Ryota & Kureji's Segment
The desert horizon shimmered with heat and malice as the manta rays continued their coordinated assault. Each creature moved with unnatural precision, their massive wings carving through the air in perfect synchronization. The threads of chakra that Ryota had identified pulsed with a sickly green luminescence, visible only to those with the keenest of dojutsu. They stretched across the dunes like the strings of some cosmic marionette, disappearing into the distance where the sand met sky.
Nearly two hundred meters beyond the crater's edge, perched atop the highest dune in the vicinity, a figure stood motionless against the burning sun. The puppetmaster was a gaunt man, skeletal in frame, draped in tattered robes that whipped and snapped in the desert wind. His fingers danced in the air before him, each digit controlling multiple threads that extended from his fingertips like spider silk made manifest. The man's face was hidden behind a porcelain mask painted with a grotesque smile, cracked down the middle as if it had survived some terrible impact.
Around his feet, half-buried in the sand, lay dozens of broken cocoons, the husks from which the manta rays had emerged. More disturbingly, several intact cocoons still writhed and pulsed with an internal rhythm, suggesting that the current aerial assault was merely the first wave. The puppetmaster's hands moved in hypnotic patterns, and with each gesture, the manta rays responded instantly. When his left index finger curled, three of the creatures dove in unison toward Ryota's squad. When his right thumb twitched, another pair banked hard, circling to flank from the opposite direction.
But the puppetmaster was not alone.
Flanking him on either side stood two massive figures, each easily seven feet tall and built like siege engines wrapped in human flesh. They wore matching armor, blackened steel plates adorned with the symbol of two intertwined serpents, the mark of the Baron Twins. These bodyguards remained perfectly still, their eyes hidden behind dark visors, but their presence radiated menace. Each carried a massive tetsubo, iron clubs studded with wicked spikes, resting casually against their shoulders.
The manta ray that Kureji had mounted suddenly convulsed violently. The puppetmaster had noticed the intruder on his creation's back. His fingers jerked sharply, and the creature responded by executing a barrel roll so violent that the g-forces alone would have liquefied an ordinary person's organs. The beast shrieked, a sound like tearing metal, and began to climb at an impossible angle, trying to reach an altitude where the thin air might force its passenger to release his grip or pass out entirely.
Meanwhile, the other manta rays shifted their attack pattern. Rather than continuing their dive-and-circle routine, they began to coordinate a more sophisticated assault. Three of them dove simultaneously at Ryota's squad from different angles, creating a triangulated attack that would force the defenders to split their attention. Their underbellies, softer and more vulnerable than their armored backs, were indeed exposed during these aggressive dives, but targeting them would require precision timing and nerves of steel.
As if responding to some unheard command, the intact cocoons at the puppetmaster's feet began to crack and split. Wet, glistening shapes pushed their way free from the membranous prisons. These new creatures were different from the manta rays, smaller, roughly the size of large dogs, but with too many legs and mandibles that clicked with anticipation. There were at least a dozen of them, and they immediately began skittering down the dune toward the battlefield, moving with horrifying speed across the sand.
The puppetmaster's mask tilted slightly, as if he were observing the chaos below with detached amusement. His fingers never stopped moving, never faltered in their dance. One of his bodyguards shifted slightly, adjusting his grip on his tetsubo, but otherwise the three figures remained statue-still atop their dune, confident in their elevated position and the barrier of controlled creatures between them and any would-be attackers.
In the sky, the manta ray carrying Kureji had reached an altitude where the air grew noticeably thinner. The creature's movements became even more erratic, influenced by its master's growing irritation at this persistent parasite. Below, Ryota's squad found themselves pressed from multiple angles, the diving mantas from above, and now these new skittering horrors approaching rapidly from the dunes.
The puppetmaster raised both hands higher, and every creature on the battlefield, both the aerial manta rays and the ground-based horrors, suddenly stopped their individual attacks. They held position for a single, breathless moment. Then, as his hands came together in a sharp clap that echoed across the desert, every single creature lunged forward in a coordinated strike. The mantas dove as one entity, wings folded back for maximum speed. The sandworm-like creatures leaped the final distance, mandibles spread wide and dripping with venom.
The attack was meant to overwhelm through sheer synchronized force, a tidal wave of chitin, teeth, and unnatural flesh designed to crush any defense through perfect coordination.
Akkuma & Shin's Segment
The fog was a living thing now, thick and malicious, pressing against exposed skin like cold fingers seeking warmth to steal. Within its depths, Akkuma held Jigoku in his iron grapple, the Hands of Chaos locked around her armored form like the embrace of death itself. Above them, the corrupted sun of the Sol Fire Tempest continued to build, its surface roiling with unholy flames that cast sickly shadows through the suffocating mist. Ten seconds. That's all the time that remained before the meteor would fall and the Desert Tendril would erupt in its maze of life-draining spikes.
Shin stood mere meters away, his ethereal wings spread wide, red and blue flames licking along their edges. The Phantosmia style kept him in constant motion, a blur of calculated strikes and psychic influence designed to create openings, to disrupt, to protect. His sapphire eyes blazed with senjutsu power as he assessed the rapidly deteriorating situation. Jigoku was dangerous, her Sharingan saw through his Genjutsu as if they were mere parlor tricks, and her mastery of fire techniques carved burning paths through even Akkuma's corrupted fog.
But she was not giving up.
"You misunderstand everything," Jigoku hissed through gritted teeth, her voice strained by Akkuma's grapple but losing none of its venom. Her Sharingan spun wildly, the tomoe blurring into a complex pattern as she analyzed every possible escape route, every weakness in her captor's hold.
"The Twins don't send lambs to slaughter. They send messages. And I am their loudest declaration."
Her body temperature began to rise dramatically. Flames erupted across her armor, not as an attack, but as a defensive aura that made her form nearly untouchable. The heat was intense enough to make the air warp and shimmer, to force even Akkuma's corrupted regeneration to work overtime where his flesh touched her superheated form. This was a technique born of desperation and determination, she was willing to burn herself from the inside out if it meant breaking free.
"Eight seconds," she counted aloud, her voice taking on an almost taunting quality despite her predicament.
"Your meteor falls in eight seconds. Will you die with me, Demon of Mist? Or will you let go and watch me dance through your storm?"
Shin's mind raced. The situation was spiraling beyond his control, and he could feel it slipping through his fingers like sand. His Mind Thread network stretched across the battlefield, connecting him to dozens of shinobi, feeding him information from every front. Ryota's discovery of the puppetmaster. Kureji's aerial struggle. The approaching wave of sandworm-creatures. And now, Akkuma's incoming friendly-fire cataclysm that would devastate ally and enemy alike.
"All Sunagakure forces!" Shin's voice rang out both audibly and through the Mind Thread network, carrying the weight of absolute command.
"Raise your barriers NOW! Maximum defensive formations! Seek cover behind the largest dunes! We have incoming friendly ordnance, I repeat, FRIENDLY ordnance inbound in seven seconds! Stone enclosures, sand walls, anything you can manifest! MOVE!"
His wings beat once, a powerful downdraft that cleared a small area of fog around him and Akkuma. He could see the shinobi scrambling to obey, see the panic as they realized what was about to happen. Some of the veterans immediately began forming hand seals, raising earthen barriers and stone domes. Others grabbed their less experienced comrades and dove behind natural cover.
But then Shin felt it, a sudden absence in his awareness. A void where connection had been.
His orchids. The beautiful, luminous anchors he had planted across the battlefield. They were dying.
The first one shattered with a sound like breaking glass. A manta ray, driven by its puppetmaster's coordination, had crashed directly into the five-meter-tall bloom, obliterating it in a spray of petals and chakra residue. Then another fell, crushed under the stampeding advance of the sandworm-creatures. A third was caught in the edge of a mercenary's desperate fire jutsu, immolated as collateral damage.
`No... no no no...` The thought escaped Shin before he could contain it, broadcasting across the entire Mind Thread network. His Genjutsu, the Mental Unbinding and Phobophobia that had been keeping the enemy forces destabilized, began to fade. Without the anchors to channel his influence, the widespread psychic assault collapsed like a house of cards.
Almost immediately, the change was palpable. Enemy mercenaries who had been cowering in fear suddenly straightened, confusion giving way to renewed aggression. The unnatural terror that had gripped them evaporated, replaced by the cold professionalism of hired killers who remembered their training. Within seconds, the battlefield dynamic shifted. What had been a rout was becoming a legitimate fight again.
"There it is," Jigoku laughed, her Sharingan catching the moment Shin's confidence wavered.
"The Sage of End Times, brought low by broken flowers. How poetic. Five seconds, gentlemen. Four. Three..."
Shin's phoenixes, the Nevermore constructs that had been harrying enemies across the battlefield, suddenly found themselves under concentrated fire. With the fear effect gone, the mercenaries could think clearly, could coordinate. Multiple jutsu lanced upward, striking the ethereal birds and causing them to dissipate in bursts of red and blue flame. One by one, Shin's aerial advantage disappeared.
The situation was collapsing faster than he could adapt.
Shin's hands moved through seals almost unconsciously, a technique he had hoped he wouldn't need. Chakra coalesced in the air before him, shaping itself into a small, elegant form. A messenger bird, not one of his combat phoenixes, but something far more delicate. It materialized fully in less than a second, perched on his outstretched gauntleted hand. The creature was barely larger than a sparrow, its feathers the color of desert twilight, its eyes bright with borrowed intelligence.
"Find Lord Toraono Michino," Shin commanded, his voice low but urgent. He pressed his forehead briefly against the bird's, transferring memory and intent directly through chakra.
"Show him this. All of this. Tell him... tell him his fellow Kazekage requests reinforcement. The Baron Twins have played their hand, and we're drowning in it."
The bird chirped once, a sound surprisingly clear amid the chaos, then launched itself into the air. It climbed rapidly, its small form easily avoiding the larger combat creatures, threading through the fog with preternatural grace. Within moments, it had cleared the battlefield entirely, streaking toward the village proper where the legendary Toraono Michino maintained his vigil.
Shin turned back to the duel before him just as Jigoku counted down the final second.
"Zero."
General Battlefield Update
The battlefield had transformed into a three-dimensional nightmare of coordination and chaos. With Shin's Genjutsu anchors destroyed, the psychological advantage that Sunagakure had held evaporated like morning dew under the harsh desert sun. Enemy mercenaries rallied, their professionalism reasserting itself now that the unnatural terror had lifted. They formed proper combat lines, covered each other's flanks, and began pushing back against the scattered Sunagakure forces with renewed vigor.
The Epsilon formations that Shin had ordered were holding, barely. Teams of four huddled behind hastily erected barriers as the countdown to Akkuma's cataclysm reached its final moments. Some of the more experienced Jounin had managed to raise impressive defensive structures: multi-layered stone domes reinforced with chakra, sand walls compressed to the density of concrete, even a few experimental barriers that attempted to redirect rather than absorb the incoming damage.
But not everyone had made it to cover in time.
A squad of three Genin, caught in the open while engaging a group of mercenaries, looked up at the corrupted sun above with expressions of dawning horror. Their squad leader, a Chuunin with barely two years of field experience, screamed for them to run, to find anything to hide behind. They scattered, diving toward the nearest dune, knowing even as they ran that they wouldn't make it.
Near the crater's western edge, a veteran Sunaku clan member finished her hand seals and slammed her palms into the sand. A massive wall of compressed silicon erupted from the ground, easily twenty feet tall and thick enough to stop a charging elephant. Half a dozen younger shinobi dove behind it, trusting in the Sunaku's mastery of their element. She held the wall firm, chakra pouring into it, reinforcing every grain even as sweat poured down her face.
The mercenary forces, lacking the warning that Shin had provided to his own troops, suddenly found themselves in a panic. Some of the smarter ones had recognized the building chakra signature overhead for what it was and were already fleeing, abandoning the battle entirely in favor of survival. Others, either braver or more foolish, tried to form their own defensive positions, but without the coordination and training of village shinobi, their efforts were haphazard at best.
The manta rays continued their assault despite the impending cataclysm, driven by their puppetmaster's will. They showed no sense of self-preservation, no instinct to flee from the growing threat above. They were tools, nothing more, and tools did not fear their own destruction. Several had been wounded by Sunagakure's defenders, deep gashes across their underbellies leaked viscous fluid that sizzled when it hit the sand, but they fought on with mechanical determination.
The sandworm-creatures that had emerged from the secondary cocoons reached the battlefield's edge just as the final seconds ticked away. They scattered across the sand with horrifying speed, each one targeting a different isolated shinobi or small group. Their mandibles clicked with anticipation, venom dripping from curved fangs. One leaped at a Medical-nin who had been tending to a wounded Chuunin, only to be intercepted mid-air by a perfectly timed lightning jutsu that fried it instantly. Another managed to latch onto a Main Branch shinobi's leg, its mandibles crunching through armor before the victim's teammate decapitated it with a wind blade.
In the fog-shrouded heart of the battlefield, where Akkuma held Jigoku and Shin prepared for impact, the temperature had risen to unbearable levels. The combination of Jigoku's defensive flames and the building heat from the Sol Fire Tempest above created a pocket of superheated air that shimmered and warped. Any shinobi who ventured too close risked heat exhaustion at best, severe burns at worst.
And then, finally, the ten-second delay expired.
The corrupted sun fell.
The Desert Tendril erupted.
The world became fire and earth and screaming.
