Faced with Obito's clear and utterly foolish eyes, Mikami Yuu almost said something, then stopped himself. This was exactly why he hated talking to illiterates with no education. It took way too much effort.
"Put it this way. There's an extremely powerful enemy ninja from another village. He's captured five Konoha ninja and strapped them full of explosive tags. Then you and your teammate arrive at the scene. Instead of attacking right away, he gives you a choice.
"One: kill your teammate, and in exchange those five ninja get to live.
"Two: do nothing, let him detonate the explosive tags, blow those five to pieces, and then leave with your teammate.
"In that situation, what would you choose?"
"Isn't that obvious? There's no way I'd kill my own teammate!"
Obito answered without even thinking.
"Then what if the teammate beside you isn't someone you're close to, but among the five captured people are Kakashi and Rin?"
Yuu asked again.
Obito looked confused. "Why would Kakashi get captured? He's super strong!"
"Then make the enemy one of the other villages' Kage, okay? Don't get hung up on the details!"
After Yuu restated the premise, Obito lowered his head and thought about it for a while before answering hesitantly, "If the enemy is really that strong, strong enough to beat even Kakashi, and no matter what someone's going to die… then between one person and five people, I guess you should choose the side with more people."
"Really? What if the teammate standing next to you was Rin?"
"Then there's no way I could kill Rin!"
"But the other side also has Kakashi and Minato-sensei."
"…" Obito opened his mouth, but the words caught in his throat. Then he started scratching his head frantically, trying to come up with a perfect solution that could save everyone, but he kept getting nowhere.
"One person… five people… Rin… Kakashi… aaagh! This question is way too hard! I can't solve it!"
Well then.
Looks like the trolley problem had completely fried Obito's brain. At least for now, he probably didn't have the mental bandwidth left to keep talking about "war and peace."
Yuu didn't say anything more. He simply stood up, stretched lazily, and glanced toward the mountain stream. Rin, having finished bathing, was already walking back this way, drying her hair with a towel and smiling as she waved to him.
"Yuu, I'm done. We can go back and sleep now."
"…?"
Mikami Yuu vaguely felt like Rin's wording was a little ambiguous. What do you mean, now that you've bathed we can go back and sleep? That made it sound like the two of them slept together every night—
Beside him, if this had been any other day, Obito would have rushed over at once to fuss over Rin. But now he was still stuck thinking about the trolley problem, and even when he saw her, he looked distracted.
More precisely, he looked even more distracted.
The Uchiha clan's naturally strong mental energy gave them superior genjutsu talent, but it also made their imaginations run wild. And now that Rin was standing there in front of him, the scene he'd been imagining had become even more vivid, as if he were really being forced to choose between one person and five.
That impossible dilemma left Obito clawing at his own hair in growing agitation.
Rin blinked. "Yuu, what's wrong with Obito?"
"He's thinking about life. Don't worry about him."
Yuu stretched and answered casually, "Come on. Let's head back and get some sleep. We still have patrol tomorrow."
"Okay."
Rin nodded and followed Yuu back to the temporary shelter Kakashi had made with Earth Style, where they got ready to rest.
Then the next morning, while the team was brushing their teeth and washing up by the stream, Obito—dark circles under his eyes—came straight to Mikami Yuu and got right to the point:
"Yuu, I thought about that question all night. What's the right answer? Tell me already!"
"What question?"
Minato happened to pass nearby and caught part of that, so he asked casually.
"You know… the one about choosing Rin or choosing Kakashi…"
"Ah?" Minato froze.
What did that even mean?
He knew Obito liked Rin. He'd been that age himself once. And he also knew that Rin liked Mikami Yuu—that wasn't exactly a secret in his eyes, because the way Rin looked at Yuu was pretty much the same way Kushina had looked at him back then.
But…
How had Kakashi gotten dragged into this?
Could it be Obito also had feelings for Kakashi—? Wow. Were kids these days really playing that wild?
Seeing the suspicion appear on Minato's face, Mikami Yuu had no choice but to explain and repeated the trolley problem from the start.
Minato raised a brow. "Interesting idea. So what were your answers?"
Obito stayed silent. "I still haven't figured it out."
Rin, who had come over to eavesdrop, raised her hand. "If I were the one who got captured, and the person having to choose was Yuu or Obito, then I'd probably tell them to kill me. Compared to my life, the lives of Yuu, Obito, and those five people are more important."
"!"
Obito's head snapped up in shock. He seemed to picture the situation Rin described, and his pupils shook.
Mikami Yuu, meanwhile, sighed inwardly.
In a way…
Out of the original Team Minato, the one who thought most like a Hokage wasn't Kakashi or Obito. It was Rin.
Whether it was the Kannabi Bridge incident or the Three-Tails incident in the Mist, both of those could basically be seen as incarnations of the trolley problem in a ninja-world setting.
And in both of those incidents, Rin showed remarkable decisiveness. First, after personally witnessing Obito's "death," she immediately performed the eye transplant for him and Kakashi. Then, after realizing the Hidden Mist's scheme, her first thought was self-sacrifice.
Compared to Obito, who was foolish in a strangely insightful way, and Kakashi, who preferred to numb himself, Rin's mental resilience was far beyond what you'd expect from a kid her age.
Still…
Now that Mikami Yuu was part of Team Minato, those original events didn't necessarily have to play out the same way.
Especially the Three-Tails incident. If handled badly, it would absolutely become a disaster—but if managed properly, maybe it could be turned into an opportunity for Rin to become the true Three-Tails jinchūriki.
That was something Mikami Yuu meant to start planning around when he had the chance.
At that point, Minato looked at him. "So what's your answer, Yuu?"
"As for me… it depends on the situation."
Yuu shrugged. "Human lives aren't equal, so you can't measure value just by numbers. And war is basically a game of trading pieces. In extreme situations, all you can do is choose the option you think you'll regret the least later."
"But the most important thing isn't the choice itself. It's how to kill the person who created the dilemma in the first place, so that the same kind of choice doesn't keep appearing over and over again afterward."
"…"
Minato fell silent.
With his intelligence and experience, it wasn't hard for him to grasp the deeper meaning of the problem.
In the ninja world, choices like sacrificing one to save five happened every day. And that one and five might be literal human lives, or mission versus comrades, or personal interests versus the interests of the village, or ideals versus reality—
As a ninja, you had to make choices every moment, and many times there was no option that didn't leave regret behind. After long enough, all that remained was habit and numbness.
Minato had once wanted to change all that too. But the ninja world had worked this way for centuries. Changing it—even nudging people's fixed beliefs a little—was as hard as reaching the sky. So in the end, he had given himself a smaller goal first: become the Fourth Hokage.
"…Yuu, you're right."
Minato patted him on the shoulder. "There isn't a correct answer to that question. All you can do is follow your own heart. But the most important part is what comes after the choice—how to make it so that the comrades who were sacrificed can rest in peace."
Then he smiled again. "That said, you kids don't need to worry too much. The time when you'd have to make choices like that hasn't come yet. If the kind of situation Yuu just described ever really happens, then as long as I'm still alive, I'll do everything I can to save all of you."
Yuu thought to himself: Don't make promises that absolute.
If Kannabi Bridge still happened later, and Obito remembered those words after getting crushed into "Obi-toast," he might end up blackening even harder than in the original story—
But that wasn't something Yuu could say out loud right now.
For him, the important thing was how to raise his own strength over the next two years before Kannabi Bridge arrived, so that he himself could survive that moment. Only after that could he think about changing someone else's fate—like Rin's.
So, after packing up a little, the group met back up with Kakashi, who had returned from his morning training, and set off once again to continue patrol.
This time, the terrain around their assigned reconnaissance zone was more complicated. Moving as one squad would've meant a lot of wasted detours, so when they reached a fork in the route, they naturally split into two teams again. Minato took Obito, while Yuu and Kakashi continued forward with Rin.
Along the way, Mikami Yuu multitasked—watching the surroundings while devoting a sliver of his attention to building affection with the "girls" inside the galgame system.
That had become part of his regular routine.
After all, [Talk] could be done mentally, even while patrolling. As long as he didn't try chatting with several "jutsu girls" at once and split his focus too much, he generally wouldn't miss what was happening outside or get jumped by Suna.
Even before this current trip out of the village, both Phoenix Fire and Water Wave had already been close to 75 affection. Two weeks later, their affection had easily risen past 80, unlocking their third-stage traits.
[Phoenix Fire Technique:]
(Trait: Burst Shot — Your Phoenix Fire is extremely nimble. The scattered fireballs will track enemies within range along faster, more unpredictable trajectories, and now have a 70% chance to cause an additional explosive burst on impact, making them much harder to defend against.)
[Water Wave Technique:]
(Trait: Dancer of Water — Your Water Release has even more artistic possibilities. When you cast it in a form that satisfies Water Wave's artistic standards, chakra consumption is reduced by 60%.)
In addition, Hatake Swordsmanship and Dragon Fire Technique, which Yuu used frequently against enemies, had also been steadily rising in affection.
Another thing worth mentioning was Monster Strength.
This one had a very lively personality and was hopelessly addicted to gambling. She often sought him out on her own even when he didn't actively choose [Talk], and at least eight times out of ten, the topic somehow ended up being gambling:
[Monster Strength: (Sitting at the card table with one leg crossed, utterly unwilling to admit defeat) Hey! Mikami brat! Dare to go again? I only lost yesterday because I slipped up. No way I can't turn it around today!]
The corners of Yuu's mouth curled up. "Sure. Let's go."
[Monster Strength lights up at your response. She shuffles, cuts, and deals at top speed. You look at your hand: Five of Hearts, Six of Spades, King of Diamonds (hole card). She has Nine of Hearts, Jack of Spades, and one hidden card. After seeing her own hand, she looks excited. "Raise!"]
"Fine. I call."
[Monster Strength deals again. You receive Six of Clubs and King of Spades. She receives Queen of Hearts and Queen of Spades. Seeing those two cards, Monster Strength looks disappointed, but still slams the table and barks, "Come on, come on, show them already!"]
[A: You reveal first!]
[B: I raise!]
[C: My cabinet moved, I'm out.]
"Alright, raise!"
Yeah, that's right.
By now, Monster Strength wasn't limited to simple high-or-low games anymore. It had expanded into three-card brag, blackjack, Old Maid—
In Yuu's eyes, these "conversations" were basically just little text mini-games embedded in the galgame system.
At first, he'd been cautious. He worried that choosing wrong might mess something up and interfere with the romance progress. But it didn't take long for him to realize that these gambling matches didn't seem rigged at all. They depended purely on luck and skill.
His luck was only average.
But Monster Strength's gambling luck seemed to have inherited Tsunade's.
And as for skill—
That girl's emotional changes were practically written directly into the text box. Yuu just had to read her face to get a rough idea of how good her hand was, so under those circumstances, it was hard to lose.
And once Yuu won—
[The hole cards are revealed. You have two Kings and two Sixes. Monster Strength has a pair of Queens, just a little smaller than yours.]
[Monster Strength: (Grinding her teeth) Damn it, how did you win again?! I was this close! Are you secretly cheating?! Tch, whatever. A loss is a loss. I'll win tomorrow! ]
[Monster Strength affection +2! Current affection: 20/100 (Stranger)]
That's right — the stake in Monster Strength's games was affection. As long as Yuu won, her affection for him would go up by one. Sometimes if he pulled off a best-two-of-three or best-four-of-five, he'd even get a little crit and gain two or three points at once.
As for Yuu's side of the wager, it was chakra.
But since his chances of losing weren't high, and even if he did lose it only cost him about five percent of his chakra, the affection was basically free. Yuu usually played a couple rounds with Monster Strength every day, and when he was really bored, he'd play even more.
At this rate, it looked like Monster Strength's progress would soon overtake both Eight Gates and Binding Formula. He was pretty curious what kind of trait she'd unlock.
"Everyone, pay attention. Something's up ahead."
Kakashi suddenly spoke.