Chapter 219: The Idiot Who Went Looking for a Beating
"You're telling me Hanzo the Salamander is actually dead?"
"Yes."
The Rain ninja's voice was flat and empty, the way a man speaks when his will to resist has been completely removed. No inflection, no hesitation.
"How did he die?"
"He was killed by our god."
"Your god?"
"Yes. The god of the Hidden Rain Village."
Shisui stared at the Rain ninja sitting in front of him and felt something crawl across the back of his neck. One god-level figure was dead, and a new one had apparently taken his place. He glanced sideways at Minato, not entirely sure how to proceed.
They had not walked into the village openly. Instead, they had used Ritsu's Byakugan to locate an isolated patrol squad in the outer perimeter, well outside the range of whatever barrier Amegakure had erected, and Shisui had put the whole squad under genjutsu before they could raise an alarm. Quiet, clean, no unnecessary noise. Now the squad leader was sitting in front of him answering questions in a controlled monotone.
"Continue," Minato said quietly. "Ask him what this god looks like. Specifically the eyes."
Shisui understood immediately. If this was the Rinnegan holder, being worshipped as a deity by the village's own ninja would actually make a certain kind of sense. The Rinnegan was the stuff of legend, the visual technique of the Sage of Six Paths himself. Ordinary people and even trained shinobi, seeing those eyes without context, might reach for divine explanation before any other.
"Describe your god. What do his eyes look like?"
The Rain ninja answered. The squad leader was a mid-ranking jonin with actual access to the village's inner circles, someone who had seen the god directly. His description was detailed.
"Orange hair. Eyes like pale violet, with rings of pattern spreading outward."
Shisui's head turned immediately toward Minato.
Pale violet. Rings of pattern.
There was no question. That was the same Rinnegan they had encountered before. They were in the right place. What had seemed like it might take days of careful searching had resolved itself within minutes of arriving at the outer perimeter.
"The god of the Hidden Rain Village," Minato said quietly, his eyes narrowing as he studied the village through the curtain of rain. "He's brought the entire village under his control."
Dodai, standing near the back of the group, did not look particularly pleased about the swift confirmation. "That complicates things considerably. Rain ninja aren't weak, and there are a lot of them. If they're all loyal to the Rinnegan holder, he can field a human wave defense on top of whatever the Rinnegan itself can do. That is genuinely bad for us."
Minato said nothing for a moment.
He had miscalculated. His original working assumption was that Nagato, if he was hiding in Amegakure at all, would be keeping a low profile — minimizing his presence, not drawing attention to himself, trying to avoid the exact kind of notice that the Rinnegan would attract. It had seemed like reasonable logic.
Looking back at it now, that assumption had been too convenient. The Rain ninja had no reason to know what the Rinnegan was. Even Konoha hadn't known what it was until recently — Ritsu's family archives had given them the identification. Jiraiya had recognized it through his own connections to the sage world. But for the average Rain jonin? An entity with impossible eyes performing miracles would just be a god. You wouldn't recognize a legend. You'd just worship it.
And it was worth noting that the Uchiha clan, for all their Sharingan heritage and extensive records, apparently had less preserved lore about the Rinnegan than the Hyuga archives did. The Uchiha had been at the center of every major conflict for generations — records got lost in wars, traditions fragmented during the long fighting seasons. It was understandable. Didn't make the gap less inconvenient.
Either way, the situation in front of them was more complicated than anticipated.
Jiraiya spoke up. "Minato. Let me go in ahead. Reconnoiter."
Minato looked at him. "Sensei. The situation is different from what we planned for. Even with one of my kunai, if you get into real trouble, I can't guarantee I'll reach you in time."
"I know." Jiraiya smiled, easy and unhurried. "And don't underestimate me, by the way. I can still take care of myself."
Minato held the look for two full seconds, then yielded. "Alright."
He didn't doubt Jiraiya's capabilities. As long as his teacher didn't get careless, he could manage.
"Shisui. Ask the prisoner where the god usually stays."
Shisui relayed the question without missing a beat.
"Our god lives at the top of the tallest tower in the village."
Every eye in the group turned to look at the skyline.
The barrier Amegakure had deployed blocked sensory jutsu but left ordinary eyesight unaffected. Even through the rain, the tower was visible — a massive structure rising from the center of the village, easily the tallest thing on the horizon, built with the kind of scale that announced importance before you even got close.
Jiraiya looked up at it for a few seconds, measuring the distance in his head.
Then he formed hand seals and summoned a frog the size of a large hand — small, green, eyes blinking. He pushed his arm into the frog's mouth. The frog swallowed him whole.
Several people stared.
Then the little green frog issued a series of croaking sounds, bounced twice, and dropped into the nearest body of water. It moved through the rainfall-flooded streets toward the tall tower at a speed that was surprising for something so small.
When the frog had vanished into the grey distance, Pakura watched the spot where it had disappeared and raised an eyebrow. "Hokage-sama. Letting Jiraiya-senpai operate separately like this — you're sure about that?"
She was diplomatic in how she raised the concern, even adding an honorific when she mentioned Jiraiya's name.
Minato looked at her. The look was polite and absolutely cold. "It's fine."
Pakura pressed her lips together and said nothing more.
It wasn't a difficult calculation. Even without Jiraiya, the remaining force consisted of the Yellow Flash, the White Night Yaksha, and Uchiha Shisui. The four other villages combined might not defeat those three. The only reason Konoha's operational command had been so readily accepted at the summit was precisely because of this kind of arithmetic. In the ninja world, strength defined who spoke and who listened.
Dodai, Kitsuchi, and Mangetsu had watched Pakura receive the cold shoulder and all three had the good sense to keep their own thoughts to themselves.
Ritsu looked at the village ahead, studying what he could see beyond the edge of Amegakure's barrier, and raised his voice. "Hokage-sama. We should move. Jiraiya-senpai is working from the shadows — let's give him something to work with and draw attention to ourselves from the front."
Minato's brow furrowed slightly. "The number of Rain ninja in there..."
"Hokage-sama, we came here with the weight of five great villages behind us. We should act like it." Ritsu's tone was calm and direct. "If the Rain ninja are too blinded by loyalty to their god to recognize that reality, I'll handle them."
The last sentence carried an edge that left no ambiguity about what handling them would entail.
Minato looked at him for a moment. The polite framing in the first half of Ritsu's statement was pretty window dressing, and both of them knew it — the underlying logic was the same as every show of force in ninja history. But the practical point was sound, and more importantly, Minato trusted Ritsu's assessment of his own capabilities without reservation. Ritsu had never claimed he could do something he couldn't.
"Alright. Move out." He made the decision cleanly and without hesitation. "Kazekage, Dodai, Kitsuchi, Mangetsu — with me."
Minato was first, moving at the kind of pace that made other elite shinobi look like they were standing still.
The four named followed immediately. The rest fell in behind them.
Within moments, the group of more than a dozen shinobi walked openly out of the grey haze and into plain sight of the Hidden Rain Village's outer guards.
The reaction was immediate and predictable.
Amegakure had been isolated for years, but it wasn't completely blind to the outside world. The senior jonin at least had working knowledge of the major players in the ninja world. And you didn't need to know anyone personally to recognize what a headband carved with five different village symbols meant when they all walked in together.
"What in the — why are ninja from all five great villages here?"
"That yellow hair. Is that the Yellow Flash? The Fourth Hokage of Konoha?"
"Byakugan eyes. That's the Hyuga clan."
"The fan crest — that's Uchiha."
"Dodai from Kumogakure. That old bastard."
The Rain jonin clustered together, talking over each other, fitting the pieces together with increasing alarm. They arrived at a rough picture of what they were looking at. Then the alarm gave way to a different problem entirely.
What were they actually supposed to do about this?
Invite them in? Turn them away? Find some middle ground? Every option seemed to lead somewhere terrible. A group with this composition didn't show up to make polite conversation. Getting this wrong — whatever that meant — was going to create a catastrophe.
While the Rain jonin were still arguing in urgent whispers, one of them had a moment of clarity.
"Someone go tell the Angel right now!"
That gave the rest of them a direction to point at. Voices came back in agreement from several directions.
"Right, right, inform the Angel — let the god decide how to handle this!"
"This is a decision for the god, not us!"
But the god couldn't make a decision instantaneously, and the incoming force wasn't waiting politely at the gate. Something had to happen in the meantime. After a brief, fractious debate, a few of the more senior Rain jonin were pushed to the front as the official face of the village's response.
The one at the point of the group pulled himself up to full height, filled his lungs, and called out in the most authoritative voice he could manage: "Outsiders, halt. State your purpose. This is the Hidden Rain Village. Unauthorized entry is considered an act of aggression."
He had worked hard to keep it civil. The word "please" was technically implied by the entire structure of the sentence, and the careful phrasing avoided anything that could be read as an open declaration of hostility. It was, under the circumstances, a fairly diplomatic statement.
Ritsu walked to the front of the group and spoke over the man before he had finished echoing.
"Who here has authority to make decisions? Get them out here. If no one has authority, get out of my way."
Then he kept walking.
His pace had increased. He was at the front now, closing the distance.
It was, objectively speaking, a fairly aggressive approach.
The Rain ninja at the front, who had just spent significant effort composing a respectful greeting, felt something hot ignite in his chest. "Konoha shinobi. I will say this one more time. This is the Hidden Rain Village, and you are not in a position to —"
A Palm of Eight Trigrams hit him like a thunderclap.
The man never saw it coming. The force threw him clean off his feet. He hit the ground several meters away, spitting blood.
"If you're going to bark at someone, make sure you can back it up first," Ritsu said, already moving on. He sent one Palm of Eight Trigrams to each of the remaining Rain jonin in the forward group in rapid succession, a brief demonstration that left all of them airborne.
Not a single one blocked it. Not one dodged. They had trained for years under the protection of Pain's divine authority, and that protection had come at a cost — it had softened them. The brutal, grinding combat experience that had made Hanzo's Rain ninja feared during the Second War was gone from this generation. They had lived too long without needing it.
Facing Ritsu, they weren't opponents. They weren't even a warm-up.
More Rain ninja were surging in from the surrounding streets, shouting, the situation escalating fast.
Ritsu formed hand seals.
Water Style: Hidden Mist Technique.
Fog erupted across the area. The Land of Rain's air was saturated with moisture, and Ritsu drove that moisture into a dense, rolling white-out that swallowed the advancing Rain ninja in seconds. Under his precise control, the fog wall sealed around the surrounding area completely while leaving the path forward for his own group untouched. Clear visibility, open road.
The Rain ninja caught inside the fog went immediately disoriented. In near-zero visibility, any offensive jutsu they launched was as likely to hit their own people as the enemy. They froze.
Mangetsu Hoshigaki sucked in a sharp breath as the white walls closed around them, studying the technique with wide eyes. He let out a slow exhale through his teeth. "That's..."
Dosu Kinuta and Zabuza Momochi were both standing nearby and both nodded almost in sync. They knew the Hidden Mist Technique well. It was Kirigakure's calling card, a technique the village had spent generations refining. Both of them had put serious time into learning it.
Which meant they understood better than anyone just how far above their own versions this was.
Zabuza kept his voice down. "Mangetsu. That White Night Yaksha is a natural counter to everything we do. If we ever get the chance, we should kill him."
Mangetsu's expression went through several changes in rapid succession. He turned to Zabuza and hissed through clenched teeth, "Zabuza, shut your mouth."
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