Chapter 221: Even an Inflatable Doll Is Dangerous at the Right Size
The Rain ninja never entered the fight.
It was the outcome Minato had been most worried about, and it didn't happen.
Nagato had made the call before his avatars even appeared on the platform. The order went out: stay back, keep the civilians moving toward the shelters, do not engage. He understood the arithmetic. Throwing Rain ninja into a battle against five great villages wouldn't change the fact that he was being driven out of Amegakure — it would just guarantee those ninja died in the process. The original Akatsuki members who had followed him into the village, the people he had actually fought alongside — they were the ones he wouldn't spend as shields.
Hanzo's former subordinates were another matter. Nagato felt considerably less attachment toward them. But even they received the same order, because the consequence of their deaths would fall on the village regardless of which flag they had once served under.
So the tide went out. The Rain ninja retreated in organized streams, clearing the combat zone with a speed that served two purposes — it got them clear of the summoned beasts' path, and it let them maintain the fiction that they were withdrawing out of faith in their god rather than out of orders from a man preparing to run.
Ritsu watched them go and lowered his hands.
He was not a sadist. Fighting was a tool, not a pleasure, and the Rain ninja had disengaged. There was nothing for him to do but let them.
Minato reappeared beside him, Nono safely repositioned to the rear where the withdrawing Rain ninja no longer posed a threat to her.
He looked up at the Pain avatar standing above them — the one that led, the one with Yahiko's face — and made one more attempt. "You didn't give the order to send them in. That means something human is still in there, whoever you are. If you're willing to stand down now, I can swear on Jiraiya-sensei's name that we will —"
"Don't waste your breath, Fourth Hokage."
Pain's voice hadn't changed. It carried no anger, no passion, nothing that resembled the heat of someone who could still be reached. "Even if Jiraiya-sensei were standing directly in front of me right now, it wouldn't stop me from pursuing what I've dedicated my life to."
"Then tell me what that is. What is this ideal worth all of this? What did Missing-nin Anonymous actually offer you?"
A pause.
"Missing-nin Anonymous. You mean Uchiha Tatsuhata."
Pain said the name without any apparent concern for the intelligence he was giving away. Around Ritsu, he could feel the non-Konoha ninja processing that piece of information with visible effort.
"Tatsuhata brought me something. A genuine possibility of eternal peace for this world."
Minato stared.
Ritsu blinked.
Eternal peace.
Ritsu ran that through his head twice and arrived at the same conclusion both times. Tatsuhata had sold this man a dream. In the original timeline it had been someone posing as Uchiha Madara doing the selling. Here, Tatsuhata was apparently running the same script without even borrowing the name — and it had worked just as well.
Pain looked at both of them with eyes that saw something they apparently couldn't.
"I know what you're thinking. But I have no interest in explaining myself to the Fourth Hokage or the Hyuga Clan Head. People like you can't understand what real desperation for peace feels like."
He let that land.
"So rather than have you stand in the way, you should both die here."
The Asura Realm was already moving.
After the last exchange, it had been pulled back by the Animal Realm while the Hell Realm's King of Hell restored it — the severed arms regrown, the serrated tail repaired, the damage reversed entirely. It was at full function again.
It extended an arm.
Clustered missiles, hanging from the arm like oversized grapes, detached and launched in a spread pattern, trailing fire, aimed across both Minato and Ritsu's positions.
At the same moment, Pain raised his palm.
Universal Pull.
The gravitational force locked onto both of them, dragging them toward the incoming missiles rather than letting them retreat.
Minato vanished. The Flying Thunder God Technique was instantaneous, and no gravitational jutsu — regardless of its power — could reach through a spatial transition. He reappeared at a coordinate marker fifteen meters to the left, Nono already secured. The missiles that had been aimed at him curved in empty air and found nothing.
Ritsu did not have that option.
The gravitational pull latched onto him and yanked, and he couldn't twist his body into the Eight Trigrams: Rotation because his limbs were being pulled in the wrong direction. He had half a second to respond.
Wood Style: Wood Locking Wall.
Curved wooden trunks erupted from the ground on both sides, bending toward each other overhead like two hands lacing their fingers together, enclosing him in a wooden shell. The barrier severed the gravitational pull by putting solid matter between him and its source, and absorbed the first several missile impacts before the pressure built too high.
The wood shattered in seconds. Fire poured through the gaps. But those seconds were what he needed — enough time to release the Wind Release Chakra Mode before it became a liability with open flame everywhere, and enough time to trigger something larger.
Size and mass had their own arguments to make.
Wood Style: Wood Human Technique.
The technique wasn't subtle. A towering wooden giant heaved itself upright from the ruins of the wall, solid-core construction, its scale turning the surrounding architecture into furniture. Ritsu stood on its head, elevated above the fire and the chaos below.
The missiles that followed detonated against the wooden giant's body. They scorched it, blackened it, carved burning channels across its surface. None of it reached the figure standing on its crown.
Ritsu used Ninja Art: Hair Needle Senbon to clear the burned hair from his scalp in a single fired burst, and fresh black hair was already growing back as he straightened up.
Pain watched the wooden giant straighten to its full height and said nothing for a moment.
The Universal Pull had no purchase on something that massive. The physics simply didn't cooperate. He shifted his attention.
The wooden giant lifted one enormous foot and drove it into the tower's lower structure. The platform buckled. A section of the tower's base caved inward, leaving a rough hole the size of a house. The stomp missed Pain entirely — the Animal Realm's summoning technique had already relocated Pain, the Asura Realm, and the Hell Realm to a different section of the battlefield where the summoned creatures were occupying Shisui and the four village squads.
"Difficult thing to fight," Pain said flatly, looking up at the wooden giant.
He wasn't wrong. Jutsu designed to be used against human-sized targets scaled poorly against something that large. You could pour chakra into lower-tier techniques indefinitely and they would stop improving at some ceiling well below what was required. The only real options were high-tier techniques with large area-of-effect capability, or techniques that gained proportional power from increased chakra investment — which meant sage-level chakra, which introduced its own complications since most jutsu weren't calibrated to accept that kind of input without modification.
In short: big things were annoying to deal with regardless of how much chakra you had. He wasn't short on chakra. He was short on appropriately calibrated tools.
Pain filed it away as a problem and moved on.
Laser Cannon.
The Asura Realm's head split open like a blooming lotus, petals of metal folding back to reveal the convergence point beneath. Chakra poured into it — massive, precise, building toward a threshold that the technique required before it could fire. The light it produced before release was already bright enough to cast shadows in the rain.
The wooden giant turned, stepping free of the tower wreckage, pulling one leg clear. The movement took time. Large things moved more slowly than small ones, and the Asura Realm had used that window deliberately.
The leg that hadn't cleared the rubble yet took the beam.
White light crossed the distance and consumed the wooden giant's knee in its entirety. Not burned. Not damaged. Removed. A clean annihilation at the point of contact, the cross-section of the remaining leg charred black with smoke still rising from it. Without both supports, the giant's balance failed immediately. It toppled sideways, falling across three adjacent towers, sending water and stone erupting into the rain-soaked air.
Ritsu dropped clear before impact, leaving the giant to its collapse.
Pain used Universal Pull again, reaching for the falling figure.
Fifteen palm strikes in rapid succession launched upward from the descent.
Eight Trigrams: Empty Palm.
Pain had to break off the Universal Pull and redirect the Almighty Push to absorb the volley, canceling both techniques against each other in a momentary standoff. The exchange cost him the window to follow up.
But the Asura Realm was already building light again.
Six tri-pronged kunai cut through the rain with a sound like tearing silk, arriving at the Asura Realm from multiple angles simultaneously.
Yellow light flickered across three of them in the instant before they reached their mark.
Minato arrived.
He came in from a different vector than the kunai's paths, already inside the Asura Realm's reach, and drove the Rasengan directly into the crown of the Asura Realm's head — into the half-formed convergence point where the Laser Cannon's energy was still building toward critical mass.
The balance of forces broke instantly.
The stored energy had nowhere to go and no containment to hold it. It detonated inward and outward simultaneously. In the rain-grey light of Amegakure, white brilliance erupted for the second time, brighter for being contained rather than directed.
When it faded, the Asura Realm was gone. No residue, no fragments, nothing for the Hell Realm's restoration techniques to work with.
Minato had stepped through space in the fraction of a second before detonation, emerging unharmed at the next coordinate he had already placed.
The elegance of the sequence — using the enemy's own accumulated energy as the weapon, timing entry and exit through spatial transitions to avoid all consequences — was the kind of thing that looked impossible until someone actually did it.
In the deep underground chamber below the village, Nagato sat with his eyes closed and his jaw tight.
No enemies neutralized. One more Asura Realm lost, destroyed completely, not recoverable. The Hell Realm had nothing to work with.
He would need to find another body. Build it again from scratch.
Five villages, he reminded himself. Even if three of those five were contributing almost nothing, the remaining Konoha trio was proving extremely difficult to deal with individually, and collectively they covered each other's weaknesses in ways that made sustained pressure nearly impossible.
That Flying Thunder God Technique was particularly infuriating. It turned every offensive commitment into a potential trap. You couldn't lock the Fourth Hokage into an exchange because he was simply never there when the attack arrived. The Rinnegan's many capabilities all relied on being able to reach the target, and Minato was the most difficult target alive when it came to being reached.
Nagato held the frustration, let it pass, and started thinking forward instead of back.
His remaining avatars were the Deva Path, the Hell Realm, and the Animal Realm. Three. Against this force, three was not enough for a prolonged engagement.
He needed help.
His eyes drifted, through the Hell Realm's borrowed vision, to the ring on the Deva Path's finger. The Zero ring. The signal device.
One of the other rings was reachable. One belonged to someone who could cover ground quickly and arrive in time to matter.
The thought formed, and he acted on it immediately. The Deva Path began to move, pulling the Hell Realm with it, heading toward the outskirts of the village where Amegakure maintained a prison facility — a structure with occupants that served as viable anchors for the technique he had in mind.
He needed a conduit. The ritual required a sacrifice.
And at the end of it, someone very dangerous would be standing in this village.