Sasori was a unique member within the Akatsuki despite having been the first to die in the narrative.
Unlike Kakuzu, who viewed his partners as disposable meat and routinely murdered them in fits of rage, Sasori held a twisted reverence for partnership. He wanted a functional unit and he viewed his comrades with a strange sense of possessive pride.
Even when Orochimaru had betrayed the organization years ago, Sasori took it as a personal insult by dedicating a massive portion of his spy network to hunting the snake down.
He had also tolerated Deidara's obnoxious obsession with art simply because it meant he wasn't operating alone.
"Yeah," Jasper said, "I knew all that already."
"Strange… How could you when none of this was made public?"
"I—ugh—I killed Orochimaru, remember?" Jasper lied. "We—ugh—extracted some of his memories."
Whatever…" Sasori grumbled, accepting the lie solely because arguing in the rain was a waste of breath.
The topic was back to Kaito.
When Arthur's clone was first assigned to Sasori as a replacement partner, the veteran missing-nin had expected another arrogant nuisance. Instead, he found perfection. Kaito rarely spoke, never boasted, and executed assassinations with terrifying competence.
Missions that usually took weeks of tracking were completed in days.
Their combat synergy had also been flawless. Since Kaito wielded the Adamantine Sealing Chains, it allowed Sasori's puppets to sweep through the battlefield unobstructed. Their tools never collided, and they operated as a perfect, lethal machine.
Sasori had gradually grown fond of the silent mercenary. He had finally found a tool that didn't complain.
While those two were completing more tasks, Zetsu had been busy.
The parasitic spy had managed to slip through the sensory barriers of Arthur's newly constructed Light Village. And what Zetsu found deep within the Bird Country borders defied all logic: the resurrected Uchihas.
Entire bloodlines that belonged in the grave were breathing, training, and building an army. So Zetsu wasted no time delivering the report.
Pain processed the intelligence and deemed Arthur far too dangerous to let roam the world unchecked.
The Akatsuki had originally attempted diplomacy by extending a peace treaty disguised as a massive trade agreement to the Bird Country. But with Arthur lost in the past—a fact the world remained ignorant of—the clones managing the Light Village had flatly rejected the terms.
This rejection, combined with the horrifying reality of a resurrected army, prompted Pain, Konan, and Obito to declare total war.
The perfection of Sasori's and Kaito's partnership shattered the day they were summoned to the main hideout in the Rain Village in order to discuss these matters.
Kaito, surrounded by the world's deadliest killers, was ordered to reveal everything he knew about Arthur. But he refused to speak.
The silence was deemed absolute treason as the assembly launched a coordinated execution strike.
Killing an extension of Arthur, however, was nearly impossible.
Kaito had spent his time in the Akatsuki memorizing their attack patterns. He dodged Iron Sand, deflected the paper spears, and bypassed all their elemental strikes. But his skills alone forced him to reveal the Flying raijin—which he used to teleport directly out of the Rain Village.
Having returned to the Light Village, Kaito immediately informed the other administrative clones that the Akatsuki was mobilizing.
Back in the Rain Village, Pain distributed the orders: every Akatsuki member was to take command of a battalion of Rain ninjas and march on the Bird Country. They were going to raze Arthur's empire to the ground.
"How did Itachi feel about all this?" Jasper interrupted.
Sasori snapped. "Just let me finish…"
"Fine… My bad."
Itachi Uchiha had slaughtered his entire family, his friends, and his parents to prevent a civil war—like everyone knew.
It took less than a day for him to calculate the grim reality of the Akatsuki's war declaration. His clan had been resurrected, and as a member of the Akatsuki, he was going to have to march into the Bird Country and slaughter them all over again.
The nightmare had reset.
Jasper knew from the meetings in the Leaf that Jada had actively contacted Itachi during this buildup. She had always maintained a fragile line of communication with him. She was one of the few who knew the true burden he carried, and her presence made the stoic killer feel a fleeting sense of ease.
But Itachi was aware that if he told Jada the clan was alive and that a war was descending upon them, she would abandon the Leaf and throw herself into the fray.
To protect her, he kept the resurrection a secret and left her entirely in the dark as he rallied his Rain ninjas and prepared to march against his own blood.
Jasper walked quietly for a long stretch to digest the sheer scale of the conflict.
'I wonder why Obito wasn't in that war,' he thought.
The geopolitical landscape of the Leaf Village was currently a mess of misplaced priorities.
Thanks to the others from earth, Kakashi, Minato, and the Leaf elite already knew that the masked man orchestrating the Akatsuki was not Madara Uchiha, but Obito.
Naruto despised the man, blaming him for the death of his parents and the burden of the Nine-Tails. Kakashi and Minato felt a crushing sense of personal responsibility to stop their former student.
In fact, Minato had attempted to end the threat the moment he learned the truth.
He tried to activate the Flying raijin he had slapped onto Obito's back fifteen years ago during the Nine-Tails attack. But to the fourth Hokage's absolute shock, the teleportation failed.
Whether Obito had purged the formula through sheer willpower, shed that portion of his physical body, or if the temporal anomalies fracturing the world had simply erased it, no one knew.
Even more shocking was that none of Minato's old marks functioned anymore.
Now, despite knowing Obito's true identity, the Leaf Village was blind to the war brewing in the west. Tsunade and the Anbu were entirely obsessed with hunting down Orochimaru. That meant the Leaf was sitting out the largest conflict of the era.
"Hey, Sasori," Jasper said. "I'm not really the war-room type of guy. Mind skipping to when the actual fighting took place?"
Sasori's wooden head turned as the puppet glared at the boy. "To think an idiot like you holds that much power…"
"I—ugh… Thanks, I guess?"
Sasori obliged before shifting the narrative from the war room to the battlefield.
The war did not begin with a single clash. Unlike the brief, explosive conflicts of the Fourth Shinobi War from the original timeline, this war dragged. It was a muddy campaign that spanned weeks across the borders of the Bird Country.
Arthur's clones had fortified much of the terrain perfectly.
The first major assault struck the eastern border, where Hidan pushed through the forests. They expected to slaughter standard border guards. Instead, they crashed into a wall of red hair and sealing jutsu where Ashina Uzumaki was commanding the defense.
They neutralized Hidan's forces as the eastern front turned into a grinding stalemate.
A few days later, Konan was dispatched on a solo reconnaissance mission near the northern front.
Her objective was to bypass the fortifications and map the internal infrastructure of the Light Village. But she was intercepted by Sora.
The former monk of the Fire Temple had been fiercely loyal to Ryugetsu since their time together. However, Sora had not yet mastered the residual Nine-Tails chakra inside him.
Konan exploited his lack of control and defeated the boy before retreating with her intelligence.
The bloodiest theater of the early war occurred in the deep desert wastes on the western border.
Sasori was stationed there, commanding a battalion of Rain shinobi. He had specifically requested this desolate front for one reason: his spy network indicated Kaito was operating in the sector.
Sasori wanted revenge on the clone that had deceived him.
The Rain shinobi set up their war tents amidst the dunes, preparing to lay siege to the western outposts. But Kaito did not wait for the siege; he met face-to-face with Sasori.
Their fight didn't last as Kaito slipped past Sasori's traps and whispered a single name: Obito Uchiha.
"What?!" Jasper yelled, stopping dead in the mud. The sheer panic in his voice had echoed through the trees.
Sasori also came to a halt. "You seem to know something about this 'Obito'."
Jasper swallowed hard.
Arthur's clone would go as far as to say that name. No one outside of the Leaf's inner circle and the Akatsuki leadership was supposed to know the masked man's true identity. That only furthered the notion that Arthur was doing his best to prevent the other earthly ninjas from saving this world.
"N-no," Jasper stammered, quickly composing himself. He then forced a dry laugh. "It's just kinda weird he'd name-drop someone out of the blue like that."
Sasori stared at him for a long, uncomfortable moment before turning away. "If you must know, I didn't report it to Pain. I could care less who this Obito is. The name means nothing to me."
Sasori explained that the whisper wasn't a threat but leverage.
Kaito had revealed the name to Sasori because he had offered him a position within the Light Village. Sasori, furious that the clone refused to fight, threatened that all traitors of the Akatsuki would die. Kaito, therefore, fled, prompting Sasori to regroup his forces.
The war would continue to drag on for days.
It was a brutal game of attrition as war tents were burned in the night. Supply lines were severe, spies on both sides were routinely caught and executed, and the Akatsuki's power slowly began to break through the Bird Country's outer defenses.
No one had ever seen all of the Akatsuki members fight together against an entire village. The results were to be expected: Rain shinobi bolstered by S-class monsters could push even Arthur's country on the edge.
Things were heavily favouring the Akatsuki.
But the grinding warfare of the borders was only the prelude.
Sasori detailed how the Akatsuki's central column, led by Kisame, finally breached the inner valley. That caused Arthur's main forces to march out and meet him in the open field.
As Kisame advanced, he was stopped by two specific Uchihas, which made Itachi personally come to that valley.
Those two Uchihas were his best friend, Shisui, and his father, Fugaku.