The Suna Front – Land of Rivers
The battlefield in the Land of Rivers was a storm of iron and lightning.
Sakumo Hatake had lightning crackling around his body, and his short sword was not the standard blue, but a vibrant purple lightning.
The Third Kazekage, revered as the strongest in Suna's history, was being pushed to the absolute brink. Sakumo was simply too fast. Every time the Kazekage raised his Iron Sand, Sakumo would slice clean through it, ignoring the density of the iron entirely.
"Damn you, Sakumo!" the Kazekage cursed, barely weaving away from a decapitating strike. He couldn't even track Sakumo's movements with his eyes.
Sakumo vanished, appearing directly in front of the Kazekage for a finishing slash.
But the Kazekage's desperation birthed a trap. The Iron Sand that had been scattered on the ground suddenly surged upward. It gripped Sakumo's feet with a crushing hold, crawling rapidly up his ankles and rooting him immovably to the earth.
"Got you!" the Kazekage roared. He materialized a massive, jagged spike of Iron Sand and drove it straight through Sakumo's chest.
For a heartbeat, the Kazekage thought he had won. But Sakumo didn't bleed.
Instead, the impaled body crackled violently and burst into a blinding explosion of purple lightning.
"A Lightning Clone?!"
The high-voltage surge washed over the Kazekage, short-circuiting his nervous system and paralyzing his muscles for a crucial, fatal second.
That was all the real Sakumo needed.
Standing directly behind the paralyzed Kazekage, Sakumo drove his short sword—bathed in humming purple lightning—straight through the Kage's back, the blade protruding from his chest. Sakumo coldly increased the voltage. The violent surge of lightning obliterated the Kazekage's heart instantly.
The strongest Kazekage fell dead to the mud.
A mile away on the same battlefield.
Tsunade Senju, shrouded in the radiant, golden Nine-Tails Chakra Mode, commanded the battlefield with her presence alone. She had created a dozen golden shadow clones, and they were tearing through the Suna forces with absolute, devastating brute force.
Her main body was locked in combat with Suna's elite puppeteer duo—the son and daughter-in-law of Chiyo (Sasori's parents).
All around them, Katsuyu's summoned slugs were slithering over the wounded Konoha shinobi, applying rapid healing. For the Suna forces, Tsunade was their ultimate nightmare. She was a walking antidote; their deadly poisons were instantly neutralized by her Nine-Tails-enhanced healing, and their intricate puppets were shattered into splinters before they could even trigger their hidden mechanisms.
Tsunade looked at the puppeteer duo. She knew Suna had acquired Ren's Type-2 Healing Tags. If she just injured them, they could use the tags to recover.
"Everyone, fall back!" Tsunade's voice echoed through the slugs.
The Konoha shinobi scattered instantly.
Tsunade raised her hand. Chakra condensed rapidly in her palm, forming a dense, dark purple sphere surrounded by a glowing ring—Great Spiraling Ring.
Tsunade hurled the purple-ringed sphere.
The resulting explosion was blinding. A dome of pure, destructive light consumed the puppeteer duo. When the light faded, there was nothing left. No bodies, no blood, no chance for a Type-2 tag to save them.
Without pausing, Tsunade turned her glowing eyes toward the center of the battlefield, where the One-Tail, Shukaku, was wreaking havoc.
"Clear the area around the One-Tail!" Tsunade commanded through the slug.
As her allies retreated to a safe distance, Tsunade gathered even more chakra, manifesting an even larger Great Spiraling Ring. The sheer density of the purple sphere cracked the earth beneath her feet.
She launched the sphere directly at the One-Tail.
The blast shook the Land of Rivers. A gargantuan crater was carved into the earth, vaporizing the One-Tail and instantly killing its Jinchuriki, Bunpuku.
The Suna Front was secured.
The Iwa Front – Land of Grass
While the Sand front was a decisive victory for Konoha, the battle in the Land of Grass was a grueling fight for survival.
Jiraiya, fully immersed in Sage Mode with Fukasaku and Shima perched on his shoulders, flipped backward, narrowly dodging a brilliant white beam.
"Particle Style: Atomic Dismantling Jutsu!" Onoki shouted, hovering high above the battlefield. The beam erased a swath of the forest into nothingness.
Onoki gritted his teeth, panting. Jiraiya was too slippery. If he kept firing Particle Style and missing, he would lose the battle to sheer chakra exhaustion. He needed to change his tactics.
Onoki descended rapidly. He clapped his hands together, creating a massive, towering Rock Golem. Levitating high above Jiraiya, Onoki touched the golem.
"Added-Weight Rock Jutsu!"
The golem's density multiplied exponentially. The colossal stone titan plummeted from the sky, aiming a devastating punch directly at Jiraiya. The sheer gravity of the attack was unavoidable.
The golem crashed down, completely burying Jiraiya beneath hundreds of tons of hyper-dense rubble.
Onoki landed on the grass, gasping for breath, assuming the enemy was crushed.
Suddenly, the earth beneath Onoki exploded. Jiraiya burst from the ground, his fist coated in natural energy, and delivered a devastating uppercut squarely to Onoki's chin.
The Tsuchikage was launched skyward, blood flying from his mouth.
Mid-air, Onoki forced himself to stabilize, his hands glowing to fire another Particle Style. But abruptly, the world around him warped. The sky vanished, replaced by a surreal, rippling dimension. Four giant toads surrounded him, trapping him in an illusory cube.
Toad Singing. Jiraiya had used Fukasaku and Shima's auditory genjutsu to paralyze the Tsuchikage's mind.
Below, Jiraiya leaped into the air, a kunai drawn, aiming straight for Onoki's chest to end the war.
But Iwa ninja were fiercely loyal.
An elite ninja from the Explosion Corps intercepted Jiraiya mid-air, forcing the Toad Sage to block and abort the fatal strike. Simultaneously, dozens of Iwa shinobi swarmed Jiraiya, engaging him in a desperate, chaotic melee.
One of the Iwa Jonin managed to reach Onoki; he disrupted his chakra network and snapped him out of the genjutsu.
Onoki's eyes snapped open. He didn't waste a millisecond. He reached into his robes, pulled out a blue piece of paper, and slapped Ren's Type-2 Healing Tag onto his chest.
HUMMM.
His shattered jaw and internal injuries healed instantly, and his chakra reserves spiked back to thirty percent.
Looking down, Onoki saw Jiraiya bogged down, fighting off the swarm of dozens of Iwa ninjas. The Tsuchikage formed the deadly transparent cube between his palms.
"Die! Particle Style!"
The beam of molecular erasure shot down, aimed directly at the center of the melee.
At the last possible microsecond, Jiraiya's Sage senses screamed. He violently twisted his body to the right.
He dodged a fatal hit to his torso, but the beam clipped his left side. In an instant, Jiraiya's entire left arm was disintegrated into dust.
The beam didn't stop there; it completely vaporized four of the Iwa ninjas who had been holding Jiraiya down.
But the remaining Iwa shinobi didn't even flinch at the death of their comrades. Seeing one of the Legendary Sannin crippled and bleeding heavily from his missing limb, they roared and stepped forward for the kill.
"Don't count the boy out yet!" Pa Toad (Fukasaku) croaked from Jiraiya's right shoulder.
A hyper-pressurized jet of water shot from the toad's mouth like a laser scalpel, cleanly slicing the two closest Iwa ninjas completely in half.
Before the rest of the Iwa forces could recover and press their attack, the forest erupted.
Glowing, golden chains shot out from the tree line. The Adamantine Sealing Chains whipped through the air, wrapping tightly around the remaining Iwa ninjas, binding them completely and rendering them immobile.
From the shadows of the trees, Kushina Uzumaki stepped onto the battlefield, her hands held in the Tiger seal controlling the chains.
High above, Onoki hovered, clutching his chest. He looked at the golden chains, then at Kushina.
His heart sank. If this Uzumaki girl was here, it meant their Five-Tails Jinchuriki, Han—had been entirely neutralized.
Onoki ground his teeth together, the bitter taste of defeat in his mouth.
"All forces!" Onoki's voice boomed over the battlefield. "Retreat!"
We see a place with a lot of cuboid structures, and we see Obito kneeling in front of a dead body whose lower half was obliterated in an explosion. It was Rin Nohara, and both of Obito's eyes were Mangekyou. He was in the Kamui dimension.
Suddenly, a portal appeared behind Obito at some distance, and from that portal stepped a figure looking like a monk in white robes.
A/N: I'll try my best to publish new chapters regularly from next week.