Chapter 466: A Missing-Nin Should Do What Missing-Nin Do
When Jun came back to herself, the night was deep.
She opened her eyes slowly, and as her awareness returned and the events prior to losing consciousness came back with it, she sat bolt upright with a sharp cry, cold sweat soaking through her clothes.
Her hands went immediately to her abdomen.
There should have been a wound there. A deep, bleeding wound. Instead she felt only smooth skin.
She stared down at herself, unable to immediately process what she was seeing.
"You're awake."
She turned toward Yasushi's voice. He was sitting beside a small campfire, eating from a bowl of soup at a pace that suggested nothing in particular was wrong.
"Your injuries are healed. We've already left Konoha."
He paused.
"I was not able to bring your mother out."
The word mother arrived in Jun's chest before she had a chance to manage it. She looked down, bit her lip, her hands twisting hard in the fabric of her clothes. Tears came again.
Yasushi continued eating.
"By the way, that ninja who grabbed you and held a knife to your throat was using a Transformation Jutsu. It was not your mother."
Jun's head came up. She stared at him.
"Transformation Jutsu?"
"That was not my mother?"
"Obviously." He gave her a sideways look that carried very little patience. "Some shinobi you are, not recognizing a setup that obvious."
"Think about who we're dealing with. Danzo. The man who built an entire shadow organization on manipulation. You think he would just leave the target in a straightforward prison cell where anyone could walk in and take her?"
"And another thing: what prisoner gets to keep a knife on her person? Did you even check before you grabbed her?"
"You practically earned that stabbing."
Jun blinked at him. The berating should have landed badly. Instead something about it made the tightness in her chest ease in a direction she had not expected.
"So it wasn't really her?"
"None of it was real?"
"That's what I just said."
She sat with that for a moment.
Then she burst into something that was equal parts laughter and sobbing, pulling her knees up to her chest, her whole body shaking.
"I was so terrified."
"I really believed it. I genuinely believed my mother had been hollowed out by Root and had nothing left."
She kept cycling between laughing and crying, neither one winning, tears running freely down her face. The stone that had been sitting on her sternum since the cell was gone. The thing that had been making each breath feel borrowed was gone.
Her mother was still her mother. Still the person who had loved her. It had not happened.
Yasushi watched this from across the fire with his soup.
When she had been going long enough, he spoke again, his tone back to flat.
"You are celebrating prematurely."
She looked at him.
"I found your mother's body in the facility afterward. Danzo had already had her killed."
He met her eyes steadily.
"I burned her remains before I left. I was not going to let Danzo's people use her body for experimentation."
He watched Jun's face stop moving.
He had made the decision quickly and had not second-guessed it. The calculus was simple: this version of the truth was easier to carry than the alternative. He had reduced everything to ash and there was no one left to contradict what he said. If Broken Fang had truly been who he said she was, that was what history now contained.
Jun sat completely still for a long moment, looking at the fire without seeing it. Everything in her expression had gone somewhere internal.
Her mother had still been her mother. Her mother had loved her, had not been lost. And her mother was dead.
She was not sure what she was supposed to feel, whether grief or something closer to relief, whether those two things could coexist. She did not know how to hold them at the same time.
She sat like a figure without a person in it.
Then the light came back into her eyes, and what it carried was something hard and specific.
"Danzo. I am going to--"
"Danzo is dead. I killed him. There is no one to go after."
He finished the soup.
"Dead and gone. Not a trace left."
The emotion that had been building toward somewhere had its destination removed. Jun's expression shifted through several things in quick succession, none of them landing cleanly, until she exhaled once, long and slow.
The anger, the grief, the need to do something with all of it: they settled without resolving, becoming something quieter and heavier that she would carry forward instead of releasing.
She looked at Yasushi with genuine feeling behind her eyes.
"Thank you. For everything you did today."
"Don't thank me." He waved a hand. "If anything, this is my fault for involving you in the first place. Danzo's target was always me. You were collateral."
He looked at her with something direct in his expression.
"Which is why you do not need to come with me from here. The situation has changed. Your mother's situation is resolved. Danzo is dead. The main reason this became what it became no longer exists."
"Most of what happened in that facility today was my doing. The Root operatives, Danzo himself: my hands. That means the consequences follow me, not you."
"If you go back to the village now and explain what actually happened, Hiruzen will hear you out. He is not unreasonable. You were coerced, you had no real alternative, and without Danzo pushing the narrative against you, the village has no particular interest in making an example of you."
He held her gaze.
"Go home, Jun. Go back to Konoha. That is where you belong."
He meant it, and it showed.
"You are a strong shinobi now, and you are going to become stronger. You will have companions. You might even be Hokage someday."
"Running from village to village with a missing-nin, never knowing what comes next: that is not the life you should be living."
For a moment, Jun wavered. She felt it clearly, the pull of the reasonable path.
Then she shook her head, hard and final.
"No."
"I am not going back."
"I go where you go. If you are a missing-nin, then I am a missing-nin."
No hesitation in it. No room for negotiation in her tone.
Yasushi looked at her face carefully, checking for the particular quality of a decision that had not actually been made yet.
He found none of it.
He sighed.
"You really do not have to do this."
"Danzo came after me. You were pulled in because of my situation. I handled it because I was responsible for handling it, not because I owe you anything in either direction."
"So you do not owe me anything either. There is no debt here that requires you to follow me into this."
"You understand that, right?"
Jun was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, her voice had a quality that was different from anything he had heard from her before. Not the voice of a child making a decision. Not the voice of someone grateful and responding to that gratitude.
Something else.
She looked up past the fire and past him, her gaze finding the sky above the trees.
The stars were out. Dense and clear.
"When I was small, my mother was good to me. She was genuinely warm. I was too busy with training to notice properly, always chasing the next milestone, the next level, always sure that when I became a real shinobi there would be time for everything I was deferring."
"Now she is gone and I understand clearly what I deferred away."
Her voice was quiet. The words were slow and measured, like she was reading something she had spent time writing.
"After today, I understand something I did not understand before. Some things cannot be waited on."
"When someone is good to you, you respond to that while you still can."
"I grew up in an environment where kindness was the exception. The people around me when I was a child kept their distance because of what I couldn't do. The looks I got were pity or contempt. Root was worse than nothing."
"I have not had a surplus of people being genuinely good to me. So I am not slow to notice when it is real."
She looked at him directly, the firelight making the steadiness in her eyes very clear.
"Yasushi. I know that you are real."
"This is not impulse. It is not gratitude. It is not any temporary feeling that I will regret tomorrow."
"I am following the only thing that has ever led me somewhere worth going."
"I don't want to miss this. I don't want to regret this."
"Is that a problem?"
Yasushi made a sound under his breath, looking at her with an expression that had shifted slightly from what it had been before.
He had not thought of either of them as anything other than very capable children before today. Effective in the field, reliable in ways that mattered, but still fundamentally young in the way that children were young regardless of how well they performed.
What Jun had just said was not the reasoning of a child.
The ability to look clearly at your own heart and follow what you find there, without flinching and without excusing it: most adults never managed it.
He was not certain he always managed it himself.
He looked at the fire for a while.
His honest preference, if he stripped everything away, was to travel alone. Alone meant no constraints on what he could do or when he could do it. He had plans forming already: find the old man in his deteriorating condition and finish that before it could become a problem, then settle the unfinished account with Nagato. After that, the world opened.
Taking Jun along complicated those plans. She was going to need somewhere safe before any of the interesting parts could happen. There would be considerations there had not been before.
The fire crackled between them.
He thought about it for another moment, and then a different thought arrived and hit him harder than he expected.
A ten-year-old girl had just demonstrated more courage and clarity than he was currently showing.
He slapped his knee once.
"Fine. Together then."
Jun's face opened completely, a smile spreading with the specific quality of something that had been working very hard against a great deal of resistance and had finally arrived.
She wiped her face dry, turned to face him, and started talking immediately.
"Where are we going? Are we leaving Fire Country? Should we pick up a few bounty contracts at a nearby station before we cross the border? I have never actually been to a bounty station."
"Bounty station?" He shook his head with something between contempt and amusement.
Taking commissions for money was the lowest application of what he currently had available. As a Konoha jonin there had been limits on what he could openly do. As a missing-nin, every one of those limits was gone.
The shinobi world, honestly assessed, was one large collection of poorly defended resources with his name on them. He was not going to spend his time completing assigned tasks for other people's money.
Though outright banditry also had drawbacks: the constant trickle of mission-accepting shinobi showing up to collect on posted bounties was genuinely irritating even when none of them were individually dangerous.
The most efficient system, when he thought about it clearly, was one that generated income passively without requiring him to go looking for it. Taxation. A regular revenue source from a defined area.
Which meant, when he followed that logic to its natural endpoint:
"We are going to become a daimyo."
Jun stared at him.
"You mean, work as a daimyo's personal guard? Get their protection in exchange?"
"That is actually a decent idea. A daimyo's patronage would create real political complications for anyone trying to pursue us, even the Hokage would have to handle it carefully."
"I did not say work for a daimyo."
He cut her off.
"I said become a daimyo. There is one daimyo, and it is me. You are my captain of the guard."
Jun's mouth opened and closed.
"You are a shinobi. You cannot be a daimyo."
"Why not?"
He could see that this particular sequence of logic was going to require her a significant amount of time to process, so he did not wait for her to catch up. He was already working through the operational details in his head.
"The five major countries have too many layers of protection around their leadership. Too complicated to control cleanly."
"But the minor country daimyo are different. Minimal shinobi presence, ordinary guards, no real security depth. Walking in would not require significant effort."
"I open the Sharingan on the current daimyo, and they cooperate. They appoint you as captain of the guard, which gives us legitimate authority over the security apparatus."
"Then we clear out the existing personnel."
"Once the household is clean, I step in as the actual decision-maker. The daimyo functions as the public face."
"The whole transition happens without anyone outside noticing a change has occurred."
"If some noble figures it out and decides to be difficult, that becomes a corruption investigation. Their assets are seized. Legal, documented, and financially productive."
"How is that not perfect?"
"How is it-- how can you even-- this is completely--"
Jun's eyes had gone very wide. Her lips were moving faster than the words were coming.
"You cannot do that."
Yasushi put both hands on her shoulders with the patient expression of someone explaining something important to someone who would understand it eventually.
"Jun. Think about where we are right now."
"We are missing-nin."
"Missing-nin should do what missing-nin do."
"Going to a bounty station and taking commissions, that is just being a shinobi with extra steps. Where is the missing in that?"
"But if we--"
He released her shoulders and waved one hand with the finality of someone who had already decided.
"Trust me."
"I am not going to lead you somewhere bad."
Jun closed her mouth.
She sat with the fire between them and the stars overhead, and somewhere in the process of sitting there she arrived at a quiet and private suspicion that the decision to follow him into this might have been made somewhat hastily after all.
Chapter 467: Ebizo's Open Gambit
Secrets do not stay buried.
Sand Village had eventually learned the truth: their tailed beast had not died in the field. It had been taken. A Konoha shinobi had walked out of the engagement carrying Shukaku.
This was not acceptable.
"Tell our negotiators that everything else is on the table. Every other term is negotiable." Elder Chiyo sat upright against her chair, her body wrapped in bandages from the engagement's aftermath, her voice leaving no room for interpretation. "But we are getting our tailed beast back. That point is not open for discussion."
"We lost this war. That does not mean we have lost our capacity to continue it."
"If Konoha wants a peace agreement, they will have to give ground on this. There is no version of this treaty that does not include the return of Shukaku."
"The distribution of tailed beasts across the villages was an arrangement established by the First Hokage Senju Hashirama himself. It is part of the foundational structure of the shinobi world. Sarutobi Hiruzen does not have the authority to simply dismantle it."
The Third Kazekage was dead. The two most likely candidates for the next Kazekage position had not survived the war either. Nagato had vanished. Sand Village's leadership structure had collapsed down to a council of elders, and Chiyo was the unquestioned senior voice among them. When she spoke, she was effectively speaking for the village.
The jonin responsible for external negotiations, Yashiro-maru, was less settled.
"The individual who took the tailed beast is a rising talent from the Uchiha clan. The intelligence from the field indicates he is seven or eight years old and has already awakened the Mangekyo Sharingan. Killed the Third Kazekage personally. His future potential has no visible ceiling."
"Konoha will not give up someone like that."
"The very fact that he is exceptional is precisely why he must be removed before that potential can be realized."
Chiyo's expression carried a cold clarity.
"With most clans, the calculation would be more complicated."
"But he is an Uchiha. Which means we may actually have an opening."
"Sarutobi Hiruzen cannot want a Fourth Hokage who is an Uchiha. He has spent his entire tenure managing the balance between the Uchiha and every other interest in the village."
"Whether it works or not, the attempt costs us nothing."
"Think about Sakumo Hatake. Think about Jiraiya and Tsunade, who both left the village. Eliminating inconvenient geniuses is not something Konoha has any difficulty with."
"I understand." Yashiro-maru composed himself and bowed with proper gravity, then withdrew.
When the door closed, Ebizo spoke.
"Sister. What if we gave this plan some additional insurance?"
Chiyo knew her younger brother's reputation for thinking several moves ahead. She looked at him with full attention.
"What are you thinking?"
Ebizo settled back.
"The Third Kazekage's sealed archive has been declassified now that he's gone. I assume you've gone through the intelligence on Uchiha Yasushi."
"I have." Chiyo's expression acknowledged what that intelligence had contained. Even for someone of her experience and composure, the file had been unsettling. "The world those reports describe is completely different from what we know. No wonder the Third made decisions that seemed incomprehensible at the time."
"And yet, even knowing what was coming, he could not avoid his own death. The war still happened. Nagato has gone missing. Everything he worked toward appears to have accomplished nothing."
"Not quite nothing," Ebizo said. "Our village is in considerably worse shape than the intelligence indicated it would be at this stage."
Chiyo gave him a flat look.
"At your age, constantly stating the obvious is a quality no one finds endearing. Get to the point."
He did not take offense. He never did.
"The point is this: because we know what this boy will eventually accomplish, we need him removed. The Third spent years trying to arrange that and failed every time. The boy is only getting stronger, which makes direct action increasingly difficult."
"Which is why I want to create a situation where other people remove him for us."
"Specifically, I want to drive a wedge between him and Konoha that makes the village do what we cannot."
"And your method?" Chiyo asked, her voice carrying the beginning of interest.
"Konoha will not move aggressively against him as long as Hiruzen believes the boy can be shaped. He has too much confidence in his own ability to manage young shinobi. He will not commit fully to eliminating Yasushi until he is completely certain that control is impossible."
"So we need to make that certainty available to him."
Chiyo's eyes had sharpened. "You are going to share the intelligence. What we know about his future."
"Not just to Hiruzen." Ebizo smiled, and the expression carried everything his reputation was built on. "To all five major villages."
The silence that followed was brief.
"If only Hiruzen hears it, he can choose not to believe it, and he can suppress it. But if everyone hears it, he cannot control the reaction even if he dismisses the source."
"Think about how the Uchiha clan itself will receive this information. Think about how the other hidden villages will respond."
"No village in the shinobi world will accept the prospect of being absorbed into someone else's empire. Not for a certainty, not for a probability, not even for a remote possibility."
"The moment this information is in circulation, every person in a position of power will be running the same calculation: what does this cost me if it turns out to be true? And the cost of it being true is complete annihilation. No one bets their village's existence on a one-in-ten-thousand chance."
"People will move against him. Plenty of them. We do not have to be one of those people."
He let the corner of his mouth shift.
"When Yasushi is dead, Shukaku will die with him, and in time the beast will reconstitute itself in the desert. We wait. That is all we have to do."
"It is a shame about Danzo," he added. "If he were still alive, a careful word in his direction would have been more than enough. He would have found his own way to finish it."
Chiyo had not anticipated how far he was willing to push this. Releasing intelligence of this sensitivity into general circulation was not a small decision.
She thought about it.
Then she nodded, slowly, with something that was close to admiration.
"Turning other people's weapons against a common target. An elegant approach."
"But releasing this puts pressure on our own village as well. The moment we let this out, every other village will want everything we have. They will send every operative they can find to take what they can."
"Let them come." Ebizo was entirely unbothered. "Akakaze's knowledge of the other villages' internal situations was not comprehensive enough to constitute anything genuinely sensitive. If they steal it, the loss is acceptable."
"What we protect carefully are the materials on Nagato and the Akatsuki. Everything else can serve as bait."
"Useful side benefit: it will flush out whatever intelligence operatives are currently embedded in our village. Let them take the low-value material and follow them home."
Chiyo considered this and found no flaw in it.
"Then that is what we do."
Several days later, the Sand Village delegation arrived in Konoha and formal peace negotiations began.
There was not much to negotiate. Sand had lost the war, and the negotiating position of a defeated party had predictable limits. Sand Village had surrendered before and was not unfamiliar with the process. The goal was to minimize the cost, not to secure favorable terms.
Both sides understood the parameters, and progress was rapid. Agreement came on most points without significant difficulty.
Until they reached the tailed beast.
"Shukaku belongs to Sand Village. This was guaranteed by the First Hokage himself, and that guarantee is not subject to revision by anyone." The Sand negotiator delivered the position with the particular clarity of someone who had been told there was nothing to discuss. "You will return the One-Tail. This is a condition of any peace agreement. It is not negotiable."
Konoha's negotiating jonin felt the room become uncomfortable.
Because on this specific point, Konoha was in the wrong, and everyone in the room knew it.
The distribution of tailed beasts across the hidden villages was one of the foundational arrangements of the shinobi world. The First Hokage had established it, and its logic was simple: the balance of power between the major villages depended on no single village holding all the tailed beasts. If Konoha could take Sand's tailed beast today, what prevented any village from taking any other village's tailed beast tomorrow? What had been the point of the First Hokage's arrangements at all?
But returning the tailed beast was equally impossible to say out loud.
Extracting a tailed beast from a living host killed the host without exception. For a nameless genin, the village might have been willing to absorb that cost for the sake of restoring international order.
The person who had acquired the One-Tail was named Uchiha Yasushi.
The same person who had awakened the Mangekyo Sharingan at seven years old. The same person who had killed the Third Kazekage and defeated the legendary Wood Release user in the same engagement. His reputation within the village, and particularly within his own clan, had reached a level that put him in the same conversation as the clan head Fugaku himself.
The situation around Yasushi was already delicate. Because of the incident with Danzo, he had been forced out of the village. Konoha had not issued a formal missing-nin designation yet. Yugao had been sent after him specifically to keep things from escalating, because the village's leadership understood that any aggressive move against Yasushi would provoke the Uchiha clan in ways that wartime Konoha could not easily manage.
Fugaku had absorbed the situation about Danzo with visible restraint. The clan had done the same. But announcing that the village intended to kill Yasushi to return a tailed beast to Sand would be a different category of provocation entirely.
The Uchiha would not tolerate it.
"This decision is above my authority. It requires the Hokage's direct judgment."
The Konoha negotiator moved the problem upward as quickly as possible.
It landed on Hiruzen's desk, where it did not become any simpler.
The One-Tail itself was not something he valued. Konoha already had the Nine-Tails, and he was not in the business of accumulating tailed beasts at the cost of village stability. Under different circumstances he might have found a workable solution.
The circumstances were not different.
He was still actively trying to bring Yasushi back. He was still hoping that the right approach could turn what had happened into something manageable. Publicly announcing that the village intended to kill the boy in order to satisfy a Sand Village demand would permanently close every door he was trying to keep open.
But he was not going to carry this pressure alone.
He would make certain the Uchiha understood exactly what had been asked and exactly what position he was taking on their behalf.
"Convene a jonin meeting."
The senior jonin of Konoha assembled. The Uchiha delegation was among them, as expected.
Fugaku had been pulled back from the northern front specifically because of what had happened with Yasushi and Danzo. Having him in the village was necessary to prevent the clan from responding in ways that created additional problems. He was present.
Hiruzen tapped his pipe against the table surface.
"We'll begin."
"The peace negotiations with Sand Village are proceeding well. We expect to finalize terms shortly."
He let the room absorb a moment of satisfaction.
Then his expression shifted.
"However. Sand Village is demanding the return of the One-Tailed Shukaku, which was acquired by Uchiha Yasushi during the western front engagement."
"This is not something we are able to agree to."
"The village does not sacrifice its shinobi. We are not going to take someone's life to fulfill an obligation that was created by their actions in service of this village's interests."
"But tailed beasts are of critical importance to any hidden village, and Sand's position is understandable. They will not accept our refusal without something in return."
"I have called you all here to discuss how we respond."
The effect on the room was exactly what he had intended. Fugaku came to his feet before anyone else.
"The Third Hokage's generosity is beyond what the Uchiha clan can adequately express." He bowed with genuine feeling. "I want to make a commitment on behalf of our clan here and now. Whatever compensation Konoha must offer Sand Village in lieu of the tailed beast, the Uchiha clan will bear that cost entirely. The village should not suffer for what was done by one of our members."
"That is not necessary." Hiruzen waved his pipe with the easy gesture of someone declining a gift he was privately pleased to have been offered. "Protecting the village's shinobi is the village's responsibility. You should not feel obligated."
He was not interested in Fugaku's resources. He was interested in Fugaku's gratitude, which was now publicly and irrevocably on record in front of every senior jonin in Konoha.
The Uchiha behind Fugaku had noticed too. The expressions on their faces when they looked toward Hiruzen had changed.
For a clan that had spent years absorbing the village's distrust as a background condition of their existence, having the Hokage take an explicit and public stand on their behalf was not a small thing.
Hiruzen felt the room warming and allowed himself a moment of private satisfaction.
Before he could build on it, a jonin appeared at the door.
"Hokage-sama. Sand Village's negotiator Yashiro-maru is requesting permission to address the jonin assembly. He says he has information of significant importance to share."
Hiruzen considered this briefly. His own territory, his own people, controlled environment.
"Let him in."
Yashiro-maru entered with a measured bearing, offered the appropriate greetings to Hiruzen, and exchanged brief formal pleasantries. Then he surveyed the room, taking particular note of the Uchiha contingent and satisfying himself that the relevant people were present.
He turned back to Hiruzen with an expression that had settled into something serious.
"Third Hokage-sama. I have come to offer Konoha a piece of intelligence. Sand Village presents this freely, as a demonstration of genuine good faith in these negotiations."
Hiruzen straightened slightly.
"Please proceed."
Yashiro-maru laid out the existence of Akakaze: a Sand Village jonin who had traveled backward in time through the Dragon Vein, arriving in his own past with knowledge of events that had not yet occurred. He described the intelligence that Akakaze had brought, the nature of the archive, and what it contained.
Then he took a breath and delivered the core of his message.
"According to the future intelligence obtained from our time traveler, the five great nations and the five hidden villages will ultimately cease to exist. What replaces them is an empire established and ruled by Uchiha Yasushi. It has been called the Uchiha Divine Nation."
He looked at the room and let it land.
"This is the reason our late Third Kazekage dispatched assassins to Konoha targeting Uchiha Yasushi and his father. Yasushi's father Takeshi was a secondary target used to obscure the true objective. The real target was always Yasushi alone."
"I can also now confirm: Danzo-sama's relentless efforts to eliminate Uchiha Yasushi were not independent of this. He obtained this intelligence from us. He knew what Yasushi would become."
Chapter 468: What Uchiha Madara Could Not Do, What Makes Uchiha Yasushi Think He Can?
"What?"
Hiruzen came to his feet, his pipe falling from his mouth and clattering across the floor, tumbling under the table. He did not notice.
He was staring at Yashiro-maru with the focused intensity of someone searching for a crack in a story, waiting for a flinch or a tell or some visual confirmation that the words he had just heard were not what they appeared to be.
Yashiro-maru did not flinch. He met the Hokage's stare with an even calm.
"Hokage-sama. I understand this is difficult to accept. But I have no reason to stand here and lie to you about something this significant."
The assembly room had become something different from what it had been a minute ago. Voices broke out across the room in rapid overlapping exchanges, everyone processing the same information in different directions at once. Eyes kept moving toward the Uchiha section of the room.
The Uchiha themselves, after the initial shock, were not wearing the expressions of people who had just heard something alarming.
They were wearing the expressions of people who had just heard something vindicating.
"So Yasushi-sama is really that powerful?"
"He is seven years old and already at this level. By the time he is grown, an undefeated record is not even hard to imagine."
"The Uchiha Divine Nation. Just hearing the name, I want to follow it wherever it leads."
Even Fugaku, who had spent years genuinely committed to the village and its stability, felt something move through him when he heard those words in that sequence. He recovered quickly, but the moment was visible.
Takeshi said nothing. He stood very still, and something was moving behind his eyes that was not surprise. The accumulation of every strange thing his son had said and done since childhood was running through his memory, and it was settling into a different shape than it had previously occupied.
The shape that the word "of course" produced.
Hiruzen swept the room with one look, saw the Uchiha faces, and felt the thing he had feared land in his chest.
The Uchiha had never been easy to contain. Their loyalty to the village was real for most of them, but it coexisted with a pride that had its own center of gravity, and that center of gravity did not orbit Konoha. The more moderate majority had always checked the more aggressive minority from within, but that internal balance depended on a shared conviction that the clan's future was bound to the village's future.
If one person appeared who could offer a different future, a grander one, one in which the Uchiha were not managed and contained but ascendant, the internal opposition to that path would not hold the same way.
The radicals would not need to fight the moderates first if the moderates were already beginning to dream.
Hiruzen looked at Yashiro-maru and wanted to remove him from the room in the most direct available manner.
He brought his palm down on the table.
"That is enough."
"You come into my village and deliver fabricated intelligence specifically designed to cause internal discord. Is Sand Village's position that it does not want peace after all?"
"If that is your choice, then let the war continue. We are prepared for that outcome."
Yashiro-maru was not rattled by the threat. His expression remained precisely what it had been.
"Hokage-sama, this intelligence has already been transmitted to the other three major nations."
"Whether you choose to believe it makes no difference to the eventual result."
"And as for whether our two villages continue fighting: that is entirely your decision. If Konoha wants to keep the war going, Sand Village will keep fighting."
"We were going to be destroyed by Uchiha Yasushi eventually regardless of what peace agreements we sign today. Under those circumstances, it makes a certain sense to spend our remaining strength now, while we still have some, trying to remove the threat. At minimum it gives us a chance."
Hiruzen's hands had closed into fists. The visible effort of managing his expression was not something he usually let show.
Nara Shikaku stepped forward quickly.
"Hokage-sama. Please. This is exactly what they want."
"Do not let the enemy's words drive your response. Everything they have said today could be fabricated for exactly this purpose. We verify before we draw conclusions."
He turned toward the Uchiha side of the room.
"Fugaku. What are you smiling about?"
"Do you understand what just happened here?"
"Sand Village has just deliberately painted a target on Yasushi's back and is counting on every nation in the shinobi world to move against him. That is what today was."
The smile on Fugaku's face faded.
The other jonin, who had been watching the Uchiha side carefully while keeping their own expressions guarded, began exchanging glances with each other. Assessments were being made without words.
Shikaku's intervention had brought Hiruzen's emotional temperature back into a manageable range. He composed himself, looked at Yashiro-maru with controlled displeasure, and gestured to his ANBU.
"Escort the Sand Village delegation back to their lodgings. The assembly will continue."
Yashiro-maru did not argue. He had accomplished what he came here to do and had no interest in lingering. He left with the ANBU without ceremony.
When the potential complication was gone, Hiruzen addressed the room with the full weight of his authority.
"What the Sand Village representative said can be dismissed for what it is: a fabrication. Deliberate provocation, designed to create discord between the village and the Uchiha clan. Do not accept it at face value."
He let a beat of silence make the next point before he said it.
"Think about it clearly."
"What Sand is claiming is that Yasushi will accomplish something that even the First Hokage and Uchiha Madara together could not achieve."
He had not wanted to use that name. Madara was not a name that got spoken lightly in this building. But the circumstances required the most powerful available reference point, and Madara was the only name in the Uchiha's history that carried the necessary weight.
"Madara. With the First Hokage as his opponent and contemporary. Two of the most powerful shinobi the world has ever produced in the same generation, one of them an Uchiha. And even with all of that, the shinobi world survived. Konoha was built. The nations persisted."
"A seven-year-old boy is going to accomplish what that generation could not?"
The name had done precisely what he intended. The Uchiha side of the room went from animated to quiet.
The clan's relationship with Madara was layered and complicated, a mix of pride and guilt and ancestor-worship that they had never quite worked through cleanly. They had rejected him when it came to the choice, and they had spent generations carrying the complicated weight of that rejection. His name was both a source of clan identity and a source of unresolved shame.
But the admiration was also real. Whatever they thought of his choices, Madara's sheer capability was not something the clan disputed. He was what the Uchiha were capable of being at the absolute outer limit.
And even he had not done this.
The room began to fragment again, different voices pulling in different directions.
"Right, with all due respect to Yasushi-sama, even Lord Madara at his peak couldn't unify the shinobi world. The difficulty involved is beyond anything any individual could realistically manage."
"But Yasushi is already stronger than Madara was at his age. That is a fact."
"Madara had the First Hokage beside him, and they built Konoha together. Even with that partnership, unifying the world was beyond them. What changes now?"
"Yasushi will find strong allies too. He already has. The Wood Release user he defeated, for example. That level of power doesn't disappear."
"We are shinobi. We know what the five major nations represent. The entire Uchiha clan together cannot defeat a single major nation. You understand that, right?"
The argument escalated. The faces went red. The voices rose over each other without landing.
Fugaku and Takeshi were both staying out of it, their expressions performing restraint, but neither of them was as still as they were trying to look.
Shikaku caught Hiruzen's eye. Hiruzen gave him a slight nod.
Shikaku clapped once, sharp enough to pull the room's attention.
"None of this matters. The future cannot be known, and arguing about it now is a waste of time and energy that we do not have."
"The immediate priority is finding Yasushi and bringing him back before foreign shinobi reach him first. If this intelligence has already been transmitted to other villages, the clock is running."
"Yes." Fugaku stepped forward immediately, the argument behind him forgotten. "Hokage-sama, Yugao has been searching without result for too long. With your permission, I want to lead a search team personally."
Before Hiruzen could answer, Shikaku stepped in again.
"That would be playing directly into Sand's hand, Fugaku."
"Think about what Sand just accomplished. The moment you leave for a personal search and rescue, Konoha's most capable active clan head is off the front line. We are still fighting Cloud and Mist. The Uchiha's strength belongs at the front, not in the rear on a search operation."
"The whole point of today was to pull that strength away from where it is needed. We cannot let them win that."
"What I propose is this: the village increases its search resources for Yasushi. A properly organized effort, not improvised."
He turned to include Takeshi in the next part.
"Takeshi. The eastern front lost Yasushi's promised support when he left. That gap needs to be filled, and you are the most appropriate person to fill it."
He delivered it cleanly, leaving no visible space for objection.
Fugaku and Takeshi had no counter that did not put their own interests visibly above the village's. They accepted it, each of them with the particular expression of someone who has been outmaneuvered through logic they cannot argue against.
The assembly concluded.
Under Shikaku's efficient management, the meeting produced immediate results. Fugaku received an escort home, said the necessary things to his wife Mikoto, held his newborn son for a brief moment, and was on the road to the northern front before the afternoon was over.
Takeshi's situation had a different texture.
The acknowledgment of what his son might become had moved through the clan faster than the assembly itself had ended. By the time Takeshi was preparing to depart, a significant number of Uchiha jonin had arrived at his door, volunteering to accompany him to the eastern front. Not as assigned units. As personal followers.
He refused all of them.
He asked for village assignment instead, officially and on record.
He had a sense of what was happening. If the village was looking at the Uchiha with new suspicion following today's assembly, then accepting a private following of enthusiastic clan members on a combat deployment was exactly the kind of image that would make the situation worse. He did not want a clan army. He wanted a mixed unit with official sanction.
The young men he had turned away went to the village assignment office directly after leaving his door, where they applied as volunteers and were welcomed with visible enthusiasm and the words "brave" and "Will of Fire" applied generously.
When Takeshi received his final unit composition, he found that most of the names on it began with the word Uchiha.
He looked at the list for a long moment.
Then he went to the personnel office and requested the addition of several Hyuga branch house members before accepting the assignment and departing.
In the Hokage's office, Hiruzen stood with his back to the room, looking out the window at the village stretching away below him. He watched the supply convoy and its escort moving through the main street and out through the gate until the distance made them small.
Behind him, Shikaku stood quietly, waiting.
After a long silence, Hiruzen asked the question he had been sitting with since the assembly ended.
"How much of what Sand told us today do you believe is true?"
Shikaku did not answer immediately. He chose his words.
"I spent the assembly going back through everything we know about Sand Village's behavior over the past several years. A number of things that did not make sense before today become completely coherent when I add what we just heard as context."
"Meaning you believe they actually have a time traveler's intelligence."
"I believe the time traveler part is probably real. As for the Uchiha Divine Nation specifically, I cannot confirm that."
"The Third Kazekage made a series of decisions that look reckless in isolation: sending assassins to the Academy, risking a war with Konoha over a single child, coordinating with Danzo at significant diplomatic cost. None of those decisions make sense unless the intelligence told him clearly that Yasushi represented an existential threat to Sand Village specifically."
"So the threat is real. Whether the specific future described is accurate: uncertain."
"It is also entirely possible that today was a pure manipulation exercise. A way to get Sand's tailed beast released by having every other nation kill the host. A way to destroy our internal stability without spending another soldier."
He paused.
"There is one more thing worth noting."
"Sand Village's involvement in the Rain Country situation was something I could never explain satisfactorily before today. The Third Kazekage supported the Akatsuki, trained the boy Nagato, and then arranged Yahiko's death through Hanzo to eliminate the emotional buffer between himself and complete control over Nagato."
"Nagato's Rinnegan awakened during this war. So did a Wood Release user. Neither of those things should have appeared at this time under normal circumstances."
"If the Third Kazekage knew in advance that both were coming, and positioned himself to acquire both before they could fall into anyone else's hands, the strategy makes perfect sense. A Fourth Kazekage with both Wood Release and the Rinnegan would have changed everything."
"The only thing that stopped it was Yasushi awakening the Mangekyo ahead of schedule and defeating Sand Village's forces before the plan could complete."
"I used to think Sand was simply fortunate. Now I think Sand knew exactly what they were moving toward."
Hiruzen exhaled slowly.
"I had reached something close to the same conclusion."
Chapter 469: Setting an Example for Future Generations
"Nagato." Hiruzen bit down on the word with quiet fury. "And Jiraiya, that fool."
"That child should have been ours. Sand Village got to him first."
The Wood Release's appearance had triggered a thorough investigation into every available piece of intelligence on Nagato. His history with Jiraiya, his relationship with the other two orphans, the full record of what had happened in Rain Country: all of it was now on the Hokage's desk.
"Hokage-sama, the intelligence indicates that Nagato was subsequently abducted."
"Do you want to send word to Jiraiya? Ask him to attempt a recovery and bring Nagato back to Konoha?"
"Yes. Immediately."
Hiruzen straightened, moved back to his desk, picked up a brush, and wrote the letter with the focused efficiency of someone who had been waiting for an actionable option.
"Someone take this to Jiraiya directly. Tell him to find Nagato and bring him back to the village."
The ANBU vanished with the letter.
Hiruzen settled back into his chair and reached for his pipe.
He looked at Shikaku, who had returned to the posture of someone waiting to be addressed, eyes down, giving nothing.
In moments like these, he found himself missing Danzo.
Not the things Danzo had done or the positions he had taken. But the function. Danzo had understood implicitly which work needed to happen and which of it could not come with the Hokage's name attached. He had handled it without being asked, without requiring direction, without creating a paper trail that led upward.
Shikaku was an exceptional strategist. He was also a man with a clear sense of where the boundaries of his role began and ended, and he did not cross them voluntarily. He would advise when asked. He would implement what was assigned. He would not, under any circumstances, simply take care of the things that a Hokage could not officially order a jonin commander to do.
Which meant that if something needed to happen to Yasushi that could not be attached to Hiruzen's name, Hiruzen would have to find a different mechanism.
He exhaled smoke toward the ceiling.
Danzo, you impossible man. Why did you have to go and die?
The thought lasted less than a second. He dismissed it and went back to work.
The River Country capital. Within the daimyo's palace.
The wide central courtyard had gone very quiet. At the base of the main hall's steps, a scattered arrangement of bodies lay across the ground, the stone beneath them darkened with blood.
Jun drew the short blade across the edge of a dead man's sleeve, wiped it clean, and looked back with irritation.
"I thought you were going to use a genjutsu to control the daimyo. Would you like to explain the bodies?"
"Yes, fair point, I apologize." Yasushi rubbed the back of his head with the expression of someone who has encountered a minor logistical inconvenience. "How was I supposed to know that a country this small would have countermeasures against illusion techniques on their daimyo's daily schedule?"
After the decision to become missing-nin, Yasushi had selected River Country as the target.
It sat between Fire Country and Wind Country, dense with forest, rich in mineral deposits, with a land area and population that were not trivial by the standards of the smaller nations. The climate was genuinely good: not like Rain Country, which was miserable by design; not like Wind Country's endless desert; not like the frozen conditions of Snow Country. The land itself had everything needed to support something larger than a minor nation.
The reason it had never become a major power was simple: the Takumi Village shinobi force was inadequate for anything beyond craftsmanship and light security work. Even Grass Country's village outclassed it.
Wealthy. Weak. Situated between two of the five great nations and surviving precisely because both found it useful as a buffer rather than as a target.
In other words: an ideal first acquisition.
Getting in had been straightforward. Yasushi and Jun had infiltrated the palace without difficulty and had the daimyo under Sharingan control within minutes.
The problem had emerged when the daimyo attempted to hold his regular morning audience with subordinates.
Apparently the daimyo of River Country had an established daily routine that included a mandatory genjutsu inspection, because the practical threat of illusion-controlled leadership had been taken seriously enough by someone, at some point, to become policy.
The illusion was detected immediately.
No clean alternatives presented themselves.
"I trusted you!" Jun's expression had the particular quality of someone who has been badly let down by their own optimism. "You looked so completely confident. I assumed you had actually planned for this. Instead you just walked in and improvised."
"Among the wandering shinobi population, there are S-rank practitioners who specialize in exactly this kind of detection work. Any daimyo worth assassinating is going to have that capability in his security apparatus. If he did not, he would already be someone's puppet."
Yasushi gestured at the daimyo, who was still standing in the hall behind him in a completely blank-eyed trance.
"The process was messy. The result is fine."
"The result is fine? We just killed half the palace guard. People heard the noise. More are coming."
"Watch."
He moved his hands through a rapid sequence of seals. The smoke that followed produced a group of shadow clones, which fanned out immediately and began sorting through the bodies on the ground, selecting roughly half of them and carrying them into the main hall.
A few moments later, the clones re-emerged.
Each of them now wore the face and body of one of the dead.
Yasushi himself flickered and became someone else: a round-faced, self-satisfied figure with a daimyo's particular physical signature, complete with a posture that implied he had never performed useful work and did not intend to start.
"From today onward, you address me as Your Excellency the Daimyo."
Jun stared at him with an expression that required some time to process.
Then she took the actual daimyo by the collar, dragged him into the hall, and came back out wearing the face and stance of the palace's head guard captain.
She had barely taken her position at the door when the sound of running feet arrived.
The gate burst open.
"Where is the intruder?"
"Protect His Excellency!"
Jun set her face into the particular expression of someone who has been doing this job for a long time and is not impressed by the emergency.
She stepped into the doorway and put her blade across it horizontally.
"Password."
The man in front stopped, then went red.
"Choubei, what is wrong with you? You don't recognize me?"
"Tonight, someone used Transformation Jutsu to attempt an assassination." Jun's voice carried the quality of a person exercising professional caution. "I cannot confirm you are who you appear to be. No password, no entry. His Excellency's safety is not negotiable."
"I--" The man opened his mouth, could not find an argument, and turned to the people behind him. "What is tonight's password?"
Blank expressions all around.
"I don't know. I wasn't told there was a password tonight."
"Neither was I."
"Anyone?"
No one had it.
Jun kept her face completely neutral.
"In the absence of the password, I am going to have to ask you all to return tomorrow morning. Whatever your business is can wait until daylight."
The group looked past her into the courtyard. The ground was wet. The clones wearing dead men's faces were methodically arranging the fallen. The daimyo figure was standing at the top of the steps, pointing at several guards and delivering what appeared to be a comprehensive and personally insulting explanation of how they had failed him. The guards being addressed were doing the progressive bow of people who have decided that the most efficient response to being screamed at is to keep lowering themselves and apologize.
Everything was catastrophically normal.
The nobleman at the front of the group reassembled his expression into something that conveyed dignified acceptance of the situation.
"His Excellency appears to have the matter well in hand. We will not disturb him further this evening. We will call tomorrow morning to pay our respects."
After everyone had gone, the servants and attendants who had scattered during the commotion gradually filtered back and began cleaning the courtyard. Yasushi found tasks to distribute among the ones who had attached themselves to him, sent them in various directions, and moved with Jun into the study.
The real daimyo was in here.
Everything that needed to be known had already been extracted. Yasushi looked at the man with the mild distaste of someone looking at a piece of furniture that is taking up space.
He would deal with that later. Find somewhere to put it.
He dropped onto the wide, comfortable couch, crossed his feet, and pulled a bunch of grapes from the desk with one hand, tossing half to Jun.
"This is how shinobi should live."
"Spent our whole lives in the rain and the sun. For what?"
"Fighting every day. Nothing dignified about it. Where is the governing class behavior?"
Jun ate two grapes and looked at him lying there with the exact expression of the thing she had been told she was replacing.
"If anyone tried to pass you off as a fake daimyo, no one would believe them. You are too convincing."
"If every shinobi lived like this, there would be nothing left worth saving."
"You have that completely backwards." Yasushi deposited the grape seeds onto the floor without looking. "If shinobi lived like nobles, there would be no wars."
"Nobody who can stay home in comfort willingly goes out to kill people."
Jun blinked at this several times.
"So you are telling me that everything we went through, all the training, all the discipline, all the sacrifice, that was actually a mistake?"
"Training and discipline are not the mistake." He pointed at the daimyo in the corner. "Working for people like that is the mistake."
"You just said they are useless. They are. They produce nothing, they know nothing useful, they contribute nothing."
"And yet they collect taxes from everyone who works, and when someone refuses to pay, they hire shinobi to go and handle it. Then they yell at the shinobi for not being fast enough."
"Shinobi have all the power. They have been convinced to use that power in service of people who do not deserve the deference."
"Is that not funny to you?"
Jun turned this over for a moment.
"But they are nobles. The nobility has always existed. That is just the way the world is structured."
"Ha!" Yasushi jumped to his feet and clapped her on the shoulder. "Then we will set an example for everyone who comes after us. Show the next generation that nobility is not a permanent condition."
"Show them it can be replaced."
"By us?"
"What are you planning now?"
He grinned and deflected.
"In the meantime, the immediate problem is staffing."
"We eliminated most of the palace guard. I cannot maintain the illusion indefinitely with shadow clones. Tomorrow I will issue a public notice under the daimyo's seal, stating that the assassination attempt has prompted a decision to expand the guard corps by recruiting from the wandering shinobi population."
"The clones handle external appearances. We fill the actual positions with people who are not connected to the existing power structure here."
"Fine." Jun had reached a level of familiarity with his methods that had moved past surprise and into something closer to resigned competence. "We fight whoever shows up. That is more or less what everything becomes eventually."
She was confident in his ability to handle it, whatever it became.
The next morning, the nobles arrived for their courtesy visit.
Yasushi received them in the main hall with a full formal meal laid out, adopted the complete aesthetic of a corrupt administrator who had finally found his natural environment, and proceeded to be exactly the kind of host that a gathering of self-interested nobles found instinctively comfortable. It did not take long.
When the meal had reached a comfortable depth and the general mood was agreeable, he introduced the topic.
"Last night's unpleasantness has made me realize the guard corps needs strengthening. I have decided to bring in some additional shinobi from the wandering pool."
Immediate concern from every direction.
"Wandering shinobi? That is a significant risk, Your Excellency."
"Those individuals will do anything for money. There is no reliability there."
"Precisely. If security is the concern, surely Takumi Village can simply send additional personnel?"
That would not work. Takumi Village personnel were trained within an existing institutional framework and had loyalties that predated any arrangement with Yasushi. He needed people whose only loyalty was to whoever was paying them.
He shook his head.
"Takumi Village's shinobi are reliable, yes. They are also not effective enough. Two assassins came last night and we lost half the guard in the engagement. What happens when they come back?"
"Furthermore, I think Takumi Village deserves more support than it has been receiving. This incident has made that clear."
The nobles came alert immediately, the comfortable warmth of the meal evaporating.
"With respect, Your Excellency, this may not be the right moment for that particular initiative."
"River Country's strength has always been its neutrality. A stronger shinobi village would complicate that position considerably."
"If additional security is truly required, the sensible option is a long-term contract with Konoha. Let their personnel handle it. There is no need to build internal capacity."
Yasushi listened carefully and found that the source of their objection was not what he had initially assumed.
It was not concern about the political implications of a stronger Takumi Village. It was simpler than that.
Military budgets came from tax revenue. Tax revenue was the same pool that lined their pockets. More allocation to the shinobi side meant less available for everything else, including the informal diversion of funds that made their positions worthwhile.
They would rather spend more money hiring external shinobi after a crisis than adjust the baseline allocation in a way that reduced their regular income.
Yasushi did not actually need Takumi Village's personnel anyway. That part of the proposal had been leverage, not a genuine request. He let them win the argument.
"If there are significant reservations about the Takumi Village expansion, we will set that aside for now."
"However, the wandering shinobi recruitment stands. The current gap in the guard corps is real."
The nobles looked at each other.
"Hiring from Konoha would surely be more advisable?"
He looked at them with the specific patience of someone waiting for a social process to complete.
"Of course. If you would like to cover the cost."
Silence.
"Actually, there are some perfectly capable people among the wandering shinobi population."
The matter was settled.
Chapter 470: Kakuzu, Interested in Being a Noble? Totally Legal Tax Collection.
"What do you mean you could not find them?"
Hiruzen looked at Yugao with an expression that was not pleasant to be on the receiving end of. Yugao felt the weight of it on the back of her neck, her palms cold.
"I am deeply sorry, Hokage-sama. I failed you."
She went to her knees, her head down, tears coming.
"I followed their trail for several days. Then I lost it. When I examined the tracks carefully afterward, I realized the footprints I had been following were not theirs. They were shadow clones."
"Yasushi and Jun had already changed direction at some point before that, somewhere in the middle. I do not know where they went."
Hiruzen studied Yugao's face with the attention he normally reserved for people whose honesty he had reason to question. He found nothing to question.
"I see."
He settled back in his chair and picked up his pipe.
After a long pull, he exhaled and waved his hand.
"This is not your failure. You did your job well."
"The village has assigned other shinobi to continue the search. We will see what they find."
"Go and rest."
"Hokage-sama." Yugao's voice came up quickly. "They are hiding because they are afraid of what the village will do when it finds them. If you send out a message, something that makes clear the village is not pursuing them as criminals, they will come back on their own."
Hiruzen gave her a long, neutral look.
"Yugao. The village is in a difficult position."
"Whatever the circumstances that led to it, Yasushi killed a village elder. That is a fact that cannot be acknowledged and then set aside without consequence. It would mean the village's own law means nothing."
"Even if I personally wanted to bring them home, I cannot simply declare a pardon. That would create its own kind of damage. The only path that works is to give them a mission, let them earn their way back through demonstrated service, and then the village has a legitimate basis for the outcome."
"Anything else invites objections I cannot answer."
Yugao heard this and absorbed it. The logic was not wrong. But it sat uncomfortably.
After a moment she lowered her head.
"Then please give me another chance. Let me keep looking."
"I will bring them back. I promise."
Hiruzen considered.
The village had no shortage of shinobi. But Yugao's specific connection to the two missing people had a value that a standard search team did not. If Yasushi was going to voluntarily make contact with anyone, it would most likely be someone he actually trusted. Sending Yugao was not just a search operation. It was a signal, one that might produce more than a standard deployment would.
He nodded.
"You have the village's support."
"When you find Yasushi, tell him that his parents and his clan are worried about him. That matters."
Yugao thanked him, bowed properly, and left.
Hiruzen stood at the window for a while after she was gone, looking at the village below without seeing it particularly.
He was thinking about where two missing-nin might go when the world's most powerful hidden villages were either actively looking for them or passively watching for them. And he was thinking about what leverage, if he found them, would be strong enough to hold onto Yasushi.
His parents and his clan: the Uchiha angle was complicated in the current climate and did not constitute the kind of clean positive attachment that created stable loyalty.
Jun was something. Yugao was something. His teacher Kushina might be the most direct connection, given what he knew of their relationship.
That was a very short list for someone his age.
Something would have to be done about that.
More integration. More shared experiences. More connections built into the village's social fabric before those connections could be replaced by different ones.
He filed it away for when it became actionable.
Yasushi, for his part, was nowhere near Konoha.
He was seated across a wide desk in River Country's daimyo palace, looking at a man who had accumulated a considerable reputation over the course of several decades, and opening a business proposition.
"I have heard that you care about money more than any other shinobi alive. I have a business opportunity that makes more money than anything else you have ever been offered."
The phrase "makes more money" arrived in Kakuzu's attention the way such phrases always did, producing an immediate, involuntary alertness that decades of careful self-discipline had never quite managed to eliminate.
"Your Excellency." The smile on his face was the kind that a professional produced for people with money to spend. "If the compensation is appropriate, I would not hesitate to fight Senju Hashirama again."
"Ha!" The daimyo's hands folded over his considerable midsection. "Fighting. What kind of money does fighting actually make?"
"Kakuzu. What do you think of the noble tax collection business?"
"Tax collection." Kakuzu had a brief misunderstanding. "I see. Someone is refusing to pay. Give me the list, Your Excellency, and I will ensure every outstanding amount is recovered in full."
"No, no." The daimyo waved a hand. "I mean, Kakuzu: are you interested in becoming a noble?"
"Becoming a noble?"
Kakuzu looked at the man across from him with a careful expression that was trying to determine what category of eccentric this was.
"Nobility is hereditary. I am a shinobi. The two categories do not overlap."
"Shinobi cannot be nobles. But shinobi who can use Transformation Jutsu are a different matter."
The daimyo was entirely serious. Kakuzu considered this, and then ventured a guess at what was actually being proposed.
"Your Excellency is suggesting that I kill a noble in a hostile country and replace him to gather intelligence?"
"No." The daimyo's expression said that this particular line of thinking was exactly the problem with people who had spent too long doing conventional shinobi work. "You are thinking too small. Why does it have to be an enemy country's noble?"
"What about this country's nobles?"
"This country's nobles."
"Correct." The daimyo settled into the explanation with the air of someone presenting a thesis. "Nominally, everything in this country belongs to me. The land, the grain, the people. All of it."
"But in practice, governing a country requires distributing authority. I grant land to nobles. I permit them to organize trade convoys. In exchange, they manage the provinces, collect agricultural tax, collect commercial tax."
"Over the years, their families have grown. Their trade operations have expanded. They have accumulated an increasingly large share of the country's total output."
"The country's total output does not grow just because they want more of it. What they take, I do not have."
"This is wrong."
The daimyo leaned forward, the round face carrying an expression of aggrieved principle.
"I intend to correct it. I am going to recover what belongs to me."
"However, even a daimyo cannot simply charge nobles with crimes without producing evidence. Move too directly and you create a rebellion."
"So here is the solution."
"I hire shinobi to replace those nobles using Transformation Jutsu. Over time, we arrange accidents for their heirs and relatives. The family lines are quietly reduced."
"Made to look like natural attrition. With my cooperation from the top, no investigation will go anywhere."
"When the noble families are smaller, their claims are weaker. The wealth flows back toward the center."
"It returns to me."
"Is that not elegant?"
Even Kakuzu, who had seen a great many things in a long career, found himself slightly taken aback.
He looked at the daimyo with the expression of someone recalibrating.
"I have always known that the nobility tended not to be sharp thinkers. But Your Excellency has managed to set a new reference point for me."
"This is an absurd task. Find someone else."
He turned and walked toward the door.
"It includes legal tax collection rights."
Kakuzu's pace continued without change.
"We split everything collected fifty-fifty."
Kakuzu's pace slowed very slightly.
"Do you have any idea how much a major noble's territory produces in annual tax revenue?"
"This is last year's collection record for the Finance Minister's family alone. Perhaps review it before you make a final decision."
A thick ledger landed near Kakuzu's feet.
He stopped walking. He looked at it.
He picked it up.
He opened it.
Several pages later, Kakuzu turned around and walked back to the desk.
"Your Excellency. Let us discuss the operational specifics."
"First: your original plan will not work. My Transformation Jutsu is exceptional, but no technique is infallible against everyone who has daily contact with the target. The people closest to a noble will always include someone who would notice something wrong."
"Kakuzu." The daimyo waved his folding fan, the lower half of his face concealed behind it, the smile visible above it anyway. "You fought Senju Hashirama. You are a legend in this world. Your Transformation Jutsu is beyond what ordinary people can detect."
"And let us not forget your own assessment of the nobility. If they are as incapable as you said, then expecting them to identify a sophisticated deception is setting the bar far higher than the evidence supports."
The flattery did not affect Kakuzu in any practical way. Thirty years of shinobi work had made him immune to that particular instrument.
But the point about the nobles was not without basis.
He let it pass and raised a different concern.
"Even if I manage the primary targets, their families are too large. Sustained disappearances within a single family are going to be noticed. No amount of careful staging will prevent that."
"On that point, I can reassure you." The daimyo leaned back. "You are not the only missing-nin I am recruiting for this. I intend to bring in several dozen at minimum."
"The operation is designed as a simultaneous replacement. At a single event, every major official will be switched at once. The people they would normally report problems to, the allies they would call on for help: all of them will already be our people."
"When something seems wrong and they go looking for help from someone they trust, they will be walking into us."
"The cleanup pace is faster because everyone is cooperating."
"And by the time they consider going to a hidden village and commissioning a proper response: they will find that their funds are gone."
"Villages are not charities. They do not act without compensation. No money means no mission."
Kakuzu sat with this for a moment.
"Your Excellency has thought this through more carefully than I expected."
He looked at the daimyo again with fresh eyes, the initial assessment of incompetent aristocrat undergoing revision.
Then he came to a new question.
"Your Excellency. Does it not concern you that a shinobi might simply apply the same logic upward, and replace the daimyo himself?"
"Impossible." The daimyo waved this away with complete confidence. "Who would dare touch a daimyo?"
"You are touching the nobles."
"Nobles and daimyo are different categories."
"A daimyo rules by heaven's mandate. We are the chosen administrators of this world."
"Nobles are instruments the daimyo uses to manage the provinces. When an instrument wears out, you replace it. That is the nature of instruments."
"If you shinobi perform well enough, I would not object to formalizing that relationship and giving some of you noble status eventually."
"But a daimyo is irreplaceable. Any action against a daimyo is an offense against every daimyo in every country, and you would be hunted by all of them simultaneously, including the five great nations."
"Without pause. Without end."
"Furthermore: the reason you are able to do this at all is because you are operating under my authorization. If something goes wrong, it is the daimyo's problem to manage. Without that protection, who would commission the same work against a daimyo? Which shinobi would accept that contract?"
"Anyone who tried would be on their own."
Kakuzu looked at the daimyo's completely self-assured expression for a long moment.
He arrived at his private conclusion.
There it was. That unmistakable quality of noble thinking, present and accounted for, even in the sharpest version of it he had encountered. The man genuinely believed that his position was categorically protected by something more than power.
Which was, of course, exactly the kind of blind spot that made for interesting opportunities down the line.
A single major noble's territory generated that much in annual taxes.
A daimyo's revenues would be an order of magnitude beyond that.
Just worth keeping in mind for the future.
Kakuzu stood, and the smile he produced had the same quality as the one at the beginning of the meeting: professional, pleasant, and entirely detached from whatever was actually running in his head.
"Your Excellency has a clear vision. I understand it now."
"I accept the contract."
"Ha!" The daimyo clapped him on the shoulder. "You made the right call."
"Trust me. You will not regret this."
Two people with completely different internal agendas looked at each other across the desk and reached an agreement.
The terms suited both of them exactly as well as they intended to honor them.