Beneath Kikyō Castle, the heavy cease-fire parchment—its clauses dripping with humiliation—fell like a final verdict, drawing a blood-red curtain over Sunagakure's eastward gamble that had staked the nation's fate. What followed was the long, excruciating withdrawal spelled out by the treaty.
Every step of the retreat unfolded under the cold gaze of Konoha Shinobi; each movement required permission from the Konoha command—a slow-motion dismemberment.
The first to leave were Sayo and his unit, already penned like prisoners in the Land of Rivers Camp. Their orders were blunt: escort every mobile casualty and, as the vanguard, march straight back to Sunagakure in the Land of Wind.
No cheers, no hope—only numb silence. Sayo organized squads to help the lightly wounded hobble along; the grievously injured lay on crude stretchers. All Ninja tools and puppets had been confiscated, leaving them empty-handed, clad only in tattered uniforms and deeper scars within.
Under the apathetic watch of a Konoha squad, this column of broken soldiers trudged out of the captured Land of Rivers Camp and onto the endless road home. The journey was still harsh, but now it carried the added sorrow of the homeless. Sayo walked at the front, back straight yet bearing unspeakable weight. The pocket body cultivation furnace on his wrist pulsed faintly, sustaining him and reminding him that power alone grants the right to speak.
Once the wounded were gone, the real spectacle began: the withdrawal of several thousand bloodied, disarmed Sunagakure regulars still camped beneath Kikyō Castle.
The process was engineered for slowness and shame. Konoha capped the headcount of each departing batch and dictated exact routes. Day after day, only a fraction of the Sunagakure Ninja were allowed to leave the temporary stockade under elite Konoha escort, shuffling dejectedly toward the Land of Rivers Camp.
That camp now served as a transit pen and a "disinfection pool." Early arrivals rested while they waited for later cohorts, letting Konoha tally and control them. The once-bustling Suna compound echoed with the oppressive silence of the defeated and the vigilance of their jailers—a grotesque atmosphere.
Elder Chiyo and Ebizō were permitted to move with these main-body batches. Watching their Ninja driven and divided like livestock filled the two elders with grief and helplessness, yet they had to stay—to steady morale and prevent desperate mutiny, and to represent Suna's leadership in the hand-over.
The defeated supreme commander, Fourth Kazekage Rasa, faced the treaty's harshest clause: he must remain inside Kikyō Castle as its highest-value hostage.
He could not lead his troops out, nor race home to calm and rebuild. He was trapped in an enemy fortress, watching through windows as his forces crept away in humiliating driblets. This mental torment cut deeper than any battlefield loss. His very person guaranteed Suna's compliance—the strongest card Konoha held.
So the days crawled by in slow, stifling transfers. The Suna camp beneath Kikyō Castle thinned while the Land of Rivers pen filled, then emptied westward, until the last stragglers crossed into the Land of Wind's endless sandstorms.
When the final Sunagakure Ninja lowered their heads at the Land of Rivers border, Konoha Shinobi promptly seized every outpost; banners of the Land of Fire replaced the Sandstorm Sigil for good.
The Land of Rivers—where Sunagakure had poured rivers of blood and life for nothing—was now wholly Konoha's.
And Sunagakure greeted its returning remnants not with triumph but with cold reality: crushing reparations, a vassal-alliance treaty, and the long, bitter reconstruction that would demand every scrap of remaining pride.
The shadow of the Kikyō Mountain campaign, bleak as the depths of winter, settled over the Land of Wind. Sayo's journey and Sunagakure's future would have to open their next chapter amid this biting frost of disgrace.