The world had narrowed to the cramped, blood-soaked alley between two earthen bulwarks. For Jiro, a seasoned Iwa chunin with rock-hard nerves and a face like weathered granite, it was just another pocket of resistance to be crushed. The air was thick with the shhh-ting of shuriken deflecting off stone and the guttural grunts of close-quarters combat.
His squad, "The Stone Fists," had just overwhelmed a Konoha defensive position, their Earth Style: Earth-Style Wall technique providing perfect cover for their advance.
The Konoha shinobi were falling back, their formations breaking. Victory, Jiro thought with a savage grin, was a foregone conclusion. They just had to keep applying pressure.
Then, the world began to unravel in ways his combat manuals had never described.
To his left, his comrade, a burly man named Baku who could shatter boulders with his fists, simply… collapsed. There was no kunai flash, no war cry, no tell-tale hand seals.
One moment, he was poised to strike a retreating Konoha genin, the next he was on the ground, his head lolling at an impossible angle. A fine mist of blood hung in the air where his throat used to be.
'What in the—?' Jiro's mind stuttered, his confidence cracking.
'A genjutsu? A sensory disruption?'
Before the thought could fully form, the shinobi to his right, a woman named Fumi known for her razor-wire traps, let out a choked gasp. A kunai, seemingly born from the shadows themselves, was suddenly buried to the hilt in her sternum.
Her eyes widened in shock, not at the pain, but at the impossibility of the attack. There had been no one there. Jiro's own eyes, darting frantically, saw nothing but the chaotic but clearly visible battlefield. No blur of movement, no flicker of a Body Flicker. It was as if an invisible scythe was moving through their ranks.
Konoha was known for its strange and esoteric jutsu. The Nara shadows, the Yamanaka mind-control, the Akimichi size manipulation. Was this some new horror? An invisible assassin? A wind-style technique so refined it could wield a blade without a wielder?
Fear, cold and unfamiliar, began to coil in Jiro's gut. He tightened his grip on his kodachi, his knuckles white.
"Form up! Back to back!" he roared, his voice betraying a tremor he desperately tried to suppress.
His remaining two squad members scrambled to obey, their eyes wide with the same primal terror. They stood in a tight triangle, weapons facing outward, scanning the rubble, the sky, the very air around them.
The sounds of battle from the rest of the frontline seemed to be changing. The confident war cries of Iwa were being punctuated by more and more shouts of alarm, confusion, and sudden, sharp cries of pain that were cut off with unsettling finality.
Jiro's eyes locked on a flicker of movement about twenty meters away—a Konoha shinobi with a headband askew, desperately parrying an Iwa attacker. Then, between one blink and the next, a flash of brilliant, sun-yellow hair appeared between them. It was there for less than a heartbeat, a stark, impossible contrast to the mud and blood of the battlefield.
In that same infinitesimal moment, the Iwa attacker was lifted off his feet, a spiralling sphere of churning blue energy—a technique Jiro had never seen—slammed into his chest with a sound like a thousand sheets of paper being torn at once.
"FWOOM-SHHRRRP!"
The man's flak jacket and the flesh beneath it vaporised into a fine red mist. He was dead before the force of the impact hurled his broken body backwards into a collapsed earth wall with a sickening crunch.
The yellow flash was gone.
Jiro's brain, trained for analysis, tried and failed to process the data. 'Speed? No… this is… this is teleportation.'
The thought was more terrifying than any invisible foe. An enemy you couldn't see was bad. An enemy who could be anywhere, everywhere, in the space of a single breath, was a natural disaster.
He never got to finish the thought.
A powerful, concussive force struck him from behind. It wasn't a punch; it was like being hit by a falling menhir. The air exploded from his lungs, and he felt several ribs snap.
The world became a dizzying whirl of sky and ground as he was hurled through the air. As he tumbled, his spinning vision caught it again—that same flash of yellow, standing calmly where he had just been standing, a single kunai held loosely in one hand.
'So fast…' was his last, coherent thought.
He never saw the kunai that followed his trajectory. It moved with a physics-defying precision, a silver streak that intersected his path. The cold, sharp kiss of steel against his throat was a surprisingly clean sensation.
Then, nothing.
=====
From the relative safety of a shattered barricade, a group of battered Konoha shinobi watched the same sequence with a mixture of awe and disbelief. They had been moments from being overrun, their chakra reserves nearly depleted, their spirits flagging. Then, the tide had turned in the space of ten heartbeats.
"Did you see that?" whispered a young kunoichi with a bandaged arm, her voice trembling not with fear, but with exhilaration.
"He just… appeared."
"He took out an entire squad," murmured a jounin beside her, his single visible eye wide. "I didn't even see him move. One moment they were there, the next…" He gestured at the crumpled forms. 'He's not just fast. He redefines fast. It's like watching lightning strike in multiple places at once.'
They watched as the yellow blur—Minato Namikaze, though most only knew him by his title—became a vortex of destruction on the battlefield. He didn't use grand, elemental techniques that lit up the sky. His tools were deceptively simple: kunai and that strange, spiralling ball of chakra.
A squad of Iwa shinobi erected a layered earth wall, confident in their defense. A trio of kunai, each marked with strange seals, landed in a triangular pattern around them.
There was a golden flash, and Minato was among them, inside their perfect defense. The Rasengan bloomed in his palm, and the central shinobi was obliterated. Before the other two could even turn, his kunai flashed, a silver blur that moved with impossible economy.
"Swish. Thwip."
Two precise strikes to the neck, and they fell, their earth wall crumbling now that its creators were dead.
He moved through the enemy ranks like a reaper through wheat. He would throw a marked kunai high into the air over a cluster of enemies. As their eyes instinctively tracked it, he would vanish from his current position and materialize in mid-air, above them. He'd drop like a hawk, a Rasengan forming in his hand, and land amidst them, the resulting explosion of force sending bodies flying.
"BOOM."
Then, another flash, and he was gone before the dust had even settled, already delivering a killing blow with a kunai to an enemy commander who thought he was safely directing the battle from the rear.
It was a brutal, beautiful, and terrifying ballet. The Rasengan was his hammer, a tool of utter, concussive annihilation that left no doubt about its lethality.
The kunai were his scalpels, extensions of his will that found gaps in armour, deflected incoming attacks with preternatural timing, and always, always struck a fatal point.
The enemy's numerical advantage became their greatest weakness; their crowded formations were perfect killing fields for a man who could be anywhere at once.
Suddenly, the voice of Yamanaka Aito echoed in the mind of every Konoha shinobi.
{All units, reinforcements have arrived! I repeat, the Yellow Flash is on the field! Regroup and support him! Launch a counter-offensive!}
A surge of renewed vigour shot through the weary defenders. A rallying cry went up. They tightened their grips on their weapons, ready to surge forward and fight alongside their legendary saviour.
But then, Minato himself stopped. He landed lightly on a promontory of rock overlooking the main thrust of the enemy advance, his bright yellow hair a beacon in the gloom. He raised a hand, not in a seal, but in a gesture of halt. His voice, calm and clear, cut through the din of battle, carrying an authority that brooked no argument.
"Thank you," he said, his gaze sweeping over the thousands of enemy shinobi still pouring into the valley. "But please, hold your positions. Protect the wounded and secure the perimeter."
He turned his back to the Konoha forces, facing the endless sea of Iwa shinobi alone. The spiralling pattern on his special kunai seemed to glow with a faint, deadly light.
"I will handle the rest."
=====
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