"Patriarch-sama! Lord Raizen! The Allied Forces have secured full control of Qishui Gorge!"
A Hyūga scout knelt in the mud, voice hoarse but firm. His forehead protector was cracked; his eyes still reflected the pale shimmer of the Byakugan.
Hyūga Tennin stood from his seat, expression blank as winter glass. "Restrain any who refuse surrender," he ordered quietly. "And house-arrest the elders."
The command spread like cold fire through the ravine. Within hours, the Gorge—once drenched in blood and chakra sparks—was under the full command of the Amamiya-led coalition. More than six thousand enemy shinobi were taken alive. The surrender was total, but not clean.
Raizen watched from a cliff edge as banners of the defeated were trampled into the wet soil. The victory should have tasted sweet. Instead, it reeked of ash.
Two months of slaughter, bluff, and mind games had led to this. And yet, he knew the war wasn't done. It never was.
This world doesn't do "happily ever after." It just resets the casualty counter.
The truth was simple: Tennin hadn't surrendered out of goodwill. He was still under Raizen's genjutsu—Distinguished Heavenly Gods, the illusion so deep it rewrote loyalty itself. Through that fragile tether, the Hyūga had fallen in line, and Qishui Gorge had fallen with them.
But beyond this canyon lay two more fronts, each crawling with tens of thousands of shinobi. And the moment word of Tennin's surrender reached them, they would either dig in—or burn everything to the ground.
Raizen knew what fear could do. He had seen it in the eyes of every man who'd knelt before him—terror wrapped in forced obedience. Fear doesn't last long once the source walks away.
So he ordered Tennin to send coded messages to the Hyūga detachments still fighting on the remaining fronts, urging them to defect. Tennin complied instantly, the perfect puppet in priest's robes.
Unfortunately, Raizen's orders arrived too late.
By the time Tennin's missives reached the other Hyūga divisions, the allied commanders there had already heard rumors of his surrender. Furious, they locked up every Hyūga soldier before a single hand seal could be formed.
The battlefronts erupted into chaos. Inuzuka and Aburame units tried to capitalize on the confusion but met brutal resistance. Tennin's betrayal had lit a fire under the remaining coalition soldiers, who now fought like cornered wolves.
The alliance fractured. The "Hyūga Coalition" name was scrapped and replaced by a new banner—the Sarutobi-led Resistance. Twenty thousand shinobi, desperate and leaderless, but still standing.
The Warring States whispered of Tennin Hyūga's foolishness, of how a single decision had doomed half an army and tarnished an ancient clan.
Tennin himself remained silent, unbothered. His mind wasn't his own.
And Raizen—watching the pieces move—understood the irony. He'd broken a giant, but in doing so, had handed his enemies a martyr.
Nice job, me. I turned a national scandal into a recruitment poster.
He couldn't use Distinguished Heavenly Gods again anytime soon. The cooldown was brutal, and the mental strain even worse. If he wanted to win the rest of this war, he'd have to do it the old-fashioned way—steel, chakra, and sheer stupidity.
"Fine," he muttered. "Let's finish this properly."
Before moving to the next front, Raizen handled what he hated most: logistics. The surrendering ninjas. Tens of thousands of them.
He didn't trust a single one. They'd bent the knee out of fear, not loyalty. The moment his back turned, that fear would fade, and they'd remember who their families still fought for.
And family ties—especially in the Warring States—cut deeper than steel.
"The only way to keep them from flipping," Raizen decided, "is to drag them to the Konoha front. Keep them under watch, feed them, use them if needed. Prisoners with privileges."
Tennin and his clan would stay behind to hold Qishui Gorge. Tennin's power and the Hyūga's discipline would be enough to deter rebellion there.
Raizen would personally lead the march east—escorting the surrendering troops like a grim parade.
The column stretched for miles, a snake of weary shinobi, armor dull with dirt, faces blank from too much survival.
As they moved, word spread across the Warring States:
Amamiya Raizen had taken Qishui Gorge. The Hyūga Clan had surrendered.
Every village whispered the same question:
Why did Tennin Hyūga yield?
No one knew. Some said it was genjutsu. Others said divine madness.
Only Raizen knew the truth—and he was too tired to care whether the world ever did.