A great cheer erupted from the Hidden Leaf's side as their reinforcements from the north-eastern front line came pouring over the waterfall alongside the Hidden Sound's forces, running along the cliff walls while bombarding the Hidden Stone's troops trapped below in the Valley of the End with ninjutsu and pelting them with kunai.
BOOM!
In the middle of pummelling a bruised and battered Stone-nin, Naruto looked up as an ear-splitting explosion rang out overhead, the sound echoing again and again as it rebounded off the valley walls.
Shortly afterwards, stones of all shapes and sizes began pelting the valley like hail, the smaller, pebble-sized ones braining people left and right and the larger, boulder-sized ones crushing them outright. As they realised what was happening, the shinobi on both sides of the conflict stopped fighting to concentrate on dodging the falling rocks.
"Wood Style Secret Jutsu: Nativity of a World of Trees!"
Senju Hashirama clapped his hands, causing trees to sprout from the valley walls and grow into leafy umbrellas that shielded only the Hidden Leaf's side, leaving the Hidden Stone in the unenviable position of having to dodge both the meteorites fragments and the Leaf's long-ranged attacks.
Thanks to Sakura's earlier genjutsu distracting the enemy, the timely arrival of their backup forces, and the rain of stones, the tide of battle finally began to turn in the Hidden Leaf's favour. Despite their side still being outnumbered by ten thousand men, Naruto and Hashirama were each worth far more than ten thousand men!
"You're quite the promising young man, aren't you?" Hashirama called to Naruto as they fought side by side deep in the heart of the enemy's formation. "You've almost got as much chakra as I did at your age!"
Ten golden chakra arms burst from Naruto's back, twisting and coiling around him in spirals as they each shoved their respective exploding Rasengan into the nearest Iwa-nin they could find, sending them spiralling into their comrades or the valley's walls.
"You're not too bad yourself, First Great Stone Face Guy!" Naruto shouted as he picked up two Iwa-nin with his chakra arms and slammed them together, before tossing them away like disposable chopsticks. "Real sprightly for your age, ya know?"
Though Naruto had gained a reputation in the fandom as a pacifist, thanks to his fondness for Talk-no-Jutsu and a final kill count of just one by the end of his story, the truth was that he had no hesitation when it came to doing whatever it took to protect his comrades.
Naruto was a strike-first sort of bloke, often with the Rasengan, and it was only once the enemy could no longer move that he would choose to berate them at his leisure and subject them to his infernal Talk-no-Jutsu, when they no longer had the ability to shut him up with their fists.
Although Naruto's Rasengan had only ever killed one person, it was still an extremely lethal technique developed by the Fourth Hokage. Sakura could personally attest to that, having once had a massive hole torn into her body by friendly fire from Naruto.
In any case, if someone could survive his killing blow, Naruto would usually spare them, and luckily for his peace of mind, his opponents were more often than not durable enough to tank a Rasengan and survive it, at least just about.
All that to say, Naruto had no qualms about going for the throat, unlike Sakura, who was a big softie and would usually go easy on her opponents unless she feared for her life, and Sasuke, who had no interest in killing anyone not named Itachi or Danzō. In that respect, Naruto was much like his father Minato and the previous Hokage: kind to his friends, merciful to the weak or the defeated, but merciless towards the village's enemies.
"Hahaha!" Hashirama laughed. "I may be over a hundred years old, but I'm still just a kid at heart, you know! That's what you get when you die early!"
To the Hidden Stone's shinobi, having their opponents exchange small talk as they tore through their ranks as if they were nothing but rice paper was extremely demoralising. To make matters somehow even worse, those who had consumed Takigakure's Hero Water yesterday were already beginning to drop like flies, dying of old age in their thirties or forties.
"I give up!"
"I signed up to fight men, not monsters in human skin!"
"What's happening to me!? My hair is falling out, somebody help me!"
One by one, the Hidden Stone's fighters began throwing down their weapons as they succumbed to despair, watching their comrades get torn apart by the enemy's ninjutsu or rapidly develop wrinkles and white hair before their very eyes, withering as though their personal time had lurched into fast forward.
Before long, this trend had propagated through the entirety of the Hidden Stone's army, with even a few bouts of infighting breaking out as chūnin and genin turned against their jōnin captains, fragging them when they insisted they continued to fight. Although they all burned with patriotic fervour, they knew deep down that this wasn't a war to protect the Hidden Stone, even though they had been attacked first. This was a war of aggression, of conquest.
"Wood Style: Four Pillar Prison Jutsu!"
Great wooden bars burst out of the ground around the Hidden Stone's forces, trapping them inside. Reinforced with Hashirama's natural senjutsu chakra, the timber was nigh indestructible, and short of using the Transformation Jutsu to make themselves as flat as paper, escape was impossible.
The Hidden Leaf had just won a major battle, so why was Naruto feeling so apprehensive...?
"Oh, is that Sakura-chan's and Captain Yamato's Wood Style?" Naruto observed as Hashirama added horizontal lattices between the vertical bars. "It's pretty useful for camping outdoors when there's no inns around, ya know."
Hashirama's eyebrow twitched.
"I'd say they're using my Wood Style, not the other way around," he said. "I was the first person to awaken the Kekkei Genkai in history, you know?"
"Eh…" Naruto said, unconvinced. "Then—"
Naruto broke off, his eyes widening in shock.
'Brat, I don't sense the little missy's negative emotions any more,' the Nine-Tails said gravely. 'I've lost track of that hateful Madara's chakra, too… they're gone.'