STIN: Chapter 65/67

Chapter 65: Mikoto’s Feeling of Stealing

Mikoto did not know how she made it back.

Scarlet posters screamed from both sides of the street, "Blood debts must be repaid! Annihilate Suna!" The air was steeped in a mix of iron rust from ninja tool shops and the bitterness of apothecaries' herbs.

The villagers' whispers pricked her ears like needles:

"That one's from the Uchiha."

"Heard the sensory barrier picked up a Yin Release fluctuation near their compound yesterday. Hokage-sama forced it down."

"Tch, shifting the disaster east, right? Only fools buy that. Still, that little Uchiha girl climbed high, got into Tsunade's squad. Tsk, tsk, must have used her tricks."

Mikoto's steps nailed to the ground.

The sting in her fingertips spread, but a stronger emotion surged up, anger.

She remembered the suffocating council meeting her grandfather Setsuna had told her about.

Hiruzen's face, outwardly gentle, in truth cold and calculating.

To appease public fury and redirect focus, he had taken a vague report, "The source of the psychic shock might have brushed the edge of the Uchiha district," and twisted it into a shadow of suspicion stamped onto every Uchiha.

Grandfather Setsuna had sat below, the suppressed fire in his Sharingan so cold it could have burned through the roof.

But in the end, he had to swallow that toxin wrapped in sugar, the so-called favor of an entry ticket into the Hokage's inner circle.

For the Uchiha. For a slim chance to squeeze into the core.

And the cold stares and suspicion from the other clans became the interest on that favor.

But why?

Her joining Team Eight was clearly political compensation, Hokage's balm and calculation rolled into one.

Why should she bear baseless slander and gossip?

Just because she was Uchiha?

Because the rabble and scheming clans needed a target for their fear?

Because Hiruzen needed a scapegoat?

Anger, like magma, blasted aside the sour ache and disappointment in her chest.

Even the grievance stoked moments ago at the Hokage Building, sparked by Kushina's oblivious third wheel stunt, sizzled and burned in the fire.

The brave get to enjoy the world first.

The thought cleaved through Mikoto's tangled mind like ice-tempered lightning.

Breathing a little hard, she leaned against the cold wall and closed her eyes.

Back came the image, clear as day, of that red-haired loner in a faded, washed-out shirt, standing like a solitary wolf at the back of the classroom.

How many girls had snuck glances at his face back then?

But besides Kushina, who had the guts to go near?

Even a second glance left you frozen by those glacier eyes.

She remembered her own faint yearning then, and a small, guarded pride, yet she had not dared step closer.

And the result, cowardice is a sin.

Then came Uzumaki Kushina.

A clueless, reckless girl from outside the village. On sheer, shameless courage alone, like an irrational wildfire, she crashed straight through Ryo's keep out ice wall. How many times had she snatched his food and been barked at, "Beat it," "You're noisy"?

Anyone else would have frozen to death.

But Kushina?

The more she got knocked back, the braver she returned. With that shameless, stubborn, fear-nothing energy, she became the one closest to that lone wolf. In the end, she even took that cold, hard heart.

And Uchiha Mikoto?

Clutching laughable restraint and a noble girl's pride, she watched, late to the race, overtaken in the end.

A fierce, choking frustration and unwillingness battered around her chest.

Why? What did Uchiha Mikoto lack?

Beauty? Brains? The poise of a highborn Uchiha lady?

She had noticed that boy named Ryo even earlier than Kushina.

Why did the prize go to that simple, smiling Blood-Red Chili Pepper?

"Hmph… Kushina…" Mikoto opened her eyes. Deep within them flashed, for an instant, a glint of jealousy that even she found frightening, then it drowned a heartbeat later in helplessness and complicated feeling.

After all, Kushina was her best friend.

This stifled breath, she could only swallow it with blood.

Hard to accept. That was Uchiha Mikoto's greatest hard-to-accept.

But the more she choked on it, the clearer her circumstances became, a catalyst instead of a cure. As the granddaughter of the Uchiha Grand Elder, her very existence had never been her own to command.

There was only one road, political marriage, a bargaining chip to secure the clan's interests.

Look at the men in the clan. Not much skill, eyes growing out of their foreheads. They prattled all day about the so-called glory of the Sharingan and how glorious the ancestors were, drowning in yesterday's fumes.

Compared to him, the monster who split the earth with a few sheath strikes, who carved through Kumo spies like chopping melons, whose psychic shock swept half of Konoha.

Nausea rolled through Mikoto's gut. That clogged frustration curdled into disgust.

Especially that sticky fly she could not shake, Uchiha Fugaku.

"Mikoto, you are back?"

A graceless face thrust in, false concern and oily smiles blocking her path back to herself.

Uchiha Fugaku.

Here we go again.

Inwardly, Mikoto flipped the Sharingan like a Hyūga's blank Byakugan glare.

This pest. Flaunting his status as deputy clan head and being five or six years older, he had actually asked Grandfather Setsuna for her hand.

Couldn't he take a long, hard look in a puddle at least, at that visage that shamed the Uchiha name?

Generations of Uchiha, handsome men and lovely women, how did he end up such a failed half-breed anomaly?

Looking unfortunate is not your fault. Being unfortunate and narcissistic and trying to lay hands on me, that is your original sin.

"Fugaku-nii, hello."

Mikoto lowered her lids. The flawless noble-lady mask slid over every real emotion.
Her voice was cool, polite yet distant, shutting out all approach. No expression on that exquisite face. A slight dip of the chin, and she moved to pass.

Uchiha Fugaku seemed oblivious to the silent go away, or maybe he had long grown used to her reserve.

He kept half a step at her side-rear, eyes gleaming with what mattered most to him.
"You have worked hard. Oh, how did the team assignment go today? Did the Hokage make good on the promise?"

On assignment day, he had parked himself on the route Mikoto had to take home.

Comfort and concern did not matter. He had one goal, did Mikoto squeeze into Team Eight, the symbol of the Hokage's inner power core. It decided whether Elder Setsuna's concessions in the council had been worth it, and whether the Uchiha could use this chance to merge deeper into the core.

Clan. Clan. In these Uchiha men's eyes, beyond those paltry calculations and face, was there anything else?

Mikoto stopped dead. A hot, foul fire shot straight to her crown.

Both are straight-laced men. Ryo was cool and distant, few words, yet he had the strength and presence to hold up the sky, and he doted on Kushina.

But Uchiha Fugaku here, bared his intent to use her as a tool, an infiltration piece to question for intel.

The politeness and tolerance she had maintained for her grandfather's sake and his title snapped.

"Tsunade-sama will return to Konoha in a few days." Mikoto spun around. The gentleness was gone from her voice. In its place were impatience and tamped-down fury.

"When she does, Tsunade-sama will personally lead our squad. Deputy Clan Head, you may report back with peace of mind." She addressed his station directly, eyes cold as steel.

Fugaku flinched beneath the sudden sharpness of her tone and the chill in her gaze. His caring smile froze.

He finally, belatedly, sensed that something was wrong with Mikoto's mood, but had no idea why the fire. Instinctively he started to explain, "Mikoto, that is not what I meant. I was just worried about you, "

"Mikoto, you, "

"Fugaku." An elderly, hoarse voice cut him off, iron authority brooking no argument.

Uchiha Setsuna had somehow appeared at the main gate not far away. His clouded Sharingan skimmed over Fugaku, gaze indifferent, as if at a roadside stone.
"You may go. I have matters to discuss with Mikoto."

Fugaku's face flipped from blank to embarrassed, then flushed with a trace of slighted anger, but before the iron-blooded Elder, he did not dare to protest.

He forced his temper down, squeezed out a respectful fake smile.
"Yes, Elder Setsuna. I will take my leave."
He bowed stiffly. When he turned, his hurried steps were uneven. His back was all fluster and shame.

Watching his hasty retreat, the foul fire in Mikoto's chest did not fully die. Instead, a deeper fatigue and helplessness welled up.

This was the man she was meant to face in the future, a deputy clan head who could be waved off by the Grand Elder and did not dare talk back.

"Grandfather." Mikoto followed Setsuna into the compound, through the winding corridors. Their footsteps sounded unnaturally clear in the empty, silent courtyard. They reached Setsuna's private tatami room, and the paper door slid shut without a sound.

He did not ask about assignments right away. He gestured for her to sit.

"The assignments are as you wished, Grandfather." Mikoto spoke first, her tone unreadable.

"Team Eight. Tsunade-sama is the jōnin leader. Ryo, Kushina, and me."

She deliberately pressed weight onto Kushina, tangled threads of secret struggle and the complicated feelings of submitting to her grandfather's marriage plans knotting together.

Uchiha Setsuna stood with his back to her, looking out at the winter daphne tree in the courtyard, the emblem of the Uchiha flame.

At her report, he only made a faint, almost inaudible sound.

After a pause, his rasp returned, this time hammer-solid, the cadence of command.
"Mikoto, from now on, you must find a way to draw close to that Ryo, of the Kamiyama line."

He turned sharply. His clouded yet piercing Sharingan locked onto her face, no longer a grandfather to a granddaughter, but a clan lord to a precious tool to be used to the utmost.

"You must make it so he sees only you. At any cost. Hold him in your hands."
Setsuna's tone burned with fervent ambition.
"He is Tsunade's disciple, monstrous potential, bearing the makings of a Hokage."

His voice rose with excitement.
"If you can secure him, you could one day be the Hokage's wife. If you sit firmly in that place, then we Uchiha can step on the Senju and reach the summit, become Konoha's true masters. Then we will see who dares make us take the blame again."

His withered fingers trembled with force, sketching a blueprint that could drive the entire Uchiha into a frenzy.

Hokage's wife?

Mikoto's body went rigid, fingertips like ice.

She had long guessed she would be used for marriage, but "draw close to Ryo," "Hokage's wife" seared across her heart like red-hot brands.

Ryo, that cold, powerful boy, become his wife, control him?

The thought itself carried a forbidden, breathtaking allure.

All the more when his figure, his strength, and those intimate moments with Kushina had just been roiling through her mind.
A sudden, indescribable thrill, part theft and part shiver, shot electric down her spine.

And right on its heels came a stronger wave, the guilty pleasure of stealing and the weight of sin tangling together.

(To be continued.)

Chapter 66: A Great Tonic

"You do realize Kamiyama Ryo is Uzumaki Kushina's lover, right? You want me to cut in as the third party? What does that make me? Kushina is my best friend!"

Her eyes rimmed red, both hands clutching the front of her kimono, her body trembling.

The guilt toward her friend she had forced down, and the fear of her own ambition, surged back up. In Uchiha Setsuna's clouded old eyes flashed the look of someone unsurprised, mocking and impatient, as if at a child who did not understand the world.

He stepped closer. His voice dropped to a hiss, cold as a snake's tongue slipping into the ear: "Friend? Best friend? Hah." A contemptuous snort rumbled from his nose.

"Mikoto, put away that pointless sympathy. Use the mind I have honed in you and see reality." A glint shot through the murk of his eyes. "That best friend of yours, Uzumaki Kushina," he enunciated each word like a blade, "she is the future Nine-Tails jinchūriki in waiting. That is her essence."

"What?!" Mikoto's pupils shrank. It felt like a bucket of ice water dumped over her head. The shock wrenched a soundless cry from her.

Konoha's jinchūriki? That carefree, big-hearted Kushina she knew, a vessel for the Nine-Tailed Fox?

Watching his granddaughter blanch, Setsuna spoke with cruel certainty:
"This is top secret, but an iron rule the leadership accepts. The Nine-Tails jinchūriki is the village's greatest weapon and deterrent. And that means she is a caged canary. She will never be free. Her existence is to seal the Nine-Tails. When the next jinchūriki is of age, the beast is transferred to the new container. And her? Hah. Best case, she fades away in some hidden corner. Worst, she dies on some dark operating table, or gets drained as a sacrifice."

Setsuna's words stabbed like poisoned ice awls into Mikoto's heart.
"See it now? The Konoha leadership will never allow someone like her to marry, much less to conceive."

His tone hammered at the core obstacle, cold with worldly certainty. "Childbirth by a jinchūriki could bring disaster on Konoha. She and Ryo were never destined to end well. That is a fixed reality."

"And," he pivoted, deliberately coaxing, "as a jinchūriki, she can never leave the village's cage. You, better than anyone, should know what that means."

Mikoto felt the strength drain out of her. She staggered half a step back, her spine striking the cold paper lattice with a dull thud.

Jinchūriki, caged, operating table, destined tragedy, no freedom.
The words whirled and sliced through her mind.

Her earlier worry that Ryo might leave after graduation, the small, childish fear of losing him, felt laughably naïve.

Kushina's future was dyed in primordial black.

Her laughter and sweetness with Ryo now looked like poison flowers blooming on the edge of an abyss, brief and fatal.

Setsuna's tone softened at just the right moment, the practiced whisper of a schemer certain of his investment, a devil's murmur threading Mikoto's turmoil:

"And Ryo? You have seen his power, his potential with your own eyes. A terror that swept half of Konoha. He will surely leave the cage that holds the jinchūriki and soar like an eagle. Under Tsunade's lead, he is destined for the bloodiest battlefields."

A cold arc tugged at the corner of his mouth.
"Mikoto, that is your opportunity."

"Now, think carefully about the road I have paved for you since childhood." He pinned her with a look, savoring his long game. "Kushina will be locked in the village as the new Nine-Tails jinchūriki. And I had you work your way close to her, into her circle. Did you truly think it was just to keep up appearances between Uchiha and Uzumaki? Childish."

"Look now, you are about to be a formal teammate of Kamiyama Ryo." He stepped in, energized. "Field hospital and front lines, those will become the perfect stage to apply what you have learned."

"Remember? I hired the finest bridal tutors for you since you were small, spent blood and breath honing your strategy, bearing, and speech. I taught you how to read faces, steer emotions, grasp a man's weaknesses. I even allowed you to use those means to help your best friend Kushina get closer to Ryo. You thought it was some girlish game of friendship?"

His voice lowered, thick with wicked allure.
"No. Every so-called strategy you taught Kushina, every contact with Ryo under the banner of helping her, each was practice. Each sharpened the blade named bridal training forged for you. Each was rehearsal for the final moment, when fate itself clears the obstacle named Kushina, so you can slip in seamlessly and take the opening."

"Picture it. When Ryo is out bleeding on the field, you are the one by his side with tactical support and solace. When he is loneliest and most dejected, you, the comrade who understands him best, whom he trusts most, are there to listen, to stay."

Fervor lit Setsuna's eyes.
"With my granddaughter's wit, and these years of hammer-and-anvil bridal training, that powerful man will fall wholly into your hand. That is the road to lift Uchiha's glory to Konoha's peak."

"In the future, you will stand upon this land and look down upon the Hokage's shadow."

"Mikoto, remember this. Power is a woman's tonic, and it is a great tonic."

"Grandfather would never harm you."

Hokage's wife.

The words became a real crown, cold and heavy, yet dazzling to the point of vertigo.

Power is a woman's tonic. A great tonic. Setsuna's words dropped into the dead water of her heart like stones. Wicked ripples spread outward, no longer merely furtive delight, but poison mixed with honey, steeped in the reek of betrayal and the greed to possess.

Thump. Thump.

Mikoto could hear her own heart pounding, dense drumbeats against fragile ribs.

A scalding torrent named ambition smashed the dikes named friendship and guilt in an instant.

Hokage's wife. Uchiha's glory. Master of the village to come. One beneath ten thousand above.

The words gathered into an irresistible flood, grinding Kushina's face, stamped now with doomed tragedy, beneath its weight.

The brutal essence of that bridal training flared in her mind.

It had never been about the romance of first love strategies. It was power politics at its coldest.

She was a weapon, honed to breach the target man.

Setsuna's aim was always sharp and cold, use her as the tether to bind a boundless talent with Hokage's potential, Ryo, and drag Uchiha back to Konoha's core, washing away decades of exclusion.

The insight, feigned gentleness, and mastery of hearts she had learned were blades serving this bargain.

Duty? Belonging?

Absurdity yawned before her.

Her value, in the end, was a stepping stone for the clan's return to power, a more ornate chess piece.

To be taught love only to steal more efficiently, to take.

Kushina's naïve, proud face and Ryo's indulgent downward gaze ripped back and forth in her mind. Her best friend's unreserved trust and the surging betrayal within her twined like two venomous snakes, tearing her spirit ragged.

Her nails bit deeper into her palm. Sharp pain tamped the turmoil.

She lowered her lashes. The dark fringe cast deep shadows across her pale cheeks, hiding the storm and leaving only heavy fatigue and a helpless struggle.

"…I will think about it."

The five words scraped out between her teeth, draining her strength.

Was it surrender, delay, or the reflex buffer of someone torn by pressure and temptation?

Setsuna caught it, the wavering spark deep in her eyes, guttering then flaring again, now tinged with a new certainty in her capability.

A subtle satisfaction flickered in his murky gaze. Enough.

The seed had been planted. Press further and he would spoil it.

His old eyes eased, like a wily fox catching the scent of prey stepping into a snare.
"Good, good, Mikoto." He reined in his force and resumed the solemn elder's tone, even with a faint, nearly soothing note. "Grandfather will not force you. Think it over."

"As for Fugaku?" Setsuna snorted.

"In time, I will see him kept away from you. I, Uchiha Setsuna, do not need a weak grandson-in-law. He is unworthy."
He gave Mikoto a long, loaded look, then turned and strode down the corridor, leaving the weight of choice on the shoulders of a girl whose heart was a snarl, and whose ambition now burned bright.

His figure vanished past the door. The air held only a musty scent, rotted wood mixed with naked ambition.

A few days later, news of Tsunade's return spread through Konoha.

Morning mist clung low. The Uchiha compound remained deathly still.

Heavy wooden fences sliced the grey light into bars, like a cage's ribs.

Mikoto drew a deep breath. The cold stung her lungs. Setsuna's poison hummed through her veins. The mantra of bridal training echoed like a spell. The specter of Hokage's wife burned against her eyelids.

She straightened her back. The first step toward Konoha's power center had to be clean.

Creak—

A familiar face squeezed out of the shadow by the gate.

Fugaku rolled his sleeves and forced what he thought was a tender smile. "Mikoto, shall we—"

Before he finished, Mikoto swept past in long, decisive strides.

Her fingers clenched and opened inside her sleeve, steady, no tremor.

She stamped to a halt, pivoted. Sunlight lit half her face at last.

Her step paused for only a heartbeat.

No hesitation. No preface.

Just as Fugaku arranged his habitual smile and opened his mouth for the same tired lines, Mikoto slipped in like a cold wind, closing to a single pace before him.

Too close, close enough that Fugaku could see the permafrost compacted deep in her dark pupils.

Instinct prickled. Something was wrong. His smile froze. His Adam's apple bobbed.

Mikoto spoke in a tone deliberately calibrated, a noblewoman's cool clarity bestowed by her bridal training, her pace even and crisp, not a ripple in her voice, yet striking like a judge's anvil:
"Fugaku-kun."

She even shifted to the most distant honorific.

"Thank you for your past regard and feelings. But—"

She lifted her face and met his startled eyes. Each word precise to coldness, like a wintry gust nailing him in place: "You are a good man."

Fugaku's expression locked, a plaster mask flash-frozen on his face.

"We," Mikoto paused deliberately. Her gaze swept over his face as if appraising a trivial, flawed item. "Are completely incompatible."
The words fell like ice.

She did not wait for any response.

Before his expression could fully collapse into shock and humiliation, she turned on her heel. Her black ponytail drew an arc in the air without a hint of reluctance, slicing past his slack mouth.

Something snapped in that instant, restraint, endurance, the disgust for clan-arranged marriage.

The sheer pleasure of rejection roared up like lava, searing her insides.

That furtive unwillingness born from Kushina was swallowed by the flame of exhilaration.

This, too, was in the curriculum, when a target's value is insufficient, the most dignified, yet most lethal farewell.

She could almost hear Fugaku's shocked gasp behind her.

Her steps quickened. Wooden clogs tapped the stone, tak, tak, tak, crisp beats shattering ten years of forced gentleness.

The shadow of the Uchiha estate reeled back. The leaden lump in her gut peeled away.

The street to the Hokage Building unfurled ahead. At its end stood the eagle fated to fly, and the light fated not to belong only to her best friend. She strode away without looking back.

Wind teased the wisps over her brow.

Her pace was steady and swift along the gravel-strewn path. She left the gates without a backward glance, leaving Uchiha Fugaku frozen in place, ears ringing with that cold, knife-edged "You are a good man," and the lingering trace of her sharper, prouder aura.

Sunlight slanted across his vacant face.

"Didn't she call me Fugaku-nii just the other day…?"

His baffled mutter drifted after her, as if through a thick wall of water.

At the corner of Mikoto's lips, the curve of satisfaction widened, silently.

(To be continued.)

Chapter 67: Damn Hiruzen

Time shifts back to a few days earlier.

Ame no Kuni front line.

The low, leaden sky sagged. Endless cold rain drenched the sodden earth of Ame no Kuni, turning the muddy trenches into wide, murky pits.

The air reeked of wet soil, blood, and the stubborn stench of rotting medicinal herbs. In Konoha's hastily assembled command post, oil lamps guttered and threw dim light.

A huge situation map, its edges soaked by rain, sprawled across the table. Tiny flags marking friend and foe bristled over it like a hedgehog's spines.

Shimura Danzō sat at the head. Days of strain had swollen the bags under his eyes like two overripe prunes, and bloodshot veins crawled across the whites. Even the mantle signifying Konoha's supreme battlefield command was spattered with dried mud and ink.

"Trash. An entire platoon, wiped out again by that old hag Chiyo's poison mist." Danzō slammed a fist into the oak tabletop. The dull thud sent several dossiers skidding off a corner.

"Hanzō's poison rain piled over Suna's stiffening toxins, this damned Ame no Kuni is one giant gas chamber. What comes in every day is not the wounded, it is meat waiting to die." He pinched the bridge of his nose. His temples throbbed. He felt like an old wolf trapped in a pit, snarling without relief.

Watching the death toll climb coldly on reports, hearing the wails from the front, this was a slow knife carving flesh. It would drive a shinobi mad.

What made it feel like swallowing flies was Tsunade.

The granddaughter of the Shodai, grandniece of the Nidaime, Konoha's princess, now blazed like a beacon in the field hospital.

Every time that golden hair appeared in a tent of the gravely wounded, the green glow of Shōsen no Jutsu (Mystical Palm Technique) bloomed, and that soft yet massive Katsuyu split and spread to cover the injured, the camp would rise in honest gratitude. "Thank you, Tsunade-sama."

Those words pricked Danzō's ears like needles.

It was him, Shimura Danzō, sitting here, wringing his mind dry to analyze intelligence, deploy forces, bearing the pressure of supreme command, stitching together a collapsing line.

Yet who received the thanks of those mud leggers?

Tsunade.

It was she who dragged men the reports had already consigned to the dead back from the Gate of Hell, again and again.

Her names, "saint of medical ninjutsu," "slug princess," spread among soldiers and junior officers, and even began to overshadow him, the commander in the center.

That honor, that popular support, should have been the harvest after victory, the laurel that lifted Danzō to the summit.

And now?

All of it was flowing to Tsunade, a flood he could not ignore.

"Damn woman." Danzō swore under his breath, a gleam of gloom cutting through his eyes.

More than once, in the insomnia of exhausted nights, a dangerous thought born of frustrated jealousy had stirred. If, if there were no Tsunade, casualties would spike, morale would crumble, the war would turn even bloodier. Yet in the end, the honor of a pyrrhic victory, or of grinding the enemy down, would fall wholly to Danzō. He was the commander of this meat-grinder.

The thought flickered up, and he stamped it out.

"No." He forced it down at once.

Without Tsunade, the front would collapse immediately.

Chiyo's new toxins kept coming. Hanzō's rain-nin were ghosts.

With no medical pillar from Tsunade and that disgusting but indispensable Katsuyu, they would never last to the day Suna ran dry.

If the front shattered for lack of medical support, Danzō knew the man in the Hokage's office would not spare him.

That seemingly gentle Hiruzen would seize the chance and dump every charge and chamber pot on Danzō's head.

"Hokage's aide fails, leading to the collapse of the Ame no Kuni front"?

That one line could end his political life on the spot and nail him to a pillar of shame forever. What talk of Hokage then.

"Danzō-sama, urgent transmission." A masked Root operative slipped into the tent like a ghost, knelt on one knee, and presented a tightly sealed scroll with both hands. Rain dripped from his cold armor onto the floor.

Danzō's heart sank. At times like this, the word "urgent" was the last thing he wanted.

He snatched the scroll, poured chakra into his fingertips, and ripped the sealing script open.

The scroll unfurled.

The first was from Konoha's Hokage Tower, bearing the flaming seal of the Sandaime, Hiruzen.

Special order. One of the Sannin, Tsunade-hime, upon receipt is to immediately disengage from the front and return to Konoha headquarters at once, without fail. Signed: Hokage Hiruzen.
(Addendum: matter is classified. Details will be given in person.)

"Recall Tsunade?" Danzō's brows knotted.

The front was deadlocked, the poison threat unresolved. Recall Orochimaru and Jiraiya, fine, but summon away Tsunade, the medical core, at this exact moment? Had the Hiruzen gone mad?

He burned to know why, but the scroll held only the cold order and the word "classified."

A fresh sting of being shut out from the inner circle rose. He was the highest commander on the battlefield, yet he was not told why a core general had to be pulled back urgently.

He almost tore open the second scroll in anger.

This one came from Root's secret node in Konoha, his true ears.

Its phrasing was colder and more detailed.

Though the body was not to be reproduced, a handful of conclusory phrases pierced Danzō's mind like ice awls:

… mental power outburst … a massive psychic shock blanketing the entire village … preliminary center point of the burst, Kamiyama Ryo … triggered widespread panic, chaos, hidden damage to infrastructure … estimated energy level of the shock source, Kage class or higher … destructive power and range assessed as follows, data attached … extreme hazard …

"Kamiyama… Ryo?" Danzō clenched the scroll so hard it almost tore.

The name branded itself on his memory like a red-hot iron.

In an instant he recalled the smoke-filled office years ago, how highly he had valued that fearsome commoner brat, how he had asked Hiruzen to place that born Root seedling in his hand.

And then?

"The light on him, it grows best under the sun, inheritor of the Will of Fire. Hiruzen takes all." That damned refusal, heavy with moral superiority, rang in his ears.

And that damned line.

"I, Danzō, refuse."

Smothered.

A suffocation that could flip his blood surged from his soles to his crown.

Years flashed like lantern slides. His desire to bring the boy named Ryo into Root, Hiruzen's rejection, the pivot to demanding control of the jinchūriki Uzumaki Kushina, Hiruzen parading Mito to refuse again, and finally, even the bright prospect of Ryo was cut off when Tsunade took him as a disciple. All that bottled fury found a fuse in this instant.

"Ah."

Bloodshot eyes drilled into the name on the scroll, Ryo. This brat had thrown Konoha into a terror like that.

But this power. This potential. This report's assessment of Kage and above.

It was power Danzō had recognized years ago, tried to claim for Root, to forge into Konoha's sharpest hidden blade.

It should have been his. Root's.

Now that strength, that fang he had craved, had once again been snatched and flaunted by the one man he hated most, Hiruzen.

"Hiruzen." Danzō ground his back molars. His breath came hard. His chest heaved, every inhalation heavy with resentment and venom.

"You stole from me again. You greedy thief. That power, that Ryo, should have been my blade. Mine." Helpless rage and the sting of betrayal gnawed at him.

He could already see Hiruzen in the Konoha office, smugly admiring the tool named Ryo, while pushing all blame for rear-area disruption onto someone else.

Why? Why did all good assets and seedlings fall into Hiruzen's lap? Disgusting.

He shielded the jinchūriki. He hoarded a potential stock like Ryo. Was the fat harvest all his orchard?

Blood rushed to Danzō's head.

He hammered the table. The oil lamp shuddered hard, light and shadow careening across the tent walls.

(To be continued.)