Phiew~! Pung!!!
A piercing whistle sliced through the trees as a flare shot directly into the sky, exploding into a dense, bleeding cloud of crimson smoke.
"There is no escape, Tobirama!" Kinkaku declared, stepping out from the brush.
Within seconds, the Gold and Silver Brothers, flanked by a lethal escort of eighteen elite Kinkaku Butai Jonin, formed an ironclad perimeter around the Second Hokage. Tobirama's crimson eyes darted smoothly across the landscape, instantly calculating the variables.
"Kinkaku... Ginkaku..." Tobirama spoke, his voice carrying a chilling calm. "Why have you chosen to assassinate your own Raikage? Are you defecting from Kumogakure? If you are operating as rogues, perhaps you would care to negotiate asylum with Konoha?"
"HAHAHA! We are going to be hailed as the immortal heroes of the Cloud! The official story is perfect: Senju Tobirama, the Second Hokage, launched a craven, underhanded ambush against the Second Raikage during the summit, executing him. The Hokage attempted to flee, but the KinGin Kyodai hunted you down, avenging our pitiful leader's death! How does that sound for a legacy?"
"…Do you truly believe your village council and the rest of your shinobi are idiots?" Tobirama countered as his lip curled in disdain. "Do you honestly believe you can mask a conspiracy of this scale unknown to the world?"
"Hmph! It appears you are desperately attempting to buy time, Tobirama," Kinkaku sneered, completely unfazed. "Do you think your stalling tactics mean anything? You are a master sensor; you should have already realized that your scattered decoy teams and Anbu escorts are being systematically dismantled. It won't be long before the rest of our brothers to tracks down and butchers those fleeing brats."
Tobirama narrowed his eyes, pinning Kinkaku with a sharp, intimidating glare.
"I have absolute confidence that there is not a single Kumo-nin alive capable of subduing the six of them—save for the two of you. So long as hold you both down, Konoha's future is secured. Not to mention... do you truly possess the martial capacity to defeat me?"
"Haha! Useless false bravados!" Ginkaku barked. "Suna's chakra-dispersion poison isn't something you can simply purge or cure in a single day—especially not during war time like this. No matter what desperate schemes you formulate, nothing will alter your fate today... nor the fate of the remaining Konoha army!"
Tobirama's breath hitched. 'Suna's chakra-dispersion poison!'
His mind instantly scanned through his memories.
'How did they acquire such poison?! Those specialized recipes are heavily restricted and checked by Suna's elite Kuchimoso clan... The most recent transaction of rare goods was conducted between Suna and... !!!'
Tobirama's eyes widened in sudden, horrifying realization.
"MU!"
"Enough! What use is there in empty talk!" A jonin roared, refusing to let the Hokage piece together the Tsuchikage's global web. "Kinkaku-sama, don't let him scheme further. This man—"
Before he could finish his sentence, his vision shifted. 'Isn't that me...? Where is the head tho.... Oh'
"Well, you served your purpose well enough, mole."
Ginkaku flicked the blood off of Shichiseiken sword, as the Jonin's head rolled over. After a moment of rigidness, the body collapsed.
Kinkaku smirked and surged past Ginkaku, violently snapping the Kōkinjō canopy rope outward like a high-velocity whip.
'The Treasured Tools of the Sage… there isn't much information known about it…' Tobirama thought while executing a rapid backward leap. 'Only that Kokinjo, Shichiseiken, and Benihisago works in conjunction to seal the target's sould'
Mid-air, Tobirama's hands blurred through a lightning-fast sequence, hurling a volley of specialized kunai and shuriken directly into Kinkaku's path.
Shuriken Kage Bunshin no Jutsu 手裏剣影分身の術(Shuriken shadow clone technique)
"!"
Watching the single volley instantly multiply into a dense, sky-blotting wall of shurikens, Kinkaku planted his heels and violently swiped his palm fan through the air.
Bashōsen: SenPu 芭蕉扇・扇風 (Bashosen: fan wind)
A colossal, high-density tempest of Wind Chakra erupted from the fan, generating a kinetic shockwave that easily deflected the entire iron barrage into the surrounding timber.
Exploiting the distraction, Ginkaku executed a Shunshin, materializing directly at Tobirama's flank as he swung the massive Shichiseiken downward in a lethal arc. Yet, just a fraction of a millimeter before the star-engraved steel could cut through Tobirama's fur collar, the Hokage's form vanished completely from Ginkaku's field of vision.
"!"
"Watch out, Ginkaku! It's the Hiraishin!" Kinkaku screamed.
Hiraishingiri 飛雷神斬り (Flying Thunder God Slash)
Grasping a custom-marked kunai, Tobirama materialized at the exact coordinate of a scattered blade resting right behind Ginkaku's blind spot. Moving at the blinding speed of space-time, he delivered a precision slash as he flashed past the giant's frame.
Cling!
'! He blocked it?!' Tobirama's mind reeled in shock. 'Even Uchiha Izuna succumbed to the velocity of this technique...'
Executing a tactical backflip, Tobirama created immediate distance between himself and the brothers. His brows furrowed as he re-evaluated the targets.
'No, the strike connected, but his physique is unnaturally durable... a standard kunai is insufficient.'
Ginkaku was bleeding from a shallow, horizontal laceration extending from his left arm across his chest armor. At the final microsecond, his animal like instincts had allowed him to tilt the Shichiseiken, barely parrying the lethal depth of Tobirama's blade.
"As expected of the fastest ninja alive," Ginkaku growled, a dark chuckle rattling in his throat. "But we were thoroughly briefed on the spatial mechanics of your Hiraishin!"
Tobirama's eyes narrowed to dangerous slits as he watched the fresh wound on Ginkaku's chest begin to sizzle. A bubbling, boiling coat of rust-red chakra enveloped the giant, knitting the severed flesh back together seamlessly within seconds.
'…This malevolent aura... it mirrors the signature of a Tailed Beast,'
Tobirama analyzed grimly. He glanced toward the southwest, tracking his disciples' fading signatures.
'Hiruzen and the others still require at least ten... no, five more minutes to completely clear the Kumo tracking grid.'
Tobirama rapidly simulated every tactical permutations in his mind.
'But to conserve enough chakra to execute a final, long Hiraishin while manually suppressing Suna's poison... and simultaneously fighting off Kinkaku and Ginkaku...'
Relaxing his posture, he firmly gripped his kunai, completely discarding his self-preservation to embrace total martyrdom. A fierce, suffocating spiritual pressure erupted from the Second Hokage's body. The sheer weight of his chakra cracked the earth beneath his boots.
"If you truly believe you can easily dismantle the head of the Senju clan, you are gravely mistaken!" Tobirama thundered.
Kinkaku stood fixed beside his brother, his expression turning solemn as he measured the sheer, unyielding majesty of Tobirama's final stand.
Realizing that a standard battle of attrition would only waste precious time, he shrugged his left arm, letting the Kōkinjō unravel from his forearm to tightly bind the Benihisago gourd across his back. With a rapid, unified hand seal, both the Seven Star Sword and the Banana Palm Fan vanished in a sharp puff of white smoke.
"Kinkaku?" Ginkaku tilted his head.
"Ginkaku... we end this right now," Kinkaku commanded. His voice no longer carried the usual carefreeness and dropped into a guttural, terrifying growl. "Tobirama is intentionally stalling to ensure that Konoha escapes our perimeter. Let us unveil it."
"You mean… 'that' ?"
Ginkaku's eyes widened in brief shock before his features contorted into a mischievous, demonic grin, his raw bloodlust boiling over.
"It is highly probable that Tobirama can only sustain his network for another three to five minutes under that poison. Let us go completely all out!"
"OOUUUUUU!!!"
With a cataclysmic roar, the rust-red chakra coats surrounding the two brothers exploded outward, expanding into massive, boiling geysers of pure malice. The density of the energy was so immense that their human silhouettes were completely obliterated from view. When the smoke cleared, two towering, skinless chakra beasts stood in the clearing—six distinct, physical tails of bubbling, demonic energy whipping violently through the shattered trees.
Tobirama's pupils dilated, a rare shock fracturing his stoic expression as the sheer, suffocating gravity of the transformation crushed the surrounding atmosphere. Through his senses, he confirmed the origin of the terrifying chakra.
"IMPOSSIBLE!" Tobirama gasped as his voice echoed in the shadowed forest. "You... you are not even the Nine-Tails' Jinchūriki!"
"Heh~! You are smart. Figure it out yourself! Tobirama!" Kinkaku roared.
The demonic beast unleashed a colossal, repulsive shockwave that completely vaporized the forest, flattening everything within a one-kilometer radius into a wasteland of splinters and dust. The remaining Kinkaku Butai members had long since fled to the safety of the perimeter, well aware that staying near the twins in this state was a death sentence.
Before the debris could even settle, Kinkaku and Ginkaku targeted Tobirama's flanks, executing a lightning-fast pincer movement. Their fists and tails—thick with bubbling, corrosive Nine-Tails chakra—smashed down with tremendous force onto the Hokage's coordinates.
Tobirama stood rigid, seemingly frozen in a mixture of shock as the kinetic impact crushed the earth beneath him. Yet, the triumphant smiles on the twins' faces instantly curdled into sneers of pure displeasure. The physical body beneath their fists dissolved into a violent explosion of water.
Kinkaku furiously whipped his remaining tails, creating secondary shockwaves to forcibly clear the lingering mist from his vision.
"…A Mizu Bunshin combined with the Hiraishin… what an infuriatingly elusive jutsu!"
Though the thick, roiling red chakra cloaks masked their faces, the contours of their eyes and jaws slumped into deep expressions of frustration.
"Heh! I refuse to believe you can continuously sustain your chakra flow under that poison!" Ginkaku bellowed through the ash. "Just admit your defeat!"
Tobirama revealed himself atop a shattered stump. His breath was ragged but his spirit remained unyielding.
"…Never underestimate the Hokage of Konoha! Do not dare celebrate your victory so soon!"
"Hmph! Kinkaku, let us end this charade! You compress the left flank, I take the right!"
"Heh, you don't need to tell me twice!"
The twins charged once more, tearing through the landscape. Tobirama's fingers blurred through a rapid sequence of hand seals before he clasped his palms together. Drawing his head back, he exhaled violently, spraying a razor-sharp, hyper-pressurized stream of water that he swept across the horizon like a fluid whip.
Suiton: Suidanha 水遁・水断波 (Water release : Water severing Wave)
Instead of breaking their momentum or twisting away to evade the lethal line of the jutsu, Kinkaku and Ginkaku crossed their tails before their bodies, acting as chakra shield as they barreled straight through the attack. The high pressured water blade successfully severed five of their lashing tails, but the density of the Nine-Tails' cloaks absorbed the kinetic energy, sparing the brothers from any fatal injuries.
'Tssk! Is this the true power of Tailed Beast and Jinchuriki?' Tobirama analyzed frantically, as his mind flashed to his sister-in-law. 'Can Mito-nee also do this?"
Refusing to test the physical durability of the Biju Chakra coats with taijutsu, Tobirama triggered his hiraishin, flashing away toward the trajectory of a secondary kunai to escape the pincer.
However, the battlefield variables had shifted against him.
"!!! Arrrgghhhhhhhh!!!"
The moment Tobirama materialized at the new spatial anchor, Kinkaku's sole remaining, unsevered tail swept through the coordinates in predictive blind-swing. Tobirama threw his forearms up out of desperation to guard his vitals, but the sheer, monstrous mass of the impact overrode his defenses.
The Second Hokage was launched through the air like a cannonball, his body violently skipping across the shattered earth like a stone thrown across the surface of a lake.
"HAHAHAHAHA! Your over confidence with Hiraishin is your weakness!!"
Kinkaku laughed hysterically, clutching his newly severed left arm as the red chakra began to slowly knit the limb back into place.
"We have already scanned and mapped the exact coordinates of every single kunai and shuriken you scattered across this area!"
Tobirama slowly forced his eyes open, his vision fractured into a muddy, vibrating blur. A wave of catastrophic kinetic shock and agonizing pain radiated through every nerve ending in his body.
'Ugh... my left leg… the bone is completely shattered. Both arms… no, right arm is still marginally operational.'
Cough! cough!
A heavy torrent of crimson spilled from his mouth and nose, splattering his remaining armor plate as he forced his lungs to breathe in a slow rhythm to calm his failing nervous system.'
'At least nine or ten broken ribs... and a bone fragment punctured through my lung….'
With an unyielding display of sheer, terrifying willpower, Tobirama slowly dragged his broken frame out from the rubble. He forced his remaining clean chakra to condense around his shattered limbs in a flickering, brilliant blue chakra, physically binding the broken bones and torn musculature together like an internal splint just to force his body to move. The entire left side of his navy-blue Senju battle plating was completely obliterated, his flesh painted in a mosaic of deep lacerations, burns, and bubbling blood.
"Hoh~! You actually survived that strike?"
Kinkaku noted with a genuine flash of awe, though his confidence remained entirely unwavering as he allowed his jonin subordinates to reattach his severed arm.
"Survived? HAHAHAHA."Ginkaku mocked, stepping up beside him. "Look at him, Kinkaku. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to label him a walking corpse at this point!"
The dark, boiling red chakra cloaks began to recede, flowing back into their bodies as Kinkaku and Ginkaku slowly reverted to their human states. Their skin was heavily blistered, deeply bruised, and blackened by severe chakra burns, but their physique allowed them to recover at a visible pace.
Ginkaku winced slightly as he evaluated the damages covering his body. "It appears that directly forcing our networks into the six-tailed state extracts a far greater toll on our body than gradually scaling the biju chakra output..."
"Well... we rarely deploy this form in the first place, brother," Kinkaku muttered as he rolled his re-attached shoulder. "It is entirely expected that we would encounter physical side effects we hadn't mapped out."
"??!"
"!!!"
To the shock of the Gold and Silver Brothers, the mangled, dying figure of the Second Hokage began to shift as Tobirama squeezed the final droplets of his remaining chakra from his cells. Ginkaku instinctively sprang forward, his bloodlust flaring in pure panic.
"HOW PERSISTENT!"
"JUST DIE ALREADY!"
But Senju Tobirama, even with his vision failing and his pupils completely unfocused, fixed the brothers with one final, devastatingly arrogant smirk.
A sharp flash of light illuminated the ruined clearing, and the Second Hokage vanished from the Land of Hot Springs forever.
"UUUWWWWAAAAAAAAHHH!!!!!!!"
"TOBIRAAAMAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!"
A twin roar overflowing with fury and frustration echoed from the throats of the brothers, shaking the empty clearing. They had won the war, but their ultimate prize—the Hokage's body—had slipped cleanly through their fingers.
***
Tobirama calculated that his death was a certainty. There was no contemporary Medical Ninjutsu in existence that could reverse his failing body. He could, at most, prolong his heart's rhythm for a few agonizing minutes, but his expiration was set.
The true, horrifying genius of Suna's chakra-dispersion poison was finally showing its fangs. While widely feared across the nations for its capacity to disrupt and disperse a ninja's active chakra flow, its most catastrophic lethal mechanism was a passive trap triggered only when the venom infiltrated the heart itself.
Upon initial ingestion, the poison does not immediately attack the organs; instead, it behaves like a passive parasite, latching directly onto the nearest dense chakra reservoir within the stomach. The moment the host attempts to mold that energy and push it through their chakra pathway system, the chemical components of the venom activate. It systematically breaks the molded chakra down into its base components—spiritual energy and physical energy—and feeds upon those raw energies to rapidly multiply.
Because this initial proliferation is highly silent and gradual, the vast majority of its victims remain entirely oblivious to the infection until the toxic load multiplies to a point where they notice a significant, permanent drain on their chakra capacity. By that stage, the infection has fully saturated the entire chakra pathway system, riding the internal currents until it reaches the center of the human network: the heart.
The heart is the ultimate nexus of a shinobi's anatomy—the largest and most significant chamber of the eight in human body where the circulatory system (the blood: physical energy), the nervous system (the mind: spiritual energy), and the chakra pathway network physically converge. Once the venom penetrates this chamber, the boundary of isolation is permanently shattered. Before this critical failure, an individual who possessed an immense chakra pool and a peerless, microscopic level of chakra control—like Tobirama—could successfully construct internal barriers to contain the infection within a localized zone of their network.
But the moment the kinetic trauma from Kinkaku's tail strike knocked Tobirama unconscious for a brief, critical fraction of a second, his internal chakra barriers collapsed.
The unleashed poison flooded his heart instantly, using the blood vessels of the circulatory system to hijack his physical energy, and the neural pathways of the nervous system to consume his spiritual energy. With its primary food sources fully tapped at the core, the venom began rapidly draining the literal life force from his cells, systematically shutting down his organs one by one.
Sensing that his motor functions were on the verge of permanent paralysis, Tobirama channeled the last spark of his remaining consciousness into a final, definitive Hiraishin.
His chakra already confirmed that Hiruzen, Danzō, and the rest of the guard squad had successfully crossed the threshold of the Konoha camp; there was no longer any necessity to stay and buy them time. Furthermore, his logic dictated that his physical body could never, under any circumstances, be left behind for foreign nations to harvest. His brain, his cells, and his blood contained an infinite repository of classified Konoha lore, forbidden formulas, and the genetic secrets of the Senju clan—knowledges that could never be exposed to the enemies of Konoha.
With a final flash of space-time, the Second Hokage returned home to his camp to lay down his mantle, leaving the new generation to face the dawn of a new era.