Chapter 215: Heavy Losses for Iwagakure
On the very night the Five Kage Summit concluded, while the Third Tsuchikage Onoki was still on the road making his way home, Iwagakure was hit.
The village had been on high alert ever since Onoki departed for the Land of Iron. Every watch rotation tightened, every patrol doubled. They had taken precautions. They had been careful.
It wasn't enough.
They had underestimated what the Mayfly Technique and Substitute Transformation could accomplish in combination — and that underestimation cost them dearly. Tatsuhata used the Mayfly Technique to phase through solid matter and isolate lone Rock ninja, subdued them before they could cry out, then slid into their identities with a flawless Substitute Transformation. Wearing a Rock ninja's face like a borrowed mask, he walked openly among Iwagakure's finest and began to hunt.
One by one, he pulled targets aside. One by one, he used his Mangekyō Sharingan — the Toyoakitsushihime technique — to copy their chakra signatures and create replicas. One by one, they died.
By the time the village finally sensed something was wrong, twenty-one jonin had already been killed.
He had disposed of the bodies. But you cannot make twenty-one elite ninja simply vanish without someone noticing. Iwagakure's shinobi weren't fools — especially not when already operating at maximum vigilance. The sudden absence of so many experienced fighters set off every alarm they had, and the village shifted into full wartime footing.
Once the wartime protocols activated, there were no more lone targets. Rock ninja moved exclusively in groups, squads paired with squads, no one operating without backup at their flanks. The easy hunting was over.
So Tatsuhata changed his approach.
He deployed the twenty-one replicas he had already created and drove them into open confrontation against Iwagakure's response teams — full-force assault rather than quiet assassination. Five more squads fell to the combined onslaught. With each squad commander's chakra he absorbed, his replica army grew. By the time the dust settled on that phase of the assault, he commanded twenty-six jonin-level replicas.
He had standards. Chunin and genin weren't worth the chakra cost to duplicate — even with his enormous reserves, manufacturing replicas of lower-ranked ninja was a wasteful exercise that offered no meaningful return. He only ever copied jonin.
It was after he finished copying the fifth squad's jonin commander that Han appeared.
The Five-Tails jinchuriki. The Steam Ninja.
The man materialized from the chaos like a wall of scalding vapor and placed himself directly in Tatsuhata's path. Whatever calculation Tatsuhata had been running in his head, it hadn't accounted for this.
What followed was the kind of battle that reshapes geography.
When it was finally over, one-sixth of Iwagakure lay in ruins.
Kitsuchi intervened in time to prevent it from being worse. He and Han coordinated — and with the support of dozens of jonin working in tandem, they managed to push the engagement out of the village proper and into the barren wasteland beyond its walls. The transfer of the battlefield was what saved Iwagakure from total devastation.
Civilian casualties were limited. The moment the wartime protocols had activated, residents had been evacuated into shelters, and most of them were safely underground before the worst of the fighting began. The deaths that did occur were shinobi — several dozen chunin and genin who had been helping Han's encirclement and couldn't withdraw in time when the fighting reached its most intense pitch.
By the cold mathematics of ninja warfare, the human cost could have been catastrophic. It wasn't.
But the material damage was another matter entirely.
One-sixth of a hidden village wasn't a scratch. It was a wound. The reconstruction costs alone would strain Iwagakure's treasury to its limits — and that treasury was already depleted. The Third Shinobi World War had ended in defeat, and no matter how cunning Onoki's financial maneuvering had been, he hadn't been able to stop the Land of Earth's daimyo from cutting the village's budget allocations in response to that defeat. There was no cushion left to absorb a blow like this.
Onoki arrived back to find his village looking like a disaster zone.
He stood at his office window and stared at the damage reports stacked on his desk. The casualty lists. The reconstruction estimates. Numbers that exceeded anything the village's remaining reserves could realistically cover. The fury that rose through him was the kind that had nowhere to go — a fire burning with no outlet, climbing higher and higher until it threatened to split his skull open.
His hatred for Missing-nin Anonymous reached a depth he hadn't felt in decades.
This was the greatest humiliation of his career as Tsuchikage.
When Uchiha Madara had beaten him half to death alongside his teacher, the Second Tsuchikage Muu, it hadn't made him feel like this. That had been a loss, yes — a brutal one — but it had been clean. A stronger enemy had defeated him. He could accept that.
This was different. This was his village, gutted from the inside while he was sitting at a summit table making polite conversation about Rinnegan distribution rights. This was unforgivable.
"That useless Fourth Hokage," he snarled, his voice rising as his composure cracked completely. "A pretty face who sweet-talks women and calls it diplomacy. A naive, stupid waste of breath who can't even deal with his own village's missing-nin, and has the nerve to stand in front of me and lecture about —"
The office was full. Kitsuchi, Han, Bunka, Akatsuchi, and four others — eight people in total, the core of Iwagakure's leadership hierarchy. Every one of them stood in silence and let the old man rage. None of them had needed a summons. The moment word spread that Onoki was back, they had all come on their own.
He cursed until his throat went dry, then stopped, chest heaving, and reached for his tea. He took a long drink, set the cup down, and finally looked at the people assembled before him.
Kitsuchi stepped forward first.
"Tsuchikage-sama," he said, his head bowed, jaw tight. "This is my failure. I didn't protect the village."
"Obviously it's your failure."
Onoki didn't soften the words simply because the man standing in front of him was his son. His eyes were hard as flint. "I read every report you submitted. Your response time was too slow. You didn't drive Missing-nin Anonymous out of the village the moment you identified the threat. You let him and Han fight it out inside the village walls — and that's why we're standing here looking at a hole where one-sixth of our home used to be."
Kitsuchi's head dropped lower with each sentence until it seemed like he might fold in on himself entirely.
Han spoke up. "Tsuchikage-sama. You can't put this entirely on Kitsuchi. The responsibility is mine as much as his. I'm the one who couldn't control my own reaction — I engaged that bastard inside the village when I should have found a way to draw the fight outside first."
"Han."
Onoki's voice cut through his words like a blade.
"You did nothing wrong. You fought an enemy without regard for your own life to protect this village. If that kind of courage is somehow a mistake, then I have no business sitting in this chair." The old man's expression didn't soften, but the direction of his anger was clear. "Kitsuchi made the errors. The decision-making was slow and the tactical response was poor. If he hadn't at least managed to correct course later and kept things from getting even worse, I wouldn't be offering him the chance to make amends."
Han went quiet. He was genuinely relieved — he had worried that Onoki's fury might land on Kitsuchi with the full weight of an official punishment.
The others in the room didn't share his concern. Bunka and Akatsuchi and the rest had all served under Onoki long enough to read the old man accurately. The volume of the dressing-down was theater, in part. Onoki was iron-willed and unsentimental about leadership — but he was not a man who treated his family as strangers. The thunder would rumble. The lightning would not strike.
Kitsuchi raised his head just enough to show the steel returning to his expression. "Tsuchikage-sama. For the sake of the village — even at the cost of my life, I won't hesitate."
"Then prepare to put that commitment to use."
Onoki's eyes swept across the room. His tone settled into the measured cadence he used for strategy. "You all received my transmission. The five great villages are launching a joint operation into the Land of Rain, the Land of Grass, and the Land of Taki to locate the Rinnegan's holder. I don't need to explain to any of you how dangerous this is. We are being asked to confront what is reportedly the most powerful of the three great visual techniques."
He let that sit for a moment before continuing.
"Konoha provided us with intelligence on the Rinnegan's capabilities. I trust each of you has studied that information carefully, so I won't repeat it. What I will say is this: we need to contribute meaningfully to this operation. Meaningfully enough that when the time comes to divide the spoils, we can claim our share."
One of the men seated on the couch spoke up — an elder with white hair that matched his long beard, his frame still broad and solid despite his age. Elder Fukiishi's brow was furrowed.
"Tsuchikage-sama. Based on your transmission, the possession rights for the Rinnegan are determined by each village's contribution to the operation. Given how dominant Konoha has been lately — I think it's a fair assumption the Rinnegan ends up in their hands first. Am I reading that correctly?"
"You are."
Onoki nodded. "We aren't going to outcompete Konoha for first rights. That's not a fight worth picking. What we're competing for is second position."
"And if Konoha simply chooses not to honor the contract?" Fukiishi pressed. "They wouldn't even need to formally break it. All they need is a convenient excuse, and the Rinnegan stays with them indefinitely."
"That possibility occurred to me as well." Onoki looked at him steadily. "But if Konoha tries to hold onto it through excuses, then we align with the other three villages and demand accountability. Together."
"Together." The elder's frown didn't ease. "Tsuchikage-sama — forgive me for raising a painful subject, but it needs to be said. The war we just came through — that Fourth Hokage's village stood against four great villages simultaneously, and when it was over, Konoha had won. We were on the losing side of that. Again."
The room went quiet in a different way than before.
No one could contest it. Every Rock ninja in the room had lived through that truth. Normally, speaking it aloud so plainly would have earned looks of irritation — but the speaker was Elder Yumeno, and beyond her considerable status, she was a woman, and the men in the room understood instinctively that the same bluntness from one of them would have been received very differently.
She continued because she spoke not from weakness but from devotion to the village. "Given that reality — is it realistic to believe four villages can hold Konoha accountable for anything?"
Onoki didn't get angry. He exhaled instead — a long, tired sound — and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
"You're right, Yumeno. That Fourth Hokage nearly broke us single-handedly. I'm not forgetting that." His eyes were weary but not defeated. "But here's the thing: the reason that war ended the way it did is that we fought it the wrong way. We fought in parallel, not together. Look at the actual record — Konoha's heaviest burden at any one time was two fronts. They were never fighting all four of us simultaneously. We handed them that advantage by failing to coordinate."
He let that settle before continuing. "If all four villages moved against Konoha at the same moment — truly together, not separately — the outcome of that war might have looked very different. Konoha knows this. It's precisely why they'll think twice before giving us a legitimate reason to unite against them. As long as we hold that threat, the contract means something."
"Can it actually happen, though?" Fukiishi wasn't fully reassured. "Four villages against Konoha?"
"Nothing in this world is guaranteed, Fukiishi. We can only do what we can and accept that some risks are unavoidable." Onoki's voice carried the weight of a man who had stopped pretending that certainty was achievable. "But that possibility is real enough to keep Konoha honest. That's enough for me."
Fukiishi exhaled. "Understood. I have no further objections."
Elder Yumeno also fell quiet. With both advisors brought around, the room settled into alignment. No dissent remained.
Onoki turned his gaze back to his son, who was still standing with the same rigid posture he'd held since being dressed down.
"Kitsuchi. You're leading our squad for the joint operation. I'm giving you authority to select your own personnel. Put together a team." He paused, and his next words were direct. "I'm not asking you to throw Iwagakure's lives away being heroic — leave the suicidal charges to Konoha. What I need is our contribution ranking second. Behind Konoha and no one else. Can you do that?"
"Yes, Tsuchikage-sama. I'll see it done."
There was no hesitation in Kitsuchi's answer. He meant every word.
Onoki gave a short nod and let out a breath. For a moment, the old man almost looked his age.
Then his eyes drifted back to the documents piled on his desk — the casualty lists, the reconstruction estimates, the numbers that refused to become smaller no matter how many times he looked at them — and the headache that had briefly receded came roaring back.
He stared at the stacks of paperwork for a long moment.
"Namikaze Minato," he muttered, his voice dropping into a register that was less a shout and more a slow burn. "A man whose only genuine talent is looking trustworthy. If I had any way to make you pay for what your runaway missing-nin did to my village tonight, I would drain your treasury down to the last coin and call it a bargain..."
The eight people around him quietly pretended not to hear.
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