Instead of:
💬 1.7k
@kawaiswagsasukeThe sky above the crater is the color of a bruise.
There is rubble where a forest used to be. Chunks of earth the size of houses jut from the ground like broken teeth. Whatever wind there is carries ash and the smell of scorched stone.
At the basin of the crater, four figures in white stand in a loose row, facing outward. Dust lifts from the chalky ground around their feet and drifts back down.
The one on the far left wears his hair long and dark, and when he tilts his face to the ruined horizon, there is no mark on his skin but a fine crack at his temple, like a hairline in porcelain.
Senju Hashirama
So someone called us back. lifts a hand and turns it over, flexing the fingers slowly Madara's on the other side of this. I can feel him from here.
Senju Tobirama
Of course he is. does not look up from the ground; his voice is flat Who else would drag four Hokage out of the afterlife for a war.
Sarutobi Hiruzen
We should find out who performed the technique before we move. rubs at his wrist The last time men brought the dead back, it did not end well.
Namikaze Minato
turns slowly, scanning the treeline Who's out there?
In the rubble to the north, a figure steps around a fallen pillar.
She is small, and mud to the knee, and the jacket on her shoulders is patched along one sleeve. Her hands are empty. Nothing about her reads as a threat — except that she has come armed, the way a person comes armed when they have spent their life at the edge of someone's territory.
Hiruzen sees her first. He stops moving entirely.
Sarutobi Hiruzen
quiet That's Julie. The Arakawa girl. glancing sideways at the others She's from my time — well. After my time.
Senju Tobirama
Arakawa. finally looks up I've never heard of them.
The four of them hold still. The girl has not walked into the crater yet; she has stopped at its lip, looking down at the white robes and the cracked faces, at the four men who should not be standing.
A half-step behind her and to the right, the empty air is still empty — but the dust on the ridge shifts as though something passed through it a second ago and is deciding what to do.