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[— Manga Scene —]
The Land of Wind. The Hidden Sand Village.
The desert village stretched across the entire page: sand domes packed together like colossal beehives, walkways carved into the rock, and at its heart, the largest building of all, bearing the symbol of "Wind."
And inside that building, in a dim chamber guarded by shadows…
"Well done… Baki."
The Kazekage sat at the head of the chamber, the village elders seated at his sides.
Nothing of the man could be seen.
The hat concealed the upper half of his face, and the cloth hanging from it concealed the rest — until the one sitting beneath it was nothing but a shadow that spoke.
"As we planned… the three have advanced to the main matches."
said Baki, kneeling before him.
"And the agreement with the Sound Village… is it proceeding smoothly?"
"Yes."
"That is the plan with the Sound Village."
"Then we shall rely on them for the work."
Baki raised his head slightly.
"But… Kazekage-sama… could the four of us, on our own…? Could we fake a training exercise, so we can move forces close to the border?"
"Konoha is not foolish. The ANBU are watching the region."
answered the seated shadow calmly.
"If we do that, they will discover our intentions."
Then the Kazekage raised a scroll in his hands.
"We sent you because we are counting on your performance. That is why we assigned Gaara, while the other two go."
"Now… leave."
"Yes, my lord."
And in the outer corridor, as he walked away from the chamber, Baki's visible eye narrowed.
'Is that truly… the Kazekage's wish?'
…
And elsewhere in the village, Baki stood before the three siblings.
"The Sand will join the Sound… in a war against Konoha. This is an S-rank mission — you must understand its importance."
"But why war, and why now?!"
Temari objected.
"It took so much time and sacrifice to build the alliance with Konoha…"
"A lot of people are going to die…"
Kankuro muttered.
Baki looked at the two of them, and spoke with the voice of a man who had shut the door on his own questions long ago:
"In the end, shinobi are merely tools of war."
"And it is the alliance itself that threatens our existence."
[— End Scene —]
…
Sunagakure:
For the first time since the manga began, Suna saw itself.
Its domes. Its walkways. The Kazekage's building with the symbol of Wind. Every detail drawn with a precision that made some readers lift their heads without meaning to, comparing the page with the walls around them.
It should have been a moment of pride.
Their village — at last — on the pages of the manga the whole world was reading.
But Suna had entered the manga through the very door it had dreaded for two chapters now: the door of conspiracy.
"Look at how the pages introduced us to the world…"
whispered a jonin in the middle rows, bitterly.
"Not with a glorious battle, not with a hero from among our children… but with a dim chamber where treason is being woven."
Yet the greatest whispering in the hall was not about the village.
It was about the shadow seated at its head.
"The Kazekage… why didn't they show his face?"
"The manga showed the Hokage's face across entire volumes… drew him laughing with children! So why is our Kazekage, alone, left without features?"
"Maybe the artist didn't want to—"
"The artist has shown everything so far. Everything. Except this face."
And at the head of the hall, the Third Kazekage was staring at his supposed counterpart — if it was his counterpart at all — with unreadable eyes.
'Twenty years from now… either it is me, grown old, or a successor who has not yet sat upon the chair.'
'But in either case…'
'…why would a Kazekage hide his face in the heart of his own chamber, among his elders and his guards?'
As for Chiyo, she was not occupied with the hidden face.
She was occupied with a single sentence.
"And it is the alliance itself that threatens our existence."
The old woman read it twice, then closed her eyes.
'This sentence…'
'I know this sentence.'
'I have heard it in our own councils. This very year. In almost these very words: the Daimyo keeps diverting our missions to Konoha, the alliance is strangling us slowly, the village's funds are withering…'
Chiyo opened her eyes slowly, and looked around at the faces of the elders seated near her.
'The seed that will sprout into that betrayal twenty years from now…'
'…is already planted in our soil.'
…
And close by, Karura was reading the same scene… but her eyes were on neither the Kazekage nor the plan.
They were on the girl with the four ponytails who had objected.
"But why war, and why now?! It took so much time and sacrifice to build the alliance with Konoha…"
And on the boy in the black garb who had muttered:
"A lot of people are going to die…"
Karura felt that same old instinctive pull squeeze her chest — the pull that visited her with these two in particular, ever since their first appearance, and for which she knew no name.
'In a chamber plotting war… only two children asked about the dead.'
'They resisted — if only with a question — while the adults obeyed in silence.'
The young woman smiled despite herself — a small, warm smile in the middle of a cold hall.
'Whoever your mother is, little ones…'
'…she raised you on something the war could not tear out of you.'
Then she noticed that her hand had settled, without her meaning it to, over her stomach.
She pulled it away quickly, her face reddening a little, and returned to her reading.
…
And in the front rows of the hall, there was a seat around which the stares had hovered for two chapters now — a seat no one dared approach.
The seat of a small, ten-year-old genin.
Baki.
Ever since the chapter of the examiner's murder, the ten-year-old's life had been turned upside down. The boy who only yesterday had been an unremarkable genin dragging his mistakes through D-rank missions had become, today, the most famous face in Suna: the future jonin who killed Konoha's examiner, led the siblings' team, and carried out the Kazekage's orders in the most dangerous conspiracy of the age.
Some had begun looking at him with veiled admiration.
Some with fear.
And some — and these were the cruelest — with that cold curiosity with which shinobi survey a battlefield whose corpses have not yet gone cold.
As for little Baki himself, he was reading his counterpart's pages with a grim face that tried very hard to resemble the faces of the adults.
'My counterpart asked the Kazekage: could the four of us, on our own?'
'And he asked himself, in the corridor: is that truly the Kazekage's wish?'
'…He asks. The whole time, he asks.'
The boy clenched his small fists over the volume.
'Then he stands before the siblings and says: shinobi are merely tools.'
'He questions on the inside… and obeys on the outside.'
'Is that what I will become? A man who buries his questions in the corridors… and executes in the chambers?'
And the ten-year-old never noticed that the Third Kazekage himself, from the head of the hall, had been watching him for minutes with a long, unreadable gaze.
'A genin of ten…'
thought the Kazekage.
'Reading, in front of the entire village, how he will become the hand that executes a great betrayal… without even the right to leave the hall.'
'The pages do not merely draw the future.'
'They distribute its burdens onto the living… twenty years before they are due.'
Then the man turned his eyes away from the boy, and decided something in his heart that he shared with no one.
…
Konohagakure:
In Konoha's hall, the village's leadership read those same pages with sharpened inner pens.
'A complete plan. Troop movements at the border. A fake exercise as cover. And the three siblings as the spearhead inside our walls.'
thought Hiruzen Sarutobi, the warmth of the Academy pages gone entirely from his eyes.
'These are no longer hints on a back cover… this is an operations record.'
But a single line in the pages drew from the old man something like bitter satisfaction:
Konoha is not foolish. The ANBU are watching the region.
'Even our enemy in those pages testifies for us…'
'My two advisors dispatched the ANBU on decoy missions chapters ago… and here is that surveillance, shackling the Sand's movements at the border.'
Hiruzen looked toward Homura and Koharu, who were reading that very line at that very moment — and on their two aged faces was a faint trace of pride that neither bothered to conceal.
As for Shimura Danzo, he had moved past the entire plan to the one detail that had troubled Suna itself.
'The hidden face.'
'The manga drew Hiruzen's face, and the Fourth's face, and the faces of elders and jonin and children and pet dogs…'
'Then it reached the Kazekage of the Sand… and drew the curtain over him.'
Danzo turned the page, then returned to it.
'In our line of work, when a face is concealed in a picture… the reason is one of two:'
'Either the face does not matter…'
'…or revealing it, right now, would ruin something far bigger.'
The man's eyes narrowed.
'And an artist who has shown everything… does not conceal what does not matter.'
…
Amegakure:
And far away, in the village where the sky rains without end…
Inside the Art Store of Amegakure, Hanzo of the Salamander sat in the isolated spot where no one else ever sat, the respirator fixed over his face as it had never once left it, Volume Eleven open in his hands.
The leader of the Rain read Suna's pages in full without a single thing moving in his face.
Then he closed the volume, and stared at the wall for a long time.
'The Sand joins the Sound… the Sound is led by Orochimaru… and the target is Konoha.'
'And when the great villages go to war, their armies do not fight in their own capitals…'
'…they fight in the small countries caught between them.'
Hanzo knew that better than any man alive. The Land of Rain had never been anything but an arena upon which the great powers wrestled, and the generations of Amegakure had inherited nothing from the great wars but funerals and hunger.
'The First War passed through here. The Second buried half our youth.'
'So if a third is brewing in those pages…'
'…then Amegakure will not be caught by surprise this time. It will know in advance from where the wind will blow — and when — and with what force.'
Hanzo did not smile. The man who had made the three Sannin beg for their lives had not smiled in longer than he could remember.
But his fingers tapped once, slowly, on the volume's cover.
'Document the war, Uzumaki Rubiro… document it in detail.'
'For Amegakure is reading.'
…
Sunagakure:
And as the hall neared the end of the chapter, most of Suna's readers had settled upon their questions: who is the veiled Kazekage? When does the betrayal take root? And what will become of the village when everything is laid bare?
Heavy questions — but questions of the mind.
Only one reader in the entire hall carried something different.
Something that did not resemble a question.
Rasa.
The young man had reopened the page of the dim chamber for the fourth time, his eyes fixed on the shadow seated beneath the hat.
He did not know why he kept returning to it.
The veil over the face had disturbed the whole hall, yes. The mystery had unsettled everyone, yes.
But what Rasa felt was not the others' unease.
It was something older than unease. Something instinctive, cold, crawling up from the base of his spine every time his eyes fell upon that particular way of sitting, that particular slope of the shoulders, the particular way the two hands rested upon the knees.
'What is this…'
'Why is my body doing this?'
Karura placed her hand on his arm.
"Rasa? You're pale."
"I'm fine."
He was not fine.
For every time he stared at the shadow seated upon the Kazekage's chair, his instinct — the instinct that had never once betrayed him in the field — whispered to him the same sentence, the sentence that made no sense, the one he did not dare say to anyone:
'That thing sitting there…'
'…is not what it is supposed to be.'
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Upcoming chapter titles (spoilers):
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Chapter 213: Face to Face with the Kyūbi!
Chapter 214: A Summoning Beyond All Expectations!
Chapter 215: I Was a Monster Since Birth!
Chapter 216: The Resemblance Between Naruto and Gaara!
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