Pre-Chapter A/N: Here we go with another chapter, coming in right on time. Next three chapters on my patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)— same username as here and link in bio.
None of my Flying Raijin tags in the Land of Rain were working anymore. None of them. Of course, when I put it like that, it seemed like I'd had a million or something. No. That wasn't the case. I'd had maybe a dozen hidden all around Ame. Some by spies who had infiltrated before fighting had broken out, and the vast majority by me during the fighting against Madara. And none of 'em were responsive. It felt like they didn't exist anymore. Either Zetsu and Ishiguri had found them and destroyed them, which would be impressive enough on its own, or there was something truly insane going on.
Knowing my luck, I was betting on the latter. With no option for teleporting there quickly, it seemed like we would be getting there the old-fashioned way. But this had advantages of its own. Panem et circenses, after all.
I threw a party. I leveraged my immense personal wealth and bought up the stock of every food-selling merchant and got them to come towards the gate and give their stuff away for free. I had the entire thing broadcast on screens all around the village, so even those who had been unable to make it would see it as it happened. I was a popular enough Kage, but far from the figure that my grandfather cut. Few people could be Hashirama, after all. And did I even want that? Hashirama's journals had told me enough. The weight of being loved by the village had grown and grown until the point where it was too much for even him to bear at times. But still, I watched the people trickle in and then flood towards the gate to the point where one second, it was just a couple dozen and by what felt like the very next second, they were hundreds.
I did my rounds, of course. I kissed babies, accepted the request from mothers to stay safe, answered the questions that some of the younger girls had about Uzume's and my wedding and when it would finally happen—after the aliens were gone. If I didn't know better, I'd suspect that Mito had some hand in those ones. And then I accepted requests from men to beat up the foreign nin even though that was far from what I was going there to do, and answered questions from all sorts of children—so many children—about how to become shinobi, how I had gotten so strong, how they could manage the same. It was all bleeding into itself—the monotony of it—when I was jolted back to reality by a pair. Man and boy.
Both in what were truly extremely tight green spandex jumpsuits. This had to qualify as indecent exposure, no? I was only able to look past their dressing when the question came. Not from the man, but the boy. His voice was strong, and burning behind his eyes was a fire. A bonfire that I instantly feared saying the wrong thing would quench. This was the boy who would grow up to be a man that could put Madara himself on the back foot in another life.
"Can I become a shinobi if I don't have talent for ninjutsu or genjutsu?" he asked, and some of those around us heard. How could they not, with the strength of his lungs?
"What is your name?" I asked instead. Those around us were already tittering to themselves, more than expecting me to begin to let the boy down. It was what they would do.
"Might Guy," he said, and I could not help but notice that he had become more hesitant with that. Did he expect that I would refuse him an answer? Or that I would discourage him?
I looked into his eyes before I spoke, making no effort to keep my words between just us.
"Might Guy, if you work hard and never give up, you can nurture your inner fire until you outshine even the Kage. Even me," I said, and his eyes widened.
"Your path will be harder. You will have to work ten times harder for what others will get just by asking. You will question yourself, this dream of yours, all of it. And when you do, I want you to remember this moment where I, Shorirama Senju, Fourth Hokage of Konoha, tell you this: You can do it," I said, growing excited even within myself as I spoke. It was infectious, this fire of his. He was weeping. His father was as well.
But that didn't stop the two of them from lifting their fists to the sky and screaming: "Yosh!" And then, like the wind, they were gone.
And I returned to my duty of making the rounds, not letting those eyes leave my mind even as I memorised every face I spoke to. They, all of them, were the reason for this. The reason to fight. Those who dreamt, and those who feared. I would fight to protect them all. That was what it meant to be Hokage, after all.
"That was reckless," Uraume said when I reached her right in front of the open gates.
"A Kage too scared to walk among his own people is no Kage," I said.
"I wasn't talking about that. Though the risk for one of these people to slip a kunai between your ribs is greater than I would like. No, I was talking about the boy you encouraged. Might Guy. He truly has no talent. Not little talent like you might think. None. For some reason, Toshiro admitted him into the academy. But it hasn't changed a thing. His chakra is too dense. Not dense like yours. Dense in that it clogs up his pores and gives him no shot of even the simplest ninjutsu," she said.
"And yet you've been looking into him. You wouldn't do that if you didn't see something worth watching," I said.
"I saw a child chasing an impossible dream and saw my friends encouraging it," she tossed back.
"Well, I guess we just have to wait for you to be proven wrong, then," I said.
"What are we talking about?" Shika asked, stepping next to us.
"Nothing all that important," I said.
"How is she?" I asked.
"I'm more worried about Retsu, to be honest. She's intense."
"My grandmother is a sweetheart," I said, and neither of the women next to me seemed to be buying it. Mito had taken her position as temporary Kage once again. I would be gone for days at the most, so it was more of a ceremonial position than anything else, but she had set up shop in the office for the time being, and she and Kushina had moved all their work there. Now that Minato knew Flying Raijin, he'd dedicated a clone to spending time with them to help if they had issues with anything as well as to learn from the breakthroughs they were making in space-time fuinjutsu. It would be perfect when it was ready. It had to be. Three of the world's greatest sealing masters working on something that I myself had been working on on and off for years.
I'd done a lot of the groundwork. They just had to finish up the thing, and I trusted them to do a good job there. My job now would be making sure that there was something on the other side of that seal. A future.
This alliance was the first step in it.
"Ready?" Uraume asked.
Shika nodded, and I turned to the waiting crowd, waving and receiving waves and cheers in return before we stepped past the gates and then away from the village. Ishiguri's invitation had said I could come with two guards who would be allowed into the meeting hall. I had chosen Uraume and Shika. Not because they were going to keep me safe from anything, but because they were the ones I wanted at my back when negotiations were taking place, and if in the end the other Kage ended up losing out because they brought fighting shinobi rather than strategists, then that was their problem. Minato had been a consideration, as I knew moments like this gave Kage the chance to show off their chosen successors, but part of me felt that it would breach if not the letter of the agreement I'd reached with Hiruzen, then the spirit of it for sure.
And he had kept up his end. The serum Orochimaru had helped make would probably lead to hundreds of lives saved. The least I could do was at least pretend to give him a fair chance at the seat after I was done with it.
----
Ame was... different. I had initially assumed that Ame was the chosen destination only because of its central location and lack of a central shinobi authority after the deaths of most of the warlords. But now I was realising that after the damage Madara and I had done, Ishiguri probably saw Ame as an opportunity for him to flex his own power and that of his people. And the first step was rebuilding.
The remnants of all those destroyed buildings and the smashed apart earth that we had left in our wake were gone. The ground had been levelled out completely. And then in the middle of the land mass was a single building. It was designed to look like a bolt or something like that from above, I suspected. The inside was a single meeting room that was large enough that the massive circular table in the middle was tiny in comparison. There were smaller tables on all sides, pushed up against the wall. The chairs were simple things with ample space between them.
The choice of a circular table rather than a regular one was interesting. But that probably made sense in that no one would do any dick measuring about getting the seat at the head of the table. Apart from the building that held the meeting room, there were quite a number of apartment buildings. They were spread out across the place. And somehow a good number of them were occupied. He'd gotten the civilians of the Land of Rain to move towards the village somehow.
With the rest of the country the war-torn mess that years of fighting had made it into, it made sense though. Perhaps not this quickly, but it was inevitable that the people here would appreciate the barest hint of stability. I took a deep breath at the implication that setting something like this up might indicate an intention from Ishiguri to remain here on Earth even after the Otsutsuki were dealt with. That would be less than ideal.
Because, not to sound greedy and all that, but the Earth was mine and I wasn't keen on sharing. When we passed through what seemed to be Ame's boundary, I noted that the constant rain that gave this place its name was gone. Not weather manipulation like Nagato had been capable of in canon with the Rinnegan, but a barrier of some sort. Looking up told me the rain was still falling. It just reached a certain point above the village and just disappeared.
Shika's eyes were flicking every which way, and Uraume's Byakugan was active as both women catalogued and committed everything they saw to memory.
A rift in space opened before me, and this time my eyes still didn't manage to fully understand the jutsu, but seeing it three times now was bringing me closer and closer. Ishiguri walked in and then gave me a smile.
"Welcome, Cousin," he said, spreading his arms wide.
"If you want to come to any sort of accord with Kumo and Suna, you probably shouldn't call me that when they're here. If they suspect, however far from the truth it might be, that we are aligned beyond this, then they will refuse. Getting them to work with me in any way is already going to be hard. I'd suggest that you not make it any harder for yourself," I said. He nodded, dropping his arms, but the smile on his face was still there.
"Thank you for that, Cousin. Now come with me. Let me show you where you will be staying," he said, leading us into the village proper. Gazes followed us as we walked together. I noted that they were all focused on Uraume, Shika, and myself, rather than Ishiguri despite the fact that he was the one with the more attention-grabbing features. The people here saw him often enough that they didn't need to focus on him then. Interesting. That said something about how much time he had been spending here.
He took us to one of the buildings next to the central meeting hall.
"Zetsu felt it would be best if we put you all up in separate buildings for sleeping. But meals must be had together, of course. If you all cannot do something as simple as share a meal without violence breaking out, then there's no hope of an alliance and we are all truly lost," he said. I shrugged. I wasn't going to start any of the trouble here. His attention would be better served giving veiled warnings to the others. I wanted this to succeed. Thinking had made me assured that a united world would be what we needed when the Otsutsuki came, if only so we could be sure that the Otsutsuki would have multiple targets to deal with and I could focus on fighting them without worrying about watching my back for threats from within the planet itself.
With how much time had passed, there was no hope of conquering and integrating the other villages in time, and to do it I would have to kill their strongest shinobi. Those were bodies that would be better spent fighting against the powerful ones among the Otsutsuki. I had come around to Ishiguri's way of seeing things now, so that meant I wouldn't do anything to sabotage it. If it became necessary, I would even step in to make things go better. The topmost floor of the hotel he led us to was set aside for the three of us.
A massive penthouse suite for me, smaller rooms for both Uraume and Shika opposite it. They all looked good. Very good. And when we were settled, he told us that a servant would come call us when it was time for dinner, and that he was going to welcome the next arrivals. I nodded, and then he did that thing again. He reached out and hugged me before he left. I'd searched myself, and even had Uraume and Mikoto use their eyes to check whether he'd left anything on me last time—awkward since I'd had to strip for Mikoto's examination just so I could be perfectly sure.
I turned to Uraume as he left.
"There was nothing. Keep your clothes on," she said, shaking her head and going to her room.
"What was that about?" Shika asked, and I felt my face heat up.
"Nothing at all," I said, and then went into my own room.
The travelling showed little on me. Spreading my chakra around the three of us to ward away the rain, wind, and mud that assaulted travellers on the way to Ame had been so easy it had barely even counted as training. So I began to do some pushups while I thought. My eyes tracked the latest entrants, the group from Sunagakure, as Ishiguri greeted them in a friendly manner but somewhat more reservedly than he had greeted us earlier.
----
'Do you see it?' I asked Uraume with Anbu sign language as we began following the servant that Ishiguri said would be sent for us to dinner.
'Yes,' she signed back. The servant, to the Byakugan, was hollow. It was a puppet. And not one with visible chakra threads leading back to any human. Only the detail with which my eyes could perceive chakra allowed me to see just what we were working with here. The puppet was being controlled by the building itself. I hadn't been paying close enough attention on the way here. The building was a hotbed of chakra. They all were.
What I had initially thought were electric appliances were instead running on something far more precious: chakra. Chakra powered the puppets, the elevators that took us down, the heating system in the rooms, the kettle that was in my kitchenette, the lighting, everything. All powered by chakra. And all done wirelessly just like this puppet was controlled. Chakra over the air from place to place. Oh, this was going to turn out to be something truly interesting then. If I could figure out how Ishiguri was doing it, then I could just imagine the kind of bustling metropolis we would be able to turn Konoha into.
Nature energy gathered in seals and used to power everything from air conditioning to streetlights, an intra-village rail system, maybe even one that stretched all the way to the capital (of course this would only happen when the world was united under Konoha's rule and there was true world peace). All of it happening over the air without having to worry about each appliance having a large enough seal to gather the energy it would need. I was so focused on it that I barely paid attention to the journey from the hotel to the dining area. I was able to note that it was in the general meeting building in one of the side rooms that I'd ignored in favour of the more impressive meeting chamber.
I stepped in after the puppet, with Uraume and Shika behind me. The table was circular this time as well. There were two large tables, but one had fewer seats than the other. I noted Bunpuku and Ishiguri already sat at the one with fewer seats. So one for the Kage, and the other for their guards. Well, if there was one way to prevent a fight from breaking out too quickly, it was by keeping trigger-happy guards away from those most likely to set them off. Bunpuku's guards were an interesting choice. Two red-headed young men, one a teenager, and the other closer to my age. Sasori and Rasa most likely. I was just sitting down when Ay walked in, and right after him, Madara.
A/N: Here we go. Finally on to the Kage Summit. Next chapter comes on here by Wednesday night. Next three chapters up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) (same username as here and link in bio), you can support me there and read them early.