Gaara was bleeding.
His sand armor, once flawless and impenetrable, had cracked in a dozen places, flaking away in dry sheets each time he moved. Beneath it, his skin bore the proof of everything he'd failed to stop — shallow cuts across his arms, a shallower one along his jaw, another tracing his ribs where the sand had been half a second too slow.
None of them were deep enough to kill him. That fact alone should have told him something about the boy standing across the arena, but rage had a way of drowning out reason, and with every passing minute, Gaara's grip on that reason slipped a little further.
Sukuna, for his part, looked bored.
He wasn't. Not really. At least not by the fight itself; his expectations weren't high to begin with.
Naruto handled this version of Gaara in the canon. He personally would be offended that someone might think that he'd have trouble against the sand boy.
But he'd started taking the match seriously five minutes ago. It didn't show in the loose way he stood, the almost lazy manner in which he'd been picking apart Gaara's defense piece by piece instead of ending it outright.
But he was getting a bit serious now because it turned out that hitting hard enough alone didn't knock out a Jinchuriki, unlike what anime shows us.
So now he was at a bypass: how to stop this sand raccoon without killing him before he turned into a big sand raccoon.
"Troublesome..."
He could have finished this the moment Gaara's sand had first risen to meet him. One Dismantle, invisible and silent, and the Kazekage's son would have been in two pieces before his armor even registered the cut.
However, he would rather not cause a diplomatic incident until someone else started the fight, those were very annoying.
But the feeling in his gut had been there since the beginning of the match, a low, persistent unease he couldn't quite place, and as he watched Gaara's fingers twitch and his breathing turn ragged, that unease started sharpening into something closer to certainty.
Enough playing around.
"It's getting troublesome."
He shifted his weight, ready to close the distance and put an end to it cleanly, without theater, without cruelty — and that was when he felt it. A change in the air pressure around the arena, thick and suffocating, rolling off Gaara in slow, deliberate waves. The sand at his feet stopped drifting lazily and began to climb, crawling up his legs, his chest, his throat, like it was trying to consume him rather than protect him.
Gaara's eyes had gone wide and unfocused. He said something — Sukuna caught only fragments of it, broken pleas directed at no one, mother among them — and then the boy wasn't fighting the transformation anymore. He was surrendering to it.
There it is.
The sand split open across Gaara's shoulder, and a single, distorted eye stared out from inside it, sclera black, iris gold, blinking slowly as if waking from a long sleep.
'Yeah... knew it. The most irritating part was this: invasion or not, this guy was trouble no matter the case...' Sukuna grumbled internally.
He'd wondered, quietly and without much hope of being wrong, whether Orochimaru's absence from the stands meant the invasion had been called off.
He'd wondered, and he'd been wrong to wonder, because the first genjutsu dropped over the stadium roof at almost the same instant Gaara's transformation began, and the world outside the arena erupted into screaming.
His neck snapped toward the sound faster than even he realized and saw what he was worrying about all this time.
Feathers falling on the stadium and shadows moving around the entire battlefield.
"F*ck..."
The Konoha Crush was happening.
Which meant Suna and Kiri had decided the plan was worth running with or without Orochimaru — and that was a detail Sukuna intended to be furious about later, once there was a later to be furious in.
For now, there was only Gaara, and the sand climbing over his skin like something alive and hungry, and the single word chasing itself around Sukuna's skull: Shukaku.
He didn't get the chance to stop it in time. The transformation completed in a heartbeat — sand exploding outward in a dome that swallowed half the arena floor, then collapsing inward and re-forming into something enormous, hunched, and grinning with a mouth full of jagged teeth.
The One-Tail rose fully into the world, not on some empty training ground miles from anywhere, but in the dead center of Konoha, inside a stadium packed with civilians, shinobi, and children who had no business being anywhere near a tailed beast.
Sukuna's mind moved fast, faster than his temper, which was already screaming at him to just kill the thing and be done with it. He couldn't. Not here.
Cleave and Dismantle most likely wouldn't work, seeing as the entire body was made of sand.
And the only technique which might work was too, too dangerous to use inside the village.
'What a pain...'
There was only one option that didn't end in a crater where Konoha used to be.
Flying Thunder God.
He didn't have time to weigh it, to consider what it would cost him or what it would leave behind. He simply reached for the technique the way he'd reach for a kunai, marked the space above the beast's shifting form, and closed the distance with Sakura's brother's usual contempt for hesitation.
At least when temper runs high for a Haruno.
His hand found purchase against scaled, sand-crusted hide the size of a hillside, cursed energy flooding into the seal beneath his palm, and the last thing he registered before the world folded around him was the stadium — Sakura's face somewhere in the stands, Kakashi's rigid stance, Naruto's mouth already open in a shout that never reached him — and then it was gone.
Konoha was gone.
In its place: open sky, wind, and a very large, very furious raccoon demon that had just realized it was no longer standing where it wanted to be.
Sukuna cursed, once, quietly.
"Damn Troublesome Tanuki..."
xXx
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