Pre-Chapter A/N:Another chapter on time? Guess my lock-in is going pretty well. If you haven't already, I recommend turning on notifications for my stuff so you can see when new stuff drops right as it drops. More chapters on my patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)— same username as here and link in bio. Since I just started a new story, there's a cheeky discount on said patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) page for anyone interested.
For the first time in a long time, when I got out of the shower, I walked straight to the mirror rather than getting dressed. Today could not go wrong. Not a single thing could be out of place, and my appearance was one of those things. I flowed chakra through my hair, straightening it forcefully until it hardened into a consistency similar to a baseball bat. Then I relaxed it shortly after, allowing it to fall down my back, perfectly straight.
I hadn't cut the length of my hair in a while. Now it reached down to my lower back. I had more hair than Uzume did, funny enough. In most others, long hair like this was a liability; someone could grab onto it in battle or something. In my case, I practically wished someone would dare. It would be fun to see their reaction to losing the ability to ever use their hand again. I ran a brush through it a few times to be sure that it was perfectly straight.
I knew it was. Using my chakra to deal with my hair was a part of my daily routine, but today was not just any other day. Anything that gave me additional security would be welcomed in the present situation. My outfit had been laid out before I'd even gone for the shower. Undergarments first, and then over them, my best kimono. Over that, I wore a hakama, the pleated trouser-like layer. And then, on top of all of it, went my haori.
This was going to be one of the few times I ever dressed so formally. It was probably going to be a sign to Uzume of what was going to happen today, but I had asked her to dress somewhat formally as well. Since we were going to be visiting the latest high-class restaurant to open up in Konoha, there was even an ostensible rationale for it.
I walked out of the house, taking note that I would have to get a place of my own sooner rather than later. Living with Grandma was cool, and it had even become necessary at a point where her health began to fail, but Kushina had more of a handle on things now that she was a full jonin and wouldn't be required out of the village anywhere near as often. Maybe if I planned to start a family with anyone else, we would have made do with the Clan Head compound, but I could already foresee many nights with Uzume and Grandma Mito trying to get the better of each other.
It was probably years of watching Hashirama pine over a friendship that had been long dead and gone, but she was certain that my relationship with Uzume would end terribly. Getting her consent to the wedding had been more about every other elder in the Clan saying yes and me making it clear that she could either join the boat—willingly or not—or the boat would leave without her. At least that had been enough to get her on board for the time being.
But I knew that woman better than she knew herself. She had raised me from childhood, after all. She was just as stubborn as any other Uzumaki out there and had bite aplenty to go along with her bark. It was somewhat of a surprise that she hadn't been waiting in the living room to give me one final look of judgment before I left. I decided to take the long way to the Uchiha district—that is to say, I chose to walk rather than teleport to any of the markers I had in that area. I'd kept quite a few—some with Uzume's permission, and the vast majority without.
While I accepted that the Uchiha coup in canon was unlikely, I wasn't going to live without countermeasures. Call it paranoia if you would; I would call it a healthy amount of caution. It was the same caution that had made me mark Shiba's skin with the Flying Raijin. I'd told him it was to ensure I could always reach him if things went wrong, but the implicit threat was one he was smart enough to notice without me spelling it out for him. Betray me and it doesn't matter when or where: I will find you and I will end you. I'd had similar markers smuggled into the Daimyo's palace, and eventually, I would have them smuggled into all the other villages. It was only a matter of time.
By the time the next war began, whoever was stupid enough to declare war on Konoha would have to deal with the very real consequence of having me show up in the middle of their city. I could just imagine Ay's face when he saw me cut a bloody swathe through his village.
It took me about half an hour to reach the Uchiha Clan District walking at a good pace. On the way, I'd gotten to look through the shinobi-occupied areas of the village. It was one thing to receive infrastructure completion and repair reports and another to see it with my own eyes. The single-family homes that had been common before I took the hat were still all the rage, but every few buildings, there was a multi-story apartment complex. These were my idea—well, not entirely mine, but mine enough that I could take credit for them.
Single-family homes were nice and all, and when the shinobi class was made up of children who were taking after their parents and would take their homes when they inevitably died, there had been more than enough supply for everyone. But now, with more and more shinobi being recruited from civilian backgrounds, and more of the Clan shinobi having the funds to move out of the home earlier, we needed more housing options. The apartment buildings had come in to fix that problem. The village had taken on most of the cost of building with part of the spoils from the war in Iwa and now had them both as a consistent revenue source and a means for affecting the economy.
Since we owned the building, we could give rent discounts to genin or other lower-ranked shinobi, as well as people who got hurt in action. It was a masterstroke.
The Uchiha district was right at the outskirts of the shinobi section of the village. The Uzumaki compound on one end, the Uchiha on the other, and the Senju right in the middle. Speaking of the Senju compound…
My thoughts screeched to a halt as I caught sight of her. She'd done something to her hair, I noticed. Not just her hair.
"Are you wearing makeup?" I regretted the question the second it slid from my stupid, clumsy lips. The way Uzume's face flushed said it had been a mistake to mention it.
"You look beautiful tonight, 'Zume," I said, stepping forward and offering her my hands to hold. She took them.
"Are you just saying that?" she asked.
"You know just as well as I do that you are a goddess among mortals. Tonight, you look it. Not to, of course, say that you don't usually look beautiful, it's just that tonight you look even more…"
I heard her begin to chuckle and I stopped myself. There that sound was. It was like a pair of bells—delicate bells. She had two laughs, I knew. This one, which was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever heard, and the mocking one I'd heard so often in the days of our youth. Look at me, talking about our youth like we weren't still just a pair of children at heart.
"So what do you have planned for us today?" she asked, placing her arm in the crook of my elbow.
"For you, that's a surprise. Just let me take the lead and I can promise you are going to have the night of your life," I said. Well, the night of her life if all the other parts of this plan of mine went as they ought to. I had close to a dozen clones running around the village working on all the little things it took to put a proposal like this one in order, as well as to ensure that there were no interruptions to what was about to happen.
We left the Uchiha compound, arm in arm, and then began the walk to the civilian district. In a different world, I wouldn't have worried about things like intra-village transportation, but this one had even civilians who could walk tens of miles in a day without tiring. Things just worked differently. There were carriage lanes, of course, but most of them didn't extend into the shinobi side of things. Here, the streets were lined with flowers and other sorts of beautiful plants.
Inoken had been quite enthused to receive the contract for the Yamanaka and Aburame clans to take charge of managing the "flower lanes," as I called them now. They gave a splattering of color to the streets that had otherwise been naught but cold and efficient, while also acting as a place for both Aburame bugs and other—less organic—monitoring devices to be placed. This was a shinobi village, and if there was one thing I knew for certain, it was that information would make the difference between a successful reign and a failed one.
I was going to be sure to land on the right face of the coin. "So… how was Frost?" I started with.
"You have my mission report," she said.
"And I have you here now. Just tell me about it."
"It was cold, as expected. The hidden village there is little to write home about. The resources we gave them were clearly desperately needed. Why are we wasting money and time supporting people too weak to support themselves?" she asked.
"You know exactly why," I said with a smile. This was an old conversation, but one I still enjoyed.
"Annexing Frost would work just as well as taking Kusa. Give me three hundred and they will fly our flag in a week," she said.
"I have little doubt you'd somehow even be able to do it on your own. But that isn't really the point. Frost will never be able to stand without large amounts of outside help—not anytime soon, at least. The campaign Hiruzen led through much of their productive land will ensure of it. But that doesn't make them useless. If we keep them propped up, they can act as a vital buffer village between us and Kumo," I said.
"Was the plan not to take Kumo eventually? Why play around with Frost now? The resources we use to support them could be used to help them oppose us in our own invasion. Would it not then be better to just annex now and keep them as a dagger pointed at Kumo's throat?" she asked. Oh, interesting. She had a response for this point now.
"Maybe if we had infinite resources and manpower. Maybe. But while our appetite is insatiable, our capacity very much is not. We cannot expand on two fronts at the same time. We might have fought the world and won last time, but it was a hard-won victory. Once the world knows what we truly plan—what we really want—they'll fight like Naraka to deny it to us. That is why we have to be slow. Remember the plan. Kusa first, then Ame, then Iwa, before Kawa and Suna. From there, we let the world decide what we do next," I said.
"I get antsy waiting."
"Don't think of it as waiting. Think of it as sharpening our kunai before the battle. Don't worry, there's going to be plenty of fighting when the time comes. So much that I fear you might tire of it," I smirked.
"Don't threaten me with a good time, Shori."
I chuckled and we kept going.
"How is the new project coming along?" she asked.
"It should be finished now. We've fixed the durability issue and have managed to get the cloaking seals to work well enough that anyone other than a skilled sensor would need to be within about a hundred meters to sense them," I said.
"So they don't shine like lighthouses when they're in use anymore?" she asked.
"Yes. But the cloaking seals, in addition to everything else, means we can't just have them passively run on natural energy anymore. At least not without them causing meaningful disruptions to any ecosystem they get placed in," I said.
"Regular recharges then. How often?" she asked.
"My math says a month. But it could be as often as half that for the ones placed farther away."
"Why such a wide difference?" she asked.
"They don't just have to be sensing and scouting all the time. They also have to constantly be sending that information back to Konoha. We can just about manage it, but it takes a lot more energy than transmitting data to something closer," I said. I then smiled at a man who offered a greeting as we passed him by.
"Oh. So there are going to be missions for people to go out there and recharge the seals," she said.
"Yes, another expense the village will have to bear," I said with a nod.
"In Frost, their yearly budgets are voted on by a council. If that was the case, I fear you wouldn't last all that long as Hokage," she said. I chuckled at that.
"Yeah, I think you're right. If I had to explain all our expenditure to the clan council, they'd have my head," I accepted.
"At least no one is spreading gossip about you stealing from the coffers or anything," she said.
"Because no one other than Shika, I, and a select group of paper pushers have the faintest idea of the true size of the treasury," I said.
"Am I going to have to get ready to tighten my belt?" she asked. Before I replied, I took a second to wave at a woman who had looked out from her balcony and called out to me.
"No. Iwa had more gold than you can actually imagine. We're selling most of it to the Daimyo at a consistent rate so we don't cause an oversupply and drop the prices, but we're getting good value regardless. The village has money. Perhaps not as much to burn as it did immediately after the war came to an end, but then again, we have far fewer fires to put out. Soon the taxes on missions will return to their full amount and we can expect incomes to rise in the treasury as well. How about the hawks? When was the last time you were over there?" I asked.
"Three weeks ago. Their pesky war with the eagles had another flare-up, so I got summoned to roast a few birds," she said somewhat sullenly.
"Well, I told you that getting a summoning contract wasn't just all fun and games. You have to live up to your own end of the bargain, you know?" I said between chuckles.
"I don't see the whales summoning you every month to help end a war they probably started. Assuming the opponents were even more interesting, then things would be better. But they basically start running the second I arrive, and I get to roast only a few of them before the rest are gone," she said.
"The whales don't really do much, to be fair. They swim so deep and far out in the oceans that there's barely anything that can even survive to be out there other than them. And well, those other things don't survive long when they come in contact with the whales, so they know to give them a wide berth," I said.
"Hmph. And the damn hawks turned out to be a bunch of scammers even. Way more trouble than they're worth," she said.
"Maybe you should have asked if they had the resources for a human Sage Mode before signing the contract," I said with a smirk building.
She turned to me, giving me a look that might have set my face on fire if she'd been blessed with a different Mangekyou ability. I lifted my hands in surrender. She scoffed and dragged my right hand back down, running hers through the crook of my elbow again and directing us forward.
"Careful," I called out as I noticed a group of children climbing one of the many trees that dotted the city. That was one of Hashirama's, I noted, as it reached about as high as a duplex.
"It's the Hokage!" one of them called out, and suddenly we were beset by the lot of them begging to see a jutsu. I looked over to Uzume only to find her smiling and nodding at me to go ahead, rather than upset at the interaction. I nodded back and squatted so they'd all get a good view as I formed a Rasengan in my outstretched left hand.
It took the children thirty minutes to leave us alone, and by then we had reached the civilian district already. I moved her toward the chosen restaurant, noticing quite a few people milling about outside.
"Is that a line?" Uzume asked with some apprehension. I looked over at her, genuinely impressed that it seemed like she'd actually wait in one if we had to.
"Worry not. We have an appointment," I said, stepping forward and leading her straight to the door. I responded to calls of my title with smiles and waves as the line parted before us.
A/N: Another chapter bites the dust. More action in the next one (or two), I promise. Next five up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) (same username as here and link in bio), support me there and read them early. Started a new story, so there's a discount for the rest of the month on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga): feel free to check that out as well.