Land of Water v3 and the Hidden Mist (Knyght)
Land of Water v3 and the Hidden Mist (Official Version)
This is an island country floating on the eastern ocean of the continent that is completely surrounded by water. It consists of one central island occupied by steep mountains in the middle of several smaller islands with hundreds of little ones between them. Each of the main islands have their own traditions that their citizens stubbornly insist in preserving to this day, creating a very unique culture. Many of the islands are uncharted and home to all kinds of wildlife, terrain and weather conditions.
The Civil Wars
The country was once subject to countless civil wars as the islanders treated each other as enemies instead of fellow countrymen. Divided from the mainland by the sea, they were far more concerned with their own interests than that of the rest of the world. They hired shinobi clans to go to war with one another; ninjas would be given missions to sink their ships, raid their businesses and destroy their home in an ever-escalating blood feud between islands. Where the other nations typically used shinobi to fight against other nations in their struggle for dominance, the islands were officially all meant to be one nation which made their warring more senseless and brutal than most.
Among the ninja clans that fought in these wars, it was the ones who possessed kekkei genkai that were naturally the most highly desired. Blessed with prodigious talent and unique powers essentially from birth, they fought countless battles against each other and every other shinobi clan, causing untold devastation across every island to carry out their missions.
The bone wielding Kaguya Clan terrified any who saw them tear their own bones from their bodies to wield as weapons and leap into battle with ecstatic bloodlust. The acid breathing Ashido Clan turned any battlefield they stood on into a desolate wasteland and leaving behind bodies too corroded to identify. And the ice-making Yuki Clan turned the abundant waters of the nation against its own people as they coated vast swatches of land in ice and shattered anyone caught in their path.
These three clans were the most powerful weapons used in any of the wars. But the magnitude of their success had a terrible impact on their reputation.
Everyone who ever suffered at their hands despised them and anyone who used them grew to fear them. This led to tales of the kekkei genkai clans being bringers of misfortune who were responsible for the civil war themselves, working to destabilize the country and profit from its death. The populace began to turn against these clans entirely as they became the scapegoats of the entire conflict, refusing their services, cutting off their supplies and attacking their people and homes.
The Founding
It was the news of the strongest ninja clans, the Senju and the Uchiha, had united spreading like wildfire across the continent that changed the status quo in the Land of Water as they scrambled to match this village of shinobi. Thus the feudal lord was convinced to allow the ninja clans to become the main military force of his nation and the Village Hidden in the Mist was built on its central island.
The Hidden Mist was immediately used as a tool to bring an end to the civil wars that had constantly plagued their country. With the feudal lord's blessing, the hidden village took the offensive against his enemies to violently quell any rebellion and bring all of the islands under their control. It helped gather more ninja clans to their cause with the visible evidence of their might and soon established it as one of the Five Great Hidden Villages.
Naturally, the widespread resentment against the kekkei genkai clans made them prime targets as the hidden village was used to bring them to order. By the time the civil wars came to an end, the kekkei genkai clans had been all but decimated. What remained of the Ashido and Yuki clans chose to go into hiding, disguising the truth of their origins and blending into the rest of the population for the sake of survival. It helped to ensure the continuation of their bloodline as their descendant throughout the nature would inherit their power - which would unfortunately lead to many being killed when their heritage was discovered - but the clans themselves had essentially come to an end. The Kaguya chose another path where they chose to retreat from the world without splitting apart as their savage nature meant that the idea of disbanding and become civilians was anathema to them. They instead became something like bandits who took on bloody missions from those willing to pay for their services but otherwise ravaged the land to keep themselves alive.
The Mizukages
The founder of the Hidden Mist was the First Mizukage Byakuren. The man had earned a legendary reputation in his long life. He was famous for forging seven magnificent swords with unique abilities that he wielded in battle himself, and for the experience and skill he had gained from living far past the average life expectancy of a ninja. His legendary status and prowess in battle is what allowed him to unite the ninja clans under his banner. He was a stern individual who believed that he could make his hidden village the strongest on the continent, pushing forward ruthlessly effective policies to raise the level of his shinobi into something to be feared. And he was a key figure in Kiri's role of ending the civil wars and making the hidden village recognized as one of the strongest on the continent, though the country's location and his intolerant attiude caused them to have only distant relations with other countries.
Byakuren took on seven disciples of the most skilled swordsmen from across the country for the sake of teaching each one to wield on his seven blades. When he died during the First Shinobi World War, these seven disciples each took one of his swords and went on to become the infamous Seven Ninja Swordsmen of the Mist.
The Second Mizukage was Hoozuki Gengetsu, the most powerful member of the clan of water shapeshifters. His mastery of their hijutsu manifested as water with an oily consistency and his infinite explosion ninjutsu, as well as genjutsu that very few were ever capable of seeing through, let alone breaking. His nomination was almost surprising in how rapidly he went from being a relative unknown to gaining immense popularity through his magnetic charisma and the clever tactics he utilized in the war. Unfortunately, his enmity towards the Second Tsuchikage culminated in a battle that killed them both.
His successor was the right-hand man of the First Mizukage, Shikaemon Saizou. He was originally slated to become the Second but was passed over in light of Gengetsu’s rapid rise to fame. Saizou’s most famous act as the Third Mizukage was leading an offensive against the Village Hidden in the Eddies and the Uzumaki Clan who had earned a fearsome reputation for their fuuinjutsu in the first two world wars.
The Third Shinobi World War saw the Fourth Mizukage Yagura rise to power. He was the son of the Three-Tailed Jinchuuriki and a once-in-a-generation child prodigy with an incredible affinity for water ninjutsu. It’s believed that the Tailed Beast influenced his innate talent at the cost of stunting his physical growth which plagued him with a child-like appearance even into adulthood. The scar on his left cheek was left by his own father when he lost control and left a wound imbued with corrosive chakra that resisted medical ninjutsu. He was elevated to the position of Kage while still in his teens as his abilities made him highly respected in his home village and equally feared by their enemies. Unfortunately, the Fourth Mizukage's reign became known as the darkest period in the Hidden Mist's history.
The Bloody Mist
Upon the Fourth Mizukage's selection, he used the war to significantly increase the rate of conscription among the country's populace. The village was flooded with potential shinobi, especially those who had been orphaned by the war and had no other prospects, who would be trained under a new academy curriculum. The training was soon said to be effective but brutal, designed to rapidly create effective fighters more than anything with the intention that their later education would compensate for their weaknesses.
The most infamous aspect of this was the new graduation test that was only revealed at the end of the first academic year that Yagura was in office. Every aspiring shinobi at the ninja academy needed to kill one of their classmates in one-on-one combat to graduate. It was for the sake of ensuring that only the strongest students would prosper, providing their worth in love combat and ensuring that any mist-nin would be capable of the most ruthless of acts for the sake of the village. The ritual worked and the next generation of shinobi quickly gained a fearsome reputation on the battlefield; news of the ritual itself horrified the world to the extent that the village became known as the Bloody Mist.
Naturally, such merciless changes in Kiri meant that there was an increase in the number of missing-nin the village produced. Many of these were people who had lost family to the graduation ritual or were afraid of their children participants or were going to be participants themselves. In response to this, Yagura dedicated a regiment of Kiri’s Anbu to tracking and executing these individual which he named the Hunter Corps - also called the Undertaker Squad by some - who held the duty of destroying their bodies to protect the village’s secrets. The Hunter Corps were soon feared by the rogue ninja but they gained an unfortunate reputation for the collateral damage and innocent lives lost in their pursuit as well.
This test only came to an end when Momochi Zabuza, a nine year old boy who would become the Demon of the Hidden Mist, killed over a hundred students before he had even received any ninja training. He was graduated immediately and was placed on a genin team with one of the students who had killed their partner and survived the massacre, Terumii Mei. It was this very act that would inspire her to become Mizukage and change what the Hidden Mist had become. The drastic loss in potential manpower meant that the practice needed to be discontinued.
The Real Mizukage
The unstable nature of the Hidden Mist is what made it a target for Uchiha Madara and, later, Uchiha Obito.
Madara infiltrated the village and manipulated the leadership into an audacious plan to use the currently unsealed Three-Tailed Turtle against Konoha. Under his unseen influence, Kiri kidnapped one of the Yellow Flash’s students, Nohara Rin, when he was on a mission and sealed the Tailed Beast inside him. They allowed her to escape when her teammate, Hatake Kakashi, came to rescue her and sent a contingent of shinobi to chase her back to Konoha. The plan was for Rin to return to Konoha unaware of her prisoner where the seal would automatically be released, releasing the Three-Tails inside the enemy village to unleash untold destruction. It would mean the loss of one of their Tailed Beasts but it would undoubtedly cause irreparable damage to Konoha before it was sealed away or drive off.
However Rin learned of what had been done to her during her imprisonment and forced Kakashi to kill her before she could return to Konoha. Uchiha Obito witnessed her death and, before the mist-nin could potentially retrieve the beast before it died along with its host, massacred the entire group.
Fortunately, the Three-Tails revived within a short amount of time and was immediately captured by Kiri once more. But instead of sealing it inside a child as was normal, Yagura, who was the most compatible with its chakra due to his heritage, chose to become its next jinchuuriki. And in a turn of events that no-one else foresaw, he gained completely mastery of its power.
Confident in his strength as the Fourth Mizukage, Yagura confronted the Tailed Beast directly in a contest over its chakra and actually emerged victorious. He subjugated the creature and stole the majority of its chakra for himself, allowing him to train with its power without its willful influence. Unknown to him, he had followed a similar path to Killer B in gaining control of its chakra yet Yagura never became partners with Isobu and they remained hostile to one another. But his mastery of its abilities meant that he became recognized worldwide as a perfect jinchuuriki too.
After the war ended, though Kiri ceased any overt acts of aggression against the other villages it never officially made peace with the others. This, coupled with the fear they had garnered during the war, severely damaged the village's diplomatic relations with the world worse than ever before.
Yagura’s negative relationship with his Tailed Beast was actually what allowed Uchiha Obito to exploit them. Obito avoided a direct confrontation by ambushing the Fourth Mizukage, crushing his will with the hypnotic influence of his Mangekyou Sharingan as he had been taught by Uchiha Madara. With neither Yagura nor Isobu protecting the other from genjutsu, both were overcome by Obito and became subject to his control. And so the Hidden Mist itself fell under his control as well.
Controlling the Hidden Mist helped steadily destroy one of the Five Great Hidden Villages and make the continent less capable of defending itself without one of its most powerful cornerstones. It helped induce the paranoia of other villages over its unpredictable actions which could end up leading to further war. And it kept two of the Tailed Beast’s under his control while poisoning the reputation of Jinchuuriki even further as the world witnessed Yagura’s actions, something that led to the Seven-Tailed Jinchuuriki Utakata being despised by many up until his own death. The only mist-nin who learned who was really in charge was Hoshigaki Kisame as Obito recognized a kindred spirit and powerful tool, revealing himself as "Uchiha Madara" who divulging the Moon's Eye Plan.
Under Obito’s influence, Yagura showed an increasing paranoia and descent into madness as he started to tear his own nation apart. His citizens became subject to heavily increased surveillance, crimes rates rose as law enforcement grew increasingly short staffed, seemingly loyal shinobi were interrogated under questionable evidence and relationship between ninja and civilian deteriorated more than ever.
One particularly ill-conceived mission ended up provoking the increasingly volatile Kaguya Clan. Their response was an all-out assault on Kiri where every man, woman and child capable of fighting broke through the village’s defenses and started the slaughter the entire populace. Armed with a lifetime of bloodlust and the incredible bodies granted by their kekkei genkai, they committed a terrible massacre before the clan could be brought down. The event was later known as the Kaguya Kamikaze.
The only survivor of the suicidal charge was its youngest and most talented member, Kimimaro, who was unintentionally hidden under the bodies of his dead kin and successfully escaped the village. Unable to survive alone, he was rescued by Orochimaru of the Legendary Sannin who had his own plans for the child. Even the Kaguya who had remained behind - the ones who were too old or too young - were hunted down and slaughtered to the lost. And while the bloodline still lives on in those who had left the clan during the past century, the Kaguya Clan itself was finally extinct.
The Next Era
Yagura’s actions had made him increasingly suspicious to certain members of the village. Terumii Mei was one of those.
She had suffered great stigma for her twin kekkei genkai, Boil Release and Lava Release, yet she had risen above all that in her impressive career and had garnered the admiration and respect of many of her fellow shinobi. She was a symbol for those who had discovered that they had descended from the kekkei genkai clans as well such as Chuukichi, with parents or grandparents who had been among those and had gone into hiding after the civil wars, and many of them gathered around her.
Mei had always been against the Fourth Mizukage’s brutal policies but she still believed that he had acted for the sake of protecting the village and making it stronger. However his actions in the past few years had only ever caused the village more harm.
Mei shared her suspicions with Ao of the Hunter Corps who used his Byakugan - one he had torn from one of the Hyuuga before killing them in the Third Shinobi World War - to observe Yagura directly. This careful examination revealed that Yagura was under a powerful genjutsu which was manipulating his actions under someone else’s control for an unknown length of time. With this discovery, Mei galvanized the mist-nin to join her in a uprising against the Fourth Mizukage to free the Hidden Mist of his tyranny. Manipulating events to get him outside the village to avoid immense collateral damage and prevent any loyalist enforcement, Mei led an ambush against Yagura with the rebel fighters and together they overcame his full strength.
Upon his death, Mei was selected to become the Fifth Mizukage and she immediately worked to bring enlightment to the hidden village and push it away from its bloodstained past. Tired of the infighting and ruthlessness of the Bloody Mist, many ninja were happy with the idea of change. She focused on rebuilding the damage to the village's infrastructure, reworking the academy curriculum and even granted amnesty to the shinobi who went rogue during Yagura's reign as she recognized that many of them had only left because of his extremist policies.
However there were still some who believed in the old regime and that Mei was destroying what made their village great. The most powerful of those traditionalists were the last and stronest generation of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen.
Without Yagura as his puppet, Obito believed that Hoshigaki Kisame would better serve away from the village. His final orders were to wreak havoc for the government which he fulfilled by assassination several important nobles and even killing the daimyo of the Land of Water, an event which had a terrible backlash on the relationship between Kiri and the country's rulers. This act had him immediately labeled an S-rank criminal and forced to escape the country where he soon joined Akatsuki. He was the first of many of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen to go rogue.
The most notable of these was the Fifth Mizukage's old teammate, Momochi Zabuza. He abandoned the village with his apprentice Haku for several years with the intention of building up money and allies to take the title of Mizukage for himself. He returned and launched a coup d'etat against Mei which ended in bitter failure and forced him to spend the next year on the run until he met his death in the Land of Waves.
The only Swordsmen to remain with the village was Hoozuki Mangetsu. He had a bloodthirsty personality that made him feared by many, but he was genuinely loyal to Kiri and believed that Mei was the best ruler they could have at the time. He also believed that men like him and his equally murderous brother Suigetsu would be needed even with the direction she was planning to take the village. And as the only one who had proven capable of wielding all seven swords, hunting down the rest of the Swordsmen would allow him to monopolize the weapons for him and his brother who wished to become one as well. Unfortunately, his ambitions came to an end midway when an ambush by the Hidden Sound ended his life and his swords were taken by Orochimaru as a part of his collection of rare weaponry.
Only the Hiramekerai, already passed down to Chojurou, remained the village. Suigetsu chose to abandon the village after his brother's death to find the lost swords and then rebuild the Seven Ninja Swordsmen as an independent organisation with himself as the leader.
But despite the many setbacks, Kiri flourished under the Fifth Mizukage's rule. The latest generation of shinobi were raised without living through the upheaval that had plagued their home in recent years. Today, Terumii Mei has helped her hidden village rise above its bloody past and she is the most loved and respected Mizukage to date.
This is an island country floating on the eastern ocean of the continent that is completely surrounded by water. It consists of one central island occupied by steep mountains in the middle of several smaller islands with hundreds of little ones between them. Each of the main islands have their own traditions that their citizens stubbornly insist in preserving to this day, creating a very unique culture. Many of the islands are uncharted and home to all kinds of wildlife, terrain and weather conditions.
The Civil Wars
The country was once subject to countless civil wars as the islanders treated each other as enemies instead of fellow countrymen. Divided from the mainland by the sea, they were far more concerned with their own interests than that of the rest of the world. They hired shinobi clans to go to war with one another; ninjas would be given missions to sink their ships, raid their businesses and destroy their home in an ever-escalating blood feud between islands. Where the other nations typically used shinobi to fight against other nations in their struggle for dominance, the islands were officially all meant to be one nation which made their warring more senseless and brutal than most.
Among the ninja clans that fought in these wars, it was the ones who possessed kekkei genkai that were naturally the most highly desired. Blessed with prodigious talent and unique powers essentially from birth, they fought countless battles against each other and every other shinobi clan, causing untold devastation across every island to carry out their missions.
The bone wielding Kaguya Clan terrified any who saw them tear their own bones from their bodies to wield as weapons and leap into battle with ecstatic bloodlust. The acid breathing Ashido Clan turned any battlefield they stood on into a desolate wasteland and leaving behind bodies too corroded to identify. And the ice-making Yuki Clan turned the abundant waters of the nation against its own people as they coated vast swatches of land in ice and shattered anyone caught in their path.
These three clans were the most powerful weapons used in any of the wars. But the magnitude of their success had a terrible impact on their reputation.
Everyone who ever suffered at their hands despised them and anyone who used them grew to fear them. This led to tales of the kekkei genkai clans being bringers of misfortune who were responsible for the civil war themselves, working to destabilize the country and profit from its death. The populace began to turn against these clans entirely as they became the scapegoats of the entire conflict, refusing their services, cutting off their supplies and attacking their people and homes.
The Founding
It was the news of the strongest ninja clans, the Senju and the Uchiha, had united spreading like wildfire across the continent that changed the status quo in the Land of Water as they scrambled to match this village of shinobi. Thus the feudal lord was convinced to allow the ninja clans to become the main military force of his nation and the Village Hidden in the Mist was built on its central island.
The Hidden Mist was immediately used as a tool to bring an end to the civil wars that had constantly plagued their country. With the feudal lord's blessing, the hidden village took the offensive against his enemies to violently quell any rebellion and bring all of the islands under their control. It helped gather more ninja clans to their cause with the visible evidence of their might and soon established it as one of the Five Great Hidden Villages.
Naturally, the widespread resentment against the kekkei genkai clans made them prime targets as the hidden village was used to bring them to order. By the time the civil wars came to an end, the kekkei genkai clans had been all but decimated. What remained of the Ashido and Yuki clans chose to go into hiding, disguising the truth of their origins and blending into the rest of the population for the sake of survival. It helped to ensure the continuation of their bloodline as their descendant throughout the nature would inherit their power - which would unfortunately lead to many being killed when their heritage was discovered - but the clans themselves had essentially come to an end. The Kaguya chose another path where they chose to retreat from the world without splitting apart as their savage nature meant that the idea of disbanding and become civilians was anathema to them. They instead became something like bandits who took on bloody missions from those willing to pay for their services but otherwise ravaged the land to keep themselves alive.
The Mizukages
The founder of the Hidden Mist was the First Mizukage Byakuren. The man had earned a legendary reputation in his long life. He was famous for forging seven magnificent swords with unique abilities that he wielded in battle himself, and for the experience and skill he had gained from living far past the average life expectancy of a ninja. His legendary status and prowess in battle is what allowed him to unite the ninja clans under his banner. He was a stern individual who believed that he could make his hidden village the strongest on the continent, pushing forward ruthlessly effective policies to raise the level of his shinobi into something to be feared. And he was a key figure in Kiri's role of ending the civil wars and making the hidden village recognized as one of the strongest on the continent, though the country's location and his intolerant attiude caused them to have only distant relations with other countries.
Byakuren took on seven disciples of the most skilled swordsmen from across the country for the sake of teaching each one to wield on his seven blades. When he died during the First Shinobi World War, these seven disciples each took one of his swords and went on to become the infamous Seven Ninja Swordsmen of the Mist.
The Second Mizukage was Hoozuki Gengetsu, the most powerful member of the clan of water shapeshifters. His mastery of their hijutsu manifested as water with an oily consistency and his infinite explosion ninjutsu, as well as genjutsu that very few were ever capable of seeing through, let alone breaking. His nomination was almost surprising in how rapidly he went from being a relative unknown to gaining immense popularity through his magnetic charisma and the clever tactics he utilized in the war. Unfortunately, his enmity towards the Second Tsuchikage culminated in a battle that killed them both.
His successor was the right-hand man of the First Mizukage, Shikaemon Saizou. He was originally slated to become the Second but was passed over in light of Gengetsu’s rapid rise to fame. Saizou’s most famous act as the Third Mizukage was leading an offensive against the Village Hidden in the Eddies and the Uzumaki Clan who had earned a fearsome reputation for their fuuinjutsu in the first two world wars.
The Third Shinobi World War saw the Fourth Mizukage Yagura rise to power. He was the son of the Three-Tailed Jinchuuriki and a once-in-a-generation child prodigy with an incredible affinity for water ninjutsu. It’s believed that the Tailed Beast influenced his innate talent at the cost of stunting his physical growth which plagued him with a child-like appearance even into adulthood. The scar on his left cheek was left by his own father when he lost control and left a wound imbued with corrosive chakra that resisted medical ninjutsu. He was elevated to the position of Kage while still in his teens as his abilities made him highly respected in his home village and equally feared by their enemies. Unfortunately, the Fourth Mizukage's reign became known as the darkest period in the Hidden Mist's history.
The Bloody Mist
Upon the Fourth Mizukage's selection, he used the war to significantly increase the rate of conscription among the country's populace. The village was flooded with potential shinobi, especially those who had been orphaned by the war and had no other prospects, who would be trained under a new academy curriculum. The training was soon said to be effective but brutal, designed to rapidly create effective fighters more than anything with the intention that their later education would compensate for their weaknesses.
The most infamous aspect of this was the new graduation test that was only revealed at the end of the first academic year that Yagura was in office. Every aspiring shinobi at the ninja academy needed to kill one of their classmates in one-on-one combat to graduate. It was for the sake of ensuring that only the strongest students would prosper, providing their worth in love combat and ensuring that any mist-nin would be capable of the most ruthless of acts for the sake of the village. The ritual worked and the next generation of shinobi quickly gained a fearsome reputation on the battlefield; news of the ritual itself horrified the world to the extent that the village became known as the Bloody Mist.
Naturally, such merciless changes in Kiri meant that there was an increase in the number of missing-nin the village produced. Many of these were people who had lost family to the graduation ritual or were afraid of their children participants or were going to be participants themselves. In response to this, Yagura dedicated a regiment of Kiri’s Anbu to tracking and executing these individual which he named the Hunter Corps - also called the Undertaker Squad by some - who held the duty of destroying their bodies to protect the village’s secrets. The Hunter Corps were soon feared by the rogue ninja but they gained an unfortunate reputation for the collateral damage and innocent lives lost in their pursuit as well.
This test only came to an end when Momochi Zabuza, a nine year old boy who would become the Demon of the Hidden Mist, killed over a hundred students before he had even received any ninja training. He was graduated immediately and was placed on a genin team with one of the students who had killed their partner and survived the massacre, Terumii Mei. It was this very act that would inspire her to become Mizukage and change what the Hidden Mist had become. The drastic loss in potential manpower meant that the practice needed to be discontinued.
The Real Mizukage
The unstable nature of the Hidden Mist is what made it a target for Uchiha Madara and, later, Uchiha Obito.
Madara infiltrated the village and manipulated the leadership into an audacious plan to use the currently unsealed Three-Tailed Turtle against Konoha. Under his unseen influence, Kiri kidnapped one of the Yellow Flash’s students, Nohara Rin, when he was on a mission and sealed the Tailed Beast inside him. They allowed her to escape when her teammate, Hatake Kakashi, came to rescue her and sent a contingent of shinobi to chase her back to Konoha. The plan was for Rin to return to Konoha unaware of her prisoner where the seal would automatically be released, releasing the Three-Tails inside the enemy village to unleash untold destruction. It would mean the loss of one of their Tailed Beasts but it would undoubtedly cause irreparable damage to Konoha before it was sealed away or drive off.
However Rin learned of what had been done to her during her imprisonment and forced Kakashi to kill her before she could return to Konoha. Uchiha Obito witnessed her death and, before the mist-nin could potentially retrieve the beast before it died along with its host, massacred the entire group.
Fortunately, the Three-Tails revived within a short amount of time and was immediately captured by Kiri once more. But instead of sealing it inside a child as was normal, Yagura, who was the most compatible with its chakra due to his heritage, chose to become its next jinchuuriki. And in a turn of events that no-one else foresaw, he gained completely mastery of its power.
Confident in his strength as the Fourth Mizukage, Yagura confronted the Tailed Beast directly in a contest over its chakra and actually emerged victorious. He subjugated the creature and stole the majority of its chakra for himself, allowing him to train with its power without its willful influence. Unknown to him, he had followed a similar path to Killer B in gaining control of its chakra yet Yagura never became partners with Isobu and they remained hostile to one another. But his mastery of its abilities meant that he became recognized worldwide as a perfect jinchuuriki too.
After the war ended, though Kiri ceased any overt acts of aggression against the other villages it never officially made peace with the others. This, coupled with the fear they had garnered during the war, severely damaged the village's diplomatic relations with the world worse than ever before.
Yagura’s negative relationship with his Tailed Beast was actually what allowed Uchiha Obito to exploit them. Obito avoided a direct confrontation by ambushing the Fourth Mizukage, crushing his will with the hypnotic influence of his Mangekyou Sharingan as he had been taught by Uchiha Madara. With neither Yagura nor Isobu protecting the other from genjutsu, both were overcome by Obito and became subject to his control. And so the Hidden Mist itself fell under his control as well.
Controlling the Hidden Mist helped steadily destroy one of the Five Great Hidden Villages and make the continent less capable of defending itself without one of its most powerful cornerstones. It helped induce the paranoia of other villages over its unpredictable actions which could end up leading to further war. And it kept two of the Tailed Beast’s under his control while poisoning the reputation of Jinchuuriki even further as the world witnessed Yagura’s actions, something that led to the Seven-Tailed Jinchuuriki Utakata being despised by many up until his own death. The only mist-nin who learned who was really in charge was Hoshigaki Kisame as Obito recognized a kindred spirit and powerful tool, revealing himself as "Uchiha Madara" who divulging the Moon's Eye Plan.
Under Obito’s influence, Yagura showed an increasing paranoia and descent into madness as he started to tear his own nation apart. His citizens became subject to heavily increased surveillance, crimes rates rose as law enforcement grew increasingly short staffed, seemingly loyal shinobi were interrogated under questionable evidence and relationship between ninja and civilian deteriorated more than ever.
One particularly ill-conceived mission ended up provoking the increasingly volatile Kaguya Clan. Their response was an all-out assault on Kiri where every man, woman and child capable of fighting broke through the village’s defenses and started the slaughter the entire populace. Armed with a lifetime of bloodlust and the incredible bodies granted by their kekkei genkai, they committed a terrible massacre before the clan could be brought down. The event was later known as the Kaguya Kamikaze.
The only survivor of the suicidal charge was its youngest and most talented member, Kimimaro, who was unintentionally hidden under the bodies of his dead kin and successfully escaped the village. Unable to survive alone, he was rescued by Orochimaru of the Legendary Sannin who had his own plans for the child. Even the Kaguya who had remained behind - the ones who were too old or too young - were hunted down and slaughtered to the lost. And while the bloodline still lives on in those who had left the clan during the past century, the Kaguya Clan itself was finally extinct.
The Next Era
Yagura’s actions had made him increasingly suspicious to certain members of the village. Terumii Mei was one of those.
She had suffered great stigma for her twin kekkei genkai, Boil Release and Lava Release, yet she had risen above all that in her impressive career and had garnered the admiration and respect of many of her fellow shinobi. She was a symbol for those who had discovered that they had descended from the kekkei genkai clans as well such as Chuukichi, with parents or grandparents who had been among those and had gone into hiding after the civil wars, and many of them gathered around her.
Mei had always been against the Fourth Mizukage’s brutal policies but she still believed that he had acted for the sake of protecting the village and making it stronger. However his actions in the past few years had only ever caused the village more harm.
Mei shared her suspicions with Ao of the Hunter Corps who used his Byakugan - one he had torn from one of the Hyuuga before killing them in the Third Shinobi World War - to observe Yagura directly. This careful examination revealed that Yagura was under a powerful genjutsu which was manipulating his actions under someone else’s control for an unknown length of time. With this discovery, Mei galvanized the mist-nin to join her in a uprising against the Fourth Mizukage to free the Hidden Mist of his tyranny. Manipulating events to get him outside the village to avoid immense collateral damage and prevent any loyalist enforcement, Mei led an ambush against Yagura with the rebel fighters and together they overcame his full strength.
Upon his death, Mei was selected to become the Fifth Mizukage and she immediately worked to bring enlightment to the hidden village and push it away from its bloodstained past. Tired of the infighting and ruthlessness of the Bloody Mist, many ninja were happy with the idea of change. She focused on rebuilding the damage to the village's infrastructure, reworking the academy curriculum and even granted amnesty to the shinobi who went rogue during Yagura's reign as she recognized that many of them had only left because of his extremist policies.
However there were still some who believed in the old regime and that Mei was destroying what made their village great. The most powerful of those traditionalists were the last and stronest generation of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen.
Without Yagura as his puppet, Obito believed that Hoshigaki Kisame would better serve away from the village. His final orders were to wreak havoc for the government which he fulfilled by assassination several important nobles and even killing the daimyo of the Land of Water, an event which had a terrible backlash on the relationship between Kiri and the country's rulers. This act had him immediately labeled an S-rank criminal and forced to escape the country where he soon joined Akatsuki. He was the first of many of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen to go rogue.
The most notable of these was the Fifth Mizukage's old teammate, Momochi Zabuza. He abandoned the village with his apprentice Haku for several years with the intention of building up money and allies to take the title of Mizukage for himself. He returned and launched a coup d'etat against Mei which ended in bitter failure and forced him to spend the next year on the run until he met his death in the Land of Waves.
The only Swordsmen to remain with the village was Hoozuki Mangetsu. He had a bloodthirsty personality that made him feared by many, but he was genuinely loyal to Kiri and believed that Mei was the best ruler they could have at the time. He also believed that men like him and his equally murderous brother Suigetsu would be needed even with the direction she was planning to take the village. And as the only one who had proven capable of wielding all seven swords, hunting down the rest of the Swordsmen would allow him to monopolize the weapons for him and his brother who wished to become one as well. Unfortunately, his ambitions came to an end midway when an ambush by the Hidden Sound ended his life and his swords were taken by Orochimaru as a part of his collection of rare weaponry.
Only the Hiramekerai, already passed down to Chojurou, remained the village. Suigetsu chose to abandon the village after his brother's death to find the lost swords and then rebuild the Seven Ninja Swordsmen as an independent organisation with himself as the leader.
But despite the many setbacks, Kiri flourished under the Fifth Mizukage's rule. The latest generation of shinobi were raised without living through the upheaval that had plagued their home in recent years. Today, Terumii Mei has helped her hidden village rise above its bloody past and she is the most loved and respected Mizukage to date.
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