Hiruzen Sarutobi knew he was getting old. At sixty-five, it was just a fact. But he had excellent health and even if his life as a shinobi had left some marks on his body, none were gruesome enough to handicap him truly.

In addition to that, those who mastered chakra lived longer than any normal human, their body and mind made stronger by the refining of the life-sustaining energy. It was a shame chakra users tended to die a violent death long before their time.

There were tales of a time long lost, a time of peace when chakra was used to heal and communicate, to maintain the harmony between men and nature. A time when people lived for centuries. Pretty legend, in Hiruzen's opinion, who also knew legend always held a sliver of truth.

Whatever the case, the Sarutobi had never felt as old as he did now, with a sword going through his right lung and poison seeping in his bloodstream. However, and in spite of the blood he could feel invading his airways, he couldn't help but smirk.

"Now, now, sensei, just because I kept missing doesn't mean you can actually go and ruin my fun you know?" Orochimaru said with a smile that looked more like a grimace. "You thought I'd miss a target as slow as you?"

Somewhere beyond the adamantine cage, the world seemed to distantly explode. The Hokage felt worry claw at his heart when he felt his skin prickle under the diluted wave of pure chakra. The old man mentally shook his fears away. Danzo was surrounded by excellent shinobi; they would contain the Ichibi. As for him, he had a fight to finish here anyway.

Hiruzen coughed and looked at his student. "You've always been too arrogant, Orochimaru."

With a twist of his hands and a flex of his chakra, the sword piercing him became the perfect conductor for a blast of lightning that struck the traitor fully on his head, causing it to explode in a burst of steamed flesh and blood. With fascination, the old Kage watched as the corpse of his student trembled before its mouth was forcefully opened from the inside. Like a snake shedding old skin, Orochimaru slowly emerged from his own ruined body.

Hiruzen took the opportunity to consider the Nidaime, still trapped in the cocoon of ashes which was already crumbling.

The Impure Resurrection Jutsu was a summoning ritual that didn't need a contract. It did need, however, an offering: a piece of whoever was to be brought back from the pure land. It acted as an anchor for the soul to invade the sacrificed body and possess it.

However, every technique had a weakness and Hiruzen's clone had found one for the Impure Resurrection.

In a living body, yin and yang balanced naturally, seamlessly. In the undead Nidaime, it was only made possible by the anchor. The simple solution was to detect and destroy the anchor. Hiruzen sped through hand signs until his hands glowed green with a diagnostic jutsu. It took the Professor barely a second to find the blatantly out-of-place genetic material within the sacrifice.

With a flick of his wrist, the Onmyoton turned to Katon and incinerated the anchor.

Both clones of the Nidaime dispelled and the shell of ashes keeping the true corpse captive crumbled, revealing the smiling face of the second Hokage.

"I'm very… Proud… Little Saru," rasped the undead before he was reduced to cinders which a second, greatly reduced shockwave dispersed.

"No!"

Hiruzen exhaled the rest of the Katon he was holding in his damaged lungs, spewing a sea of flames at his student, who was lunging at him. The Hokage whirled around, kunai in hand, and stopped the assault of the literally smoking traitor, who had just exited a substitution to barely avoid being roasted alive.

"You stubborn! Old! Fool!" The Snake Sannin screamed, hacking wildly with the strength granted by absolute fury. "Taking away my toys! Always taking everything from me! Why! Won't! You! Die!?"

Hiruzen couldn't escape the sudden onslaught unscathed, especially with his breathing becoming ragged because of his damaged lung and the poison progressing in his body. The traitor's kunai scored several times, sending trails of blood everywhere, never cutting the Kage enough to put him out of the fight. Slowly pushed back, the only thing the old Sarutobi could do was fend off the worst strikes and orient himself to his right.

After ten unending seconds, he suddenly felt his feet sink in mud, the mud he had created seemingly an eternity ago. The Kage smiled weakly: now that the Nidaime was not here anymore, it was time to end this fight. His eyes flickered downward once before they focused again on his opponent. Gritting his teeth, Hiruzen allowed the kunai to pierce his forearm, locking both him and his wayward student in a hopeless contest of strength.

"You were always quite the fast learner, Orochimaru," rasped Hiruzen, his voice laced with regrets and pain. "Ninjutsu, taijutsu, techniques came to you quickly."

The Snake Sannin snarled. "You think I care for your compliment? You think I'll maybe spare you?"

"No," replied Hiruzen with a light shake of his head, blinking his eyes to clear out his darkening vision. "But there's one thing I'm still better at than you."

"Ku!" Orochimaru chuckled before it devolved in full-blown laughter. "Ku ku ku! You? Still better than me?" The man snarled once more. "I know ninjutsu you couldn't dream of, old man, I-"

"It's not that," interrupted Hiruzen, his voice strangely pitched. Sweat was mixing with his cut and he was grateful for the stinging pain it caused. It was the only thing that kept him thinking straight.

Orochimaru pushed against his kunai, his face deformed by rage. "Then what is it?"

"The Game," answered the Kage, before he abruptly sunk in the pool of mud, which instantly dried up afterwards.

Orochimaru looked at the spot where the old Kage had just been standing before a strange sound made him look up. "What?"

In a second, the enormous adamantine cage surrounding their fighting ground shrunk to the size of a matchbox.

The Snake Sannin smirked. "Well done, sensei," he had time to think as he was reduced to nothing while several tons of rubbles were turned to magma due to the abrupt, incredible peak of pressure they were subjected to.

Outside of the cage, Hiruzen breathed as deeply as his wounds allowed him before he finally fell to his knees. He could feel the poison of Orochimaru's jian progressing in his system faster and faster. With trembling hands, he tried to form the necessary seals for a healing jutsu but his motor control failed him. The old Kage felt his chakra go haywire. The sensation calmed down as his life-energy slowly extinguished.

He was so tired. So very tired. He looked around and saw silhouettes approaching him, shouting indistinct words. He recognized the insignia they were all wearing proudly on their forehead.

A Leaf. The old man smiled. The village was safe. Good. He was sure Asuma, Konohamaru and Naruto were safe too. It meant he could rest.

Surrounded by his soldiers, Hiruzen Sarutobi, Sandaime Hokage of Konoha, breathed out his last.

The fight, Naruto observed between two ragged breaths, wasn't going particularly well.

It took about fifteen seconds to realize the man in front of them wasn't actually covered in armour. Rather, his bones were protruding above his skin, phasing through the three layers of the dermis without apparent problem. And these bones were hard as steel. Even harder, in fact, considering Genma's blade was chipped. Also, the man could displace, grow, shoot and regrow his bones with nary a thought and seemingly instantly. The man had literally fired his own phalanges at them, piercing Raido's manchira and wounding the tokunin.

Naruto had formally identified the two white blades of the enemy as outgrowths of his ulnas.

If that had been the only problem, they would have been done with the man much sooner but the problem was, the opponent was an extraordinarily skilled swordsman who had, in under a minute, already drawn blood heavily from both Genma and Raido.

The two Konoha ninjas had also successfully gone through the enemy's defence but he had activated a strange jutsu. His veins, clearly visible underneath his too-pale skin, had started to pump black blood and the man's wounds had healed while his speed and strength had augmented.

Luckily, Anko and Naruto had enough jutsu in their bag to keep him from simply dispatching them and going after the rest of their comrades. Between the snakes and flames coming regularly from the purple-haired kunoichi and Naruto's own Suiton and Doton, the bone-user couldn't press any advantage without being severely punished.

At least, the man could burn and seemed to fear being poisoned.

So, the blond supposed, it wasn't going too terribly either. No one was dead yet and at least, the sand monster wasn't blasting the village with deadly howling winds anymore. Naruto didn't dare look away towards the arena, afraid a second of inattention would spell the death of one of his comrades.

Steel clanked and scraped against bone as Genma and Raido both lunged back and forth, leading with their blade. With hypnotizing grace, the man intercepted each strike in a whirling motion, forcing the two shinobi to follow him and masking Naruto's line of sight. It was a clever style meant to avoid being peppered with and overwhelmed by ranged attacks, yet offensive enough to score nick and cuts.

Obviously, Genma and Raido had touched the enemy swordsman several times, trumping his guard but since he had activated his strange boost, his indestructible bones, moving with their own will, intercepted all their hits even faster than before.

Naruto eyed Anko, who, armed with two kunai, was trying to get to the man from behind. Until now, the purple-haired woman had no such luck. Rather than join the fray - the boy knew he would be useless, given his inexperience of this type of multidirectional team fight - Naruto decided to observe the opponent as closely as he could, prepared to keep him in place with a well-aimed jutsu.

Ignoring his slowly receding headache, the boy narrowed his eyes and watched. The man was thin with a slim built. The shift of his bones was clearly visible, happening above his skin like some sort of exoskeleton. Naruto didn't focus on that. Rather, the blond circled around the fight, watching how the man's muscled flexed, how his tendons were alternatively relaxed and pulled tautly, how his blood vessels shifted, all to accommodate the displaced bones.

It took all of twenty seconds for the blond to conclude the man's joints weren't even built like a normal human's and twenty more to find an exploitable flaw in the man's Kekkei Genkai.

From the look of it, the white-haired man was still full of squishy, fragile things inside. Organs which enough concussive force would rupture and break. Naruto didn't especially relish the idea of killing someone via massive organ failure and internal bleeding but they had to neutralize this hostile. The blond eyed the arena quickly; the monster of sand was still there, ready to reduce the village to nothing.

Naruto welled his chakra and pinched his entire reserve of chakra paper before speeding through several exotic hand signs. All but one piece of paper folded on themselves and swirled around him like a flock of swallows.

The bond positioned his hands in an exotic seal, two fingers of his right pointing at the enemy. The paper birds, chattering like the real thing, instantly swarmed around the enemy shinobi, offering a brief reprieve to the three tokunins surrounding him.

"Anko!" Naruto called and a twitch of the woman's ponytail told him he had her attention, "concussive force!"

The purple-haired woman swore. "No kidding Kiddo?!" She spat impatiently, hunched over and holding her left side.

"Two seconds immobile, that's all I need!" The blond answered back.

Genma swore, chewing on his senbon. "Easier said than done."

Before anything more could be said, the bone-user whirled, blades jutting from his entire body slicing through Naruto's distraction. "You resisted me and I did not expect it. It is time to stop playing with you, however."

Without warning, the man's chakra levels spiked as his skin took on a dark hue as his visible bone turned black. Naruto watched with sickened fascination as the man's spine exited his back, the various processes - spinous, transverse and articular - elongating to form spikes and blades. The fingers of his left hand elongated and twisted in a spiralling pattern along the ulna-sword to form a drill. The man's cranium partially protruded from his face, forming a helmet of a sort while his jaw unhinged, his cheeks tearing apart to reveal too many teeth. The ribs fused together to form an armour while the floating ribs pierced his skin, two more menacing blades. The right shoulder blade shifted and grew, forming a shield of a sort on the man's arm.

"Kami almighty," whispered Raido.

The man - or was he a monster? - blurred in front of Naruto's eyes and steel shattered as Genma was speared right through his manchira.

The armoured vest of Konoha was made of a padded layer of fire-retardant cloth covered with hundred of little octagonal steel plates arranged close together to form a flexible but protective layer and sewed to the fabric. The metallic plates were then covered by a second padded layer of more of the same cloth. Piercing or cutting through it with conventional means was impossible.

The enemy's drill had gone through it like it was wet paper.

Genma gave the enemy ninja a surprised, disbelieving look before he sagged, suddenly chalk white, red blood spurting from his lips. Slowly, deliberately, the enemy pushed the dying body of the Konoha-nin from his weapon, looking at his three comrades.

"Being disembowelled is a very painful and slow death," rasped the monster through his too many teeth.

Naruto forced himself to look away from Genma, from the blood that was pooling under the tokunin's body, from the dying man's ragged breathing, from the tears and the fear and the anger in his eyes, from the sickly pallor of his skin. He forced everything that was attempting to swallow him, concealed them in a dark recess of his mind. The only thing he allowed out was a wave of ice-cold anger, fear turned fury and frozen, a rage that pulsed in his veins like melted steel.

Kill it.

The blond snarled at the enemy. There was no time to capture him anymore for a safe kill; his danger-level had risen exponentially.

Kill it before it kills Anko.

Chakra welled and erupted through his coils. Naruto would put him down. The price mattered little. He could heal. Genma could not and Anko wouldn't either.

Kill it before it kills you.

Crack his bones. No, impossible. Then burst his heart. Liquefy his brain. Rupture his bowels, mangle his spleen, crush, cut, paste, destroy!

"Naruto!" He heard Anko shout but he was already going, launched like a shuriken, speeding through hand seals.

Light fractured around him and the drill missed his head from an inch, cutting part of his hair instead and drawing a long gash on the top of his head. Naruto paid it no mind, already preparing another jutsu. The man's second sword came in an upward slash for his leg and Naruto twisted horizontally, his cheeks bulging already. The four floating ribs came at that blond, who knew he wouldn't escape them.

He didn't care and shifted his head upward.

As the ribs speared him through, a jet of high-pressure water impacted the enemy shinobi. Right below his jaw.

The monster's neck, unprotected by the very spine he had torn from under his flesh, was immediately severed and blood was pumped everywhere. Naruto felt a sword cut through his right side. He answered by slamming a palm against the monster's left ear, unleashing hastily converted Fuuton chakra. With intense satisfaction, he felt brain matter turn into mush as a shockwave rippled through the enemy's cranium. A kick shattered the blond's left knee. The boy stuck his last square of chakra paper, rolled in a cone and base first, on the monster's stomach and twisted his hand in a half-tiger seal.

Innards were blown away by the directed blast that ensued.

Naruto felt blood seep in his lungs and coughed. He looked in wonder at his hand. The appendage was cut in half, the last two fingers had been blown away and the remaining three were broken in all the wrong direction. His eyes slowly shifted to the enemy's face. The monster was giving him the same look Gemma had given him earlier. Disbelief, incomprehension, fear and hate.

The blond gave him a bloody smile. "You lost, you son of a whore," he rasped.

The monster was already dead. The boy smiled again as he heard Anko scream his name. He had done his job. He could rest.

Everything had been going according to plan. The sugar had mixed with the sodium chlorate hidden in the sand in the arena. Kakashi's Raiton had ignited the highly unstable, highly explosive mixture and the Suna jinchuuriki had been forced to release the Ichibi completely.

They had all been momentarily distracted by the Kage-fight showdown going on in the Kage loge. Danzo had even seen some fools attempt to "help", only to be warded off by a sea of fire first, then by plasma-charged steam and two massive Suiton jutsu before Hiruzen had finally caged the fight once more.

Intervening in a fight between Kage, really, those shinobi needed to take some remedial classes on situation appraisal and operational judgement.

Whatever the case, Kinoe had long since extended his Mokuton in a network of root below the ground. When the bijuu had emerged from the flimsy seal holding it back, he had immediately been trapped by the chakra-sealing wood.

No one wanted a bijuu wandering in the village proper and going through it freely.

Unfortunately, Kinoe's Mokuton was far from powerful to hold the tail of a fully formed bijuu. It was where their power was said to reside and the two swings at twenty seconds interval seemed to confirm it.

Danzo wished the Shodai was there but those structural damages had been entirely inevitable. The Suna jinchuuriki bore a faulty seal and the only way to fix it was to extract the Ichibi from its host nearly completely before resealing it once more.

Konoha couldn't keep the Ichibi and make a new jinchuuriki. It would upset the entire balance of the elemental nations and Konoha and Fire Country would suddenly find themselves facing the entirety of the other ninja villages and countries.

So they had gone with the only possible route available to them.

Then, obviously, everything had gone to shit when the enormous seal Danzo had prepared around the arena had been partly destroyed. He, Torune Aburame and Fuu Yamanaka - remnants of the Root program and the only two shinobi he could call an absolute success of the method - had dispatched with extreme prejudice the four little flies who had thought they could mess with his painstakingly drawn seal. They had been tough enough that Danzo had to reveal his ace - given the situation - and he was really peeved about it.

Then he had to draw the broken parts of the seal once more and it was as much time the Ichibi had to swing his tail.

Thankfully, the Hatake brat and his friend, the young Maito, had proven they were the worthy sons and students of brilliant shinobi and their capable heirs by containing the sand monster, with copious help from numerous other shinobi, in particular the Hyuuga clan head.

Finally, after a grand total of two minutes after the beginning of the attack, Danzo sped through the necessary hand seals. The soil glowed painfully before the Ichibi gave an ear-wrenching howl of primal fury as it was once more trapped into its host.

Exhausted, the man swore under his breath as he stumbled down on his behind. "Enough kick to take care of the Ichibi, I swear," Danzo muttered darkly, fatigue causing an unusual lapse in his emotional control. "I'm going to kick your ass, Hiruzen." The man sighed and tightened the bandages around his right eye. "Hope you enjoyed the action, Kagami," he breathed lowly when he was done.

Shouts and cries echoed distantly in his ears and suddenly, Danzo felt worry creep in his chest. He looked up and saw Torune looking at him. The Aburame shook his head.

Danzo felt his fist tighten until it became white and blinked once as his jaw tightened, causing his teeth to grind against each other. The man took a deep breath as he leashed the feelings trying to burst out of his chest and rose.

"Konoha stands. We've work to do."

AN: I'm glad it's over. Writing fights takes a certain kind of energy and I'm out of it. Before you take your pitchforks, it was either Hiruzen or Anko and the challenge's rules specified Hiruzen had to die. As sad as it is, I'm a strong believer of the "Death of the Mentor" in a story. I think it is a necessary step.

As you have seen, the Bijuu are dangerous. And not "oh, they were hyped so much but a genin and a giant toad are enough" type of dangerous, no, they are A-bomb-level of danger.

The overall power of the Bijuu is the first change of many to come, as I'll wander into AU territory for what follows. You're reading fanfiction, so of course, it's an AU but until now, I pretty much used the Orochimaru-threat as in canon and the powers more or less worked as in canon. It won't be the case for Part Two because, in my honest opinion, Madara, Kaguya and all that jazz was a terrible, terrible mistake. Expect large changes. I'll keep Pein though. Pein is a good antagonist to explore.

Best,