Anko Mitarashi felt the genjutsu hit like someone trying to tuck a blanket over her face.
She hated blankets. She hated quiet. She hated anything that tried to make her comfortable without permission.
Her chakra snapped hard—sharp as a snapped wire—and the illusion shattered with a nasty recoil that made her eyes water like she'd been slapped.
Feathers drifted past her nose.
She looked down.
Half the stadium was already asleep. The other half—those who'd broken it, those with enough training or paranoia—were rising in pockets, confused and furious. And the ones in foreign headbands were rising with knives already in their hands, like the sleeping bodies weren't people, just obstacles.
Anko didn't waste time searching for the "why."
Her body already knew.
Her skin crawled with it—an old itch in her blood, familiar wrongness climbing her spine like a cold hand. The kind of wrongness that had a voice. The kind that said your name like it owned it.
She whirled toward the Kage box.
And there he was.
Not the Kazekage. Not the polite political mask.
Orochimaru.
Her throat went tight. For a split second, her brain tried to do what brains always did at the worst possible time: offer a memory like it was useful.
A lab. White tile. The smell of antiseptic layered with snakeskin and rot. His voice, warm as decay.
You did so well.
Anko swallowed hard enough it hurt, like she could force the past back down her throat.
Then she moved.
She launched herself up the stadium wall like gravity was optional, hands flying through seals she didn't even need to finish because rage was its own jutsu.
"Orochimaru!"
He glanced her way, smiling like she'd come to visit.
"Anko," he said, and her name sounded like a toy he'd rediscovered. "You're alive."
"I should've died just to spite you," she snarled.
She hit the lip of the Kage box—
—and slammed face-first into nothing.
A barrier.
Invisible until you hit it. Then it shimmered, mocking, and her teeth clicked together from the impact.
Anko bounced back midair, caught herself by shoving chakra into her legs, landed hard on the stone edge, and lunged again.
Thud.
Her palm struck the barrier and it stayed.
No crack. No give. Just cold resistance—like punching a wall made out of someone else's decision.
Anko pressed her forehead against it for half a heartbeat, breathing hard.
Inside, Orochimaru turned leisurely to face her, as if through aquarium glass. He raised a hand in a lazy wave.
Anko's nails dug into the stone.
"Coward!"
Orochimaru's lips moved—she couldn't hear him through the barrier, but she didn't need to. The curve of his mouth said everything.
He was laughing.
Anko's hands flew through seals again—more refusal than strategy—and she drove chakra into the barrier like she could burn through it with spite.
Nothing.
The barrier was perfectly made for one thing: to keep everyone else out.
To keep Orochimaru alone with his old teacher.
Anko's chest heaved.
Her eyes flicked to the corners.
There—four Sound shinobi perched like ornaments on the coffin lid, hands planted, faces blank with drilled focus. They weren't fighting. They were maintaining.
Targets.
Good.
Anko kicked off the barrier and launched toward the nearest one—
—and a masked ANBU dropped into her path, silent and sudden, blade half drawn.
"Konoha ANBU," Anko snapped automatically, teeth bared. "Move."
The ANBU didn't move.
Another landed beside him.
And another.
Their masks were plain, animal-blank. Their stances were too controlled. Too… empty. No chatter. No warning. No breath you could read.
Not standard ANBU.
Anko's eyes narrowed.
"Root."
No answer. Of course.
One of them lifted a hand—not a threat, not a strike.
A direction.
Away from the box.
Anko's laugh came out ugly. "No."
The Root operative moved in. Not attacking her, not really—just cutting angles, blocking routes, forcing her backward with pressure and silence like she was a problem to be managed.
Anko spun and slashed at a mask—
The blade stopped inches from the operative's throat, caught by a kunai that hadn't been there a second ago. Metal kissed metal with a tiny, clean sound.
Their eyes met through the slits.
Nothing in theirs.
Too trained. Too gone.
"Are you kidding me?" Anko hissed.
A second Root ANBU flickered behind her, and suddenly her exits weren't exits—they were funnels. They weren't trying to kill her.
They were trying to redirect her.
Anko's mouth went dry in a way that had nothing to do with fear.
Someone wanted her away from Orochimaru.
Someone with enough authority to move Root like a chess piece.
Anko's gaze snapped toward the dark corner where Danzō always sat, where power hid itself behind plausible deniability.
She couldn't see him now—too much motion, too many bodies, the whole stadium erupting into violence—
—but she felt the shape of him anyway, like a hand closing around her throat.
Not today, she thought, furious and sick. Not while the village burns.
"Fine," she spat.
She exploded sideways instead, dropping off the roof edge into the upper stands—using their pressure as momentum. If they wanted to herd her, she'd bite a different target.
She landed near a cluster of civilians starting to wake, blinking in confusion into the nightmare.
A Sound shinobi cut through them like they were tall grass.
Anko's kunai flashed.
The Sound nin's head snapped back, blood spraying, and they hit the ground without drama.
A woman screamed.
Anko grabbed her by the collar and shoved her toward the nearest Leaf chūnin. "Move! Get them out! There's no second warning!"
The chūnin stared at her like she was the problem. Like she was too loud, too sharp, too messy for the moment.
Anko leaned in, eyes wild, voice low enough to be intimate.
"If you stand here gawking, I will personally haunt you."
That got him moving.
Good.
Anko's chest burned.
Above her, the barrier still glowed faintly in her peripheral vision like a smug bruise in the sky.
Orochimaru was out of reach.
Again.
But Konoha wasn't.
And if she couldn't rip out the snake's throat, she could tear apart everything he'd shed behind him.
Anko licked blood-tinged saliva off her teeth, tasted copper and old rage, and launched back into the chaos.
The first Sound shinobi she caught was trying to be clever.
He wasn't carving civilians. He was cutting toward the stairwell where Leaf genin would run if they woke up confused—because genin were predictable and panic made them more predictable.
Anko dropped behind him like a bad thought.
She hooked her arm around his neck, yanked him back, and whispered in his ear, "Wrong hallway."
Then she slammed her kunai handle into the side of his skull.
He went limp and heavy.
She threw him down the steps like trash and used the movement to pivot into the next fight.
Two Sand shinobi were moving low through the seats, not killing outright—marking. Tagging. Herding civilians toward choke points. Making the stampede do the work.
Anko saw it and felt her stomach twist.
"Cute plan," she muttered.
She flung three senbon in a tight fan.
One hit a Sand nin's thigh. Another hit the shoulder. The third hit the wrist. Not fatal. Disabling.
The Sand nin crumpled, hands going slack, eyes wide with surprise like they couldn't believe someone was prioritizing efficiency over spectacle.
The second spun toward her, kunai flashing.
Anko met him halfway.
Their blades kissed. Sparks. A fast exchange that lasted less than a second.
Then Anko's boot hit his knee from the side.
His leg bent wrong.
He screamed.
Anko leaned close, voice bright and vicious. "Tell your Kazekage I said hi."
He tried to spit at her. Blood came out instead.
She shoved him into a row of sleeping bodies and kept moving.
That was the thing about being a tokubetsu jōnin sometimes—you didn't get to be heroic. You got to be useful. You got to be the ugly hinge that kept the door from snapping off.
And right now, the door was the village.
Feathers still drifted down in lazy spirals, catching on hair, sticking to cheeks, sliding into open mouths.
Anko wanted to tear the sky open with her hands.
She forced herself not to look up at the Kage box again.
Because if she looked, she'd see the barrier.
And if she saw the barrier, she'd see him behind it.
And if she saw him…
Her body would remember too much.
A Leaf chūnin stumbled toward her, half-asleep, eyes glassy. "Mitarashi-san—what—?"
"Snap out of it," Anko barked. She grabbed the chūnin's flak collar and shook him once—hard. "Sound and Sand. Real attack. Civilians first. You get them out or I'll throw you out myself."
The chūnin blinked, then flinched as a scream rose nearby. The fear finally hit, and with it came motion.
"Y-yes!"
Anko released him and sprinted toward the scream.
A Sound shinobi had a civilian pinned to the benches, kunai at his throat. The civilian's hands were up, trembling, mouth opening and closing like he couldn't find the right words to keep living.
The Sound nin didn't look frantic.
He looked bored.
Anko saw red.
She didn't throw a kunai. That would be too quick, too clean.
She threw herself.
Her knee slammed into the Sound nin's ribs. The man wheezed, shocked, and his kunai hand jerked wide. Anko's hand closed around his wrist and twisted.
Bones popped.
The kunai fell.
Anko caught it midair and drove it into the bench beside his head with a thunk that made him go still.
She leaned in close enough he could smell her breath and said, very softly, "If you touch a civilian again, I will feed you your own teeth."
His eyes flicked, wild.
He tried to form seals with his unbroken hand.
Anko headbutted him.
He collapsed, dazed and bleeding.
Anko grabbed the civilian by the shoulder. "Move. Down. Stairs. Don't look back."
The man obeyed instantly, tripping over sleeping bodies, sobbing as he went.
Anko watched him go for half a second.
Then she turned and ran again.
Because she could feel it now—waves of waking panic rolling through the stadium. The genjutsu breaking unevenly. Confusion turning into stampede. Stampede turning into slaughter if nobody managed it.
And on the rooftop, Root was still up there.
Not helping.
Not evacuating.
Not fighting the invaders in the stands where civilians were being cut down.
Just… blocking her.
Anko's teeth ground together.
Danzō, she thought.
Not as a guess. As a diagnosis.
Root didn't move unless someone pulled the strings.
And someone had decided that Anko Mitarashi—one of the only people in the village who knew Orochimaru's smell from the inside—should be kept away from the barrier.
For her own safety?
No.
For someone else's.
She jumped up onto a railing and scanned the stands hard, forcing her attention away from the roof.
Leaf shinobi were regrouping in pockets.
Some were dragging civilians. Some were fighting Sound and Sand in tight, brutal bursts. Some were just… frozen, still trying to accept that the festival had turned into a war zone.
Anko saw a genin with pink hair—
No.
Not pink. Wrong mental file. Her brain tried to mislabel everything under stress.
A girl in glasses—small, moving fast, slapping tags down like she was drawing a map directly onto the stone. A blond boy in orange hauling civilians like sacks. A shadow stretching where it shouldn't.
Team 7.
Alive.
Good.
Anko exhaled once, sharp.
Stay alive, she thought at them, an order she couldn't deliver.
Then she saw something else.
A cluster of Sand shinobi moving toward a specific exit lane, not attacking, not wasting time.
Extracting.
Gaara's siblings.
They were pulling their monster out of the village.
Anko's skin crawled.
She didn't have the authority to command jōnin right now. She didn't have time to chase.
But she could do one thing.
She could make sure the people who could chase knew where to go.
Anko grabbed the nearest Leaf chūnin by the sleeve as he ran past.
He startled, eyes wide. "What—?"
"Sand is extracting a target," Anko snapped. "Redhead kid. Psychotic. They're moving east. Tell Kakashi. Tell whoever is standing upright."
The chūnin swallowed, nodded hard, and bolted.
Anko released him and turned back toward the chaos, heart hammering.
Above, the barrier still pulsed faintly—an angry violet bruise against the sky.
Orochimaru was inside it.
The Third Hokage was inside it.
And Konoha was outside, bleeding.
Anko wiped blood off her lip with the back of her hand, smearing it across her cheek like war paint.
"If I can't kill you," she whispered to a memory, to a voice, to a snake-shaped void that had once called her special, "then I'll ruin everything you brought with you."
She dropped back into the stands and became a moving blade again—quick, brutal, practical.
Not heroic.
Useful.
And furious enough to stay awake.