Back In Konoha...
Nobody had expected the invaders to be this strong, this fast, or this many.
Hell, nobody expected the invaders to bypass the borders of the Land of Fire entirely and assault the walls of Konoha itself.
This was the first time since its founding that Konoha had come under an attack like this. Sure, there was the Nine-Tails attack around twelve years ago, but that wasn't a real invasion. It was more of a natural disaster than anything.
But enemy shinobi laying siege to the village's defenses, pouring through breaches in the walls and intentionally killing everything in their path—that was something else entirely.
A squad of genin had backed themselves against a collapsed storefront, watching just this: a group of enemy shinobi approaching out of nowhere, kunai shaking in their hands, watching three enemy chūnin close the distance with the kind of unhurried confidence that only came from knowing you'd already won.
Alarms were ringing all over the village. Fire and smoke were visible everywhere, and the screams of civilians hummed in their ears, elevating the already dreadful situation to psychological levels.
Even trained, genin were still genin. Most were kids, and those who weren't clearly weren't in the right line of work.
One of the genin had already dropped her weapon once and picked it back up with fingers that wouldn't stop trembling. Nobody said it out loud, but all three of them understood, in the way you understand things right before they happen, that this was probably how it ended for them.
The enemy didn't even seem to consider whether to kill or spare them. They simply charged with their weapons raised, ready to kill and move forward.
The Konoha genin could clearly see the forehead protectors of both Suna and Kiri. Two great villages had attacked the village simultaneously.
This was a disaster.
Just as the genin thought that this was it for them, something happened that none of them expected.
None of them saw it happen. One moment three chūnin were advancing with kunai raised, promising violence in the most casual way possible, and the next all three were on the ground, and there was a boy standing where they'd been a heartbeat ago—pink hair, red eyes, already turning away like the fight hadn't been worth a second thought.
"W-what—" one of the genin started, and got no answer. Instead, the boy stated without even looking at them.
"Get out of here. All genin will help evacuate the civilians. Avoid fighting as much as possible... move."
He shouted, and then he was already gone.
Vanished just like that...
Not far off, an academy teacher had thrown her own body between an enemy jōnin's falling blade and the two children she'd been trying to hide behind a fruit cart. She'd closed her eyes. She remembered closing her eyes, bracing for something that never came.
When she opened them, the blade wasn't falling anymore. The jōnin who'd swung it was face-down in the street, blood pooling beneath him.
She blinked, dazed at what had happened. Her eyes went to the boy standing next to the newly made corpse. It was a boy, a pink-haired boy. If he hadn't been wearing the Konoha forehead protector, she would have already begun pleading for the lives of the children she had so bravely thrown herself in front of to save, even at the cost of her own life.
"Get them out of here..." He pointed at the children, who equally looked at him in a daze, and before she knew it, he was gone.
The next second she knew, he was already three blocks away, moving faster than the eye could follow.
"Is he—" one of the children whispered.
"I don't know," she admitted, still shaking. However, for a long moment her eyes lingered in that direction.
"I'll be that cool one day," one of the children, a young boy, spoke out, finally jolting her out of her shock. Their situation kicked back into her mind, along with what the pink-haired boy had told her. Her hands shot out and grabbed the children by their arms, already dragging them to safety.
Elsewhere, a wounded chūnin bleeding out against a collapsed wall watched an enemy shinobi step toward him with the flat, professional indifference of someone finishing a job, and had just enough time to think that this was a stupid way to die, defending an evacuation route nobody would remember by name.
And for the most part, he agreed. It was really stupid to stay back defending the route. However, he couldn't help it. Even though most of the Konoha shinobi were currently only passively defending against the sudden invasion, while the majority of their workforce was working in the background to evacuate the civilians first, that route right now should have been filled with Konoha shinobi for him to try protecting it alone.
But he really couldn't help it.
His family had also gone there along with the other civilians.
He would be damned if he let even one of these bastards get past him and reach them as long as he was alive. Even knowing that the civilians themselves were guarded by stronger shinobi than a mere chūnin like him.
'Guess this is it then...' He smirked with no regrets, for at least he felt he'd die protecting his loved ones.
Just as the enemy was ready to end his life, all of a sudden he simply crumpled, his throat already opening around a wound the chūnin never saw delivered, and the boy responsible was gone before the body finished falling.
'What?'
All he saw was a blur.
A pink blur.
It kept happening like that all across the village. Enemies dropping mid-stride. Fights ending before either side had time to register a winner. A pink blur, faster than anything most of the younger shinobi had ever seen a person move, tearing through one skirmish after another and vanishing before anyone caught up enough to say thank you.
The older shinobi, however—the ones who'd fought in the last war, who remembered exactly what a battlefield looked like when it stopped making sense all at once—went pale the moment they understood what they were watching.
"That speed," one grizzled jōnin murmured, watching an entire enemy squad collapse in the space of a single breath none of them had seen coming. "Yondai-sama..."
Tears seemed to pool in his eyes, recalling the days when enemies feared even thinking about Konoha simply because one man existed in the village who could have ended entire armies by himself.
The Yellow Flash of the Leaf.
"B-but it's pink?" another finished, voice tight, eyes following a blur that had already vanished three streets over.
-x-
The invasion had never been contained to the stadium. The stadium was merely the flashiest place where it had begun, and by the time Sukuna's head had cooled enough for him to move again, the rest of Konoha was paying for it.
Using his Maximum Technique, which he was hardly accustomed to, had hammered his head so hard that he needed an impromptu five-minute break just to even think about moving again.
Mainly because this was the first time he had ever come close to experiencing technique burnout. It was completely new to him, to the point it affected him far more than it should have.
Recalling how Gojo and Ryomen Sukuna practically shrugged off technique burnout like it was child's play, he couldn't help but feel a growing respect for both of them.
Of course, they had experience, and a few more years than him for their minds to mature into adulthood, to the point they could bear a much heavier load.
Because it just so happened that a thirteen-year-old brain was not developed enough to handle as much strain as a fifteen-year-old's or a seventeen-year-old's, let alone fully grown men in their prime.
His first instinct had been to head straight back to the arena—that was where the Kage were, where the heaviest fighting had to be concentrated—but a moment's thought talked him out of it. Most of Konoha's strongest were already there. Hiruzen, Izumi, Kakashi, Guy, half the jōnin roster he could name. If anyone needed him urgently, it wasn't that pocket of the village.
He let his malice sensing stretch out across Konoha instead, filtering past the stadium entirely and settling instead on the dozens of smaller fires burning throughout the rest of the village—enemy shinobi cutting through evacuation routes, striking down chūnin trying to shepherd civilians toward shelter, exploiting exactly the chaos an invasion was designed to create. None of those fights had a Hiruzen or an Izumi standing in the middle of them. Most of them barely had anyone standing at all.
So, until his technique recovered from its borderline burnout state, to the point where going into a high-stakes battle would be more of a liability than a help, he decided to focus his attention on the rest of the village.
And Shrine wasn't the entirety of his arsenal. Just the most used and best-trained part of it.
Kamui opened first, a familiar tug at the edges of his vision, and Flying Thunder God did the rest.
He wasn't Minato—he'd never pretend otherwise—but between the Mangekyō's clarity and Kamui's ability to fold space just slightly in his favor, the gap between himself and the Fourth's legendary speed was a lot smaller than it should have been for someone his age.
Well, not raw speed, to be honest, but the movements itself. Kamui let him move however he wished after teleporting. He could just flail his hands around like a two-year-old trying to get his parents' attention after teleporting into the enemy's range with a sharp object in hand, and he'd still do more damage than most of Konoha's defensive units combined, especially considering that they were being heavily held back by defending the civilian population of the village.
A squad of Konoha genin, backs against a collapsed storefront, three enemy chūnin closing in with kunai already raised—
Gone.
He teleported near the enemies. Before they even knew it, he used a kunai to cut open most of their throats. When the reflexive retaliation came, he didn't back off, instead using Kamui to phase through them and keep killing.
Within a matter of heartbeats, the enemies were done for.
An academy teacher shielding two children with her own body, an enemy jōnin's blade already falling—
Gone.
The blade never landed. The jōnin hit the street instead, unconscious before he understood what had hit him. A single cut at the nape of the enemy, severing the entire bone structure. There was no possibility of survival.
A chūnin bleeding out against a wall, an enemy closing in for the kill—
Gone again.
Just one kunai, teleportation, a cheat like Kamui, and maximum effort.
Could it have been much quicker with Shrine?
Absolutely yes.
But would that have left behind a mess?
Absolutely, it would have.
Slitting someone's throat was still less visually disturbing compared to bodies littering the streets, most of them cut in half or into even smaller pieces.
It went on like that, block after block, an unbroken chain of Flying Thunder God markers connecting fights that had nothing to do with each other except the one constant thread running through all of them—Sukuna arriving a half-second before someone died, ending the threat, and vanishing again before anyone had time to thank him.
The younger shinobi caught in it had no framework for what they were seeing. To them it was just a pink blur, there and gone, leaving unconscious enemies scattered in its wake like something out of a story too fast to actually believe.
The older shinobi understood immediately, and it turned their stomachs in an entirely different way.
By the time Sukuna's Shrine had completely recovered to the point he was confident it could cut open the entirety of the village itself, he had another problem at hand.
He felt like he was about to throw up from how many teleportations he had experienced in the span of just a few minutes.
His Mangekyō burned—not damaged, RCT made sure of that—but the constant strain on his eyes was enough to leave them dry and itchy.
He needed more practice with them.
"How did Minato do it? I feel like shit."
xXx
A/N : Ah, I wished to give him his Minato moment for such a long time. And I confess, he is not on Minato's level in terms of using Flying Thunder God.
Remember this was him taking out only the fodders. Genin and Chunin. If Jonin then think about normal Jonin, not the elites like Guy and Kakashi.
For them, that speed and the element of surprise is enough.
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