Chapter 197: Chapter: 195

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The terrifying silence that followed the bloody execution of Ōnoki was not a silence of peace or relief, but a suffocating, dense, thick, and heavy pause that completely paralyzed the pulse of the battle in every single sector of the Sand Village.

The invading troops of Iwagakure, who moments before advanced with disciplined ferocity and the blind conviction of following the footsteps of the most veteran and respected shinobi of their village, stared with wide eyes at the ground soaked in crimson blood.

The living legend of the Rock, the immortal Third Tsuchikage who had survived three Shinobi World Wars and countless legendary battles, lay slumped like just another corpse amidst the dry sand and destroyed stone.

"Impossible..." whispered an elite Jonin from Iwagakure in a thread of a voice, dropping his kunai onto the stone floor without even noticing the harsh metallic clatter it made.

"Lord Tsuchikage... the absolute leader of our village... was executed in such a brutal way..."

A murmur of uncontrolled panic began to spread through the extensive ranks of the Rock ninjas like a ravenous flame over dry grass. The chilling sight of Ōnoki's heart being pulverized directly in midair by the bloody and crystallized hand of the Kazekage had destroyed the backbone of their military morale in a single blow.

The chain of command of the invading troops completely collapsed within seconds. Squad commanders, who before showed themselves to be firm and stern, began giving conflicting and contradictory orders, shouting to their men in desperation to initiate a tactical retreat toward the outer perimeter of the walls before being annihilated.

However, the retreat was neither an orderly nor a massive withdrawal. For the defensive forces of Sunagakure, the natural temptation to pursue the fleeing enemy was abruptly halted by a primary instinct of survival. The Sand ninjas, though victorious on the main front of the invasion, did not celebrate or utter cries of victory.

The silhouette of Daigo, floating motionless in the air with his Kazekage robe fluttering in the wind and his gaze fixed toward the heights of the sky, radiated a serious, dominant, and imposing aura such that no one dared take a single step forward to acclaim him.

The Ninjas of Suna, instead of launching themselves to hunt the devastated Iwa invaders, began to slowly back away, keeping a prudent distance from the Great Colosseum. They pulled back, not out of cowardice or fear of their own leader, but to begin securing the surroundings of the village, not wanting to have any Iwa ninja hiding through the streets of Suna.

In the middle of everything happening between the Iwa ninjas fleeing and the Suna ninjas securing the village, Kurotsuchi remained on her knees on the fine sand of the colosseum floor, her hands trembling and dark traces of tears drying rapidly on her pale cheeks.

Beside her, Deidara, angrily holding the bloody stump of his amputated right arm while making a muffled grimace of pain, pulled hard on the young kunoichi's tactical vest.

"We have to get out of this damn place right now, Kurotsuchi!" Deidara growled with an altered voice, looking up with cold sweat running down his neck toward the pink figure floating meters above.

"That guy isn't a normal human being... If we stay here a single second longer, absolutely no one will be left alive to tell what happened today in this village. Move already!"

Kurotsuchi clenched her teeth with immense strength, swallowing the lump of bitterness that threatened to choke her in the middle of the disaster.

She took one last look at her grandfather's inert and bleeding silhouette in the distance of the battlefield, feeling how the implacable words Daigo had dedicated to her resonated in her mind with the indestructible force of an iron mandate:

"I want you to become Tsuchikage and change your village for the better..." Standing up clumsily with a broken heart, she forced her trembling legs to respond and ran alongside Deidara toward the protective shadows of the eastern evacuation canal, joining the chaotic flow of terrified Iwagakure troops precipitously abandoning the battlefield.

In the center of all the chaos over the destroyed platform of the stadium, the air seemed to have frozen completely in an almost unreal stillness.

Daigo floated majestically in the sky using his Light-Weight Rock Technique (Koshinjutsu), maintaining a perfectly upright, serene, and elegant posture several dozen meters high above the ground.

Directly in front of him, suspended in the vastness of the desert sky without needing to lean on any structure, stood the enigmatic figure with orange hair and a black robe decorated with red clouds.

Pain stared at him intently with eyes that clearly did not belong to any mortal being known on earth: concentric waves of a pale, mystical, and hypnotic purple tone that seemed to encompass and dominate the entire spectrum of human existence. The legendary supreme Dōjutsu, the Rinnegan.

Pain showed not the slightest sign of haste, agitation, or any emotion in his facial features. His arms remained elegantly concealed beneath the wide, dark sleeves of his cloak, and his black metal piercings coldly reflected the harsh light of the bright midday sun.

"Is your show over, Kazekage?" Pain finally spoke. His voice was neither deep nor harsh; it was an incredibly monotonous tone, flat and completely devoid of any human nuance or warmth, as if those words were being uttered by an ancient stone statue simply reproducing the distant thought of a superior divine entity.

Daigo did not immediately respond to the provocation. He wore the same slight, leisurely, and almost cordial smile on his face that had characterized him since the definitive end of the Third Shinobi World War.

He calmly raised his right hand, the same one that still held remnants of the pink crystal layer and encrustations of Ōnoki's crimson blood, and with a careless movement of his fingers, wiped his forehead and cheek, shaking off the small red drops like someone brushing off routine dust after finishing a common job.

Completely ignoring the Akatsuki leader's mocking question, Daigo tilted his head slightly and articulated his own query in a clear, powerful, and resonant voice that easily cut through the dry desert wind.

"Rinnegan... interesting," was the first thing Daigo said upon being face to face with Pain, who showed no surprise at Daigo naming his eyes.

"Indeed, I find it surprising that you have heard of it."

"Well, I like the past history of these lands, though tell me something..." Daigo began, slightly adjusting the collar of his robe.

"For what reason does an organization that has preferred to act in the shadows for so long decide to make such an open, careless, and clumsy move as joining Iwagakure in this invasion?" Daigo made a amused gesture, slightly narrowing his single pink eye.

"Even if you like to move very quietly along the borders of the great villages performing mercenary work for minor feudal lords, I know your name is Akatsuki, and being a group of S-class ninjas, I doubt you only want to be mercenaries."

For the first time since his sudden appearance on the battlefield, the concentric pupils of Pain's Rinnegan showed a slight tactical adjustment. A deep and heavy silence reigned between both fighters for three long heartbeats.

"Indeed... I did not expect a Kage to have such precise knowledge about the existence of Akatsuki," Pain responded, without altering the icy monotony of his vocal tone in the slightest.

"However, your individual knowledge lacks any relevance in the face of the inevitable destiny that approaches. This world we live in is submerged in selfish and destructive ignorance, foolishly believing that the prosperity of one nation justifies the misery of another. Sunagakure has grown and developed too fast under your command, completely ignoring the pain that its borders impose on the rest of the continent. I have not come here to debate politics or temporary alliances with stubborn, useless old men like the Tsuchikage. I have come to Sunagakure with the sole purpose of showing you reality. I have come to teach this entire world what true pain means."

Daigo carefully contemplated the motionless figure of the Akatsuki leader, Pain. Behind the imposing facade of that reanimated corpse with chakra receptor piercings, his cold, highly calculating, and intelligent mind read the real structure of the enemy's technique with extreme precision.

He knew perfectly well that the orange-haired man was nothing more than a physical puppet, an empty shell being controlled from a safe distance by the true user of the Rinnegan: Nagato Uzumaki.

"Pain is simply an excellent excuse for those mediocre people who stayed stuck in their past tragedies and lack the ability or strength to build anything new," Daigo said with a completely ruthless serenity in his eyes.

Without uttering a single word more to waste time, Daigo crossed his shoulders and tilted his head smoothly to the side, producing a dry snap of his cervical vertebrae as he cracked his neck.

In the very next millisecond, the air above the colosseum exploded thunderously.

BANG!

A massive sonic boom echoed through the atmosphere as Daigo activated the First Breath of the Seven Heavens to shoot forward. His human figure instantly disappeared from the view of any observer, turning into an implacable, undetectable pink blur that cut through the aerial distance at superhuman speed, appearing right in Pain's upper blind spot with his right fist covered in a layer of crystal.

Pain, however, showed not the slightest physical surprise at the Kazekage's overwhelming speed. He didn't turn his head or adjust his foot stance in midair. He simply extended his right hand forward with absolute calm, placing his open palm in the direction of Daigo's attack path.

"Shinra Tensei."

A gravitational and repulsive force of monstrous density detonated from Pain's open palm. The impact of the shockwave was not just a common physical barrier; it was an invisible wall of pure gravity that struck Daigo's body full-on in midair.

Although the Kazekage clearly foresaw the existence of Shinra Tensei, he had never faced it before and failed to fully anticipate the overwhelming volume and destructive magnitude of that gravitational force.

The force of gravity was so sudden and strong that he could not resist it, sending him flying backward as if hit by an entire moving mountain. Daigo crossed the sky of the central district like a missile, tearing through dense layers of smoke before impacting with atrocious force against the upper facade of a central building in Suna.

BOOOOM!

The massive reinforced stone structure partially collapsed under the violence of the physical impact, raising a dense curtain of dust, rubble, and broken stones.

However, Daigo did not waste a single moment lamenting. Getting back up in a fraction of a second amid the smoking ruins of the building, using his hands he stood up quickly, wiping off everything that fell onto his body, though he didn't even have time to evaluate anything else.

His sensory senses, perfected to the maximum by all his training, urgently warned him that something was coming toward him, diving straight down from another building in the village onto his position.

An overwhelming, deafening, and purely bestial roar suddenly tore through the city sky.

Quickly looking up revealed the hideous creature: a giant centipede with iron fangs, armored plates, and dark eyes marked with the same wave pattern of the Rinnegan, summoned on a nearby building by Pain's Animal Path.

The giant body of that monster, dozens of meters long and weighing several tons, came toward him at full speed with the clear intention of crushing him with its fangs as if he were its dinner.

Daigo flexed his knees on the collapsed ledge, clenched his fist with force, and took a dazzling jump directly toward the face of the centipede that wanted to eat him.

"A centipede? Do you think this can do anything to me, Pain?!" Daigo said with annoyance at having to fight against summons.

Wrapping his right fist in a thick, dense, and shiny layer of pink crystal, Daigo delivered a devastating uppercut against the lower jaw of the giant centipede. The pure physical force of his strike, multiplied thanks to the Breath of the Seven Heavens, generated an impact so strong that the wind moved with it.

CRACK-BOOOOM!

The destructive impact of the crystallized fist instantly fractured the giant centipede's thick outer shell and drastically altered its flight path. The imposing creature was completely deflected off course, shot out like an out-of-control projectile straight into the empty basin of the abandoned colosseum.

Daigo knew perfectly well, thanks to his seismic sense, that this specific area of the stadium had been completely evacuated of civilians and allied troops following Ōnoki's execution.

The summoned centipede crashed against the remaining walls still standing in the colosseum with a devastating seismic thud that raised a column of debris.

However, the relentless combined attack of the Akatsuki lineup gave Daigo not even half a second of truce or respite.

As soon as the giant beast fell defeated into the stadium, a sharp, shrill, and purely mechanical whistle echoed behind him. A short distance from his position, Pain's Asura Path had deployed its complex mechanical limbs, throwing open the protective armor of its shoulders to reveal a deadly battery of rockets powered by concentrated chakra.

Six metallic projectiles shot off at close range, leaving dense trails of white smoke behind as they flew on an inevitable, direct collision course toward Daigo's position.

Daigo did not make the mistake of trying to block the missiles head-on. Flexing his torso with fluidity, he bounced off the surface of an adjacent stone pillar and projected himself to the side a millisecond before the missiles impacted full-on against the building's roof.

BOOOOOOOM!

A violent series of chain explosions completely demolished the remains of the building that had previously been held up only by luck, engulfing the entire perimeter in a hell of collapse.

But Daigo was already completely outside the effective blast radius. Cutting through the curtain of dust like a swift pink exhalation, Daigo concentrated a massive and overwhelming flow of chakra into his right fist, shaping the energy with extreme precision to connect a definitive physical blow as he charged once more toward the main figure of Pain.

Pain floated in the exact same aerial position as the beginning, completely motionless, without having changed the angle of his cold gaze at any point.

Before Daigo could close the last three meters of distance to strike the face of the Akatsuki leader, a second figure abruptly stepped into his aerial attack path.

It was the Preta Path: an extremely robust, bald man with a broad face who appeared out of nowhere with both arms extended forward to intercept the Kazekage's violent frontal attack.

Seeing the sudden intrusion of this new reanimated body with open palms facing him, Daigo flashed a small, cold, and confident smile in midair.

"Got one of you out..." Daigo thought with absolute tactical coldness, knowing there would be one less body.

Daigo did not stop his punch or reduce the power of his blow. He deliberately allowed his right fist, loaded with a truly massive amount of chakra, to strike full-force against the open palms of the Preta Path.

At the precise moment of physical contact, the Rinnegan's signature ability activated automatically: the Preta Path's body began to ravenously absorb, drain, and devour all the chakra concentrated in Daigo's hand, dissolving the bright layer of Shōton into thousands of tiny sparks of pink light that disappeared into absolute nothingness.

The Preta Path held its position firmly in midair, prepared to completely neutralize Daigo's elemental ninjutsu and leave him disarmed. But what that reanimated body could not foresee in any way—and what Nagato's distant mind did not know about the true nature of his powerful enemy—was the very foundation upon which Daigo's power was built.

Unlike conventional shinobi inhabiting the Five Great Nations, whose combat strength relied almost entirely on the constant molding of chakra, Daigo had dedicated every single day of his life to subjecting his body to truly inhumane physical, athletic, and intensive training.

His massive raw strength, the density of his muscle fibers, and the reaction speed of his joints were not a simple illusion generated by ninjutsu or chakra control; they were the result of absolute physical and athletic conditioning, designed precisely never to depend on chakra if the combat situation demanded it.

Although the Preta Path successfully drained every last drop of chakra accumulated in his hand, the immense physical force and Daigo's momentum continued their devastating course.

"Chakra is just a simple tool..." Daigo whispered with his mouth right next to the reanimated corpse's ear.

"My own body is the real weapon."

PAAAAAMMMMM!

Without the protection of chakra to cushion the impact, Daigo's bare, pure, and direct fist collided against the Preta Path's face with the unstoppable power of a heavy iron battering ram.

The force generated by the strike was so utterly devastating that the Preta Path's body bent backward at a completely unnatural angle with a crunchy snap of broken bones, while the facial structure of the reanimated body deformed horribly from the force.

The Preta Path went flying backward like a heavy stone thrown by the full force of the blow, hurtling through the air at breakneck speed until embedding itself deep into the stone wall of a tower more than a hundred meters away, left completely disabled, broken, and out of commission to continue getting in the way.

Daigo didn't land; he remained in midair while looking at his fist, feeling that his plan had never let him down for a reason: even if crystal was strong, taijutsu had never failed him.

Around him, the strategic lineup of Pain's paths lay completely exposed before his analytical eyes. Four of Pain's six reanimated bodies floated or remained stationed at key points on the surrounding roofs and ledges: Pain in the absolute center of the formation, the Asura Path adjusting its deadly mechanical weapons to the left, the Animal Path preparing new imposing summons to the right, and the Human Path observing in absolute silence from the rear of the zone.

Daigo calmly readjusted his shoulders, keeping his gaze fixed on Pain's pupils, but slowly extended his right arm toward the opposite side of the village.

He pointed his index finger directly toward the shadow of a half-destroyed structure located over two hundred meters away from the main front line.

"You tried to hide it quite well among the ruins, but it's completely useless against my senses," Daigo said, showing a cold smile that seemed to freeze the ambient temperature.

"You have one body hidden carefully in the rear for the sole purpose of repairing and summoning the other paths again if they fall in direct combat. I know exactly where the path safeguarding that function is located... the Naraka Path is hiding right in that building."

For the first time since the decisive battle began, Pain slightly shifted the rigid stance of his shoulders in midair. The cold neutrality of his pale face hardened suddenly as the purple pupils of the Rinnegan locked onto the Kazekage's figure with a dark, heavy, and extremely dangerous intensity.

The open revelation that Daigo not only understood the exact division of his bodies' abilities, but had also located the most vital and key member of his tactical formation within minutes, completely exceeded any prior defensive calculations made by Nagato.

Pain slowly raised both hands toward the sky, allowing the wide, dark sleeves of his red-cloud-patterned robe to flutter wildly in the fierce desert breeze.

"I have seen more than enough of you..." declared Pain's monotonous voice, though this time loaded with a grave, deep, and ominous vibration that made the small stones on the ground tremble slightly.

"Your individual capabilities far exceed the ordinary ninjas of this world, Kazekage. Your cold logic, your brute force, and your extreme strategies are the exact reflection of a man who has never in his life known true despair. But the history of this shinobi world always ends in the exact same way."

The sky over Sunagakure seemed to darken slightly, as if a dense, heavy, and tragic shadow had settled directly over the brightness of the sun.

"It is time for you to know True pain," Pain sentenced.

Pain began to slowly descend from the heights toward Daigo's fixed position, while behind him, the threatening silhouettes of the other paths adjusted their defensive formation to completely surround the leader of the Sand.

The true battle for the absolute survival of Sunagakure was just beginning.