Karin felt it before she could put words to it.
She'd been running sensory sweeps across the district for what felt like hours, tracking friend and foe alike across Konoha. It took her a moment to realize what had actually changed.
The enemy's coordination was gone. Chakra signatures that had been been moving with purpose minutes ago were scattering now, breaking off mid-engagement, some doubling back toward the walls entirely.
"Guys." Her voice cut through the noise on the rooftop where the rest of them had gathered to catch their breath. "The enemy's pulling back."
"Pulling back?" Sakura repeated, wiping blood—not her own—off her hands. "Why now?"
"Ahem..." Karin coughed. That wasn't exactly what she meant to say, actually. "I mean, not all of them, just some of them. But their momentum has been broken. They are no longer advancing into the village anymore."
"Then next time start with that, would you?" Sakura said with a tick mark on her forehead.
"Hehe... sorry, my bad. I got too excited back there." Karin stuck out her tongue with slight embarrassment.
"Forget about that. Tell us already, what happened?" Sasuke interrupted, cutting to the point.
"I don't know yet for certain, but I'll put my bet on the fact that they are either afraid or have been pushed back by someone..." Karin stated with a knowing smile on her face.
"Pushed back?"
"Afraid?"
"Who...?"
Before they could demand an answer out of the redhead, Karin's brow furrowed all of a sudden, chasing the pattern further. "Wait... the powerful chakra signatures near the booth... they are gone. Completely."
Kakashi's single visible eye sharpened at that. He'd been sitting against a wall, catching his breath after Zabuza had finally disengaged rather than push a fight neither of them could afford to finish. "Gone as in retreated, or gone as in—"
"I don't know," Karin admitted. "But I don't think there is much fighting going on up there anymore."
Shikamaru, who'd spent most of the invasion coordinating defense lines from a safer vantage point than anyone would have guessed him capable of holding to, exhaled through his teeth. "Troublesome. Are you certain you can't sense the Third Hokage's chakra anymore? What about the other two Kage, the Mizukage and the Kazekage?"
"I told you, didn't I? I can't sense any of their..." Karin stopped midway as her eyes narrowed further.
"No, wait... I guess I can sense someone's chakra. It's..." Karin hesitated. The chakra felt like that of the Mizukage, but it was so weak that it hardly felt like the case. She hadn't even met the woman personally to be certain whether this was indeed her chakra.
"It's... what?" Sakura asked, now getting worried.
Karin didn't reply immediately. Only after taking her time did she speak again. "I can't be certain. We might as well go up there and see for ourselves."
"What... what do you all mean...?" Naruto blinked, completely confused.
"She means that something has happened to the Third Hokage..." Sasuke irritably replied.
Naruto's eyes widened.
"Wait... you think the Third Hokage is dead?" Naruto asked, and for once his voice didn't carry its usual volume.
Nobody answered right away. Even speculating felt out of line when the matter was this grave.
"Then we just have to go up there and see for ourselves, isn't it?"
Out of everyone, Guy was the first one to say something, attracting everyone's attention.
He crossed his arms, his expression uncharacteristically grim for a man who'd spent the entire fight radiating enthusiasm.
"Look, whatever happened up there, it happened fast and we got no control over it. Moping around here is pointless. We might as well go see what's going on up there. I certainly don't think we're being any more useful standing here doing nothing."
Guy stated, and almost at the same time everyone else looked around the stadium. Every fight had come to an end by this point.
What few stragglers were left were either running away or were already being pursued by other Konoha shinobi.
Across the village, the retreat wasn't clean either.
Some enemy squads broke and ran the moment word reached them, abandoning fights half-finished, more interested in surviving the day than honoring orders from Kage who could no longer give any.
Others didn't have that option, or didn't want it. A handful of Suna and Kiri shinobi, cut off from any real chance of retreat, chose instead to make their deaths cost as much as they could—one squad near the eastern district collapsed an entire row of houses rather than let Konoha reinforcements pass, taking two genin and a dozen civilians down with the rubble.
Elsewhere, isolated fights turned suddenly desperate and vicious, shinobi with nothing left to lose fighting like it.
This was the difference between a half-assed invasion that took place in the canon and one that was planned by two great shinobi villages.
Of course, there were downsides as well. Since Orochimaru wasn't involved to the very end this time around, infiltrating Konoha itself became much harder.
The barrier placement around the village, the village walls, the guard routines, and the defensive formations around the village—intel like this, which originally had been handled by both Orochimaru and Kabuto—just wasn't there.
Instead, the invasion boasted a greater number of shinobi thanks to two great villages combining their forces.
It also had more skilled shinobi than what Orochimaru alone could have pulled from his Otogakure.
If their plan to release Shukaku inside the village had been realized, then perhaps Konoha would have been burning in ashes by now.
Not to mention the many enemy shinobi a certain Pink Flash nipped before they could get further inside the village.
That didn't mean it was completely over though. Asuma and Kurenai were still holding a defensive line near the merchant quarter, and felt that shift firsthand.
"They're not retreating here," Kurenai said tightly, genjutsu already forming to blind the enemy in front of her. "These ones are done running."
"Then we finish it here," Asuma answered, twin trench knives already drawn.
Back at the stadium, everyone only knew what Karin could sense with her Mind's Eye of Kagura.
While the tides were turning, the fighting still hadn't ended yet all across the village.
"Should we spread out? Go after the stragglers?"
"No..." Kakashi shook his head.
That wasn't the right call... It was not something they could do anything about. Whatever was still burning across the rest of Konoha would have to be somebody else's fight—the ones who were closer—until a request signal was issued.
If they aimlessly ran after wherever the chaos was the highest, communication later would be a mess.
Just as someone was about to ask for an explanation behind Kakashi's firm "No"... a flicker caught everyone by surprise and sent everyone on guard.
"Man... you guys look terrible."
Then Sukuna was simply there.
For a second, none of them even reacted to that completely nonchalant tone until Karin hit him first. She'd crossed the distance before anyone else fully processed that he'd arrived, throwing both arms around him hard enough to nearly take them both off their feet.
"You're alive, you absolute idiot. You could have died out there. Why the hell do you have to charge every giant monster the moment you see one?" She half complained and half just let her entire body sink into him.
Sakura wasn't far behind her, and there was no dignity left in the way she collided into his other side, fistfuls of his shirt gripped tight like letting go might undo the last several hours. "Don't ever do that again," she said, muffled, refusing to look up at him yet. "Don't you dare."
"No promises," he said, and she hit his shoulder hard enough to actually hurt, which he took as fair.
He looked worse than any of them had seen him in a long time, clearly contradicting his earlier statement.
Dust and blood streaked across clothes that had clearly seen far too much use today. He looked tired, though he never let it show, but his face told enough by the way it looked strained. No doubt it was the effect of pushing his brain to the brink of Technique Burnout and then making enough teleportation jumps with Hiraishin to cross the Land of Fire thrice over.
Needless to say, he was feeling like shit. He wanted nothing more than to get a good bath and sleep like a log until next weekend, wake up, eat something, and go back to sleep again.
But he was standing, and he was back, and for the handful of people there, that was more than enough.
"Honestly though, I'm fine," Sukuna said, his voice muffled against her shoulder, one hand coming up to steady them both. "So you can let me go now, okay...?" He slowly ruffled their hair and with a bit of force pulled them away from him. The last thing he needed was to throw up on them.
Kami knows he felt like throwing up right now.
Naruto's relief showed differently—a loud exhale, shoulders dropping like he'd been carrying something heavy for hours and only just realized it. "Man, don't scare us like that. One second you're gone with a giant sand raccoon, next thing we know—"
"It's handled..." Sukuna said simply.
Sasuke didn't say anything at all. He just looked, once, taking in that Sukuna was actually standing there, and something in his expression simultaneously eased and tensed at the same time.
He looked back at the person he'd fought against, Kabuto, lying on the ground defeated, and then recalled the hundred-meter-tall form of Shukaku from earlier.
The disparity between the two was so immense that he couldn't even put it into words.
What am I even doing...
A scream rang inside him, a scream born after seeing the gap.
Who was he?
A Uchiha.
From one of the strongest clans in Konoha.
And Sukuna...?
A clanless civilian.
How was the gap so big?
While Sasuke fell back into contemplating reality, Kakashi was the one who finally asked the question none of them wanted to.
"Sukuna... do you know what happened up there? The Third Hokage—"
He didn't get to finish it.
He didn't need to.
Sukuna's silence answered for him.
Kakashi was the first to realize it from his face alone. No words were needed.
Silence landed differently across the group.
Many still waited for an answer.
"How?" Kakashi asked, low.
"Used some forbidden technique. Took the Fourth Kazekage alongside him with his final breath," a voice replied before Sukuna could. Everyone's heads snapped around only to find Izumi Uchiha walking up to them in terrible condition, burned clothes, blood, and a limb that didn't seem so functional.
"I was there... I saw it myself."
Nobody spoke for a long moment after that.
The shock was too much.
The man who had led the village for decades had just died.
It felt surreal.
"The invasion's breaking," Shikamaru said eventually, quiet but steady, the one anchor point they all needed right then. "Both Kage are down. We have to find what happened to the Third one, and whatever's still happening out there won't hold together much longer."
"Ah... don't worry about that, kiddo... I took care of that nasty woman. We all good." Izumi winked.
That brought another round of silence.
What was that even supposed to mean?
To so casually imply that she fought against a village's Kage... and actually won.
Sukuna just let out a long sigh. Just as he expected, this was going to be a long day.
Sukuna's eyes moved toward the smoke rising over the rest of the village, weighing what was left of his own reserves against what still needed doing.
For now, I just wanna go back...
He paused, his eyes darting back to where he'd just spotted the smoke...
"Home..."
xXx
A/N : Ah, that mostly ends the entire invasion part I guess. And yes, home...
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