"Do it, Jiraiya."
Tsunade didn't scream it. She whispered it into the nape of his neck, a command that vibrated directly into his spine.
She bit her lip, drawing blood.
"Ninja Art: Creation Rebirth."
The violet diamond on her forehead shattered.
It didn't break; it dissolved, turning into thick, black ink that raced down her face like intricate war paint. But the cost was instant. The roots of her golden hair, right at her temples, leeched of color. A streak of stark, bone-white shock bleached its way through her bangs in a single heartbeat.
She wasn't just releasing chakra. She was burning time.
"Hold tight, Hime!" Jiraiya roared.
He clapped his hands together. The natural energy of the Wadi Rum canyon—the heat of the red sand, the ancient stillness of the granite—rushed into him.
But he wasn't a master yet. He couldn't balance it.
His face contorted. His nose swelled, becoming bulbous and covered in rough, wet warts. His jaw unhinged slightly, widening into a croak-ready maw. His fingers fused, gray webbing stretching wetly between the knuckles. He didn't look like the noble toad sages of Mount Myōboku. He looked like a swamp monster wearing a human's clothes.
His skin grew cold and slimy against Tsunade's arms, weeping a thick, protective oil that smelled of pond scum.
He looked hideous. And he felt invincible.
BOOM.
Jiraiya launched himself off the valley floor. The black basalt pebbles beneath his sandals were pulverized into dust.
He moved with a speed that defied his bulk, a cannonball of senjutsu chakra aimed directly at Hanzō.
"Reckless," Hanzō muttered from atop his sandstone pillar.
The Salamander, Ibuse, opened its mouth. A cloud of purple gas, denser than the air, rolled down the dune like an avalanche. It hit the narrow canyon walls, trapping the Sannin in a corridor of death.
Jiraiya didn't dodge. He dove straight into the fog.
"Are you insane?!" Orochimaru hissed from the safety of a high rock bridge, watching with wide, reptilian eyes.
Inside the purple haze, Jiraiya's skin began to blister. The toxin ate at his eyes, his throat, his exposed forearms.
Sizzle.
It felt like swimming in boiling oil; every inch of exposed skin screamed as the cells began to liquefy.
"Clear it!" Jiraiya gurgled, swinging his hair—now hard as steel needles—in a massive arc. "Sage Art: Needle Jizō!"
The hair needles pierced the gas, creating a vortex, but the poison was already in his blood. His heart stuttered.
On his back, Tsunade's hands glowed with a light so intense it was nearly blinding.
"I've got you," she snarled.
She pumped her chakra directly into his nervous system. The blisters on his skin didn't just heal; they vanished, replaced by fresh, pink skin that aged into toughness in a millisecond. She forced his heart to beat, forced his liver to process the toxin, forced his cells to divide, die, and be reborn at the speed of a curse.
Jiraiya burst out of the poison cloud, steaming.
Hanzō's eyes widened behind his rebreather. "What?"
Jiraiya was airborne. He swung his leg—a limb thick with toad muscle—and slammed it into Ibuse's head.
CRACK.
The sound echoed off the canyon walls like a thunderclap. The massive salamander, weighing tons, was knocked sideways, crashing into a "melted wax" rock formation. Shards of red sandstone rained down.
"30 seconds!" Tsunade screamed in his ear.
Hanzō leaped from the beast, his kusarigama spinning.
WHIP.
The weighted chain caught Jiraiya's right arm. The sickle blade swung around, biting deep into the bicep, severing the muscle cleanly. The arm went limp. Jiraiya gasped, the sensation of rapid healing itching deep inside the bone marrow, worse than the pain of the cut.
"Got you," Hanzō whispered.
"No," Jiraiya croaked.
SQUELCH.
Tsunade jammed her hand onto the shoulder. Chakra flooded the injury. The severed muscle fibers writhed like worms, seeking each other out, knitting together with a wet, tearing sound.
Jiraiya's arm snapped back into functionality instantly. He grabbed the chain that was still embedded in his flesh and pulled.
Hanzō was yanked forward, losing his footing on the shifting sand.
"His bicep tore," Tsunade reported, her voice calm and terrifying. "I fixed it. Hit him."
Jiraiya hit him. A Rasengan, fueled by nature energy, slammed into Hanzō's guard. The explosion blew a crater in the mudflat, sending Hanzō skidding back fifty meters, his heels carving deep trenches in the earth.
High above, perched on a wind-eroded arch that framed the darkening sky, Orochimaru watched.
He didn't intervene. He stared, transfixed.
He saw the white streak in Tsunade's hair growing longer. He saw the way her skin turned slightly gray, the collagen breaking down and rebuilding too fast.
He saw two people destroying themselves to survive.
Inefficient, Orochimaru thought, his golden eyes tracking the splatter of blood. Look at them. Breaking their toys just to keep playing.
He ran his long tongue over his lips, tasting the iron in the air, his pupils dilating with morbid fascination.
He watched Tsunade cheat death, dragging Jiraiya back from the brink over and over.
She repairs the vessel, Orochimaru analyzed, a cold, hungry covetousness taking root in his soul. But the vessel is flawed. It breaks. It ages. It dies.
I don't want to be the mechanic, he decided, watching the gore. I want a body that doesn't break.
"15 seconds!" Tsunade shrieked.
The battle had devolved into a brawl. Hanzō, realizing he couldn't poison them fast enough, had switched to explosives.
Fire Release: Exploding Flame Formation.
The ground beneath them turned into a minefield. Paper tags ignited.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
Jiraiya danced through the fire. His toad-skin was scorched black, then peeled away to reveal fresh gray skin underneath. He was panting, his breath rattling in his chest like loose stones.
"The poison is in his lungs," Tsunade diagnosed, feeling the shudder in his ribcage. "Hold your breath."
She slammed a palm against his back, between the shoulder blades. She surged chakra through his lungs, flushing the alveoli with brute force. Jiraiya coughed up a glob of black blood and kept moving.
It was horrific. It was intimate. It wasn't a hug; it was surgical attachment. They were a single organism—one part violence, one part life-support, screaming defiance at a god of the battlefield.
"7 seconds!" Tsunade yelled, her voice cracking. "JIRAIYA!"
They were close now. Hanzō was backed against a sheer cliff of striated ochre rock. Ibuse was unconscious.
Jiraiya drew back a fist, ready to spend the last of his sage chakra, the last of Tsunade's gambling chips.
"DIE!" Jiraiya roared.
Hanzō raised his sickle.
And then—
Thrum.
It wasn't a sound.
Every ninja in the canyon felt it at the same time. Their chakra systems stuttered. The natural energy of the world—the wind, the sand, the heat—hiccuped.
Jiraiya froze mid-punch. Hanzō froze mid-block. Tsunade gasped, clutching Jiraiya's shirt.
They all turned their heads to the west.
One hundred miles away, in the direction of the ancient ruins of Roran, the horizon vanished.
A pillar of light, pure and blindingly white, pierced the stratosphere.
It was followed by silence. An impossible, vacuum-like silence that sucked the air out of the Wadi Rum.
The pressure drop popped their ears, a sudden painful suction that made the entire world feel underwater.
Then came the sound.
It wasn't an explosion. It was the sound of the sky tearing open. A deep, resonant VOOOM that shook the sandstone pillars to their granite foundations.
A mushroom cloud, violet and angry, bloomed against the twilight stars.
Sakumo Hatake had cut the line.
The White Fang had dropped the nuke.
In the canyon, the three combatants stood frozen, their petty battle for survival rendered instantly meaningless by the apocalypse rising in the distance.