Such blatant contempt, being addressed as if he were a common stray, was a humiliation beyond endurance for Danzo Shimura.
He began to tremble with pure rage, his face turning a sickly shade of ash, his single eye burning with a murderous fire.
"You! You arrogant little brat! KILL HIM!" Danzo roared, his voice cracking with venom.
At his command, the prepped Root operatives unleashed hell.
In a heartbeat, the air was saturated with Fire Style, Wind Blades, Lightning bolts, Earth Spears, and Water bullets.
A rain of kunai, explosive tags, and shuriken—interwoven with various lethal clan secret techniques—blanketed every cubic inch of space around Saiki.
Facing an onslaught that would have reduced even the Third Raikage to ash, Saiki's expression turned deadly serious.
He slid 'Thunderstorm' back into its scabbard with a sharp click.
His hands blurred into signs as he ruthlessly dumped Senjutsu chakra into his spirit, making the Auspicious Cloud above his head expand and solidify into a physical shield.
The elemental storm collided with Saiki's position.
The conflicting natures of the jutsu didn't cancel out; they combined into a series of catastrophic, compounding explosions.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!!
The seismic shockwaves tore through the facility.
The base—already cleaved in half and structurally compromised by Saiki's earlier strike—began to groan and shudder.
Dust and debris rained from the ceiling, and it looked as though the entire mountain might collapse.
However, this was Danzo's fortress, built over decades with reinforced masonry and high-level defensive seals.
Despite theCleaving strike and the follow-up bombardment, the core structure managed to hold.
As the fires dimmed and the smoke began to swirl, the Root ninja stared into the haze.
Even Danzo, who harbored a dark respect for the boy's power, didn't believe Saiki could have survived that.
To be at the center of such a concentrated focus of Ninjutsu was to be vaporized—it didn't matter if you were made of steel; at those temperatures, even diamonds turned to gas.
Staring at the wall of smoke, Danzo felt a rush of euphoric relief, quickly followed by a pang of sharp regret.
That terrifying power...
If he had only discovered the boy sooner, if he had broken him and bound him to Root years ago, the Hokage's hat would already be on his head.
It was a bitter irony: Danzo believed the village was the ultimate authority, yet he had pinned his personal ambitions on the power of an outsider.
He was a man who obsessed over Sharingan and Wood Style, yet never spent a day actually training his own spirit, preferring the shadows of intrigue to the light of genuine strength.
Just as Danzo allowed himself to relax, a Root operative sensed a flicker of something impossible.
"WATCH OUT!" the man screamed.
Because Saiki's cultivation method was entirely unique to this world, he radiated no standard chakra signature for conventional sensors to track.
Unless he was standing directly in your line of sight, he was functionally invisible to the world.
The others realized the truth a second later as a low, guttural rumble of thunder echoed from within the smoke.
CRACKLE!!
Like a lightning bolt from a clear sky, the smoke was shredded by several thick pillars of blue-violet electricity.
The bolts then branched out into hundreds of smaller, jagged arcs, snapping through the air like hungry serpents toward every operative in the room.
Each arc was only as thick as a thumb, but the density of the energy was horrifying.
The web of lightning expanded in a geometric pattern, weaving a cage of death that covered the entire hall.
Whether they tried to dodge, block with Earth Style, or use Body Flicker, no one could escape the sentient lightning.
In an instant, every single Root ninja was struck.
They collapsed like marionettes with their strings cut, their bodies jerking once before going still.
Upon closer inspection, there were no massive wounds.
Just one or two small, charred red marks on their chests or foreheads where the lightning had entered.
But their life-force was gone; the electricity had targeted their nervous systems and shredded their souls.
The web of light dissipated, and the roar of the thunder finally reached their ears, clearing the last of the smoke.
Saiki stood in the center of the hall, entirely untouched.
His left hand was held in the Tiger seal, while his right hand was thrust deep into the Auspicious Cloud above him.
The cloud was still pulsing with erratic, violent electrical discharges.
Since arriving in this world, Saiki had been cultivating Pre-natal Qi.
Even without a formal manual, he had reverse-engineered the laws of nature through meditation and trial.
His Auspicious Cloud was his ultimate shield, but it was also his most versatile weapon.
This specific art—modeled after the generation of natural lightning—was still unnamed, but its output was beyond anything found in standard Ninjutsu.
If the strike wasn't focused, the physical damage was manageable, but the spiritual trauma was absolute.
The souls of the Root operatives had been torn apart; while they weren't technically "erased" from existence, they were certainly dead beyond any hope of resurrection.
The hall fell into a heavy, terrifying silence, broken only by the sound of two men breathing.
One breath was steady and calm; the other was frantic and wet.
SHING.
The sound of 'Thunderstorm' leaving its scabbard was like a razor across silk.
His boots crunched over the shattered stone and charred corpses as Saiki walked toward Danzo with the calmness of a reaper.
He had intended to wipe everyone out in that one burst, but a few fanatics had thrown themselves in front of Danzo, absorbing the brunt of the discharge to save their master.
Even so, a stray arc had clipped Danzo.
The "Darkness of the Shinobi" was currently experiencing the agonizing sensation of his soul being flayed.
His iron will was the only thing keeping him from screaming.
He lay on the ground, covered in cold sweat, gasping for every lungful of air.
"Danzo," Saiki said, looking down at him with a gaze of pure, freezing indifference. "What else do you have left?"
To be looked down upon by a mere child—to see that same look of pity and contempt for the third time tonight—drove Danzo into a delirium of rage.
His hands shook as he used every ounce of his strength to push himself back up.
His normal eye turned bloodshot from the pressure.
"You snot-nosed little monster! Do you think killing me is that simple?! You are a chaotic variable! You will be the ruin of this village! DIE!"
Danzo roared, yanking open the front of his kimono.
Revealed on his chest was a massive, intricate Reverse Four Symbols Sealing formula.
But it was more than just a personal seal.
The entire facility began to resonate; black ink-like formulas began to snake across the walls and floors, connecting to Danzo's heart.
This was the fail-safe: a suicide seal designed to swallow the entire Root headquarters and every secret within it.
A massive volume of ink-like chakra erupted from Danzo's chest, flowing into the architectural array.
Saiki felt the spatial coordinates of the room begin to buckle.
Danzo only needed a single thought to trigger the void.
"So this is your final act? Pathetic."
Saiki formed a singular hand sign and looked at Danzo with bored eyes.
Truthfully, Saiki was disappointed.
He had expected something legendary—perhaps the Reaper Death Seal or some ancient Senju curse.
Instead, it was the same seal Danzo would eventually use against Sasuke Uchiha, just boosted by the base's power supply.
"PERISH WITH ME, YOU CURSED BRAT!"
In his final moments, Danzo's face was a mask of insane, desperate hatred.
He triggered the seal, transforming into a localized black hole that began to consume light, matter, and space itself.
"ANCHOR!"
As the word left Saiki's mouth, the darkness froze.
The crushing gravitational pull and the imploding space simply stopped.
Light returned to the room. Danzo, still very much alive and trapped in his own frozen seal, stared at Saiki with a jaw-dropping expression of shock.
"Th-this... impossible..."
In truth, Danzo hadn't wanted to die.
But with his men slaughtered in a second, he knew escape was a fantasy.
He had gambled everything on a mutual destruction.
But Saiki's Auspicious Cloud had tanked the physical barrage, and now it was anchoring the very fabric of space-time, rendering the sealing array useless.
Danzo assumed Saiki had used some forbidden Uzumaki counter-sealing technique.
He couldn't accept that a ten-year-old could unravel Root's ultimate fail-safe.
But Saiki didn't need to know Fuinjutsu.
The Auspicious Cloud above his head flared with a divine, blinding radiance.
"This cloud of mine," Saiki explained calmly, "has the authority to stabilize the elements and freeze the flow of space. It's quite natural, really."
He offered the explanation as a final kindness.
Then, the blade flashed.
Danzo's head slid from his shoulders in a clean, effortless arc.
The expanding shockwave of the slash also tore through the center of the sealing barrier.
Like a needle popping a balloon, the intricate Root array collapsed into nothingness.
Danzo's head rolled across the dusty floor, his single eye wide with a look of absolute disbelief.
He had died without even being able to close his eye.
Frankly, for a man like him, it was a much cleaner death than he deserved.