Kureji & Ryota - Symphony of Salvation
The puppet master writhed against the sand, his porcelain mask cracked and splintered from the combined assault. The Tourniquet genjutsu made phantom blood seep through his tattered robes, warm and wet against skin that bore no actual wounds. His fingers twitched erratically, desperately trying to grasp at threads that no longer existed, trying to control creatures that had either fled or been destroyed.
The wild sandworms circled closer, their massive bodies creating tremors that rippled through the dune. They were drawn by the vibrations still echoing from the battlefield, by the scent of fear and blood that permeated the air. Three of them had been successfully diverted from the Sunagakure positions, their eyeless heads turning toward this elevated position where the music had originated.
The bodyguards lay collapsed nearby, their massive frames crumpled like discarded puppets. Occasionally one would twitch, muscles spasming as they fought uselessly against the sensory deprivation that had crippled them. Their tetsubo clubs had fallen from nerveless fingers, half-buried in the sand.
"Please... please..." the puppet master gasped, his voice losing its musical quality entirely. The darkness was absolute, the pain from imagined wounds excruciating, and the sound of approaching sandworms was unmistakable even through his compromised senses.
"I'll tell you anything... just make it stop..."
The threads that had once controlled his creations hung limp and useless, severed or simply abandoned as his concentration shattered under the assault. Below, the few remaining controlled manta rays had either been freed by Ryota's precise strikes or had simply fallen from the sky when their master's grip failed completely.
"The Twins!" he finally screamed, the words tearing from his throat like a confession ripped from his soul.
"The Baron Twins hired us! They paid good money, better than anyone else was offering! We were supposed to meet them at the Golden Sanctuary!"
His breath came in ragged gasps, each one punctuated by phantom pain from wounds that existed only in his mind.
"In the Diamond Ocean! The place that used to be hidden by the Maelstrom! It's... it's a merchant paradise on the surface, but underneath... underneath it's all forced labor and trafficking. The Twins operate from there! They coordinate everything from there!"
The sandworms were getting closer now, their movements causing small avalanches of sand to cascade down the dune's sides. One of them released a low, rumbling call that vibrated through the ground itself.
"That's all I know! I swear that's all I know!" The puppet master's voice cracked with desperation.
"We were just hired muscle! Just contractors! The Twins wanted Sunagakure buried, wanted to cut off the surface access and let everyone suffocate below! That's the plan! That's everything!"
His mask had cracked enough that one eye was partially visible through the porcelain, wide, terrified, darting sightlessly in the darkness that still consumed his vision.
"The Golden Sanctuary... it looks like a prison from the outside but inside it's sprawling, massive... They run everything from there. Trade, trafficking, mercenary contracts... The Twins are always there, always watching..."
Below, on the main battlefield, other Sunagakure shinobi were beginning to respond to the situation. Some of the Sunaku clan members had noticed the wild sandworms and were forming defensive positions, ready to redirect or repel them if they turned toward the village forces. A few of the more experienced puppet users had heard the distant call about bringing their creations to bear and were scrambling to deploy their mechanized warriors.
The puppet master continued to babble, his professional composure completely destroyed.
"They said it would be easy... said Sunagakure was weak after everything that happened... said the village was fractured and leaderless... They were wrong... oh gods they were so wrong..."
One of the bodyguards groaned, beginning to stir as he fought through the lingering effects of the genjutsu. His hand fumbled weakly toward where his tetsubo had fallen, but his movements were uncoordinated, barely functional.
The wild sandworms had stopped their advance, seemingly waiting. They swayed slightly, as if listening, as if trying to determine whether these small creatures on the dune were prey or threat. Their attention could shift at any moment toward the mercenaries, toward the Sunagakure forces below, or simply away into the deeper desert from whence they'd come.
The choice of what happened next lay with those who had brought them here.
Harupia - The Desert's Wrath
The maelstrom of sand that Harupia had conjured dominated the battlefield like a force of nature given consciousness and purpose. The silvery glitter suspended in the air caught the light in ways that seemed impossible, creating patterns that older shinobi recognized with expressions of shock and wonder.
"
That's... that's not possible..." a grizzled Jounin whispered, his weathered face pale beneath layers of ash and blood. He'd been perhaps twenty years old when the original Diamond Maelstrom finally stopped and allowed Sunagakure to resurface after so much time underground. The sight before him now was unmistakable, smaller in scale, controlled rather than wild, but fundamentally the same phenomenon that had reshaped their entire world mere decades ago.
Another veteran, a woman missing her left arm below the elbow from a Desert Tendril strike, stared upward at the floating figure directing the storm. "
The Sunahoshi bloodline... I thought it was lost. I thought they were all gone after Lord Katsuo vanished..."
She didn't say the name aloud, couldn't bring herself to make such a claim without proof, but the implication hung heavy in the air between the survivors. The stories of the Sunahoshi clan, blessed by the desert itself, capable of commanding sand in ways that made even the most skilled Sunaku look like children playing with toys. Those stories had become legend, then myth, then nearly forgotten in the years since Sunagakure's fall.
But legends, it seemed, had a habit of returning when needed most.
The mercenaries caught in the sand tsunami had been scattered like leaves before a storm. Some lay buried up to their necks, gasping and spitting grit. Others had been hurled dozens of meters away, their bodies broken against dunes that had become hard as stone under the silvery sand's influence. A few had simply vanished, pulled down into the depths where the desert's mercy was a concept foreign and unknowable.
Those who remained conscious and mobile found themselves struggling against a phenomenon they couldn't understand. Their weapons, the metal ones at least, seemed to grow heavier with each passing moment. Kunai that should have flown true from desperate throws instead curved mid-flight, pulled off course by invisible forces. Armor plates shifted uncomfortably, tugging against their fastenings as if drawn by phantom hands.
A younger Chuunin, her Byakugan active, watched the silvery particles with fascination and growing comprehension. "
The sand... it's magnetic. Look at how it clusters around metal!" She pointed toward a fallen mercenary whose tanto was slowly being buried under accumulating grains that seemed to crawl across the blade's surface like living things.
The three tendrils of sand that had wrapped around the damaged tunnel entrance worked with methodical precision, reinforcing the structure from the outside while simultaneously pushing support beams back into alignment from within. The silvery sand compressed under Harupia's direction, forming layers that were harder than concrete, more flexible than steel. Where cracks had threatened to spread and bring the entire access point down in catastrophic collapse, the makeshift reinforcements held firm.
But beneath the surface, beyond what most eyes could see, the damage ran deeper than structural failure.
The ground trembled... not with the violence of combat, but with the subtle wrongness of fundamental instability. Fracture lines spider-webbed outward from multiple points of origin: the initial explosion that had carved the primary crater, the secondary detonations from the coordinated charges, and most significantly, the devastating impact zone of Akkuma's Sol Fire Tempest.
The heat from that cursed meteor had done more than scorch the surface. It had fundamentally altered the composition of the sand itself, fusing it into glass in some places, sublimating it into vapor in others, creating pockets of empty space where solid ground should exist. The Desert Tendril's eruption had only exacerbated the problem, punching holes through layers of compressed sediment that had taken centuries to settle.
An Earthborn Medical-nin kneeling beside a wounded comrade suddenly jerked upward as the sand beneath her shifted unexpectedly. "
The ground... it's not stable!" Her voice carried panic that combat hadn't managed to instill.
She was right to be afraid. The entire battlefield, perhaps three hundred meters in diameter, sat atop a network of compromised substrate. The tunnel system below, already damaged from the initial attack, was bearing weight it was never designed to support. Cracks were spreading through the bedrock itself, following lines of weakness that the extreme temperature differential had created.
If nothing was done... if the weight distribution wasn't somehow equalized, if the compromised sections weren't reinforced or replaced... the entire area would collapse. Not gradually, not with warning, but all at once. A catastrophic sinkhole that would swallow everyone still standing on this cursed ground and dump them hundreds of feet down into the tunnel network below.
And from his elevated position, riding the winds atop his sand platform, Harupia could feel it all. Every tremor, every hairline fracture spreading through stone, every pocket of emptiness where solidity should reign. The desert spoke to him in ways it spoke to no other, and right now it was screaming a warning that time was running out.
The Sunagakure shinobi who had recognized the maelstrom's signature were already moving, trusting in the power they'd witnessed to guide them. They pulled the wounded toward the tunnel entrance where Harupia's reinforcements promised stability. They formed defensive perimeters around the most compromised sections, ready to evacuate at a moment's notice.
Some of them called out orders, their voices carrying across the storm: "
Fall back toward the tunnel! The ground isn't stable!" "
Anyone who can use Earth jutsu, shore up the weak points!" "
Medics, triage only—we need to move NOW!"
The silvery sand continued to swirl, a beautiful and terrible reminder that the desert itself had entered this battle. Whether it would save them or swallow them whole remained to be seen, but at least now they had a chance. At least now someone who understood the desert's language was fighting to keep the ground beneath their feet from becoming their tomb.
Michino & Chiyo - No Mercy for Cowards
The killing field stretched before them, a canvas painted in crimson and ash. Michino's blade had carved a path of absolute devastation through the fleeing mercenaries, each stroke a masterwork of lethal efficiency. Bodies lay scattered in his wake, some cleanly bisected, others bearing wounds so precise they seemed almost artistic in their brutality. The ebony-skinned Toraono lord stood amid the carnage, his purple eyes cold and calculating as they swept across the remaining survivors.
But not all the bodies were as dead as they appeared.
A mercenary who had been lying face-down in the blood-soaked sand suddenly tensed, his hand inching toward a kunai still holstered at his hip. His breathing, which he'd been carefully controlling to mimic death, quickened ever so slightly. His eyes, barely cracked open, tracked Michino's position, waiting for the right moment to strike or flee.
Thirty meters to the left, another figure lay partially buried under the corpse of a fallen comrade. Her fingers twitched against the sand, slowly, carefully forming hand seals beneath the concealing weight of the dead man atop her. A desperate jutsu, perhaps a substitution or a desperate offensive strike, anything to buy her a few more seconds of life.
Near the crater's eastern rim, three mercenaries had abandoned all pretense of fighting. They ran with the desperate speed of prey animals, their weapons discarded, their armor shed piece by piece to gain even fractional increases in speed. They weren't heading toward any rally point or strategic position. They were simply running away from the nightmare that had materialized behind their lines.
And closest to the transformed Toraono lord and his black-eyed partner, two mercenaries had dropped to their knees in the sand. Their weapons lay at their feet, hands raised in universal gestures of surrender. Both were young, barely out of their teens by the look of them, and tears streaked through the ash and blood coating their faces.
"
Please!" one of them sobbed, his voice cracking with terror. "
We were just hired! We didn't know it would be like this! We didn't know about the genocide, they just said it was a raid! Please, we surrender! We surrender!"
The other was shaking so badly his raised hands trembled like leaves in a storm. "
We have families! Children! Please, we'll tell you anything you want to know! We'll testify against the Twins! Just please don't kill us!"
The irony wasn't lost on the observers, these men who had come to suffocate an entire village underground, to murder men, women, and children by the thousands, now begged for the mercy they had planned to deny others.
Around them, the battlefield continued its chaotic symphony. Shin's orchids pulsed with maintained genjutsu, keeping other mercenaries trapped in unconsciousness. Akkuma's great water dome had shattered, flooding portions of the crater and extinguishing the worst of the fires. Harupia's maelstrom raged in the distance, a silvery tempest that made the air itself shimmer with power. And everywhere, everywhere, lay the evidence of what happened when cowards attacked Sunagakure's home.
The mercenary playing dead tightened his grip on his kunai. His muscles coiled, preparing to spring. He'd seen Michino's back turn slightly, seen what he thought might be an opening. Desperation made men stupid, made them believe they had chances that didn't exist.
The woman forming seals beneath her concealing corpse completed the final gesture. Her chakra flared, preparing to substitute with a piece of debris twenty meters away, if she could just execute the technique before being noticed, she might escape into the confusion of the larger battle.
The three runners had made it perhaps fifty meters from their starting position. Their lungs burned, their legs screamed in protest, but fear drove them onward. Behind them, they could hear the sounds of combat, could hear the screams of their fellow mercenaries, could hear the terrible silence that followed Michino's blade.
And the two who knelt in surrender continued to plead, their words tumbling over each other in desperate torrents. "
We were told it would be easy money! We were told Sunagakure was fractured and weak! We were told—"
A shimmer in the air beside them marked where Chiyo had positioned herself using her Jōmyaku-enhanced movement techniques. Her golden eyes, set in pools of inky black, tracked every heartbeat, every muscle twitch, every subtle sign of deception or desperate action. She could see the elevated heart rates of those playing dead, could see the chakra building in the woman attempting her substitution, could see the panic-driven cardiovascular systems of the runners and the surrendering mercenaries.
The question hung unspoken in the air between the assassain and her beloved: What fate awaited those who had dared to attack their home? What mercy, if any, did cowards deserve when they begged for lives they had planned to take by the thousands?
The wind carried ash and the scent of death across the dunes. Somewhere in the distance, a wild sandworm called out, its rumbling voice a reminder that the desert itself bore witness to this moment. The sun beat down mercilessly, casting stark shadows that painted the world in absolutes, light and dark, life and death, mercy and justice.
The choice, as always, belonged to those who held the power to grant or deny it.
Shin & Akkuma - Light and Shadow Entwined
The moment Akkuma's Energy Transfer connected, Shin felt it like a dam breaking inside his chest. Corrupted chakra, vast, ancient, and utterly inexhaustible, flooded through the link between them. It was nothing like drawing from his own spiritual reserves or even channeling his holy natural energy through Sage Mode. This was darker, heavier, carrying with it the weight of countless consumed souls and forbidden techniques, but it was also
life. Raw, undeniable vitality that pushed back against the hemorrhaging drain of his chakra burn.
The sapphire glow of Shin's eyes intensified, burning brighter than they had since the battle began. The tremors that had been wracking his body began to subside as the borrowed power stabilized his deteriorating condition. His wings, which had been flickering and threatening to dissipate entirely, suddenly roared back to full brilliance—red and blue flames dancing along ethereal feathers with renewed vigor.
Then Kureji's healing music washed over him.
The Audio Medic technique manifested as sound itself given curative properties, the melody weaving through the air to find Shin's battered form. Where the chakra burn had opened internal wounds, where blood vessels had burst under impossible strain, where his very life force had been converting itself into power, the music touched each injury and began to
mend.
The combination was unlike anything Shin had experienced. Akkuma's corrupted chakra providing the fuel, Kureji's sound healing providing the restoration, and his own holy energy caught between them like light refracted through a prism. For a heartbeat, the three forces warred within him... shadow and sound and sanctity... before finding an impossible equilibrium.
Shin steadied his flight. Blood still stained his armor, his breathing was still labored, but the immediate crisis had passed. He was no longer dying and falling from the sky.
His sapphire eyes found Akkuma's crimson gaze as Fate rose beside him on his flying nimbus, and something clicked within Shin in that moment, gratitude, certainly, but also something deeper. Something that had been building since Wei's torture chambers, since the Dark Sage had pulled him back from the brink of complete madness, since countless shared battles and whispered strategies in the depths of night.
"You came for me," Shin said softly, his voice carrying only to Akkuma despite the chaos surrounding them. There was wonder in those words, as if he still couldn't quite believe it.
"Even with Jigoku in your grasp, even with the battle still raging, you came for me."
Below them, Akkuma's Medical Assistant clones worked with expert precision over the fallen Genin. Their hands glowed with restorative chakra as they performed the delicate work of resurrection, pulling souls back from the veil, restarting hearts that had gone still, mending flesh that had been torn beyond mortal healing. It was work that should have been impossible, techniques that existed in the realm of the forbidden, yet the Dark Sage wielded them as casually as others might form a simple clone. Proving that not only was he a powerful shinobi, but he was truly a Chief in the Medical Field who was here for his fellow Sunans.
One of the Genin gasped suddenly, her eyes flying open as life returned to her body. She convulsed once, twice, then lay still as the healing chakra worked through her system, stabilizing what had been catastrophic damage. The Medical Assistant moved immediately to the second fallen shinobi, hands already glowing with the same impossible power.
Shin watched this for a moment, watched Akkuma save lives with the same hands that had moments ago plucked out Jigoku's Sharingan, and felt something in his chest tighten. The Dark Sage was a creature of contradictions, capable of unspeakable cruelty and profound mercy in the same breath, walking the line between monster and savior with such perfect balance that sometimes Shin couldn't tell which side would win.
Perhaps that was why he couldn't look away.
"I need to end this," Shin said, his voice growing stronger as he drew more deeply on the chakra link between them.
"The mercenaries... they're unconscious but that won't last forever. If they wake while we're still weakened..."
He didn't need to finish the thought. They both knew how quickly the tide could turn back against them.
Shin's right hand came up, and chakra began to coalesce around it in a way that made the air itself scream. This wasn't the gentle weaving of genjutsu or the controlled application of sage techniques, this was reality itself being forced to
break. The power built and built, drawn from Akkuma's seemingly bottomless reserves, shaped by Shin's will into something that existed on the border between technique and catastrophe.
"Stay close to me," Shin whispered, and there was an intimacy to those words that transcended the tactical necessity of the request.
"I don't want you caught in this."
His wings beat once, carrying him higher into the air above the battlefield. The orchids below pulsed in response to his ascent, their violet-blue petals trembling as if in anticipation. Akkuma's Desert Nimbus kept pace effortlessly, the floating platform of compressed sand moving with fluid grace to maintain their proximity.
For just a moment, they hung there together... Light and Shadow... Life and Death... Kazekage and Crime Lord... silhouetted against the sun like figures from prophecy or nightmare depending on which side of the battle you stood.
Then Shin's hand
snapped.
The sound was like reality fracturing. Shattered Reality, one of his most devastating techniques, exploded outward from his position in a wave of pure mental destruction. It didn't target the body or even the chakra system, no it targeted the
mind itself, forcibly ripping away every genjutsu, every illusion, every false perception with such violence that the subjects' psyches bore the damage like physical wounds.
The unconscious mercenaries convulsed as one. The Pox, the Verse of Darkness, the Temple of Nirvana, and even the forbidden Somnal Eclipse, all four overlapping genjutsu shattered simultaneously. But instead of waking refreshed, instead of simply being freed from the illusions, the mercenaries experienced the psychic equivalent of having their skulls cracked open. Blood trickled from noses and ears. Some screamed without waking. Few convulsed into life ending seizures. Others simply went
deeper into unconsciousness, their minds retreating from trauma they couldn't process.
It was brutal. It was merciless. It was
necessary.
Shin descended slowly, his wings carrying him back toward the ground with Akkuma at his side. His hand was still extended, still trembling slightly from the force of what he'd just unleashed, and when he looked at it he saw his own blood staining the gauntlet, the chakra burn hadn't been completely healed, just stabilized.
But they'd survived. Sunagakure had survived.
As his feet touched the sand once more, Shin felt it... the change. The ground beneath him wasn't just sand anymore. Akkuma's Supreme Aqua Realm had flooded significant portions of the battlefield when it formed, and the water hadn't simply drained away into the desert. It had pooled in depressions, had collected in the spaces between glass-fused dunes, had seeped into cracks and crevices.
And where Shin walked, where his holy energy and natural affinity for life touched that water-soaked ground, something
impossible began to happen.
Green.
Tiny shoots of green pushing up through blood-stained sand. Desert flowers that shouldn't exist blooming in fast-forward, their petals unfurling in seconds rather than days. Hardy scrub grass taking root in soil that had been sterilized by extreme heat moments ago. Even a few small succulents, their thick leaves already storing precious moisture, sprouting from the edges of glass formations.
Life. Defiant, impossible,
inevitable life, growing in the heart of a battlefield that should have been dead for decades.
Shin stared at it, his sapphire eyes wide with something like awe. This wasn't a jutsu he'd cast, wasn't a technique he'd activated, it was simply what happened when his Plant Sage essence touched ground prepared by Akkuma's water and baptized in the blood of those who'd fought to defend their home.
He turned to look at the Dark Sage, at the reaper-esque figure still hovering on his sand platform, and for once Shin's carefully maintained composure cracked completely. Gratitude, wonder, something deeper and more dangerous than either, all of it showed plain on his face for anyone close enough to see.
"We did it," he said, and his voice broke slightly on those words.
"We actually did it... Together."
Around them, the battlefield was transforming. The Medical Assistant clones had successfully resurrected more fallen Genin and were moving toward other casualties. The unconscious mercenaries lay broken by psychic trauma, no longer a threat. The wild sandworms were being directed away from Sunagakure positions. Harupia's maelstrom provided both cover and structural support. Michino and Chiyo were dealing with the stragglers and deserters.
And in the distance, barely visible through the haze and smoke, a figure fled. Jigoku, one eye missing, her armor scorched and her pride shattered, running toward whatever sanctuary or revenge she could find. Akkuma had let her go... had
chosen to let her go... trusting that the Sharingan he'd claimed would allow him to track her later.
It was a calculated risk, but then again, everything the Dark Sage did was calculated. That was part of what made him so terrifying. And so invaluable.
Shin took a step closer to where Akkuma's Desert Nimbus hovered, close enough that he could have reached out and touched the compressed sand. Close enough that when he spoke, only Akkuma would hear.
"Thank you," Shin said softly.
"For coming back. For staying. For..." He trailed off, not quite able to articulate what he was thanking the Dark Sage for. For everything? For nothing? For simply being exactly what Shin needed when he needed it most? A soft blush formed on his cheeks as he looked away towards the battlefield.
The tiny flowers continued to bloom around his feet, green life amid red death, and overhead the sun beat down on a battlefield that had become a graveyard that had become something almost like a garden.
The war wasn't over. The Baron Twins still existed, still plotted, still posed a threat. But today, in this moment, Sunagakure had held. And Shin knew with absolute certainty that he couldn't have done it alone.
Then... came the collapse.
