"Mito-sensei," Azula announced, with a smile she didn't hide showing she was in good mood. "I have succeeded."
Across from her, Uzumaki Mito was in the middle of a delicate sip of tea. The announcement caused not a spill, but a very deliberate, very slow lowering of her cup. Her elegant eyebrow arched upward.
From Mito's perspective, Azula had 'succeeded' at this task weeks ago. The girl had achieved the desired effect almost at that time.
The problem, Mito had come to learn, was that Azula's internal standards were forged in a psychological foundry of impossible perfectionism.
To Azula, 'good enough' was an insult, and 'almost perfect' was a failure she wouldn't tolerate. For her to now declare victory meant she had polished this incomplete technique to a mirror sheen.
"Oh?" She said, her voice a calm counterpoint to Azula's triumphant energy. "You've finally decided to stop terrorizing a single grain of rice with the intensity of a thousand suns and have accepted its existence as… sufficient?"
"See for yourself," Azula said, her smirk never fading.
She didn't bother with dramatics, she simply repeated the same she'd performed for Tsunade. But where Tsunade had seen a neat parlor trick, Mito, with her depth ninjutsu mastery, saw the breathtaking technical mastery. It was like watching a master calligrapher draw a single, perfect line—effortless, beautiful, and hiding a lifetime of practice.
She set her teacup down with a soft clink. A rare, genuine look of amazement flickered across her ageless features.
"Well. I have to say that it's is not merely a projection technique anymore. This illusion, in theory, can be weaponized." A faint, almost wicked smile touched her lips. "In a fight, making your opponent flinch for even a single second is a all you need to end them. And through this, you could ever cloud their judgement of distance and all if they aren't careful."
She let out a sigh that seemed to carry the weight of decades. "It appears you have are finally no longer wasting time. You are, without a doubt, ready to learn the Sealing Arts."
The sigh wasn't just about Azula's progress. It was a release of the quiet, building desperation Mito had been grappling with for months. Armed with Azula's horrifying glimpse into the future, Mito had not been idle. She had tried, subtly at first, then more overtly, to steer her clan away from its apparent doom.
As an Uzumaki, and the Uzumaki Mito, her influence was a quiet, formidable thing. While she technically held no official seat on the clan council, her reputation was a currency more valuable than any title. A word from her could move mountains, or so she thought.
She had requested, then strongly suggested, that the clan send a contingent of their brightest to Konoha. She would personally tutor them in their own ancestral arts, and they could learn combat from the legendary Shinobi of the Leaf. It was a generous offer, a lifeline thrown across the sea.
The response had been a chorus of polite, infuriating refusals. The prevailing sentiment from Uzushiogakure was a confident, almost arrogant, "We have our own country, thank you very much."
The Uzumaki who did visit Konoha were tourists, merchants, or cousins visiting Senju relatives who had long since abandoned the name.
They came, they enjoyed the sights, they had tea, and they left without a second thought, utterly oblivious to the sword dangling by a thread above their entire civilization.
It was, Mito thought with a sinking heart, as if some unseen cosmic script had already been written, and they were all just actors helplessly reading their lines, marching cheerfully toward their own destruction.
Meanwhile, Azula's thoughts were on an even grander, and frankly more terrifying, scale. Her discovery that the multiverse was likely a vast, infinite library containing every anime she'd ever watched was both the most exciting and annoying revelation imaginable.
On one hand, handy! Theoretically, a whole smorgasbord of powers was up for grabs. On the other hand, troublesome! It came with the kind of metaphysical baggage that would give a philosopher a migraine.
She reasoned that world-specific power sets—like the chaotic randomness of Quirks or Stand—were probably off the menu.
But something elegantly self-contained, like the Breathing Styles from Demon Slayer? That was just advanced bio-physiology! That could, in theory, be reverse-engineered.
But daydreaming about multiverse-hopping was a luxury for those who weren't currently small fish in a very dangerous pond.
Until she could confidently call herself a Sixth Path-level threat, all that multiverse nonsense was just a distracting thought experiment. Her desire for power was immediate, personal, and urgent. She wanted the security to grip her own destiny in her hands and tell the world, "No, you bend to me."
"Mito-sama," Azula said, pulling herself back to the present. "Now that this phase is complete, I need two, maybe three day to animate the first part of my manga. Once the project is stable and my newly formed team can manage without me, I am yours. I wish to begin my studies in Sealing Techniques immediately."
Mito looked into Azula's eyes and saw the familiar, burning hunger for power. It was a look she knew well from a certain stubborn, white haired brother in-law of her, and from his equally stubborn rival.
In an Uchiha, it was as natural as breathing.
But Mito can't help but smile. So what about destiny? So what about a future set in stone? Azula had said the destruction of Uzushiogakure was over a decade away.
That was time. Time she would use to forge Azula into a master of seals, time she would use to stop going so easy on her granddaughter and whip Tsunade and even Nawaki into shapes worthy of their lineage so that he couldn't die from something as embarrassing as an exploding tag like Azura said.
She would create her own counter-destiny force: a legendary due, a power-hungry Uchiha prodigy with future knowledge, and the last Princess of the Senju, all backed by the might of Konoha.
"My verdict?"Mito said, a slow, determined smile spreading across her face. "Okay, we begin in three days. Do not be late."
(END OF THE CHAPTER)
Probably the shortest chapter I ever made, and the next but I was truly blocked but as of now where I'm three chapters ahead on Patreon, I'm finally about to make the Timeskip-jutsu.