Chapter 52.5- One Thousand Hands

XXXXX- SHORIRAMA SENJU

I entered the office, but I did not kneel. Danzo might have been left temporarily in charge, but he wasn’t my Kage. Hiruzen could barely even claim that position himself after all the shit that he’d gotten up to. I delivered my report with a dispassionate tone, explaining that we’d routed Iwa with little difficulty, I’d killed Han, helped secure Taki, and had then been ambushed by Chiyo on the way to the village. By the gods, was that woman thorough and petty. Everyone that had survived her rampage had been too poisoned for me to be much help to, and so I’d been forced to mercy kill my own comrades— both to prevent them from suffering for much longer, and to prevent them from falling into enemy hands.

“And you failed to return with any of the bodies?” He asked. I nodded easily.

“I did not have any corpse scrolls in my possession”, I replied, a blatant lie, but one he could not call out easily.

“And you, a seal master, could not make some in your position?” He tested.

“Village policy is to destroy bodies where return is neither expedient nor essential. It was neither in this case.” I said, not shrugging, but not hiding my desire to.

Of course, that had nothing to do with the various sharingan that now sat safely in my strange, and even less to do with the fact I knew the Yamanaka could mind walk dead bodies and I wouldn’t b turning them over to Danzo for him to use for information about my abilities.

“Village policy is also to complete missions no matter the cost” He said, hand hitting the table. How the hell had I managed to get on his nerves so quickly? At this point, that might have been my actual kekkei genkai instead of mud release.

“And I did. There is no longer an Iwa presece in Takigakure” I said.

“Where is the Village hidden in the Waterfalls?” He asked pointedly.

“I don’t know" I shrugged.

“And were you not ordered to find that information?”

“No, I was not” I replied. Because my orders were contained in my official mission statement. The statement read— ‘Remove the armies and forces of Iwagakure from the Takigakure no Kuni by any means necessary’. Sure, Hiruzen had very strongly hinted that he wanted me to find Taki, but he had never phrased it as an order and so I had not taken it as one.

“Hiruzen himself told me he ordered you.”

“Then he must have been mistaken, and I do believe that you should refer to our honourable kage as Lord Hokage” I said with the edges of a smile creeping up.

“Moving on from that, the men assigned to you are dead”

”Acceptable casualties. We struck a blow against Iwa they’d struggle to recover from”

“And yet they didn’t die against Iwa”

“Maybe we should look into how Chiyo knew I’d be there. It was this office that ordered me to make a spectacle of my departure, was it not? Their blood is on your hands.”