Chapter 481: Despair of the Alliance and Mifune's Final Gambit
At the main encampment of the Allied Shinobi Forces.
While Konoha's vanguard practically vibrated with the chilling, metallic anticipation of sharpening blades, the atmosphere here carried the suffocating weight of a mass grave. The sky above mirrored their morale—a terrifyingly gloomy expanse of bruised-purple clouds pressing down so heavily it made drawing a full breath an agonizing chore.
Inside the dimly lit commander's tent, the air was stagnant.
"It is over..."
A long, ragged sigh fractured the suffocating silence. Ōnoki floated a few inches above the ground, but his posture lacked its usual overbearing rigidity. His arms hung limply at his sides rather than being crossed in his trademark stance of defiance. The man known across the nations as Ōnoki of Both Scales—a figure legendary for his unyielding stubbornness—looked as though a decade of vitality had been violently stripped from his bones in a single afternoon.
"Everything is over." Ōnoki murmured to himself, his gaze fixed on nothingness.
Below the hovering Tsuchikage, Mifune, the General of the Land of Iron, sat cross-legged before a sprawling tactical map. His weathered hands rested heavily on his knees. As the leader of a strictly neutral samurai nation, he had initially treated this deployment as just another ordinary, albeit large-scale, conflict in the endless cycle of ninja warfare. He had been confident in his samurai's discipline.
Until that colossal blue giant had risen from the earth, blotting out the sun and shattering mountains with a casual swing of its blade. Only then did Mifune realize how ridiculously, fatally wrong his assumptions had been.
On the opposite side of the heavy canvas tent, Darui paced the cramped space. The acting commander of Kumogakure moved like a caged, irritable lion, his heavy boots thudding rhythmically against the dirt floor.
"Stop sighing over there!"
Darui halted abruptly. He lunged forward and slammed his heavy fist onto the central war table. The thick solid wood splintered with a sharp crack, an entire corner snapping off and crashing to the ground.
"Lord Raikage is still in their hands!" Darui roared. His eyes were heavily bloodshot, raw with exhaustion and fury, while thick blue veins pulsed violently against the dark skin of his neck. "Lord Bee's whereabouts are also completely unknown!"
He swept a glaring look across the defeated faces of the other commanders.
"What is the point of us just standing around here waiting to die?" Darui demanded, his voice echoing off the canvas walls. "Assemble the remaining troops! We fight our way back!"
"Even if we die on that battlefield! We must rescue Lord Raikage!"
"Shut your mouth!"
A sharp, gravelly roar forcefully cut through Darui's shouting. Ōnoki spun in mid-air, his bloodshot eyes glaring daggers at the Kumogakure shinobi.
"Fight our way back?" Ōnoki spat, his composure entirely shattered. "With what exactly?"
The old Tsuchikage gestured wildly toward the flap of the tent, pointing in the direction of the battlefield they had just fled. "Did you not see it with your own two eyes? That Perfect Susanoo!"
He gasped for breath, his chest heaving. "That is a world of power only Uchiha Madara ever possessed! No! That monster Uchiha Akira is even more terrifying than Madara ever was!" Ōnoki's voice pitched upward, hurried and slightly out of tune from sheer panic. "Tens of thousands of our elite allied troops were nothing more than a swarm of insects before him! He crushed them without even trying!"
"Rescue the Raikage?" Ōnoki let out a miserable, hollow laugh that scraped against the silence of the tent. "Stop dreaming, boy. Marching back there now has absolutely no meaning other than throwing your lives into a meat grinder!"
"You bastard!"
Darui bared his teeth. Arcs of volatile blue lightning crackled across his shoulders and arms, the air instantly smelling of ozone. "Are you really going to cower like a beaten dog? Is this the so-called backbone of your mighty Iwagakure?"
"This is not about backbone! This is about avoiding absolute stupidity!" Ōnoki retorted, refusing to back down an inch despite the crackling lightning illuminating his wrinkled face. "I am making this choice to preserve the very last sparks of Iwagakure's legacy!"
He lowered himself slightly, his tone turning grim. "Look at the reality of our situation. The only options left on the table are to surrender, or to run! We run back to the Land of Earth, use our mountainous terrain to maneuver, and perhaps we can linger on for a few more miserable days! If we fight head-on today, there will be no Iwagakure left on the map tomorrow!"
Ōnoki and Darui remained locked in a bitter standoff, the heavy tension in the room threatening to ignite. Neither man was willing to yield.
The surrounding leaders of the smaller hidden villages huddled in the dim corners of the tent. They kept their heads down, trembling slightly, not even daring to breathe too loudly lest they draw the ire of the giants. When gods clashed, mortals suffered the consequences. Whether it was the raging lightning of Kumogakure or the crushing weight of Iwagakure, none of these minor leaders could afford to offend either side.
Yet, in the darkest, most secluded corner of the command tent, a cold and elegant figure stood in absolute silence.
It was Konan of Amegakure.
Her amber eyes tracked the escalating argument. Watching Ōnoki and Darui scream at each other until their faces flushed dark red, a fleeting hint of genuine pity flashed across her stoic features.
'Pathetic fools.'Konan sneered coldly in her heart.'You have absolutely no idea what kind of monster you are facing.'She knew the depths of true despair. Nagato's power—the Rinnegan, the Six Paths of Pain—had been enough for him to call himself a living god. Yet even Nagato, with all his divine might, had been utterly and effortlessly crushed beneath Uchiha Akira's heel. That man had long ago shattered the ceiling of what the world considered a Kage.'Resist?'Konan lowered her gaze, her paper-white skin catching the faint candlelight.'In the face of absolute power, all mortal struggles are entirely futile. Your petty bickering is nothing more than the meaningless wailing of livestock before the slaughter.'
Just as Ōnoki and Darui looked ready to come to blows, a sharp voice cut through the clamor.
"Enough!"
The old but deeply resonant shout echoed through the canvas walls. Mifune rose slowly from his cross-legged position, his hand resting on the hilt of his katana.
"The greatest enemy this world has ever seen is standing right at our gates, yet you immediately fall into disarray and turn your fangs on each other!" Mifune glared at the Tsuchikage and the Kumogakure commander, his weathered face etched with deep disappointment. "Is this the true caliber of the shinobi world?"
Ōnoki and Darui exchanged a brief, hostile glance before simultaneously snorting in derision.
"Then you tell us, samurai, what exactly should we do?" Ōnoki demanded, floating down to heavily drop himself into a wooden chair. He crossed his arms, his tone dripping with bitter sarcasm. "We clearly cannot win in a direct fight, and you criticize us for wanting to retreat. Are we supposed to just wash our necks clean and wait patiently for Uchiha Akira to come and chop our heads off?"
Mifune took a slow, measured breath, forcing the rising tide of panic in his chest to settle. He walked over to the fractured war table. Raising a calloused finger, he pressed it heavily onto the center of the map—right over the sprawling territory of the Land of Fire.
"We negotiate." Mifune spat the word out like a bitter pill.
"Negotiate?" Darui barked a harsh, humorless laugh, acting as if the old samurai had just told the most absurd joke in history. "Look at the current situation! They hold all the cards! Do you honestly think Konoha will even entertain the idea of a negotiation?"
A sharp, dangerous glint flashed in Mifune's dark eyes. It was the specific, terrifying madness of a cornered gambler preparing to throw their final, bloodstained chip onto the table.
"They will listen," Mifune said grimly, "because we still hold valuable chips in our hands."
"Chips?" Ōnoki blinked, stunned for a fraction of a second. Then, as a buried memory surfaced, his eyes widened. He snapped his head up to stare at the samurai. "You mean..."
"Exactly." Mifune lowered his voice to a conspiratorial rasp. "Before this disastrous war officially commenced, we strictly followed the established contingency plan."
He leaned over the map, his shadow falling across the parchment. "We dispatched several elite infiltration squads. Their orders were to completely bypass Konoha's heavily fortified front lines and sneak directly into the undefended heartland of the Land of Fire."
At this point, Mifune paused. His heavy gaze swept over the tense faces of every commander present in the tent.
"These specialized squads were given only one singular mission." The samurai's voice dropped to a chilling whisper. "Sabotage."
He tapped the map again. "Not against their military. Not against their shinobi forces. Their targets are the civilian populace, the undefended towns, the agricultural granaries, and the primary water sources of the Land of Fire..."
Mifune closed his eyes for a brief second. "Indiscriminate destruction."
A heavy silence fell over the tent. It was the absolute lowest, most despicable tactic conceivable in the rules of warfare. To target innocents was a violation of every code of honor Mifune had ever sworn to uphold. But standing on the precipice of total annihilation, staring down the barrel of national extinction, the fragile concept of morality had already been burned to ash.
"So far, not a single piece of news has come back from those units." Mifune's voice carried a faint, almost imperceptible tremble. "This means they have not been discovered by Konoha's sensory divisions. Or rather... they have already successfully gone into deep hiding within the civilian populace."
Mifune clenched his hand into a tight, trembling fist. "These are our bargaining chips!"
He slammed his fist against the map. "If Uchiha Akira dares to make another aggressive move toward us, we will give the order! We will turn the entire Land of Fire into a burning sea of flames! We will use the lives of millions of his precious civilians to trade for the Raikage, and to secure our safe passage out of this slaughterhouse!"
Darui opened his mouth, his jaw working as if he wanted to protest, but the words died in his throat. He snapped his mouth shut. As a proud Kumogakure shinobi, he had always advocated for overwhelming power and honorable glory on the battlefield. This cowardly act of using defenseless civilians as hostages made bile rise in his throat. It disgusted him to his core.
But... this was for the Raikage.
To save his leader, his boss, Darui was willing to become a despicable evil spirit. He would shoulder that sin.
"Good!" Ōnoki suddenly slapped his thigh, the dying embers of hope violently reigniting in his aged eyes. "We will do exactly that!"
The Tsuchikage's face twisted into a desperate grin. "Uchiha Akira may be an invincible monster, but he is still the Hokage after all! The title comes with chains! He absolutely cannot stand by and watch his own country's people suffer and burn!"
Ōnoki floated higher into the air, his voice cracking with a feverish, desperate madness. "As long as we firmly grasp this fatal weakness, we have a real chance to survive!"
He turned to his aides, barking orders. "Quickly! Establish contact with those infiltration squads! Get them moving immediately! Tell them to create chaos—the bigger and bloodier, the better! We need Uchiha Akira to understand that if he pushes us into a corner, he will bleed for it!"
Back in the shadows of the corner, Konan watched the scene unfold. She looked at this group of supposed leaders, watching them grow feverishly excited as if they had just caught a life-saving straw in a churning ocean. The pity in her amber eyes only deepened into something resembling mourning.
'Stupid.'She shook her head gently, the paper flower in her hair rustling softly.'Threats? Hostages?''You fools do not understand Uchiha Akira at all.''Doing this will not force his hand. It will only enrage him.''And the consequences of enraging a man like Uchiha Akira...'
Despite her usual cold composure, Konan could not suppress the sudden, violent shudder that wracked her slender frame.
She closed her eyes, but the vision was already burned into her mind. She could already see it clearly. A hell far more terrifying than mere death was about to descend upon their heads.
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