisted, now burning on the floor, an insatiable black maw. He couldn't extinguish it. He could only contain it.
With a sweeping motion, he gathered clean sand from a reserve gourd he kept in the chamber, shaping it not into a weapon, but into a prison. "Sand Style: Quartz Prism Seal." The sand crystallized under immense pressure, forming a thick, transparent wall of super-heated silica around the patch of Amaterasu, cutting it off from oxygen and fuel. The black flames beat against the inside of the prism, but could not escape. Gaara had bought seconds, at great chakra cost.
Itachi observed, impassive. "Impressive control. But you cannot prism the entire world."
He raised a finger. Another spot of black flame bloomed, this time on the sand shield Gaara had around his own body.
Gaara hissed, shedding the shield instantly before the flames could touch his skin. He was on the defensive, and Itachi had barely moved.
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Second Movement: Watery Grave
While Gaara faced the Uchiha, the others moved. Temari and Kankuro launched their attack on Kisame.
Temari: "Wind Release: Great Scythe Weasel!" A focused, slicing gust of wind, capable of cutting through steel, shot towards Kisame's neck.
Kisame just smiled. He didn't bother to block. He took the hit. The wind blade connected—and splashed harmlessly against skin that suddenly seemed to be made of water, dispersing into a thousand ripples.
Kisame: "Wind against water? You'll need a bigger fan, little lady."
He slammed Samehada into the stone floor. "Water Release: Exploding Water Colliding Wave!"
A titanic geyser of water erupted from the point of impact, not from his mouth, but from the floor itself, as if he'd struck an underground sea. The chamber, the entire tower level, was instantly flooded with a churning, chakra-rich tidal wave. The force smashed Temari and Kankuro against the far wall, the water filling the room up to the ceiling in moments.
They were shinobi. They held their breath, chakra adhering them to the walls. But their techniques were neutered. Temari's fan was useless in the soup. Kankuro's puppets, their mechanisms clogging with water, flailed helplessly.
Kisame swam through the water he created, effortless as a shark. "This is my domain. Water Prison Shark Dance Technique."
The water began to rotate, forming a massive, spinning vortex. Temari and Kankuro were ripped from the walls and pulled into the dizzying current. Kisame moved among them, Samehada slashing. Not to kill, but to graze, to taste.
Samehada's scales brushed Kankuro's leg. Instantly, a massive chunk of his chakra was sheared away, absorbed into the sword. Kankuro gasped, bubbles erupting from his mouth, his vision graying.
Temari tried to form hand seals for a lightning attack—one of the few things she'd learned from the Kumo shinobi—but the water conductivity was a double-edged sword. Kisame just absorbed the weak current with a laugh.
Baki, from the doorway, having avoided the initial wave, acted. "Wind Release: Vacuum Blade!" He fired a compressed air projectile into the water vortex. It traveled, slowed, but created a temporary tunnel of air.
Temari saw her chance. She kicked off the wall, using the air tunnel, and shot towards the room's large, now-submerged window. With the last of her breath and chakra, she reinforced her fist with wind and punched. The thick glass shattered outward. The water, under immense pressure, rushed to escape, creating a powerful suction that pulled Kisame, Temari, and Kankuro out of the tower and into the open air four stories above the plaza below.
The water dome exploded outward, crashing down into the plaza like a localized tsunami, washing away carts and stands. Temari and Kankuro landed hard on a rooftop, coughing up water. Kisame landed in the center of the newly formed lake in the plaza, standing on the surface, Samehada hungry for more.
Kisame: "Tsk. Made a mess. Well, more room to swim."
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Third Movement: The Illusion of Self
Back in the tower chamber, now half-flooded and littered with debris, Gaara was fighting a war of attrition he couldn't win. He'd contained three more Amaterasu blooms with sand prisms, which now glowed with contained black fire around the room like cursed lanterns. His chakra was depleting rapidly. He couldn't attack; every grain of sand he sent towards Itachi risked becoming a vector for the inextinguishable flames.
Itachi, still standing in the same spot, sighed almost imperceptibly. "You are resilient. But you fight the symptom, not the source. Your true weakness is not your sand. It is the beast you rely on."
His Mangekyō whirled, patterns shifting.
Gaara knew what was coming. He tried to look away, to focus on the sand at his feet. But Itachi's voice seemed to bypass his ears, speaking directly into his mind.
Itachi: "Tsukuyomi."
The world didn't dissolve into a dark void. It transformed. Gaara stood not in Suna, but in a vast, endless desert under a blood-red moon. Shackled to a massive, ornate wooden post was Shukaku, the One-Tail, but it was not the raging beast. It was subdued, its single eye wide with a fear Gaara had never sensed in it. Iron spikes, glowing with Uchiha hatred, pinned its limbs and tail to the post.
Shukaku, whimpering: Get it out… get the eyes out of my mind, brat!
Itachi appeared before Gaara, a giant in this mental landscape. "The bond between Jinchuriki and Tailed Beast is a bridge of consciousness. A vulnerability. In here, time, space, reality… are mine to sculpt. For the next seventy-two hours, you will watch as I dismantle this beast's mind, thread by thread. You will feel every second of its agony as your own."
In reality, less than a picosecond had passed. Gaara stood frozen, his eyes blank, a single tear of blood tracing down his cheek from the strain of the mental invasion.
The Tsukuyomi wasn't targeting Gaara's personal traumas. Itachi was too efficient for that. He targeted the link, the nascent partnership. He showed Shukaku's mind being flayed, its rage turned to incoherent terror, its power becoming a feedback loop of pain that flooded back into Gaara's own psyche.
In the real world, Gaara's sand, bereft of conscious direction, slumped to the floor. The prisms containing the Amaterasu flickered.
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Fourth Movement: The Drain
Itachi took a step forward, then paused. A flicker of genuine strain crossed his face for a nanosecond. Using Tsukuyomi at this level, targeting two consciousnesses simultaneously, was a colossal drain, even for him. A trickle of blood escaped from under his left eye.
He didn't have long. He moved swiftly to Gaara's paralyzed form.
Outside, the battle raged. Temari and Kankuro, now aided by returning Suna shinobi, were harrying Kisame with hit-and-run attacks, avoiding the ever-expanding water dome he was trying to recreate. But they were losing, badly.
Kakashi and Guy arrived on a neighboring rooftop, having sensed the massive water release.
Kakashi: "Itachi and Kisame! Guy, help them with Kisame! I have to get to Gaara!"
Guy: "Understood! Eight Inner Gates: Gate of Pain, OPEN!" He turned into a green meteor and shot towards Kisame.
Kakashi body-flickered towards the tower window. He saw Itachi inside, reaching for Gaara. He formed the hand seals for Chidori, lightning screeching in his palm. He had to break the Tsukuyomi, interrupt the extraction.
He was too late.
As Kakashi burst through the window, Itachi's hand touched Gaara's forehead. Not to harm. To seal. A complex pattern of black kanji—a suppression seal—spread from his fingertips across Gaara's skin, silencing his chakra coils and his connection to Shukaku.
At that moment, Kisame, dealing with Guy's furious assault, decided to end his fight. He disengaged, leaping back towards the tower. He saw Kakashi entering.
Kisame: "Itachi! We have company!"
Itachi, slinging Gaara's limp form over his shoulder, turned. His eyes met Kakashi's.
A lifetime of grief, guilt, and unresolved fury passed between them in that glance.
Kakashi: "ITACHI!"
Itachi: "Stand aside, Kakashi. This does not concern you."
Kakashi: "Like hell it doesn't! Lightning Cutter!"
Kakashi charged, the Chidori a lance of pure fury. Itachi didn't dodge. He raised his free hand.
"Yata Mirror." A spectral, octagonal shield materialized from the ethereal form of his Susanoo's ribcage, just for an instant. The Chidori struck it and dissipated without a sound, its energy nullified.
The recoil from manifesting even a fragment of the Susanoo made Itachi cough, more blood staining his lips. The strain was immense.
Kisame landed beside him, Samehada raised. "Time to go!"
Itachi nodded. With his last reserves, he performed a hand seal. A flock of crows, illusions made real by his genius, erupted from his cloak, swarming the room, obscuring everything.
When Kakashi swatted them away, Itachi, Kisame, and Gaara were gone. Only a single, black feather drifted to the wet floor, and the fading, hungry crackle of the contained Amaterasu prisms.
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Fifth Movement: The Hollow Victory
Silence, deeper and more terrible than any explosion, fell over the tower chamber. Kakashi stood amidst the water, the debris, and the glowing sand prisons of black fire, his sharingan eye aching, his fist clenched so tight his nails drew blood.
On the plaza below, Guy subdued the last of Kisame's water clones. Temari and Kankuro, bruised and chakra-drained, stared up at the broken window of the tower, hope dying in their eyes.
Baki stumbled into the chamber, his face ashen. "The Kazekage…"
Kakashi, his voice hollow: "They took him. Itachi used Tsukuyomi and a suppression seal. Kisame covered the retreat."
He walked to the window, looking at the devastation below—the flooded plaza, the injured shinobi, the terrified civilians peering from shelter doors. "They never intended to fight a war here. They came for one thing only. And they got it."
Temari climbed through the window, her clothes soaked, her body trembling not from cold but from shock. She saw the blood tear on the floor where Gaara had stood. A low, wounded sound escaped her.
Kankuro joined her, his puppet's arm broken, hanging limply. "We… we failed him. We were supposed to protect him."
Baki, the seasoned commander, fought to keep his voice steady. "We must send the alert. To the Raikage. To the Hokage. To the Coalition."
Kakashi was already at the Thunderhead terminal in the corner, which had survived the flooding. He input the highest priority crisis code. The screen flickered to life, connecting to the secure network.
Kakashi, speaking into the comm with a grim finality: "This is Hatake Kakashi, Konoha, at Sunagakure. Priority Alpha Distress. Transmission follows: At 13:47 hours, following repulsion of initial Akatsuki assault forces, a secondary extraction team comprised of Uchiha Itachi and Hoshigaki Kisame infiltrated the village. They engaged and subdued Kazekage Gaara. The Kazekage has been captured and extracted from the village. Repeat: The Kazekage has been taken. Current status of Suna: Defenses compromised, significant casualties, leadership chain activating. Requesting immediate strategic conference and pursuit parameters. End transmission."
He sent it. The message, encrypted and boosted by the satellite network Indra had built, would reach the other Kage within seconds.
In the Land of Lightning, in the Heart Mountain, the terminal chimed with a sound reserved for existential threats. Raikage A, Indra, and Darui looked up from a map detailing the Three-Tails' location. They saw the message.
In Konoha, Tsunade was in a meeting with the Fire Daimyo's regent. Shizune burst in, a printout in her hand, her face white. Tsunade read it, and the cup of sake she was holding shattered in her grip.
In Iwa, Ōnoki received it and felt his age like a physical weight.
In Kiri, Mei Terumī read it and knew the nightmare had truly begun.
The first major blow of the war had landed. Not on a village's walls, but on its soul. The Kazekage, a sovereign Kage, a Jinchuriki, had been stolen from the heart of his own fortified village in broad daylight.
The silent alarm spread across the world. The Storm Coalition had just lost its first leader. And in a hidden cave far to the east, a Gedo Statue with one eye closed slowly, ponderously, opened its second.
End of Chapter – 83.