"Rumble—!"
With a roar like it came from the depths of the earth's crust, the ground across Kirigakure began to buck and heave. The shaking didn't spread evenly; it rolled outward from a center point in waves, making everyone standing on it feel their insides flip.
Jagged black fissures ripped crazily across the earth like gaping maws hungry to swallow the night's faint light. Then something even more terrifying happened—
Crack!
Boom!
Thick tree trunks burst up from beneath their feet, punching through rock strata and tearing soil apart, surging to the surface with unstoppable force and speed. The trunks snaked and coiled, twining together like wooden dragons waking from an underground sleep.
In the span of a heartbeat, the sheer violence of their growth—and the terrain turning inside out—knocked every Mist-nin off balance. Some misstepped and plunged into the cracks; others were flung skyward by upthrust roots; formations shattered in an instant.
The trunks, rearing and winding, grew at a pace beyond imagining—ten, twenty meters high in the blink of an eye—until they formed a moving, living palisade of wood.
The Mist-nin reacted fast. A thousand jutsu flared at once.
"Water Release: Water Dragon Bullet!"
"Water Release: Water Colliding Wave!"
"Water Release: Wild Water Wave!"
Rivers shaped like dragons roared forward. Flooding torrents tried to tear a path. Dense barrages of water bullets poured down like a storm…
Water Release after Water Release slammed into the surging trunks, the collisions booming like muffled thunder. But the result was chilling: all that force left only shallow dents in wood that thrummed with a strange life. Water streamed down the bark as if they'd merely watered it.
Meanwhile—
Ffftt, ffftt, ffftt—
Explosive tags flew true and slapped onto the trunks.
Boom!
Boom!
Boom!
The chain of blasts was deafening. Fire and smoke swallowed sections of wood—yet where tags could topple stone walls, they only kicked up splinters here, leaving scorched patches and shallow pocks. Against that bulk, it was nothing.
Mist-nin planted their feet, chakra pooling at their soles to ride out the quake. Bodies blurred as they juked left and right—shadows weaving through the crazed growth as they tried to slip the trunks erupting everywhere.
But the density and speed outstripped human limits.
"Aaagh—!"
"My leg!"
Those a step too slow took the trunks' unstoppable blows head-on. Dull thuds mingled with the brittle snap of bone; shins shattered in an instant. Some had both legs bent into grotesque angles and hit the ground screaming—only to be swallowed by the branches and vines surging in behind.
Worse, the trunks weren't dead wood. Before their eyes they budded and branched, throwing out tough limbs and unfurling pale green leaves. In under ten seconds, a battlefield of explosions and battle cries became a lush, murderous forest.
Houses went over under the press of roots. Beams snapped in chorus; stone paving buckled and heaved out of shape. One after another the trees shot up dozens of meters high, their crowns knitting together to blot out the sky and cast a suffocating shadow.
From afar it looked as if a full tenth of Kirigakure had turned into untouched primeval woodland—raw and ancient—sitting in eerie contrast to the man-made village around it.
The sight left the Mist-nin who'd wisely hung back, lowering their heads and retreating from the front lines, completely dumbstruck. A chill raced from tailbone to crown.
"Wood Release… it's Wood Release!!!"
A Mist jōnin's pupils pin-pricked as he stared at the forest that had replaced buildings and streets. Sweat ran down his back; his hand around the kunai trembled. If he hadn't refused to follow the bloody policy and stepped out of the fight… he'd be trapped in that man-eating forest right now.
That kind of power… isn't something people can resist.
On the other side, Mei Terumi, Ao, and Elder Genju were just as shaken. What they saw almost upended their sense of what "power" meant.
Ao stared at the forest, which still seemed to writhe ever so slightly. Even the Byakugan under his eyepatch ached. "If I remember right, intel said Uchiha Chizumi had two kekkei genkai—Uchiha's Sharingan and Lava Release. He… he's using the First Hokage's Wood Release too? That makes three bloodline limits?"
It made no sense to him how one body could bear and fuse three utterly different bloodlines.
Mei, too, was stunned beyond words. She watched the giant trees coil and braid like titanic serpents and felt a crushing pressure wash over her. She swallowed, throat bobbing. "No wonder the Fourth went down so easily…"
Before a power like this, the title "Kage" felt pale and flimsy.
Elder Genji stared ahead, something like remembrance glinting in his clouded eyes as old memories were dragged to the surface—of Hashirama Senju, the First Hokage, the "God of Shinobi" who pacified an age of war with his own strength. His Wood Release was said to call up forests in an instant and suppress tailed beasts. And now, in a young man from Konoha, he saw a shadow of that legend.
"Konoha…" he rasped, voice old and hoarse, edged with emotions he couldn't name. "Is another child of destiny about to rise above the entire shinobi world?"
Inside the "Nativity of a World of Trees," the trapped Mist-nin were drenched in sweat, dust and blood sticking cold and clammy to their skin. They realized, in horror, that the ninja tools that had drunk so much blood were toys against a jutsu of this scale. A kunai that could slit a throat with ease was laughable against a living trunk ten meters thick and growing. Could it even pierce the bark?
It was ants trying to move a mountain.
Worse: the trees seemed alive, sensing their chakra and position. From every side—from above and below—the living wood coiled and squeezed inward, intent on strangling and crushing all life inside.
Death poured in like a cold tide, filling every corner.
Desperation wrung the last chakra from them. Hands flashed through seals as they hurled Water Release after Water Release.
"Water Release: Water Dragon Bullet!"
"Water Release: Exploding Water Colliding Wave!"
They roared, trying to blast a breach—any gap to slip through—as the wooden world cinched tight. And when, with everything they had, a handful of them finally shattered several trunks and opened a temporary gap…
They watched in despair as new trunks, even thicker, crawled in from nowhere and refilled the hole faster than they could make it—like an infinite regeneration that sealed their hard-won "exit" tighter than before.
"This isn't even a fight against ninja…"
One Mist-nin's killing intent and rage had been ground away, leaving only bone-deep shock and uncontrollable fear. He looked up at the layers of branches pressing down, blotting out the sky. "That Konoha ninja's power… it's like a god's. How can humans fight a god…"
For a shinobi tempered by the Blood Mist to say something so hopeless meant his will was broken.
"Water Release: Hard Whirlpool Water Blade!"
Another Mist-nin, face twisted, mustered everything he had, compressing chakra into a high-speed drilling torrent—and managed to chew through one more trunk. Gasping, spent…
He saw, with empty eyes, an even larger trunk lance out of the shadows as if it had been waiting, and slam across the fleeting path ahead, sealing it completely.
He collapsed to his knees, dazed, whispering, "How… how can there be this much of a gap?"
An instant later, trunks like giant arms slammed in from both sides.
Squelch—
It was like a water-filled skin burst under a press. In a heartbeat his body was crushed to pulp—blood spattering the rough bark in a brutally vivid pattern. He didn't even have time for a proper scream before life left him—one more offering to the forest.
While scores of Mist-nin struggled and fell in that jungle hell, Uchiha Chizumi stood quietly on the highest bough—hundreds of meters up—wind tugging at his clothes. From here he could see roughly a third of the village: distant lights flickering against the dead forest near at hand; clusters of stunned Mist-nin ringed around the jutsu's edge, too afraid to advance.
His gaze swept the village—at buildings even plainer and older than Konoha's, some on the edge of dilapidation. Like most towns in the Land of Water, everything seemed blanketed by a heavy, wordless gloom, starved of vitality and hope. If you ignored the thinning screams below, the stillness was stark.
Sin had spread here without end. The Blood Mist Policy was a tumor rotting this place.
Chizumi's eyes were calm. "After tonight, it won't instantly be as peaceful and prosperous as Konoha. But at least… it will be better than before. Those who should be dead yet roam free—those stubborn to the core, hands soaked in blood—will be judged by absolute justice."
He slowly raised a hand and curled his fingers into a fist.
The tremors deepened, like the very ley lines were groaning. For hundreds of meters around, the trees answered his will—twining, braiding, wrenching and cinching tighter than ever.
The screams below seemed to condense with the shrinking space, sharper and closer together. Blood seeped through early cracks between trunks like thin streams, staining the earth. If you listened, there was a faint, tooth-aching crunching—whether bark giving way under strain or bones breaking, it was impossible to tell.
Veins flickered under the skin on the back of his hand.
Below, the pressure and torsion began to crack wood. Fibers snapped and rattled like firecrackers. The screams grew sparse, then thin, then almost nothing. Trunks pressed so tight no more blood could leak through. Every sign of life was sealed within.
By then, countless thick trunks—streaked with blood and scorch marks—had twisted together into a colossal spiral sphere of wood at the village's heart. Hundreds of meters across, it towered over everything, its skin a braid of bark-brown, clotted crimson, and fresh green.
No more screams—only the occasional wooden creak under stress. Then stillness. The trunks ceased their motion as if the work were done.
The veins on Chizumi's hand smoothed, and he let his arm drop. Kirigakure—along with the distant onlookers—fell into a suffocating, deathly silence.
Mei Terumi stood there stunned, mind blank, body trembling. She couldn't fathom how a force this large—packed with elite Mist-nin, jōnin among them—could be wiped out like cut straw in so little time.
Was it just because he wielded the First Hokage's Wood Release? That reason felt thin. Or had Chizumi, the instant he stepped into Kirigakure, already flooded the ground with chakra and laid the trap—so anyone who entered his zone died without suspense?
Were Kirigakure's many shinobi really this feeble before his power? Was the old tactic of throwing bodies simply meaningless at this level?
The Third Raikage—"strongest spear" and "strongest shield"—had fought thousands of Iwa-nin for ages before collapsing from exhaustion. That was at least a long, brutal battle.
But this… was almost instant annihilation. Was Uchiha Chizumi stronger than the Third Raikage? Had he truly reached that mythic level—Hashirama Senju's?
Truthfully, Mei had no way to know how strong the so-called God of Shinobi really was; that was half a century past.
In her limited imagination, the power it would take to suppress the entire shinobi world and hand out tailed beasts felt about the same as what Chizumi had just shown. Hadn't he, alone and almost off-handedly, suppressed the entire Hidden Mist?
She was certain: even if every bystander here had charged in together, the outcome wouldn't have changed.
"…I can say for sure he isn't here on Konoha's orders to invade us," Ao said, his voice still trembling. His face was pale; cold sweat clung at his temple. "I don't think the Third Hokage could command a monster like that. How could someone that strong obediently follow a Hokage's orders?"