Mū's scream tore through the valley.
"ANSWER ME! TOBIRAMA!!!"
Tobirama finally raised his head. His crimson eyes gleamed with an unnatural, piercing light. Mū flinched, a phantom memory of another crimson-eyed individual flitting across his mind—a memory steeped in humiliation.
"I didn't expect you to secure the Five-Tails so quickly," Tobirama said, his voice carrying a frigid calm. "And to already thirst for the Seven-Tails, Mū… you never change."
The words hit Mū like a warhammer. Any lingering doubt evaporated. Chakra signatures could be forged, and jutsu could be passed on to successors, but this chilling aura, this unbothered, condescending posture, and that indifferent, arrogant gaze—none of it could be replicated. This was the Second Hokage.
Mū's floating form jerked violently, his chakra flaring in jagged, chaotic bursts, and his hands trembling. Rage, fear, and sheer cognitive dissonance twisted his features into something feral.
"You—"
Tobirama didn't give him the chance to finish. He snapped his fingers into a seal, and the Edo Tensei army surged forward.
The battlefield erupted into total chaos.
Mū's elite guards slammed into their own deceased comrades—shinobi they had once trained beside, eaten with, and bled with. Now, those exact same faces stared back at them, hollow-eyed and dead.
Tobirama did not move an inch. He stood perfectly still, flanked on his left by Kenji—Hashirama's second-born, clad in ANBU gear and a stark deer mask—and on his right by Genshiro, the Senju grand elder, wearing ancient, battle-worn green armor.
The reanimated army fought without hesitation, without fear, and without fatigue. Taro's Explosion Corps squad and Okamoto's team detonated their own techniques and tore up the earth to blast the horde away, but the shattered corpses simply knit themselves back together and advanced anew.
"Tsuchikage-sama!" Taro shouted through the smoke. "We can't hold this front! We're entirely outnumbered and we need a sealing team right now!"
Mū's mind raced as he desperately utilized his Earth Release, conjuring massive boulders and earth golems to pin fifty reanimated shinobi down without crushing them into reformable dust.
'What are you playing at, Tobirama?' Mū thought, his eyes darting frantically. 'Why are you standing so still? Are you still wary of my Jinton?'
Something felt fundamentally wrong, and he desperately wanted to figure out what it was. But the battlefield was collapsing too rapidly, leaving him no time for calculation.
"RETREAT!" Mū commanded, his voice cracking under the strain. "Fall back to the border! Regroup with the main army!"
His guards disengaged instantly, dragging their wounded comrades along the dirt as the undying army pressed forward relentlessly. Mū floated backward, his chest heaving as his eyes locked onto Tobirama's rigid, unmoving form.
'Why aren't you pursuing us? Why aren't you using the Hiraishin? What are you trying to achieve here—'
A cold, parasitic suspicion crept into Mū's mind. Tobirama wasn't whole.
***
Minutes later, well beyond the safety of the ridge, Mū's breathing finally steadied. His mind cooled down.
"Tsuchikage-sama," Okamoto said, his face flushed and covered in soot. "Should we withdraw entirely? Your h—"
"No." Mū's eyes narrowed as he surveyed his men. Their pale, hollow expressions were a mix of horror, anger, and worry—perfectly mirroring his own internal distress.
Mū's chakra flared, reasserting his authority. "He barely moved a muscle out there. Something is wrong with him. If Tobirama is weakened, this is our only chance to eliminate him."
He raised a hand, sharply cutting off his subordinates' rising protests.
"Inform the entire Explosion Corps and all available sealing teams to regroup here. If we cannot secure the Seven-Tails, then we must at least take his head today. Send word to Ōnoki—tell him to abandon the search for Takigakure and the Seven-Tails! Order him to gather the remaining forces and prepare an organized retreat path."
Okamoto and Taro exchanged a worried glance, but they bowed their heads to Mū in submission. They were deeply unsettled by their Tsuchikage's unusually volatile composure, but their absolute faith in his leadership silenced their doubts. They vanished into the trees to relay the orders.
An hour later, the strike force regrouped and charged back into the fray. Four hundred and fifty Explosion Corps members, thirty sealing teams, and forty elite Jonin followed Mū back into the jaws of the valley.
But the moment they re-entered the gorge—the Edo Tensei army was already waiting.
And this time, Tobirama raised a single, commanding hand.
"Sealing teams!" Mū barked. "Prepare containment—"
"It's too late," Tobirama's voice echoed.
With terrifying synchronization, reanimated shinobi burst from the earth directly beneath Iwa's lines. They tore through the sealing corps, ripping containment tags, shattering formations, and dismantling the miniature shrine originally erected to house the Seven-Tails.
Within minutes, half of Mū's forces were hopelessly entangled. As the elite of Iwagakure, the Explosion Corps fought back savagely, even managing to successfully seal a few of the reanimated dead, but fighting an enemy that felt no pain was a grueling, deficit-heavy war of attrition.
Mū ignored the desperate cries of his men. Blinded by the belief that Tobirama was stationary due to lingering injuries or poison, he charged straight for the Hokage.
"TOBIRAMA!!!!" he screamed. Years of deep-seated anger, frustration, inferiority, and pure hatred echoed in his howl.
Tobirama smoothly formed a single hand seal. In a flash of water, his body split into multiple forms.
"A mere Mizubunshin?! Not even a Mizu-Kagebunshin?! ARE YOU LOOKING DOWN ON ME?!" Mū roared, rocketing higher into the air to evade a hail of Tobirama's kunai and shuriken. He interpreted the basic water clones as a ultimate insult—an act of pure arrogance from a hunter who viewed him as nothing more than prey waiting for execution.
Mū brought his shaking hands together, forming a precise triangle and locking Tobirama in its center. He flooded his pathways with chakra, completely ignoring the blinding, stinging pain ripping through his arms.
But the Jinton cube never formed.
The gathered chakra flared violently for a fraction of a second, then abruptly dispersed into nothingness. Mū's eyes widened in sheer horror as the dust cleared. His white bandages had turned a deep, brownish-red, completely soaked through with fresh, oxidized blood.
Underneath the wraps, his left forearm bore a massive, jagged gash extending all the way from his palm to his elbow. His hands were heavily bruised, and his chakra nodes were dangerously swollen—shredded from the sheer stress of prematurely detonating his Jinton when he had narrowly escaped Tobirama's Hiraishingiri (Flying Thundergod Slash) earlier.
Mū hung suspended in the air, utterly dumbfounded by his own reckless stupidity. He had pushed his broken body past its absolute limit.
A sudden, deafening cascade of rapid explosions snapped him out of his daze.
BOOM!BOOM!BOOM!BOOM!
Gojō Kibaku Fuda 互乗起爆札 (mutually multiplying explosive tags)
A blinding sheet of continuous fire swallowed the Iwa forces currently entangled with the Edo Tensei. Through the smoke, Mū watched in horror as the Explosion Corps lost more than half of its remaining numbers in an instant. The front line didn't just break; it completely disintegrated.
"Tsuchikage-sama!" a surviving Jonin screamed, coughing up blood. "We can't hold! The sealing vessel is entirely compromised!"
Mū's pupils dilated as he looked at the slaughter below. Reality crashed down on him. He made the only choice a leader could.
"RETREAT! ALL FORCES, FALL BACK!"
The remaining Iwa shinobi fled in absolute terror, dragging survivors through the dirt and abandoning their massive sealing equipment along with the half-completed containment structures.
Mū retreated far enough to escape the lethal radius of the exploding tags. His heart hammered violently against his ribs as he looked down at his ruined, bleeding hands one last time, and then back across the smoking valley toward the unyielding, motionless figure of the Second Hokage.
'Tobirama…' Mū thought, a bitter, defeated weight settling into his chest. 'You win today. You monster.'
***
As the dust settled, Kenji and Genshiro moved quickly to Tobirama's side.
Kenji knelt, his expression tight as he extended a hand. "Uncle, your chakra—"
"I know," Tobirama said quietly, cutting him off before he could panic. "We don't have much time."
Genshiro leaned heavily on his cane, peering into the distance. "Mū has retreated beyond the valley. He will undoubtedly regroup with his main battalion."
Tobirama nodded, his breathing shallow. "Kenji."
"Yes, Uncle."
"Send Kagami to the Suna front."
Kenji blinked, caught off guard. "Immediately?"
"Immediately."
Tobirama's voice grew noticeably weaker, a cold bead of sweat dripping down his pale forehead as the artificial strain caught up to him. "He must finalize the treaty with Suna. And tell Fukashi to watch over him."
Kenji hesitated, his eyes narrowing as he read between the lines. "Is this about the report…? Kagami's emotional outburst after the Kinkaku rebellion?"
Tobirama's crimson eyes sharpened into narrow, piercing slits. "Kagami is close to awakening the Mangekyō Sharingan. His current emotional instability is too dangerous. If he awakens it now, only another Mangekyō user can hope to restrain him effectively."
Genshiro's eyes widened. "You believe Fukashi—"
"Yes," Tobirama said. "Fukashi is the only one who can anchor Kagami's heart if the Mangekyō manifests."
Kenji bowed deeply. "I will deliver the orders myself."
Tobirama exhaled slowly, a long, shuddering breath escaping his lips. His body trembled violently as the final, lingering remnants of Mito's crimson chakra finally emptied from his system, leaving him entirely spent.
Yet, even as his physical strength failed him, his eyes remained sharp, burning with a final, unyielding flame.
"The rest is up to you," Tobirama murmured, his gaze casting out toward the distant horizon. "Hiruzen."
Genshiro stepped forward, silently supporting the collapsing Hokage. The grand elder closed his eyes, completely masking the complex storm of grief, anger, frustration, and cold, political cunning brewing within him.