"Did you catch those two just now?"
Fourth Raikage A stood on the roof of the Raikage Building, looking down over Kumogakure.
He couldn't relax. A vague, clawing anxiety sat in his chest, too loud to ignore. Sitting in the office had felt like suffocating, so he'd come up here to breathe and calm himself.
"Apologies, Lord Fourth. Those two are very skilled at hiding. C tracked them as far as a valley… then completely lost their trail."
The ANBU kneeling behind him answered immediately.
A's face darkened.
C was one of his most reliable shinobi—excellent at sensory ninjutsu, genjutsu, and medical arts. If he lost the quarry…
"Tell the barrier team to reinforce security," A said, eyes narrowing. "If they detect any intruder—"
His irritation only got worse.
That uneasy, gnawing feeling made him want to punch a mountain in half just to vent.
The last time he'd felt like this had been the day his father died.
Back then, the same kind of restlessness had eaten at him all day. Only later did he learn: the Third Raikage had fallen.
Now that feeling was back.
A felt exposed, raw — and he didn't know why.
Was it Bee?
No. Impossible.
He knew his younger brother's strength better than anyone.
To threaten Killer B, you'd either need a fully committed Konoha force with the Third Hokage at the front, willing to trade lives…
And if something had happened, Bee would've found a way to let him know.
He was still turning that over in his mind when his ear twitched.
…A sound?
He snapped his head up.
The sky above Kumogakure was its usual state: layers of drifting cloud, pale and opaque. Nothing unusual.
But that unease in his chest only intensified.
Then, in the corner of his vision, he spotted it — a tiny black speck, hurtling downward at terrifying speed.
By the time his brain registered what he was seeing, the object had already closed half the distance to the village.
A narrowed his eyes.
A long, metallic cylinder.
Silver-white, gleaming with a dull metal sheen.
Not chakra, not ninjutsu. Just… something falling.
"A foolish attack," A muttered.
Kumogakure's barrier had been active continuously since the war began.
It could block chakra, physical intrusions, even wide-area jutsu.
A solid metal rod like that?
The barrier would swat it away.
But for some reason, his unease spiked instead of easing.
The cylinder struck the barrier.
The impact lasted less than a heartbeat — the barrier flared and bounced it away, deflecting it down toward the left side of the village.
A turned his attention back to the sky, ready to see what else might be coming—
The world went white.
A blinding flash erupted from the left side of the village.
A instinctively tried to blink, to shut his eyes against the light—but before his eyelids even moved, a wall of force slammed into him.
A deafening shockwave, carrying searing heat, crashed over the Raikage Building.
The impact forced A backward several heavy steps.
The scorching gale whipped up rubble, roof tiles, and chunks of stone — and mixed among them…
A severed human eye spun through the air and smacked wetly against his cheek.
It hissed and vanished against his Lightning Release Armor, vaporized instantly.
Then came the strangest sensation.
He couldn't breathe.
His body went through the motions — chest expanding, throat working — but no air entered his lungs.
Nothing.
And when he forced his mouth open wider, the only thing that rushed in was heat, like he was trying to inhale from a furnace.
"What kind of jutsu is this…?!"
If A still thought this was anything but an attack, he might as well check himself into a hospital.
In the distance, at the very center of the blast, a cloud of fire was surging upward — blooming into the sky like a towering mushroom.
The shockwave kept rolling outward, dragging the superheated air with it, racing to swallow the entire village.
A watched, eyes bloodshot.
No.
No.
He would not let some unknown attack swallow Kumogakure.
"Defend! All units, defend, now!"
He roared the order, but his voice seemed strangely small in the ringing silence.
The thermobaric blast had ripped the oxygen out of the air, creating a momentary artificial vacuum. Sound itself felt muted, strangled.
Still, shinobi weren't fools.
Even as the shockwave tore across the village, defensive jutsu bloomed across rooftops and streets—walls of earth, domes of water, hastily raised barriers of lightning and wind. They blunted some of the blast and heat.
Then the second wave hit—the suffocating emptiness.
Those same shinobi suddenly realized they couldn't breathe. Panic flashed across faces as lungs clawed for air that wasn't there.
Fortunately, it didn't last long.
Within a few seconds their environment normalized, the pressure equalized, and oxygen rushed back into the shattered streets.
They gasped like drowning men hauled onto shore.
And what they saw when their heads cleared was—
Ruins.
A third of the left side of Kumogakure had simply… vanished.
The buildings closest to the epicenter were gone. Not damaged — gone.
Churned into dust and ash, reduced to a crater of molten, twisted stone.
Further out, it was nothing but a terrain of shattered walls, broken beams, and scorched, half-standing structures. The air was full of smoke, dust, and the continuous chorus of screams and groans.
The shinobi had at least defended themselves.
The villagers had not.
In the inner ring around ground zero, there were no intact bodies.
No corpses, even.
Some had been blown apart. Some burned.
And the ones closest to the center… were simply not there anymore, like water that had been boiled away.
A stared, fists shaking so hard his gauntlets rattled.
Then he tilted his head back and glared at the sky.
That attack had come from above.
"Whew… didn't penetrate the barrier? Guess they were lucky."
High in the clouds, on a drifting hot-air balloon, Amamiya Kenichi clicked his tongue as he watched the enormous mushroom cloud rising over Kumogakure.
When he'd asked Sasori to hurl the bomb down using magnetic force, the speed had been incredible.
But not quite enough to punch straight through the barrier — it had hit, flared, then been deflected aside.
The good news (for Kumo): the barrier only lasted a fraction of a second under that kind of blast before shattering.
The better news (for Kenichi): in that fraction of a second, it had absorbed a huge portion of the energy.
Otherwise, this wouldn't be "a quarter of the village destroyed."
It would be: "goodbye, Kumogakure."
If that bomb had gone off inside the barrier instead of outside, things would've been far more interesting. At that point, "flattened" might not even be an exaggeration.
Even with the barrier helping, roughly a fourth of the village had been erased.
"W–what… kind of jutsu was that…?"
Sasori was practically leaning over the edge of the basket, eyes wide.
When Kenichi had handed him that metal cylinder and told him to drop it, he hadn't thought much of it.
Sure, Kenichi was obsessed with "science," but in this world, if it wasn't ninjutsu, how dangerous could it be?
Then Kenichi had immediately used Wind Release to push the hot-air balloon away from Kumogakure's airspace, as fast as possible.
Sasori had been confused.
Now, staring at the mushroom cloud and the burning city below, he wasn't confused anymore.
He was scared.
If that thing had exploded while he was still holding it…
He would have died.
No question. No puppet tricks, no poisons, no clever traps. Just instant, all-consuming death.
A deep, primal fear ran down his spine.
For the first time, Sasori truly felt it:
Maybe becoming "eternal" really was a necessity.
Becoming a puppet, making his body into an immortal work of art… might not just be an obsession.
It might be the only way to survive the era of "science" Amamiya Kenichi was dragging this world into.
(End of Chapter – if you're enjoying it, don't forget to support the book!)