[Nine-Tails? Three-Tails? What is going on?]
[Are you telling me there's a whole roster of these things—one through nine?]
[Probably, right?]
[The lore keeps getting more interesting]
[I feel a boomerang coming]
[Same. Did anyone else notice—Kakashi once stabbed his own teammate, and now the villain's saying Kirigakure ran an op to release the Three-Tails inside Konoha]
[Holy—those two threads just connected]
[That writer is something else]
Tracking audience reaction mattered.
Hanabi genuinely enjoyed reading the comments and speculation. It helped her calibrate—gave her a read on where the audience's head was. And viewers who liked to dig into details sometimes caught things she'd glossed over herself.
"Hanabi—how do you read the situation now?"
After finishing her exchange with Zabuza, Hanabi had returned to Tazuna's house. Kakashi had apparently been waiting.
"Our objective has always been the same—the bridge. If the bridge is completed, we win. Zabuza and our mission don't directly conflict…" She paused. "And with any luck, Gatō himself may no longer be a factor."
Kakashi went a little pale. "…Using one enemy against another?"
"I wouldn't put it quite like that. But there's clearly a significant rift between Zabuza and his employer."
"Is Gatō actually connected to Kirigakure?"
"When an enemy starts doubting everything, that's when you know you're winning. Whether Gatō is really tied to the Hidden Mist is beside the point—what matters is whether Zabuza believes it. And Zabuza's personality all but guarantees he'd never lower himself to ask Gatō directly. He took the job as a stopgap measure, nothing more."
"…Doubting everything," Kakashi murmured.
Cold sweat ran down his back. He'd been doing the same thing himself lately.
"There's something else—that third party who appeared. I dug into it and found a few interesting threads."
Hanabi smiled.
"Interesting?"
Kakashi raised an eyebrow.
"Before we arrived, Gatō's fleet was actually hit several times. Attacker unknown, motive unknown. But based on other information I've gathered, each of those attacks was preceded by rumors placing Gatō at that specific location."
She paused.
"None of the attacks resulted in casualties—Gatō apparently didn't take them seriously. The attacker, each time, withdrew as soon as they confirmed Gatō wasn't there."
"Someone with a grudge against Gatō?" Kakashi rubbed his chin.
"It goes further than the Land of Waves. I've also picked up intelligence from the Water Country. Similar tactics—ice—used against targets there as well. No confirmed deaths, but there are accounts of Mist shinobi found sealed inside ice crystals."
This was a lie.
Technically.
Hanabi had, at one point, slipped away to the Water Country and left a series of large ice sculptures in conspicuous locations, purely to generate rumors. Her disguise work was not something an ordinary person could see through.
As for dead Mist shinobi—absolutely not. Hanabi was kind-hearted; she couldn't stand to see anyone suffer. And there was no real danger to herself either. When resonating with Jingliu, she could borrow Jingliu's combat power—enough to trade blows with the Nine-Tails. At full resonance, forget the Nine-Tails; an entire Ōtsutsuki family reunion could show up and she'd clean house without breaking a sweat.
She'd fabricated traces of bloodstains and abandoned shinobi forehead protectors. Enough to suggest something without actually hurting anyone.
The Hidden Mist had investigated, found nothing conclusive, and some among them had begun attributing certain disappearances of Mist shinobi to this "attacker." Hanabi hadn't discouraged that interpretation.
It served her purposes perfectly.
"…Revenge against Kirigakure?"
Kakashi was starting to see it.
"That's my read." Hanabi nodded. "The attacker likely took note of the Nine-Tails at some point—possibly connected to the same grudge. They may be planning to drop the Nine-Tails right into Kirigakure. It wouldn't be the first time someone tried that approach."
Kakashi felt his PTSD about to flare up again.
Right. The Hidden Mist had done exactly that. And the last time it happened—
That one specific incident—he'd made a choice he couldn't take back.
Kakashi felt like he was unraveling at the seams.
He'd seen Rin during Team 7's bell test. Now every line of discussion led back to her.
Rin is still following me.
"But this isn't necessarily bad news," Hanabi said. "This person is working alone, and lacks reliable intelligence networks—they can't even fix Gatō's exact location. As long as Zabuza doesn't move openly, they're unlikely to reveal their real identity. And their actual combat capability is still an open question."
"That ominous chakra…" That was what still sat wrong with Kakashi—that feeling of dread, the wrongness in the air.
"On that note—I did find something." Hanabi tossed him a scroll.
"What's this?"
"Intelligence from the Land of Hot Springs. Involving a certain evil god." She said it lightly. "Supposedly, worshipping it grants immortality. True or not, I couldn't say."
"…Where do you even get things like this?"
"Neji-nii mentioned something about it when he was assigned a mission to the Land of Hot Springs. I reconstructed what I could from what he described."
This was also a lie.
Because Hanabi had been the one to ask Neji to investigate that lead in the first place—she'd expressed interest in the local cult, and he'd gathered information on her behalf.
Hidan's immortal god genuinely intrigued her. And the "folklore" she'd gathered had been part of her source material for this whole scenario.
"The mysterious woman's power—it may be related to this. There's one more thing: several months ago, ruins were discovered on an island near the Land of Waves. They disappeared shortly after—supposedly collapsed in an earthquake—but what traces remained bore similarities to the Hot Springs material."
"An evil god's power—can something like that actually exist?"
"Of course. Immortality is real."
Never mind evil gods—this world had a literal Death God. Undead armies, extraterrestrials, parallel-dimension visitors. The full inventory, frankly, read like it belonged in Dragon Ball.
The ruins, incidentally, were real. Hanabi had built them herself—even moonlighting as a construction worker to get it done. After constructing the site, she'd resonated with Jingliu's power to let the Mara-Struck energy seep into the surrounding space. Then she'd tested a few Riddler Dolls, some Mutually Multiplying Explosive Tags, let loose with Fire Release and Ice Release in alternating passes until the structure came down—thus finishing the background setup.
"Is there a name? Any more details on this deity?"
"Nothing. Just fragments. Something about a plague ancestor, something about a medicine master."
The Mara-Struck energy traces back to the Mara—the Plague Forerunner. That much was accurate.
Hanabi hadn't lied.