The scorched, cracked earth—rivers of magma still crawling across it—was veiled in thick black smoke and choking dust. An invisible shockwave swept through, thinning the haze and sharpening the view a little.
Jūzō Biwa narrowed his eyes, trying to make out the edge of the blast zone.
A heartbeat later, his pupils tightened.
Beyond the thinning dust loomed a colossal, mountain-sized shadow in deep gray, flickering in and out of sight.
The outline alone pressed on the lungs, as if it could freeze the very air. It also dragged something ugly up from Jūzō's memory.
He drew a sharp breath. Even the sulfur and burnt stench in the air felt suddenly cold.
He muttered, "The Three-Tails—Isobu… the Mizukage actually let it out?"
Beside him, Uchiha Izumi forced her eyes wide, curiosity battling instinctive caution as she peered into the distance.
Through the smoke she could only just make out a turtle-shaped mass the size of a hill.
Her first impression was a giant tortoise, magnified a thousandfold and steeped in ill omen.
The behemoth seemed furious beyond reason.
Every breath howled like a gale, rumbling like distant thunder.
Even from this far, Izumi felt the ground under her boots tremble, and in that sound she heard raw wildness and a lust to destroy.
"So this is a tailed beast—like the Nine-Tails that attacked the village?" she whispered, palms damp with sweat.
Another hot gust scoured the smoke away, and the Three-Tails, Isobu, finally showed itself in full.
It did resemble a gigantic turtle—but as if warped by a creator with no sense of beauty. Its vast body wasn't covered by a normal shell but by a heavy carapace with a cold, gray-white metallic sheen, bristling with towering spikes like jagged peaks—savage and grotesque.
Its head was huge, the crown and lower face masked in chaotic gray-white spines. One eye seemed blind; the other blazed with primitive ferocity.
Ugly and vicious didn't begin to cover it.
Behind it, three massive tails thrashed like crazed pillars, each ringed with bony segments and barbs that cut the air with a shrill hiss.
Where the shell didn't reach, its hide showed a dark, living red—like exposed muscle—striped with fiber-like lines that quivered slightly, radiating unnerving vitality.
More alarming still—atop that monstrous head, the upper body of the Fourth Mizukage, Yagura Karatachi, protruded in plain view.
His lower half seemed fused to the beast's body. Eyes shut, face an unnatural pallor—like someone in a deep sleep. This was no "perfect jinchūriki"; he wasn't in full control of the tailed beast's power.
So the Fourth Mizukage really is being controlled.
It wasn't Izumi's first time seeing a tailed beast.
The nightmare of the Nine-Tails' night still stalked her sleep—an orange-red demon fox raging and roaring, and her father's figure swallowed forever by the rubble.
"Haa—" She let out a long breath, pressing her emotions down. "He unleashed the Nine-Tails in Konoha; now he's puppeteering the Three-Tails in the Mist. Just like Chizumi-senpai said—Uchiha Obito could die ten thousand times and it still wouldn't pay for his sins."
On her shoulder, Jujirō the cat went wide-eyed and finally squeaked out, "That's one huge turtle, meow—"
He paused, then couldn't help adding from the heart, "Meow, and uniquely ugly!"
"M-Mizukage-sama—he—he's unleashed the tailed beast's power!!"
Far off, a badly wounded Mist Anbu ninja pushed himself up with one arm, the other clamped over his screaming chest.
He looked up, saw the giant through the smoke, and his face went slack with shock.
He tried to stagger to his feet, to run to help—only for a tearing pain to saw through him. His knees buckled and he crashed back down.
"Guh—" He coughed up a mouthful of bright blood that splattered the charred ground.
His face grew ashen, his breath the flicker of a candle.
"Damn—"
He ground his teeth, nails gouging into the scorched earth.
Then—a big hand, blistered and raw from burns, slid over his shoulder without a sound and pressed him down again with irresistible force.
The Anbu's pupils pinpricked.
Training took over. He snatched a kunai from his pouch and stabbed backward without looking.
An iron-grip hand caught his wrist mid-air. He couldn't budge it an inch.
"It's me." The cold, familiar voice from behind loosened the wire in his nerves.
He turned to see a face caked in ash and blood, battered but still ferocious—Zabuza Momochi.
"D-Demon…?" the Anbu blurted, stunned it was him.
Zabuza released him but never took his eyes off the monstrous Three-Tails. Blood still slicked his mouth as he said, flat as ice, "If the Mizukage's drawn on the tailed beast, it means he's decided to finish every enemy alone. If half-cripples like us go now—"
He paused, a trace of mockery in his tone. "—we're not helping; we're dead weight. You want the Mizukage fighting a monster while babysitting someone who can't even stand?"
The words cut. The Anbu opened his mouth, then bowed his head and slammed a fist into the ground. "Damn it! How can that Lava-Release freak from Konoha be this strong?! One exchange and we're in ruins. The Mizukage was forced to unleash the tailed beast—before this, that card was always the very last resort—"
Zabuza didn't answer. He stared at the far-off devastation, the sting of his burns humming under his skin.
He had his own reasons for holding the man back.
Uchiha Chizumi's calamity-like strike—crippling more than thirty elite Mist Anbu in an instant—let Zabuza glimpse, in the endless black of blood-mist, a sliver of light he'd never seen:
A chance to overturn the order.
That man—
Terrifyingly strong.
Strong beyond reason.
Maybe—he was the only one here who could crush the Mizukage who smothered Kirigakure like a bad dream, not by plot or assassination but by absolute force.
Even if—
He was from another village.
"The Konoha Lava Beast—the man rumored to have assassinated the Daimyō of the Land of Fire. The most dangerous, most unreadable shinobi alive—Uchiha Chizumi!"
Elsewhere, Mei Terumi's beautiful eyes were tight with caution as she replayed the rumors about Uchiha Chizumi. She drew in a breath that tasted faintly of sulfur. A kunoichi with two kekkei genkai herself, she could feel the hopeless gap even more clearly.
Her Boil Release and Lava Release were strong—but nowhere near this natural-disaster level of destruction.
What puzzled her more was—why?
Why would Konoha's Uchiha Chizumi suddenly appear in the Land of Water?
Wasn't the Mizukage supposed to be hunting the defector Jūzō Biwa?
How did it come to such a violent clash with that Konoha scourge—bad enough to force out a tailed beast?
"Bottom line is—" Mei's face stayed guarded. "The most dangerous man in the ninja world showing up in the Land of Water is a disaster no one budgeted for."
The nobles and the Daimyō of the Land of Water wouldn't be sleeping well for a while.
This was a man who truly dared to kill the so-called "people above people."
By rights, as a Mist shinobi, Mei Terumi should be rushing to aid the Mizukage.
But she held back.
Her gut told her something was very wrong with him. Maybe, watching him fight Uchiha Chizumi, she'd spot it.
"Huff—!!!"
Isobu vented a breath thick with chakra, a tangible fog rolling out in all directions and even sweeping the black smoke from the air.
One eye was clamped shut, the lid scored with burn-like scratches. The other, bulging wide, burned with violent, rabid madness.
That annihilating gaze locked on the small figure below radiating lethal danger—Uchiha Chizumi. If you looked close, something like a faint, ominous red flicker ghosted in the depths of its pupil.
The muscles of its hideous face twisted, a seizure of raw pain and struggle—like two wills fighting in its skull.
Then the struggle shattered under a stronger, foreign will, replaced by something even purer and more rabid.
BOOM—!!!
Tailed-beast chakra burst out of it like a broken dam. A dark-red aura wrapped its body; the already scorching air warped and trembled, humming in resonance.
"RAAAH!!!"
Isobu's forelimbs—thick as towers—gouged the ruined ground to gravel. It threw its monstrous head back; the cheeks ballooned like bellows as a tide of chakra funneled into its mouth.
PFFFT!
A heartbeat later, a water sphere two or three dozen meters across—compressed to a terrifying density—the "Great Water Mass Bullet"—fired from its mouth like a giant shell.
It tore the air with a screaming whistle and dove straight for Uchiha Chizumi. Even the air bent in its wake.
Chizumi still stood on the charred, lava-slick ground, a vast, bottomless crater hundreds of meters wide yawning behind him like the mouth of the abyss.
Facing a tailed-beast-class Water Release that could erase an ordinary village, his expression didn't change.
His right hand had fully elementized—molten, viscous, scarlet magma.
And that magma arm was pulsing—swelling and compressing, again and again at a frightening tempo.
Each cycle drove the color deeper red, packed more volcanic fury inside—like ramming an entire erupting mountain into a single limb.
In the instant before the giant Water Iron Cannon swallowed him—
Chizumi's molten fist clenched.
"Lava Release: Great Eruption!!!"
BOOOOM—!!!
A magma titan of a fist, larger and wilder than the Great Water Mass Bullet, exploded forth like a volcano finally breaking after ages—carrying heat to burn the world and impact to crush anything in its path.
The arm ballooned to its limit; crimson light washed the sky.
SSZZZZ—!!!
KRAKOOM!!!
When they smashed together, extreme heat and high-pressure water collided in the worst possible way. The screech was like ten thousand red-hot brands plunging into an icy sea.
The massive Great Water Mass Bullet flash-vaporized almost on contact, detonating into a storm of scalding white steam.
The surface of the magma fist was gouged open by the water's brutal force; molten splinters fanned out in a red spray.
But—
That loss couldn't blunt the Great Eruption's unstoppable momentum.
What remained of the magma fist kept driving, irresistible, straight for Isobu's body.
Isobu's wild eye twitched—clearly not expecting its attack to be erased so easily.
"ROAR!!!"
All three barbed tails snapped like titanic steel whips, swinging with mountain-shattering power to smash the incoming magma aside.
Trying to stop it—
But—
RIP!
SSZZZZ—!!!
The instant the tails touched the molten heat—
"GRAAAAAAAAAH—!!!"
Isobu let out a scream that shook the sky, pure agony that made the distant onlookers' scalps crawl.
In that moment of contact, the three rock-hard tails were shorn more than halfway through—as if a hot knife had glided through wax.
The cut faces were unnaturally smooth; you could see tailed-beast chakra boiling and venting within.
Only three bare half-stumps jerked and wobbled.
No blood—just torrents of tailed-beast chakra spilling out of control and black scars where the heat had carbonized flesh in an instant.
Pain spattered bloodshot veins across Isobu's remaining eye.
A berserk, feral aura burst from it, almost tangible.