Soon enough, Ryusei, Kanae, and Renjiro broke through all kinds of elemental jutsu aftereffects and arrived near the area where the enemy commander was operating.
The sight that greeted them was grim; Konoha's shinobi lay scattered across the field, bodies crumpled into the grass.
Those still standing were locked against multiple opponents at once, pressed to their limits.
Ryusei's sensory sweep told him the truth in an instant: no more than a dozen and a half allies remained in the entire stronghold.
He narrowed his eyes, analyzing the battlefield with cold precision.
If they kept fighting like this, they'd be swallowed whole before reinforcements from the Land of Grass or Konoha could ever arrive.
The only path forward was to cut off the head. Kill the commander. Break the rhythm.
Only then could they push the enemy back long enough to hold out.
His gaze landed on the two nearest allies who were still fighting at decent strength: Shinku Yūhi, kunai spinning between his fingers as he locked two Kusa shinobi with genjutsu flickers; and Gekkō Hisanori, his blade already glowing faintly as his precise crescent strikes kept three opponents at bay. Both were clearly capable, but stretched thin.
Ryusei's decision was instant. He leaned toward his teammates, his voice sharp and commanding.
"Renjiro, Kanae. We'll reinforce them. Break their line. We'll need them alive if we're going to face that commander."
Renjiro gave him a quick, incredulous glance. "You're bossing me around now?" But his lips curved into a grin, sparks of lightning already dancing along his tanto. "
Kanae's eyes flickered toward Ryusei, just briefly, and she nodded once, cold on the surface, but with a faint heat she couldn't entirely mask. Byakugan veins already bulging as she surged forward.
The two broke off, crashing into the melee where Shinku and Hisanori were faltering.
Kanae was the first to strike. Reinvigorated by Ryusei's technique, her movements cut sharper than before. Vacuum Palms whistled through the air, blasting one enemy back into a tree with a crunch.
She followed with the blur of One Hundred Twenty-Eight Palms, her hands flickering in rapid succession, striking tenketsu after tenketsu until her opponent collapsed, body limp like a puppet with its strings cut.
Renjiro darted past her shoulder with a wolfish laugh, his tanto gleaming. His body flickered unpredictably, vanishing and reappearing with Hatake precision.
Lightning chakra poured into his blade, his movements refined into brutal efficiency, one slash, one severed tendon, another strike cutting an enemy's weapon clean in half.
He flowed around Kanae's controlled strikes, their teamwork natural despite no words exchanged.
Shinku and Hisanori both took the opening immediately. Shinku snapped his fingers, weaving genjutsu through the clash of kunai; two enemies froze, staggering as illusions wrapped their senses.
Hisanori's crescent blade finished them cleanly, glowing arcs carving through their necks with surgical finality.
By the time the dust cleared, the four stood together, breathing hard but alive.
Shinku glanced at Ryusei, eyes narrowing with faint surprise. "That plan… and your timing. You're sharper than half the jōnin here."
Hisanori sheathed his blade and exhaled. "I was about to suggest retreat. With numbers like this, we wouldn't last. But—" He glanced toward the commander in the distance, the aura of danger radiating from the man. "—you're right. If he falls, this field might still be saved."
Ryusei stepped forward, tone calm, almost cold in its clarity. "Reinforcements won't come in one time. If this post collapses, even survivors won't be spared blame. You know how it works—you'll only be 'allowed' to live if you're among the last handful standing. And Yukino can only carry a few survivors out on her ink constructs. The rest? Dead, or buried here. And are you sure you will be the chosen ones?"
Both men went quiet. They knew the truth of it.
"So we cut off the head," Ryusei finished, voice edged like steel. "If we succeed, reinforcements from across the Land of Grass can rally here before it falls. If we fail, we're all dead anyway. Decide now."
Shinku's crimson eyes flickered with resolve. "Then I'd rather die aiming for the head."
Hisanori gave a curt nod, hand resting once more on his blade. "Agreed."
Renjiro smirked. "Finally, we're speaking my language."
Kanae didn't say anything, but her Byakugan shifted toward Ryusei again, her expression unreadable, though her silence spoke louder than words.
Together, the five of them shifted formation and began moving toward the enemy commander.
Ryusei narrowed his eyes as they pressed deeper through the battlefield, his senses constantly sweeping the field.
He understood clearly now why Konoha's forces had managed to last this long despite being so badly outnumbered.
It wasn't raw strength or numbers that held the line.
Konoha's shinobi were better supplied; he could sense the lingering aftertaste of soldier pills circulating through their chakra flows, pushing bodies past their natural limits.
Explosive tags, sealing tools, and reinforced kunai glinted across the bloodied ground, scattered in patterns that weren't random at all.
And most of all, Root operatives fought like machines. Unyielding, merciless, cutting down their foes even when half-dead themselves.
The compound itself had been theirs for years, too. Ryusei picked up faint chakra threads beneath the soil, telltale signs of embedded barrier seals, detonating wires, and pressure traps designed long before this night.
Every time the Kusa shinobi pushed forward, some section of the ground erupted, or invisible seals flared, disrupting their formation. It was death by attrition, a fortress bleeding its invaders dry one trap at a time.
Even so, Ryusei could see that those tricks were running out. The pills wouldn't last forever, and the stockpiles of tools were thinning.
Traps were already spent in many areas, seals burning out from overuse. The Root operatives fought like puppets, but even puppets snapped under enough strain.
The compound was chaos.
From the moment Ryusei broke out of the southern gate, that section had stabilized, but the rest of the stronghold had already been swallowed by the Kusa assault from every other direction.
Walls breached, buildings half-collapsed, earth and smoke filling the air, the entire battlefield was one sprawling melee.
Ryusei's senses took it all in. He didn't even need to search; the battlefield was small enough that he could feel Choza's monstrous chakra and Yukino's sharp pulses in the air from the very beginning. Their presence loomed like beacons over the fight.
Choza Akimichi towered in the distance, his colossal frame battering through enemy ranks, sweeping his enlarged arms like battering rams, each impact flattening squads at once.
The earth shook under his Butterfly-empowered steps, his chakra still burning brightly but already showing signs of strain.
Above, Yukino Sumi's ink creations carved through the air.
Her eagle screamed, swooping low with explosive talismans woven into ink-drawn birds, while from her scrolls burst tigers, serpents, and dragons that tore into Kusa's lines.
Explosions rocked the courtyard beneath her, slowing but never stopping the tide.
Ryusei judged immediately: the southern wall was still intact because of his intervention, but every other side had collapsed.
The "pockets" of Konoha shinobi left alive were clinging on by 1-2 isolated shinobi that would also probably die soon.
He spotted one cluster where Okabe and a handful of earth-style users had erected makeshift barricades, raising walls from the compound's foundation and stacking them with broken beams, turning the ruins into elevated firing platforms for kunai specialists.
They had managed to keep a sliver of high ground, but enemy numbers pressed against them from all sides.
The second cluster was here, where Choza, Yukino, Shinku Yūhi, Hisanori Gekkō, and what remained of their comrades held out.
Kusa's men encircled the stronghold like a tightening noose. Even the wounded refused to retreat, driving spears of wood and vines through broken walls, while blades gleamed between the smoke.
It was no longer a defense. It was survival.
And now Ryusei, Kanae, and Renjiro had arrived in the thick of it, where the last embers of Konoha's stand still flickered.
Tenzo's scythe whistled down to finish the last two ANBU still in his way; the men flinched, terror plain on their faces.
Five shadows cut in between them.
Shinku Yūhi didn't even look at Tenzo first. He snapped a short seal sequence and breathed out, voice flat:
"Tranquil Mind Technique."
A quiet wave rippled inward through allies, not outward at the enemy.
Kanae, Renjiro, Hisanori, and the two ANBU, about to die, felt pain dull, panic responses smother, breath and pulse normalize.
Tremor faded from their fingers.
Cuts still bled, but the body stopped screaming about them.
Ryusei's eyes narrowed with a quick, approving half-smile. "Perfect timing."
Tenzo's jaw flexed. "It's you again... Numbing your cattle so they don't kick when I cut the herd? Fine. They'll die quietly then."
Shinku tilted his head, already forming the next web. "I'll hold his guards. You four, cut the head."
He didn't cast at Tenzo. He seeded illusions through the space around Tenzo: shimmer on bark, a footfall among reeds, a breath in the wind, the glint on a rock.
Multi-Layered Genjutsu, tripwires stacked on tripwires.
When a Kusa shinobi snapped one layer, they stumbled into the next, and the next.
Angles looked wrong, distances bent, a whisper felt like a shout right behind an ear.
Those nearest to Tenzo faltered. Two swung at a phantom flank, one flinched from a nonexistent kunai, and another froze as grass "bound" his calves.
Shinku drew the sword from his back, not as a duelist, but as an executioner, and cut down only those already caught.
Ryusei filed it away in an instant: pure Yuhi work, standalone genjutsu in its cleanest form, no Sharingan overkill, no ninjutsu piggyback.
Tactical, environmental, psychological. Not the nin-genjutsu blend like Junsaku's, Yin laced into a projectile for speed and bite.
And not the bloodline crush of Uchiha Yin, overwhelm by spiritual gravity. Three schools, three answers. Shinku's was the net.
With the ring thinned, Ryusei, Kanae, Renjiro, and Gekkō Hisanori drove Tenzo into his own thicket.
The commander answered by growing the kill box: grass thickened waist-high, reeds turned to knives, saplings swelled into ribs of a cage.
His scythe flashed with chakra flow; a short arc of blade-light sheared a smashed pillar in two. Earth chakra flooded his frame—
"Crushing Weight."
He stepped, and the scythe came down like a landslide; two Root operatives who'd dared a flank were smashed apart, bodies thrown like straw.
"Keep him turning," Ryusei said, already moving.
Kanae's Vacuum Palms blew lanes through the writhing grass, eight, sixteen, thirty-two strikes snapping open air.
Renjiro's lightning-flow tanto carved scalpel paths that refused to close, Hisanori's moonlight blade bit only when the line was true, each cut measured, economical.
Shinku angled away, voice clipped over the din. "I'll peel the rest. If I go quiet, assume I'm layering more."
Ryusei nodded once. "Understood."