The world had become a canvas for gods, and the paint was pure chakra. The plateau was no more. In its place was a graveyard of geography—shattered mountains formed jagged teeth against the sky, forests were reduced to fields of smouldering splinters, and the very earth was cleft with glowing veins of magma where the Raikage's lightning had superheated the stone.
On the outskirts, shinobi from all villages could only watch, their bodies pressed to the ground by the suffocating weight, their minds unable to process the scale of the collision they witnessed.
Five philosophies stood embodied in the devastation. Hiruzen Sarutobi, the Hokage, was the Balance of Knowledge, a calm centre in the storm whose every move was a calculated paragraph in a thesis on war.
Ay, the Third Raikage, was the Rule of Strength, a being of pure, unadulterated power who believed any problem could be solved by hitting it harder.
Onoki, the Tsuchikage, was the Will to Endure, a stubborn, ancient force that could outlast any assault and erase what could not be outlasted.
Hiroshi, the Mizukage, was the Power of Adaptation, fluid, unpredictable, and deadly, changing his form to exploit every weakness.
Saitetsu, the Kazekage, was the Discipline of Control, his will imposing order and structure on the chaos through the relentless, grinding power of his Iron Sand.
Their chakra fields overlapped in a violent, discordant symphony. Then, without a signal, a word, or even a shared glance, the storm began again.
The Raikage burst forward, a human comet wreathed in a nimbus of blue-white lightning. The ground did not crack under his feet; it melted, leaving molten streaks in his wake. The sound was a continuous, tearing shriek of atmosphere being violated. Hiruzen did not retreat. He met the charge, his body flowing into a defensive stance, Enma the Adamantine Staff spinning into his grasp. When lightning met adamantine, the world did not simply echo; it broke. The "CLANG" was not a sound, but a physical force, a shockwave that levelled the remaining standing stone spires for a hundred meters and sent a shower of white-hot sparks cascading through the air like a vengeful constellation.
Hiruzen's movements were a study in patience. His eyes, ancient and weary, never left the Raikage's face, reading the micro-expressions of rage, the tell-tale flaring of chakra in his coils before each strike. Between the concussive impacts, Hiruzen's voice cut through the din, mild, almost conversational, and perfectly calibrated to maim pride.
"If this is all you can do, Raikage…" he said, sidestepping a Hell Stab that vaporized a ton of rock behind him, "…I begin to understand how you failed to stop a child like Renjiro."
The words were a senbon to the heart. They hit with a precision no taijutsu could match. Ay's jaw tightened, a muscle twitching in his temple. The lightning around him, once a controlled aura, flickered erratically, spitting angry arcs that earthing themselves harmlessly into the sky.
'Good… lose yourself in it,' Hiruzen thought, his thoughts a cold stream of strategy. He knew the Raikage's greatest strength—his absolute, unthinking focus—was also his greatest weakness. Tempered by rage, it became brittle, predictable. Each taunt was a hammer blow to that temper, carefully swung.
Enraged, the Raikage bellowed, his chakra surging beyond its usual controlled ferocity. His next punch, a wild, haymaker swing, carried so much force that it shattered the extended form of Enma mid-air with a sound like a mountain splitting.
But in the follow-through, his guard was open. Hiruzen, having anticipated this very outcome, was already moving. He twisted inside the Raikage's reach, one hand forming a seal.
"Fire Release: Great Fireball Jutsu!"
The point-blank explosion of flame did not incinerate the Lightning Armour, but it used the Raikage's own uncontrollable momentum against him. The concussive force, combined with his forward lunge, sent the titan of Kumo hurtling backward, crashing through a rocky ridge in a cloud of dust and shattered stone. Hiruzen landed lightly, his expression unreadable.
"Power without patience," he murmured to the settling silence, "burns itself away."
=====
Far across the ruined plain, a different kind of battle was unfolding. Hiroshi had flooded a vast basin with a thick, chakra-laden mist that deadened sound and blurred vision. Onoki hovered above it like a vengeful spirit, while Saitetsu stood his ground, expanding his Iron Sand in every direction, transforming the misty basin into a deadly, shifting landscape of metallic spikes and armoured dunes.
As the two Kage converged on his position, Hiroshi's voice cut through the fog—calm, cold, and dripping with disdain. "In my clan, we have a saying—those who need numbers to win, melt fastest when the cold sets in." As he spoke, the mist at his feet crystallised into a sheet of pristine, glassy frost. The temperature in the basin plummeted, the very moisture in the air freezing.
Onoki's eyes, capable of perceiving the molecular, narrowed. He saw the chakra nature shift, the seamless fusion of water and wind.
"Ice Release…" he rasped, a note of realisation in his voice. "The Yuki clan..."
Hiroshi's chakra condensed, and with a series of soft, crystalline pings, mirrors of perfect, shimmering ice materialised in a wide circle around him. He vanished into one and reappeared from another in the space of a heartbeat—faster than even Onoki's experienced eyes could reliably track. This was the Demonic Mirroring Ice Crystals (Makyō Hyōshō). From the reflections, attacks rained down.
A Thousand Flying Water Needles of Death (Sensatsu Suishō)—countless frozen senbon that formed mid-air and exploded outward in waves, their passage marked by the sound of shattering glass. When Onoki, analysing the pattern, fired a small, controlled Particle Style cube to test the defence, Hiroshi didn't dodge. He raised a hand, and the very air in front of him froze into a translucent, multifaceted Ice Dome. The Dust Release beam struck it, and instead of being utterly erased, the dome absorbed and refracted the terrifying energy, sending wild, scattered beams of annihilation lancing harmlessly through the fog and into the surrounding cliffs.
Onoki shifted to offence, adjusting his altitude and firing smaller, faster Dust bursts, trying to map how the ice mirrors bent chakra and light. Saitetsu, the master of control, provided defence and suppression, his Iron Sand morphing into whipping tendrils and sharpened spikes that lashed out at every mirror from which Hiroshi appeared. They were trying to collapse the network through coordinated, overwhelming force—Earth crushing Ice, Iron piercing reflections.
But Hiroshi was dominance embodied. Every defensive measure they took only gave him new angles, new surfaces to manipulate. His movements were like water given sentience and shadow given form—graceful, fluid, and utterly predatory. His voice echoed from every mirror simultaneously, a chilling chorus.
"You can't cage what mirrors your strength back at you."
Onoki, frustrated, created localised gravity fields, forcing the mist down to reveal Hiroshi's body. Saitetsu reshaped his sand into a vast, closing dome, attempting to trap all the mirrors within a magnetic snare. Through one shimmering reflection, Hiroshi smiled.
"Iron rusts. Dust scatters. Ice endures." The fight had become an elemental metaphor, a poetic and violent clash of national philosophies: Onoki's power of disintegration, meant to erase; Saitetsu's power of structure, meant to control; and Hiroshi's power of stasis, meant to preserve and reflect.
The stalemate broke when Onoki decided to end it. He rose higher, charging a massive Particle Style cube that glowed with the promise of total obliteration.
Hiroshi reacted instantly, his mirrors shifting to form a layered, interlocking dome of ice. Onoki released the jutsu. The beam of nothingness lanced down, piercing the dome—but the perfect, crystalline structure refracted it violently. The single, clean beam of annihilation became a chaotic scatter of deadly light.
Saitetsu, with incredible speed and control, threw up layered barriers of Iron Sand, shielding himself and Onoki from the deadly scatter. The world flashed white. The collision of Dust, Iron, and Ice created a shockwave that turned the surrounding fog into boiling vapour.
In that moment of visual chaos, Hiroshi acted. He darted from a surviving mirror, his entire right arm sheathed in a razor-sharp, glowing gauntlet of ice. He aimed directly for the Kazekage's heart.
Saitetsu intercepted with a wall of sand, but Hiroshi's strike was too fast, too precise. The icy blade did not pierce deeply, but it slid across the Kazekage's side, shearing through armour and flesh. The wound itself was serious, but the true damage was the instant, searing cold that flash-froze the tissue around it, locking the gash in a rictus of frost and stopping the blood flow with agonising finality.
Saitetsu stumbled back, his breath catching in a gasp, his face paling as the frost spread a spiderweb of white across his dark armour. Onoki landed beside him, his own breathing laboured from the chakra exertion. The Tsuchikage looked at the wound, not fatal, but a grave and debilitating injury. The Kazekage's Iron Sand trembled in the air but held its defensive formation, a testament to his immense will.
Onoki muttered, the words half-lost in the steam, tinged with a grudging respect he would never voice aloud. "Even iron bends under cold enough pressure…"
Saitetsu forced a pained smirk, his hand pressed against the frozen wound, his chakra fighting a new, internal war against the invasive cold. His eyes, however, burned with undiminished resolve. "Then we raise the heat." The battle was far from over.