No matter how you sliced it, Kakashi was in a pretty good mood.
He'd won—and not the kind of hollow victory where the opponent sandbags the whole way, either. This fight had been back and forth, both of them more or less going all out in their own way. That made the win feel a lot sweeter.
As promised, Kakashi didn't drag his feet about what he'd agreed to. On top of that, he even tossed Feiyu a sealing scroll so he could pack up the giant bear's corpse properly.
The only problem was: Konoha's White Fang was out on a mission.
So for the moment, there was no chance to pay him a visit.
After parting ways with Kakashi, Feiyu headed home. His house was a small detached place on the very edge of the Uchiha compound—technically inside their territory, but as far from the clan's core as you could get.
He opened the door and stepped in, his gaze drifting to the framed family photo on his desk.
A shadow crossed his eyes.
Not long after he awakened the Sharingan, his two civilian parents had died in a sudden "accident."
Because he'd reincarnated into this world, Feiyu's feelings toward them weren't as deep as someone born here would've had—but they were far from cold. He'd lived with them for years. That was enough.
Their abrupt, unexplained deaths had left a knot in his chest that had never really gone away.
For now, though, he was weak. That was one issue.
The other was that he had no idea what had actually caused their deaths.
The Uchiha clan were suspicious as hell, but as someone with an adult's mind and a solid understanding of the Hidden Leaf's way of doing things, Feiyu wasn't nearly naive enough to just slap the "murderer" label on the Uchiha right away.
In this world, the ones who moved in the shadows loved nothing more than to use hatred to brainwash shinobi. If someone deliberately wanted to steer him into hating the Uchiha, Feiyu would not be surprised in the slightest.
His "slacker" attitude all this time, his refusal to take things too seriously—part of that was just who he was. The rest, though, was deliberate camouflage.
So long as he stayed mediocre enough, no one would see him as a useful piece on the board.
He stayed home for two full days.
On the morning of the third, while he was in the middle of his exercises, someone knocked at the door. He wiped the sweat from his face and walked over.
When he opened it, a white-haired boy was standing on the threshold.
Hatake Kakashi.
"Kakashi? What are you doing here? Don't tell me… the White Fang's back?"
"That's right. You're lucky—my father returned last night."
"You wanted to meet him, didn't you? Today's as good a time as any."
Kakashi's tone was cool and flat behind his mask, but Feiyu picked up a faint trace of impatience under it.
Someone else might have misunderstood, thought Kakashi was annoyed about having to bring a weird Uchiha kid to his house.
But Feiyu knew him better than that. At this stage, Kakashi was still very much in the "honest cub" phase—cold on the outside, sure, but once he said something, he stuck to it. He wasn't the type to develop an attitude just because of a small favor.
Which meant this edge in his voice had nothing to do with Feiyu.
Did Hatake Sakumo's mission… fail?
The thought flickered through Feiyu's mind.
Judging from the timeline in his memory, they were right around the point when Konoha's White Fang would suffer his first—and last—mission failure.
After that would come the rumors, the whispers, the accusations. In the end, Hatake Sakumo would crumble under the weight of it all and take his own life at home.
In a way, the death of Konoha's White Fang was one of the sparks that helped ignite the Third Great Ninja War.
Led by Kakashi, Feiyu quickly arrived at the Hatake residence. Kakashi knocked. After a short while, the door opened.
A tall shinobi stood there, lines of fatigue etched faintly into his face.
He had a striking, sharp-edged kind of handsomeness—icy features and silver hair that made his blood relation to Kakashi instantly obvious. His posture was straight, his movements clean and precise, like a blade honed down to its leanest form.
Only the bloodshot eyes and the slight daze in his gaze betrayed how exhausted he truly was.
Konoha hadn't yet reached the stage of open rumor-mongering. Not yet. But a first-ever mission failure was no small blow to a man who had kept a perfect record his entire career.
Feiyu, who knew the future, understood all too well that this was only the beginning.
The rumors in the village, the cold shoulders and cutting words from comrades and "friends"—those were what would really break the White Fang, far more than any failed mission.
"Dad, this is that weird Uchiha I told you about," Kakashi said.
He was still too young to really read his father's exhaustion, but he at least understood that a failed mission meant his father wasn't in the best mood. After a brief introduction, he fell quiet.
Sakumo's gaze finally settled fully on Feiyu.
He looked him over for a few moments, and surprise lit his expression.
"So you're Kakashi's friend? Your physical training looks solid. These days, there aren't many Uchiha who're willing to put this much work into their foundation."
"I've heard a few rumors about you. Seeing you in person… you're clearly not some fluke who awakened the Sharingan by luck."
As one of Konoha's most active elite shinobi, Sakumo knew the Uchiha clan very well.
Setting aside their reputation for volatile temperaments and complicated personalities, their combat ability justified their status as Konoha's foremost clan.
They had weaknesses too, though.
Most of them revolved around one thing: overreliance on their bloodline.
The Sharingan was simply too convenient. Once an Uchiha awakened it, they could effortlessly copy taijutsu and ninjutsu, and their genjutsu aptitude shot through the roof. With an eye like that, any Uchiha could become a nearly flawless all-rounder in a very short time.
Given a cheat that good, who wanted to grind basic taijutsu or sweat through learning extra jutsu by hand? Most of them focused on pushing their bloodline and their eyes as far as they could instead.
Feiyu, however, was different.
From the calluses on his hands, to the steadiness of his stance, to the way his body carried weight and strength, it was obvious he'd tempered his physique to a certain degree.
Among the Uchiha, that was extremely rare—like finding a single rough gem in a pile of polished glass.
On the surface, he seemed like an oddball in that clan. In practice, shinobi like him often reached heights that those chasing nothing but their Sharingan never could.
Without reaching the Mangekyo stage, the Sharingan was, at its core, a support-type kekkei genkai. It made reaching the pinnacle of technique easier, but once you got there, your true ceiling still depended on your own foundation.
"Come on, don't flatter me like that, senpai," Feiyu said with a crooked grin. "Kakashi's five years younger than me and I still lost to him. If that doesn't make me a talentless hack, I'm at least a prime example of wasted potential."
Sakumo couldn't help letting out a short laugh.
"I've heard a few of your stories from Kakashi," he said. "Looks like you really do have your own way of thinking."
"Your mindset is pretty different from most shinobi—especially most Uchiha. But in its own way, that calm you have about success and failure… is far more suited to being a shinobi than you might think."
Feiyu blinked, a little taken aback.
He hadn't expected Konoha's White Fang to say something like that.
When it came to judging others, the man saw quite clearly. When it came to himself, though… he was nowhere near as detached as he sounded.
Still, Feiyu kept that to himself.
He was still eyeing this man's soul, after all. The last thing he wanted to do was talk him out of dying. If the White Fang suddenly found inner peace and decided not to commit suicide…
Uchiha Feiyu would be the one taking the loss.
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