Chapter 506: Urashiki: "Uchiha Yasushi, Why Have I Never Seen You in the Future?"
Being berated to their faces left everyone in the room red with embarrassment that they had no clean outlet for.
Because the facts sat there undeniably. They had contributed to the situation falling apart.
But underneath the shame, something else was quietly taking hold.
Yasushi had spelled it out plainly: the Savior of the shinobi world was not a title reserved for any one specific person. It was a function, not a birthright. Whoever became the new Six Paths Sage could fill it.
He had also made his personal ambition for that position completely transparent.
And if Uchiha Yasushi could reach for it, then the thought that naturally followed was: why not us? Why not someone from our village?
The mood in the room shifted. An undercurrent started moving beneath the surface.
Jiraiya caught it before it could build and cut in immediately.
"None of that matters right now!"
"If we cannot defeat Otsutsuki Urashiki and recover the Demonic Statue, Ten-Tails cannot be revived, and the Six Paths Sage discussion is pointless either way."
"If we fall apart instead of holding together at exactly this moment, we will be picked off one by one and end up back on the original timeline anyway."
"Everything those Dragon Vein travelers brought back will have been wasted."
The room sharpened. Everyone pulled themselves back to the immediate problem.
"Does Lord Nagato have any method to locate Urashiki or the Demonic Statue?"
Nagato turned the question over for a long time and came up empty. He shook his head with regret.
They looked at Yasushi next, hoping the man who had lived through the future could offer something practical.
Yasushi was the only one in the room who knew Urashiki did not actually have the Demonic Statue. He shook his head.
"I have no insight either. We are probably down to the slow approach."
"On one side, we expand the intelligence network as far as it will reach and cast as wide a net as possible. On the other side, we use the Nine-Tails jinchuriki and me as bait and set an ambush."
The discussion went in circles for a while before landing back on that same answer. They moved forward with it.
It worked. Urashiki appeared within days.
But the combined six villages had prepared with unusual thoroughness. The two jinchuriki were wrapped in multiple rings of protection, every available high-level combatant had been pulled in, and the barrier teams from all six nations had cooperated to deploy detection seals across the entire area, specifically calibrated to pick up any spatial disturbance.
The moment Urashiki arrived, the seals went off. Alerts rang out across the perimeter and everyone mobilized at once.
From every direction, ninja converged on his position.
"You put together a fairly thorough reception this time."
Urashiki smiled without any sign of concern. He looked at the mass of fighters closing from every angle as though they were background scenery, swung the fishing rod, and drove the hook toward the two jinchuriki at the center of the protective formation.
Both jinchuriki were from Konoha. The surrounding guard was drawn from all six villages, but the closest escort was Konoha's own.
They were experienced veteran jonin, and they moved without needing to coordinate.
Minato launched himself forward first, scattering Flying Thunder God kunai in every direction around Urashiki in a single throw.
Fugaku stepped in front of everyone else and called out with full force.
"Susanoo! Hold him!"
Chakra surged out of him on a massive scale, forming the towering armored construct around him and sealing everyone behind it from view.
From inside the Susanoo's protection, the other fighters activated everything they had.
"Secret Technique: Shadow Bind!"
"Sealing: Adamantine Chains!"
"Wood Style: Arbor Death Bind!"
Based on the intelligence Yasushi had provided, everyone had already accepted that conventional elemental jutsu were simply ineffective against the Otsutsuki clan. Only sage techniques and sealing techniques carried any weight. The agreement to use only support-oriented attacks was unspoken but universal.
The plan had a clean shape: use the Susanoo for defense, give Minato the engagement up close, and have everyone else apply suppression from the flanks.
It looked airtight.
But Urashiki's hook was a product of Yin-Yang Release, carrying the Outer Path's force that came with the Rinnegan. It had extreme penetrating power. Chakra-based defenses of any kind were irrelevant to it.
In front of everyone, the construct that had been called an absolute defense was pierced as though it were open air. The hook passed through the Susanoo's body without any resistance and buried itself in Fugaku.
The truth was that the hook, for all its penetrating ability, had a very narrow function. It stole chakra. It did nothing else. There was no physical damage, no lethal quality to the contact. If someone simply sealed their own chakra before the hook reached them, it would find nothing to pull on and accomplish nothing at all.
That information existed. Yasushi had it. He had deliberately kept it to himself.
Being hooked and losing chakra was not lethal. It was unpleasant. The cost of withholding that one detail was acceptable.
So Fugaku became the next victim. The Susanoo collapsed the moment the hook found him, and he went down in seconds.
Urashiki laughed softly, lifted the rod, and a mass of crimson chakra was drawn out of Fugaku's body and fell into his hand. Fugaku pitched forward and the Susanoo dissolved completely, leaving everyone behind him suddenly exposed.
Urashiki tucked the chakra into the creel at his back, reached inside, and pulled out a different chakra mass, tossing it forward.
The moment it hit the ground it became a wall of water, an overwhelming surge that spread in every direction at once. It was the Three-Tails chakra he had extracted earlier, and under his amplification it performed like the actual tailed beast behind it.
The fighters behind Fugaku had not been expecting him to go down that fast. The flood caught them off balance and scattered them in every direction.
Yasushi had seen it coming and had deliberately stayed back from the initial push. When the water rushed toward them, he caught Kushina around the waist, vaulted over the crest of the wave, and came down steadily on the surface.
Looking up, he saw Minato already in close range, trading blows with Urashiki at full speed.
With the Flying Thunder God, Minato moved through the airspace around Urashiki like a streak of yellow light, appearing from multiple marked positions and striking at every opening.
But the spatial technique that had never failed Minato against anyone else produced nothing here.
Urashiki tracked him as though he had been told in advance where each reappearance would come. He moved to meet every strike before Minato had fully arrived.
He spoke while fighting, his commentary delivered with the bored ease of someone making small talk.
"Solid spatial technique."
"Unfortunately, showing off spatial ninjutsu in front of an Otsutsuki who has made it a specialty is a bit like bringing fireworks to a forge."
His blue Rinnegan flickered. He swung the rod sideways at a spot of empty air to his left.
An instant later Minato materialized at exactly that spot.
The timing was seamless, as though the two of them had rehearsed it.
"Ah!"
Minato threw himself backward, yanking the kunai up to block.
With a sharp metallic ring, the rod and the kunai connected directly. The hook deflected off the block.
But the fishing line trailing behind the rod arced in mid-air and came around, driving the hook into Minato from behind instead.
"No!"
Minato had no time to recover. The weakness hit him immediately and he dropped.
His fall bought the other fighters enough time to close in. But since Urashiki's abilities were clearly outside the range of ordinary technique, the regular ninja stayed at the perimeter while the jonin with specialized jutsu pushed in from the front.
"Hmph." Urashiki glanced at them with mild contempt. "The best the Shinobi Headquarters can manage is a coordinated pile-on. Useless, all of you."
Being openly mocked in the middle of a battle was a predictable way to make the fighters in front of him angrier. Several expressions went dark.
Nagato stepped through the group and addressed Urashiki in a flat, cold tone.
"Do not make yourself sound more impressive than you are."
"If you genuinely had the ability, you would not keep relying on ambushes and harassment to do your work."
"If you dispute that, fight me alone. One on one. Let's settle whether you're the useful one or I am."
Urashiki looked at him and showed zero interest in taking the bait. He slung the fishing rod over his shoulder and answered with complete ease.
"Fine. I'll admit the Shinobi Headquarters isn't entirely useless."
"But fighting for its own sake doesn't interest me. And I have no interest in killing people."
"If I had a choice, I'd rather find somewhere quiet and actually go fishing."
"The only reason I came all this way is to do my job. If you let me collect the chakra harvest without getting in the way, no one has to get hurt."
Yasushi had shared the intelligence about the chakra fruit with everyone beforehand. They all understood what the harvest meant: to grow the fruit, all the chakra that had spread through the shinobi world had to be drawn back together. Taking it was not a neutral act.
The room ignited.
"Shameless!"
"Easy for you to say! Have you thought for one moment about what that would mean for us?"
Urashiki shrugged with complete indifference.
"The shinobi world never had chakra to begin with. My clan's people chose to plant the Divine Tree here. You only have chakra because of us. Taking back what we gave you is entirely reasonable from where I'm standing."
Neither side had anything left to say to the other. The conversation was over and the fighting resumed.
Nagato stepped up immediately and went for his heaviest technique. He flicked a finger and sent a small black point arcing outward.
"Planetary Devastation!"
But Urashiki's blue Rinnegan flickered, and his body scattered into a swarm of paper cranes that slipped past the gravitational field before it could take hold. They reformed into solid shape on the far side.
The moment he was whole again, a line of lightning was already on him.
The Raikage's thick arm came through like a blade, drawing across his neck.
"Lightning Release: Lariat!"
The Raikage felt the clear, definite resistance against his arm and the spray of blood going upward. The satisfaction was immediate and total.
"Got him!"
But Urashiki's severed head tumbled through the air with a slight smile on its face. The blue Rinnegan flickered several times, and time itself rewound. The battlefield reset to the moment before the engagement had started.
"Planetary Devastation!"
Nagato opened the same way, and Urashiki evaded the same way.
But this time, Urashiki already knew exactly how the Raikage would move in the recovery window. As he reformed, he swung the fishing rod outward.
The crash was immediate and tremendous. The Raikage's arm and the rod met with a shockwave that shook the ground around them. Before the force had even finished releasing, the hook had already swung around the rod on its line, arced behind the Raikage's guard, and buried itself cleanly. A full mass of tailed beast chakra was drawn out of him. Urashiki planted a kick, and the Raikage went sailing.
The time-rewind ability was, from any practical standpoint, completely broken. If the person using it did not announce what they had done, no outside observer could detect that anything unusual had happened. The process was completely invisible.
From where the others were standing, the sequence read as: the Raikage charged, the Raikage was beaten, the Raikage was kicked away. Straightforward.
Only Yasushi, watching from the rear with full information, read the sequence correctly. He said nothing.
He wanted Urashiki to stay exactly this threatening, this seemingly untouchable. The heavier the pressure on the other nations, the more they would feel the pull toward unification. The more desperate their need for a Six Paths Sage, the more leverage that position carried.
The effect was everything he wanted.
Everyone watching was fully convinced, and deeply impressed, by a power that was considerably less absolute than they believed.
From that point the fighting became repetitive. With the time-rewind available, Urashiki broke through every combination they tried, as many times as it took, until the attempt fell apart.
But Yasushi had no interest in letting the situation drag on indefinitely. The weakness that had been responsible for Urashiki's defeat in the original timeline was not subtle. Even Boruto, a child, had figured it out. Any experienced ninja in this room was going to land on the same conclusion eventually. It was only a matter of time.
And given how Urashiki's original arc had gone, there was every chance he would blunder into a corner and get taken down before Yasushi could control the outcome.
He stepped forward to end it.
Before he could do anything, Urashiki's blue Rinnegan shifted toward him with an expression of genuine puzzlement.
"You're the One-Tail jinchuriki?"
"Why was the One-Tail jinchuriki someone completely different in the future I came from?"
"And how do you have a Rinnegan? How does that work?"
"A fighter at your level would have to be a significant figure in the Shinobi Headquarters. Why have I never encountered you?"
Yasushi paused. It was a genuinely curious question. If the World Government and Shinobi Headquarters that Urashiki knew had any connection to this timeline, traces of Yasushi's own existence should be present in it.
The most likely explanation was that he had deliberately erased those traces, or moved under cover. He turned the thought over briefly and decided there was no useful conclusion to draw here, and no reason to press it.
He settled on a deflection.
"You don't recognize me. I recognize you. I recognize your partners Otsutsuki Momoshiki and Otsutsuki Kinshiki as well."
"The reason you haven't seen me is probably that I spent that period building the Uchiha Divine Nation."
He patched his earlier fabrication together smoothly enough and dropped the subject.
Then he opened his Rinnegan and moved to engage.
Urashiki seemed to reach a conclusion about how the fight would go. He smiled slightly, stepped backward, and stepped through Yomotsu Hirasaka. The rift closed behind him. His voice came back through the air after he was gone.
"That's enough for today. I'll be back."
Chapter 507: The Divine Knights Order
In the days that followed, Urashiki did not come back. The security around the base remained unusually heavy, but Yasushi suspected the real reason was different. When Urashiki had left, he had done so immediately after seeing the Rinnegan open. Whatever the blue eyes had shown him about that fight, the conclusion had been to withdraw and find a solution before returning.
The others had no way to know that. Their uncertainty made them more tense with each passing day, and theories circulated about what Urashiki might be quietly preparing, or whether he had already found a way around the One-Tail and Nine-Tails problem entirely.
The anxiety may have helped. Or perhaps it was the mounting weight of the future intelligence. Either way, something shifted among the six daimyo.
The first move came from the Water Country daimyo, who changed position and agreed to support the creation of a World Government and the merger of all six nations.
Once that opening appeared, the rest followed like dominoes. One by one, the other daimyo announced that they had reached the same conclusion. By the end, all six were aligned.
When the six daimyo stepped forward together and announced the unification to the shinobi world, every noble in every country celebrated at once. The news traveled as fast as anything ever had, carried outward by thousands of voices all pushing it in the same direction: the shinobi world's era of war between nations was over. Peace had finally come.
The world celebrated.
At the same time, it quietly marked the end of the arrangement between Yasushi and Black Zetsu. They had exchanged value. The exchange was complete. Now came the question of who moved first.
Black Zetsu appeared to understand this without being told. His behavior changed. He claimed to be searching for Urashiki's location, and that explanation served as cover for simple avoidance. He was not placing himself anywhere Yasushi might reach him without witnesses. If he appeared at all, it was in rooms full of people, and he made certain not to be alone with Yasushi under any circumstances.
He was also making moves.
Specifically: a White Zetsu had been inserted into Uchiha Takeshi through official Konoha channels, awakening Wood Release in him. The operation had been handled quietly enough that Yasushi only found out when Takeshi came to tell him personally, barely able to contain his excitement.
"That's impressive!" Yasushi applauded enthusiastically, pulling every bit of warmth he had into his expression and keeping the fury well below the surface where his father could not see it.
"Wood Release on top of the Sharingan, that makes you a jonin with two bloodlines. Give it enough time and you might even awaken the Mangekyo and the Rinnegan."
"Oh, it is all down to the Hokage and Black Zetsu-sama taking notice of me. The Wood Release nomination would never have come my way otherwise."
"From what I understand, Black Zetsu-sama put up two additional White Zetsu for the village specifically to get me that slot."
"I know I'm just an ordinary jonin. He must have done it for your sake, Yasushi."
"We should really thank Black Zetsu-sama for that."
Yasushi smiled with his teeth together. The intent to kill Black Zetsu intensified and he filed it away.
White Zetsu was a powerful control mechanism, but it had no real independence. Kill Black Zetsu and the parasite became a tool rather than a threat. He would deal with it then.
He was mentally weighing whether to use Urashiki for the job or bring Madara back through Edo Tensei as the cleaner option when the good news arrived from an entirely different direction.
Amado had results.
Yasushi slipped away from the base again using the same window gap method, left a shadow clone in his place, and headed for the Kara facility at speed.
"What did you find? Can you transfer the Karma Seal out?"
"Complete removal is still beyond us for now." Amado's expression was bright and clearly satisfied. "But the work hasn't been wasted. We found something else."
He called over several clones and pointed to the curved, comma-shaped patterns marked on each of their necks.
"This is what we developed by reverse-engineering the Karma Seal's principles and combining them with some of Orochimaru's prior research. We're calling it the Magatama Curse Mark."
"We've made substantial progress understanding the technology behind converting personal information into chakra form. Memories, knowledge, skills, all of it can be compressed and stored inside this mark."
"We can't yet achieve what the Karma Seal does at full depth, where the stored information decompresses inside a host and displaces the original consciousness entirely. But what we can do is use it as a backup. If the person carrying this mark dies in battle, their information can be extracted afterward and used as the basis for a revival."
Yasushi's interest dropped immediately. He had just spent a considerable amount of effort hoping for something new, and this was Orochimaru's Heavenly Curse Mark with a different name.
Amado caught the reaction and kept talking.
"There is a second function. That one is more relevant to your situation."
"Go on."
"Everything we have built here was always aimed at solving your Karma Seal problem. This function grows from that same root."
"Our working assumption has been that chakra is the foundation of everything in the shinobi world. Every jutsu, every seal, everything runs on it. When the chakra runs out, the effect ends. That holds for the Karma Seal as well."
"We do not yet fully understand the Karma Seal's underlying mechanics, so we cannot remove it directly. But what we understand very clearly is how to deplete it."
"Use it. Keep using it. The chakra stored inside the Karma Seal is vast, but it is not limitless. Each activation draws some of it down. Use it enough times and the reservoir empties completely."
"The problem, under normal conditions, is that each activation also reshapes the host body toward the original. Before the chakra runs out, the host is already being overwritten."
"But the Magatama Curse Mark can intercept the chakra that flows out of the Karma Seal during each activation. Instead of that energy restructuring your body, it flows into the mark instead."
"In practical terms: once you learn to use this, you can activate the Karma Seal and route the outgoing chakra directly into the Magatama Curse Mark rather than letting it modify you. The Karma Seal's reservoir depletes. Your body stays intact."
"When the energy in the Karma Seal is fully exhausted, the seal dissolves on its own."
"And the Magatama Curse Mark can be applied to other people as well."
"That means we can produce large numbers of powerful subordinates in a short time. Whoever carries this mark will develop, to some degree, toward the Karma Seal's original occupant. Toward Isshiki Otsutsuki."
"With favorable results, we may produce fighters who develop the Black Eye or White Eye as genuine bloodlines. Strong fighters, possibly at Jigen's level, once the Karma Seal's energy has done its work on them."
Yasushi was not particularly interested in the subordinate-manufacturing angle. But learning that there was a viable path to draining the Karma Seal made the rest of it easy to tolerate.
"Excellent work. All of it."
"So the approach is straightforward: learn the Magatama Curse Mark, apply it widely, activate the Karma Seal repeatedly against a long list of recipients, and drain it down to nothing."
"Who carries the mark? The clones?"
Amado shook his head.
"Clones will work, but one clone is not enough. The energy volume inside the Karma Seal is simply too large for an ordinary clone's body to absorb even a single activation's worth without being destroyed. One at a time, and the body would probably rupture."
"Our proposal is a two-track approach."
"First, apply the Magatama Curse Mark to your existing clone subordinates broadly. It raises the overall capability of the Kara Organization's personnel across the board."
"Second, select cellular material from genuinely powerful ninja and use it to produce high-quality clones specifically. Even if those bodies still cannot absorb a full activation on their own, they will last for several rounds rather than one. And the baseline capability of a clone built from elite material, then modified further by the Karma Seal's energy, should produce fighters in the range of Jigen's combat power. That makes them useful as the core strength of the organization."
"That works." Yasushi agreed immediately.
"And it gives those World Nobles a purpose before they get cleared out eventually."
"Run a few Karma Seal activations through them first, then have them go out and acquire cellular material from powerful ninja across all the nations. Get everything out of them before the end."
"The cells from deceased fighters should also be usable."
He turned to Orochimaru.
"Have you started researching Edo Tensei?"
"You must still have cellular material from the First and Second Hokage. Put it to use."
Orochimaru paused for a moment, then reached into his coat and produced a scroll, handing it to Amado.
"Given that the First Hokage's Wood Release traces back to Black Zetsu's intervention, those cells are somewhat less unique than they once seemed."
"If you want to use them for cloning, be my guest. I only ask for a copy of the research data afterward."
Yasushi let that pass without comment. He was not about to explain anything about Black Zetsu's involvement in Hashirama's Wood Release.
What genuinely interested him was the question of what a Hashirama clone would look like without Ashura's chakra riding alongside the original's bloodline. It was a variable worth testing.
"Bring me a sample of Madara's cells as well. Clone both of them and run a side-by-side comparison. I want to know which of the two actually comes out stronger."
"When those clones are ready, gather this entire group of powerful clone bodies together and form a unit. Call it the Divine Knights Order. They answer directly to the World Nobles and their specific function is to monitor the work of the Six Elder Stars."
With the planning settled, Yasushi sat down with Orochimaru and began learning the Magatama Curse Mark.
The technique drew from both sealing theory and biological knowledge in ways that most ninja would find genuinely difficult to combine. For Yasushi, the sealing foundations were already in place, and with Orochimaru guiding the instruction directly, he had the mark's mechanics down within a short time.
He spent the next while opening spatial portals across the entire map of replaced nobles and daimyo, imprinting the Magatama Curse Mark on each one in sequence.
It worked exactly as Amado had predicted. After repeatedly activating the Karma Seal through the chain of recipients, the square-patterned mark on his arm visibly dimmed. The energy in the seal was depleting.
Then a different problem surfaced.
Once the Karma Seal collapsed entirely, he would lose the ability to switch into Black Eye mode. No Karma Seal meant no Daikokuten. No Sukunahikona. The spatial portal utility he had been relying on heavily would vanish with it.
He had been so focused on removing the Karma Seal as a possession risk that the loss of what the seal provided had barely registered. Now that the threat was neutralized, a rather familiar pull toward having everything reasserted itself.
He went back to Amado.
Amado called his team into a meeting, and they came back with a stack of proposed solutions an inch thick.
"We reviewed more than a dozen approaches. Our consensus is that the Information Diversion Plan has the highest viability."
"Information diversion. Explain."
Amado spread the proposal across the table and worked through it section by section.
"We know that bloodline traits, memories, jutsu, and other personal information can all be compressed onto chakra. We also know they can be decompressed and released. What we are proposing is simply pushing that existing understanding one step further."
"If we can separate the energy component from the information component in what flows out of the Karma Seal, we can route them to different destinations. The Magatama Curse Mark receives Isshiki's information. You selectively absorb only the energy."
"Better still, if we go further and disaggregate the information itself, separating bloodline data from jutsu data from memory, the outcome improves considerably."
"The actual danger in the Karma Seal is Isshiki's memories. That is the possession vector. Strip that single category out and direct it into the Magatama Curse Mark instead. Everything else that flows from the Karma Seal, the bloodline elements, the technique knowledge, the raw energy, all of it stays beneficial and none of it carries the override risk."
Yasushi pointed at the proposal before Amado finished his last sentence.
"That one. That is exactly what I want."
"Start on it immediately. Whatever resources you need, tell me and the World Government will provide them."
Amado produced a supply list without hesitation. It was long, and almost certainly included personal requests buried in the technical specifications that had nothing to do with the research.
Yasushi did not care.
People always had their own angles. If you wanted a horse to run, you needed to feed it well. And the cost was not coming from him anyway.
He took the list directly to the six national daimyo and tasked them with sourcing everything on it.
In principle the funding should come from those who stood to benefit. But since Yasushi was generous by nature and hated watching common people suffer, the nobles naturally stepped up to absorb the expense themselves, each contributing from their own holdings for the good of the shinobi world.
Chapter 508: Strong Enemies Without, No Strife Within
Holding power was satisfying.
Nothing required direct handling. Issue a command and someone else handled it. The only imperfection in the arrangement was that Yasushi was not yet the visible ruler of the shinobi world. He was the hand working from behind the curtain.
The unification had gone through cleanly enough, announced through the six daimyo as planned. But a unified nation on paper was a different thing from a unified people. Years of killing each other across national borders had left hatreds that did not dissolve because a document was signed. The fact that ninja from rival villages were managing not to attack each other on sight was already the product of extreme professional restraint under the pressure of shared purpose.
Genuine cooperation was a different matter entirely.
Before the merger, facing a common powerful enemy, the six nations' ninja had worked together with reasonable effectiveness, each operating within their own chain of command without needing to interact too deeply. After the merger, joint operations and mixed-unit assignments became regular occurrences. That friction had no equivalent in their prior experience.
The resentments were immediate and predictable. If a jonin from another village was giving orders to your genin, you had no way to know whether that person had a grudge against your village and was going to find ways to have your people absorb the worst assignments. The elite ninja had enough perspective to work past it. But the elite were all stationed at the Akatsuki base, leaving people of much more variable judgment running operations everywhere else.
In a short span of time, multiple serious clashes broke out between ninja from different villages.
After putting down yet another escalating confrontation, the Six Elder Stars gathered again to address the situation directly.
"Urashiki still hasn't been found and hasn't attacked again. We can't keep every available fighter sitting here on indefinite standby."
"All of us have critical work waiting. We cannot simply outlast an enemy who isn't coming."
"The friction between villages keeps building. A real merger isn't something you can accomplish just by announcing it."
"If he doesn't attack soon, we may create a crisis ourselves before he gets around to it."
As though responding to the collective frustration, an alert rang out from outside.
Everyone was on their feet immediately, moving toward the exits.
What met them was not an Otsutsuki stepping through a rift. It was an army. Hundreds of black-uniformed ninja coming in hard, crashing against the base's outer defenses with driven, synchronized violence.
The Akatsuki base had been on high alert, but the alert had been calibrated for a specific threat: an extraordinarily powerful Otsutsuki moving alone, someone like Isshiki or Urashiki. Against that kind of opponent, ordinary jonin were background noise. They existed at the base to maintain watch and sound the alarm. When the real threat arrived, their job was to get clear and let the actual fighters handle it.
No one had prepared for an organized army of regular ninja.
The gap in the defensive posture was immediately exploited. These attackers moved with complete disregard for their own safety, came in trained and capable, and caused significant damage in the opening moments before the defense could adapt. The base's regular defenders absorbed the first hits hard.
But these were veteran fighters with years of real combat behind them. After the rough opening exchange, they steadied, reinforcements came up, and a genuine back-and-forth developed.
The entire area outside the base became a collision of jutsu and close-range combat in every direction.
"Where did these people come from?"
Nagato and the others stood at an elevated position, looking out across the chaos with visible surprise.
The answer arrived in front of them without further waiting.
A spatial rift opened in the air a short distance ahead. A tall ninja stepped through it. His uniform matched the attackers outside, but on his left temple, displayed clearly enough to be seen from a distance, was a tattoo of the number one in solid black.
His most distinctive feature was not the number. It was his eyes.
One black. One white.
"The Black and White Eyes. Otsutsuki Isshiki!"
The recognition passed through the group, and the tension spiked immediately.
Only Black Zetsu's gaze moved in a different direction, flickering toward Yasushi where he stood in the middle of the protective formation. He knew things the others did not. Isshiki had been killed by Yasushi some time ago.
Yasushi met the look with a slight smile and said nothing.
The force attacking them was Kara Organization clones, each one enhanced through the Magatama Curse Mark. Individually they had been brought to jonin level or above. Clone #1, the fighter now standing across from them, was the standout among them. He had absorbed two rounds of Karma Seal energy, awakening a partial Isshiki bloodline that included the Black and White Eyes.
The cost had been severe. His lifespan had been shortened to less than three months from the moment of transformation.
Given that limitation, letting him sit in storage unused would be a waste. A real field test was the logical choice, and field data was worth collecting. An additional benefit was the pressure it would put on the newly formed Shinobi Headquarters, which had been spending too much time fighting itself rather than preparing for the actual threat.
"The things I do for peace in the shinobi world," Yasushi thought with quiet satisfaction, watching the violence unfold in front of him.
"Wood Release: Nativity of a World of Trees!"
Wood Release had become common enough in the Shinobi Headquarters that entire forests erupted from the ground almost simultaneously, wrapping around the base in dense, surging timber. The quality was nowhere near Jiraiya's Wood Release, but against standard jonin the technique was more than sufficient.
Individually outclassed, the attacking force began to be overwhelmed.
Clone #1 raised one hand. Dozens of black cubes materialized overhead and dropped rapidly toward the wood release forest below.
The crashes came in rapid sequence. Tree trunks the height of buildings splintered under the impact and ignited from the friction, sending columns of black smoke rising across the battlefield. The ground shook under the repeated concussions, and structures throughout the base began to fail.
But more trees pushed up from the ruined ground, coiling vines around the falling cubes and wrestling with them.
Nagato had fought Isshiki before and had a clear memory of what the Black Eye could do. He did not hesitate.
"Universal Pull!"
Clone #1 stiffened involuntarily and began to arc through the air toward Nagato. His eyes moved and a black cube appeared directly above Nagato, accelerating downward.
"Shinra Tensei!"
Nagato's wrist rotated and the repulsive field sent everything coming at him blasting outward. Clone #1's trajectory reversed completely and he was pushed far back.
A flash of yellow light followed him immediately. Minato had been tracking the opening and came through with a blade moving at killing speed.
The exchange that followed was close and relentless, both fighters working at the edge of what the other could handle.
Black Zetsu stayed far back and kept out of the combat entirely. Most of his attention was on Yasushi rather than the fight. He had no evidence, but the instinct was persistent: these attackers felt like Yasushi's doing. He simply could not construct the mechanism. He had no understanding of cloning technology or what the Karma Seal research had produced, and so could not picture how a fighter with the Black and White Eyes could be Yasushi's tool rather than an independent Otsutsuki arrival. What he arrived at instead was a suspicion that Yasushi had some private arrangement with the Otsutsuki clan that he had not been told about.
That was the nature of a suspicious mind. Whoever saw the world through dark assumptions found darkness in every direction.
Yasushi was not thinking about Black Zetsu at the moment. He was watching Clone #1 carefully.
The clone was impressive. Not Isshiki's level by a long margin, but genuinely strong. The problem was that the Shinobi Headquarters had received detailed briefings on the Black Eye's properties and had updated their tactical approaches multiple times since then. Nagato alone might have struggled to close things out quickly, but with the full weight of the assembled fighters working in coordination, the balance of the engagement was clearly shifting.
The clone was going to be captured or killed on the field.
Yasushi was almost ready to send the withdrawal signal when something touched his awareness from behind. A faint spatial disturbance.
He knew that signature immediately. Urashiki.
The man had not left at all. He had withdrawn from direct engagement after the last encounter and gone to ground somewhere nearby, waiting for the right moment. A direct fight with Yasushi's Rinnegan open was not a favorable matchup for him, but a surprise attack from behind was a different calculation.
What Urashiki did not know was that Yasushi had spatial perception of his own.
That worked very conveniently. Being surrounded by a protection detail at every moment had made certain things awkward. A pretext to be cleanly separated from that detail was actually welcome.
Urashiki had been watching from outside the perimeter since the fight began. He had not intervened. He had waited patiently, letting the engagement develop until both Nagato and Jiraiya were fully committed to the fight with Clone #1, then opened a quiet portal.
The detection barriers that would normally have registered the spatial disturbance were overwhelmed by the volume of jutsu going off in every direction. The regular ninja present had no sensitivity to spatial fluctuations at all. Minato, the only fighter at the base with real spatial technique expertise, was locked in close-range combat with Clone #1 and had no attention to spare.
So Urashiki's hook flew out of the rift before anyone in the main group noticed.
"Yasushi, behind you!"
At the shouted warning, Yasushi spun around and opened his Susanoo in the same motion.
The hook punched through the Susanoo's chest without pausing and found him just as it had found Fugaku. His chakra drained out of him in a rush. He went down.
His Mangekyo rotated once. The emptiness closed over immediately, the self-healing technique filling the gap before the fall had fully registered.
The next instant, a Yomotsu Hirasaka rift opened behind Kushina.
But the warning had already reached everyone who mattered. Kushina was pulled clear at speed while the fighters around her brought physical weapons up to intercept the hook. A blade can deflect a fishing line the same as anything else.
Minato, the moment he registered Kushina in danger, broke off from Clone #1 without a backward glance and closed the distance to her position.
Clone #1, finding his engagement partner suddenly gone, opened a space portal without ceremony and stepped through. The instant he withdrew, the black-uniformed attackers outside all pulled back simultaneously.
The Shinobi Headquarters fighters were not inclined to accept that outcome. They went after the retreating force hard, cutting down anyone they caught before the pursuit finally ended.
The Wood Release networks had captured a fair number of prisoners, which gave Nagato useful material for interrogation. He set that process in motion, then came to confirm Yasushi's condition before addressing the larger question.
"Are you hurt?"
"I'm fine."
Nagato's brow stayed creased.
"That fighter with the Black and White Eyes, was that Kinshiki or Momoshiki? The information you gave us doesn't quite line up."
Yasushi had thought through this contingency before he had ever set the operation in motion. Without any outside source to contradict him, the explanation could be built from almost any direction.
"Kinshiki and Momoshiki haven't arrived at this timeline yet. Urashiki is here because of a specific time artifact. Chronologically, those two are still on their way."
"The fighter we just saw was a hybrid, one of Isshiki's converted followers."
"The Otsutsuki have a technique for rapidly converting ordinary ninja into powerful Otsutsuki mixed-bloods. What the hybrid manifests as, in terms of eye abilities, depends on whose cellular material was used in the conversion."
"This one was converted using Isshiki's tissue, which is why the eye abilities matched Isshiki's exactly."
"The technique is expensive. It doesn't get used casually."
"Isshiki must have sustained serious injuries from when we fought him previously. Running out of options, he used the conversion technique to produce a hybrid subordinate."
"The attack pattern also tells us something: Urashiki has linked up with Isshiki. Isshiki himself wasn't present, which means his injuries haven't fully healed yet."
"If we cannot deal with Urashiki before Isshiki recovers, the number of enemies we are facing will essentially double."
The mood in the room deteriorated further.
"You had this intelligence and didn't think to mention it earlier?" the Raikage demanded, his voice cracking with the effort of not shouting.
Yasushi matched the energy with visible contrition.
"In the future's war, the Otsutsuki held the advantage throughout the entire conflict. This conversion technique was used so rarely that it barely registered. I simply did not think of it."
"Damn it all!"
The Raikage's fist came down on the nearest pillar and reduced a section of it to rubble.
"So what do we do? The One-Tail chakra is gone now, we've lost that. All we have left is the Nine-Tails chakra. There is absolutely no room for any more mistakes."
The room went quiet. Nobody had an answer ready.
Yasushi looked around slowly, then expressed his thoughts with an edge of open contempt.
"I have no idea how to keep the Nine-Tails chakra safe when the defensive arrangement we have right now can't even hold itself together."
"The shinobi world has been unified for months. The Shinobi Headquarters still hasn't finalized its structure. The new organizational framework still hasn't been agreed on. Villages are brawling with each other over minor advantages on a weekly basis."
"You are a pack of petty opportunists arguing over scraps while the actual threat circles the building."
"Honestly, why not skip the World Government stage entirely. We already know where this has to go eventually."
"Jump straight to the Uchiha Divine Nation."
"Break all the existing village structures apart. Reassign everyone from scratch. Anyone who refuses to cooperate gets removed from any position with actual influence."
"Regular ninja, the chunin and genin ranks, send them all out to the field. Intelligence gathering, support operations, that kind of work. Scatter them across the territory."
"Frankly, they have no meaningful role in a fight against the Otsutsuki anyway. Sending them out is actually doing them a favor. It keeps them alive."
Chapter 509: Without Uchiha Yasushi, the World Government is Finished
When you want to open a window and the other person refuses, threaten to tear off the roof. It works every time.
The moment Yasushi mentioned the Uchiha Divine Nation, all six shadows immediately rediscovered their appreciation for the World Government framework.
"Enough of this constant infighting!"
"We need to stop wasting time and actually pull the shinobi world's strength together. That is the only way any of this works."
"If we let the Otsutsuki keep gaining ground while we squabble among ourselves, today's casualties are going to look small by comparison."
With the external pressure forcing their hand, the Six Elder Stars finally began working seriously on giving the Shinobi Headquarters genuine substance and structure.
None of that required Yasushi to be directly involved. His One-Tail chakra had already been extracted, which meant he no longer needed to be surrounded by a protection detail around the clock. The entire guard concentration shifted to Kushina instead.
Yasushi said his goodbyes pleasantly and headed back to his room.
He swept the area for any surveillance that might have been left behind, confirmed that the hidden watchers had all been reassigned, slipped out, and returned to the Kara base.
Amado and the others had been waiting.
"The first-generation clones were expended in the assault, Yasushi-sama. The combat performance data and failure point analysis have been compiled and are ready to feed into the second-generation optimization."
"Clone #1 has used up a significant portion of his remaining lifespan, but he still has a few engagements left in him."
"That said, the Shinobi Headquarters now has detailed intelligence on Clone #1 specifically. Sending him out again without modifications is likely a one-way deployment."
"Hold Clone #1 back for now," Yasushi said. "Once the second generation is ready, I will run another round of Magatama Curse Mark enhancement and see if we can produce a few more numbered clones from the improved baseline."
"On a separate matter, how is the Hashirama and Madara cloning project going?"
Amado scratched his head with a slightly embarrassed expression.
"We owe you an apology on that front. Under normal conditions, cloning from complete tissue samples of both subjects should not present any particular difficulty. But something is going wrong at the embryonic formation stage. Every attempt collapses before the embryo can stabilize. We have not yet identified the cause."
Yasushi already knew the answer. Complete cellular material was present, but what the cells lacked was the divine inheritance that had never resided in the cells themselves: Ashura's chakra in Hashirama's bloodline, Indra's chakra in Madara's. Those elements could not be replicated from a tissue sample because they had never been stored there in the first place.
"Forget those two. They are special cases in ways that cloning cannot reproduce. Stop spending time on them."
He waved it off and let Amado redirect his attention.
Amado accepted this without argument, then continued.
"The Second Hokage, Senju Tobirama, does not have the same problem. His clone is progressing normally and should reach maturity in the relatively near future."
"Now that is interesting."
Yasushi's mood lifted immediately. He followed Amado to the cultivation chambers for a look.
The Tobirama embryo floating in its container was at an early enough stage that there was nothing visually compelling about it. Yasushi stood in front of it anyway, turning something over in his head.
"Can we currently make targeted genetic modifications to adjust a clone's bloodline traits during the embryonic stage?"
"Of course. That is fairly standard work at this point. What bloodline addition did you have in mind for Tobirama, Yasushi-sama?"
"What if we gave him an Uchiha bloodline?" Yasushi suggested, with a smile that was doing most of the communication.
Amado had no particular context for the specific history between the Uchiha clan and Tobirama, and responded with a neutral nod of acknowledgment.
Orochimaru, working at a bench nearby, quietly set down what he was doing and looked up. His expression was more considered than amused.
"You are not doing this as a joke."
"Honestly, no." Yasushi let the pretense drop. "The World Government just got announced. The Shinobi Headquarters is still getting organized. There is an enormous amount of structural work to do before any of this actually functions."
"And our external threat is Urashiki."
"The problem is that Urashiki, as impressive as he looks, does not exert nearly enough pressure to keep the Shinobi Headquarters pointed in the right direction. He is a genuine nuisance, but he is one person. He can be avoided, worked around, and eventually tolerated."
"He is not enough to make everyone set down their village grievances and commit to real cooperation."
"If I do not help him become considerably more threatening, the Shinobi Headquarters is going to dissolve from internal friction before it ever gets the chance to accomplish anything."
"The World Government without its internal functioning is nothing. And a World Government that collapses is worse than not having tried."
Orochimaru was quiet for a long moment, golden eyes steady.
"So the enhanced Tobirama clone, and the continued deployments, all of it is constructed pressure."
"You created the external threat and you are sustaining it. You are also building the institutions that are supposed to respond to it. You are doing both sides of the work simultaneously."
"I suppose the answer to why your Mangekyo abilities are healing-type is obvious, in retrospect. You are genuinely trying to put something together."
He made a sound that was something between a laugh and acknowledgment.
"The rest of us spent years assuming the nations were simply too different to ever genuinely unify. It did not occur to us to simply replace everyone who stood in the way of that outcome."
"The next generation, raised inside these new unified schools with no memory of which village their classmates came from, will not carry the old hatreds forward. Ten years from now you will have a generation of ninja who think of themselves as Shinobi Headquarters ninja before they think of themselves as Cloud ninja or Mist ninja."
"The friction right now is severe. But you are right that it is manageable. The old structure produced wars. This produces arguments."
"For what it's worth: from a purely technical standpoint, what you've managed is genuinely unprecedented. Even the First Hokage couldn't build something like this."
"Keep going," Yasushi said comfortably. "I'm not stopping you."
"I'll leave it there." Orochimaru returned to his work, then added one more point without looking up.
"There is something worth considering. If you want even more capability on your side of things, you have two obvious candidates within reach."
"Jiraiya and Tsunade."
"Nagato is a more difficult read for me, but Jiraiya is a straightforward idealist. He has been watching the shinobi world change toward something he used to only dream about. Show him the truth and he does not abandon what you have built. He helps you finish it."
"He is currently one of the three leading figures in the Shinobi Headquarters. Having him work openly with you rather than alongside you accidentally would simplify a great deal."
"Tsunade is different. She does not have the temperament to challenge existing systems, and she has a personal investment in the idea of unified villages given the First Hokage's legacy. But she hates the war cycle deeply. When she finds out all the daimyo and nobles have been removed, she will not waste her time trying to put them back. She will accept it and move forward."
"She's the kind of person who, upon learning the whole truth, punches you hard enough to feel it, and then helps clean up the mess."
Yasushi caught the trace of something personal in the way Orochimaru said it. He was about to ask when Orochimaru's expression settled back into complete neutrality without offering anything further.
"If you want, I can approach both of them for recruitment. Even if either of them declines, I can guarantee neither one will learn who or what is actually behind this."
"The Jiraiya situation has a complication," Yasushi said. "Black Zetsu fused a full White Zetsu into his body during the Wood Release awakening. He is under continuous surveillance, and at critical moments White Zetsu can override his movements entirely."
Orochimaru's vertical pupils contracted sharply.
"Black Zetsu is Hagoromo's younger brother. He has spent a thousand years working to prevent Otsutsuki invasion. That has been the established story."
"Yes. I know."
Yasushi considered how much to share, and decided the operational risk of Orochimaru operating on false assumptions outweighed the risk of disclosure. He laid out the full truth.
Orochimaru went silent when he finished. Amado and Hiruko both stood without speaking for a moment, their expressions suggesting that a substantial portion of their world model had just been restructured.
"So the real threat to the shinobi world is not the Otsutsuki invaders," Orochimaru said eventually. "The real threat is Kaguya Otsutsuki, sealed inside the moon."
"That is correct. Once the Otsutsuki threat is resolved, Black Zetsu will move to revive her."
"Which means Black Zetsu has to be sealed before we deal with Urashiki. If that thread is left in place, the shinobi world's stability is temporary regardless of everything else."
The group worked through options for some time. Finding a way to act on Black Zetsu while avoiding White Zetsu's surveillance had no clean solution.
The decision they arrived at: recruit Tsunade first. Get her embedded inside the Shinobi Headquarters. Use her as the instrument for neutralizing Black Zetsu when the opportunity came.
Yasushi returned to the Shinobi Headquarters base after the meeting.
In the days that followed, he kept his visible behavior completely unremarkable: spending time with his father, exchanging friendly trouble with Jun, looking like someone with nowhere particular to be. In the evenings he slipped back to the Kara base and kept his actual work moving.
Orochimaru made contact with Tsunade. She agreed to a meeting, came face to face with Yasushi, and saw the evidence for herself. After a long silence, she accepted his proposal and arrived at the Shinobi Headquarters shortly afterward.
To give her integration a smooth institutional foundation, Yasushi issued instructions through the World Government channel: establish a National Medical School at the Shinobi Headquarters, drawing the finest medical ninja from every village. Any ninja or child with medical ninjutsu talent across all nations would be eligible to enroll.
The most accomplished medical ninja in the shinobi world was Tsunade. She became the school's first director without anyone finding reason to object.
The Six Elder Stars supported the initiative enthusiastically, recognizing that a medical school shared among all villages would do more to blend the ninja populations than almost any policy-level directive could achieve.
The school went up within days: several dozen acres, fully equipped, properly staffed. Medical ninja from every village arrived in a rush, drawn by the prospect of access to Konoha's medical knowledge base and training systems that had previously been unavailable to outsiders.
Tsunade ran the admissions process personally, sorting the most capable into instructor roles and placing everyone else in the first student cohort, with standing arrangements for strong graduates to cycle into the teaching pipeline in subsequent years.
Watching the medical school model take hold as quickly as it did, the Six Elder Stars applied the same framework to a National Ninja Academy, constructed directly adjacent. If the institution was going to carry a national designation, the instruction quality had to match. The best teachers from every village were called in, supplemented by jonin from each nation serving in rotation.
The old model had been each village hoarding its own knowledge down to the most basic level. The new school took a different approach: low-level jutsu were declassified and made freely available to any student with the ability to learn them. The World Government backed this explicitly and encouraged the major clans to donate scrolls of non-family-secret techniques as teaching materials.
The major clans objected collectively and uniformly refused.
Then one clan member broke ranks.
Uchiha Yasushi, over Fugaku's explicit opposition, stepped forward and donated several hundred jutsu scrolls without asking permission.
The other clans were furious. The World Government issued a formal commendation and presented him with a ceremonial banner.
The civilian ninja population's restraint lasted approximately as long as it took for word to spread. Applications for the academy flooded in from parents across the shinobi world, each wanting their children in the first cohort.
That split off another segment of the population from the old village-loyalty framework.
The new institutions also created a new problem.
The Akatsuki base, and later the developing Shinobi Headquarters, had operated out of the Land of Iron from the beginning, initially because it served as neutral ground during the alliance-formation period. After the World Government was established, the Shinobi Headquarters had stayed in the same location because the organization itself was not yet fully consolidated. The footprint had grown considerably since then.
The Land of Iron had not joined the World Government.
Mifune came to Nagato and the Six Elder Stars directly, requesting that the Shinobi Headquarters relocate off his territory.
Nagato and the others considered it a reasonable point and tried to resolve it by inviting the Land of Iron to simply join the World Government, expanding the Six Elder Stars to seven at the appropriate time.
Mifune declined unconditionally. The permanent neutrality of the Land of Iron was not negotiable.
Since the request was technically valid and forcing the issue publicly was not worth the trouble, Nagato found a suitable location in the interior of Fire Country and the Shinobi Headquarters began relocation. Both national schools were moved along with it.
The Six Elder Stars had no particular stake in the Land of Iron's status. One small holdout was not a significant concern in the context of the broader unification.
Yasushi had a different view.
He could not allow any independent state to exist outside the World Government within a shinobi world that was supposed to be unified. An exception tolerated now was a precedent that made the next exception easier.
After the Shinobi Headquarters had fully cleared out of the Land of Iron, he slipped back to the Kara base.
The second-generation clones were lined up in their rows, calibration complete, ready.
Yasushi's gaze passed over them without warmth.
"The Land of Iron has chosen separation over unity. That cannot be permitted."
"All units deploy. Tear the Land of Iron out by the roots. Remove it from the shinobi world entirely."
Chapter 510: Uchiha Tobira
Not everyone has the standing to remain neutral.
Without sufficient strength to back it up, claiming neutrality is not a position. It is a joke.
The Land of Iron had maintained its neutrality for so long because its samurai force was genuinely capable of holding its own against ninja from any of the major nations. The calculation had always been that eliminating it would cost more than it was worth, and the Land of Iron held nothing attractive enough to justify that cost.
Those conditions no longer applied. Yasushi needed a unified shinobi world, which meant he could not tolerate any independent state sitting outside the World Government's borders.
And the Land of Iron was a different kind of problem than most.
Everywhere else, the daimyo and their nobles were effectively powerless. Replacing them had been straightforward. Mifune was a genuine master swordsman. Replacing him quietly was not a realistic option.
The diplomatic approach at the summit had been the last reasonable opening. If Mifune had taken it, a position in the new structure could have been arranged. He had been too stubborn to consider it.
That was his choice to live with.
Or not, as it turned out.
That night, under a moonless sky, Yasushi moved on the Land of Iron with the second-generation clone army.
Alongside the original Clone #1, two newly matured units had been completed and were ready for deployment. Clone #2 was the strongest Black and White Eye bloodline carrier selected from the second-generation batch.
Clone #3 was something entirely different. He carried the combined bloodlines of Senju Tobirama and the Uchiha clan, and Yasushi had given him a name: Uchiha Tobira.
He was the only one of the three numbered units to have his own name.
This hybrid inheritor of two apex bloodlines had Tobirama's characteristic white hair and, in his eyes, the unmistakable red of a fully developed three-tomoe Sharingan.
The only shortcoming was that the Sharingan had not broken through to Mangekyo level.
Three-tomoe was still three-tomoe, however, and after Magatama Curse Mark enhancement, Uchiha Tobira had absorbed Tobirama's signature technique with no apparent difficulty. He could use the Flying Thunder God Jutsu.
In practical terms, what Yasushi had deployed tonight was an upgraded version of Minato Namikaze.
He had brought Uchiha Tobira specifically to see exactly how the new unit performed in live conditions.
Yasushi looked out at the distant city, dark and settled into sleep, and raised one hand.
"Attack. Destroy everything."
Every ninja in the formation began their hand seals simultaneously.
"Fire Style: Great Dragon Flame Jutsu!"
Under combined casting, more than a dozen enormous fire dragons erupted outward, crossed the distance, and crashed into the city.
"Enemy attack!"
The screaming started immediately. Lights came on inside buildings that had been dark a moment before. Samurai poured out of their quarters in various states of undress, weapons in hand, charging toward the advancing force.
Against ninja, the samurai's greatest disadvantage was range.
Before any of them could close the distance, the follow-up attack was already on them.
"Earth Style: Swamp of the Underworld!"
The ground softened rapidly across the approach corridor, turning the terrain to something that stopped boots mid-stride.
While they were working out routes around it, another combined technique came in.
"Wind Style: Great Breakthrough!"
The compressed wind blast crossed the swamp in an instant and tore through the samurai formation. Blades came up instinctively across the front ranks, but steel alone had no answer for a force-multiplied wind jutsu. Within moments the forward surge was reduced to scattered, bleeding bodies.
Black rods dropped from above and pinned the group leaders where they stood.
The Land of Iron had earned its neutrality over many years and was not a weak country by any measure. Under normal circumstances, its samurai would not have been this passive. But this was a night assault, no warning and no preparation time. The samurai were out of formation, out of armor, reacting to fire and shockwaves rather than executing any prepared defense. And the second-generation clones were jonin-level fighters, each one exceeding what ordinary samurai could handle by a meaningful margin, with two weaker Isshiki-derived units providing support.
It was not a battle. It was a one-sided engagement.
Mifune himself came out, sword in hand. He took in the scope of what was hitting his people and his face flushed red.
"You have no right to be here!" he shouted across the field. "The Land of Iron is a neutral nation! We do not participate in your wars!"
"The Shinobi Headquarters has already cleared out completely! There was no reason for this attack!"
No one answered him. The jutsu kept coming. Yasushi had transformed into Urashiki's appearance before the assault began, carrying a prop fishing rod and creel that would not survive any close examination, but they looked right from a distance and at night. Someone needed to carry this incident, and Urashiki was the logical choice.
With his own people collapsing around him in significant numbers, Mifune's anger reached a point that moved his feet forward. He charged.
Every wind blade and fire attack aimed at him was cut down. The swamp that had stopped his soldiers proved no real obstacle to someone who knew how to move through terrain. He covered the distance with his sword clearing the way ahead.
When he reached solid ground, a cluster of kunai came in from the front. He deflected them in a fast sequence, the sound of metal on metal marking each contact, and kept moving.
Then something changed. A cold feeling went through him without warning, and instinct brought his blade around behind him fast.
The impact that met it was hard enough to stagger him backward. He went with it, recovered his footing, and came up to find a pair of crimson three-tomoe Sharingan looking at him from a white-haired face.
"You are..."
He had started to speak when Uchiha Tobira was already gone. The reappearance came from directly behind him. The blade went in at the upper back, withdrew immediately, and was gone again.
In the exchange when their blades had connected a moment earlier, Tobira had placed a Flying Thunder God marker on the back of Mifune's armor.
A space-time technique used without warning in a first contact, when the target has no knowledge of it, has effectively no counter.
The blood spray was brief. Mifune wavered on his feet, then went down and did not move again.
Samurai could not sustain injuries the way top-level ninja could. Any number of elite ninja had survived wounds that should have been fatal, held together by chakra applied deliberately to the body's systems. Samurai put their chakra into their strikes. Their bodies were ordinary beneath the skill.
The wail that went up confirmed it.
"The general is dead!"
The breaking point of any force is different, but it is always there. This was the Land of Iron's. One soldier ran. Then several more. Then the entire formation, in the span of a few breaths, became a general rout in every direction.
Yasushi looked at the fleeing mass and made a practical assessment. This territory was going to be absorbed into the World Government. These people were going to become its population. Wholesale slaughter was wasteful.
"Kill the leadership. Anyone with rank or command authority. The ordinary samurai can be left. Give them a chance to find their way back."
The units spread out and moved through the objectives methodically. When they reassembled, Yasushi opened a spatial portal and the entire force stepped through and was gone.
By the time the Shinobi Headquarters' response force arrived, what greeted them was rubble and bodies. The former Third Hokage Hiruzen led the rescue column, with Minato and Fugaku among the accompanying jonin.
Hiruzen surveyed the damage briefly, noted Mifune's death among the fallen, and addressed the surviving samurai.
"Who speaks for your people here?"
The samurai conferred briefly among themselves and put forward a middle-aged man who looked like he would rather be anywhere else.
"Hokage-sama, I am Captain Uesugi. General Mifune and the other unit commanders are all dead. I appear to hold the highest rank still standing."
Hiruzen did not recognize him, which made sense. He pressed forward anyway.
"Who were the attackers? Was this the Otsutsuki again?"
"Yes, I believe so. The leader was the one who attacked before, the Otsutsuki called Urashiki. There were two fighters with the Black and White Eyes alongside him, and there was also..."
Uesugi's words stopped. His eyes moved sideways toward Fugaku, and some thought seemed to pass through him without completing itself.
Hiruzen's expression tightened. "And what else?"
"Whatever it is, say it. We have no time for hesitation."
Uesugi drew a breath and spoke toward the ground.
"There was also an Uchiha ninja. With a three-tomoe Sharingan."
"It was that Uchiha ninja who killed General Mifune. He used a space-time technique to appear behind the General and strike him from behind before anyone could react."
"If not for that, we would not have collapsed as quickly as we did."
"Impossible!" Fugaku stepped forward, his voice sharp. "You are absolutely certain that person was an Uchiha? Not a mistake?"
Uesugi flinched under the force of the question and said nothing more.
Hiruzen was unsettled in a different way. He placed a hand on Fugaku's shoulder and offered a measured alternative.
"No Uchiha knows the Flying Thunder God Jutsu. We know this for a fact."
"Whatever this fighter is, it cannot be a village Uchiha. If the Otsutsuki can produce fighters with the Byakugan, replicating the Sharingan is not outside the range of what they might be capable of."
Fugaku settled, visibly turning this over. "You may be right. If they can create a Byakugan hybrid, a Sharingan hybrid is the same category of problem."
Hiruzen had Uesugi walk through the engagement in full detail. When the account was finished, the expressions in the room were uniformly troubled. A fighter with the Flying Thunder God Jutsu who could also deploy Sharingan-based techniques was a very specific kind of threat, and everyone present understood what that combination meant in close combat.
"Who or what this person is, they are clearly an enemy. We need to identify them."
He turned to Uesugi.
"Draw a sketch of the face. We'll have the intelligence division run it against every known profile. Something may come up."
"Minato, check Mifune's body. See if the Flying Thunder God marker is still present. If it is, we need to destroy it before someone uses it to enter this location again later."
Both men moved to their assignments.
Minato examined the marker on the general's body and came back with an expression Hiruzen could not immediately read. He came close and kept his voice low.
"Hokage-sama. There is something strange about the marker."
"The Flying Thunder God scroll kept in the village is Tobirama-sensei's original work, with his own marker preserved in it as a teaching reference for students. Everyone who learns the technique develops their own marker with a slightly different quality based on their individual chakra characteristics."
"The marker on General Mifune is identical to the one in Tobirama-sensei's scroll. Not similar. Identical."
He paused.
"Tobirama-sensei has been dead for some time now."
Hiruzen went completely still.
What came to mind first was a technique he had watched his own teacher invent. A forbidden technique, developed by Tobirama himself.
He stepped away from the others, found Uesugi with the sketch in hand, and asked one more question.
"Think carefully. The skin on that Flying Thunder God user. Was it broken up? Patched together in pieces, like fragments stitched into something human-shaped?"
Uesugi thought about it with genuine effort and shook his head firmly.
"No. His skin was completely normal. If anything it looked unusually pale and clean, smoother than most people."
Hiruzen could not remain still after that. He handed the immediate rescue coordination to Minato and left for the Shinobi Headquarters at speed, calling a Six Elder Stars meeting as soon as he arrived.
Yasushi was included in the session as a Dragon Vein transmigrator with the most complete future intelligence available.
Hiruzen summarized the incident, provided the key details about the Flying Thunder God marker analysis, and then gave a brief outline of Summoning: Impure World Reincarnation for the benefit of those unfamiliar.
"My concern is that the Otsutsuki may have acquired access to a technique comparable to Impure World Reincarnation. If Tobirama has been pulled back from the afterlife and is operating under their direction, they will not stop there. The First Hokage, the former Kage from every village, none of them would be left untouched if that kind of capability exists."
"Does anyone have a way to determine whether this is actually what happened?"
Every head turned toward Yasushi.
Yasushi shook his head without hesitation.
"The Otsutsuki have nothing like that. I fought them for years in the future and never once saw them use anything that disturbed the dead. I also never encountered any fighter matching the description you've given."
"My reading of the situation is that this is a new development. After arriving in the shinobi world, the Otsutsuki have had access to shinobi techniques they didn't bring with them. This is probably something they built by combining one of their own capabilities with something they picked up here."
The mood in the room turned toward Hiruzen with an uncomfortable edge.
The Raikage let it become direct.
"Konoha's people are always the ones behind these disasters," he said flatly, and struck the table hard enough to shatter the section in front of him.
"Senju Tobirama, of all the jutsu in the world he could have invented, chose to develop a technique for dragging back the dead. And now that evil has come back around to bite him. It seems fitting."
Hiruzen reddened considerably and had nothing useful to counter with. He changed direction.
"We are not here to assign blame. We need to decide how to respond."
No workable ideas surfaced. After the discussion had gone in circles long enough, Yasushi offered a suggestion with a pleasant smile.
"Actually, the solution is straightforward."
"If the concern is that the enemy will use Impure World Reincarnation to drag out the former shadows and turn them against us, the answer is to get to those former shadows first."
"Summon them ourselves. Before the enemy can."
The objections started immediately and came from everywhere.
But nothing better emerged from anywhere in the room, no matter how long they argued. In the end, the choice was between accepting an unsatisfying answer and accepting no answer at all.
The agreement reached was this: summon the former shadow leaders through whatever means were available before the Otsutsuki could. Once the war was resolved, they would be released back to rest in peace.
Everyone said they agreed reluctantly.
No one in the room said it out loud, but the agreement itself was the concession Yasushi had been waiting for.