The sky above Tanzaku Quarters wasn't falling; it was being constricted.
Massive purple scales ground against ancient masonry, a sound like the earth itself grinding its teeth. The main keep of Tanzaku Castle—a monument that had stood through three Great Ninja Wars—shuddered. A spire that had housed shoguns and daimyo snapped off like a dry twig, plummeting toward the courtyard below.
Dust billowed out, thick and choking, smelling of pulverized limestone and rot.
Tsunade didn't look up. She didn't look at the history being erased. She looked at the blood on her thumb.
A minute ago, the sight of it would have paralyzed her. It would have sent her spiraling into the black static of panic, freezing her lungs while Kabuto mocked her. But the fear had burned away, replaced by a cold, furious clarity. Naruto was bleeding on the pavement. Jiraiya was drugged and sluggish. Shizune was barely standing.
The castle groaned, a deep, structural scream as Orochimaru's summoned monstrosity tightened its coils.
Tsunade bit down.
She ignored Jiraiya shouting for her to stop.
Funny how you always call me Hime when you need something.
She tore the skin of her thumb without ceremony. There was no speech. No dramatic declaration of will. She slammed her hand onto the broken cobblestones. The connection didn't snap into place; it burst. She felt the chakra leave her coils not as a stream, but as a deluge, wet and heavy, like she had just severed a major artery in the earth itself.
"Summoning Jutsu!"
The smoke didn't poof; it exploded outward, heavy and wet.
Most shinobi summoned Katsuyu as a single, towering entity—a mountain of acid and flesh to crush armies. Tsunade didn't need a mountain. She needed a shield.
"Scatter," Tsunade ordered.
The massive form of the Slug Queen didn't fully materialize. Instead, she arrived in a thousand pieces—a deluge of white and blue slime that flooded the courtyard instantly.
"Yes, Tsunade-sama!" the hive-mind voice echoed in her head, calm and sterile.
The falling spire crashed into the courtyard. But it didn't hit the ground. It didn't crush Shizune or the unconscious brat. It landed with a wet thud onto a cushion of smaller slugs that had already swarmed over the vulnerable bodies, their bodies hardening into rubbery, chakra-reinforced domes.
Stone shattered. The slugs didn't.
Tsunade stood amidst the ruin, her haori snapping in the wind generated by the collapsing keep. Around her, the castle was dying. The great timber supports were splintering under the snake's weight. The history of the Land of Fire—the legacy of the Senju clan's architectural influence, the pride of the Tanzaku lords—was being turned into rubble.
She looked at it.
It felt like looking at a corpse she was being asked to mourn.
Let it fall, she thought, the venom in her mind matching the acid in her summon.
The village elders would have wept. The Third Hokage would have talked about the cultural tragedy, about the loss of a symbol. They loved their symbols. They loved their stone faces and their monuments. They loved them so much they fed children into the mortar to keep them standing.
Tsunade watched a priceless tapestry flutter out of a broken window and get trampled into the mud by a falling rock.
She didn't care. Not even a little.
"Katsuyu," Tsunade said, her voice cutting through the roar of destruction. "Ignore the structure. If it's made of wood or stone, let it burn. Cover the people. Only the people."
"Understood. Splitting division count: four hundred and rising."
Tsunade wiped the blood from her lip. The castle collapsed inward with a final, thundering crash, sending a cloud of debris rushing toward them. She didn't flinch. She stepped in front of Naruto's unconscious body, raising a fist that glowed with blue chakra.
If history wanted to crush them, she would punch history in the teeth.
The drug was still thick in Jiraiya's blood, turning the world into a smear of oil and watercolor, but he didn't need clear vision to feel the malice. It radiated off Orochimaru like heat off pavement.
Orochimaru wasn't just fighting. He was reveling.
Standing atop the highest remaining parapet, his long black hair whipping in the updraft of the collapsing keep, Orochimaru looked terrifyingly young. The pain that had plagued him since the invasion—the rot in his arms, the feverish desperation—seemed to have evaporated. He was loose. Fluid.
He bit his thumb. The blood sprayed in a wide, theatrical arc.
"Come forth!"
His ears popped as the air pressure plummeted, a vacuum forming around his bloodied thumb. Before the snake even materialized, the smell hit him—the thick, rotten-egg stench of sulfur and ancient, dry scales from the Thunder Caverns, filling his lungs like sweet oxygen
The air pressure dropped instantly. The smell of old stone and dust was obliterated by a sulfurous stench—the scent of the Ryūchi Thunder Caverns.
Manda didn't emerge; he erupted.
The purple colossus burst from the castle's foundation, shattering the retaining wall. The great snake didn't strike immediately; he coiled. He wrapped his massive body around the main tower like a lover, scales grinding against frescoes that were older than the village itself.
Orochimaru laughed. It wasn't the jagged cackle of a villain in a play; it was soft, breathless, and almost fond.
"Do you know how long this place has been begging to die?" Orochimaru shouted, his voice carrying over the groan of buckling timber.
Manda squeezed.
The mural of the First Daimyo exploded into dust. Banners bearing the crest of the Fire Country snapped and fluttered down into the abyss. Orochimaru watched it fall with manic delight. This wasn't rage. It was the euphoric release of a man who realized that if he couldn't own the world, he could at least enjoy breaking it.
And Hime- Tsunade, already mid-summon.
"Dammit."
Jiraiya gritted his teeth, forcing his sluggish hands together. The drug made his chakra feel like mud, but he pushed through it.
"You always were a drama queen," Jiraiya wheezed.
Jiraiya slammed his hands down.
"Summoning Jutsu!"
The drug made his chakra feel like sludge, thick and resisting the flow. He didn't just release the seal; he had to mentally grab the summoning formula and wrench it sideways, hauling the spatial tear to the left like a man dragging a fishing net against a riptide.
Gravity lurched. A massive puff of white smoke exploded in the lower courtyard, but Jiraiya didn't let the summon take full form randomly. He wrenched the chakra tether, forcing the arrival point twenty meters to the left.
Gamabunta materialized in the air.
"Jiraiya! You're rusty!" the Toad Boss roared, a pipe clenched in his teeth.
"Land soft!" Jiraiya yelled back.
Gamabunta grunted, twisting his massive bulk in mid-air. He didn't crash down like a kaiju; he landed in a deep crouch, his webbed feet digging into the stone to arrest his momentum. He slammed down into an ornamental garden—a space Jiraiya had calculated was empty of refugees.
The impact shook the teeth in Jiraiya's skull, but no buildings collapsed. No civilians were crushed.
Gamabunta drew his massive blade, the dosu, with a metallic ring that cut through the chaos.
Jiraiya stood on the toad's head, swaying slightly, trying to blink away the double vision. He looked across the ruin.
It was the Three-Way Deadlock2, finally realized in full scale, but the geometry was all wrong.
To his right, Tsunade stood on the ground, surrounded by the fractal slime of Katsuyu3. She wasn't looking at the enemy. She wasn't looking at the castle. She was staring at her hands, directing the slugs to cover the bodies of the wounded. She didn't care if the castle burned to ash, as long as the people inside breathed.
Above him, Orochimaru stood on Manda's snout, preening. He wanted the spectacle. He wanted the sky to fall so he could watch the dust settle.
And here was Jiraiya, in the middle, standing on a toad that represented the bridge between the swamp and the divine4. He was half-focused on fighting the monster in front of him, and half-focused on making sure the monster didn't fall on the orphanage behind him.
"Boss," Jiraiya muttered, wiping sweat from his eyes. "Try to keep the snake away from the east wing. There are kids there."
Gamabunta blew a smoke ring that drifted over the battlefield. "You owe me a drink for this, pervert."
A final groan echoed from the keep.
Manda tightened his grip one last time. The central support pillar snapped. The great watchtower of Tanzaku Castle—the symbol of the region's endurance—tilted lazily and began to fall.
It crashed into the courtyard with the force of a meteor.
Debris sprayed outward like shrapnel. A cloud of dust swallowed the world.
Through the haze, Jiraiya saw the white forms of Katsuyu's divisions. They didn't run. They leaped toward the civilians. As the stones fell, the slugs expanded, wrapping around men, women, and children like living gel, absorbing the impact of tons of rock.
When the dust cleared, the castle was gone. A mountain of rubble stood in its place.
But under the rubble, faint blue lights glowed—the chakra of the slugs, holding the weight.
Tsunade stood in the center of the destruction. She didn't flinch. She didn't look at the ruin of her grandfather's era. She stepped forward, her green coat bright against the gray dust.
The legacy was over. The triage had begun.