"Begin."
As Pain's words fell, the clay giant bird beneath Deidara fiercely beat its wings and carried him soaring into the sky.
The next moment, piercing alarms rang throughout Sunagakure. One Sand ninja after another looked up, only to see enormous vines that had sprung from nowhere winding around the entire area. Everyone's faces went pale.
"Akatsuki really attacked!"
"Damn... Is that the First Hokage's power?"
"With this much chakra, the entire village has been sealed off!"
Chiyo and Ebizo, who had been summoned back out, looked at the horrifying sea of vines surrounding the walls, their expressions ugly to the extreme.
"Damn it, how could Hashirama Senju, who was brought back by Impure World Reincarnation, be this powerful?!"
Chiyo could only helplessly stare at the immense-scale ninjutsu. Sunagakure's prized puppet techniques were laughably fragile before this monster-level power.
Mechanisms, kunai, and poison—those usual methods had no chance of dealing with the situation before them.
Ordinary puppets were no different from toys before true powerhouses.
In the entire Ninja World, only Sasori of the Red Sands had, through his talent, developed human puppets to the point where they could use the ninjutsu the deceased had possessed in life, making them almost a crude imitation of Impure World Reincarnation. As for other puppets, in this era where the balance of power had completely collapsed, they could at most serve as cannon fodder.
Just then, Ebizo suddenly looked toward Sunagakure's entrance, and his expression changed at once.
"Not good! Earth Release ninja, quickly use Earth Release to block the flood!"
Sunagakure was built in a valley, surrounded by steep cliffs. This terrain had originally been a natural barrier that was easy to defend and hard to attack, but after Captain Yura of the guard force betrayed them, the entire village had instead