The night over the contested borderlands was a taut, black canvas, punctured only by the pinprick lights of distant watchfires and the cold, indifferent stars. In a hidden observation post nestled high in the skeletal branches of a fire-scorched tree, two Konoha scouts leaned into their Chakra fields. The younger one, a chunin named Kenta, adjusted the chakra-focused lens, his brow furrowed.
"Squad Leader," he whispered, his voice tight. "I'm getting something… strange."
His superior, a grizzled jounin named Matsu with a face like old leather, didn't look up from his map. "Strange how? Patrol? Raiding party?"
"No, sir. That's just it." Kenta's finger traced a line on the glowing chart. "It's a single signature. And it's… dense. Impossibly dense. Reading like a battalion's worth of chakra compressed into one point." He tapped the screen. "And it's moving. Fast. Deliberate. Heading straight for the heart of the Suna forward positions."
Matsu finally looked up, his eyes narrowing. He felt it. The chakra signature was a brilliant burning with an intensity that defied all known parameters. It wasn't flickering like a shinobi using Body Flicker; it was a constant, blazing beacon, moving with the unstoppable momentum of a landslide.
"That's not a scout," Matsu murmured, a cold dread trickling down his spine. "And that's no suicide run. How can you not recognise the chakra, it's the Hokage!"
The sheer, arrogant power of it was baffling. They were trained to track stealth, to identify squads by their chakra composition. This was neither stealthy nor composite. It was a statement.
=====
Twenty miles east, in a fortified Sand outpost carved into a mesa, the mood was one of bored confidence. The commander, a Suna jounin named Baki, sipped bitter tea from a tin cup. A scout, dusty and panting, had just delivered his report.
"A single chakra source, Commander. Closing on our perimeter. Fast."
Baki snorted, setting his cup down with a clink.
"Another one of Konoha's desperate dogs. A message runner, maybe. Or some fool on a suicide mission to take out a supply tent." He waved a dismissive hand.
"Send a squad. Crush him. I want his head on a pike by dawn as a warning."
The scout hesitated. "Sir… the intensity of the signature… it's unlike anything I've ever felt."
"Probably a malfunctioning chakra pill or a poorly sealed scroll he's carrying," Baki retorted, his patience thinning. "Or are you scared of one man?"
The scout bowed and retreated. Baki shook his head. Konoha was on its last legs, sending lone martyrs to die pointless deaths. It was almost pathetic.
=====
The phantom moved through the desert night. Hiruzen was a wisp of darkness, his passage marked not by sound, but by the subtle rewriting of the landscape itself. As a squad of five Suna shinobi fanned out to intercept him, he didn't alter his course. His hands, hidden in the folds of his gear, formed a single, subtle seal.
The ground beneath the lead Suna ninja's feet, seemingly solid sand, instantly turned to sucking, viscous mud.
"Gloop."
The man sank to his waist in an instant, his startled cry cut short as the mud hardened just as quickly into solid, unyielding stone, trapping him like a fossil. Earth Release: Double Decapitation Technique.
The others froze, their eyes wide. A cloud of thick, genjutsu-laced mist—a simple technique, but perfected to an art form—billowed from nowhere, hissing around them.
It wasn't to hide him; it was to disorient them, to erase any trail he never left. In the two seconds they were blinded, coughing and swatting at the phantom smoke, he was already a kilometre past them, a ghost they never even glimpsed.
The first minor camp, a relay station of three tents and a dozen shinobi, was his true destination. They had barely registered the alarm from the trapped squad before he was among them.
He didn't announce his presence. He simply unmade them.
A Suna shinobi, drawing a kunai, found the air in his lungs turning to water. He collapsed, gagging, drowning on dry land as Hiruzen passed—Water Release: Water Pillar Technique.
Another, leaping from a tent with hands ablaze with wind chakra, was met by a wall of earth that erupted from the ground and then, impossibly, caught fire, the flaming rocks slamming into him and pinning him to the tent, which instantly became a funeral pyre. The combination was seamless, effortless—Earth and Fire Release: Fist Rock Technique, ignited.
It was over in less than ten seconds. No grand explosions, no roaring fireballs. Just a series of precise, elemental readjustments. A subtle shift in the atmosphere here, a minor tectonic nudge there.
When the last Suna shinobi fell, a shard of water piercing his heart from a puddle of dew that had no right to exist in the desert, the silence returned. The camp was dead. The fires crackled softly, the only eulogy for the slain.
Hiruzen did not pause. He continued his walk, his pace unchanged. He was the Professor, and this was simply him turning a page.
====
Back at the mesa outpost, the mood had shifted from boredom to unease, then to burgeoning terror. The communications from the forward squad had gone dead. Then, the relay station had vanished from their scrying pool, its chakra markers extinguished like snuffed candles.
Baki was on his feet now, staring at the map as if it had betrayed him. "Report! I want a report! Now!"
A sensor-nin, her face pale and slick with sweat, looked up from her pool of enchanted sand. "I… I can't get a clear reading, Commander. The chakra signatures… they're just gone. And the primary signature… it's still coming. It's passed the relay station. It's… it's heading here."
Panic began to ripple through the command centre. This was no malfunctioning pill. This was no suicide runner.
Then, the world outside their fortified walls began to change. The very mesa upon which their outpost was built shuddered. A deep, groaning rumble vibrated through the stone, sending dust cascading from the ceiling.
Through the openings, they saw the desert floor below heave and buckle, swallowing their perimeter defences in newly-formed crevices. The air grew thick and humid, then bitingly cold, then dry as a bone, all within the space of a minute.
They saw phantom images of Konoha shinobi flicker at the edge of their vision, only to dissolve into mist when a guard threw a kunai. Illusions, earth manipulation, water creation, temperature control—it was as if the environment itself had become a weapon.
Baki stared, his mind trained for warfare and tactics, scrambling to process the data. The sheer, impossible variety of techniques. The effortless, seamless combination of opposing elements. The power to alter the landscape itself without a single shouted command. There was only one shinobi in the world whose prowess encompassed every known nature transformation, who was referred to not by a single technique, but by the title of the ultimate master.
The blood drained from his face. His cup of tea fell from his nerveless fingers, shattering on the stone floor. The sound was deafening in the sudden, terrified silence of the command post.
His lips moved, forming the words that were a death sentence for every man and woman under his command. A whisper of pure, unadulterated horror.
"It's him… the Hokage himself."