Pain's Assault: The Day Konoha Disappeared

Six Bodies Enter Konoha

Akatsuki no longer sends envoys. After the failed capture of the Eight-Tails (Hachibi), its leader comes to take the Nine-Tails himself. Six figures with red hair, pierced faces and ring-circled eyes cross the village barrier in broad daylight. They bear the same name, Pain, and the same gaze: the Rinnegan. Konoha thinks it is facing a squad. In reality the village is facing a single man.

The plan is methodical. Three bodies wreck the infrastructure and pin down the village's forces while Konan and the three others look for Naruto. Each corpse masters only one specialty — gravity, summoning, absorption, souls, mechanization, the King of Hell — but they all share a common field of vision. The six Paths are in fact named after the six realms of Buddhism. Catching one of them from behind amounts to attacking all six.

Kakashi leads the defense and ends up facing two bodies. He destroys the Asura Path, works out that the enemy's gravity follows a rhythm, then entrusts his conclusions to Choji so they can reach Tsunade. To cover his junior, he burns his last strength on a Kamui and deflects the projectile fired by what is left of the destroyed body. Chakra exhaustion finishes him off under the rubble.

Intelligence work moves forward in parallel. Shizune establishes that the black rods driven into the corpses are chakra receivers, powered from a distance. The Human Path catches her off guard, tears out her soul and reads the key detail in it: Naruto is training at Mount Myoboku. At headquarters, Shikamaru and the cryptographer Shiho decode the message that Jiraiya had carved on the back of Fukasaku. The key is one of the Sannin's novels, and the conclusion fits on a single line: the real Pain is not among the six.

A Village Reduced to a Crater

The village does not surrender. Konohamaru, still a genin, runs into the Naraka Path in the middle of interrogating civilians, refuses to flee and routs it with a Rasengan learned from his elder. Chunin teams harass the bodies without ever managing to hold them. Tsunade holds her line: she will not hand over her jinchuriki. That is exactly the answer Pain was waiting for.

The Deva Path then rises above the rooftops. A single gesture: Almighty Push (Shinra Tensei). The gravitational repulsion sweeps away everything for hundreds of meters. Houses, towers, walls, trees, streets: not a building or a landmark is left, only a basin of churned earth. Konoha was erased in a few seconds, with no frontal battle, by a single area technique.

The human toll, however, stays far lower than it should be, and that comes down to one decision. Before the impact, Tsunade summoned Katsuyu and had her split into hundreds of fragments, one per villager, to shield and heal everyone from a distance. The effort drains her reserves. Her rejuvenation jutsu wears off, she collapses and falls into a coma. The village loses its Hokage in the middle of the attack.

Pain then descends into the crater and lays out his doctrine. The world, he says, learns nothing from speeches and everything from suffering. His plan: gather the nine tailed beasts to forge a weapon so destructive that fear would impose peace, a temporary peace lasting only as long as it takes for people to forget. The demonstration comes at a cost: that giant repulsion has drained Nagato, who must recover before striking again.

The Return of Sage Mode

Naruto had been training at Mount Myoboku since Jiraiya's death. A messenger toad brings him the news and the toads immediately send him back by reverse summoning, along with Fukasaku, Gamabunta, Gamaken and Gamahiro. He arrives in Sage Mode, orange pigment around the eyes, able to sense the chakra of every enemy body. Pain immediately recognizes his former master's technique.

The fight dismantles the six Paths piece by piece. The Preta Path absorbs a Rasengan then falls to a blow of Frog Kata, natural energy extending the strike beyond the fist. Gamabunta swallows the Animal Path to cut it off from the rest and let Naruto finish it. A Rasenshuriken thrown from a distance takes out the Human Path, and the Asura Path, back on its feet, takes a Rasengan as it charged at Tsunade. Sage Mode does have a limit, though: clones store natural energy in reserve, and that reserve runs out.

That leaves the Deva Path, and the real problem: gravity. Naruto exploits the interval Kakashi spotted, about five seconds between two pushes, to slip his clones into the gap. The counterattack is brutal. Fukasaku is killed, Naruto is pinned to the ground by black rods. It is Hinata who steps in, finally says what she has hidden from him since childhood, and is struck down before his eyes.

The seal gives way. The Nine-Tails resurfaces at six tails, then at eight. Pain traps him in a Chibaku Tensei, a gravity sphere that tears up the ground to build a satellite of rock. Inside the seal, a figure appears: Minato, whose residual chakra was waiting for exactly the eighth tail. He tightens the seal, reveals to his son that he is his father and that a masked man was behind the fox's attack. Naruto comes to, breaks the sphere, finishes the Deva Path with a clone feint, then traces the chakra of the black rods back to its source.

The Conversation That Changes Everything

The trail leads to a paper tree on the edge of the village. There Naruto finds Nagato: an emaciated body, wired into a machine, its back bristling with the same receivers he drove into his corpses. Konan stands guard and lets them talk. The boy had come to avenge Jiraiya. He does not attack: first he demands an explanation.

Nagato tells of Amegakure, a buffer country crushed by the wars of the great nations. He tells of his parents, killed before his eyes by two Konoha ninja who had come looking for food, during the Second Great Ninja War. He tells of Jiraiya, who took in three orphans and taught them everything. Above all he tells of Yahiko, his friend, who threw himself onto the blade during the trap set by Hanzo. The body that has just leveled Konoha wears that dead man's face. The spiral of hatred simply keeps being passed on, side after side.

Naruto's answer comes down to a refusal. He does not forgive and he has no ready-made solution, but he will not kill. He invokes Jiraiya's first novel, the one whose hero gave him his name, and the Sannin's stubborn will to believe in spite of everything. Nagato yields. He gathers his last strength and casts Rinne Tensei, which frees the captive souls and brings back everyone who fell during the invasion, Kakashi and Shizune included. The technique costs him his life. Konan carries away his body and Yahiko's, and swears loyalty to Naruto.

The consequences are twofold. The village is a field of rubble where the inhabitants are rehoused in tents, but its dead have come back, which happens nowhere else in the series. Tsunade stays unconscious and the Fire Daimyo appoints Danzo interim Hokage, Kakashi having been considered before his death. Naruto, for his part, returns carried by the crowd: the child people used to avoid becomes the village's hero. The price, invisible at the time, is a seal that nearly broke and that his father will never be able to close again.

Summary Table

FAQ

• Which episodes cover Pain's invasion?
  Episodes 152 to 169 then 172 to 175 of Naruto Shippuden, with two off-arc episodes in between. In the manga, this corresponds roughly to chapters 413 to 453, or volumes 45 to 48.
• Why does Pain attack Konoha?
  To capture the Nine-Tails, one of the last two tailed beasts Akatsuki is still missing after the failed capture of the Eight-Tails. Since Konoha refuses to hand over Naruto, he destroys the village to force him out.
• Who is the real Pain?
  Nagato, a former student of Jiraiya originally from Amegakure. He stays motionless off to the side and commands six corpses through chakra receivers. The lead body is that of his childhood friend Yahiko.
• Does Naruto kill Nagato at the end of the arc?
  No. He refuses revenge after their conversation. Nagato then chooses to revive his victims with the Rinne Tensei and dies from his own technique.
• Does Kakashi really die during the invasion?
  Yes, from chakra exhaustion after protecting Choji. He is among the characters brought back to life by Nagato's Rinne Tensei at the end of the arc.

In summary

Pain's invasion is the turning point of Shippuden. It settles Jiraiya's legacy, turns an enemy into a mirror and replaces revenge with a far costlier choice: taking the blow without returning it. Konoha comes out of it destroyed then rebuilt, with its dead given back and an interim Hokage nobody chose. Naruto comes out of it recognized by the entire village, but bound to a fox whose seal nearly gave way. Everything that follows, from the Five Kage Summit to the war, flows from that conversation in a paper tree.