Soon, they reached the next hideout.
Tsunade immediately slipped back into her typical duties, moving among the wounded with her usual authority, but before leaving him, she promised she would return by the end of the day with some written notes and instructions, the first steps in teaching him.
Ryusei, meanwhile, found himself settled in a smaller valley cave near the hideout. It was close enough to the medical corps to avoid suspicion, but far enough that he had space for himself.
After finishing his usual training routines, he finally sat still, letting his mind turn over the next stages of his plan.
He was still waiting for that clone to return with confirmation. Thankfully, a clone could remain operational for days.
That message was everything. His Daimyō plan had to succeed before Root or the elders managed to scramble their own counterplay.
Ryusei had been incorporating game theory into his thinking ever since arriving in this world.
And here, the logic was simple: they would not leave him alone.
Every move he made forced a response, and he had already begun mapping what their next counter might look like.
If the Daimyō plan failed, the retaliation would come swiftly, perhaps even in days or weeks.
If it succeeded, he would finally have his first true breathing space, months, maybe more, time enough to sharpen himself and absorb the world-class teachings Tsunade was about to give him, and they would guess that too.
But precisely because he understood how they thought, he had ordered those six men to be doubly cautious.
Any slip, any hint, and Root would descend on them first.
His thoughts shifted to another name, one he was sure would not stay silent much longer: Orochimaru.
The man's curiosity was practically a law of nature.
Ryusei surviving an elite Root kill squad, while standing beside Tsunade, could not go unnoticed by him on this front.
It was only a matter of time before Orochimaru's snake-like instincts brought him slithering closer, whether to dissect him, recruit him, or simply probe.
Ryusei almost smiled. That was fine.
He wanted the approach.
With Orochimaru, everything was a transaction, knowledge for knowledge, power for power.
And Ryusei had more than enough ideas for exchanges, alliances, and negotiations. In a way, he was looking forward to it.
'Come to me, snake,' he thought, eyes narrowing as he leaned back against the cool rock. 'I'll trade fairly, for now. But I'll be the one holding the knife when the time comes.'
Regarding Tsunade, Ryusei felt his pace and plans couldn't have gone more perfectly.
It was many times better than anything he had imagined before.
Previously, even in his subconscious, he had classified her as some unapproachable monster at this stage of life, someone impossible to bend or get close to.
Yet only now was he far more optimistic. They had truly known each other for basically a single day, and still, they clicked, or more accurately, Ryusei had successfully imprinted himself into her world as though he had always been there, as if they had known each other for years.
He wasn't complacent enough to think this was only because of his amazing tactics, acting skills, or even his handsome face.
Nor did he fool himself into thinking Tsunade was gullible.
No, it was because so many different confluences overlapped, pushing things in his favor.
For example, Ryusei, who had initially worried he might have overestimated her relationship with his father, thinking perhaps it was just a fragment of his imagination, had now learned he had actually underestimated it.
That bond, twisted and unresolved as it was, ran deeper than he first guessed.
The same applied to her feelings about the clan as a whole. Before today, he thought she was far more detached, almost indifferent to the Senju name.
But after spending a full day in her presence, watching her masks slip, hearing her confessions between sighs and smirks, he finally saw the truth.
He realized that his earlier pessimism came from these missed expectations, blind spots he had carried. Only now did he have the real picture.
And with that picture came certainty: as long as he didn't make a catastrophic mistake, the relationship between him and Tsunade would sail smoothly.
Smoothly enough for him to secure 'more' than her jutsu teachings, sometime in the future.
Judging from the way she was lowering her defenses more and more, treating him casually, openly, Ryusei felt the steady progress like a weight lifting off his shoulders. He had cracked the impossible shell.
Suppressing the small twitch at the corner of his lips, he also forced down the drool that threatened to form and buried those mental images unsuitable for children, popping up.
He shook his head once, dragging his thoughts back into order. There were still other matters to consider.
Ryusei suddenly chuckled under his breath, the grin tugging at his lips almost automatic as his thoughts drifted back to his teammates.
He needed to show them he was fine, especially Kanae. After all, she wasn't just in the "warming up" stage anymore, he felt.
No, judging from their more recent interactions, where she herself probably hadn't noticed, she was close to "fully cooked" already.
But from this distance, even if he wanted to, there was no way to reach them.
They didn't have sensory baseline prowess anywhere near Tsunade's level, so they couldn't catch even a trace of him now from this distance.
And while he briefly considered sending a clone, he discarded the idea just as quickly. It was logistically hard to pull off.
Besides, he reassured himself, he had left enough behind already.
Enough hints. Enough signals. He was confident they'd know he'd survive.
"Let's just hope they don't slack off," he thought with a dry smirk.
Before leaving, he had already given both of them pointers, clear directions for what to focus on next.
If they followed them diligently, their growth would spike in the next months.
And that was what he needed, teammates who grew as fast as possible, weapons sharpened alongside his own edge.
Rare pieces worth investing in.
Kanae, though… she was the one who worried him since their relationship was obviously much "deeper".
Not because she was foolish. Far from it.
She was never the reckless or stupid type.
Still, there was always the risk she might move too soon, or think too deeply about his absence, misreading it as his fall.
He shook his head lightly.
"No, she'll wait around for a while. Then, she'll test the waters slowly first. That's who she is."
Ryusei then thought about a few other things before his thoughts randomly circled back on Tsunade again, and he thought suddenly that if the same situation from before were repeated now, Tsunade would have cut those Root operatives down for him without hesitation anymore.
Back then, she hadn't acted decisively not only because they weren't that close yet, but also because she'd still been buried under that fog, that giant mental barrier, grief from the last war, lifelong indoctrination, and the confusion that came with it.
At the time, he had practically categorized her as a zombie, shackled by years of brainwashing and loss.
But the more they spoke, the more he felt her waking up and waking up out of that.
He sensed it directly in her chakra aura, brighter, denser, even taking on a fuller, more colorful texture as her spirit returned, despite the sometimes darker topics they visited.
Conversation by conversation, she was regaining pieces of herself, and he knew that was vital for her to climb back to her true peak in strength as well, which he also wanted as well.
In a way, he was doing what Naruto would someday do, more than a decade later, but through a completely different path.
Naruto had his plot armor, the power of friendship, and that pure, almost childlike optimism that bordered on idiocy. That was how he achieved that.
Ryusei, though, was dragging her out of her haze the hard way: brutal truths, sharp edges, forcing her to confront what she had buried.
He wasn't painting over reality in some new, brighter, but still fake color.
He was making her see it as it was. And in the long run he knew that would benefit her more.