Bloodbath at Kikyō Mountain

Beneath Kikyō Mountain City, the battle turned upside down in an instant. One moment, Sunagakure's army had been immersed in the frenzy of imminent victory; the next, they had fallen into a carefully woven death trap.

Minato Namikaze's very existence overturned conventional understanding of shinobi. His Flying Thunder God had no hand-sign windup or movement trajectory—it was a conceptual "teleportation." Golden light flashed anywhere it could: at the landing points of thrown kunai, within the smoke of Explosive Tags, even beside Sunagakure shinobi who had been knocked flying. Every flash brought precise, efficient death. Like an indifferent god of death, he wielded kunai marked with his formula as he darted freely through Sunagakure's ranks. Wherever he passed, shinobi fell in swathes, without even time to scream. He was as fast as true lightning; ordinary shinobi's reflexes simply could not keep up, and despair spread through the army like a plague. The rumor that one could abandon a mission upon encountering Konoha's Yellow Flash had now become a bloody reality.

To the flank and rear, Orochimaru, riding Manda, brought another kind of terror. Every twist and sweep of Manda's massive body cleared a huge stretch of ground, smashing Sunagakure shinobi and their defenses alike into pulp. The purple poisonous mist it spewed was intensely corrosive; anything it touched collapsed, instantly creating broad zones of death. Orochimaru himself moved like a specter, using vicious, sinister ninjutsu. Every flash of the Kusanagi Sword's cold gleam brought a spray of blood. The private forces of Konoha's ninja clans under his command were even more elite, driving like a blade deep into Sunagakure's chaotic rear formation.

On the front walls, Konoha's defenders, who had seemed on the verge of collapse, erupted with astonishing fighting strength after being spurred on by the arrival of reinforcements. Countless