Minato Namikaze stared fixedly at the distant Deva Path, his palms slick with cold sweat.
The shadow of a nation.
The supreme ruler of the mighty Land of Water.
Yet he had been silently captured and forcibly stripped of the tailed beast within him!
What was even more terrifying was this.
The Mizukage had been attacked, and the tailed beast stolen.
And yet, for something this huge, not a single whisper had leaked from the entire Land of Water or all of Kirigakure!
No unrest, no calls for aid, no intelligence leaks.
It was as though nothing had happened.
Minato's fists clenched with a crack.
What did that mean?
It meant that this Akatsuki not only possessed the terrifying military power to easily suppress a perfect jinchūriki.
They had even silently taken complete control of Kirigakure's upper ranks!
They had toyed with the shinobi village of one of the Five Great Nations in the palms of their hands, turning it into an airtight city of death!
At that thought.
Minato Namikaze felt an unprecedented wariness toward the Akatsuki led by Pain and the masked man before him.
Minato Namikaze stared fixedly at those colossal creatures, cold sweat soaking the handle of his kunai.
Before he could devise a response, Pain, standing atop the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path, raised his hand again.
"Feel the weight of despair."
Pain's pale-purple Rinnegan did not ripple in the slightest. His hollow voice seemed to be pronouncing Konoha's death sentence.
At his command.
Son Goku, Kokuō, Saiken, Chōmei.
The four mountain-sized tailed beasts raised their heads at once.
They opened their gaping maws.
The chakra drifting through the air surged madly into their mouths like a hundred rivers returning to the sea.
Yin and Yang chakra compressed and condensed at an extreme ratio.