Facts proved that having the advantage of foresight led to accurate judgments of the situation. But even without foresight, Higashino Makoto would never have believed that Kirigakure would remain obedient forever.
Among the Five Great Shinobi Villages: Sunagakure had puppets and poison; Iwagakure had numbers and group ninjutsu; Kumogakure had brute force and zero-cost looting; Konohagakure had… a deep foundation—at critical moments, someone extraordinary would always emerge.
So what did Kirigakure have? They had lunatics—experts at killing each other.
The most mysterious of the Five Great Shinobi Villages, Kirigakure had long enforced an extremely closed policy, so very little information ever leaked out.
However, based on the limited intelligence available, they had been carrying out the so-called Blood Mist policy internally. The pressure caused by their brutal internal struggles was already on the verge of exploding. If they were going to blow something up, better to blow up others than themselves.
At this moment, his four opponents were all battered by war and had no cards left in hand. It was precisely the best time to throw bombs and harvest at double the gains.
Finally, one month after the Battle of Kannabi Bridge—namely, in August of Konoha Year 49—Kirigakure decided to join this delightful game of slaughter.
They landed along the eastern coast of the Land of Fire and brazenly launched an invasion of Konohagakure. In an instant, the eastern coastal defenses collapsed; civilians were killed or displaced, towns were destroyed, and the situation became extremely dire.
These madmen displayed an incomparable lust for killing, as if their invasion was not for profit at all, but purely to vent their bloodthirsty desires.
But Konohagakure could no longer redeploy enough shinobi forces from other fronts.
The Third Hokage, Sarutobi Hiruzen, convened an emergency meeting of the major clans overnight and produced the final solution.
Close the gates—release the Uchiha.
Use the fire-style–specialist Uchiha to deal with the water-style–specialist Kirigakure. The Uchiha had no objections: this was the perfect opportunity for the strongest shinobi clan to rack up merit. As for elemental advantage? What was that, anyway?
Thus, with Uchiha shinobi as the main force, the Hyūga as support, and the reserves contributed by the other clans, an emergency unit was hastily assembled and dispatched to the eastern front.
To replenish enough strength, the village—aside from squeezing the civilian shinobi for more—even threw many newcomers who had only graduated a few years ago onto the battlefield again.
Other than leaving behind the minimum force to guard the village itself, every bit of manpower they could squeeze out had already been wrung dry. Fighting on multiple fronts had left Konohagakure's forces severely short.
In the end, in order to balance the competition between Konohagakure's two great noble clans, the Third Hokage had no choice but to hand the eastern-front command over to Orochimaru.
Although Iwagakure had already agreed to peace talks under pressure, it had not signed a peace treaty. Coupled with Kumogakure's offensive, Jiraiya and Namikaze Minato simply could not get away.
Orochimaru had long since seen through everything. Although his mind was no longer on the war, he did not refuse. On the contrary, he was quite happy to take on this burden. Compared with the single-variety Sunagakure, the bloodline types Kirigakure possessed were simply far too many.
The Kaguya Clan's Shikotsumyaku, the Yuki Clan's Ice Release, the Hōzuki Clan's Hydrification Technique, the Hoshigaki Clan's Body of a Human Shark…
All were first-rate experimental materials.
Splendid!!
Kirigakure's entry made the shinobi war situation—one that had been gradually becoming clear—turn murky and hard to read once again.
Not only that: when they invaded Konohagakure, they also dispatched forces into the southern seas at the same time. Using the Land of Tea's peninsula as a springboard, they set their sights on the wealthy southern coastal region of the Land of Wind.
In his previous life, Naruto fans had speculated that Kirigakure crossed the ocean and launched an invasion of Sunagakure from the other side of the planet, and that a war broke out between the two sides.
But that was very unrealistic, because it was simply too far. The Earth where the ninja world was located was not small, and the Five Great Nations plus the many small nations were almost all concentrated in a small region.
For Kirigakure to invade Sunagakure, they only needed to head west across the Rainbow Sea, then directly establish a foothold in the Land of Tea, where there was no shinobi village power.
The Land of Tea was a vassal state of the Land of Fire, but Konohagakure had no time at all to protect them right now.
As for going east to the other side of the planet, not only was it distant, it also required detouring around two other continents—one large and one small—vast and barren.
Those two continents were almost wastelands. Only a small number of humans lived on them, and their power styles and cultural customs were completely different from the mainstream world.
The ninja world was not ancient times. Maritime technology was well developed, so it was naturally not unfamiliar with those places. It was just that the two continents truly offered little in the way of benefits, so no nation had any interest in them.
As for why this situation existed, the people of the ninja world did not know. Curious explorers had gone there in the past to investigate, but in the end they still failed to figure out the reason.
Perhaps only Ōtsutsuki Kaguya and her three sons—who had long since lost their human forms—knew the full story.
Higashino Makoto had studied the geography of the ninja world and had vaguely guessed the answer.
They had certainly been drained dry by the God Tree, while the regions where the ninja world's large and small nations were located represented the planet's final remnant of vitality. Even so, the Land of Wind, the largest by area, was still overwhelmingly an endless desert.
Otherwise, what did you think the Ōtsutsuki clan came to the ninja world to plant trees for—reforestation?
Faced with Kirigakure's senseless attacks, Sunagakure was also furious. They immediately mobilized their forces and, with Pakura as the commander, delivered a head-on blow to this group of lunatics.
If we can't beat Konohagakure, can't we still beat you, Kirigakure?
Fire Release is countered by Water Release? Pakura stated plainly that she used Scorch Release, guaranteeing them a full-service mummification package—from sauna to drying.
For a time, countless Kirigakure shinobi experienced a level of dryness and freshness they had never known in their lives. The Third Shinobi World War, which had already been showing signs of stabilizing, once again fell into chaos.
…
The chaotic war continued.
Kirigakure had originally believed that Konohagakure was already exhausted and powerless to respond to their sudden invasion. But after only a few days of celebration, they were brutally beaten by Konohagakure forces led by the Uchiha and Hyūga clans.
Elemental disadvantage? The Uchiha shinobi stated that as long as you were strong enough, elemental disadvantage did not affect the overall situation.
Hiding in Mist Technique to block vision? The Hyūga clan stated that before the Byakugan, there was nowhere to hide.
Kirigakure's shinobi immediately became just like those of the other villages—hating these "wallhack" users to the bone, yet desperately wanting them as well. As a result, they began secretly setting their sights on the Byakugan, searching the battlefield for members of the Hyūga main family.
At the same time, in order to turn the tide of battle, they brought out the strongest trump card in their hand: the Seven Ninja Swordsmen of the Mist.
Seven powerful shinobi of differing appearances and personalities, each wielding a different bizarre weapon, began to hunt freely across the eastern front.
They neither accepted one another nor stopped competing with each other, treating the war entirely as a pleasurable game.
Even when they ran into a rookie Konohagakure squad, the seven of them would trail behind like cats toying with mice, playing around for a long while. In the end, they would even turn on each other repeatedly over the question of who got the kill.
Kill efficiency? The Mizukage's orders? To hell with them.
And so they ran into a strange genin wearing a green one-piece bodysuit and were beaten into complete disarray—some fled, others defected.
In October of Konoha Year 49, Might Duy died in battle.
Konohagakure's upper leadership was overjoyed for a time. They had never expected such a windfall—trading the life of a single genin for four members of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen of the Mist. A massive profit, profit beyond measure.
At the same time, they began to take the Eight Gates seriously. After research, they discovered that this forbidden technique truly was not something a normal person could train. It took an extremely long time, required extraordinarily high taijutsu talent and ultimate endurance, and even after training for decades, results were not guaranteed. Worse still, it was easy to train oneself to death. It had no general applicability at all.
Fortunately, as the inheritor of this technique, Might Guy received key attention from the village.
Might Duy, with his own life, not only greatly alleviated the pressure on the eastern front, but also kicked open a future for his son.
Time raced forward amid the flames of war, and soon a new year arrived.
Unwilling to give up, Kirigakure—under the manipulation of certain wills—quietly prepared another major move. They planned to deploy the Three-Tails into Konohagakure.
The result was still failure. Aside from the death of a worthless Konohagakure female medical-nin, they achieved none of their objectives.
Not only that, Kirigakure temporarily lost the Three-Tails and sacrificed nearly their entire corps of elite ANBU operatives. A catastrophic loss—loss beyond measure.
But these people did not know that, under someone's deliberate arrangement, they had personally destroyed the light of a Uchiha youth, turning a kind child completely to darkness, who from then on became the operations director of a city of conspiracies layered within rings.
At the end of February of Konoha Year 50, the Konohagakure kunoichi Nohara Rin was killed in action.
The one who killed her was: the Konohagakure shinobi Hatake Kakashi.
The faint glimmer of light that had just been born once again turned gray. He knew that his teammate had used his hand to complete her suicide, in order to thwart Kirigakure's plot.
But precisely because of this, his pain only deepened. Even Rin, whose strength was unremarkable, possessed firmer conviction and courage than he did.
---
I will post some extra Chapters in Patreon, you can check it out. >> patreon.com/TitoVillar
---