Konoha looked like it was pretending.
Lanterns, late vendors, paper fans painted with the Leaf symbol—everything bright enough to make you forget what villages were actually built for. The rooftops caught the glow and threw it back up at the stars like the village was trying to bargain with the sky.
The air here was heavy with the scent of roasted chestnuts and sweet charcoal—the soft, domestic smells of a population that had forgotten how to smell ozone and blood.
Konan stood on a tiled ridge two blocks from the Hokage Tower and let the wind worry the hem of her travel coat.
No cloak. No rings. No theatrical silhouettes.
Just a tired-looking woman in plain clothes with hair pinned back, a white paper flower tucked behind one ear—soft as a lie.
She adjusted the flower; the paper felt dry and high-tension against her skin, a physical reservoir of chakra waiting for the command to unfold.
Below, laughter burst from an open window. Someone was drunk-singing a festival song off-key. Somewhere deeper, in a training yard, a boy shouted until his voice cracked.
Konan didn't move until she'd listened long enough to map the rhythm of the patrols by ear.
Two sets of steps. A pause. A leap. A light landing.
ANBU did not stomp. Chūnin did.
She exhaled once. Slow. Measured.
Then she reached into her sleeve.
Paper slid out like it had always lived there.
Sss-rasping.
It was the sound of a thousand dry leaves moving at once, a sharp, fibrous friction that resonated in the bones of her wrist.
She didn't need to weave signs. She didn't need to mutter. Her chakra was a quiet pressure behind her ribs—thin, deliberate, obedient.
Konan folded.
A square became a rectangle. A rectangle became wings. Creases snapped into place with crisp little clicks, like bones setting themselves right.
The paper didn't just bend; it resisted with a specific tensile strength, the fibers groaning under the pressure of her chakra before snapping into a new, permanent geometry.
Four birds perched on her fingers.
Each was the size of a sparrow. Each had a tiny inked seal beneath its belly, delicate enough to look decorative.
None of them were.
"Go," she whispered—not because paper required sound, but because she liked the human habit of naming a moment.
The birds took flight with a dry, rhythmic flit-flit-flit, their paper wings displacing the cool night air with a sharp, artificial turbulence and vanishing into the darkened sky in different directions.
One toward the market district, where people went to forget they were shinobi.
One toward the residential blocks near the Academy, where people went to pretend children didn't bleed.
One toward a clan wall, tall and clean and arrogant.
One toward the administrative sector—Hokage Tower, barrier teams, the village's spine.
Konan drew her sleeve down and waited.
When you wanted to know if a thing had truly healed, you didn't poke the scar.
You pressed around it.
The first flare was a pinprick of chakra near the Tower—small, sharp, unmistakably wrong in the way a candle flame is wrong in a library.
Konan's paper bird puffed its seal.
Not an explosion. Not an attack.
A single breath of chakra released like a cough in a quiet room.
She started counting in her head.
One—
Two—
Three—
Four—
A shadow dropped from the Tower roof like gravity owed it a favor.
Phwump.
The landing was nearly silent, the ANBU's boots dispersing the kinetic impact through the roof tiles so efficiently that not a single piece of ceramic rattled.
ANBU. Masked. Silent. Blade already out, because caution was a muscle they'd trained until it was reflex.
A second shadow. A third.
A barrier pulse rolled out—subtle, like pressure changing before a storm. Konan felt it brush her skin and keep going, sweeping the sector in a controlled wave.
The pulse felt like a sudden drop in barometric pressure, a low-frequency hum that made the fine hairs on Konan's neck stand up against her collar.
A voice, clipped and professional, carried just far enough for her to catch it.
"Sector four. Confirmed anomaly."
Another voice, deeper. "Perimeter lock. No civilian disruption."
Konan watched them converge on a roof two streets over. Watched one kneel, palm to tile, like the ground might confess.
Seventeen seconds.
She didn't smile. She didn't frown.
She filed it.
Seventeen.
Overprotected, she thought, eyes on the Tower windows. Or maybe properly protected, if you were the sort of person who believed leadership deserved a softer world than the people underneath it.
Konoha protected its head.
Bodies were negotiable.
The second flare came from the clan wall.
Konan had chosen a compound that mattered without being the Hokage's immediate shadow. Hyūga was an obvious bruise. Nara was a quieter one—clever, sleepy, underestimated.
Tonight, she picked the Hyūga wall because history left grooves, and Konoha's history loved that place.
The bird drifted over the pale stone and puffed its seal.
A tiny bloom of chakra.
Konan counted.
One—
Two—
Three—
Four—
Five—
There.
A flicker—almost invisible unless you were looking for it.
A Byakugan blinked open somewhere behind the wall like a lantern shuttering.
Konan saw nothing but she felt the change: a sudden, clean sweep of attention, the way a blade becomes aware it is unsheathed.
The air behind the wall didn't just change; it crystallized. A high-density focus of visual chakra flared behind the pale stone, warping the light around the guard's silhouette in a faint, refractive shimmer.
A guard's voice came sharp from inside. "West wall. Someone's testing us."
Another voice answered, annoyed. "It's finals week. Every idiot thinks they're clever."
There was movement. Quick. Internal.
But outside the wall, the village response lagged.
No immediate ANBU drop. No barrier team pulse. No patrol snapping into place.
They assumed the Hyūga would handle it. Of course they did.
Konan kept counting.
Fifty-four seconds before a Leaf patrol passed near enough to even glance at the wall—and even then, they didn't stop. They didn't climb. They didn't signal.
They trusted the clan to swallow the problem whole and never let it reach the street.
The sound of the village continued—a distant, rhythmic thrum of commerce—completely deaf to the sharp, localized tension of the Hyūga defense.
Fifty-four.
She imagined the shape of that assumption, the blind spot it created.
A village made of clans was a village full of fences.
Fences always had gaps.
The third flare was the market district.
Konan had sent that bird low, almost brushing rooflines, because markets were loud and crowded and full of complacency disguised as normal life.
The bird puffed.
A breath of chakra.
Someone laughed right beneath it, unaware, and Konan's mouth went very still.
The smell of frying oil and cheap sake was a wall, a sensory fog that dampened the flare's ozone-stinging scent before it could reach the chūnin's lazy nose.
She started counting.
One—
Two—
Three—
Ten—
Twenty—
Thirty—
People kept moving. Vendors kept selling. A couple argued over dumplings like the world didn't contain jutsu.
A chūnin finally looked up because the flare had brushed his senses like a fly touching his ear.
He wore his forehead protector loose, like it was a fashion accessory. His posture said "I'm on duty" in the same way a child said "I'm awake" with their eyes closed.
He yawned. Actually yawned.
"Ugh," he muttered. "Again?"
His partner didn't even bother to stand straight. "Probably some kid messing around. Finals tomorrow. Everybody's hyped."
"You go check," the first said.
"No, you."
They argued about it for a full five seconds before one of them finally jogged in the direction the flare had faded.
He didn't jump to rooftops. He didn't signal for backup. He looked like he was going to scold a cat.
A sensor-nin arrived later—late enough that his arrival was an insult.
He came from a side alley, hair messy, eyes red like he'd been dragged out of bed. He paused, palm lifted, trying to read a chakra trace that had already dissolved into the noise of a thousand civilians.
The sensor's palm hovered over the tiles, his chakra bleeding out in a weak, disorganized search pattern that lacked the sharp, coherent focus of a true war-time veteran.
His shoulders sagged.
"Nothing," he said, too tired to pretend it was anything else.
The bored chūnin scratched the back of his neck. "See? False alarm."
"Write it up," the sensor replied, already turning away.
Konan counted until her internal clock felt like it had proved a point.
Three minutes, twenty-one seconds.
Three minutes, twenty-one.
Late. Half-assed. Peace-diseased.
This, Konan thought, was what victory did to people.
It didn't make them kinder.
It made them lazy.
The last flare was the residential blocks near the Academy.
Konan had picked it on purpose.
Not because it was strategic.
Because it was moral.
The bird flew over rows of modest rooftops, where children slept and parents pretended their kid's forehead protector was a cute accessory and not a funeral coin.
The flare puffed.
A breath of chakra.
Konan counted.
One—
Two—
Three—
Nothing.
No sudden movement. No pulse. No shadows dropping.
A dog barked twice and then went quiet again.
Somewhere inside a house, a baby cried. A parent soothed them. Life continued.
Konan waited.
Thirty seconds.
A minute.
Two.
Still nothing.
A pair of Leaf shinobi finally appeared—not on rooftops, but on the street, strolling like they were walking home from dinner.
They looked up late. Squinted. Saw nothing.
One of them shrugged. "Probably a firework tag from the festival stalls."
"Yeah," the other said, already yawning. "We'll do a sweep."
They didn't.
Not really.
They walked a lazy loop, glanced at a few alleys, and then wandered off.
Konan counted until the flare's echo was fully gone.
…none.
She let the number sit in her mind like a cold stone.
None.
Children's district.
Near the Academy.
No response until after it was already over, and even then, not a real one.
Konan's eyes didn't change, but something behind them sharpened.
This is what they protected, she thought. Their leadership. Their symbols. Their pride.
The places where children lived—
Those were treated like safe by default.
Safety by default was how you got graves.
Konan shifted her weight and glanced toward the outer wall, where moonlight painted the village's perimeter into pale lines.
She didn't need to go there to know.
She remembered.
Months ago, the wall had been tight—old seals layered beneath newer ones, like Konoha had tried to stack caution on top of history.
Now?
Now she could see the failure from here.
A stretch of wall where paper tags had curled at the edges, ink faded, weather-chewed.
Konan focused on the seal; the mineral scent of the ink had faded to nothing, and the paper had become porous and soft, its structural integrity compromised by months of rain and indifference.
War-time seals left to rot, because peace made maintenance feel optional.
A broken tag flapped faintly in the night breeze like a tongue sticking out.
Flap-snap.
The sound was erratic and weak, a broken rhythm in the village's acoustic profile that shouted "vulnerability" to anyone who knew how to listen.
Konan's paper didn't lie to her. It never did.
If you didn't refresh seals, they didn't fail dramatically.
They failed quietly.
They became decoration.
And decoration was how shinobi died when their village pretended it was a town.
She watched a patrol pass the same intersection as last time.
Same timing. Same route. Same blind spot.
Konoha had tightened its security.
In the places it cared about.
In the places it performed caring about.
Not everywhere.
Not evenly.
Not honestly.
Konan breathed in, then out.
Her birds drifted back to her—four small shadows settling on her hands.
She pinched each one lightly between thumb and forefinger.
The paper softened, then dissolved into loose flakes that fell through her fingers and vanished before they could touch the roof.
The particles were so fine they behaved like ash, caught in the thermal updraft from the village's lanterns and carried away into the dark.
No evidence. No waste.
Only data.
Konan drew one more sheet from her sleeve and began folding again.
This one was not a bird.
This one was a butterfly.
She formed it with slow precision, like she was building a thought into a shape the world could carry.
The butterfly's edges were razor-sharp, the paper so thin it was translucent, glowing with a faint, internal violet light as it drank in the data she whispered.
When it was finished, she held it up.
It twitched once, as if eager.
Konan leaned close, lips barely moving.
"Seventeen seconds," she murmured.
The butterfly's wings shivered.
"Fifty-four."
A second shiver.
"Three minutes, twenty-one."
The wings trembled harder, as if offended by the number itself.
"…none."
The butterfly went still for a heartbeat. Then, quietly, it moved again.
Konan didn't add flourish. She didn't sermonize. She didn't pretend she was above bitterness.
She simply gave the conclusion the village had earned.
"They believe the Chūnin Exams have made them stronger," she said softly, as if speaking to the night.
"The opposite is true."
The butterfly lifted off her finger and drifted into the sky, a pale speck against the stars.
Konan watched it go until it was too far to see.
Then she turned her gaze back to the village.
Konoha glittered below her—bright, confident, loud.
A bowl full of chakra sources.
A bowl full of children.
A bowl full of adults who had forgotten what it meant to be afraid for the right reasons.
Konan stepped back from the roof edge, the movement silent.
"The village has grown used to peace," she thought, the words dry as paper.
"Even their paranoia has become lazy."
She vanished into the night without leaving so much as a footstep behind.
And somewhere far away, a butterfly dissolved.