Chapter 160: No.
The Raikage had never believed in fate.
But in this moment he found himself wondering.
The same world, the same conditions of birth — everyone emerged from their mother into the same world. So why did that particular patch of earth called Konoha keep producing them? Hashirama Senju, Madara Uchiha, Tobirama Senju, Hiruzen Sarutobi, Minato Namikaze, Sakumo Hatake, the Three Sannin—
And now a child not yet thirteen who had defeated a man of forty years' training.
The temper that had defined him his entire life was, at the last, unexpectedly quiet.
Strength is the only truth. His father had told him that. The Third Raikage — who had held a line of ten thousand Iwa ninja alone, and died there.
He had decided then that his father hadn't been strong enough.
So he trained. Speed that had no equal in the ninja world. He met one man who he couldn't overcome even with his brother alongside him.
Minato Namikaze.
That man had died too, eventually. The Nine-Tails, supposedly. And that death had confirmed everything he believed.
But now—
The chest that should have felt something felt nothing.
Was his strength not enough? Was that the answer?
Strength is the only truth — and he had wanted nothing more than for the people of the Land of Lightning to eat. And he was dying for it. If strength was truth, did that mean everything he'd done was wrong?
The boundary between living and dying was both instant and endless. In the time that couldn't have been more than a heartbeat, he thought about things he never allowed himself to think.
The weight of being Shadow — the exhaustion he'd never spoken aloud to anyone — felt, in this moment, possible to set down. Give it to Dodai. Give it to his brother.
Bee. Kumogakure is yours now.
He used what was left of his strength.
His blood-soaked arm came up, slowly, and made a gesture.
Retreat.
Blood and snow hit Sakura's face. Her green eyes looked down at the man on the ground without expression.
His chest had collapsed under the full-force strike. The ground around the impact point had split in every direction.
What surprised her was the gesture. In the last moment of his life, he'd raised his arm and made a signal she didn't immediately recognize.
"BIG BROTHER!"
The Eight-Tails charged.
The body coming at her moved like a mountain deciding to fall. Neither Kakashi's attacks nor Mei's had any visible effect on the trajectory — he'd stopped caring.
Sakura stood up, turned her wrist, and pressed a kunai against the Raikage's throat.
The Eight-Tails stopped.
Everyone stopped.
Including Obito.
She's using a dead man as a hostage.
The thought registered across every witness simultaneously. Orochimaru, privately, found it admirable. Consistent with his aesthetic — extracting maximum value from sentiment.
Killer Bee's eyes were burning.
How can a person—
How can someone be this—
The Raikage's sudden death had paused both sides by reflex. Without coordinating it, everyone had drifted to their respective positions.
Sakura, Jiraiya, Kakashi, Mei.
Killer Bee, Orochimaru, Obito.
Sakura looked at the arrangement and felt mild irritation.
Jiraiya, when Orochimaru walked past you just now — why didn't you and Kakashi both hit him?
She was beginning to feel out of step with this world's general standards of behavior.
"What do you want?" Bee's voice came from inside the Eight-Tails. Rage and grief compressed into something barely controlled. "What do you want to give him back?"
"Leave. Now. Return to the Land of Lightning."
"You are not to cross the border for the rest of your life. Then submit a surrender document to Konoha."
"Then the Land of Lightning makes formal apology and reparations for this war."
She turned the kunai in her hand with mild patience.
She didn't actually want to capture the Eight-Tails. It was going to be difficult. Obito — whatever his other failures — would not allow the Eight-Tails to fall into Konoha's hands, and he had enough capacity left to complicate a serious attempt. And Jiraiya, Kakashi, Mei — all visibly depleted. Functional, but not for an extended push against a perfect jinchūriki with two people backing him.
No one on her side had the sealing technique anyway.
"Yes."
"Absolutely not."
The answers arrived simultaneously from Bee and Obito.
"Decide between yourselves. Quickly."
"I'm the one who decides. And yes."
Bee looked at Obito the way someone looks at something they intend to deal with later, at a time of their choosing.
"With me and the Eight-Tails together we can still—"
Nobody took Obito up on this.
A figure emerged from the treeline.
Kumogakure uniform. A face worn by years and by the immediate weight of grief, eyes blood-shot.
"Uncle Dodai!"
Bee's reaction — that involuntary relief, that reaching for solid ground in a moment of collapse — said everything about the man's standing in Kumogakure.
The Raikage's advisor. A man who had watched the Raikage grow up. The most respected voice in the village.
With the Raikage dead, Dodai held more authority than anyone present.
Obito's face changed.
He recognized the impossibility of what was happening.
This was Zetsu. Working against him again.
"Dodai" ignored Obito's expression and walked to the Eight-Tails, resting a hand on one of the tendrils.
The touch nearly broke Bee entirely. His brother was gone. Dodai was the only person left.
"Dodai" looked at the Eight-Tails for a long moment, then turned to the Konoha side. The grief in his face rearranged itself into something more businesslike.
"We retreat. Reparations. Agreed."
"But Konoha must open the resource channels."
"The people of the Land of Lightning cannot live like this any longer."
Sakura considered it. Her fine brow shifted slightly.
The original version of this man she knew almost nothing about — not many appearances in the source material, but what existed suggested someone with a strong sense of the larger picture. After Shi, she'd stopped underestimating anyone.
As a condition, it was workable. Food could be sold. Just not at the price of fifty years of political leverage — that had always been the point.
She was about to respond when Jiraiya stepped forward and spoke first.
"Agreed!"
Her mouth twitched.
"Three days from now," she added. "Here. When terms are settled, the Raikage is returned."
Bee's composure cracked visibly.
Three days. Three days of that scroll in her possession.
But Kumogakure had no alternatives left. The Two-Tails captured. The Raikage dead. Every engagement, frontal or guerrilla, had ended the same way.
Bee watched Sakura produce a small scroll from her kit and seal the Raikage's body into it without ceremony, directly in front of him.
"Three days. Noon. Here."
She held up the scroll.
"Dodai" met her eyes.
"We'll be here."
He turned to the Eight-Tails and exhaled — the sound of someone very tired.
"Bee. Dispel it."
Bee looked at the scroll, looked at "Dodai," looked at the Konoha camp. Said nothing. Let the Eight-Tails' chakra recede, the enormous form contracting back into a person standing on the snow.
"We're leaving."
Sakura turned.
That Dodai — if he was the real one, Kumogakure would be back to strength within twenty years.
He's almost certainly not the real one.
Need to figure out what's actually in that body.
Konoha camp.
"Sakura!"
Ino saw them coming and started forward — and someone moved faster.
"Sakura!"
A red shape blew past her, generating enough wind to send her hair sideways.
She stood there for a moment.
That shape. That exact shape.
This is—
Kushina hit Sakura like a homing device reaching its destination. Sakura's arms opened on reflex and caught her.
"Ah, they're close~" Mei observed, watching.
She looked at the pink-haired girl who had stood over the Raikage's body without flinching, and felt genuinely uncertain about her read on the person.
Not pure-hearted. Certainly not.
But people genuinely ran to her.
Interesting.
Ino arrived, furious, and inserted herself into the situation.
Thousands of Konoha ninja had gathered. Some on crutches. Some with blood soaking through bandages. Medical personnel holding people upright. All of them looking at the returning group.
Jiraiya looked at it — looked at the faces — and thought of the end of the last war he'd survived.
"Everyone."
Seven words.
"We won."
It didn't take more than that.
The noise that came back wasn't clean or organized. It was the sound of people who had been bracing against something for months feeling the pressure release all at once. Some of them were laughing. Some of them were crying without being able to say exactly why. Some were doing both at the same time.
The wind kept blowing. The snow kept falling. None of it felt as cold as it had a minute ago.
Sasuke stood in the crowd and looked at Sakura standing beside Jiraiya.
He wanted to ask if she was hurt. This was not the moment for that.
Shikamaru stood beside him and made the observation that Sasuke's expression contained a volume of feeling he appeared to be completely unaware of displaying.
He quietly decided that this was someone else's problem.
He just wanted a normal life. And he wanted Sakura's attention pointed elsewhere indefinitely.
Hokage Tower — Hokage's office.
Hiruzen read the dispatch from the front and allowed himself to smile with the full commitment of someone who had been worrying for weeks.
Good.
Very good.
The guerrilla campaign dismantled within days of Sakura's arrival. The decisive engagement won. The Raikage dead at Sakura's hands.
The sapling he'd cultivated had become something that could carry real weight.
"Send word immediately — full victory at the Frost Country front. Three days of village celebration. Dispatch the negotiation team to Frost Country at once."
He was already moving to the next item when the door opened.
The man who entered heard the last of the orders.
Hiruzen's satisfaction dimmed.
"Danzō. What brings you."
The warmth left his face. Danzō Shimura had not come here by chance. The River Country losses — four thousand ninja dead through command failure — was a reckoning that hadn't been had yet. Stopping his rank had been the emergency measure. The accounting came after.
Danzō's expression was not the one he usually wore. The relentless certainty was still there, but something beneath it had shifted. Something that took a moment to identify.
"Hiruzen."
"I want—"
"No."
(Chapter End)
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