At dawn, Iwagakure's camp looked like a field of ruins.
Broken walls and rubble lay everywhere. Some gravely wounded shinobi were still groaning faintly, while wisps of black smoke rose from the camp. Shattered kunai and shuriken, along with bloodstains on the ground, spoke of the brutal battle that had just taken place.
Ōnoki sat on a boulder, covered in dirt and dust, his face faintly showing dejection and confusion.
They had only just finished sealing the rampaging Five-Tails last night when Kumogakure immediately launched its attack. The battle had continued until around dawn.
Just now, Iwagakure had finally managed to repel the Cloud Shinobi attack. No, "repel" was not quite accurate. More precisely, they had frightened the Cloud Shinobi into retreating.
Already badly weakened by the Five-Tails' rampage, stripped of the deterrence of their Tailed Beast, and thrown into chaos with morale at rock bottom, Iwagakure had been beaten down relentlessly by the Cloud Shinobi, suffering devastating casualties.
In the end, with the entire front on the verge of collapse, Ōnoki, pushed to his limit, could no longer afford to keep mutually restraining the Third Raikage. Instead, he decisively turned his Dust Release against the ordinary Cloud Shinobi.
Naturally, without Two-Scales Ōnoki holding him back, the Third Raikage charged into Iwagakure's lines and began slaughtering freely. Yet Ōnoki had made up his mind to disregard the lives of his own men and focus solely on the Cloud Shinobi's ordinary fighters. In barely a dozen minutes, casualties on the battlefield had risen to a level high enough to make the leaders of both villages burst a blood vessel at the sight.
In the end, the Third Raikage could not endure such horrifying losses and withdrew with his men. But Iwagakure had also been battered beyond recognition. Even though the casualty