Chapter 220: Only Greater Violence Can Stop the Violence of Others
The Rain ninja never broke through.
Ritsu had dropped more than a dozen of them with a handful of palm strikes, then wrapped the rest in fog before they could organize. It was clean, efficient work — the kind of jutsu application that Minato quietly admired. Technique wasn't just about raw power. Used well enough, it became something else entirely. The fog had essentially herded their own force through the village unmolested, the Rain ninja stumbling around in a white-out of their own territory while their targets walked straight to the center of it all.
They reached the tallest tower without meaningful resistance.
Once they crossed into the barrier's edge, Ritsu's Byakugan cut through the concealment instantly. He looked up.
"Target's in the tower. We don't need to go up."
His voice had barely finished when four figures dropped from the platform above, landing on the edge with the kind of easy precision that came from absolute confidence. They were dressed in black robes with red cloud patterns, and every pair of eyes that looked down at Ritsu's group was the same pale violet, ringed with patterns that spread outward like ripples in still water.
Rinnegan. Four sets of it.
These were not the same bodies as before. The previous engagement had accounted for five avatars, and all five had been destroyed. What stood above them now was an entirely different configuration.
The one at the front had orange hair.
Minato studied the figure carefully, working through what Jiraiya had told him. Nagato had red hair. The orange-haired one had a different name.
He called out across the gap. "Who are you? Are you Nagato or Yahiko?"
The figure above paused.
"Nagato. Yahiko." Something shifted in the voice — not quite emotion, but the ghost of it. "So Jiraiya-sensei told you about us."
The words landed like a stone in still water. Every non-Konoha ninja in the immediate vicinity went through some version of the same reaction — a sudden short-circuit, the pieces rearranging themselves into a shape that made no sense. The Rinnegan holder had called Jiraiya sensei. The Legendary Sannin had a former student sitting behind the most powerful visual technique in existence, and Konoha had known about the connection before this operation even began.
What exactly was going on here?
The figure above answered before anyone could voice the question. "But all of that is the past. What stands before you now is Pain. The god who will guide this broken ninja world into a better age."
"A god." Minato's voice sharpened. "You think holding the Rinnegan gives you the right to impose your will on everyone else? You trained under Jiraiya-sensei for years and what you took from it was using violence to get what you want?"
He was asking the question, but part of his mind was running a separate calculation. Where was Jiraiya? Their plan had been for Jiraiya to use the confusion at the front gate as cover and reach the tower ahead of the main group. He should have made contact with Pain before this. The fact that Jiraiya still hadn't appeared anywhere meant he had either run into a separate problem or was still working his way through the village's interior.
"Is violence wrong?"
Pain's voice was flat and cold. "In this world, only those who command greater violence can stop others from using it. Only when everyone fears the pain of violence enough — only when that suffering becomes universal — does real peace become possible."
The two men looked at each other through the curtain of rain.
What Minato saw in Pain's eyes was not madness. It was conviction. The kind that had been forged over years of genuine suffering and couldn't be argued away with words. Whatever had happened to this person between the idealistic student Jiraiya described and the figure standing above them now, the distance was too great to cover in a conversation.
Even if Jiraiya materialized right now, Minato realized, it wouldn't matter. The door that persuasion might have walked through had been closed for a very long time.
"Attack."
The order came out clean and without hesitation.
Pain raised his right hand.
Almighty Push.
The repulsive force hit like a collapsing mountain — no hand seals, no warning, no preparation. A single gesture and the air itself became a weapon.
"Incoming! Defend!"
Ritsu's shout cut through the moment.
Minato moved. He grabbed Nono's wrist and used the Flying Thunder God Technique to pull her back fifteen meters in an instant, materializing at one of the coordinates he had been quietly placing since they first approached the village. The battle had started the moment they entered Amegakure's range. He had been leaving markers ever since.
Shisui's Sharingan gave him less raw perception than a Byakugan, but his visual power was highly developed and he had unlocked the Mangekyō long ago — he simply chose not to use it freely, knowing its cost. His enhanced perception caught the edge of the repulsive wave's reach, and his self-refined Body Flicker carried him outside it before impact.
The others weren't fast enough for that.
The Rock ninja reacted in the most practical way available to them. Their Earth Style: Hardening Technique was exactly what its name promised, and all four of them had trained it to a respectable level. Kitsuchi's crew took the hit, were thrown off their feet, and came down with minor injuries. Not out of the fight.
The Sand ninja had their own answer. Yashamaru looked different from the last time — sharper, harder, something gone from his expression that had been there before. On his back was a massive gourd the same dusty yellow as desert sand. The moment Ritsu's warning sounded, the gourd opened and a wall of flowing sand erupted in front of the four Sand ninja, thick enough to absorb the wave. The force shattered the sand wall into scattered fragments, but the energy spent itself against it completely. All four of them walked out unharmed.
Mangetsu didn't even form hand seals. The Land of Rain's saturated air gave him everything he needed, and he pulled water from the atmosphere itself into a barrier that blocked the remaining force. Clean, quick, no wasted movement.
Dodai was the oldest person in the field and arguably the most tactically experienced. He heard Ritsu's shout and was already forming seals before the force wave crossed half the distance. The rubber wall he produced from his mouth absorbed the impact the way rubber was designed to — flexing, warping, nearly tearing at the edges, but ultimately holding. The Cloud ninja behind it came through without a scratch.
Pain watched all of it.
"Only neutralized one..." he began, then stopped.
Because the one he had aimed at most directly — Ritsu, who had taken the hit without time to dodge — was climbing back to his feet. His clothes were shredded, blood marking a dozen places across his torso and arms, and the stone beneath where he had been standing was cracked in a silhouette of impact. But he was standing.
"He regenerated."
Pain said it without surprise in his voice. He had his own reasons for understanding accelerated physical recovery. The entity he was connected to had a body that defied normal human limitations, capable of things that would have seemed impossible otherwise. What Ritsu was showing was still remarkable — the Almighty Push was not a light technique, and what it had just done to the ground should have done considerably worse to a human body.
These were not ordinary opponents.
In the underground chamber far below the village, Nagato exhaled slowly and redirected the full weight of his concentration toward his four avatars. Leaving Amegakure was already an unavoidable outcome. That was accepted. What he was not willing to accept was letting these people walk away without consequences. They were obstacles to everything he was building. The moon's eye plan, the path to genuine peace — everyone standing in that square was a future enemy of that goal.
He would not show mercy. But he would not involve the Rain ninja either. That order had already gone out.
On the platform above, Ritsu got his feet under him and shook blood from his knuckles.
The Almighty Push had a minimum cooldown interval before it could be used again. Five seconds. That was the window.
Wind Release Chakra Mode.
The wind came alive around him — not the invisible, passive kind but a visible current, pale and sharp, wrapping his body like armor that moved. The chakra pressure it generated was enough to cut, enough to push, and it gave him a speed that made the gap between himself and Pain's platform a trivial distance.
He crossed it in an instant.
Pain stood still.
The Asura Realm stepped in front of him.
It had been repaired — after the last engagement, the Hell Realm had used its King of Hell technique to restore the Asura Realm's destroyed arms. It stood with three pairs of arms spread wide, six mechanical limbs reaching for Ritsu simultaneously, and a serrated tail swinging down from above toward the crown of his skull.
Ritsu didn't slow down.
Gale Fist.
He drove through the outstretched arms. Three of the six were cut clean away at the joint. The remaining three were carved with deep gouges but held. The tail came down, and he caught it with the edge of his Wind Release-enhanced arm, splitting it nearly through — another three centimeters and it would have been severed entirely.
He took his own damage in the exchange. That was the calculation he always made. His combat style discarded defense entirely in favor of offense, and Level 4 Physical Regeneration meant most damage was a temporary inconvenience rather than a real cost.
By the time the exchange was over, his clothes had several new tears. The wounds underneath them had already closed.
"Annoying," Ritsu muttered.
Intelligence was the foundation of ninja combat. Know the enemy's abilities, exploit the gaps. But the Rinnegan was so comprehensive in what it offered that gaps were almost impossible to find — except for the one obvious one, which was that Nagato himself couldn't move properly and was almost certainly not present in this body. Everything else was covered.
Pain had cleared his cooldown.
But he didn't use the Almighty Push again.
Both sides reset — Ritsu dropping back from the platform as the Asura Realm reclaimed distance, watching each other with calculation replacing the initial burst of action.
It was in that moment that Ritsu noticed the Rain ninja.
They were withdrawing. The vast crowd that had been surging inward from every direction was moving in reverse, falling back in organized streams, clearing the streets around the tower in a tide that flowed away rather than toward. No hesitation, no argument. They were following an order.
Ritsu watched them go. He didn't move to stop them.
Killing Rain ninja who had chosen not to fight was not something he had any interest in. He had made his declaration earlier with full intention of following through if forced — but the Rain ninja were making it unnecessary, and that suited him fine.
Animal Realm moved.
A series of summoning techniques triggered in rapid succession. From the tower's upper passages, from the channels beneath the village, from surrounding rooftops — summoned creatures appeared. A massive, fang-heavy hound. A crab trailing chemical foam, built more like armor than flesh. A bird that was ugly in the specific way of things designed for violence rather than flight. More after them, one after another, a wave of summoned beasts released all at once — creatures that Nagato had been cultivating and growing since the previous battle, replenishing what had been lost.
They crashed into the assembled joint force like a flood hitting a dam.
The force scattered. Not from inability to handle the creatures — any of these ninja could manage a summoned beast in isolation — but because the creatures hit everything at once and the joint force had exactly the cooperative framework that five suspicious villages with no actual trust for each other could be expected to produce.
Which was to say, none at all.
Minato had shared the Rinnegan intelligence. He had explained the capabilities, the danger levels, the combat profile. He had done his part. What he couldn't manufacture was genuine coordination between groups that would cheerfully stab each other if the reward were sufficient.
So each group fought its own fight, against its own beast, and the square in front of the tower became a chaos of separate engagements that shared only geography.
Exactly as everyone had known it would be from the start.