Chapter 69.6- One Thousand Hands

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Things had gone even better than I had anticipated. My story had stood up to scrutiny even better than expected. The conclusions reached were that Danzo had escaped with the Jinchuriki. He had been negligent in securing her, they had fought, and he had lost. It had been easy for me to track her down and put her down again. Except that this time it was easily decided that the tailed beast be transferred. Since this was the course of acton that almost everyone else had been pushing for for a long time, it had moved even faster than expected.

The Uzumaki clan was called to produce another Jinchuriki, and they took the burden well. In a matter of days, Son Goku had a new host, and Konoha created her third Jinchuriki, Isane Uzumaki— a girl so young that she wouldn’t be eligible to attend the academy for over half a decade. Far from the war asset I wanted when we captured the Iwa Jinchuriki but better than nothing, at least. Three Jinchuriki from a single clan was probably pushing things as far as power consolidation went, but I didn’t really count and it wasn’t like the other clans were lining up for the duty. In fact, both Uraume and Uzume had more or less told me to fuck off (in far more polite terms when I suggested using children from their clans if they weren’t comfortable with the Uzumaki power concentration).

The mess meant I could move my plans forward a fair bit. Danzo had been Hiruzen’s man through and through and while I hadn’t managed to convince anyone to consider the Monkey as a suspect, the association was still a dangerous one for him.

“Shirirama-sama. Team Orochimaru has returned from their mission” Retsu said, walking into the office. I looked up from the scroll with anticipation building in my stomach. A fourth Jinchuriki was probably overkill but with the rest of the world on our arses, it would be one hell of a deterrent moving forwards.

Both of Tsunade’s teammates walked into the room, but notably without the two Anbu captains I’d attached to their mission. Jiraiya was visibly limping and while Orochimaru would rather die than show weakness, my byakugan could see he was favoring one side over the other and that he had heavy bruising on his ribs. They did not kneel as one would ordinarily do before their Kage, instead, standing to give their report. I wondered if I would have to deal with them when the time came to fully supplant Hiruzen— the time was coming, I knew.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Bad intel. We could not find Kiri’s Jinchuriki. If they made one, then it was better hidden than we were led to expect. The Anbu insisted that we could ferret out the jinchuriki with time but we were made somehow. It was all we could do to escape with this.” Jiraiya said and tossed a scroll at me. I opened it, unsealing Kiri’s academy records. That had been a tertiary objective. The fact that that was all they managed to secure said a lot.

“Alright then. I assume Elephant and Giraffe perished during your escape”

“Affirmative” Orochimaru said

“Alright then. Go get some rest. We move on Kumo in a matter of days” I said.

Both men were shocked, Jiraiya actually took a step back.

“But what about Iwa? They’ll pounce on us if we give them an opening like that” He said, and I began to catch them up. Maybe we would be enemies when I took Hiruzen out of the picture, but for now they were Tsunade’s teammates and for better or worse, were pretty likable characters (more Jiraiya than Orochimaru in this case even if the latter did have a delightfully sardonic sense of humour)

A/N: RIP Danzo, you will be missed.