In the Hatake yard, Uchiha Feiyu was working through his drills, strike by deliberate strike.
You could call it taijutsu, but he still had a kunai in each hand. If you wanted to stretch the definition, it wasn't wrong to call it sword practice either.
Before your taijutsu reached a certain level, fighting with or without a weapon were two completely different things. Even in the Naruto world, there weren't many people who could smash steel with their bare hands.
Hatake Sakumo stood off to the side, straight as a spear, watching Feiyu's movements and correcting them here and there.
Hoping Konoha's White Fang would pass on ninjutsu or kenjutsu was wishful thinking—Feiyu wasn't his student. But getting him to fix some training habits? That wasn't too much to ask.
"Raise your right arm a little higher—cover your head."
"Left leg back a bit. You'll get a more stable base."
"On that kunai thrust, hold a bit of strength in reserve. If they dodge, you'll be able to follow up faster."
Even in his current, worn-down state, Sakumo had more than enough in him for this kind of instruction. And it really did make a difference.
Under his guidance, Feiyu could feel his own movements smoothing out, tightening up. Just two hours of correction and it felt like someone had stripped off a layer of rust.
If he fought Kakashi again right now, the outcome would be a lot less clear. And if the fight dragged on, Feiyu was pretty sure his chances of winning would actually be higher.
"Didn't you say you didn't want to be a shinobi?" Kakashi called over, training in the same yard. "You sure train hard for someone who doesn't want the job."
Feiyu rolled his eyes.
"I'm not stupid. Whether I want to or not, I am a shinobi now. With how tense things are lately, the next ninja war could break out any day. If I care about my own skin at all, I'd better train."
Feiyu would never risk his life on the goodwill of Konoha's upper brass. Whatever his actual relationship with the clan, on paper he was an Uchiha now.
And in this world, if you wanted control over your own fate, you needed power.
And how did you get power?
You trained.
So yes, he didn't want to be a shinobi. And yes, he also trained very, very seriously. The two weren't contradictory at all.
The casual way he dropped "ninja war," though, made Kakashi pause.
"A Great Ninja War? No way. The Second Great Ninja War only ended a few years ago. Where'd you even hear something like that?"
The original Naruto timeline was a mess, but broadly speaking, there were at most seven or eight years between the Second and Third Wars.
That wasn't much time at all. Not enough for the major villages to truly recover from the last one. That was exactly why Kakashi was so shocked.
Sure, the current mood in the ninja world was tense. But in his mind, that tension might lead to skirmishes at most—a local conflict here and there. A full-scale war between the Five Great Villages? Hard to imagine.
Sakumo, however, fell silent for a moment, his expression going darker and more tired.
When he finally spoke, his voice carried a trace of bitter guilt.
"A Great Ninja War, huh… hard to say it won't happen. Kakashi, you should learn from Feiyu and train seriously for a while. Another war isn't impossible."
Feiyu froze.
In his memory, the Third Great Ninja War had always been a bit of a freak outcome.
The Five Great Villages hadn't fully recovered. On logic alone, they should have been able to maintain peace for at least another three to five years.
But then the Third Kazekage vanished.
And Konoha's White Fang killed himself.
Those two "small probability events" together blew the tensions wide open and pushed the villages into open conflict.
Given that, why did Hatake Sakumo sound so certain a war was coming?
Does his current mission tie into the Third War?
When you thought about it, ordinary missions didn't require someone on Sakumo's level—and certainly not Sakumo plus teammates.
If a mission needed Konoha's White Fang to move and needed backup…
Don't tell me it was recon on Sunagakure?
After the Third Kazekage's disappearance, the Sand immediately pointed a finger at Konoha. Part of that was just dumping the blame on someone convenient, but they still needed something to point to.
There were maybe five people in the entire ninja world who could make the Kazekage vanish in Wind Country without a sound. If, at exactly that time, the Sand discovered Konoha's White Fang operating inside their borders…
Pinning the "murder" on Konoha suddenly didn't look so far-fetched.
Sakumo, lost in his own thoughts after that one sentence, didn't notice how far Feiyu's mind had run with it.
"Father… is a Great Ninja War really going to happen? It's only been seven years since the last one…"
"I said it's not impossible," Sakumo answered. "So work hard, Kakashi."
Kakashi was young, but he'd seen his father's expression shift, and that alone was enough to make his heart clench.
He didn't know what exactly had happened in Sunagakure, but he did know this much: his father had lived through the Second Great Ninja War. He wasn't the sort of man to throw words like that around lightly.
If Hatake Sakumo said a Great Ninja War was likely… then the odds of it breaking out had just jumped well over fifty percent.
The moment the topic turned to war, the atmosphere in the yard grew heavy.
Under that weight, Feiyu soon made his excuses and took his leave.
Before he left, though, he "curiously" asked if he could take a look at the White Fang Short Sword.
Luckily for him, no matter how much Sakumo was praised for having a samurai's spirit, at the end of the day he was still a shinobi. He didn't have the kind of obsessive attachment to his weapon that a traditional swordsman might. After only a moment's hesitation, he handed the blade over.
Feiyu turned the sword over in his hands, admiring it on the surface—talking about its chakra conduction, how sharp and light it felt.
In reality, he was using the Soul Marshal to place a mark on the weapon.
He didn't have a choice.
Even knowing Sakumo didn't have long to live, in this world souls only lingered by their corpses for ten minutes at most before drifting off to the Pure Land. And Feiyu had no confidence he'd just happen to be nearby in that tiny window when the White Fang died.
But with the Soul Marshal's mark inscribed into the White Fang Short Sword, the blade could temporarily hold Sakumo's soul in place, buying Feiyu the time he needed to summon it.
In truth, this was the real reason he'd come to visit.
The guidance from Konoha's White Fang?
That had just been a very welcome bonus.
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