The alarm tore through Konoha's night sky in a long, urgent cry.
After years of peace, the village was under alert again.
Civilians scattered through the streets in waves of panic, ninja shouting over the chaos to direct the evacuation, won and children and elderly being rushed into shelters. Shops were shuttering. The entire village had gone taut with the kind of tension that makes breathing feel difficult.
On the outer walls, figures were appearing one after another.
Konoha's high-end combat force -- jonin, special jonin, ANBU elite -- assembled along the battlents, looking outward at what lay beyond.
What lay beyond was white.
A pale, endless, ocean-like white.
White Zetsu. Tens of thousands of them at minimum, blanketing the entire plain outside the village walls in a seamless carpet of crawling figures, like a winter snowfall that was far more wrong and far more frightening than any snow had a right to be.
Those pallid forms moved and shifted in the moonlight, an army of numbers that could swallow any village whole.
They outnumbered every ninja in Konoha combined, several tis over.
Hiruzen Sarutobi stood on the wall in a set of black combat armor he had not worn in years. Dust-sealed though it had been, it still fit. He still looked every bit the warrior in it. His face was grave, his aged eyes fixed on the white expanse below, brow deeply furrowed.
Jiraiya stood beside him, staring in the sa direction.
"Old man -- do you recognize what these things are?" His voice had shed its usual levity.
"No." Hiruzen shook his head. "I have never seen anything like this."
"Each one carries chakra... roughly chunin-level, I'd estimate..."
"Chunin?!" Jiraiya's brow jumped.
Tens of thousands of chunin-level enemies. "Trouble" was far too mild a word for this.
"Has Naruto been reached?"
"Yes. The boy should arrive any mont."
Jiraiya drew a slow breath. "Until then, we cannot let these things start their attack."
Before the words had finished landing, the white sea below erupted.
The White Zetsu began shouting. Tens of thousands of voices rising at once, rging into a single wall of sound that crashed toward the village like a wave -- too vast, too overlapping, too chaotic to make out as individual words. The volu of it alone shook the air.
Jiraiya tilted his head and listened, struggling to pull coherent aning from the noise.
"Hey -- you Konoha people --!"
"Give back -- the one you're holding -- our new master --!"
"Now -- or we'll flatten this whole village --!"
"New master?" Jiraiya's brow furrowed as he muttered to himself. "What are these things talking about?"
He pushed the question aside. It wasn't the priority right now. What mattered was holding the line long enough for Naruto to arrive. He needed to secure the periter.
Jiraiya bit his thumb. His hands began moving through the signs.
"Summoning Jutsu --!"
A burst of white smoke exploded in front of him, billowing outward across a wide section of the wall.
Jiraiya waited, fully confident, fully expecting the enormous, familiar, ti-tested shape of Gamabunta to resolve out of the cloud.
The smoke cleared.
Pitter-patter. Pitter-patter.
A small red thing was hopping around on the wall in front of him.
Jiraiya looked down.
It was a tadpole.
Red, round, trailing a long tail behind it, bouncing cheerfully back and forth across the stone, making small pattering sounds with every hop.
"What -- what is this -- what is happening --?!"
Jiraiya stared at it with his mouth open and his eyes wide, completely at a loss.
"Jiraiya!" Hiruzen shouted from beside him. "Stop playing around! Summon the toads from Mount Myoboku properly!"
Jiraiya turned to him with an expression of complete wounded innocence. "I wasn't playing around! I genuinely was trying to summon Gamabunta!"
Hiruzen looked at him. Looked at the massive dark circles under his eyes. Looked at the haggard, about-to-collapse-at-any-mont state of the man in front of him.
And suddenly understood.
"You..."
There was sothing close to disbelief in Hiruzen's voice. "Even you -- even soone with your level of ability -- you've actually been worn down to this point by Hokage paperwork."
Too exhausted to fight properly. Too depleted to use summoning jutsu correctly.
Jiraiya's face went red. "What?! Don't underestimate !"
He was not going to let that stand.
He imdiately ford a sign. The most basic clone technique -- a simple three-body split, academy level.
Another burst of white smoke.
The smoke cleared, and there was indeed an additional figure on the wall now.
"...hff... hff..."
Steady breathing. The clone was flat on the ground, eyes shut, chest rising and falling in the slow rhythm of deep sleep. Completely at peace.
Jiraiya. "..."
A ninja's clone reflects that ninja's will. And his clone, given form, had imdiately chosen to sleep.
He could no longer reliably use the most fundantal technique in the book.
Jiraiya was quiet for several seconds. Then he turned to Hiruzen and said, in a tone that had stopped pretending to be anything other than what it was.
"Old man. I really don't want to be Hokage anymore."
"Is this the ti to be saying that?!" Hiruzen barked at him with the particular fury of a man who has already retired and should not be dealing with this.
He had not anticipated, after all his years of stepping back, that he would find himself in a situation requiring him to personally step back onto a battlefield at nearly eighty years old.
He drew in a sharp breath and began forming signs to summon Enma.
The next instant --
A flash of gold lit the wall beside him.
When the light of Flying Thunder God faded, a figure was standing solidly on the battlents.
Golden hair. Blue eyes. Orange tracksuit.
"Sorry. I'm a little late."
Naruto's voice was calm and steady. Getting dressed had taken slightly longer than expected, on account of Satsuki -- but he had made it before the fighting started.
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