Pre-Chapter A/N: Me last week: "I think at this point, we just have to accept that I will inevitably show up with two chapters a week. As for when those chapters show up, I think it's best I not make any particular promises" And the gods laughed as I said this, lmao. Hit a writing slump plus a particularly nasty case of food poisoning and got humbled massively. Back on it though, so let's go!
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Where Toshiro had seemed to stroll into the room, comfortable in his skin, Shiba seemed to lumber. Every step he took seemed to weigh more than the last. Not with a physical weight, but a metaphysical one. This was a man with a burden on his shoulders, and he wore it on his extra-long sleeves for the world to see.
"Are you well, my friend?" I found myself asking, not out of concern for him, for he had always been this way, but to break the silence that stretched between us like a taut string, waiting, aching to snap.
"I am, Hokage-sama," he said as he bent into a bow on arriving before my desk.
"I remain at your service, Hokage-sama. Always."
"Rise, Shiba," I said.
"So I assume you have come with your arguments to convince me to entrust the group of recently orphaned to your care. I will hear them now. But be warned, however, Toshiro has been especially convincing," I said, prompting him to begin.
"I have seen Takehade-san's plans, and while admirable, they did not convince me of their utility in this present case, and I doubt they convinced you either, Hokage-sama. Why? Because they simply will take too long to come into fruition. Eight years of training to produce more shinobi suited for being naught but cannon fodder who will then have to be trained further by Jounin-sensei for another year or two of dedicated training to make them useful and productive members of the Ninja force. In that time, another war could even have come and gone," Shiba said, taking a pause. His voice was calm and soothing in a way that drove his point home without the need to scream it.
"My plan, on the other hand, will require only between six and twelve months to turn each one of them into a competent spy to plug our biggest blindspots," he began.
"Blindspots?" I asked.
"The other villages: Suna, Kusa, Ame, Kiri, Kumo, Taki. With some preliminary training, they will be able to act as competent spies. Some will begin lives as civilians while others will seek to enroll as shinobi. In a matter of years, we could have deeply embedded spies into each enemy village, just waiting to be used when the time comes," he explained. I nodded at his words.
He had a good plan, at least. One that addressed a pressing need the village itself had— the need for information both about what its allies were up to and what its enemies were cooking up. Both perspectives were invaluable for their future planning.
"So tell me what exactly this training plan of yours would entail?" I asked, knowing full well that I had made my choice already. I would make it up to Toshiro later on.
"The training would be focused on—" He was interrupted by the door swinging open.
"Ma'am, I said Hokage-sama is busy with a meeting—" Retsu's voice followed the intruder as she marched in.
"Don't worry, Retsu. Let her in," I said, looking at my Grandmother with all the exasperation I felt showing in my gaze. She just shrugged, showing me a scroll.
"I completed it," she said, pride oozing from her very being.
"I'm sorry, Shiba, but we'll have to reschedule."
XXXXX- TWO MONTHS AFTER THE ATTACK ON KONOHA- BUNPUKU THE MONK
Shamon's gambit had failed, Bunpuku knew. Even if he lacked any means of telling the time from within here, he could still count in his mind. And if his counting was accurate— which it almost definitely was— then it had been one thousand four hundred and sixty-nine hours since his friend had last seen him. Two months.
His friend had not returned in two months, and now was going to be the time he looked to figure out what exactly had happened. It was not enough for him to just know that Shamon's gambit had failed. He needed to know what had become of his friend. Had the Kage-killer killed him? Was it Chiyo who got him with her abomination to the concept of ninjutsu? Was it neither of them? Could it be that something else had happened to him?
And so Bunpuku begged his only other friend for some of his power to use.
"Do as you will," Shukaku had grunted before returning to his nap. And so Bunpuku had pulled at the chakra of his companion, using it to turn one of his fingers into sand. That sand he snuck through the teapot's seal, allowing it to escape. He closed his eyes, turning the sand into a third eye that he used to navigate his way around the village.
He ignored the sights that would have given him pause on a normal day as he kept a slow march down the streets, heading from where his teapot was stored towards the Kazekage's tower. As he walked past the streets, he began to notice something as he did so. It was the people. The people of Sunagakure looked worse than he had ever seen them. Several of them were coughing their way down the streets. Others were slumped against the walls; some had even fallen to the floor entirely. He did not know when he abandoned his journey to the Kazekage tower in favour of looking around the village proper. And the story was much the same. The civilians for the most part seemed unaffected, but there were shinobi who had lost consciousness right outside their homes, struggling to make their way inside. Some had fallen over each other, forming small piles of sick.
They coughed, moaned in pain, and in some cases even vomited on themselves. There was a plague spreading around his village, the place he had known as home for so long, and nothing about it felt right. Even where the civilians were in close contact with sick shinobi, they seemed unbothered by the disease. Not a single sick civilian, while near every shinobi looked to be near death. There was nothing natural about that.
And so he continued his investigation. He moved his eye from street to street, and when he reached the hospital, it took a large amount of willpower for him to continue. In the sand outside the hospital, they lay in their dozens, each one as sick as the last. He went inside, finding that even the medical shinobi were no exception. They lay at their desks, coughing and moaning just as surely as their compatriots lay on the ground outside. This was some kind of attack, but not a kind of attack that Bunpuku had ever seen before. Looking closer, there was a mark on the necks of all those who suffered. A seal.
"A cursed seal, hehehe," Shukaku's voice echoed.
"You mean the kind of cursed seal that you are the master of?"
"I can deal with that thing no problem," Shukaku boasted, but Bunpuku could see the angle clear as day. He wanted out of the teapot. Just as surely as Bunpuku wanted to help those who moaned in pain even now.
"You will not deceive me, Shukaku," he said.
"Okie dokie." And the Tanuki was gone from his mind, off amusing himself with something else. It was only a matter of time until Bunpuku faded. Shukaku must have known that because he did not take back the chakra he had given Bunpuku as he usually did when he retreated. And so Bunpuku continued to watch, torn between the choice of what was right and what was easy.
In the end, it was not his choice to make. Not as he watched the little boy fall off the cot in the hospital as he tried to get a drink of water. There was no choice. Shukaku, even at his worst, could not take so many lives. And never so cruelly.
"Shukaku," he called into the recess of his mind.
"Something to tell me, Bunpuku-chan?"
"I will release us from this kettle, but you must make a promise, my friend."
"Shukaku never breaks promises, Bunpuku-chan."
"Yes, yes, I know, Shukaku. So I will have your word that you will help and that you will be on your best behavior when we leave here," he said.
"Shukaku swears. Shukaku just wants to see the sun," the Tanuki said.
Bunpuku was far from convinced about his friend's earnestness, but what else could he do about it? He reached out with his own chakra, not that of the tailed beast, because the teapot would reject that outright. He reached the seal that held them and then exerted his influence in the exact same pattern as Shamon had taught him all those years ago.
And then he felt the pull at his soul as the teapot began to eject him. He landed on the ground, crouched, feeling aches all over.
But he was an abbot of the Wind Temple. Pain was an old fiend of his. He rose to his full height, not paying much if any attention to the creaks and pops that came from his bones as he did so. He rose and walked out into the village proper. With every step he took, he felt his friend begin to stir.
"Control yourself, Shukaku," he said, and thankfully, that was enough to keep him at his best behaviour for the time being.
The first sick person they met was a woman.
"I am so sorry, young one," he said, reaching down to console her. Except that the second his skin touched her, the seal on her neck began to unravel. He felt his body be flooded with Shukaku's chakra. He choked off the urge to kill her and focused on doing just enough to help her. He could do good here, and he focused only on that. Shukaku's chakra called to the seal on her neck like called to like, and it flowed across her skin smoothly until it wrapped around Bunpuku's wrist and burned itself there, creating a mark that he would bear for the rest of his days.
One down, a whole village to go.
So he continued. He walked down the streets, and where he found the sick, he healed them. And slowly and surely, once they fully recovered, they began to bring more and more of the sick to him. And that was how he ended up here, in the middle of a market, healing people one after another. The seal spread through touch, he had come to learn. And the seal was not a disease as he had initially thought. No. Shukaku's power allowed him to realise just what the seal was, and it was even more insidious than that.
The Konoha sealmasters, for who else could it be but them, had made a seal that created an advantage. It gave whoever bore it the power to intake natural chakra from the very air. The seal was a boon to all, but without the training to handle that natural chakra, it acted as a poison to the shinobi infected with it. And the seal spread by touch. A feat that Shukaku had been cackling about for long enough that it was clear it was supposed to be something difficult to do. These were geniuses by all means, and they had turned their genius to focus on destroying a people, a society.
Why? For war? Was this war? Bunpuku had never fought in war, but he had helped in more than one battle's aftermath, and rarely had he ever seen such blatant callousness and disregard for the value of life.
"Bunpuku-sama. There are more coming from the hospital. Are you clear to heal them?" The first girl that he had healed asked. She had somehow nominated herself as the one to speak to him of the lot.
"For the last time, Mina. I am no lord. I am merely a man who can help. And I remain just that, a man who can help. Let all those who are sick come to me. I will give them rest." He said, taking the burden unto himself just like he had taken the burden of holding Shukaku when no one else could have.
XXXXXXX- THREE MONTHS SINCE THE ATTACK ON KONOHA
We had finally broken ground on the new tower. It had taken a while to secure all right families and their reallocations, but that had not been the real delay. The real delay had come from the fact that more or less every single shinobi under my aegis considered it to be a terrible idea. Some felt the wise course of action would be increasing the security around the tower to prevent an attack like Chiyo's from happening again. So it went without saying that they viewed moving the tower as foolish. If I weren't their Kage, they might even have said so to my face.
Instead, Shika was the one they went to with their grievances, hoping she could talk some sense into me. The other faction opposed to the move weren't concerned about safety. They were the ones whose opinions I could safely ignore with little consequence. They did not want to move closer to the civilians because they felt the civilians were beneath them. They did not want to have to move through the civilian district to get access to their Kage. Well, if they bothered me less because of a change of location, then that was a blessing as far as I was concerned.
But the tower wasn't my objective today. No, I was waiting at Training Ground 7 for a particular group of people. A group that were becoming concerningly close to running late. Well, running late for my standards, which meant that it was already seven minutes before the time we were supposed to meet and they still hadn't arrived.
Most of them, I amended, as the first dropped out of the treeline and raced until she was knelt right in front of me.
"Hokage-sama," Mikoto Uchiha spoke.
"Rise," I replied.
"Is there a reason the others want to test my patience today?" I asked her.
"I haven't seen them in a day, Hokage-sama. The last time I did so, Minato was helping Kushina with a jutsu," she said. I nodded. Alright then.
Minato was the next to arrive, arriving exactly four minutes before we were supposed to meet, and Kushina arrived last, a minute late.
"It seems we must revisit one of our earliest lessons," I said when all three of them arranged themselves in a straight line before me.
"Which lesson, sensei?" Minato asked, ever the adorable ball of sunshine. Oh, that wasn't going to be lasting very long this time.
"The importance of punctuality. It seems like you all have a tendency to forget it, so I'll be beating it into you. You know, to prevent future forgetfulness." I said, watching Kushina groan, Mikoto take a step back, and Minato take his stance. At least they were quick on the uptake.
"Defend yourselves," I said, crashing through Minato's guard like a train and sending him flying through the treeline.
To Kushina's credit, her chains were already moving to wrap around me the second I'd tossed Minato away, but that was still far too little, and far too late. I reached for one of said chains, grabbed a hold of it, and felt it try to suppress my chakra. You're a decade too young to stand a chance, girl, I said mentally before I used it as a flail and dragged, pulling her off the ground. I spun— once, twice, and then launched her off into the distance.
Mikoto was on me like white on rice. I hardened my skin with earth release chakra and slapped the shuriken she tried to obscure her approach with. She aimed a kick straight at my head. I blocked it with a raised palm. She pushed off against it, jumping backwards. As she did so, she flipped through three seals, and then she sent a fireball bigger than I was at me. I smiled in pride to see how far she had come even with my attentions having been so divided, but still I spat a water bullet that dwarfed the fireball without forming any hand seals.
It tore through the fireball, barely losing any mass or momentum before landing where Mikoto had been. She'd taken the chance of my vision being blurred and made her escape. Smart. She was probably going after her teammates, trying to get them back, so I formed a throne from the ground beneath me with a flex of my chakra and I sat to wait.
I could use my byakugan to search them out, but that was too much effort for too little reward when those competitive little munchkins with chips on their shoulders would come to get their licks in.
The ground beneath me exploded a second later. I watched the shock on Minato's face as his rasengan hit naught but air and I grabbed a hold of his wrist.
"Using subterranean voyage against a master of the earth release is so stupid, I'd expect it from Kushina, not you."
"Heyyyy," I heard from within the treeline. So that was where she was.
Instead of being insulted though, Minato smirked at me before he muttered a single word. 'Boom'. And then the clone exploded, almost tossing me arse over teakettle backwards. Thankfully, I'd been able to harden my skin with earth release in the split second he'd given as a warning. My ears were still ringing though. I'd have to get him back for that one.
Right after I taught him that you triggered the trap before warning your opponent about it. It wasn't like the explosion would have won him the match if he hadn't warned me, but it would have achieved slightly more.
Several chains shot out of the ground around me, each one clutching a kunai at its end, and I took my stance, keen to see what they had cooked up now.
A/N: And so the chapter ends with us spending some time with our favourite genin.. Next six up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) (same username as here and link in bio), support me there and read them early.