The Northern Wastes – A Separate Theater
While Rias's strike team was assaulting the extraction cavern, the primary battlefield on Suna's northern frontier remained a smoldering, contested zone. The retreat of Deidara and Sasori had been a tactical withdrawal, not a rout. Per Pain's revised strategy, they were to maintain pressure, to pin down Suna and Konoha's elite forces, ensuring no swift reinforcement could chase the extraction team.
The problem was, the Coalition's elites had no intention of letting them leave cleanly.
Kakashi Hatake and Might Guy had pursued the fleeing Akatsuki members with Guy's characteristic relentless speed and Kakashi's tracking intuition. They found them not in full flight, but making a strategic stand in a broad, desolate basin of wind-scoured rock—a perfect arena for Deidara's art and Sasori's puppets.
Deidara, perched on a regenerated but smaller C2 dragon, scowled down at them. "Persistent, un! Can't you appreciate a tactical disengagement?"
Sasori, his core now housed securely within the Fourth Kazekage puppet, stood impassively on the ground, surrounded by the twenty remaining puppets from his Hundred collection, all showing scorch marks and repairs from the earlier battle. "They are hounds, snapping at heels. Break their teeth, and they will learn to keep their distance."
Kakashi, his Sharingan calmly analyzing both enemies: "Guy. The scorpion is yours. The bird is mine. Try not to get poisoned."
Guy, a brilliant, fiery aura beginning to flicker around him: "A magnificent challenge! The flames of youth burn brightest against the cold hearts of villains! The Eighth Gate of—"
Kakashi, without looking: "Guy."
Guy, deflating slightly: "...Right. Seventh should be sufficient. SEVENTH GATE OF SHOCK: OPEN!"
A cataclysmic surge of green chakra exploded from Guy. The ground beneath him cratered. Steam billowed from his pores, his skin flushing red, his hair standing on end. The raw, physical pressure of his presence sent a visible shockwave through the dry air.
Deidara's eyes widened. "Whoa! That's a new color palette, un!"
Sasori's puppet-face showed no expression, but his core assessed. Extreme taijutsu specialization. Speed and power beyond conventional metrics. A brute-force solution. Annoying.
The battle bifurcated.
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The Aerial Duel: Art vs. Void
Deidara took to the sky, his dragon gaining altitude. "Let's start with something big! C3!" He didn't bother with the psychological replica this time. He simply formed and dropped a massive, condensed orb of clay that swelled as it fell, aiming to blanket the entire basin in a city-leveling detonation.
Kakashi stood directly beneath it, his lone Sharingan whirling. He didn't run. He didn't form a mud wall. He focused.
"Kamui."
The Mangekyō pattern locked onto the very heart of the falling C3 construct—not the entire bomb, but the dense, complex chakra matrix at its core that controlled the chain reaction. A vortex of distorted space appeared around that matrix.
It was a feat of insane precision. The surrounding clay, the outer shell, continued to fall. But its beating heart was silently plucked from reality, swallowed by the Kamui dimension.
The remaining inert clay landed with a wet, heavy thud a hundred meters away, harmlessly splattering across the rocks.
Deidara stared, his jaw slack. "...What? WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY ART, UN?!"
Kakashi, panting slightly from the strain, looked up. "I canceled the show. Your finale needs work."
Deidara's face twisted in incandescent rage. "YOU CAN'T CANCEL ART! ART IS ETERNAL! C2: SWARM!" He unleashed a cloud of hundreds of small, agile clay bats, all streaking towards Kakashi from different vectors, a chaotic, explosive mosaic.
Kakashi's Sharingan tracked them all, calculating trajectories, densities. He weaved through the onslaught, a silver-and-blue blur, his tanto flashing to deflect bats that came too close, detonating them at a safe distance. He was a needle threading a sky of explosions.
Kakashi (internally): He fights with chaos and overwhelming area denial. Kamui is a precise tool. I need to close the distance or force him to waste his higher-tier creations.
He began forming hand seals as he ran. "Lightning Release: Shadow Clone." Two lightning clones split off from him, racing in zig-zag patterns up opposite rock faces, leaping into the air to draw fire.
Deidara took the bait, dividing his attention to blow the clones apart. In that moment of split focus, Kakashi launched a kunai trailed by a wire, not at Deidara, but at the rocky cliff face above him. He yanked, pulling himself upward at a blinding speed, then pushed off the cliff, now at Deidara's altitude.
"Lightning Cutter!"
The screeching sphere of lightning filled Deidara's vision. He lurched his dragon aside, but the Chidori grazed the creature's wing, shearing through clay and chakra. The dragon listed, Deidara cursing as he struggled to maintain altitude.
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The Ground War: Youth vs. Legacy
On the ground, it was not a battle. It was a hurricane meeting a glacier.
Guy became a green thunderclap. He didn't attack Sasori directly first. He attacked the Hundred Puppets. His speed in the Seventh Gate was incomprehensible. He moved faster than the puppets' joints could track. "Morning Peacock!"
A barrage of supersonic punches filled the air. Each strike ignited the air into a flaming peacock-tail of concussive force. Puppets didn't just break; they disintegrated into matchsticks and shrapnel under the relentless volley. Five, ten, fifteen puppets were erased in the space of ten seconds.
Sasori watched, clinically unimpressed. Predictable. He destroys the tools, not the master. A waste of energy. He directed the remaining puppets not to engage, but to scatter, to encircle, to fire poisoned senbon from a distance, to lay wire traps. They were fodder to drain the green beast's clock.
Then Guy turned his eyes to Sasori's core-puppet, the Fourth Kazekage. "Your cold heart will be warmed by the flames of passion!"
He charged. A straight line, unimaginably fast. Sasori raised the puppet's hands. "Gold Dust: Imperial Shield." A dense wall of glittering, magnetic dust formed.
Guy didn't slow. He pulled back his fist. "Daytime Tiger!"
He thrust his palm forward. The air compressed, then exploded. A gigantic, blue-white tiger-shaped blast of pure concussive force roared forth. It wasn't fire; it was compressed air so violent it looked like energy. It hit the Gold Dust shield.
The shield held. But it was blown backward like a leaf in a gale, scraping a trench in the stone as Sasori's puppet was forced back fifty feet, the shield thinning and shimmering under the strain.
Sasori's core registered the power. A single blow of this magnitude can be survived. A sustained assault cannot. The puppet's structural integrity is compromised by 18%.
He switched tactics. The Gold Dust dissolved and reformed into thousands of tiny, razor-sharp blades. "Gold Dust: Wave of Fury." They shot at Guy not as a wall, but as a swirling, omnidirectional storm, seeking to whittle him down from all angles.
Guy roared, spinning, his fists becoming a vortex that deflected most, but some blades nicked his steam-shrouded skin, drawing thin lines of blood. The poison on them? Useless. Guy's cardiovascular system in the Seventh Gate was moving so fast, the toxins were metabolized or burned away before they could take effect.
But it was a distraction. While Guy was occupied, Sasori activated a secondary set of puppets he had kept buried—the Iron Sand components, salvaged from the destroyed Third. From hidden compartments in the earth, the black sand gathered, forming into the familiar, deadly shapes.
"Iron Sand: Drizzle." A cloud of needles shot at Guy from behind, concurrent with the gold dust from the front.
Guy's eyes widened. He couldn't deflect both. He prepared to take the hit on his reinforced back to charge through the gold dust and smash the core.
A new voice cut through the din. "Ice Release: Ice-Style Wall!"
A towering, crystalline wall of ice erupted from the ground between Guy and the Iron Sand needles. They thudded into the thick ice, stuck fast, unable to penetrate.
Samui landed lightly on the ridge above, her twin swords sheathed, her hands in a sealing posture. Beside her, Omoi chewed his senbon nervously, his sword drawn.
Samui: "Analysis indicated a high probability of secondary puppet deployment. We are here to provide tactical support."
Omoi: "The Iron Sand is magnetically controlled. Ice is a poor conductor and disrupts magnetic alignment at low temperatures… probably. The gold dust is also magnetic but has a different polarity signature. If we alternate lightning and ice attacks on the two mediums, we can induce a chaotic interference in his control matrix."
Guy grinned, steam billowing. "My wonderful, cool-headed comrades! Then let's turn up the heat together! HA!"
Sasori was now facing three opponents: an unstoppable physical force, a strategic ice-user disrupting his mediums, and a tactical analyst predicting his moves. It was an inelegant equation.
He sent the Gold Dust at Samui. She formed another ice wall, but the dust began to grind through it. Omoi moved, his sword crackling. "Lightning Release: Lightning Blade." He didn't strike the dust; he struck the air above it, sending a forking arc of electricity through the charged, metallic particles. The gold dust seized up, sparking, its magnetic cohesion temporarily scrambled.
Guy used the opening. He vanished, reappearing in front of the Fourth Kazekage puppet. "Hirudora!" The Evening Elephant's air cannon, point-blank.
Sasori had no time for a perfect shield. He formed a hasty wedge of gold dust. The air cannon hit. The wedge shattered. The concussive force struck the puppet square in the chest. There was a sickening crunch of reinforced wood, metal, and… something organic deep inside. The puppet was hurled backward, its torso caved in, one arm torn clean off.
Within his core, Sasori felt the damage. Primary vessel integrity critical. Mobility reduced by 70%. Chakra transfer systems failing. This vessel is lost.
He had one last move. As the puppet flew back, he used its remaining hand to form a seal. The scattered Iron Sand and remaining gold dust convulsed, then shot towards the center of the basin, not as weapons, but as a dense, obscuring cloud.
"Retreat," his voice rasped from the broken puppet, a command to Deidara as much as an acknowledgment of his own defeat.
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The Withdrawal
In the sky, Deidara, harried by Kakashi's relentless pressure and seeing Sasori's main vessel destroyed, snarled in frustration. He launched his remaining C1 birds in a massive, screen-clearing carpet blast to force Kakashi to evade.
Deidara: "THIS ISN'T OVER, SHARINGAN FREAK, UN! MY ART WILL HAVE ITS RECKONING!"
He turned his damaged dragon and fled east at maximum speed, a sulking artist chased from his own gallery.
On the ground, the metallic cloud settled. Where the broken Fourth Kazekage puppet had landed, there was only a crater and scattered, inert components. Sasori's core—a small, glowing cylinder—was gone, retrieved by some last-minute summoning or burrowing technique.
Guy's Seventh Gate closed with a gasp of released steam, and he swayed, the immense fatigue hitting him. Samui and Omoi moved to support him.
Kakashi landed beside them, looking at the retreating Deidara and the empty crater. "They're gone. Sasori's primary vessel is destroyed. Deidara is low on clay and morale. That's a tactical victory."
Omoi, still chewing: "But they successfully pinned us here, preventing pursuit of the extraction team. Their primary objective was likely fulfilled. So it's a strategic trade… probably."
Samui: "Our secondary objective was to prevent further attrition of Suna's forces and eliminate Akatsuki combat resources. Both were achieved. We will report accordingly."
As they caught their breath, a priority message pulsed on Kakashi's communication seal. It was from Rias. Brief, to the point: *Extraction disrupted at 76%. Host secure, condition critical. Returning to Kumo. Itachi/Kisame retreated.*
Kakashi let out a long, weary breath. They had won the battle in the wastes. But the war had just taken a dark, costly turn. The One-Tail was maimed, and the Akatsuki's machine, though bloodied, was one step closer to its apocalyptic goal.
SYSTEM NOTIFICATION (to Indra/Rias): Tactical Engagement Analysis Complete. Suna Theater: Enemy ground forces (Sasori) degraded by 85%. Aerial forces (Deidara) degraded by 60%. Extraction Theater: Target preserved, but 76% of Tailed Beast chakra lost. Net assessment: Coalition operational tempo remains viable, but strategic clock is advancing. Template synergy adjustments: Ashina Uzumaki (combat logistics) +2%. Victor Von Doom (asymmetric response) +1%.
End of Chapter – 85.