The horizon didn't just burn; it turned sick.
The shockwave from Roran wasn't merely wind and heat. It was raw, unrefined Ryūmyaku chakra—the pulse of the earth itself, severed and bleeding into the atmosphere.
It hit the Wadi Rum canyon before the physical wind did.
Jiraiya felt it first. It wasn't pain; it was a heaviness that settled deep in his marrow. His tenketsu, already flared wide open from Sage Mode, suddenly screamed as if he were trying to channel liquid lead. The air tasted metallic, like biting onto a battery. It was a radioactive spiritual pressure that made the fine hairs on his arms stand up and his stomach churn with nausea.
"MOVE!"
Jiraiya's roar shattered the paralysis.
He didn't think. He spun, hooking his massive, toad-warted arm around Tsunade's waist.
She let the Creation Rebirth drop. She had to. To maintain the regeneration technique in the face of this incoming chakra storm would be suicide; she needed every ounce of energy just to shield her internal organs.
The violet diamond seal vanished. The chakra cloak evaporated.
And for one terrible, honest second, the Genjutsu masking her appearance flickered out.
Jiraiya looked down at her.
He didn't see the radiant, twenty-something Hime of the Senju clan.
He saw the cost.
He saw skin that sagged around the jawline, thin and papery like dried tobacco leaves. He saw deep, carved valleys of exhaustion branching out from the corners of her eyes. He saw the golden luster of her hair dull into the brittle gray of ash.
In fifty-six seconds, she had aged a decade.
She looked frail. She looked used up.
Jiraiya's breath hitched, a sharp pain stabbing him in the chest that had nothing to do with the poison.
Jiraiya's heart cracked. It wasn't disgust that flooded him; it was a horror so profound it nearly brought him to his knees. I did this, he realized. She spent her life to buy me a minute.
Then, Tsunade blinked. Her hands formed a seal, trembling. A shimmer of blue chakra washed over her, and the mask snapped back into place. The wrinkles smoothed. The gray vanished. The beautiful lie returned.
But the image was burned into Jiraiya's retinas forever.
"INTO THE CLEFT!" Orochimaru's voice was a hiss of panic.
The physical blast wave hit.
It was a wall of red dust and superheated air, moving at the speed of sound. The "melted wax" sandstone formations of the canyon began to vibrate, shedding layers of rock like snakes shedding skin.
They scrambled behind a massive, fallen slab of Disi sandstone—a white-capped monolith that had crashed down centuries ago.
"Anchor us!" Jiraiya yelled, throwing himself over Tsunade, using his Sage-enhanced back as a human shield.
Orochimaru didn't argue. He didn't sneer. He slammed both hands into the red sand.
"Wind Style: Great Breach... Earth Style: Mud Bind!"
He combined them. He summoned a gust of wind to deflect the initial heat, creating a pocket of cool air, while simultaneously summoning three massive brown snakes from the earth. The snakes didn't attack; they coiled around the Sannin's waists and bit deep into the bedrock, acting as living tethers.
It was the last time they would ever move perfectly in sync.
BOOOOOOOM.
The world went white.
The sound was gone. The pressure was absolute. The red sand of the valley floor was scoured away, stripping the earth down to the black granite bones beneath. The air was filled with the screaming of rock being pulverized.
Jiraiya gritted his teeth, feeling the skin on his back blister and peel despite the Sage protection. Beneath him, Tsunade was curled into a ball, her hands over her ears, her chakra system shuddering under the radioactive weight of the Ryūmyaku fallout.
The vibrations were so intense they rattled their teeth in their sockets, blurring their vision into a haze of grey.
It lasted for an eternity. It lasted for ten seconds.
Then, the wind died.
The silence that followed was heavy, filled only with the drip-drip-drip of molten sand cooling into glass. The cooling glass pinged and cracked, sounding like distant wind chimes in a graveyard.
Jiraiya groaned, shifting his weight. He smelled like burnt toad oil and ozone. He rolled off Tsunade, checking her instantly. She was pale, breathing shallowly, staring at the sky with hollow eyes.
"We... we're alive," Jiraiya wheezed.
"Barely," Orochimaru muttered.
The Snake Ninja was sitting casually behind the rock face, dusting red grit off his knees. He looked calm, but his hands were shaking slightly as he inspected his fingernails.
"That power..." Orochimaru whispered to himself, his tongue darting out to taste the metallic air. "It felt like the earth screaming. Such waste."
From the cloud of dust and settling debris, a silhouette emerged.
Hanzō stood on a ridge of untouched granite. His rebreather mask was cracked. His flak jacket was scorched. Ibuse was nowhere to be seen—likely dispelled or buried.
Hanzō looked down at them.
He didn't attack. He didn't assume a stance. He stood with the weariness of a man who had just seen the face of god and found it ugly.
"You survived the poison," Hanzō's voice boomed. It wasn't a shout; it was a projection of pure will that cut through the ringing in their ears.
Orochimaru scoffed, examining a chipped nail. 'It wasn't an issue for me.'
"You survived the fire," Hanzō continued.
Jiraiya gritted his teeth, clutching his healed-but-aching arm. 'Survived. Yeah. That's the word.'
Hanzō looked to the west, where the mushroom cloud was dissipating into the violet twilight.
"And you survived the sky falling down," Hanzō finished. He looked back at the three of them—bloody, battered, huddled together in the dirt.
"You are cockroaches. Impossible to kill. I name you the Sannin. The Three."
He turned his back on them, his cape snapping in the dying wind.
"Crawl away. Live with the memory of this day."
He didn't name them because they had won. He didn't name them because they were strong.
He named them because they refused to have the decency to die when the world ended around them.
Hanzō vanished, using the Body Flicker to disappear into the gloom, leaving them alone in the ruined canyon.
Tsunade sat up slowly. She brushed a lock of dirty blonde hair out of her face.
She looked at her hands. They looked young. Smooth. Perfect.
But she could feel it.
Inside, her cells were tired. Her telomeres—the caps on her DNA that dictated how long she had left to live—had been sheared off.
She felt physically lighter, as if a ballast had been cut from her soul, leaving her drifting and untethered.
In that 56 seconds, she hadn't just given Jiraiya chakra. She had given him Time.
She did the math in her head, the cold calculation of a medic who knew the price of miracles. Five years? Maybe ten? Gone. Burned up in a flash of violet light to keep a pervert and a sociopath breathing for less than a minute.
And for what?
Sakumo had destroyed the objective. Hanzō still ruled Amegakure. The war would continue.
"We gained nothing," Tsunade whispered, her voice hollow.
Jiraiya looked at her, opening his mouth to say something—a joke, a comfort, a promise. But the image of her grey hair and wrinkled skin flashed in his mind, and the words died in his throat.
Tsunade stood up, her knees shaking.
She had bet her life on a victory. She had gone all in.
And the house had dealt her a draw.
I already gave you everything, Jiraiya, she thought, a tear cutting a clean track through the red dust on her cheek. Don't ask me for anything else. I have nothing left to bet.
"Let's go home," she said.
She started walking, leaving footprints in the cooling glass, not waiting for the men who owed her their lives.