Chapter 264: The Four-Tails and Five-Tails Fall
News of the battle at Shiya Harbor spread fast.
Neither Konoha nor the Mist made any effort to contain it. Why would they? Konoha still held the Nine-Tails jinchuriki. The Mist still held the Six-Tails jinchuriki. Madara was going to come knocking again no matter what anyone said or did — that much was obvious. Better to be ready for it than to pretend the problem didn't exist.
Fourth Mizukage Yagura didn't return to the Mist after the harbor. He simply turned his delegation around and walked into Konoha as a guest.
His reasoning was straightforward. Every available advantage needed to be gathered now, while there was still time, before Madara made his move on the Six-Tails. Sitting alone in the Mist waiting for the axe to fall wasn't a strategy.
So rather than burying the Three-Tails loss, Konoha and the Mist broadcast it. They made certain every major power heard — not just the Sand, Rock, and Cloud villages, but the daimyo and regional lords of the smaller nations as well. The full picture, shared openly.
The response came quickly. Led by the Fire Daimyo, a wave of noble houses opened their coffers without being asked. Gold, silver, and material supplies flowed into Konoha in a steady stream, enough to put genuine smiles on the faces of the two advisory elders who managed the village's finances.
The communication lines between Konoha and Iwagakure were running hot. The Rock Village envoy stationed in Konoha very nearly burned through his entire chakra reserve keeping up with the volume of messages, and had to be warned by the medical staff that he was approaching a dangerous threshold.
It wasn't hard to understand why. Six years ago, Uchiha Tatsuhata had hit Iwagakure hard — the Rinnegan stolen, Kitsuchi and a generation of elite jonin dead, losses the village still hadn't fully recovered from. Now word had come that the legendary Uchiha Madara himself intended to take the Four-Tails and Five-Tails, both of which Iwagakure currently held.
The Rock Village was rattled, from the youngest genin to the village council. And at the top of that anxious pile sat the Third Tsuchikage Onoki, who wore his dread openly on that weathered old face. Madara was not a name he had ever managed to make peace with. The man was a nightmare he had carried since childhood, and no amount of time had dulled it.
Twelve days after Shiya Harbor, Madara's silhouette appeared in the Rock ninja's sightlines.
Less than three minutes after that, white light fell from the sky.
Hyuga Ritsu landed on a mountain peak outside Iwagakure's walls. He hadn't quite managed the landing — he'd come in too fast and put too much force into the last step, and the rock beneath his feet fractured outward in a dense web of cracks that spread ten meters in every direction.
He straightened up and looked down at the village nestled in its ring of mountains.
"What a pain," he muttered, and let out a slow breath. "The thought of doing this same routine several more times over... I really don't want this job."
He meant it, mostly.
As Fifth Hokage, he had an obligation. He had to be seen opposing Madara at every turn, throwing himself into the fight, doing everything in his power to stop the Moon's Eye Plan from advancing. That image needed to hold. It had taken multiple rounds of negotiation with the Rock Village leadership before they'd accepted that he needed to come in person, which meant he had made this second trip to Iwagakure because the performance required it.
His actual reason for being here had nothing to do with protecting the Rock Village.
He was here to test whether he could arrange an opportunity to kill Madara outright.
He'd come alone. The Heavenly Transfer Technique's near-light-speed transmission put a physical load on the body that would have killed any ordinary ninja on the spot. No one else could make the trip. Even Yagura, for all his considerable power, would have been useless on this particular errand. Useless was actually the correct arrangement, given how Ritsu needed the day to go.
He took a few seconds to survey the battlefield below.
Roughly one fifth of Iwagakure had been leveled. The reanimated First Hokage, Second Hokage, Second Mizukage, Third Raikage, and Fourth Hokage were all in the field, and between the five of them they had the Four-Tails jinchuriki Roshi and the Five-Tails jinchuriki Han pinned against a wall.
Both jinchuriki had been pushed past their limit. Their human consciousness had been overwhelmed. What was down there now was the Four-Tails in full release — a massive simian beast, burning red as an open flame — and the Five-Tails, snow white, its shape somewhere between a dolphin and a horse, enormous and strange. The two beasts were fighting back to back against the relentless press of the reanimated figures.
Onoki was dealing with Madara personally. The old man was holding, barely, visibly grinding through his reserves to stay in the fight.
There was no sign of the Second Tsuchikage, the Third Kazekage, or the Fourth Kazekage. That was expected. Their souls were still bound to Ritsu's chains, held back from the Pure Land. Madara couldn't reanimate what he didn't have.
Ritsu stood for a moment, brow furrowed, genuinely working through the problem.
He was not a natural at this. Throwing a fight convincingly required a degree of deliberate sloppiness that went against every instinct he had. He'd need something to work with — a plausible reason to be held up.
A second later, the Heavenly Transfer activated.
He appeared at the center of the battlefield in the space between two blinks. The moment his feet touched the ground, golden chains erupted from his back and shot toward Madara like thrown spears.
When Onoki saw who had just appeared, his eyes went wide. For one brief, unguarded moment, the old man looked like he might actually weep.
It lasted about a second.
A pale yellow Susanoo tore up from the earth, filling Ritsu's vision with its massive shape. The great sword in its fist came down and smashed into the chains, knocking them aside with force that sent Ritsu himself sliding several meters back through the rubble.
He wasn't angry.
The figure blocking his path was reanimated Uchiha Tatsuhata.
Tatsuhata's actual body was safe in Konoha, well-preserved in its storage scroll. But Madara and Black Zetsu had always kept their own reserve — a portion of Tatsuhata's cells, quietly set aside against exactly this kind of need. It had been enough to bring him back.
Tatsuhata's reanimated eyes were burning. At Shiya Harbor he had shown himself briefly, but the fight between them had never happened — Madara had dissolved the technique and retreated before they could engage. This was an old grudge with nowhere to land.
Before the operation had begun, Madara had given Tatsuhata one specific instruction: do not join the hunt for the Four-Tails and Five-Tails. Hold back. Wait for Ritsu to arrive. That was his purpose today.
And here Ritsu was.
"Our fight isn't finished." The voice came from inside the Susanoo, low and tight with controlled fury. The pale yellow giant raised its sword and swung down with everything it had.
"You're already dead," Ritsu said. "Shouldn't you be at peace with that by now?"
He snapped into Sage Mode and met the descending blade head on with Sage Art: Nine Aspects Rotation Kill. The strike didn't just hold — it sent the sword flying upward, the rebound force ringing out across the ruins.
He schooled his face into something that looked like frustration.
Inwardly, he was almost cheerful.
Tatsuhata's interference was not a problem. It was a gift. A ready-made excuse, handed to him without any effort on his part. He didn't need to invent a reason to be held up — he had one standing right in front of him, wearing a Susanoo.
He reminded himself, to be fair: capturing Tatsuhata alive six years ago had required the Heavenly Transfer's element of surprise. A direct fight without that advantage would have taken dozens of exchanges even then. He'd never claimed otherwise.
That was six years ago, of course. At his current level, putting Tatsuhata down quickly was entirely within reach. But there was no reason to do it quickly today. Letting this drag out served two purposes at once: it gave Madara the space to take the Four-Tails and Five-Tails without interference, and it kept Madara and Black Zetsu's assessment of Ritsu's true combat ceiling right where he wanted it — a step behind reality.
Madara, for his part, had no interest in letting it drag out. He knew Tatsuhata couldn't hold Ritsu indefinitely. The Rock ninja were already close to finished. He needed to end this before the window closed.
He glanced once at Onoki, still airborne and still fighting, then fired a Yasaka Magatama from his azure Susanoo. The projectile forced Onoki to spend the chakra he couldn't afford, pushing him into Dust Release just to deflect it.
At the same moment, Madara's Susanoo drew its blade and brought it down on the Five-Tails from a distance. The sword connected with one of the beast's horns — not a clean cut, but enough. The Five-Tails staggered, lost its footing, its massive body lurching sideways through the rubble.
The Fourth Hokage took the opening.
A Rasenshuriken crossed the distance and hit the Five-Tails square in the face. The beast had been close to its limit already. That was enough. The enormous white shape shuddered and came apart, dispersing like smoke, and where it had been, a man in tattered red armor was left kneeling in the wreckage. Han. He was alive — the Five-Tails' chakra had seen to that, holding onto the thread of his life even as it abandoned him. That was the nature of a jinchuriki. The beast would erode them, wear down their years, draw out their strength. But it would also heal them, sustain them, refuse to let them die easily.
Han's defeat was the domino.
The Four-Tails had been struggling alone for only a moment before the First Hokage's Wood Style came down on it and finished the fight.
Both jinchuriki were down.
The Second Hokage and the Fourth Hokage moved simultaneously, lifting the unconscious bodies of Roshi and Han and vanishing from the field in the same instant.
The battle didn't wind down. It simply stopped.
Madara had no reason to stay. He had never had any interest in killing Onoki. The moment the jinchuriki were secured, he was gone.
Tatsuhata's departure was equally immediate — not because he was finished, but because he chose to be. The hatred was real. The desire to repay every debt with Ritsu was real. But the Moon's Eye Plan was a stronger current than either of those things, and it was pulling him away. He stepped back into a waiting White Zetsu and sank into the earth.
Ritsu's golden chains lunged after him and closed on empty air.
"Fast."
The chains retracted, curling back behind him. Through his Byakugan he could track both Madara and Tatsuhata clearly, watching their escape routes through the ground. The Mayfly Technique was no barrier to eyes that could see through anything. But no one alive knew that yet, and he had no intention of telling them.
He closed his Byakugan and turned around.
Onoki dropped from the air and landed hard. The sound his waist made on impact was not a good one — something had gone wrong in there, bone or joint, it wasn't clear which — and the old man let out a cry that was genuinely painful to hear.
Ritsu looked back at him. He kept his eyes closed this time. He had no particular desire to look at the inside of an elderly man's body.
"Tsuchikage," he said. "If your body can't take it anymore, you should consider stepping down while you can."
"Save the lecture." Onoki's voice was strained but defiant. He straightened up by degrees, jaw set. "I'm nowhere near the age where I need to be told to rest. I've got another ten years in me at least."
He wasn't wrong, as far as history went. In the world Ritsu remembered, Onoki had still been Third Tsuchikage a decade from now, present at the Fourth Shinobi World War. Whether that future still applied in this timeline was a different question. If Madara kept pushing through Iwagakure at this rate, the repeated strain might have other plans for the old man.
Ritsu let the thought go.
He considered, briefly, the question of whether the Sage of Six Paths — somewhere in the Pure Land — could watch the ninja world in real time. Whether Hagoromo was observing all of this right now, following every deviation from the history he had set in motion.
The thought passed without settling anywhere. It didn't change his plans. And given that Hagoromo had never once appeared to intervene, the most likely answer was that he simply couldn't maintain that kind of continuous observation from where he was.
Not worth the mental space.
"Hokage."
Onoki's voice had sharpened. He was glaring at Ritsu with the unvarnished irritation of someone who had been through too much today to maintain any diplomacy. "Explain yourself. How does a man you already captured and defeated manage to pin you down in a fight?"
Ritsu looked at him flatly. "Is that a challenge, Tsuchikage?"
"It's a question." Onoki heard himself and pulled back slightly, switching his tone with visible effort. "Not a challenge. I just don't understand it."
He bit down on his frustration. He knew perfectly well that Iwagakure had no position from which to make demands of Konoha right now. But Han and Roshi were gone, and the dead were still being counted, and the anger had to go somewhere.
"There's nothing to misunderstand," Ritsu said. "Tatsuhata caught me off guard when I captured him the first time. The Heavenly Transfer gave me the element of surprise. In a straight fight, I never had a quick path to victory against him. That was true six years ago, and it's still true now."
He said it with perfect composure, his expression calm and open, as though he were simply explaining something factual.
Onoki held his gaze for a moment longer, then looked away.
After a short silence, he spoke again. "Four-Tails and Five-Tails are both in Madara's hands now. That's five of nine. The Moon's Eye Plan is moving forward and I want to know — what exactly does Konoha intend to do about it? Are you just going to stand back and watch him collect all nine?"
He stared directly at Ritsu's face as he asked it, watching for any flicker he could read.
Ritsu spread his hands. "The problem isn't whether I can fight Madara. I can. The problem is that Madara is actively avoiding a direct confrontation with me. All I can do is keep chasing him and wait for an opening."
He paused, then added plainly: "Honestly? I don't think that opening is coming until all nine tailed beasts are in his possession and he has no choice but to step out in the open to execute the final stage. That's probably when I finally get the fight I need."