THE COLLAPSE - End of Arc One
Kureji & Ryota - The Reckoning
The sandworm's maw closed around the puppetmaster with finality. Porcelain mask, tattered robes, and desperate screams disappeared into the creature's gullet in one efficient swallow. The threads that had controlled so many fell limp and lifeless, scattered across the dune like discarded puppet strings. Below, the few remaining manta rays that had been under his control simply... stopped. Some fell from the sky immediately, their wings going slack mid-flight. Others circled aimlessly, their movements erratic and confused, as if waking from a dream they couldn't quite remember.
Kureji's soothing melody washed over the three wild sandworms that had been circling, drawn by vibrations and the promise of easy prey. Their massive segmented bodies swayed slightly, eyeless heads turning toward the source of the music. The largest one—perhaps a matriarch, perhaps simply the eldest—lowered herself closer to the sand, her segments compressing in what might have been relaxation. Or curiosity. Or recognition of something that spoke to instincts older than human language.
They didn't flee. They didn't attack. They simply waited, as if listening to a song they'd heard before in dreams carved into their genetic memory.
The bodyguard Kureji held by the scruff of his neck thrashed weakly, his compromised senses making every movement uncoordinated and desperate. His mouth opened and closed soundlessly, trying to form words, trying to beg, trying to scream. The genjutsu still clouded his vision with darkness, still made phantom blood seep warm and wet through robes that bore no actual wounds. He was blind, terrified, and dangling over the edge of a dune that was beginning to crack.
Because the ground was failing.
Not all at once. Not with dramatic flair. But with the terrible inevitability of mathematics catching up with devastation. The dune where Kureji stood with his captive and his newfound sandworm audience began to shift. Small movements at first—grains sliding, finding new angles of repose. Then larger. Cracks spider-webbing outward from stress points. Whole sections of the slope starting to slough away, revealing glimpses of hollow spaces beneath where the tunnels had been compromised.
High above, a shadow banked hard against the sun. Sandy, the manta ray Kureji had freed from the puppetmaster's control, circled once before diving. Her wings caught the light, iridescent despite the blood and ash, and she shrieked, a sound that might have been greeting, might have been question, might have been joy at hearing the voice of the strange two-legged creature who'd given her freedom.
She was answering his call. She was here. The choice of what happened next was his to make.
Down on the main battlefield, Ryota's squad watched the dune where their captain had charged collapse in slow motion. Some of them had already seen his transformation—the surge of cursed chakra, the way his body had shifted into something between human and beast—but others were just now processing what they were witnessing. Their young Chūnin captain, barely promoted an hour ago, was no longer entirely human. Lightning crackled across his transformed form, scorching sand with every movement, and he was sprinting toward where his family members were falling.
The remaining controlled manta rays, now masterless and confused, began to scatter. Some fled toward the horizon, their wings beating desperately as if trying to escape the chaos below. Others dove lower, operating on base survival instincts—attack, feed, flee, anything to process the sudden severing of the threads that had commanded them for so long. Two of them banked toward Ryota's squad, eyeless faces somehow conveying hunger and confusion in equal measure.
And somewhere in the back of Kureji's mind, perhaps carried on the wind or perhaps simply echoing in memory, the puppetmaster's final confession replayed:
The Golden Sanctuary... they run everything from there... the Twins are always there, always watching...
Below, a Sunagakure intelligence officer—a scarred woman with a Medical-nin's insignia and an ANBU's awareness—made a note in a small book she kept sealed against her chest. They had a location now. A target. When this immediate crisis ended, assuming they survived, there would be a reckoning.
Harupia - The Desert's Voice
Harupia knelt in the sand with both hands buried wrist-deep, and the desert screamed at him in frequencies that hurt.
Every crack. Every void. Every structural failure point across three hundred meters of compromised battlefield translated into sensory input that scraped against his consciousness like broken glass. The Desertification technique spread outward from his position in waves, converting everything it touched into raw material he could manipulate. Discarded weapons dissolved into component grains. Chunks of glass-fused dune from Akkuma's meteor crumbled into sand. The twisted metal of a broken tetsubo club flaked away into iron-rich particles that joined the silvery magnetic flow.
Even the bodies broke down. Fallen mercenaries, their blood already soaking into the thirsty earth, began to lose cohesion at the edges. Organic matter transforming into the same golden sand that had birthed this desert millennia ago. It was brutal. It was necessary. The dead would forgive him for using their remains as building material if it meant the living survived.
The silvery magnetic sand poured from his hands like water given purpose, flowing toward cracks, filling voids, weaving through compromised substrate to create support structures that defied conventional engineering. Where Shin's orchid roots had withered and died, Harupia's sand took their place. Where Akkuma's Desert Tendril spikes had punched holes through bedrock, the magnetic particles compressed into pillars harder than steel but more flexible than bone.
Around him, the older shinobi were beginning to understand what they were witnessing.
"
That's Sunahoshi sand manipulation," a grizzled Jounin whispered, his voice carrying the weight of recognition and disbelief in equal measure. He'd been young when the Diamond Maelstrom finally ceased, when Sunagakure first clawed its way back to the surface. "
The magnetic properties, the scale of control... I thought that bloodline was lost."
A younger Chuunin with her Byakugan still active watched the silvery particles cluster and flow with fascination. "
It's not just moving the sand—he's changing it. Converting matter at the molecular level and then reshaping it. That's not a technique, that's..."
"
That's a gift from the desert itself," finished a veteran woman missing her left arm, her voice hushed with something like reverence. "
The old stories said the Sunahoshi didn't just command sand—they spoke with it. Asked it to help rather than forcing it to obey."
But even as whispers of "Sunahoshi bloodline" and "he's like the legends" rippled through the gathering survivors, Harupia felt the terrible truth in his bones: it wasn't enough.
The collapse was spreading faster than he could compensate. The mathematics were brutal and unforgiving—he was one person trying to hold back a catastrophic structural failure that had been building since the moment Akkuma's corrupted meteor struck the earth. The Sol Fire Tempest had fundamentally altered the composition of sand across hundreds of meters, fusing it to glass in some places, sublimating it to vapor in others, creating voids where solid ground should exist.
The Desert Tendril's eruption had punched through layers of compressed sediment that had taken centuries to settle. The initial explosion that carved the primary crater had fractured bedrock in patterns that were only now revealing their true extent. And beneath it all, the tunnel network—already damaged, already bearing weight it was never designed to support—was beginning its final collapse.
A section of dune twenty meters to Harupia's left gave way entirely. The surface simply opened up, revealing a fifteen-meter drop into the exposed tunnel system below. The screams of two shinobi who couldn't jump clear in time cut off abruptly as tons of sand buried them.
Harupia's blood began to seep from his nose as he pushed harder, drew deeper, pulled from reserves he barely understood he possessed. His muscles screamed. Sweat poured down his face, soaking through the hood that still obscured his features from direct view. His chakra burned through him at a rate that should have left him unconscious minutes ago.
But the desert itself seemed to offer strength.
Ancient. Patient. Willing to help this son who finally understood how to ask properly rather than demand.
He redirected everything toward a single point: the tunnel entrance. That's where most of Sunagakure's forces had concentrated after Shin's warning. That's where the wounded were being dragged. That's where Medical-nin worked frantically over broken bodies. That's where salvation existed if salvation could be found at all.
The maelstrom still raging above contracted, pulling inward, bringing all its silvery sand toward the tunnel's mouth. The reinforcements he'd built around the entrance thickened. Layer upon layer of compressed magnetic particles creating a foundation that could withstand stress that would shatter concrete.
The tunnel entrance held. Became an island of stability in a sea of cascading failure. Shinobi fleeing from collapsing sections of battlefield found their footing solid here, found the ground beneath them refusing to betray them. But even as he maintained that single point of absolute stability, Harupia felt something else. Something that had nothing to do with the immediate crisis but everything to do with what came next.
In his deep connection with the desert's voice—that frequency of awareness that let him feel every grain across hundreds of meters—he sensed a wrongness far to the north. Where the Diamond Ocean used to be hidden beneath the Maelstrom's fury, there was a... wound. An absence. A place where the desert's song simply stopped, replaced by something artificial and cruel.
The Golden Sanctuary. It had to be. A place that shouldn't exist, carved from the desert without permission, without respect, without understanding. A place that
hurt to contemplate even from this distance.
He filed the sensation away for later. Right now, the living needed him more than the distant dead.
Michino & Chiyo - The Weight of Gods
The two young mercenaries convulsed on the sand, their bodies rejecting and accepting the cursed seals simultaneously. The blonde's flesh erupted into golden flames that didn't burn so much as
transform—phoenix fire that consumed what he was and rebuilt something new from the ashes. His screams were raw and animal, beyond language, beyond thought, pure expression of agony as every cell in his body remembered deaths it had never died and rebirths it had never experienced.
The brunette's skin cracked like dried earth, scales pushing through from beneath in patterns that hurt to look at directly. Turtle shell geometry that was mathematically perfect and biologically impossible, spreading across his shoulders, down his spine, wrapping around his ribs. His convulsions were slower, heavier, as if his body was learning the patience of stone, the endurance of creatures who outlived empires by simply
persisting.
Michino stood there, watching the horror his god had inflicted through his hands. The cursed seals—intricate filigree of white chakra traced across their backs—pulsed with each heartbeat, anchoring the transformations, preventing them from burning out or tearing themselves apart. Genbu and Suzaku. Turtle and Phoenix. Two bloodlines that had been
exterminated, hunted to extinction by previous avatars and ancient enemies, now being forcibly resurrected through these terrified boys who'd simply wanted easy money.
The irony wasn't lost on him. They'd come to commit genocide against Sunagakure. Now they were being reborn as Toraono, forced into servitude to the very clan whose village they'd tried to destroy. Justice? Cruelty? Both? Neither?
Meanwhile, Chiyo fell.
The earth had cracked beneath her feet without warning—one moment solid ground, the next, void. Her Jōmyaku-enhanced reflexes kicked in immediately, her chakra flaring around her in a desperate attempt to manipulate the air, to slow her descent through sheer force of will and cardiovascular manipulation. Time seemed to bend, warping as her perception accelerated, making each second of freefall stretch into subjective eternity.
But the Uzumoreru had never devoted significant energy to external chakra manipulation. Her strength lay in enhancement, in pushing her body beyond human limits, in tracking hearts and reading the language of blood. This kind of technique—altering air pressure, creating cushions of force, defying gravity itself—required finesse that perhaps she'd never developed.
The ground slowly stopped rushing up to meet her. Jagged rocks from the exposed tunnel system. Sharp edges of broken support beams. The unforgiving mathematics of terminal velocity all but halted at her command.
Her golden eyes, set in pools of inky black, tracked every detail with perfect clarity even as panic clawed at her chest. She could see Michino above, frozen over the transforming mercenaries. Could see the massive chunks of earth already falling, already threatening to crush Sunagakure below. Could see—
Movement. Fast. Wrong.
Changed.
A figure exploded across the collapsing battlefield with speed that left afterimages. Ryota, but not Ryota. The cursed seal and Metamorphosis active simultaneously, transforming him into something caught between human and beast. His hair stood sharp and spiky, white at the roots fading to sky-blue and bright gold. His ears had elongated into points. His eyes had gone cold and sharp, predatory in ways that spoke of ancient Toraono bloodlines asserting themselves.
Half his face was hidden by a scarf-like growth that blurred the line between human flesh and beast fur. His body was encased in what looked like hardened skin marked with patterns that crackled with electrical discharge. Sparks flew from him with every movement, scorching the sand, leaving a trail of glass in his wake.
Gravitational Pull, the Mastered version, chakra coalescing in patterns that would drag a target toward the caster with irresistible force.
Whether he reached Chiyo in time, whether the technique caught her before she hit the rocks below, that story was still being written in the fractions of seconds between action and outcome.
Above them all, Michino felt Hyou return control of his muscles. The paralysis broke like shattered chains, and he moved. Hands flying through seals faster than conscious thought, electrical chakra crackling between his fingers, earth chakra grounding him to the sand beneath his feet. An A-Rank Gravity technique, one of the most chakra-intensive in his arsenal, erupted outward in a sphere of influence.
The two convulsing mercenaries lifted from the sand, caught in invisible hands. Chiyo. Massive chunks of falling earth—some the size of houses—that threatened to crush the tunnel entrance and everyone sheltering there. All of it suspended, held,
lifted against the fundamental force that ruled all matter.
Blood began to pour from Michino's nose immediately. Not a trickle, a flood. The strain was immense, the weight impossible, the cost extracting itself from his body in real-time. His entire frame shook. His vision blurred red at the edges. Every muscle fiber screamed in protest as he forced them to channel more chakra, more power, more
will than flesh should be able to contain.
But he held.
Lifted.
Moved them all up, out of the collapsing crater, away from the immediate danger. His feet dragged through the sand as he walked backward, hauling tons of earth and multiple human bodies through sheer gravitational manipulation. Each step felt like it might be his last. Each breath tasted like copper and ash.
And in his mind, quiet as a lover's whisper, spoke.
"The Twins await in their Sanctuary. They KNEW this would happen. They planned for Sunagakure's survivors to be weakened, desperate, easy prey for the REAL attack. This was phase one, my avatar. The test. The provocation. The intelligence gathering. What comes next will make this look like mercy."
Was it Hyou or was it someone, no something, else?
Michino's purple eyes widened in horror even as he continued to hold the gravity field. This entire battle—the mercenaries, the puppetmaster, the coordinated assault—it had all been reconnaissance. The Baron Twins had
sacrificed their hired forces just to see what Sunagakure could do when pressed. To measure their techniques. To identify their strongest fighters. To gauge how much punishment the village could take before breaking.
And now they knew. Everything. They'd watched from a distance and learned exactly what it would take to finish the job.
Shin & Akkuma - Light and Shadow Bearing Witness
The mercenaries convulsed one final time and went still. Some would wake later, their minds fractured beyond repair by the psychic trauma of having four overlapping genjutsu shattered simultaneously. Others had already died, their consciousnesses unable to process the violence of Shin's Shattered Reality technique. Blood seeped from noses and ears, creating dark halos in the sand around their heads. A few twitched weakly, caught in some nightmare state between waking and unconsciousness where their minds had simply retreated from trauma too great to process.
It was brutal. It was merciless. It was
necessary.
Shin descended slowly, his phoenix wings carrying him down through air thick with dust and ash. Akkuma's Desert Nimbus kept perfect pace beside him, the compressed sand platform moving with fluid grace that spoke to centuries of mastery. They landed side by side on ground that was no longer just sand.
The tiny flowers continued to bloom around Shin's feet, impossible desert blossoms pushing up through blood-soaked earth, their petals unfurling in seconds rather than days. Hardy scrub grass took root in soil that had been sterilized by extreme heat moments ago. Small succulents sprouted from the edges of glass formations, their thick leaves already storing moisture that shouldn't exist.
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 wonder and exhaustion in equal measure. This wasn't a jutsu he'd consciously activated. It was simply what happened when his Plant Sage essence touched ground that Akkuma's Supreme Aqua Realm had prepared—water pooled in depressions, seeped into cracks, baptized in the blood of those who'd fought to defend their home.
Below them, Akkuma's Medical Assistant clones moved with practiced efficiency between the fallen Genin. Their hands glowed with restorative chakra as they performed work that should have been impossible, pulling souls back from the veil, restarting hearts that had gone still, mending flesh that had been torn beyond mortal healing. Forbidden techniques wielded with the casual expertise of someone who'd crossed ethical lines so many times he no longer remembered where they'd been drawn.
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 catastrophic damage, forcing organs to remember how to function. The Medical Assistant clone didn't pause, didn't celebrate—just moved immediately to the next body, hands already forming seals.
Shin watched the Dark Sage save lives with the same hands that had plucked out Jigoku's Sharingan minutes ago, and felt something in his chest tighten. The contradiction. The impossible balance. Monster and savior existing in the same breath, the same being, the same choice.
His hand still trembled from the force of Shattered Reality. Blood stained his gauntlet where the chakra burn had reopened despite Kureji's healing music and Akkuma's transferred energy. He was stable, functional, but far from healed. The golden light that had been bleeding from cracks in his armor had dimmed to barely visible flickers.
Then he felt it.
His Sage Mode senses, still active despite his exhaustion, suddenly screamed a warning that had nothing to do with the immediate crisis. The ground beneath them. The fundamental instability. The mathematical certainty that what Akkuma's techniques had begun, physics would finish.
"
Akkuma," Shin said quietly, his voice carrying only to the Dark Sage despite the chaos surrounding them. "
The ground. Can you feel it?"
As a Sunaku, as someone who'd spent so long mastering sand manipulation, he should be able to feel it just as clearly as Shin could. The cracks spreading through substrate. The voids where support should exist. The slow-motion avalanche that was building toward catastrophic release.
In the distance, barely visible through the haze of dust and heat shimmer, a figure fled. Jigoku, one hand clutched over her missing eye socket, her ornate crimson armor scorched and pitted from their battle. She was heading north. Toward the Diamond Ocean. Toward the Golden Sanctuary where the Baron Twins waited.
The Sharingan in Akkuma's possession, kept sealed and preserved with techniques that would horrify most Medical-nin, pulsed with residual chakra. It was still connected to her, still feeding information about her location through the sympathetic link that all doujutsu shared with their original owners. He could track her whenever he wanted. Could find her in the dark if necessary. Could hunt her to the ends of the earth if he chose.
But that was a problem for tomorrow. Right now, survival took precedence.
And beyond Jigoku, even further north, Shin's enhanced senses caught something that made his blood run cold. Figures on a distant dune. Not mercenaries, no, their stance was too disciplined, their equipment too uniform. They wore armor marked with intertwined serpents, the Baron Twins' symbol, and they were simply... watching.
Evaluating.
One of them—the leader perhaps, or simply the boldest—raised a hand in what might have been a salute. Or a threat. Or acknowledgment that the game had entered its next phase. Then they vanished, not through jutsu but simply by backing over the dune's edge, swallowed by heat shimmer and distance.
The Baron Twins' actual forces. Not the hired mercenaries who'd been sacrificed as cannon fodder and intelligence gathering tools. The
real military power that controlled the Golden Sanctuary and everything it represented.
They'd been watching the entire battle. Taking notes. Learning.
Shin's wings flickered, the ethereal flames guttering despite the borrowed chakra still flowing from Akkuma's Energy Transfer. His body wanted to collapse. His mind wanted to shut down and process the trauma of burning his life force to fuel forbidden techniques. But he forced himself to stay focused, stay present, because the moment he lost consciousness was the moment everyone still depending on him would be vulnerable.
"
We survived," he said softly, more to himself than to Akkuma. "
But they learned everything they needed to know."
The flowers continued to bloom at his feet. Green life amid red death. Hope and horror growing in the same soil, watered by the same blood.
The Aftermath - Victory's True Cost
The collapse reached its peak in a moment that felt like the world ending.
Multiple sections of battlefield gave way simultaneously—not gradually, not with warning, but with the terrible finality of mathematics asserting itself. The sound was like reality breaking, a deep bass note that resonated in bone and teeth, followed by the roar of thousands of tons of sand finding new angles of repose. Dust and debris filled the air in choking clouds that turned day into twilight.
Shinobi scattered like leaves before a storm. Some made it to stable ground through speed or luck or desperation. Others disappeared into suddenly opening voids, their screams cut short by collapsing earth. A few were caught mid-leap between stable sections, forced to make impossible decisions about which direction offered better odds of survival.
But at the center of the chaos, one point held absolutely.
Harupia's reinforced tunnel entrance remained stable—an island of silvery compressed sand in a sea of cascading failure. The ground there refused to betray those who stood upon it, held firm by magnetic particles woven through substrate in patterns that defied conventional engineering. Shinobi who'd made it to that position found their footing solid, found Medical-nin already establishing triage stations, found veterans directing the wounded toward the underground passages that would lead them back to Sunagakure proper.
It became a beacon. A rallying point. The place where survival was possible.
Sandy, the freed manta ray, still circled above—her wings catching the light even through the dust, her movements graceful despite the chaos below. She seemed to be waiting, as if understanding that the strange two-legged creature who'd given her freedom might need her again.
The wild sandworms retreated into the deep desert, their massive bodies sliding beneath the sand with barely a ripple. They'd had enough of human chaos, enough of explosions and jutsu and violence that made the earth itself scream. But they didn't attack as they left. Didn't try to prey on vulnerable targets. Kureji's music had left an impression—recognition of something that spoke to instincts older than hunger.
The remaining controlled manta rays, masterless and confused, scattered to the winds. Some fled toward the horizon. Others spiraled downward, crashing into dunes far from the battlefield, their borrowed animation finally failing. A few simply stopped flying and fell, bodies hitting the sand with dull thuds that raised small clouds of dust.
As the dust began to settle, the true scope of the damage revealed itself in stages. The primary crater had become a massive wound in the earth—easily a hundred meters across at its widest point, dropping thirty meters at the center before reaching the exposed tunnel system. Secondary craters and collapsed sections dotted the landscape like pockmarks, creating a terrain that would take months or years to naturally stabilize.
The tunnel entrance stood at the heart of it all, surrounded by unstable slopes of sand that would need extensive reinforcement before anyone could safely traverse them. The battlefield had been transformed into a deathtrap for anyone without specialized training in underground operations or sand manipulation.
Bodies lay scattered across the carnage. Mercenaries mostly, their blood soaking into thirsty sand, but not exclusively. Sunagakure's fallen wore the armor and insignia of their village and the rings in which they represented—some bearing the Sunaku clan markings, most with the Toraono symbols, still others the neutral grays of Main Branch or the masked anonymity of ANBU. The exact count would take hours, but even at a glance the number was significant.
Twenty-three confirmed dead. Twenty-seven wounded, eight of them critical. Those were the numbers that would eventually make it into official reports, but they didn't capture the weight of it. Didn't capture the Genin who'd gasped her last breath while a Medical-nin worked frantically over her. Didn't capture the Jounin who'd thrown himself over three academy students to shield them from falling debris, crushing his own spine in the process. Didn't capture the ANBU whose body was never recovered, swallowed by the collapse and buried under tons of sand.
The survivors gathered slowly, exhaustedly, around the tunnel entrance. Medical-nin moved between them with practiced efficiency, assessing injuries, prioritizing treatment, making the terrible calculations about who could be saved and who was already too far gone. Veterans helped rookies who were in shock, their hands gentle despite their own wounds. Clan heads took stock of their own people, faces grim as they counted the absent.
From their elevated position, Shin and Akkuma could see everything. The scope of the damage. The clustering of survivors around Harupia's reinforcements. The bodies that would need to be recovered. The dangerous instability that would plague this area for months.
The cost of victory laid bare beneath the merciless sun.
Shin's Mind Thread network, damaged and degraded but still partially functional through the few remaining orchid anchors, carried impressions to him from across the battlefield. Fear. Relief. Exhaustion. Trauma. Grief. Determination. All of it washing over him in waves that threatened to drown his already strained consciousness.
But cutting through it all, growing louder as survivors realized they'd made it, came something else: questions.
What now? Do we pursue? Do we recover? Who were those soldiers watching from the north? How do we defend against another attack? Who leads us through this?
Shin took a slow breath, feeling Akkuma's borrowed chakra still flowing through the Energy Transfer link between them. The Dark Sage was offering strength freely, without demand for repayment, without expectation of control. Just... support. Partnership. The kind of trust that couldn't be bought or forced, only earned through shared trauma and impossible choices.
The flowers at Shin's feet continued to bloom, their green defiance spreading slowly outward from where he stood. Life reasserting itself in the wake of devastation. The cycle continuing despite everything.
In the distance, barely visible through the settling dust, multiple people now carried knowledge of the Golden Sanctuary. The puppetmaster's confession. The intelligence officer's notes. Jigoku's escape route. The observers who'd watched and learned and retreated. All pointing toward the same location—the Diamond Ocean, where the Maelstrom used to hide secrets, where the Baron Twins operated their empire of trafficking and forced labor.
Sunagakure had won the battle. Had defended their home against overwhelming odds. Had proven that even fractured and underground and vulnerable, they would not simply lie down and die.
But the war... the war was just beginning.
And everyone knew it.
Shin's wings beat once, carrying him higher for a moment so his voice would carry clearly across the battlefield. The Mind Thread network amplified his words, ensuring that everyone—from the Genin struggling with shock to the veterans binding wounds to the clan heads counting their dead—would hear.
"
Sunagakure," he said, and his voice was steady despite everything. "
You fought with honor today. You defended your home against forces that came to suffocate us in the dark. You stood against mercenaries and monsters and the very earth itself trying to swallow us whole. And you won."
He paused, letting that sink in. Letting them feel it. Letting the survivors realize they'd actually made it.
"
But this was only the beginning. They tested us. They learned from us. Those soldiers who watched from the north—they now know exactly what it will take to finish us. They know our techniques, our strongest fighters, our limitations. They measured us and found us strong... which means they'll come back stronger."
Another pause. Heavier this time.
"
We have their location. The Golden Sanctuary in the Diamond Ocean. We have witnesses who can testify. We have intelligence that will let us plan. But first... first we must honor our fallen. We must heal our wounded. We must shore up our defenses and ensure that our home remains safe while we prepare for what comes next."
His sapphire eyes swept across the gathered survivors, making contact with as many as he could despite the distance and dust.
"
And then... when we are ready... we will bring the war to them. No more defense. No more waiting for the next attack. We will take the fight to the Golden Sanctuary and end this threat once and for all. The Baron Twins wanted to know what Sunagakure is capable of? They're about to find out."
Shin's mind connection broke from everyone except Chiyo, Harupia, Michino, and Akkuma.
`
"Meet me in the Kazekage Tower. There is much to discuss.`
Shin descended slowly, his wings folding as his feet touched the blood-soaked sand. Around him, the flowers continued to bloom.
The survivors began to move with renewed purpose. Not running anymore. Not fleeing. Moving
forward, toward the tunnel entrance, toward safety, toward whatever came next.
Sunagakure had survived.
The question that hung in the air, unspoken but understood by everyone who'd witnessed this carnage, was simple:
At what cost... and for how long?
[Topic Left by Chikamatsu Shin - Continuing to Two Kings Part 2]
Mission Completed!
- A-Rank: 35000 Yen, and 75 stat points or ASP (Mission Moderator gets +30)
Seeing how Kureji had that situation up ahead in control, he felt that there was no need for him anymore. That was... until he had to flippen move and act again! Something felt uneasy, and it was coming from his brother.. and... aunty? He tilted his head as he watched it, but he did not like it a single bit. He started to move before he even had noticed in that direction. He was going to yell at his brother for leaving him just like that, just like for what he did and had done and what could be done. But all of that didn't come. "Oi oi..." A vein started to show on his forehead as he saw THE BLOODY MOUNTAIN OF WORK HIS FAMILY MEMBER WAS CREATING.