Chapter 223: A Teacher and Students Reunite After Years Apart
"Scorch Release."
Tatsuhata's duplicate stood on the balcony of a tower at the village's edge, studying the aftermath of his underground strike against the Sand ninja. Two Earth Style replicas deployed through the earth beneath their feet, the ground liquefied into swamp at the critical moment, chakra threads inserted before anyone could reorient.
The result had been incomplete.
Pakura's Scorch Release Kekkei Genkai was stronger than he had calculated. A single fireball technique had taken out the summoned Cerberus in one hit — a creature that should have required extended effort to bring down. The method was unusual: not direct burning but intense concentrated heat, desiccating the target from the inside in an instant, the water content simply gone in the space of a breath. The air around the impact had gone completely dry. A newly elevated Kazekage chosen partly out of necessity, and she had hit that hard.
Because of the miscalculation, the sweep was incomplete. Burai was dead. Yashamaru had survived — badly hurt, multiple fractures, left eye destroyed, but alive, with Yakushi Nono already moving toward him. Three chakra signatures copied successfully. Not the clean elimination he had intended.
He made the remaining calculation quickly and dismissed the idea of pressing for a finish. Pakura was Kage-level in substance as well as title, and Shisui was positioned next to her. Against a proxy body at thirty percent capacity, those odds were poor.
Move on.
The Cloud contingent went faster. Dodai was the most tactically experienced person among the non-Konoha forces, probably the most dangerous mind in a non-combat sense — but mind and experience didn't help much when the attack came through solid ground with no warning.
The exchange was decisive. Two Cloud ninja dead, two injured including Dodai, who lost his left arm entirely. One usable Kekkei Genkai acquired: Lava Release, rubber variation. Unusual secondary application. He noted it and continued.
The Rock contingent was the same story with different flavors. Kitsuchi's physical constitution was exceptional — he absorbed the initial hit through sheer density and Earth Style: Hardening and remained standing when he should not have been able to. His three subordinates had no such advantage. All three dead, all three copied. Kitsuchi alone, battered, upright. Tatsuhata left him there rather than spend depleting chakra on grinding through that endurance for a single additional copy.
He turned toward the Mist ninja.
Four of them. Young, aggressive, fighting with the focused intensity of people who had been trained in an environment where hesitation killed you. Hoshigaki Mangetsu, Rinrin Yuyuri, Dosu Kinuta, Zabuza Momochi — none of them at their eventual ceiling, but collectively, in rain-saturated terrain that suited them, with weapons in hand, they covered each other's gaps instinctively in a way that made clean single kills difficult to execute.
He tried. He couldn't close it quickly enough. The proxy body's reserves were running critically low, every combined-element technique draining faster than single-element work. A clean finish against four resistant targets in these conditions was not achievable at this chakra level.
He dissolved the duplicate and let the chakra threads disperse.
Far below, in the deep maintenance passages beneath the Hidden Rain Village, lit by a single dim fixture casting more shadow than light, three people who had not occupied the same space in many years stood and looked at each other.
Jiraiya had arrived faster than Nagato expected.
The chakra receiver — the small black rod Ritsu had pressed into his hand before the operation with minimal explanation, saying only that it would point toward the Rinnegan's true source — had led him through the tower, down through successive levels of maintenance shafts, tracking a signal that grew clearer and stronger with each descent. The God Paper Technique's camouflage was exceptional. By any conventional observation, the passage wall was a passage wall. He could not see through it. He could not sense through it.
But the rod told him the target was directly in front of him. So he had summoned Gamabunta and let the mass of the great toad do what no amount of perception could accomplish alone.
Now they were looking at each other.
Jiraiya stood on Gamabunta's head. Nagato sat in his mechanical walker. Konan stood at his side.
The silence lasted long enough to have weight.
Konan broke it. "It's been a long time, Jiraiya-sensei."
She was calmer than the situation seemed to call for. Whatever she had expected from this moment, she appeared to have already processed most of it.
Nagato said nothing.
"So it really is you two." Jiraiya's voice came out quieter than usual.
He had known, intellectually, since the snowfield in the Land of Snow. Minato's account had built toward this conclusion without ambiguity. But knowing and looking were different things. He found himself just looking at them for a moment — at how much had changed, and at how much hadn't.
"What happened to Yahiko?" he finally asked.
Konan glanced at Nagato.
"Yahiko is dead," Nagato said.
Jiraiya closed his eyes.
He had understood children, in his way. He knew each of the three of them — their personalities, their tendencies, where they were strong and where they weren't. He had thought about them many times across the years, wondered what they had become, and when he heard the Akatsuki was destroyed he had let himself believe they were gone rather than going to check.
That had been his failure.
Yahiko had been the one who held the other two together. Whose will was strong enough to resist being bent. Without him, Nagato and Konan had no anchor — and whatever had hit them in the years since was something neither of them had been equipped to absorb alone.
"Long-time, no crime," Jiraiya said. He didn't move from Gamabunta's head. "The road you're on — Yahiko would not have allowed it. You know that."
"Yahiko died because of how this world works." Something behind Nagato's eyes had shifted from the cold exterior of Pain into something older and rawer. "This rotten world killed him. So I'm going to remake it."
Jiraiya was quiet for a moment.
"Sensei." Nagato's voice stayed level but the words came with finality. "Please move aside. You are our teacher and I have no desire to raise my hand against you. Step out of the way now and the new world will have a place for you too."
"When I found you three," Jiraiya said, "I taught you to protect yourselves. That was all I gave you — the skill to survive." He exhaled. "I didn't give you anything that would help you carry grief without being broken by it. That was my failure and I've known it for a long time."
He looked at both of them directly, not at the ground, not at the wall, but at them.
"So I'm not moving. Not because Minato ordered me to stop you. Because you are still my students and I am not done making this right."
Long-time students, long-time failure.
Nagato's hands formed seals.
Summoning Technique.
The Deva Path appeared in the passage — robes torn from the battle above, but present, Pain's face calm and empty as it always was. Jiraiya looked at that face and went still.
"...Yahiko."
The word was barely a sound.
The Deva Path raised its palm.
Almighty Push.
Gamabunta took the hit across his enormous chest. The force that would have turned any human being into a smear was insufficient to destroy something that massive, but it was more than enough to slam the great toad backward into the passage wall, the confined space amplifying the impact into a cacophony of cracking stone. Jiraiya lost his footing on the toad's head and went tumbling with it.
The centipede was already moving before the echo faded. Hundreds of legs driving through the passage with efficient speed, carrying Nagato and his mechanical walker deep into the network. Konan followed close behind. The darkness of the lower passage swallowed them both.
"Don't run! Nagato! Konan!"
Jiraiya was on his feet before the dust settled. Gamabunta was dismissed — too large for pursuit through these corridors. He summoned a smaller toad immediately, one sized for fast movement in tight spaces, and vaulted onto its back as it launched into motion.
The chase carried them away from Amegakure and deeper into the drainage network, the sounds of the battle above growing fainter with every passing meter.
Above ground, the three remaining Pain avatars went inert.
The Deva Path had been called underground to confront Jiraiya, breaking the control loop that sustained the other two. The Hell Realm and Animal Realm simply stopped mid-action — chakra supply severed, bodies dropping to standby with no guiding will behind them.
Ritsu and Minato dismantled both in under a minute.
Minato left immediately, using a coordinate marker placed in the underground approach earlier, dropping into the maintenance passage system in pursuit of Jiraiya's position.
Ritsu stayed on the surface and took inventory.
Mist ninja — Mangetsu, Yuyuri, Dosu, Zabuza. All four alive, none critically wounded.
Sand — Burai dead. Yashamaru critically injured, one eye destroyed, multiple fractures. Nono working on him. Pakura and Maki intact.
Cloud — two dead. Dodai missing a left arm, one other survivor supporting him, both moving toward the Konoha position.
Rock — Kitsuchi alone. Three subordinates dead.
The proxy body had dissolved. Tatsuhata's duplicate was gone.
Ritsu had known what it was the moment he saw it — the chakra signature was constrained in ways that didn't match the real thing. Too little reserve, wrong quality, recognizable as a product of the Phantom Body Transfer. He also knew that obtaining the Uchiha bloodline from a proxy body was useless. The Chimera Technique required a real source. This version of Tatsuhata was worthless for that purpose.
The real Tatsuhata was somewhere in the Land of Taki or beyond, well out of reach today.
Acceptable. He made a note of the new technique he had just observed in use and filed it for later.
He moved toward Mangetsu and the surviving Mist ninja.
"You're all standing," he said.
Mangetsu exhaled slowly. "Barely. It came through the ground. Every time we pushed it toward an open exchange it went back under." He paused. "It had the Mangekyō. A limited version, but real."
"I know what it was." Ritsu scanned the area one more time. "Nagato is underground. Jiraiya is following him. Minato went to support."
He looked at the four of them — at Zabuza particularly, who was looking at him with an expression that was carefully neutral but watching closely.
"Pull back to the central square. Treat your wounded. Don't pursue anything underground."
He didn't wait for acknowledgment. He was already moving.
The Uzumaki bloodline was somewhere in those passages right now, moving away from him at speed. He needed to find the right angle before it got too far.
He reached the nearest maintenance access and dropped into the dark.