"What... is... that?"
Their faces suddenly drained of color. Their horrified eyes slowly widened, and their trembling lips formed disjointed words. Shock had frozen their entire bodies. Nearly all the Sound Village and Sunagakure allied forces were like this, staring fixedly upward at the colossal thing before them.
A vast wall like a mountain cliff, its top piercing the clouds and blotting out the sky, its base rooted in the earth, stretching endlessly to the left and blocking off Konoha to the right. It gleamed with black metallic luster and some deep, heavy hue.
An invisible, rumbling pressure descended heavily upon their hearts along with that enormous wall.
Overwhelming terror and dread had consumed every last scrap of room they had for thought.
This...
How... were they supposed to fight? At last, the military morale that had already begun to crumble completely shattered at that moment.
"Crack..."
A few black stones shook loose from where the massive wall rooted into the ground. Carrying traces of the tremors, they rumbled into the dense forest.
"Tap!"
Then they lightly struck a thick root.
"Wha..."
At the same time, half a cry of shock came from atop that enormous root—or rather, a startled cry that seemed to have been abruptly strangled in the throat.
"In an instant... he changed Konoha's entire landscape... with a wall like this..."
Then another voice rang out, trembling slightly and filled with terror.
After those two sentences, there was nothing more. The dense forest fell silent amid the faint trembling of the air stirred by the quaking ground.
Yet although there were no more voices and the forest had fallen quiet, those two sentences combined with that silence spread an utter sense of despair: How were they supposed to fight this?
"Lord Baki..."
Only after a long,