After listening carefully to Minato's report, Sarutobi Hiruzen leaned back in his chair, the weight of the situation heavy on his shoulders. He wasted no time. Orders were given, and soon preparations were underway for a full jounin council, one attended by all clan heads, key leaders in available positions, the elite jounin, and several experienced jounin of merit. The matter of Kumogakure and its allies and other situations in the ninja world could no longer be ignored.
As messengers departed to summon the council, Hiruzen's gaze drifted to the window. His mind, burdened by the present, inevitably wandered to the past.
He thought of his disciple Jiraiya. When the Second Ninja World War had come to a close, Jiraiya had chosen to remain behind in the Land of Rain, taking responsibility for three orphans he had encountered amidst the ruins of battle. To the outside world, it might have seemed an act of pure pity, born from a soft heart unsuited for war. But Hiruzen knew better.
Jiraiya was not naive. He had walked the battlefield for years, completing mission after mission, his hands stained with blood. During the war, death was a constant presence, an ever-present feature of war, comrades dying in camps, on roads, in the middle of every skirmish. Corpses were no longer a shock; they were routine. For a man who had seen death nearly every week, pity alone could not explain his actions. Jiraiya's choice had been deliberate, an expression of conviction and purpose rather than sentimentality.
Hiruzen exhaled slowly, his sigh heavy with both curiosity and concern.
And then his thoughts turned to Kumogakure.
The Second Ninja World War had begun with Hanzo the Salamander's declaration, dragging the surrounding nations into a brutal conflict. The small countries were swept up first, but soon the great powers themselves, Iwagakure, Sunagakure, Konohagakure, and Kirigakure, were embroiled in full-scale war.
Kumogakure, however, had remained largely passive. Their activity during the war was limited to skirmishes near their own borders. Unlike the other great villages, they had not been able to play the role of the oriole waiting patiently for its prey to weaken before striking. The opportunity simply never came.
And the reason, Hiruzen remembered all too well, lay in a single mission carried out by Danzo's men and Orochimaru.
That operation had triggered the rampage of the Eight-Tails. The devastation had consumed Kumogakure's focus and forced them into an internal crisis at the very moment they might have taken advantage of the wider war. By the time the rampage was subdued and order restored, the great conflict was already fading.
It had been, Hiruzen admitted to himself, a turning point that spared Konoha from an even longer and more punishing war.
But Kumogakure had not given up, at that time, in Hiruzen's opinion.
They had targeted the Uzumaki clan along with others to further weaken Konoha, but the plan had gone catastrophically wrong. Konoha and the Uzumaki's own countermeasures turned the ambush into a disaster for the attackers; the enemy force had been routed, effectively wiped out. Even now, the Land of Lightning kept its borders shut, a defensive reflex born of the damage and uncertainty that followed and a long recovery process in Hiuzen's opinion.
The Land of Lightning remained commercially active, and factories, trade goods, and craftsmen continued their work, as seen by the new products of the Land of Lightning, and merchants and business did not equate to ninja villages, but Hiruzen's worries were not about commerce. As Hokage, his mind lived on warfare and espionage. Ninja villages fought not only open wars but a thousand quiet contests, probes, betrayals, and careful sabotages. Those hidden conflicts never fully ceased, even in peacetime.
From the vantage of the Land of Fire's wealth, Hiruzen was fortunate; the daimyo's coffers ensured Konoha never worried about funding. That financial security allowed him to treat the Land of Lightning's economic activity as a matter primarily between daimyo and merchants, a civilian matter, not a direct concern of the village. What kept him awake at night was the way nations used their clandestine/covert tools to gain advantage and the memory of how plans sometimes collapsed into unexpected ruin, so actions in open was the least of his concertn.