Chapter 188: Hiruzen's Ambition: Three Kage, One Hand
Mei and Kakashi, still locked in their standoff with Kakuzu, felt the ground shudder violently beneath them and looked up toward the distant battlefield on instinct.
What was that?
The tremor had reached this far. From this distance.
Kakuzu turned and looked too.
A heartbeat later, all three of their faces went still.
A wave of brown-yellow rolled toward them across the horizon.
Sand.
Dizziness. Weight. The world coming back in pieces.
Gaara, hand pressed to his head, dragged himself up out of a pit easily ten meters deep. Groundwater had welled up through the cracked earth, soaking his legs to the knee.
"Hey, hey, hey. If you don't want to die, you'd better start moving."
"Even I wouldn't take that pink one head-on."
"What a monster."
Shukaku, inside him, hadn't stopped complaining.
The beast had seen the same battlefield Gaara had, sharing his vision throughout the transformation. That fist coming down — even Shukaku had no interest in facing that directly.
The tiger had torn through the sand body in an instant. If it hadn't been for—
If it hadn't been for the layer of gold sand that had appeared in front of him at the last possible moment—
Gold sand.
Gold sand.
Gaara's eyes went wide.
He turned, scanning, searching for the source.
Something behind him. He went to turn, and his body refused to cooperate — locked, rigid, breath gone tight and shallow. He didn't want to look. He looked anyway, slow, degree by degree.
A figure resolved in his vision. One he knew too well.
Brown hair. Black clothes. One arm. Floating motionless on the water's surface, a hole punched clean through his chest.
Blood spread from the wound, staining the groundwater red around him.
Dad.
Dad—
Gaara stared at his father's body, unable to process it.
Why.
Why had he done that.
Wasn't his father supposed to hate him? He'd killed his own mother before he was even born.
But—
But why had his father shielded him.
Even at the cost of his own life.
Gaara couldn't make it fit. Couldn't understand it. He'd believed, this whole time, that he hated his father too.
But—
Tears surfaced and fell before he registered them.
Shukaku howled somewhere inside him, relentless. Gaara didn't hear any of it. He reached out, shaking, wanting to touch his father.
A shadow fell across him. He went still.
He turned, trembling.
A pink figure stood at the edge of the pit, backlit, expression unreadable.
Green eyes, no warmth in them, looking down at him.
"Sa—"
He didn't finish the name.
A dark blur came at him fast. What sand remained — even soaked through with water — moved on its own, rising to block the strike.
Gaara's pupils contracted.
Shukaku shouldn't be able to interfere right now. The transformation's broken. So why—
Why is the sand still moving on its own?
This isn't Shukaku's power. So what is it?
He didn't get the chance to finish the thought. The kunai punched through the autonomous sand shield without pausing.
Gaara looked down at his own chest.
The kunai had gone through the sand. And through him.
Is that... my blood?
In his last seconds, the thing he couldn't understand surfaced once more, unresolved.
One minute earlier.
"Yang Release — Mountain Lord!"
Mid-air, blasted backward by the fifty-meter staff, transformed-Gaara watched the moment that would have stayed with him for the rest of his life, if there'd been more life left to have.
A tiger, larger than anything he'd ever seen, leapt directly at him.
Can't block it. Can't block it. Can't block it.
What do I do—
His best defense, the Sand Shield, had already shattered. He was airborne, off-balance, with no possible counter.
And then — a familiar figure appeared directly in front of him.
Gaara stared at it, uncomprehending.
The man — unfamiliar in this moment, and yet completely known — looked back at him once.
What expression is that.
He'd never seen that look on his father's face before. Not once.
Gaara didn't have a word for what "love" meant. He'd never been given the chance to learn it.
His father's mouth moved. The wind tearing past Gaara as he flew backward swallowed the sound, but he could read the shape of the words.
Gaara. Live. For both of us — for Karura's sake too.
Karura.
Mother?
Before Gaara could answer, gold sand swallowed his vision completely.
Sakura looked down at Rasa and Gaara in the flooded pit, intending to retrieve the bodies — and stopped as gold sand surged out from Gaara's collapsing form, wrapping around him entirely.
Pop.
Gaara, chest already pierced, simply vanished in front of her.
Sakura didn't move to stop it.
Storing one's remaining chakra inside another person was apparently a Sand clan secret technique — the same lineage that had given Gaara his sand in the first place, inherited through his mother, Karura.
Rasa, evidently, had chosen his wife's method in his final moment.
And before dying, he'd embedded something resembling a reverse-summoning seal into Gaara's body, intended to pull him to safety.
It had triggered a fraction too late.
Gaara, with a hole through his chest, had no realistic path to survival from this.
Unless Chiyo's life-transfer technique came into play.
A life for a life.
That was the entire reason Sakura hadn't bothered intervening.
Gaara himself didn't register as a threat to her. But to Sunagakure, he mattered enormously — not just as the One-Tail's jinchūriki, but because the village's talent pipeline had thinned out badly. Gaara represented Sand's entire future.
Chiyo would have to weigh that. Trade her own remaining years for his.
If Gaara died, Sand's next generation effectively died with him, and the One-Tail went with it.
And Chiyo herself was a considerably more dangerous problem than Gaara, longer term.
Use Gaara's hand to remove Chiyo, eventually. Maybe.
If this war ended with both the Fourth Kazekage and Sand's most senior elder dead, the village wouldn't recover from that for a generation.
There was also the question of whether Chiyo would live up to her canonical reputation for noble sacrifice — particularly without having gone through her arc with Sasori first, in this timeline.
The life-transfer technique itself genuinely interested Sakura. Bringing someone back from actual death was a different category of feat entirely than what Naruto's Six Paths Sage power had managed in the source material — even pulling Guy back from the brink had relied on Guy still having a thread of life left to work with.
Chiyo's life-transfer, by contrast, was true resurrection. And anything touching life at that level inevitably ran back through yang-release.
Sakura scratched her head.
Wow. I'm genuinely terrible.
Kill the father, set up the elder for an impossible choice, and now I'm sitting here intellectually curious about the resurrection technique she might use to fix it.
Is this just a pink-hair thing?
"What's wrong, Sakura?"
The slug on her shoulder watched all of this unfold, confused. One fewer kill on the board than expected, and yet Sakura looked entirely unbothered — faintly amused, even.
"Nothing's wrong, Lady Slug. Just thought of something interesting."
Sakura started walking, crossing to Rasa's body.
Second Kage by her hand, after the Raikage. Now the Kazekage too.
She lifted the body from the water, sealed it into a scroll, and left.
Magnetic release. Konoha's now.
"Fire Release — Phoenix Sage Fire!"
The black mask-creature spat a wave of small fireballs toward Kakashi and Mei.
Kakashi dodged, eyes briefly flashing red.
Across the field, one of Kakuzu's masks abruptly twisted and shattered.
!
In the same instant, another mask — airborne, carrying Kakuzu's wind-release heart — dove directly into his collapsed body, and Kakuzu rose again.
Kakashi watched the resurrection with exhausted, heavy breath.
"Kakashi, are you alright?"
Mei moved to shield him, eyes locked on the regenerating threat in front of them.
Five masks. Five lives. Three had already shattered — fire, lightning, water. What remained: the wind heart currently active, and the unseen one Kakuzu hadn't yet revealed.
Mei's eyes settled on the purple mask still circling at a distance.
The one carrying Torune Aburame's heart.
"I'm fine."
Kakashi's breath was ragged. His expression said otherwise.
Sakura's pills were gone. Kamui had been used twice. Chidori Blade three times. Thunder Tiger Annihilation twice.
His chakra reserves were critically low.
He found himself, currently, standing behind a woman, unable to do much else.
And—
His hand drifted, unconsciously, to the eye that had once been Obito's.
His vision was starting to blur.
Obito.
This is your eye. Let me at least pay down some part of what I owe you with it.
He forced himself upright, intending to push through with whatever chakra remained and trigger Kamui one more time.
A hand landed on his shoulder.
"Go rest, Kakashi."
Sakura had appeared without him registering her arrival.
"Sakura..."
Seeing her back meant only one thing.
The other fight was over. She'd won.
"I can keep going."
Kakashi forced himself upright anyway.
Sakura's brow furrowed slightly.
This man.
He wants to die. Or close enough to it that the distinction barely matters.
A decade of grief — father, teammates, mentors, all of it stacking up — had left Kakashi running on borrowed composure for years. And just when he'd started to find some footing again, the friend who'd given him this eye turned out to have betrayed Konoha, with countless Konoha shinobi dead at the hands of the organization he now belonged to.
The wound had reopened, and it was deeper than before.
Since Obito's identity came out, whatever Kakashi was carrying internally, no one else had any real way to access it.
Better that he never learns the Fourth was killed by Obito's hand too.
Sakura made a mental note to tell Jiraiya and Hiruzen the same — keep that detail away from him entirely. If Kakashi found out Minato and Kushina had died at Obito's hands specifically, even someone with his composure might not come back from that cleanly.
On the field, Kakuzu watched the pink-haired girl approach, working through the implications fast.
Rasa lost?
"You beat Rasa and the One-Tail?"
His voice came out cold.
A Kage and a tailed beast, combined, and this girl had taken both?
"Rasa's right here."
Sakura stepped forward, lifting the sealed scroll, giving it a small shake.
Kakuzu's expression shifted hard.
Not just beaten. Dead. The Kazekage is dead.
That weak?
"Heh. Beating Rasa — fine, call that luck."
"What comes next is mine to handle."
Kakuzu's voice went flat and dangerous, visibly committing to full effort.
One man, alone, against Sakura, Mei, and Kakashi together. The exact lineup the Eight-Tails, at full jinchūriki capacity, had once faced.
"Come on, then."
Sakura crooked a finger at him, open contempt on her face.
"Wind Release — Pressure Damage!"
Kakuzu's mask split wide and unleashed a wave of compressed wind. The sand still drifting in from the earlier engagement — kicked up by the punch that had ended the One-Tail — exploded into a churning storm, blotting out the sky over the entire field.
And then Kakuzu turned and ran. Didn't look back once.
Not happening.
That girl had killed a Raikage. Now a Kazekage and a tailed beast. He wasn't sticking around to find out what came next.
There was no version of one-versus-three, against this lineup, that he survived.
Sakura watched him bolt, mouth curving slightly.
The so-called Undying Mercenary clearly valued his own continued existence too much to commit to a fight he couldn't win.
"Watch over Kakashi. I'm going after him."
She tossed the line to Mei without slowing and launched after Kakuzu.
"Wait—"
Mei reached out on reflex. Kakashi, at the same moment, finally hit the limit of what his body could absorb.
His eyes rolled back. He went down where he stood.
Whatever instinct had Mei moving toward Sakura died instantly, redirected entirely toward catching him.
Kakuzu, gaining distance, looked back once and felt something cold settle in his stomach.
This girl—
He scanned the surroundings fast, made a decision, and the purple mask opened its jaws wide.
Purple mist poured outward, drifting toward Sakura.
Sakura's expression sharpened.
Not mist. Nanotech parasites — invisible to the eye.
The cloud closed in, ready to engulf her — and stopped, roughly ten meters out, refusing to advance further.
She watched it hover at the threshold, considering.
Interesting.
The cellular elevation from yang-release, layered with the suppression field her yin chakra produced — together, they were holding the parasites back entirely. Something about the field registered, on whatever level governed those creatures, as a threat too large to approach.
A biological hierarchy thing. Pure intimidation at the level of life itself.
Sakura filed the observation and kept moving.
Even at her current capability, she had no interest in testing whether her body could simply absorb Torune's nanotech swarm directly.
That particular experiment would likely end with a very short epitaph.
She kept after Kakuzu.
The parasites tried to dodge clear of whatever they perceived her to be — and failed. They weren't fast enough.
Sakura's mouth twitched slightly at the irony.
So I'm scared of them, and they're scared of me. Great.
Kakuzu, whatever his other limitations, wasn't slow. As the chase stretched on, he was closing fast on the border of River Country.
His intentions were obvious by now. Sand was finished — the Kazekage himself was dead. Sand couldn't protect him anymore. His destination: Amegakure, sharing a border with River Country.
Rain Country kept Zetsu scattered across its territory at regular intervals. Anyone spotted fleeing this badly would get reported straight up the chain.
Pain's protection. That was the only safe harbor left.
Sakura watched the distance between them stretch and felt her patience thin.
She'd clearly read his plan correctly by now.
If she couldn't run him down, the next-best outcome was destroying Torune's heart entirely.
She had no interest in a direct confrontation with Pain right now. Among Pain's bodies, the Animal Path, Preta Path, even the Deva Path — none of those concerned her particularly. But the Human Path was a different category entirely. One touch, and it was over.
Konan was a serious problem in her own right. And the likely backup — Deidara, Hidan — added more complications. Hidan was manageable on his own merits. Deidara's C4 Garuda was the real headache. Another nanotech-scale weapon she had no clean answer for yet.
Taking on the whole of Akatsuki, right now, wasn't realistic.
That would have to wait for Sasuke's Eternal Mangekyo, Naruto's Nine-Tails Chakra Mode, and her own Sage Mode coming together.
When that day arrived, she'd kick down Pain's front door so hard the food bowl would shatter.
Her eyes sharpened. Three shuriken appeared in her hand.
Yang Release — Superhuman Strength.
Shuriken Shadow Clone.
She wasn't skipping the Enlargement Technique by choice — there simply wasn't time to layer it in. The throw speed augmented by yang-release strength alone already pushed past what she could track and chain into a follow-up shadow clone technique cleanly. Doing both at once, at this output, was already at the edge of what she could manage.
She released all three.
The shuriken split into a black rain, converging on the purple mask still streaming nanotech parasites.
Trees in the rain's path didn't just take damage — they came apart entirely on contact. Boulders along the road shattered with a sound like detonation.
Kakuzu looked back, scalp prickling, and threw himself bodily into the nearest river, vanishing downstream toward Rain Country.
The mask Kakuzu had been using to delay her — the one carrying the nanotech control — disintegrated completely under the shuriken rain.
Sakura slowed and stopped.
She was standing one step from the Rain Country border now.
She looked at the nanotech parasites still drifting and feeding on everything around them, frowning slightly.
The mother colony was dead, but the remaining swarm reproduced fast. Left unattended, this stretch of land would turn into a dead zone within weeks. Civilians nearby would die for it eventually.
Sakura wasn't a good person. She wasn't a monster either. If cleanup was possible, she didn't particularly mind spending the effort.
Fine. Get Mei out here and handle this properly, piece by piece.
She looked once more toward Rain Country's border.
Wait for it.
I'll be back.
Konoha. Hokage Building. Hokage's office.
Hiruzen read through the dispatch in his hands, brow lifting, deeply satisfied.
The Fourth Kazekage. Dead.
A second Kage, after the Fourth Raikage, fallen to Sakura.
My final student.
Let the whole shinobi world see — what comes out of Konoha isn't just gambling, drinking, and bad habits.
She can carry this village's whole banner on her own.
Hiruzen pulled fresh paper from his desk and began writing immediately. When the letter was finished, he retrieved a small scroll from his drawer and sealed both into a message tube.
"Send for someone."
An ANBU appeared at his call, instantly ready.
"Get the fastest ninja hawk we have. Deliver this to the Whirlpool Country front."
"And dispatch Namiashi Raidō, Iwashi Tatami, and Shiranui Genma to the River Country front. Immediately."
"Understood."
The ANBU vanished.
Hiruzen looked out at the village he'd watched over for decades.
The Kazekage, dead. The One-Tail jinchūriki, dead. Sunagakure had nothing left to keep fighting with.
Which left exactly one opponent standing.
His mouth curved.
The weight that had been sitting on him for weeks — the war's slow grind, the casualties piling up — felt, for the first time, like it had genuinely lifted.
The day Sakura had reached the River Country front, Kirigakure had already moved. Honoring their commitment to Sand, the prepared Kiri forces had landed in Whirlpool Country. Tsunade had taken two thousand shinobi out to meet them.
He'd originally planned to redirect troops freshly pulled back from Frost Country to reinforce Tsunade's numbers.
That, evidently, was no longer necessary.
With the yang-release body technique complete, Hiruzen genuinely believed Sakura had no remaining equal in the entire ninja world right now. River Country wasn't fully resolved yet, but the outcome was no longer in doubt.
Reassign her. Send her straight to Whirlpool Country.
It wasn't that he doubted Kirigakure's actual combat strength. It was that Mei's intelligence had made the picture clear enough: years of the Bloody Mist policy had bled the village's real talent dry through defection. Kisame. Zabuza Momochi. Now Mei herself, gone too.
What remained in Kiri was a tiger with no teeth left — only the Fourth Mizukage and a Six-Tails jinchūriki somewhere unaccounted for holding the structure together.
And, conveniently, the man currently leading this particular Kiri deployment was the Fourth Mizukage himself. Yagura Karatachi.
With the Raikage and the Kazekage both already dead by Sakura's hand, an idea had taken shape in Hiruzen's mind.
Or, more honestly — an ambition.
A clean sweep. Three Kage, all fallen in sequence, all to the same student.
The team dispatched to the River Country front — Raidō, Iwashi, Genma — had all served on Minato's old Flying Thunder God squad. The ninja hawk would carry a Flying Thunder God marker out to the Whirlpool Country front.
The instant the marker team reached River Country, the technique would activate, pulling Sakura directly across the map to Whirlpool Country.
Immediate arrival.
Three Kage, one hand.
☆☆☆
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