"Time to come back to us, Lady Mizukage," Natsuki said, walking over to her.
"N-Natsuki-sensei." Mei's stunned expression finally cracked. She pulled herself together and bowed hurriedly.
"With the Third Raikage dead, Kumogakure will spend the next few days in chaos. They won't be in any condition to move on you again." Natsuki looked her over. "All you have to do is hold until our reinforcements land."
He already had the latest reports on the Cloud's movements. A had taken the main body back to the Land of Lightning, leaving Dodai and a thousand shinobi holding the forward camp — and once word of the Third Raikage's death reached them, they'd almost certainly follow.
Staying would only mean dying in place.
Natsuki had no intention of chasing them down.
Fighting a war in the Land of Water was a losing proposition for Konoha. For one thing, the Leaf had very few Water Style specialists. For another, it had no ships at all.
Combat on open water meant burning chakra just to stay upright on the surface. Water-walking sounded simple enough, but very few shinobi could sustain it for hours on end.
Move the front to the Land of Lightning and both problems disappeared.
Better still, the Land of Lightning was Kumogakure's own ground — and taking Kumogakure was the entire reason Natsuki had started this war.
"Yes, Natsuki-sensei." Mei drew a steadying breath and nodded.
She had already made her peace with the Third Raikage's death. From Kirigakure's perspective, it was unambiguously good news.
The problem was the man standing in front of her.
If Kumogakure could break the Mist, then so could Konoha. Whether her village continued to exist at all now rested on Natsuki's whims and nothing else.
For a Mizukage whose fate was bound to that village, the thought was a headache without a cure.
And the worst part was that there was absolutely nothing she could do about it.
"When your reinforcements arrive, we'll move on the Land of Lightning together and link up with the rest of our forces." Natsuki tore open a rift almost carelessly. "I'll send you back."
"Thank you, Natsuki-sensei." Mei spared one last glance for the Third Raikage's body and stepped through.
Once the rift sealed behind her, Natsuki surveyed the corpses scattered across the blackened island.
He thought about it and decided there was no point sweeping the battlefield for intelligence. He'd be giving up a great deal of information about Kumogakure — but since he intended to own Kumogakure outright before long, that information would come to him anyway.
The Third Raikage's body, though, he'd take.
His name was already loud enough across the shinobi world. He saw no harm in making it louder.
He stepped forward and sealed the corpse into a storage scroll.
He was about to leave and find Tsunade's column when a line of text unfurled across his vision.
[Laxus Dreyar template awakened.]
"That name doesn't ring a bell."
Natsuki turned it over for a moment and came up blank, so he simply opened the template and read.
[Name: Laxus Dreyar]
[World: Fairy Tail — 100 Years Quest]
[Rank: S]
[Ability 1 — Lightning Magic | UNLOCKED][Effect: The full body of Lightning Magic mastered by Laxus Dreyar.]
[Ability 2 — Dragon Slayer Magic | LOCKED][Effect: The Dragon Slayer Magic gained upon integrating the heart of the Lightning Dragon King.][Unlock condition: Absorb the power of the Eight-Tails.]
[Ability 3 — Lightning Dragon King Mode | LOCKED][Effect: Awakened by absorbing the power of the Yellow Dragon. Raises strength and speed, and grants complete mastery of the Lightning Dragon King's Dragon Slayer Magic.][Unlock condition: Defeat the Fourth Raikage.]
[Ability 4 — Forbidden Magic: Thunder Palace | LOCKED][Effect: Channels stored chakra crystals into an apocalypse-scale strike. Yield scales with the number of crystals used.][Unlock condition: Become Raikage.]
By the time he reached the bottom, the name had come back to him.
Laxus Dreyar. Grandson of Makarov, third master of the Fairy Tail guild. An S-Class Lightning Dragon Slayer by the age of seventeen.
In his early years he'd formed the Thunder God Tribe and gone his own way, and had been expelled from the guild after unleashing the Forbidden Magic: Thunder Palace. Several bloody lessons later, he'd come back as one of the guild's most reliable pillars. During the 100 Years Quest, he absorbed the power of the Yellow Dragon and hit the peak of his strength.
So killing the Third Raikage had awakened this particular template. That tracked — both men had built their entire arsenals out of lightning.
Ability 1: Lightning Magic.
In Fairy Tail, magic filled the same role ninjutsu did here, and Lightning Magic was one branch of elemental sorcery. Laxus had mastered a great deal of it, and the system had already converted the whole set into Lightning Style ninjutsu.
Three of them struck Natsuki as especially valuable.
The first was Lightning Body — wrapping the whole frame in lightning to supercharge the muscles, raising strength, durability, and speed all at once. In practice, it was the Third Raikage's Lightning Style Chakra Mode by another name.
The second was Lightning Transformation. Converting the body wholesale into lightning allowed for instantaneous travel across enormous distances. It reminded Natsuki of the Goro Goro no Mi, the Rumble-Rumble Fruit — the same elemental dissolution, the same untouchable body.
The third was Lightning Explosion: an immense discharge released from the palm that detonated like a warhead on impact.
Raw numbers, no gimmicks. The same brute-force category as Excalibur.
Ability 1 alone was worth the price of admission. It made Natsuki the single strongest Lightning Style user alive, effective immediately.
Ability 2: Dragon Slayer Magic.
Lightning Dragon Slayer Magic belonged to the category of Lost Magic, and it originated in the heart of the Lightning Dragon King. The name was a little misleading — for all the "slayer" in it, what it actually did was hand the user a dragon's power.
The unlock condition was absorbing the Eight-Tails.
Natsuki suspected the system was telling him something: drop the Lightning Dragon King into this world and it would sit at roughly Tailed Beast weight.
Not that the comparison was a stretch. Dragon Slayer Magic and Tailed Beast Transformation already had a great deal in common. The Lightning Dragon's Roar was, functionally speaking, a Tailed Beast Bomb with better presentation.
Ability 3: Lightning Dragon King Mode.
The form awakened by mastering both the Lightning Dragon King's power and the Yellow Dragon's. It raised speed and strength, and it opened up two special techniques on top of that.
Taken on its first effect alone, it sounded like Lightning Style Chakra Mode again — but Lightning Body already covered that ground. This was closer to Chakra Mode's true form. The Ultimate Lightning Armor.
Which was probably another reason killing the Third Raikage had awakened this template at all.
As for the two special techniques, those were Roaring Thunder: Red Lightning and Lightning Dragon King: Red Lightning. Both sat comfortably among the strongest magics Laxus had ever used.
The unlock condition was defeating the Fourth Raikage.
Kumogakure hadn't named one yet, but there was no mystery about who it would be. A, the Third Raikage's son.
A's raw power was roughly his father's, if perhaps a shade under it — he had never inherited Hell Stab, the technique that had earned the old man his reputation as the strongest spear. What he had instead was speed, and there he surpassed his father outright.
In the original timeline, the Third Raikage's speed had been rated as a match for Namikaze Minato — a man with the Flying Thunder God.
To Natsuki, none of that meant much. He had killed the third. Beating the fourth was arithmetic.
Ability 4: Forbidden Magic: Thunder Palace.
Like Excalibur, pure numbers.
In Fairy Tail, Thunder Palace required three hundred lacrima charged with lightning magic to fire, and the result could level a city without much effort. Here the system had swapped lacrima for chakra crystals — compressed chakra, condensed until it took solid form.
And Natsuki had the Black Holy Grail, which produced chakra crystals on demand.
In theory, he could convert the Grail's entire reserve into crystals ahead of time and dump all of it through Thunder Palace at once. The yield would leave a Tailed Beast Bomb looking like a firecracker. Strategic-warhead territory.
The unlock condition was becoming Raikage.
For Natsuki, that was something he'd be doing in passing regardless. He fully intended to take Kumogakure.
And nothing in the condition said he had to stay Raikage. A single instant in the chair would do. He could hand the hat to someone else the moment after.
Natsuki nodded, satisfied.
There was a certain elegance to this template — clean, escalating numbers with no fiddly mechanics attached. Better still, none of the unlock conditions were demanding, and every one of them pointed at Kumogakure.
Template or no template, he'd have done all of it anyway.
He closed the system, tore open a rift, and stepped back into the Land of Fire. Then, riding the enormous manta ray of Minazuki, he made straight for Tsunade's column.
They'd marched out at noon the previous day and were already deep into the southeastern reaches of the Land of Fire.
"Weren't you supposed to be in the Land of Water?" Tsunade asked, frowning.
"Did the Cloud call off the attack?" Nawaki added, curious.
"I killed the Third Raikage," Natsuki said, smiling.
Both of them went completely still.
What do you mean, you killed the Third Raikage?
Set aside the fact that the man was a monster in his own right — there were thousands of Cloud shinobi around him at all times. Nobody was killing the Third Raikage with an audience like that.
Unless he'd somehow been alone?
"We split our forces, so they split theirs," Natsuki explained. "The Third Raikage stayed behind in the Land of Water and took three thousand shinobi to hit Kirigakure's camp."
"Huh?" Nawaki's face was a picture of disbelief. "You killed the Third Raikage in front of three thousand Cloud shinobi?"
"No." Natsuki blinked at him. "I killed the Third Raikage and the three thousand Cloud shinobi."
"...???"
Nawaki's brain simply stopped.
Tsunade's mouth fell open.
She had always considered herself hard to surprise. Fifty years of war, three villages' worth of battlefields, and she had never once seen anything like this.
Which raised an obvious question. What, exactly, was their column marching to the Land of Water for?
If Natsuki was going to kill everyone by himself, they might as well have stayed home.
"So are we still going?" Nawaki asked, recovering enough to voice what Tsunade was thinking.
"Of course we are." Natsuki smiled. "We link up with Kirigakure, then hit Kumogakure from both sides with Minato's column."
"I think the Cloud may already be finished," Tsunade said.
Counting your chickens was bad practice in wartime. But under the circumstances, it was hard to resist.
The war with Kumogakure hadn't officially started, and they'd already lost their Kage and three thousand shinobi.
At that same moment, in Kumogakure's forward camp in the Land of Water.
Dodai sat in the command tent, waiting for the Third Raikage to come back in triumph.
An Anbu operative burst through the flap.
"What is it?" Dodai frowned.
Had they broken the Mist already? It was too soon. The round trip alone should have taken longer than this, never mind the fighting.
"Lord Dodai." The operative's voice shook. "Lord Raikage is dead. Fewer than five hundred made it back."
"What did you say? That's impossible—"
Dodai was on his feet and out of the tent before he finished the sentence.
He looked toward the camp entrance.
Wounded shinobi were dragging themselves in, a ragged tide of them. Every single one carried burns.
And every single one wore the same expression — pain, and beneath it, something hollow.
Dodai's stomach turned over. He had seen that look exactly twice in his life, and both times had come after a rout.
"How? What happened out there? The Raikage couldn't even escape?" He caught himself. "Did Konoha's main force reach the Land of Water early?"
"No, sir." The operative shook his head. "It was Natsuki."
He laid it out as briefly as he could.
Natsuki had beaten the Third Raikage in a straight taijutsu exchange. Then he had used Lava Style to kill him and very nearly three thousand others.
"Is this a joke?" Dodai felt like a man walking through a genjutsu. "Natsuki out-fought Lord Raikage hand to hand? And he commands Lava Style powerful enough to do that?"
"That's what the survivors are saying, sir. I questioned more than one of them."
The operative hadn't believed it either, the first time. But the evidence was staggering into camp in front of them — and there was no reason for a dozen separate shinobi to invent the same story. A lie like that would fall apart under the first question.
Dodai pressed a hand to his forehead. The ground seemed to be tilting under him.
Then he thought of A, and the world snapped back into focus.
There was no time for grief.
"Anbu — send a runner to A. Tell him to hold position and wait for us; we're pulling back to the Land of Lightning immediately." Dodai's voice hardened. "With Natsuki's strength, he can erase this camp whenever he chooses. We don't linger."
"Yes, sir!"
Within the hour, the order had gone through the whole camp. Nobody had time to mourn. They gathered the wounded and moved.
The sun sank toward the west.
On an island elsewhere in the Land of Water, A's column had been camped for hours, waiting.
"There they are!" Killer B spotted the shapes crossing the water and brightened.
"Why are there only a thousand?" A said, puzzled. "Did Father decide three thousand was enough and send the rest to reinforce us?"
"For fewer than two thousand Mist shinobi, Lord Raikage certainly doesn't need four thousand men," Yugito Nii said, with complete confidence.
"True enough." A nodded, some of the tension leaving his shoulders.
Then they came close enough to read faces, and he saw the problem.
Every one of them looked beaten.
"What happened?" A demanded.
"A." Dodai swallowed. "I need you to stay calm. Kumogakure is standing at the edge of a cliff."
"What does that mean?" Something cold uncoiled in A's chest.
"Lord Raikage is dead. We lost more than two thousand five hundred shinobi."
Nobody moved.
"You're joking."
"With Lord Raikage's strength? Impossible."
"That can't be right—"
The protests came all at once, overlapping. More than a few Cloud shinobi simply broke down where they stood.
"We avenge Lord Raikage!" Killer B's voice was raw with grief and fury.
"We will. But not recklessly." Dodai's tone cut through the noise. "One bad decision now and there won't be a Kumogakure left to avenge anyone."
Then he told them how it had happened.
When they reached the part where a single man had killed the Third Raikage and three thousand shinobi with him, A and the rest simply stared.
It was no exaggeration to say that Natsuki's strength was harder for them to swallow than their Kage's death.
"Our first priority is naming the Fourth Raikage," Dodai said, once he judged them steady enough to hear it. "The new Raikage declares war on Konoha."
Every eye in the camp turned to A.
He was the strongest shinobi Kumogakure had left. There was no one else.
By the next day, word of the Third Raikage's death had reached every corner of the shinobi world.
But what people actually argued about was Natsuki.
The taijutsu. The Lava Style. Nobody could make the pieces fit.
And no amount of arguing changed the central fact. The Third Raikage was dead, and that was that.
At Konoha's temporary camp on the border of the Land of Fire.
"Natsuki. How do you know Lava Style?" Tsunade asked around a mouthful of rice ball.
"I extracted Roshi's memories. Picked up a fair number of Lava Style techniques out of them," Natsuki said, as though discussing the weather.
"Your talent is ridiculous," Nawaki grumbled.
Kekkei Genkai could be learned. That much was true.
But the overwhelming majority of shinobi who wielded one had inherited it by blood. The ones who had learned a Kekkei Genkai from scratch could be counted on one hand — fewer than ten in the entire shinobi world, and every one of them a monster in their own right.
Rasa had learned Magnet Style from the Third Kazekage. Ohnoki had learned Particle Style from Mu, the Second Tsuchikage.
And Particle Style had died with Ohnoki's generation. Not his son Kitsuchi, not a single prodigy Iwagakure produced afterward, had managed to reproduce it.
Natsuki hadn't even had a teacher. He'd simply read a dead man's memories and taught himself.
"Lord Hokage." An Anbu operative's voice came from outside the tent.
"Come in."
Natsuki set down his breakfast.
"Kumogakure has named its Fourth Raikage. It's A, the Third Raikage's son." The operative continued, "Minutes ago, they formally declared war on Konoha and announced their intention to avenge the Third Raikage."
"Understood. Dismissed."
Natsuki nodded, and the operative withdrew.
"Called it, didn't you," Nawaki said.
"Declaring war is all they can do right now. Natsuki's put the fear into them." Tsunade snorted. "Otherwise, knowing Kumogakure, the Fourth Raikage would already be at our gates."
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