Chapter 179: Left by Uchiha Kou
The Third Kazekage, Enkawa Kazue, had fallen to internal strife—slain by Chiyo's own hands. Without their supreme combatant anchoring the front lines, the collapse of Sunagakure's battlefield presence was swift and brutal.
Years of superficial cooperation between the nations had bled Sunagakure's secrets dry. Their intelligence network lay exposed. No matter how frantically Chiyo shuffled her forces or rewrote deployment codes, enemy intelligence ninjas easily picked apart the breadcrumbs, predicting the Sand's every move.
The Land of Wind battlefield violently fractured into two distinct meat grinders. On the western front, Chiyo was forced to maintain a grueling, paranoid defense against Hanzo of the Salamander's venomous ambushes. Simultaneously, she had to plug the eastern gaps against the relentless, surgical offensives led by Konoha's White Fang, Sakumo Hatake.
Hanzo's toxic warfare was an existential threat. Since Chiyo alone possessed the medical expertise to synthesize antidotes on the fly and neutralize his lethal mists, she made a desperate gamble. She entrusted the eastern front to her own flesh and blood—her son and daughter-in-law. The directive was simple: hold the line against Sakumo. Buy time. Once she drove Hanzo back into the rain, she would pivot and reinforce them.
It was a fatal miscalculation. She had grossly underestimated the sheer, unadulterated lethality of Sakumo Hatake.
Years prior, at the Land of Wind border, Sakumo had been routed by the combined might of a Tailed Beast and the Second Kazekage. But that defeat had a caveat—he had been running on fumes, his chakra reserves completely drained after a grueling overnight sprint. The Sakumo Hatake of today was a different beast entirely. He stood at the absolute zenith of his prime, a tempest of white hair and crackling chakra, diving headfirst into direct combat.
Cloaked in the blinding arcs of Lightning Release, Sakumo tore through the desert sands. His signature short sword, humming with violently compressed chakra nature transformation, sheared through iron and wood alike. He plunged directly into the heart of the enemy encampment. Amidst a sprawling, complex formation of combat puppets, the White Fang danced. In a single, devastating flurry of silver flashes, he severed the chakra threads—and the lives—of Chiyo's son and daughter-in-law.
"What? You're telling me they're both dead? How is that possible?!"
The blood drained from Chiyo's wrinkled face. The battle report slipped from her trembling fingers, fluttering to the sand. Her vision swam, the edges darkening as a wave of sheer vertigo threatened to drag her under. Her son. Her daughter-in-law. Butchered by Sakumo Hatake on the front lines.
"Elder Chiyo, the intelligence... is accurate," the messenger stammered, bowing his head to avoid her hollow gaze. "It's a direct transmission from Elder Ebizo."
"I... see."
A bitter, metallic taste flooded her mouth. Was this the universe's twisted retribution? The karmic price for plunging her hands into the blood of her closest friend? Hot, stinging tears blurred her vision, but she violently blinked them away. Her jaw locked. Suppressing the agonizing scream tearing at her throat, Chiyo forced herself forward, rallying her unit to plunge back into the toxic hellscape against Hanzo.
Elsewhere, Jiraiya's three-man squad proved as slippery as greased loaches, smoothly weaving between aggressive assaults and tactical retreats. Meanwhile, the main bulk of Iwagakure's forces found themselves stonewalled by Hiruzen Sarutobi's masterful deployments, preventing the Land of Earth from flooding into the Land of Rain en masse.
This left Sunagakure holding the bag. Desperate to protect their fragile border oases and newly established civilian settlements from collateral devastation, the Sand shinobi deployed heavily into Ame territory. Consequently, they became the primary punching bag for Hanzo's localized wrath.
Pressed to the breaking point by Sakumo's relentless advance, Chiyo made a grim tactical choice. She completely abandoned the Land of Rain battlefield, ordering a mass retreat back to Sunagakure. Her strategy shifted to a war of attrition, using the unforgiving, vast expanse of the desert to bleed Konoha's supply lines.
But this retreat carried a devastating cost. The border infrastructure—the bustling factories built during years of feigned cooperation with Konoha, the golden crops swaying in the fields, the painstakingly cultivated lush forests, and the thriving civilian villages—were all left utterly defenseless. The fires of war swept over them without mercy.
Destruction required only a spark; construction demanded a lifetime of blood and sweat. The miraculous oasis that Enkawa Kazue had painstakingly carved out of the barren dunes with her own two hands could have thrived. It was the seed of a grand vision—a dream to eventually transform the entire Land of Wind into a verdant paradise.
Now, with her death, that dream withered on the vine.
Through the grinding attrition of subsequent skirmishes, a powerful Magnet Release shinobi finally emerged from the Sand's ranks, erecting a magnetic defense formidable enough to stall Konoha's ferocious vanguard. Yet, it was a pyrrhic victory. The oasis was annihilated.
The golden, ripened wheat fields—abandoned before the harvest—were trampled into mud and ash, serving as the bloody stage for warring shinobi. The land was swallowed up, inch by agonizing inch.
When a stray Fire Release jutsu incinerated the very last green leaf of Kazue's forest, Chiyo's lungs seized. A suffocating, inexplicable grief clawed its way up her throat.
Every lingering trace Kazushi had left upon this border was gone. Erased.
And it was she, Chiyo, who had personally orchestrated the destruction of this oasis—the very physical manifestation of their village's hope.
Her hands trembled as she stared at the blackened earth. Was her rigid ideology truly just? Or had she been catastrophically wrong from the very beginning?
Inside the dimly lit command tent, Ebizo quietly placed a charred, crumbling ear of wheat onto the tactical map. It was supposed to be the season of a grand, unmatched harvest. Instead, the bounty had been reduced to cinders beneath the boots of two warring nations. Without these crops, the civilian population would face a brutal, starving winter.
He turned his head, his sunken eyes meeting hers. "Sister," he rasped, his voice heavy with exhaustion. "Intelligence from the Land of Lightning confirms everything is in position. The arrangements can proceed."
Chiyo slowly raised her head. "Brother... are you blaming me? Blaming me for ignoring your pleas to spare her?"
Ebizo offered neither confirmation nor denial. His weathered face bore the eerie, hollow calm of a man whose spirit had already shattered.
"Sister, pull yourself together," he murmured, his tone devoid of its usual warmth. "Sunagakure still needs us. Do not forget your own reasoning. You chose to abandon her for the sake of the Land of Wind, ensuring our village wouldn't be swallowed whole by Konoha."
He leaned forward, enunciating every syllable with grim finality. "Since we have made our bed, we must lie in it. Do not look back. Whether we were right or wrong... history will be our only judge."
Outside, the desert night was merciless. Gale-force winds howled like grieving spirits, whipping a blinding storm of sand through the smoldering ruins. The sturdy, paved roads that Enkawa Kazue had carefully solidified with Earth Release ninjutsu were slowly ground down by the relentless erosion. Bit by bit, the stone crumbled back into loose grains, eventually vanishing into the dunes without a single trace...
Meanwhile, deep within the weeping borders of the Land of Rain, Jiraiya's trio sprinted through the downpour, desperately evading a tightening encirclement.
With Sunagakure abandoning Ame as a buffer zone, Hanzo's venomous gaze had immediately snapped toward Konoha's forces. Hanzo was a monster in his absolute prime, wielding undisputed Kage-level might. Even a veteran like Chiyo hadn't managed to secure a definitive advantage against his scythe.
For Jiraiya, Orochimaru, and Tsunade—three prodigious shinobi who had yet to reach the absolute zenith of their own strength—facing the Salamander was a suffocating, near-fatal ordeal.
Forced to buy time for their vulnerable logistics unit to evacuate, the trio had led a suicide squad into a brief, explosive head-on clash with Hanzo.
They had barely survived. Now, all three were battered, bleeding, and running on dangerously hollowed chakra coils. To add insult to injury, that arrogant old bastard had condescendingly bestowed upon them the bullshit title of Konoha's 'Sannin' before letting them crawl away.
Crouched beneath the rotting roots of a massive tree, Jiraiya quickly reverse-summoned a messenger toad to relay their grim status to Hiruzen. They were just about to collapse and finally catch their breath when the rhythmic splashing of boots echoed through the rain. A massive contingent of Iwagakure pursuit troops was closing in fast.
"A pursuit force of this scale couldn't possibly slip past Hanzo's sensory net unnoticed," Orochimaru hissed, his pale golden eyes narrowing into dangerous slits. "That decrepit old snake let them through on purpose."
Hanzo was a slippery, calculating bastard. He knew the geopolitical reality: Amegakure was a minor nation. He couldn't afford to permanently burn bridges while the war's ultimate victor remained unclear, which meant he didn't dare slaughter Konoha's most prized golden generation with his own hands.
His solution? Open the back door for Iwagakure. If the Stone shinobi butchered Konoha's newly minted Sannin on Ame soil, Hanzo's hands remained perfectly clean.
"Cowardly piece of shit," Tsunade spat, her teeth grinding together as she abruptly cut off the soothing green glow of the Mystical Palm Technique she was using to knit Jiraiya's ribs.
Denied even a moment's respite, the three forced their aching muscles to obey, launching themselves back into the fray.
"Earth Release: Underworld Swamp!"
"Earth Release: Rock Bullet Technique!"
The Iwa vanguard didn't waste a single breath on banter. They unleashed a brutal, synchronized combination ninjutsu the second they broke the treeline. The muddy terrain beneath the Sannin instantly liquefied into a bubbling, chakra-infused quagmire designed to swallow them whole, while a dense, merciless volley of hardened stone projectiles rained down from above.
Relying on pure instinct, the trio executed simultaneous Body Flicker techniques. They blurred into motion, kicking off the sinking mud and launching themselves into the rain-slicked canopy to escape the swamp's gravitational pull. Mid-air, they rapidly cycled through hand seals, unleashing a barrage of their own wide-scale ninjutsu to shatter the incoming rock bullets.
The forest erupted into a chaotic, deafening warzone once more.
But the toll of their prior clash with Hanzo was too severe. Their chakra coils burned with a hollow ache, and the sheer volume of Iwa shinobi was beginning to overwhelm their defenses.
The concussive blasts of explosive tags tore through the rain, shaking the very bedrock. Kunai and shuriken violently sparked against each other in mid-air, the sharp shrieks of deflecting steel ringing out endlessly. Trapped in the tightening noose of the encirclement, the reality was stark: if they didn't carve an immediate path out, they were going to die in this mud.
Forged by years of grueling teamwork, they didn't need words. A single, fleeting glance shared between the three was enough to synchronize their intent. Moving as a single, multi-headed organism, they concentrated their remaining firepower on the weakest link in the Iwa formation, violently blowing a hole through the enemy lines.
Without hesitation, the three surged through the gap, sprinting desperately into the deeper forest.
The Iwa commander, a scarred veteran with a keen eye, immediately noticed the sluggishness in their movements. Recognizing a golden opportunity to claim the heads of Hiruzen's prized pupils, he sharply chopped his hand forward. The main pursuit force surged after them like a pack of starving wolves.
Among the fleeing trio, Jiraiya was in the most critical condition. Having forcefully tapped into Sage Mode and spammed massive, chakra-guzzling jutsu to hold off Hanzo, his reserves were completely tapped out. His breaths came in ragged, wheezing gasps.
Spotting the white-haired shinobi stumbling, the commander signaled his men. The entire Iwa vanguard shifted their trajectory, concentrating a lethal barrage of strikes entirely on Jiraiya to pick them off one by one.
The pressure on Jiraiya skyrocketed. He parried two blades, but his exhausted muscles betrayed him. The Iwa commander blurred into his blind spot, a jagged kunai thrusting viciously toward Jiraiya's throat. Orochimaru, engaged with three other shinobi, whipped his head around, his eyes widening—he was too far away to intercept.
Death was inches away.
But just as the cold steel was about to pierce Jiraiya's flesh, the small, unassuming lucky amulet bag dangling from his neck—knocked loose from his armor during the frantic melee—suddenly pulsed.
It flickered violently, once, twice, before erupting in a blinding, incandescent white light.
Before a single shinobi could process the flash, a microscopic, razor-thin strand of pure chakra shot out from the amulet. It looked like a glowing kite string, rapidly lengthening and extending outward with terrifying speed.
There was no explosive shockwave. No devastating roar.
The elongated, ethereal thread of chakra simply reached its maximum tension and swept horizontally outward in absolute, eerie silence.
It was faster than a lightning strike. To the naked eye, it was nothing more than a singular, horizontal flash of white light that zipped across the battlefield. An instant later, the charging Iwa shinobi found themselves physically pierced by the impossibly thin line of concentrated energy.
The thread possessed an ungodly sharpness. It was the absolute pinnacle of Wind Release nature transformation—the element renowned for its peerless cutting power. Polished to a terrifying extreme and compressed through a thousand agonizing trials, this singular thread was demonstrably sharper than even Sakumo Hatake's legendary White Light Chakra Sabre.
Pfft. Pfft. Pfft.
A sickeningly soft series of wet tears echoed through the rain. It was the sound of human flesh and reinforced armor offering zero resistance. The wind thread sliced through the Iwa vanguard like a hot wire through soft tofu. It cleaved a perfect, horizontal line through the front ranks, traveling a full ten meters before finally dissipating into the damp air as its stored chakra ran dry.
The momentum of the charging Iwagakure shinobi carried them forward for another half-step before their upper torsos simply slid off their waists.
The commander, along with the entire front line, had been cleanly bisected. They died instantly, their severed halves collapsing into the bloody mud. Even as the life faded from their wide, terrified eyes, their final thoughts were consumed by sheer disbelief. How? How could anyone compress Wind Release to such a microscopic edge and seal it inside a mere trinket?
"This is..." Jiraiya gasped, his hand flying up to clutch the now-dormant lucky amulet bag. He stood frozen in the pouring rain, staring at the carnage in absolute, breathless shock.
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