When it rains it pours and the other villages must have decided it was open season.
It's been building up these past few months with missions being sabotaged, travellers being ambushed, warehouses and safehouses being discovered, then Konoha trying to lash out at the in-village plants.
But it was at least spread out, hesitant steps forward to see how the travellers react, how much power and political leverage they have.
Now the villages know more than enough to start phase two, and it happens all at once. The travellers are such a small group compared to villages of any size, so split up and scattered across the Elemental Nations - they get hit hard.
They try to gather together, reinforce their safehouses, go to ground in villages, and they're still smoked out because the villages haven't been idle.
People have noticed and they've kept track and while the traveller infiltrators tried to hide it, they can't hide this much, these years of setting up dominoes just to watch them fall. They've left a frayed but noticeable string of witnesses, destruction, bribes...
Once the villages started putting things together, things clicked and led into each other and it all came at once. First the fear, then the outrage, then arrogance, and finally the orders to find the travellers and wipe out every last one.
Kazaru marches with an army of hollowed out corpses at his back, slaughtering an entire town on the border of Iwa just to make a point, and then continuing into the hidden tunnels to hunt down the rest of the mercenary network stupid enough to take the hit job against an S-rank puppet master.
The Kiri traveller floods the coast, water creeping deeper and deeper into the land until lakes are overflowing, rivers are gushing and a hidden rural village built for kekkei genkai breeding that tried to kidnap a traveller shinobi drowns under the pull of her will.
A warning, a threat, a promise that she knows what they do and who owns them and she only let them live this long because she had better things to do with her time.
The triplets summon howling winds and a vicious thunderstorm, forcefully shaping it into a massive eagle big enough to crack one of Kumo's mountains in half, crackling with lightning and booming thunder, casting the terrified village below into stark relief.
The village, of two different minds about the travellers, finally condenses and settles low under the manipulations of A and B, waiting and observing.
A textiles merchant discusses one of his trade routes out to the sea after a bribe makes its way into his hands.
The Ame traveller dusts off their chemistry set and as the line of wagons take a shortcut through a dried out Funi river, every last man, woman and scrap of fabric is swept away by a flash flood.
A fresh batch of 'missing-nin' from Shimo ordered to infiltrate the travellers are caught in an avalanche and Tobirama waits with them, sitting above the snow and humming along with their chakra signatures until the last one sputters out.
Kusa gets their hands on Don'yoku and loses the heads of half a dozen T&I, later cashed in by a pleasantly smiling Sakumo with a wolf as big as a house sitting beside the man.
"It won't bite," he assures them happily but makes no mention of himself.
A councilman in Suna drowns in his bathtub. So do two others. A fourth falls down the stairs, head smashed in and smeared across the ground because the arm-cannon Taki got impatient.
Yu scrambles to find a new jounin commander after the last one dies from a sudden stroke and Yuwaku goes sightseeing until she can kill the next one to step up to the position.
An up and coming district lord of Tetsu dies of methanol poisoning from a bottle the Kusa traveller slipped into the gifts.
An infiltration specialist from Ishi is found with a burnt hole punctured through her chest.
Ka no Kuni mourns their city lord following a string of exploding documents that turned the nearest three floors of the building into a pile of rubble.
A noble from Kawa no Kuni disappears without a trace.
Oleander burns, the winds carrying it across Ta no Kuni, and people are running, coughing, choking, before it all goes quiet.
Four of the Fire Daimyo's advisors are discovered the next morning with their throats slit.
And Kakashi sits in the cold water of a small, slowly flowing stream, watching the faint red swirls twist in the water as the blood leeches off him.
Waiting for his next assignment.