"So there I was; stuck in the ruins of the Hidden Mist, the guy responsible for killing it? Smiling at me like a shark smelling blood. My Sage Mode? Gone. Sukuna's creepy pet took it away—don't ask me how. I wasn't quite beaten to hell yet, but I wasn't exactly in top form either. My only backup? A couple of old toads feeling the pressure just as much as me."
Jiraiya leaned back in his seat; the leather cushions creaked. He snatched another cup of sake off the table, downed it, and paused for dramatic effect. Once it had lasted long enough by his estimate, he put the cup down and gave his captive audience a wry grin and a shrug.
"Yep," he said, savoring the taste of good booze. "Things were looking pretty bad for us right then and there."
"I knew you were going to do this."
"Huh? Do what? I'm just telling you what happened!"
"With plenty of theatrics and exaggerations," Orochimaru replied from across the table, crossing his arms. "You love the sound of your own voice almost as much as you love women."
There was a round of laughter at the table. Sarutobi-sensei, to Orochimaru's left, puffed out lungfuls of smoke into the air between chuckles. To Jiraiya's right, Minato poorly tried to mask his amusement. Kushina guffawed, badly enough for her boyfriend to start patting her on the back.
After he'd returned from his mission to the Mist—alive, mostly in one piece, and with a very dead Sukuna in tow—Jiraiya decided to celebrate. He'd gotten everybody together and decided to treat them to the best food in the village. The bistro was an old family place frequented by shinobi, a place of rustic wooden walls, lanterns that gave the place a serene, orange hue at night and smelled of grilled meats that could drive a ninja hound wild.
Jiraiya let the laughter go on and smiled right at his old teammate. "True, but since your boring ass is still here, I'm thinking you're either secretly having fun or so desperate to hear about my mission that you're gonna suffer through all my theatrics to hear about it."
"We all must make sacrifices for the sake of knowledge."
"Now, now," Sarutobi-sensei said. "Let's not fight, you two. Jiraiya has accomplished an extraordinary thing for us and the whole shinobi world. I think we can allow him the luxury of basking in it."
Snake-boy gave their teacher a sideways look, then frowned but didn't say anything. Jiraiya just barely resisted the urge to stick his tongue out at him.
"What's this?" a very familiar, very pleasing voice said from behind him—one he hadn't heard in years. It left him stunned and speechless. "You got one over on Orochimaru? The world must be coming to an end soon."
Jiraiya saw the others turn or stare at the figure before him. Sarutobi-sensei suddenly looked as if ten years had been shaved off him. Orochimaru, grouch that he was, smiled with rare warmth. Minato and Kushina gasped. The recognition on their faces told him his drunk head hadn't just played a trick on him.
"I can't believe it," he said and smiled from ear to ear. "You're back! When did you come home—"
Jiraiya stood up and spun around. He knew Tsunade would probably punch him for it, but he felt overjoyed enough to risk going for a hug. He never took the first step. The second he laid eyes on her, his blood froze.
Tsunade didn't have a head from just above the mouth up; it had been cleaved off at a tilted angle as if by a large knife or sword. The almost-headless body of his teammate stared at him with eyes that weren't there and gave him a bloody smile.
"What's wrong, Jiraiya? Aren't you happy to see me?"
She collapsed a moment later, a red and black pool formed around the wound and began to spread across the floor. Jiraiya couldn't move, he couldn't look away no matter how much he tried or wanted to.
"I-Is something wrong, Sensei?" Minato asked.
The absurdity of the question was enough to wrench Jiraiya's gaze away from Tsunade and toward an altogether new, horrifying sight.
Minato's head stared back at him from the table, where it stood upside down. Kushina's was next to it, rolled over on its side with a vacant stare at the ceiling. Sarutobi-sensei was bisected, his face buried in the rice bowl he'd ordered while blood poured from his waist. Orochimaru was split into dozens of pieces, and the parts peeled off one another before Jiraiya's eyes, his mangled body spilled over the table, chair, and floor with wet squelches.
No, no! Jiraiya thought, the blood pooling around him as he stumbled back. He's… He's here, but how? I—I killed him! I killed him!
The whole room spun before his eyes, and Jiraiya felt his face hit the pooling blood. Once the vertigo passed, he gasped and looked ahead. His own severed legs were sprawled on the ground. He grit his teeth and tried to crawl away, but his arms didn't work. They'd been cut off, too—too fast for him to notice, too quickly for his body even to register the pain.
I'm not done. I've got to do something—anything. I've got to warn the—
As he lay there in the pool, a useless stump facing the ceiling, the blood darkened around him and turned pitch black. Jiraiya barely had a chance to perceive the full force of the malevolent energy when Sukuna's hands reached out from the shadow beneath Jiraiya and grabbed him around the neck, covering his mouth in a tight grip. Jiraiya tried to struggle, to break free, but Sukuna didn't budge. He just laughed.
"You can't escape me that easily." Sukuna chuckled and dragged Jiraiya into the shadow, into a deep black void where there was no escape.
He fell for what felt like forever. Strong arms held him down; he couldn't fight them off no matter how much he struggled. Eventually, Jiraiya broke free enough to scream. The shout burst from his throat with such force he felt as if his lungs were on fire.
A sudden light seared his right eye and left him almost blind. Jiraiya screamed again; it almost felt as if his arms and legs were attached, but they wouldn't move. Strong arms were holding him down.
"Master Jiraiya, Master Jiraiya! You have to calm down—"
"No!" he shouted, seeing flashes of people he couldn't make out. "Let me go! He's here! He's going to kill us all!"
"Damn it! Hold him down! I can't get the needle in!"
"Jiraiya, Jiraiya! It's me!" A voice that might have been Sarutobi-sensei's called out to him. But he knew that was impossible; Sukuna had just killed him.
Jiraiya ignored it and fought on. In the crazed daze, he thought he felt his cut off right arm somehow hit something. He almost dared to hope, to think he'd get out of the pit, when a fist struck him across the face. In an instant, the muddy flashes of faces and the dim light vanished, replaced by black spots in his vision. Jiraiya's body went limp; his throat burned from the screaming. Limp and useless, he floated in the void where Sukuna had left him, and soon enough, he let it take him away.
He almost felt at peace, for a while.
Eventually, Jiraiya started to feel again. In a dim daze, he cracked open his eye as though it weighed a ton. He blinked dozens of times until the haze and black spots in his vision mostly cleared. The thin beams of sunlight that peeked into the room through the cracks in the curtains were painful to look at.
The white room was sterile and quiet. The ceiling fan cooled the room, and Jiraiya found himself momentarily hypnotized by its rhythmic spinning. Slowly, he turned his head and saw the IV drip, sensors, and monitors connected to him by wires and tubes.
Where am I? He looked around the room again, but his fried brain and exhausted body made any coherent thinking impossible. Almost like a drooling idiot, he lay there, wondering what had happened.
I—I think I was on a mission? Yeah, yeah, that seems about right. But what was I doing?
Jiraiya tried to shift in the bed and flinched when a sharp rush of pain exploded from all over his body. His left arm, in a cast, especially protested any movement. He gasped for air, and it felt like sandpaper had been scrubbed on the inside of his throat. He didn't dare try that again. Half his face was tied into a mask of tight bandages, and he felt a gause press against his left eye.
What the hell hit me hard enough to do all this?
As he pondered that question and stared at the ceiling, the memory flashed before his eyes. The image of a massive, bone-white monster rushing toward him and kicking him like a human soccer ball in the left shoulder.
Mahoraga. Jiraiya remembered the name. That's what it was called… Sukuna's pet.
Jiraiya shivered as it all came back to him in a sudden rush: the ruins of Kirigakure, Sukuna eating the dead like broth, Jiraiya and the Two Great Toad Sages trying to kill him before the pinwheel finished spinning.
He shivered at the memory of Mahoraga ripping his Sage Mode away. He flinched at the echo of those two freaks chasing and beating him through a forest of dead trees. When he recollected the sensation of Sukuna's palm brushing along his face, Jiraiya almost felt the cut slash across his skin and left eye all over again.
But the last memory hurt him more deeply than all the others.
"Pa! No!" Lady Shima shouted at her husband as he jumped off Jiraiya's shoulder and fired off his Tongue Slash at the advancing Sukuna and Mahoraga.
"Get out of here!" the Great Toad Sage said without looking back. "You've got to warn everyone. They've got to know this monster's on the loose!"
"S-Sir," Jiraiya said. He tried to reach out, but his legs wouldn't move. Half his vision was red. "You—"
"Don't argue!" Fukasaku shouted, deftly leaping and avoiding the Executioner's Blade and Mahoraga's sword as they came down at him before blasting them back with a Frog Call. "Just go!"
Jiraiya would never forget that sight for the rest of his life: Lord Fukasaku standing alone against impossible odds, Lady Shima's tears and cries for the husband she knew she'd never see again, and his own shame as he used the last shreds of his strength and chakra to Reverse Summon out of there.
He lay there, motionless for a short while. His one good eye stung, and a lump he couldn't swallow down formed in his sore throat.
But Jiraiya knew he couldn't spare more than a few moments to process the guilt and shame. He was a shinobi, and a threat to his entire home was still out there. Sukuna had shown an interest in Konoha; it was only a matter of time before he'd come for it.
I'll make it count, Master Fukasaku, Jiraiya swore and focused on his duty. With his voice nearly useless, he touched the small chakra-imbued bracelet around his right wrist and poured chakra into it.
Moments later, a nurse stepped in, followed by two ANBU members with fox and owl masks, respectively.
"Master Jiraiya, how can I help—" The nurse, a pretty woman of about thirty with tied-back brown hair and a heart-shaped face, began, but he cut her off with a series of hand and finger gestures.
The message behind them was clear: Fix my throat, and you two? Get the Hokage. We need to talk. Now.
"P-P-Please, don't… don't kill me…" Akito stammered and bowed, pressing his face into the mud.
He had served over thirty years as a shinobi of Kirigakure. He'd risen through the ranks, was recognized for his skills, and was awarded the prestigious position in the hunter-nin unit. He'd tracked down traitors to their land across the Land of Water and dozens of foreign countries. He had braved countless battles, slain enemies of his village without mercy or hesitation. Age, gender, their reasons for leaving—irrelevant. They all died by his blade.
All his skills, all his decades of experience meant nothing in the face of this… thing.
His unit, returning to Kiri after a successful hunt, saw their home a desolate ruin. But they didn't cry; they didn't falter. They steeled themselves and rushed into the remnants of their home, vowing silently to kill whoever was responsible.
But he killed them first.
Heads, arms, legs, entire bodies—he witnessed them fall into dozens, even hundreds, of pieces. Their swords broke against the murderer's skin, and their jutsu didn't make him so much as flinch. He looked more annoyed than anything.
Akito kept his composure for a while. But as more of them died, and their blood and bodies joined those of the dead villagers, a voice told him to give up—not run, just stop and pray he'd be allowed to live. By the time he watched his squad commander be bisected, then cleaved into chunks like a fish on a board, he lost the will to fight.
"I'll… I'll do…"
"Idiots," the murderer said with a huff. "I already said I'd let you live if you answered my questions. You've got no one to blame but yourselves for this."
"P-Please," Akito shouted, burying his head and deepening the bow. "I—I'll be good. I'll tell you everything you want to know!"
"Is that so?" Akito felt a hand grab him by the hair. The marked face was inches from his; the four red eyes glinted back at him, and Akito felt himself lose all hope before that psychotic grin.
"Alright then," the murderer drawled and smiled even wider. "Tell me everything you know about a place called Konoha."
A/N: A much shorter chapter than the last one but with the story setup and opening action done, I didn't feel the need to make this nearly as long. Next time, ninja politics with Hiruzen, Danzo and the Council Farts.