Sukuna caught Daisuke's fist two inches from his jaw and redirected it past his shoulder, then put a palm on Daisuke's back and pushed. Daisuke stumbled three steps forward and had to plant his front foot hard to keep from going face-first into the wet grass.
"You're telegraphing with your shoulder," Sukuna said. "Anyone paying attention will read it."
Daisuke straightened and rolled the offending shoulder. Rain dripped from the end of his nose and he wiped it with his forearm. "I've been doing it that way for years. The shoulder thing is just how I throw a punch."
"Then you've been telegraphing for years." Sukuna shifted his weight and settled back into a neutral stance. "Again. And this time keep your shoulder quiet until the arm actually moves."
Daisuke came at him again, and the shoulder fired early again, and Sukuna caught the punch and redirected it and pushed him past. Same problem.
On the fourth attempt, the shoulder stayed down. The punch came without warning and Sukuna had to actually move to avoid it, a short step to the left, and Daisuke's fist passed through the space his chin had occupied with enough force to matter.
"Better," Sukuna said.
The training yard behind the compound held twenty-three people that morning, which was everyone the Akatsuki currently had on-site minus the three who mattered most. Yahiko, Konan, and Nagato had left before dawn two days ago, traveling south toward Hanzo's compound. The summit with the delegations from Konohagakure, Sunagakure, and Iwagakure was supposed to last a week. Formal mediation. Peace negotiations.
Sukuna had watched them go from the compound's gate, standing beside Wasuke in the predawn dark with the rain coming down and the lanterns throwing amber light across the courtyard. Yahiko had clapped him on the shoulder. "Keep everyone sharp while we're gone, yeah?"
Konan had handed Wasuke a stack of paper seals for the eastern wall because the rain had degraded them. And Nagato had looked at Sukuna with those ringed eyes and said nothing.
Then they'd gone, and the compound had felt quieter ever since, and Sukuna had filled the quiet with training because that was what he did when thinking wouldn't help.
"Rotate!" Wasuke's voice carried across the yard from the far end, where he stood on a raised platform made from stacked supply crates. The yari was planted beside him, its three prongs catching the gray light, and he held a clipboard in one hand. His brother had taken to the instructor role with a naturalness that shouldn't have surprised Sukuna but still did, a little.
The groups shifted. Sora moved from the taijutsu section to the ninjutsu line, and Daisuke took her place opposite a young fighter named Ren whose hand-to-hand needed work. Hideo set up at the ninjutsu station with three students and began walking them through a wind-shaping exercise that Sukuna had watched him teach a dozen times.
Sukuna moved to the genjutsu section, where six people sat in pairs on the wet grass facing each other with their eyes closed. The exercise was one Wasuke had designed: each pair took turns casting basic illusions on their partner, and the defender practiced catching the intrusion before it took hold. The anti-genjutsu seals that Sukuna and Wasuke wore were too personalized to distribute, but the underlying principle of early detection could be trained.
A woman named Fumiko opened her eyes and shook her head. She was in her late twenties, a former farmer's daughter who'd picked up a sword during the war because the alternative was dying.
"I can't tell when it starts," Fumiko said. "By the time I realize something's wrong, the illusion's already established and I'm fighting to get out instead of catching it early."
Sukuna crouched beside her and rested his forearms on his knees. "The foreign chakra enters through your sensory organs and integrates into the pathways that connect them to your brain. The integration takes time, maybe half a second for a skilled caster. During that half second, the incoming energy creates a disruption in your natural flow. A stutter. Like a stone dropping into still water."
He held up his hand and let a thin thread of chakra extend from his fingertip, visible as a faint shimmer. "Your job isn't to detect the illusion. By the time the illusion exists, you've already lost the advantage. Your job is to detect the stutter; the moment something enters your network that doesn't belong there."
Fumiko nodded and closed her eyes again, and her partner, a quiet man named Taro, began another attempt. Sukuna tracked the foreign chakra as it left Taro's system and entered Fumiko's sensory pathways. The integration was rough, which was expected.
Two seconds passed, then three. Fumiko's face tightened and her hands came together in the disruption seal and her chakra surged through her network and the foreign energy scattered. She opened her eyes.
"I felt it that time," she said. "Right at the start. A sort of... buzzing? In my ears."
"That's the stutter," Sukuna said. "Remember what it feels like."
He moved between the other pairs. The work was repetitive and detailed and demanded more patience than Sukuna naturally possessed, but he did it because Wasuke would’ve nagged him if he didn’t.
The morning stretched into early afternoon. Wasuke circled the field with his clipboard. He sparred briefly with Sora at the taijutsu station and caught her overextended jab between the yari's lateral tines and twisted the weapon in a motion that would've disarmed her if he'd committed to it. Instead he released the trap and showed her the counter and she tried it on him and he let her succeed once before tightening his defense.
Sukuna was showing Ren how to concentrate chakra enhancement into the forearms for blocking when the sound reached him.
Footsteps, fast and uneven, feet slapping against wet stone and squelching through mud. The breathing that came with them was ragged and harsh and audible from a hundred meters out.
Sukuna's head turned south and his hand moved to the katana's grip.
Wasuke stepped to the edge of the platform and looked south, and the yari settled into his right hand.
The figure appeared at the edge of the tree line and kept coming. His name was Kenji, maybe nineteen, one of the Akatsuki's fastest runners. His face was flushed a deep red beneath rain-soaked hair, and his legs shook with each stride and his mouth hung open pulling air in gulps.
He hit the compound gate at something between a run and a controlled collapse, and he doubled over against the stone archway and his chest heaved.
Sukuna crossed the training yard in five strides, and Wasuke dropped from the platform and followed three paces behind.
Kenji looked up. His eyes were wide and bloodshot.
"It's a trap." The words came out between gasps. "The summit. Hanzo. He's going to kill them."
The training yard went silent.
Sukuna's hand tightened on the katana's grip. "How do you know this?"
Kenji pushed himself upright against the archway and pressed one hand against the stitch in his side.
"One of our people inside Amegakure. A civilian contact who works in the administrative building near Hanzo's compound. She saw troop movements last night, ANBU-level squads repositioning around the meeting site, and she got a message out through the network before the perimeter closed." He coughed and spat. "It's not a negotiation. There are no village delegations. The whole thing was Hanzo's setup from the start."
Daisuke swore and grabbed his field kit. Sora had her sword drawn before Kenji finished talking. Hideo's hands were already forming seals.
Wasuke stepped past Sukuna and caught Kenji by the shoulder. "How long ago did the contact send the message?"
"Six hours ago." Kenji's breathing was slowing but his eyes hadn't lost that wild edge. "I ran the whole way. Sixty kilometers. The summit was scheduled to begin at noon today."
Noon. Four hours ago.
Sukuna turned. Every face in the training yard was looking at him and Wasuke.
"Everyone moves," Sukuna said. "Nobody stops for anything."
Wasuke was already organizing. "Daisuke, grab every medical supply we have and seal it. Sora, Hideo, you're the forward element with me. Ren, Taro, Fumiko, center group. Everyone else falls in behind Sukuna."
The compound's armory emptied in three minutes. Sukuna strapped his katana to his hip and pulled his cloak on and checked the storage scrolls at his belt: two with preserved Dismantles, one with medical supplies, one with flesh clone materials.
Kenji tried to stand and his legs buckled. Daisuke caught him and eased him against the wall.
"You stay here," Daisuke said.
"Like hell I do," Kenji said, but his body disagreed. Daisuke pressed a canteen into his hands, and Kenji's face crumpled as he watched the rest of them prepare to leave.
Sukuna looked at his brother. Wasuke met his eyes. Half a second, and it was enough.
"Move," Sukuna said, and twenty-three people moved.
They hit the southern road at a pace that would've been unsustainable for most shinobi. Wasuke set the speed from the front, fast enough to eat distance without losing anyone. Sukuna ran at the rear and monitored the formation through his chakra perception, and when someone started to flag he called a brief slowdown.
The rain intensified as they moved south, driven by a wind off the mountains that hit the canopy hard enough to strip leaves. Visibility dropped to fifty meters and the road became a stream of brown water ankle-deep in the ruts.
They covered thirty kilometers in the first two hours. The pace would've been faster with just Sukuna and Wasuke, but nobody quit and nobody asked to slow down.
Thirty-two kilometers in, the road descended into a valley where a river had overflowed its banks. The group waded through knee-deep water cold enough to make Sukuna's calves ache, and on the far side the road climbed sharply through a gap in the ridgeline that opened onto a broad plateau.
The plateau stretched south toward Hanzo's territory, treeless, the grass beaten flat by rain. Sukuna could see for nearly a kilometer in every direction.
Two chakra signatures registered ahead. Both were suppressed, deliberately held low, invisible until the group crested the ridge. The suppression was expert-level, comparable to Sukuna's own. That told him something.
Sukuna accelerated to the front in three Body Flicker steps and fell in beside Wasuke. "Two. Ahead. Five hundred meters."
Wasuke's grip shifted on the yari. "I see them."
The group slowed, and twenty-three sets of eyes found the two figures ahead.
They stood thirty meters apart, centered on the road. Open grassland on either side, no cover.
The figure on the left was strange. He stood with his arms folded, and his body seemed to emerge from something vegetal, a structure that rose up around him in two halves that resembled the open jaws of a massive flytrap. His face was visible between them, split down the middle, one half white and one half black.
The figure on the right was the one Sukuna focused on.
He wore a black robe, high-collared, falling to his ankles. And his face was covered by a mask.
The mask was orange, bright against the gray, with a single eyehole on the right side that revealed nothing but shadow. Concentric spirals radiated from the eyehole across the surface.
Sukuna held up his fist and twenty-three people halted behind him, and the rain fell between them and the two figures in a curtain of gray water.
His gut told him these two were dangerous. The plant-thing on the left radiated wrongness, and the masked figure on the right looked entirely at ease. Or close to it.
Wasuke shifted the yari into a two-handed grip and lowered the tri-pronged head to a ready angle. Behind them, Sora drew her sword and Hideo's hands began forming seals.
The masked figure tilted his head. The single eyehole angled toward Sukuna.
Then he stepped forward, unhurried, and raised his right hand palm out, and spoke from behind the mask, pleasant and steady.
"That's enough. You won't be going any further."