The Uzushio coastline was, for a moment, breathtakingly picturesque. Then the horizon started to develop a nasty, boat-shaped rash.
From their vantage point, the high-level Uzushio "Welcome Wagon" watched the Kiri fleet approach. It was less an armada and more a floating monument to overcompensation.
On the lead ship, Mizura looked at the people in front, SEVEN. He counted them twice, just to be sure he wasn't having a stroke.
A grin, all teeth and no warmth, split his face. "Well, well. They've sent all their high level to welcome us, what an honor, haha."
His gaze snagged on two figures in particular: a blonde teenager with that serene expression on her face and a red-haired matron. Tsunade and Mito, his target. O
"Tsk, tsk," Mizura clucked, a sound usually reserved for disappointing shellfish. "Six of them. Six. Did that Uchiha brat mastering the Second Hokage's 'Fleeing Raijin' gave them the courage ?"
Well, he was envious, that Second Hokage… made all three of the Mizukage look like they were spitting in a puddle whenever we used Water Release.
A chorus of grim nods and noncommittal grunts answered him. The general consensus was that seven people fighting thousands was about as plausible as the Sage of Six Paths having created the moon, a nice story, but utterly ridiculous.
"Mizukage-sama," his subordinate, Kosuko, interjected. "We are in range. It's time to introduce ourselves."
Mizura nodded, not taking his eyes off the six impossible figures. His instincts, the ones that had kept him alive through backstabbings, poisonings, and one particularly aggressive office party, were screaming.
Each one of those people radiated an aura of 'casual dismemberment.' This was not going to be a casual massacre.
He opened his mouth to give the order, to unleash hell, to—
He stopped.
Because the God of Shinobi's wife, the lovely, gentle-looking Mito Uzumaki, was… changing.
It wasn't a subtle shift. It was a full-scale, reality metamorphosis.
... ... ...
As the Quadrilateral Alliance's fleet darkened the horizon, Mito let out a sigh that was part resignation.
The last vestiges of the gentle grandma reluctant to kill evaporated, leaving behind the razor's edge of a kunoichi who had once painted entire battlefields red and called it a day.
There was no hesitation in her eyes. Only the cold, familiar calculus of survival she have long forgotten. She'd lost count of the lives she'd ended, a grim tally necessary to keep breathing.
And now? The stakes were so much more personal. It was a simple equation: reduce these invaders to subatomic particles, or listen to the rest of Azula's horrifying slideshow about the 'normal' future.
A future where her glorious clan was exterminated, and the survivors were used as chakra-packed juice boxes by backwaters like Kusagakure.
The indignity. It was enough to make a woman want to commit some war crimes no matter how much she hates war.
All eyes were on her, brimming with a curiosity that was frankly adorable. According to the battle plan—the one she'd outlined over tea and tactical maps—her job was simple: Step One, unleash the Tailed Beast Ball.
The problem was apart Azula, nobody in the welcome committee had ever actually seen one. Tajima and Tsunade had… an inkling.
Tsunade recalled a terrifying golden glow and a chakra signature that felt like being hugged by the sun and punched by a god simultaneously at Konoha,Tajima had just felt it too, just not witnessed it like Tsunade.
So, they trusted her. As for Shinki, Mugetsu, and old man Murasake? They were operating on pure faith. And the desperate hope that Mito wasn't the type to joke about the fate of the clan.
Spoiler alert: she was not.
In an instant, the world erupted in gold. Mito didn't just enter Kyubi Chakra Mode; she became a miniature sun of incandescent rage.
No matter how many times Azula saw it, the thought was always the same: My sensei is the coolest person alive.
And then it got weirder.
A colossal, fiery projection of the Nine-Tails materialized, enveloping them all in a chakra-based hug. Tajima's Uchiha brain short-circuited. "Hold on, wait a minute! Since when does Mito have a Susanoo? A complete one?!"
He never got his answer. Some questions are best pondered when you're not about to witness a divine act of obliteration.
Mito, now floating with an air of casual divinity, rubbed her hands together. Between her palms, raw chakra condensed, swirling into a sphere of pure annihilation. She was literally palming a black hole that was having a very, very bad day.
Down on the lead ship, Mizura, who had been so proud of his fancy flagship, felt his bowels turn to ice.
Staring at the Tailed Beast Ball—a sphere of doom with a chakra concentration at least nine times more potent than their Six-Tails—he had a single, coherent thought: We are about to become a maritime environmental hazard.
Azula, a veteran of four of these displays, just shook her head in awe.
She remembered i' the anime, where Naruto with only half a Kurama had gone toe-to-toe with seven Tailed Beasts at once.
Their combined Bomb was met by his, and he'd had to hold back so his didn't instantly vaporize theirs. The power scaling was, in a word, bullshit.
And Mito? Mito had the full fox. She was an Uzumaki, a woman whose chakra reserves made oceans look like puddles.
Inferior to Naruto? Maybe lacking plot armor, but her title as the strongest Uzumaki alive after Ashina's death when she didn't even have the Nine Tails is enough to say all.
The orb of absolute "no" left her hands, it wasn't just a Tailed Beast Ball; it was a spherical argument against existence, and it was currently winning the debate.
Behind her, the massive, chakra-formed Kurama wrapped its tails around them both in a move so blatantly copied by a future Hokage that one could almost hear the copyright lawyers from the Pure Land stirring in their graves.
Mizura, the esteemed Mizukage—or as he was now known to himself, 'The Guy Potentially About to Be a Stain on the Ocean'—felt his brain reboot.
"This is hell," he wheezed, his internal monologue hitting a pitch usually reserved for startled cats. "So the 'frail old lady who never leaves her compound' is actually a walking, talking disaster with a Uzumaki smile? Note to self: Assuming I survive the next five seconds, fire the entire intelligence division."
A Kage-level shinobi's mind works with terrifying clarity in the face of annihilation. It instantly, and with zero regard for dignity, presented him with the optimal survival strategy.
It was simple and so profoundly shameful it would probably get his face carved off the Kage Monument posthumously.
Option A: Try to counter the world-ending sphere of chakra. Result: Vaporized. A fine mist of former Mizukage.
Option B: The secret technique passed down through his line for generations: Tactical, Panicked Abandonment.
He chose B.
To the terrified Kiri ninja, their leader was the picture of stoic badassery. He stood firm at the prow, a solitary hero against the orange apocalypse.
He even began weaving hand signs—a complex, unfathomable sequence! Hope blossomed in their chests. This was it! The Mizukage's secret, S-rank, ass-saving technique!
From a distance, the two Uchiha watched with their cheat-code eyes activated.
"What trick is he pulling?" Azula muttered, her Sharingan recording every twitch. The Mizukage was an enigma, a blank spot in her knowledge both from binge-watching anime and current intel. Kiri's isolationism was very inconvenient.
Tajima, had been maintaining a face so passive it could be used to calibrate statues. But the moment he deciphered the Mizukage's "grand" hand signs, his composure shattered.
He made a sound like a teakettle being strangled.
"Pfft—HAK-CHK!" He choked, his eyes wide with a mixture of horror and profound respect for the man's sheer, unadulterated gall.
Because the grand, secret technique was the "Sprint-Dive-For-Your-Life-No-Jutsu."
The very instant Mito released the "Nope Orb," Mizukage Mizura, leader of the Village Hidden in the Mist, executed a perfect, Olympic-gold-medal-winning swan dive into the cold, forgiving embrace of the ocean.
His final hand sign wasn't for a water dragon; it was to make himself sink faster, leaving his entire fleet and every one of his subordinates as a sacrificial smokescreen. He didn't just abandon them; he used them as human chaff.
The entire sequence—from golden glow to Kage-shaped splash—took less than seven seconds. It was a masterpiece of efficient cowardice.
Mito, ever the professional, had calibrated the ball to detonate right at the fleet's heart.
The lead warship, the one its commander had so recently and heroically vacated, ceased to be. It didn't explode; it un-existed, the Tailed Beast Ball passing through it like a god's fist through tissue paper.
For the ninja left behind, it was a flash of light, a roar of oblivion, and then… silence. From Azula's vantage point, it was almost merciful.
"Well, that was efficient," she mused, tapping a finger against her chin. "Like a cosmic reset button. Quick, painless, and utterly devastating. Frankly, it's better than most of them deserved. And as for their Kage..."
She glanced at the now-empty spot on the water. "He might be a cowardly, self-serving piece of work, but you have to admire the survival instincts of a man who just used his entire military as a human shield and then hid at the bottom of the ocean."
"Well, too bad for him, this alone wouldn't allow him to escape."
(END OF THE CHAPTER)
I'm basically thinking about starting a daily update at the end of this month because I saw that I can only write about 1500 words now, it's as if I just couldn't surpasses the 2000 words no matter what.
And don't forget to vote guys.