With sage mode, I was able to level up my kekkei tota to a new height. I was on the verge of calling it Plasma Release, but thought better of it. This highly destructive chakra acted entirely like pure, fluid energy. Its power was so far off the charts, I almost destroyed a huge part of my plant dimension when I created that jutsu I had just demonstrated because I had stupidly used almost all of my chakra when my clone with a mere smidgen of my chakra had simply created a melon-sized sun.
Back at the beach, I was satisfied with the amount of chakra I carefully rationed for the jutsu.
As I silently walked to stand beside Mei whose mouth was wide open in disbelief, I watched the total annihilation I had just unleashed.
Vast masses of water were completely gone. The sand at the bottom of the ocean that was visible was entirely turned into molten glass. All aquatic flora and fauna was entirely wiped out, even a good distance still inside the water that was close to or beyond boiling point for as far as we could see.
A second sun hung in the air above the molten ocean floor. Small arches of energy were forming on its surface every so often and drifting out before fizzling into the surrounding air - they carried with it a heat that felt wild and chaotic.
"What have you done?" Mei asked after I once more clapped my hand to end the technique and made the second sun disappear.
Steam was rising from the waters in the far distance but even without the small artificial celestial body, it didn't start refilling the empty basin I had created with my jutsu.
Sweat was forming on Mei's forehead before I answered, "I have officially surpassed Senju Hashirama in sheer power. I mean, I had done that even before, in my own humble opinion. But now I can demonstrate it to all of you unbelievers."
That clone that had finished creating the sage art while I was in Konoha had been a genius. Which meant I was a genius.
"Why?" Mei simply asked, her eyes unfocused and shaking. "Why show me this?"
"When you promised to marry me, do you remember what I told you?"
She nodded but didn't speak up.
"I am vastly more powerful than you could imagine and I have no need for your pity," I repeated when she stayed quiet. "I thought we came to an understanding, but clearly you were unconvinced. I felt your reluctance in my office. You thought you were still sacrificing something by marrying me when I came back from Konoha having achieved everything you tasked me to do."
Mei's eyes still didn't leave the destruction I had just unleashed, so I walked over to stand behind her and whispered enticingly, "You and the other villages can play your little games, I won't stand in your way. But, with me here, as your husband, do you still have anything to fear for Kiri? Be bold, be aggressive. Do whatever you want. Nothing can stand in your way."
I followed her line of sight and inwardly added, '… if I'm in the mood, of course.'
"What I want you to take away from this demonstration is the following: if Konoha comes to Kiri to demand an answer for my 'act of war' as I made contact with their pint-sized nine-tails jinchūriki. If Iwa figures out I crippled both of their bijū vessels. Just imagine me using that jutsu just now while standing outside of their village gates."
—————
One whole year later, I walked the deserts in the Land of Wind. But I wasn't alone.
"I want you to stay out of it," Pakura ordered somberly.
I only shrugged and rhetorically suggested, "Am I not already disguised?"
She studied me for a short moment. I looked just like a standard-issue shinobi with black hair and dark brown eyes you could find anywhere instead of my usual handsome self.
"Will you really aid Suna with your water creation pills if I take over?"
My experimentation had recently allowed me to create a pill by total accident that would explode into a pool of cool, drinkable water. I had wanted to boost someone's water nature transformation talent but got that pill first. It could drastically change Suna's fate if I gave Pakura a sufficient amount of these pills.
"I rarely take back my promises," I countered with a small frown. "Just keep yours and give me Rasa's corpse."
Pakura only scoffed softly but kept quiet.
A good ten minutes later, two Suna-nin popped out of the sand. I had felt these sentries half an hour ago. But then again, my abilities were absolutely busted.
"Identify yourself," one of these shinobi with the Sunagakure headband ordered.
"I am Pakura of the Scorch Style. I ask you to bring your Kazekage to me to settle an old grudge," the kunoichi next to me declared with a lot of venom dripping in her voice. Rasa must have done an incredible job of brainwashing them if those two sentries didn't immediately identify one of Suna's most prolific 'heroes' in the recent decade.
But then again, Pakura was supposed to be dead.
Both Suna nin looked at each other before one gave a soft nod and sped off. Pakura's name still held some weight, it seemed.
Half an hour in the glaring sun later, it wasn't Rasa, the Fourth Kazekage who met us.
It was Suna's jōnin commander, Pakura's successor, who would keep his job for another decade according to my memories of this world.
Baki with half his face covered with a white cloth.
"It really is you, Pakura," the man commented with a deep frown.
The kunoichi sneered and pointed out the obvious as she held a ball of scorch kekkei genkai chakra.
"That leaves the question; since you are alive, where you have spent the last decade and why you betrayed Suna?" Baki solemnly questioned.
But that was obviously the wrong thing to say.
The unbearable heat in the glaring noon sun turned up to another level entirely.
"I betrayed Suna?" Pakura repeated through gritted teeth. "I betrayed my village?"
Her chakra, which had by now surpassed the three-tails in volume, drowned out everything and illusory scorch flames began filling the air all around us.
"Bring me Rasa so that the treacherous coward can give me an account before I start killing my way to him and rebuild a new Suna on the ashes of the old," Pakura growled out.
Despite all her preparations and all the time that she had spent coming to terms with the betrayal she suffered through, Pakura's emotions were still too strong.
Understandably so, from my point of view.
If it wasn't for all those kids she cared for in my service, she would have probably broken down years ago. Those brats were a balm for her soul.
Ten Suna ANBU suddenly encircled us, but Pakura merely clapped her hands together and used one of the jutsu she had created with Ryuzetsu once the two found each other. Her scorch flame chakra in the air assisted her as she used Scorch Release: Ghost Conflagration and all those ANBU dropped to the floor, screaming their lungs out.
A genjutsu where the victim would think they were burning alive. Truly devious and inhumane. I liked it quite a lot.
Baki was caught in the genjutsu as well, but he merely fell to one knee and bit his lip with weird, struggling moans of pain escaping his lips. As his hand fell forward to steady himself, I could see that half of his face hidden behind the cloth showed deep burn scars, so that genjutsu probably brought back some serious trauma for the elite Suna jōnin.
Pakura released the genjutsu after walking over to Baki and taking him by the throat.
"Bring me Rasa or I will make good on my word," she spat and kicked Baki in the chest.
The man swallowed deeply before giving Pakura a last look and running off.
Before Rasa managed to arrive, two council members of Suna showed up first yet again.
The widow of the Second Kazekage, Chiyo, and her brother Ebizo, who once served as the leader of the ANBU under both the First and Second Kazekage. Or so Pakura had told me over the years.
"Pakura, you live," Chiyo stated as she gave the unconscious ANBU circling us a small look. She unhurriedly walked over to one of them and injected her chakra into one of these fallen men. The elder was an accomplished medi nin.
"Where have you been?" Ebizo asked as he watched his sister. "It's good that you are back. Suna is in dire need of someone of your strength."
Either these two were very shrewd or they held the illusion that Pakura remained the same as she was before the betrayal at the hands of her village.
Pakura kept quiet for a while before asking, "Did you know?"
To my surprise, Chiyo wasn't at all condescending as she shook her head and sorrowfully looked at Pakura. Without insulting Pakura's intelligence or belittling her suffering, she explained, "We aren't idiots. We know that Rasa sold out your location and made a deal. But this deal with Kiri led to a ceasefire for your sacrifice. I'm sorry for what you went through, but the ceasefire was important. We could not continue a war on three fronts. And other than Rasa, nobody had the strength to become the next kage. Confronting Rasa for his hand in your downfall would have only weakened us further."
Ebizo looked at his sister with a calculating frown before shaking his head and sighing.
"Your deaths will be merciful," Pakura declared with flared nostrils watching the act of the two elders. "But you will die regardless."
"What gives you such confidence, lass?" Ebizo asked with a lifted brow.
By the changes in their posture, it was clear that both aged ninja got battle ready.
Chiyo was already grasping a scroll in her sleeves that contained all her puppets and Ebizo straightened his spine as he loosened some bandages on the hands he had clasped behind his back.
Pakura's smile turned mocking. She had clearly seen their preparations but paid them no mind.
"You want to die a warrior's death? So be it. At least you won't tarnish your image in the minds of the villagers," Pakura declared and disappeared in the form of a scorch flame that sped in front of Ebizo in the blink of an eye.
Pakura reappeared and her hand clad in scorch chakra had already pierced Ebizo's chest. The kunoichi disappeared again and two puppets with venomous weapons stood in her place a moment later.
"Ebizo!" Chiyo cried out before her head snapped in the direction of Pakura who looked at the elder angrily.
"You think I would believe it was just Rasa who plotted my death? Everyone who knew of my whereabouts that fateful day will die," Pakura spat disdainfully. "I didn't spend ten years plotting my revenge just to stop at one head. You had years to make this right. And the first thing I hear when I come back to this village is someone accusing me of being a traitor?"
Pakura's words were becoming more and more furious, but at least she kept up her vigilance.
Before Chiyo could retort, glittering sand crept up behind Pakura and pierced her thighs to keep her bound. Yet, instead of blood spurting out of her legs, the kunoichi turned into a pile of sand and fell to the floor.
She had exchanged places with a sand clone.
Further away from us, a sandstorm started raging and I could see and feel the real Pakura heading into it with wild abandon, leaving a raging and mournful Chiyo behind.
Explosions filled the sandstorm and blew it apart, but it quickly gathered again and grew in intensity. Treacherous snakes of sand formed, lunged forward at tricky angles before dispersing back into the storm again. Golden, hot flames lit up the storm from the inside.
"Who are you to her?" Chiyo spoke as she knelt next to her brother but her attention was split between the fight inside the sandstorm, her very dead brother and me.
Her grief had turned into hatred, that much was obvious even without bothering my mind's eye.
"I advise you to wait for your death at Pakura's hands. I promised her I wouldn't interfere, but I won't just stand here and endure an attempt on my life," I replied with a friendly smile. A puppet under her control was buried in the sand between the two of us, slowly inching my way.
"So it was you who brought this calamity to Suna?" Chiyo asked after some time.
I gave the woman an impressed nod to compliment her quick thinking.
Eventually, the old woman sighed and looked at the kage-level fight behind her that was starting to move in our direction.
"Will Suna survive?" Chiyo inquired, as if resigned to her fate. Her hatred turned into acceptance.
She seemed to notice that Rasa was hopelessly and utterly outmatched. Pakura was playing with the Kazekage, who had already lost a leg and an eye inside the storm.
"She will allow your village to strive," I answered with a cheerful grin.
In answer, Chiyo began to write a scroll with several ink brushes at once thanks to her chakra threads. I could see she wasn't trying to set up some kind of sealing technique.
She seemed to be writing a will.
"Pakura deserved better. We all did," Chiyo solemnly declared once she was finished with one scroll, threw it to me, and began writing another. "Hand the scroll in your hands to Pakura's student, Maki. She is a smart girl and will know what to say to her sensei to get her to stop the rampage."
She threw me another scroll in no time and explained, "This one is for Pakura once Maki managed to ease her hatred. It contains the location of certain village secrets. The text will only make sense to a loyal Suna shinobi."
I ignored the implied threat or taunt that I shouldn't peek at the scroll and allowed Chiyo to write a last scroll. This one, the old crone kept and stored inside her sleeve.
She gave me a lifted brow and merely asked, "Was it you who saved her?"
"You could say that," I replied with a shrug.
"And did you also train her?"
I nodded with an inward grin. Pakura would have hated me confirming that if she was in the frame of mind to listen to our conversation.
Alas, she was enjoying herself humiliating Rasa, one of the weakest kage, to her heart's content.
From the large-scale of this battle, I at least found some respect for the Kazekage. He might be one of the weakest kage, but that was only true if his target was another shinobi at the kage level. His vast chakra and gold-sand magnet release kekkei genkai seemed uniquely suited to annihilate entire battalions of chunin and lesser ninja in an environment suited to him. In that regard, the man was in a league of his own. One still below mine and any other superkage-level ninja.
No regular army could hope to advance toward Sunagakure with this man playing defense.
"That's a lot of gold," I pointed out once I felt Rasa losing a second arm and failing to flee the battlefield. Pakura seemed to be almost done.
"Rasa's gold refinement as he spent weeks in the desert to find the quota required by the daimyo is what kept Suna from going bankrupt," Chiyo explained in a quiet voice.
Magnet release. A combination of wind and lightning chakra.
It seemed I really couldn't waste Rasa's corpse and finally make a pill that would grant me the ability. Additionally, I really wanted to increase my wind and lightning affinity in the first place because I finally wanted to create both the fire and wind kekkei genkai scorch release, as well as the fire and lightning kekkei genkai blaze release.
Who knew? Maybe I could also finally leverage my lava kekkei genkai into dust release with the addition of wind chakra.
"Last words?" Pakura suddenly asked as she sped out of the storm that slowly died down in a single jutsu to appear before the two of us. In one of her hands was Rasa's head, eyes wide with horror.
"Don't go after his children, they are Suna's future," Chiyo requested with a solemn look toward Rasa's detached skull.
"Tssk," Pakura spat and threw a kunai to pierce the elder's head. "As if I would go after children. They hadn't even been born when I was betrayed."
"Shall we?" I asked and watched Pakura kneel down next to Chiyo's body and get a bunch of scrolls hidden in the elder's sleeves. With a last look at both elders, she scorched their bodies.
"Did she say anything to you?" Pakura asked as she started walking in the direction of Sunagakure.
"Plenty. How come you never talked about your little student Maki?"
Pakura gave me a side-eye before saying, "I knew you were a lecher long before you first put your hands on me. I wanted to keep her safe from you."
"That just makes me want to find her even more now. Is she pretty?" I asked with a derisive scoff.
Pakura scowled deeply before relaxing her expression.
As I ignored her for the rest of the walk, I was throwing my water pills haphazardly in every direction. I wasn't a geologist or meteorologist who could know if what I was doing would have any adverse effects. Like the increased moisture content in the sands swiftly growing into increased moisture in the air that would create devastating storms.
But even then, I didn't care about that very much and continued throwing the pills.
At one point, I even used a giant earth release jutsu to create a sinkhole and threw in hundreds of those pills to create an underground reservoir of water just to change it up.
"You know? I seem to remember asking for Rasa's body. But all I'm seeing is a head. Did you bother collecting all the body parts you cut off during that fight just now?"
Pakura looked at me with another fed-up glare and threw a scroll at me.
"You'll get the head once I'm done in Suna."