Saki's POV.
Saki felt herself sinking deeper into the dark water, her eyes fixed on the red moon peeking from behind the clouds high above the surface.
Her arms were completely mangled; she was honestly surprised they were even still attached to her body.
The impact had been brutal. She had fought Mito's Jinchūriki form in the past, so she knew exactly what to expect from their physical attacks. But she hadn't possessed enough information about the Bijuu-dama, or the creative ways a Jinchūriki could weaponize them.
So, she had miscalculated.
No, she corrected herself. I didn't miscalculate. I ignored a high-ranking shinobi.
And because of that mistake, she was sinking. Her entire body screamed in agony—multiple ribs were shattered, and she could feel the fractures along her spine.
She wanted to rest for a moment. Her body was begging for relief after hours of high-intensity fighting, and the rollercoaster of emotions she had experienced had finally taken its toll.
"Saki-nee, are you gonna break your promise again?"
Her closed eyes snapped open again.
The petals seals around her body glowed, and her forehead seal ignited with new light.
No. She would not let that happen again.
She ignited her six nodes in her body and her skin turned red glowing with seals and her eyes were transformed completely red.
The crushing depths began to violently boil as thick, red chakra seeped from her skin. Biting down hard on her own lip to activate her healing chakra, Saki forced her shattered, exhausted body to mend so she could move.
On the devastated shoreline, the Iwa commander swallowed hard. He watched the two Jinchūriki slowly turn their massive, bubbling heads toward him.
Tensing his muscles, he prepared to fight for his life and look for any opening to flee. He knew firsthand how unstable and bloodthirsty Jinchūriki were.
But instead of attacking, the beasts suddenly whipped their heads toward the ocean. With a deafening roar, they both began sprinting towards it.
The sea was bubbling, massive clouds of steam rising into the night sky.
The Iwa commander's eyes widened in absolute shock.
'She is still alive.'
But he didn't linger to watch. His work here was done. Casting one last, pitying glance at Sanji's bisected body, the Iwa commander flickered away, vanishing into the night.
******
Saki bent her knees against the seabed and violently launched herself upward. The sheer force of her takeoff generated massive underwater shockwaves, displacing the ocean and sending fresh, towering tidal waves rolling toward the shore.
She erupted from the surface in a fountain of boiling water. And—
Boom.
Before the beasts could even process her sudden reappearance, Saki drove a devastating punch directly into the Four-Tails' jaw. The impact was so severe it launched the massive monster straight up into the atmosphere.
Without missing a beat, she shot right after it—a blinding crimson streak ascending rapidly into the dark clouds.
Saki effortlessly weaved through the beast's thrashing, incoming tails. Reaching out, she grabbed one of the massive appendages, using her raw momentum to violently yank the Jinchūriki down toward her while propelling herself higher.
Clenching her fingers into a tight fist, the dense, crimson chakra violently condensed around her knuckles. With ruthless precision, she slammed her fist directly into the Four-Tails' head, the sheer force rattling its brain against its skull.
With a deafening sonic boom, the beast was launched backward like a cannonball, shooting across the horizon until it crashed into a distant mountain, embedding itself deep within the shattered rock.
Mid-air, she extended her empty hand to her side.
Miles below, her discarded odachi—still deeply embedded in a giant boulder—began to tremble. Its fiery blade had cooled, but the intricate seals wrapping its hilt suddenly flared to life, answering the magnetic pull of her chakra.
The trembling intensified until the massive blade wrenched itself free, shattering the boulder into dust in the process. As it shot upward into the sky, the metal ignited once more, blazing with a vicious scarlet hue.
Tearing through the clouds like a fiery meteor, the blade landed perfectly in her outstretched hand.
Without hesitation, she dove right after her target, a blinding crimson streak descending from the skies. Right behind her came the Two-Tails' Bijuu-dama beam, tearing the night sky apart as it relentlessly tracked her descent.
Saki completely ignored it.
The entire horizon was bathed in the apocalyptic red glow of their clash. Mid-dive, Saki leveled her odachi horizontally. The volatile crimson chakra violently extended from the steel, morphing into a massive, laser-sharp edge, and—
Slash.
She slashed the mountain cleanly in two. No—she didn't just cut it. The sheer, terrifying heat of her chakra melted through the solid stone like a hot knife through butter.
In a matter of seconds, the entire upper half of the mountain simply disintegrated into falling ash and molten rocks.
Saki's glowing red eyes locked onto the Four-Tails, whose massive body had been flung even further away by the blast.
'That's impossible!'
Genuine shock rippled through her. A slash capable of vaporizing a solid mountain hadn't been enough to completely bisect the beast. It had cut terrifyingly deep into its midsection, but the impossibly dense, boiling chakra of its cloak had somehow kept the other half intact.
Then, to her astonishment, the beast's dark chakra dragged the severed flesh closed, sealing the wound from within.
And sickeningly thick, white bones began to violently erupt from beneath its skin.
The exoskeleton formed a massive skeletal armor over its body.
Now it looked more like the Four-Tails than the jinchuriki. And it roared in greater fury.
Saki was violently snapped out of her musing when her sensory nodes sensed the Two-Tails' closing chakra.
"Tch."
She clicked her tongue.
Her lack of information about jinchuriki was becoming an annoyance she couldn't afford.
Biting down hard on her lip, Saki swallowed a mouthful of her own blood to force her body to keep healing. It seemed she was on a strict timer, too. Her supercharged body was generating a dangerous amount of internal heat, and her heart rate had violently skyrocketed the moment she ignited the nodes.
Ignoring the agonizing heat building within her chest, Saki launched herself at the monsters once again.
From a distance, the battle surrounding Uzushiogakure no longer looked like a fight between people. It had devolved into two streaks of bubbling, dark red chakra and one blazing streak of piercing crimson, violently and repeatedly clashing across the night sky.
Absolute destruction ensued wherever the three streaks collided. Saki's blazing odachi relentlessly sheared massive, jagged trenches through the terrain, while stray, condensed Bijuu-dama rained down around her, detonating across the ruined landscape like a meteor shower.
*****
Tsunade's POV – A few minutes earlier.
Tsunade and her team had taken a completely different, covert route toward Uzushiogakure.
After more than three hours of a relentless, continuous march, they finally reached the Land of Fire's border.
She looked out toward the dark, ominous clouds violently gathering over Uzushiogakure.
"So, where is the secret entrance?" she asked, her tone tight with worry. She looked around the clearing, seeing nothing but an old Torii gate and a cluster of large boulders.
"Tsunade-hime, please place the blood-sealed scroll here," Akimitsu replied, tapping a hidden compartment at the base of the Torii gate.
She nodded. Slicing her palm with a kunai, she smeared her blood across the open scroll before sliding it into the hidden slot.
A few moments later, complex Fūinjutsu seals crawled outward from the gate, illuminating the ground around them. In the very next second, the world warped, and they were standing inside a dark, underground tunnel.
Akimitsu looked at Tsunade. "This tunnel connects directly to the outskirts of Uzushio."
Tsunade nodded sharply. "Move!"
They began sprinting toward the end of the passage. Along the way, violent tremors rattled the tunnel walls, followed by the muffled, deafening boom of massive explosions.
'What the hell? What are they fighting out there?' Tsunade asked inwardly, aggressively pushing her speed to the limit.
Just as Tsunade and the others burst out of the cave exit, they witnessed something they would never forget.
A towering, blinding red blade was cleaving a distant mountain.
To Tsunade, it happened in slow motion. She watched as the solid stone melted on contact with the glowing blade, shearing cleanly through the rock before the entire upper half of the mountain simply vaporized into ash.
"What the hell..." Tsunade muttered, raising her arms to protect her face from the violent shockwaves and debris that blasted across the wasteland.
She wasn't the only one in shock; her entire team stood paralyzed, their eyes wide as they raised their guards against the gale.
As the dust finally settled, they saw three streaks of terrifying chakra violently clashing across the battlefield. Tsunade watched as the blazing crimson streak suddenly stopped and punched one of the dark red streaks. With a shattering sonic boom, the dark red streak was launched toward the sea.
A second later, the other red streak counterattacked, violently flinging the crimson one high into the sky. The streaks brawled furiously in mid-air before plunging like meteors toward the ocean.
Boom.
A massive tsunami erupted from the impact, but the streaks simply continued their world-breaking fight beneath the water.
Still wide-eyed, Tsunade forced her gaze away from the clash and looked toward the village itself.
Below, she saw the allied shinobi fiercely clashing with the invaders in the middle of the barren land. But when she fully registered the sheer, overwhelming numbers of the enemy forces, she gritted her teeth in fury.
A massive vanguard of several hundred shinobi was already splitting off, marching straight toward the vulnerable village.
"Akimitsu! Take two squads to reinforce the village walls. The rest, follow me!" Tsunade commanded.
"Hai!"
Swallowing their soldier pills for a burst of stamina, the Konoha shinobi flickered away into the fray.
As Tsunade closed in on the main battlefield, the sheer chaos of the war hit her. She saw devastating jutsu clashing violently in the air. Massive, golden chakra chains erupted from the ground, weaving together to form a solid wall that mercilessly sliced through everything in its path.
But what made her breath hitch were the explosions. She watched Uzushio shinobi intentionally diving into the densest enemy ranks before violently detonating. Some were shadow clones, but the blood and gore confirmed that many were real, breathing shinobi sacrificing themselves to hold the line.
Her heart ached at the horrific scene.
Gritting her teeth, Tsunade quickly bit down on her thumb. She smeared the fresh blood across her palm and slammed her hands together in a rapid, complex series of signs.
"Summoning Jutsu!"
She slammed her palm into the earth. With a massive, earth-shaking puff of white smoke, a towering giant slug materialized on the battlefield—Katsuyu.
"No one will die here on my watch," Tsunade declared, standing fiercely atop the massive summon.
Beneath her, Katsuyu instantly dissolved, splitting into countless miniature slugs that slithered rapidly across the battlefield to locate the wounded.
Wasting no time, Tsunade launched herself high into the air, crashing down amidst the enemy ranks with a devastating axe kick. The sheer force of her heel shattered the earth, cratering the ground and sending shinobi flying. She immediately dropped into a brutal rhythm—shattering one ninja's ribs with a punch and launching another away with a sweeping kick. She was making frighteningly easy work of them.
Suddenly, a strike aimed for her blind spot. But before Tsunade even had to react, an oversized blade violently cleaved the attacker in two, the massive weapon continuing its path in a straight, bloody line.
Tsunade glanced up to find the owner of the blade. A smirk pulled at the corner of her lips.
"It seems they did quite a number on you, Sakuko," Tsunade noted, taking in the other woman's ragged state—torn clothes, beaten body, and shallow cuts littering her skin.
"Ahh... shut up, will ya?" Sakuko shot back with an unexpectedly annoyed expression. This invasion had clearly taken its toll on her.
The two kunoichi closed the distance, meeting face-to-face in the center of the slaughter. Without missing a beat, they bumped their fists together.
"Like old times?" Tsunade asked.
"Like old times."
They immediately spun, pressing their backs against each other. Sakuko extended her empty hand, and her massive, bloodied blade instantly shot backward through the air, slapping perfectly into her grip.
"That's so convenient. I really need that seal," Tsunade casually remarked as she roundhouse-kicked an Iwa ninja completely over the horizon.
"Just ask Sensei," Sakuko replied nonchalantly, smoothly bisecting two Kiri shinobi who got too close.
"Like hell I would. That woman will just say something ridiculous like, 'Land a blow on me first,' or something similar."
As they casually chatted, the two of them carved a massive, expanding circle of empty space amidst the enemy army, mercilessly butchering anyone foolish enough to step inside it.
"By the way, where is she?" Tsunade asked, ducking under a stray kunai. "I thought she would be the first one I'd see in a battle like this."
Suddenly, an object—no, a massive figure—violently crashed into the earth right beside them. It was completely engulfed in blue flames, intricately laced with black markings.
Tsunade and Sakuko's hair immediately stood on end from the sheer, suffocating chakra. Instinctively, they jumped back-to-back, raising their guards.
But before they could even process the monster, an odachi came tearing through the sky, flying directly at it.
A split second later, a second figure crashed into the crater. It was Saki. She was covered in her own blood, sporting terrifying, fatal injuries—but in the blink of an eye, the wounds violently knit themselves back together.
Without skipping a beat, she launched herself straight back into the sky, rocketing toward the Four-Tails that had just swatted her down.
The blue-flamed Two-Tails instantly recovered and shot into the air to follow her, with Saki's blazing red blade magnetically trailing right behind them.
Tsunade stood completely frozen in the middle of the battlefield, her jaw hanging wide open.
"Now I'm sure of it," Tsunade muttered, staring up at the streaks in the sky. "That woman is fucking crazy."
But despite her casual tone, her hands were trembling slightly.
******
Hello there,
Finally it's reaching its end just two or three chapters more and the birth arc will be finished.
Before that I would like to clear that Saki is using 8 inner gates, if you still hasn't figured that out yet.
She just don't know yet.