Kakashi's mind felt muddy. The sight of so many enemy headbands, the memory of the suicide bombers, all converged into a dull roar at the back of his skull.
"Rin, fall back to the rock face. Obito, you're on close-range defence. I'll—"
He stopped.
What would he do? Break their line? Create an opening? Every standard tactic felt like a child's game against this coordinated, adult murder.
"You'll what?!" Obito snapped, his voice a sharp crack in the silence. His Sharingan was already active; he could see the chakra networks of their enemies flaring, see the minute tensing of muscles before an attack. "Make a decision, Kakashi!"
Two Kiri shinobi lunged from the left, their water-coated blades hissing through the air. Kakashi moved, his kenjutsu a blur of precise, defensive strikes.
"Shing! Clang! Shriek!"
Sparks flew as chakra-enhanced steel met water-forged blades. Behind him, Obito didn't wait for an order.
"Fire Release: Phoenix Flower Jutsu!"
A volley of small fireballs shot from his lips, forcing another group of attackers to scatter or raise water walls with a furious hiss of steam. Rin, pressed against the cold rock face, had already laid a simple wire trap, and one Kiri shinobi stumbled into it with a grunt, giving her a precious second to assess her teammates for injuries.
For a few, fleeting moments, their teamwork was a beautiful, desperate dance. Kakashi was the precise, lethal needle, Obito the sweeping, disruptive flame, and Rin the fragile, vital thread that bound them.
But they were dancing in quicksand.
The Hidden Mist Jutsu deepened, leaching colour and depth from the world, reducing everything to grey silhouettes and muffled sounds. Their attackers moved like ghosts, their silent footfalls and whispered communications making them impossible to track by ear.
Their Water Release techniques came not as grand, telegraphed attacks, but as sudden, sharp lances of pressurised water shooting from the gloom, forcing constant, energy-sapping dodges.
The fatigue, built from hours of frantic flight, was a poison in their veins. Kakashi's movements, once flawless, lost a fraction of their speed. He saw a Kiri shinobi feint left and committed to a counter—a standard, textbook manoeuvre.
But it was a trap.
The feint was a collective one, and two other shinobi he hadn't registered in the mist lunged from his newly exposed right flank.
"Kakashi, left!" Obito roared, but it was too late. A water whip snapped out, wrapping around Kakashi's sword arm and yanking him off balance. Obito was there in an instant, a desperate
"Fire Release: Great Fireball!" engulfing the attacker, the whoosh of flame and the scream of the burning shinobi bought a precious second.
"What is wrong with you?!" Obito yelled, his face contorted in fury and fear. "You're going to get us killed!"
The momentary rescue cost them ground. The Kiri pressure forced them back, toward the unstable edge of the ridge where the rock crumbled into the misty ravine. Rin found herself cornered against a jagged outcrop, two Kiri shinobi advancing on her with grim smiles. "The medic-nin first," one of them grunted.
"Always break the spine of the squad."
"Rin!" Kakashi and Obito shouted in unison, abandoning their positions to fall back toward her, their formation collapsing completely.
A Kiri jonin, his face scarred and contemptuous, stepped forward. "The great Konoha's future," he taunted, "Did you really think you could outrun the Mist?"
The taunt, the sight of Rin's terrified face, the feeling of his own failure—it was all too much for Obito. A raw, guttural scream of frustration tore from his throat.
He unleashed everything he had left, "Fire Release: Dragon Flame Jutsu!"
At the same moment, the Kiri jonin, seeing the reckless attack, made a sharp hand seal.
"Water Release: Water Dragon Bullet!"
A massive dragon of chakra-infused water erupted from the mist behind him, meeting Obito's flame in a cataclysmic collision.
The resulting shockwave was immense. "KABOOOOM!"
The concussive force didn't just hit the combatants; it struck the mountain itself. The ridge, already weakened by the conflict and inherently unstable, groaned.
A deep, subterranean crack echoed, louder than any explosion. The Kiri shinobi's smug confidence vanished, replaced by dawning horror as they felt the ground lurch beneath their feet.
"The slope!" one screamed.
The cliffside above them, sheared off by the violent meeting of fire and water, gave way. It wasn't just a rockslide; it was the mountain shrugging them off. Gigantic boulders, some the size of houses, tore free from their ancient moorings with a sound of grinding, shattering stone. The world became a roaring, deafening avalanche of rock and dust.
The Kiri forces, disciplined to the last, immediately broke and fled, their mission forgotten in the face of primal, geological fury. Their jonin took one last look at the three Konoha teens, now completely swallowed by the collapsing mountainside, obscured by a boiling cloud of dust and debris.
"No one survives that," he stated, "mission accomplished."
Then, silence.
A deep, profound, and dusty silence, broken only by the occasional clatter of a final, settling stone.
Minutes passed. The dust began to settle, revealing a landscape remade.
A faint groan. "K-Kakashi?"
Rin, coated head to toe in grey dust, coughed, pushing a small rock off her chest. She had managed to pull them both into a shallow recess and, with a medic-nin's quick-thinking, reinforced the overhanging rock with a basic earth-hardening jutsu just as the world fell apart. It had held, barely. Kakashi lay beside her, stirring. His head swam, his body ached, but he was alive.
"Obito," Kakashi croaked, his voice raw with dust and dread. They scrambled to their feet, ignoring their own pain, their eyes frantically scanning the apocalyptic jumble of stones.
"Obito!" Rin cried out, her voice cracking with panic.
It was Kakashi who found him. His blood ran cold. Half-buried near the base of the new rockfall, pinned at a cruel angle. A colossal slab of stone, a piece of the mountain's very heart, lay across his lower body.
Not just his legs. His entire right side, from his hip to his shoulder, was utterly crushed beneath its immense weight. Only his head, left arm, and left side of his torso were free.
"Obito!" Kakashi yelled, sliding down the rubble to his side.
"Don't… don't shout," Obito whispered, his voice a thin, strained thread.
A trickle of blood escaped the corner of his mouth. His face was pale, beaded with cold sweat, but his single visible eye—his left eye—was open and focused.
"My… my ears are working fine."
Together, Kakashi and Rin threw their weight against the colossal slab. They pushed until their muscles screamed, until the veins stood out on their necks. The rock didn't budge.
"It's… no use," Obito gasped, each word a painful effort. "Don't… waste time. You'll get killed… if you stay. They might… come back."
"Shut up!" Kakashi snarled, a desperate, broken sound. He channelled lightning chakra into his hand, the Chidori screeching to life with a thousand birds' cries.
He slammed it into the rock beside Obito's body.
"CRACK-SHZZT!"
Sparks and stone chips flew, but the slab was too vast, too deep. The backlash of chakra scorched his own hand, but he didn't seem to feel it.
"Kakashi, stop!" Rin sobbed, pulling at his arm. "You're hurting yourself!"
Obito's eye, the Sharingan still faintly spinning, watched him. There was no anger left in his gaze. Only a profound, heartbreaking understanding. "It's okay… you tried," he whispered. "You don't have to pretend you're perfect."
The words shattered Kakashi more completely than any rock ever could. He fell to his knees, his smoking hand falling limp at his side, his head bowed. The perfect jonin, the cold prodigy, was gone, leaving only a terrified, grieving boy.
Obito's breathing grew shallower, a faint, rattling sound. He managed a soft, almost peaceful smile. "Hey… Kakashi… I never got you a gift… for becoming a jonin."
Kakashi looked up, his visible eye wide with confusion and horror. "What are you talking about? Don't—"
With a tremor of immense effort, Obito raised his left hand. His fingers, shaking uncontrollably, moved toward his face. Not to wipe away blood or dust, but to hover over his left eye—the one eye not buried and destroyed by the mountain.
"Obito, no!" Rin cried, understanding dawning a moment before Kakashi.
But Obito was beyond listening. His fingers, with a final, gruesome act of will, pressed inward. There was a sickening, wet pop, a sound that would haunt Kakashi and Rin for the rest of their lives. Blood welled and streamed down his cheek in a sudden, crimson river. He let out a shuddering gasp, his body convulsing once, but his hand remained steady. In his palm, resting on his trembling fingers, was his Sharingan eye, still glowing with the faint, red light of his fading chakra.
He offered it to Kakashi.
"Take it," Obito breathed, his voice barely audible. The world seemed to hold its breath. "So you can see… the world I couldn't protect."
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