The sealed kunai

Chapter 47: No Reset Button

(Amegakure no Sato – Pein's Tower)

The body of Pein's arguably most powerful path, the body that had once been his childhood friend Yahiko, stood on a balcony high up in his own personal tower and looked out over the steady strewn rubble that a good portion of his village still lay in. The cleanup of the village had been slow as Pein had directed village resources towards one thing.

Trying to unearth the corpses that he had kept preserved for... certain purposes. And it had been a waste of time in the end.

By an act of God-. No not God. He was God.

By an act of pure, dumb luck in its purest and most genuine form, Danzo's Root force had decided to attempt to sack the village during Naruto and Jiraiya's battle against Konan and himself, scattering much of his force and destroying much of the village in what seemed to be mostly diversionary and stalling tactics that allowed Naruto and Jiraiya to somehow escape. One of these tactics wound up being demolishing the building that Pein kept to have his extra bodies preserved and stored for potential usage in case of one's outright destruction or loss, like that of his Anima Path that had been captured by Jiraiya before his and Naruto's eventual defeat.

It was pure coincidence as they had no way of knowing what they had done, as it was a well kept secret. The only thing anyone in Ame knew about his use for certain bodies was that they would take them to his tower where they would never be seen again until reanimation, and that would be where they remained until they needed to be used by him. His bodies that had been kept were buried under the rubble of the felled building. He couldn't use just any regular body for his Anima Path. Not only did the bodies need to be specially prepared, they needed to be in general powerful bodies under their own right. The ones that had been found had suffered from the runoff generated by the constant rain in Ame and had become bloated and grotesque. Unusable for what he needed them for.

The battle in Ame had produced no such casualties that Pein could use. There were mostly cannon fodder genin that were cut down in the streets by Naruto trying to keep him in place for Konan and by the Root that had gotten into the village. The few higher level shinobi that had engaged Naruto directly had been lost when Naruto cornered himself inside of an apartment skyscraper only to demolish it from the inside and escape by jumping out. Those bodies were utterly obliterated and unfit for any kind of usage... the ones that were still in one piece anyway.

This was only the first of the headaches that the Akatsuki leader had been facing. His control over his own organization was steadily fading. Most of his forces were dead or out of commission for good; Sasori, Hidan, Kakuzu, Deidara, and now Itachi had wound up being defeated as well. The rest of his comrades he couldn't trust with the exception of perhaps Kisame. It was clear that Zetsu took orders all the way from the top so to speak, from Madara Uchiha who had been under the guise of Tobi to keep a firsthand eye on the organization he had 'masterminded'.

Things had been unraveling around him as far back as several years ago when Orochimaru betrayed the group, trying to take Itachi's body for himself and failing, but as more and more time dragged on the back-schemes grew and grew. Kakuzu had killed several of his own partners in the past out of greed and anger, depleting the potential replacements for the group before the time for the plans to be carried out ever even took place. Itachi had planned for all of this to happen with Sasuke, directly going against their group for his own objectives. Having seen the battle play out he had many things to think about in the future.

The most unsettling thing that was grating on Pein's nerves was Madara. Instead of simply letting things go as they had been, the mysterious Uchiha had been asserting his place as the mastermind to try and force Pein into certain actions. He not too long ago during the strife of battle between the brothers Uchiha and Naruto had come and ordered Pein to attack Naruto and even Konoha if he had to. There were at least two reasons as to why that would be frowned upon.