For over half an hour, Baki painstakingly detailed the phantom timeline.
Karura and Yashamaru sat on the sofa, listening in a state of absolute, paralyzing bewilderment.
In their current worldview, the Five Kage were the absolute zenith of human capability, and the Tailed Beasts were walking natural disasters.
But in the apocalyptic war Baki described, Kage and Tailed Beasts were treated as mere stepping stones.
Monsters who could vaporize the Nine-Tails with a single glance.
Gods who could manifest entire forests in seconds, cleave mountain ranges in half with a casual sword swing, summon armored giants as tall as skyscrapers, and erase entire nations from the map with a single hand sign.
Did these beings truly exist in the same reality as them?
If Baki wasn’t famously stoic and unflinchingly honest, Karura and Yashamaru would have assumed this was an elaborate, cruel joke.
They had never even heard of half the names Baki listed.
And the most terrifying detail was that almost every single one of these god-tier combatants hailed from Konoha.
The siblings had always believed that while the Leaf Village was technically the strongest of the Five Great Nations, the gap between the superpowers was manageable.
Today, that illusion shattered.
They realized that Konoha at its peak operated on an entirely different evolutionary plane.
They are so strong that even if I trained every day for the rest of my life, I couldn’t survive a single strike, Yashamaru thought, a cold knot of despair forming in his stomach.
The siblings exchanged a helpless look.
They felt a sudden, bitter nostalgia for their ignorance.
Back when they believed mastering a few A-rank jutsu made them elite shinobi, they at least had hope.
Now, the sheer scale of the power ceiling was suffocating.
The despair only deepened when Minato stepped in to explain the post-war era.
He detailed the resurrection of the Ten-Tails, the descent of Kaguya Otsutsuki, the mythic Sage of Six Paths, and the subsequent alien invasions.
For Karura and Yashamaru, the transition from geopolitical warfare to fighting literal mythological deities was too massive of a psychological leap.
They sat completely silent, overwhelmed.
Minato recognized their mental overload.
He stopped talking, allowing the siblings time to process the sheer absurdity of the timeline, and shifted his attention to Baki, Temari, and Kankuro.
When Minato described the Otsutsuki threats that arrived after the Fourth War, Baki and Temari were clearly shocked.
However, because they possessed the future memories—because they had stood on the battlefield and witnessed Six Paths Obito and Six Paths Madara tear the sky apart—their threshold for impossible power was much higher.
After a brief moment of stunned silence, they quickly recalibrated, leaning forward to absorb every tactical detail Minato provided.
Baki, Temari, and Kankuro absorbed the intelligence and gave slow, grim nods.
If the Ten-Tails and the Sage of Six Paths were verifiable, historical facts, the existence of an entire clan of alien gods was entirely plausible.
Kankuro looked up at Minato, his painted face pulling into a frown.
“You said Naruto Uzumaki cast the jutsu that sent our memories back.
Then…
has he already…”
“Yes,” Minato answered softly.
“Naruto sacrificed himself.”
Kankuro lowered his head, his fists clenching on his knees.
A long, heavy silence blanketed the living room.
Minato observed the Sand shinobi.
He realized that the memory transfer possessed a very specific chronological cutoff.
Baki, Temari, and Kankuro—like the vast majority of the Allied Forces rank-and-file—only possessed memories up to the immediate conclusion of the Fourth Shinobi World War.
They had never witnessed the Otsutsuki invasions of the peace era.
During the Fourth War, they had simply watched Naruto and Sasuke fight the gods on their behalf.
They knew the aliens were terrifyingly strong, but they hadn’t personally experienced the despair of facing them without the world’s two strongest demigods acting as shields.
Now, Naruto was dead, and Sasuke was a child.
The burden of survival had shifted back to the regular shinobi.
They had to get stronger.
Minato suspected Naruto had deliberately restricted the memory transfer.
He didn’t want the veterans paralyzed by the peacetime politics or their future personal lives.
He wanted them focused entirely on surviving the coming apocalypse.
“I will escort Lord Minato to Elder Ebizo’s compound,” Baki finally said, breaking the silence.
He turned to the Sannin.
“I leave Lady Karura in your care, Lady Tsunade.”
“Go,” Tsunade ordered, her tone shifting into pure medical authority.
“I can handle Karura.”
Minato gave a respectful nod to the room.
He knew he was functionally useless during a complex medical procedure.
He followed Baki out the front door to secure the political alliance with the Sand Council.
Karura watched the two men leave.
The moment the door clicked shut, she turned her sharp, intelligent gaze onto her two young children.
She remembered how Baki had spoken of the future timeline.
Temari and Kankuro had clearly been present during those apocalyptic battles.
Karura knelt on the floor, placing her hands gently on her children’s heads.
“You two possess these future memories as well, don’t you?” she asked softly.
“Tell me the truth.
Is the future Baki and Lord Minato described real?”
Temari hesitated, biting her lower lip.
“I don’t remember anything about the aliens Lord Minato talked about…
my memories stop right after the war ends.
But everything Baki-sensei said is true.
Kaguya Otsutsuki, the mother of the Sage of Six Paths, really did resurrect.
So I believe Lord Minato is telling the truth.”
Karura looked at her toddler son.
Kankuro nodded firmly, confirming his sister’s assessment.
With both of her children verifying the impossible, Karura finally accepted the reality of the situation.
Even stripping away her children’s testimony, the geopolitical logic was undeniable.
The Yellow Flash and the legendary Slug Princess had no strategic reason to cross a hostile desert just to spin a fairy tale in her living room.
Furthermore, the intelligence reports over the last forty-eight hours had baffled the Sand Council.
Kumogakure, which had been pressing a massive tactical advantage on the front lines, had suddenly, inexplicably ordered a full-scale retreat.
Her husband, Rasa, had been completely bewildered by the Lightning Country’s withdrawal.
But if the Kumo possessed these apocalyptic memories, the sudden ceasefire made perfect strategic sense.
Karura forced her shock into a small, steel box in the back of her mind.
She looked up at Tsunade.
“I leave myself in your care, Lady Tsunade,” Karura said gracefully.
As a mother, she looked at the two children who had spent the last week agonizing over her impending death.
Regardless of whether aliens were coming to destroy the world, she had to survive the birth of her third child.
She had to live for them.
Tsunade offered a confident, reassuring smile.
“Let’s move to the bedroom.
We are going to conduct a full cellular assessment.”
Across the village, within a heavily fortified compound, Elder Ebizo let out a long, shuddering sigh of relief.
His Anbu contacts had just confirmed that the Yellow Flash and Tsunade had breached the village perimeter.
Knowing Baki was currently escorting Minato to his estate, Ebizo had summoned his older sister, Chiyo, to wait with him.
The two legendary elders of the Sand Village sat side-by-side in total silence, holding bamboo fishing rods over a small, artificial indoor pond.
Since the sudden disappearance and presumed assassination of the Third Kazekage, Sunagakure had spiraled into absolute political chaos.
Chiyo and Ebizo, who had been actively trying to retire, were forced to seize emergency control of the village to prevent a total collapse.
Chiyo was currently drowning in administrative and military crises.
When Ebizo had summoned her, claiming a matter of extreme urgency, she had been highly irritated.
But she knew her brother’s tactical mind; he would not pull her away from the war room without a catastrophic reason.
So, she sat by the pond and waited patiently.
Because Chiyo had been resurrected during the Fourth Shinobi World War via the Edo Tensei, she had technically been dead when the war began.
Therefore, she did not possess the future memories.
Furthermore, she was famously stubborn, deeply cynical, and harbored a violent grudge against Konoha.
Ebizo stared at his fishing bobber, his mind racing as he tried to formulate a diplomatic strategy to convince his sister that the apocalypse was coming.
He was so deeply lost in his geopolitical calculations that he completely missed a fish striking his line.
Suddenly, a Sunagakure Anbu flickered into the room, kneeling beside Chiyo.
“Elders.
Minato Namikaze of Konoha and Captain Baki have arrived at the compound.”
Before Chiyo could even process the sheer absurdity of Konoha’s rising star walking through their front door, Ebizo spoke up.
“Send them in,” Ebizo ordered calmly.
Chiyo snapped her head toward her younger brother, her eyes narrowing suspiciously.
She didn’t know what political game he was playing, but her implicit trust in his strategic genius stayed her hand.
She gave a sharp nod to the Anbu.
The guard vanished.
A moment later, Minato Namikaze and Baki stepped into the room.
Minato scanned the austere environment.
The room was almost entirely barren, save for the central pond and two low wooden stools.
The two ancient, legendary puppeteers of the Sand sat perfectly still, their eyes fixed on the water, refusing to even acknowledge the entrance of the Konoha Hokage.