Chapter 303: What Is He Waiting For?
Kaede stood beside the battlements and looked into the distance.
The Eight-Tails and Shukaku remained crouched there like two small mountains, completely motionless.
The violent charge from moments earlier, when they had seemed determined to swallow the entire defensive line, had abruptly stopped.
Onoki floated to Kaede’s left and rubbed his aching lower back.
"Something’s wrong."
His tone carried the instincts of an old fox who had spent a lifetime on battlefields.
"They have two Tailed Beasts here and an unknown commander behind them. With that kind of force, not pressing the advantage and tearing open the defenses makes no sense."
Kaede didn’t answer.
One hand rested on the wall while his gaze moved away from the two Tailed Beasts and toward the dense darkness farther beyond.
The enemy possessed the Rinnegan.
Controlled Tailed Beasts.
And an unknowable number of White Zetsu buried underground.
If they ignored the cost and threw everything into the first charge, they absolutely could have torn open at least one breach.
But they hadn’t.
They would rather leave Gyuki and Shukaku standing as targets than advance another step.
There was only one explanation.
They were stalling.
But this was the frontal battlefield.
What was there to stall for?
Unless the enemy’s true killing move had never been intended for the front line.
Kaede’s eyelids lifted slightly.
He withdrew his gaze from the end of the plain and turned toward the rear.
"No word from the communications squads yet?"
The moment he asked, a dark figure flashed in from the side of the wall.
A messenger ninja offered a scroll with both hands.
"Report! Urgent messages from the eastern, western, and southern sectors!"
Kaede took the scroll and opened it immediately.
His eyes moved rapidly across the dense information.
First: the eastern battlefield.
Three thousand White Zetsu and three Tailed Beasts had launched a concentrated assault.
Minato, the Third Hokage, and Jiraiya had joined forces. The line remained stable, and large groups of White Zetsu had been cut apart without creating a breach.
Second: the southern battlefield.
Two thousand White Zetsu attempted underground infiltration. Rasa detected them in advance and used a large-scale Gold Dust burial to seal them underground.
Good.
Kaede continued reading.
The third line described what had happened behind the three defensive sectors during the past several dozen minutes.
"Twelve disguised assassination attempts targeting senior commanders occurred across the camps."
Kaede paused at those words.
Onoki noticed the tiny change immediately and lowered himself closer.
"Something happened in the rear?"
His voice became heavy.
Kaede didn’t answer yet. He continued reading.
The next lines stated:
"Because complete intelligence on White Zetsu was obtained before the battle, all identification mechanisms operated normally."
"All twelve disguised assassins were exposed before reaching their targets."
"All twelve infiltrators were eliminated on site."
"The internal purge is complete. No casualties. All camps have entered maximum alert."
Kaede looked at those lines.
That made sense.
He had gone to great lengths before the war to expose everything they knew about White Zetsu and prepare countermeasures for exactly this situation.
If even several senior commanders died, orders would become confused and the soldiers below would begin suspecting one another.
An allied army assembled from tens of thousands of shinobi belonging to different factions would collapse from inside almost immediately.
Once that happened, the Tailed Beasts on the front line could advance simultaneously and shatter the defenses.
So that had been Black Zetsu’s plan.
A clever plan.
Unfortunately for Black Zetsu, Kaede had already ruined the information advantage it was counting on.
Kaede’s gaze reached the bottom of the scroll, where the report from the western battlefield ended.
Below a long list of ordinary defensive data, one extra sentence had been added in fine handwriting.
The characters were elegant, with the connected strokes of someone’s habitual penmanship.
"Pakura is unharmed. I am unharmed as well."
Kaede stared at the sentence for several seconds.
He could almost picture the scene.
Mei sitting inside the western command post after surviving an assassination attempt, writing the military report.
At the very end, she probably bit lightly on the pen and secretly added that one sentence in the corner.
It was supposed to be a battlefield report, yet the words carried an almost blatant desire for personal credit.
As if that fox-faced woman had crossed half the battlefield to stand directly before him and say smugly:
’Look how well I handled everything.’
’Your person came through without losing even a strand of hair, too.’
The corner of Kaede’s mouth shifted.
When she behaved normally, Mei really was very clever.
He rolled up the scroll and looked toward the depths of Konoha.
By now, Kushina should be preparing to give birth.
With Black Zetsu’s thousand years of scheming, there was no possibility it had wagered everything on White Zetsu infiltration alone.
That attack was probably only the first layer.
What would it do next?
...
Dozens of kilometers from the northern battlefield, wind couldn’t penetrate the dense old forest.
Fu stood on a thick branch, most of his face hidden in shadow.
Suddenly, ripples passed across the surface of the trunk beside him.
A half-black, half-white figure seeped from the wood grain.
Black Zetsu.
Its eyes turned in the darkness, and the surrounding atmosphere seemed to become oppressive immediately.
"The infiltration failed completely."
"Twelve advanced White Zetsu clones were exposed the moment they approached the command centers."
The black half of its body churned restlessly.
"Where did this go wrong?"
"White Zetsu’s transformation can perfectly reproduce chakra properties and circulation patterns. How could the allied forces build such an accurate identification system in so little time?!"
The faster Black Zetsu spoke, the greater the rage in its eyes became.
It had planned for so long, yet the very first move had been crushed immediately.
The feeling of everything slipping outside its control made it intensely irritable.
Fu stood beside it and showed no response to the anger.
The Rinnegan beneath his hood lost focus slightly.
One image refused to leave his mind.
That brief exchange of gazes with the young commander on the northern wall.
Fu was certain he had never met him.
Yet remembering that face produced a strange tremor somewhere deep inside him.
Impossible to describe.
Almost as though...
"Hey!"
Black Zetsu raised its voice and shattered his thoughts.
"What are you spacing out for?!"
Fu blinked, and his focus returned.
He turned his head. His lips moved as though he wanted to ask something.
In the end, he only shook his head.
Black Zetsu stared at him for several seconds.
It had no interest in what this tool was thinking.
As long as the Rinnegan still worked and the man could still form hand seals, that was enough.
"The infiltration failing merely removed one shortcut from the plan."
Black Zetsu looked toward Konoha again.
"We skip the first stage and move directly to the next."
"Control every Tailed Beast. Ignore the cost. Smash open those defenses by force!"
Fu nodded and raised both hands.
His fingers interlocked.
He formed a seal.
Dozens of kilometers away, Gyuki and Shukaku, which had been crouched like dead objects, suddenly moved.
The next instant, deafening roars erupted from all four directions.