Danzo's Last Strategy
Danzo stopped reaching inward.
Instead, he reached outward.
If Konoha could not be destabilized from within, it could be pressured from beyond. He began feeding carefully selected information to foreign contacts. Nothing overt. Nothing traceable.
Just enough truth to invite fear.
The Nine-Tails lived.The Hokage had changed.New sealing techniques rendered containment meaningless.
The Hidden Stone listened.
The Hidden Cloud bristled.
But it was the Hidden Sand that moved first.
A delegation arrived under the guise of renewing trade agreements. Beneath smiles and formal bows, chakra signatures shifted aggressively, measuring, testing.
They requested a demonstration.
Minato agreed.
Not out of arrogance.
Out of certainty.
The demonstration took place in a controlled training field reinforced with layered sealing arrays. Kushina stood at my side, Naruto asleep in her arms.
The Sand's sealing specialist stepped forward, confident.
"Your techniques are rumored to surpass traditional fuinjutsu," he said. "We wish to understand their limits."
"You won't," I replied calmly. "But you may observe failure."
He activated his seal.
It unraveled instantly.
Not violently.
Politely.
Alteran counter-resonance identified the seal as inefficient and collapsed it into harmless fragments of inert chakra.
Shock flickered across the delegation.
That's when Sand made its mistake.
A secondary team moved.
Their objective was Naruto.
They never crossed the field.
The moment hostile intent spiked, Kushina released Yin pressure.
The air thickened. Knees buckled. Chakra froze mid-circulation. The Sand shinobi collapsed screaming as their own spiritual imbalance turned inward.
Naruto woke.
His eyes opened.
Blue. Calm. Curious.
The harmonic field surged.
Not outward.
Downward.
The ground stabilized violently, locking everything into alignment. One Sand jonin felt his chakra coils forcibly recalibrate, tearing under correction pressure. Another lost consciousness as suppressed rage surfaced uncontrollably, then vanished.
Silence followed.
Absolute.
Minato stepped forward, Naruto now awake in his arms.
"This," he said evenly, "was a diplomatic meeting."
The Sand delegation fled.
Not chased.
Dismissed.
Within days, word spread.
Sand had tested Konoha and paid for it without a single jutsu thrown.
Danzo heard.
And for the first time since Root's creation, he realized something irreversible.
This power did not need him removed.
It was already making him obsolete.
That night, inside the Hokage's domain, Alteran containment seals closed quietly around Danzo Shimura as he slept. Recursive, self-correcting, undeniable.
No trial.
No execution.
Just removal from relevance.
A man built on secrecy erased by systems that no longer required secrets.