(I have ADHD that makes me write a new story every fucking single day, now I'm trying to instead making an Omake when I feel the urge, so enjoy but note that it was in no way relevant to the story)
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[Konoha – Five gloriously chaotic years into the reign of Fire Shadow Azula, the Hokage who replaced paperwork with pyrotechnics.]
The door to the Hokage's residence had barely sighed shut before Azula found her personal space invaded by a blonde tsunami of enthusiasm. Tsunade launched herself into Azula's arms with the force of a woman who considered subtlety a suggestion for other, weaker people.
"You're home! I've been thinking of the most wonderful fun idea all day!" Tsunade announced, her voice vibrating with the kind of glee that usually preceded property damage.
Azula's stern, post-administrative-day expression melted into a wry smile. She was putty in the hands of this human hurricane, and they both knew it.
"Do tell. Let me guess," she began, her tone dripping with theatrical contemplation. "Finally gotten bored and decided to depose the Daimyo for a lark? Or perhaps you've dug up Danzo's corpse just to beat him in a rematch for old times' sake?"
She leaned in, her lips brushing Tsunade's ear, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial purr. "Or is this a more… carnal proposition? Planning to test the structural integrity of our bed again? I did warn the builders to use reinforced timber."
A magnificent blush exploded across Tsunade's face, clashing wonderfully with her formidable demeanor. "Wha—! No! Well, yes, but later! This is different!"
She extracted herself, puffing out her cheeks in a pout. "Remember that story you had about the Dragon Vein in the Wind Country? The one you said could, theoretically, create a hole through the fabric of reality to alternate worlds?"
Azula's eyebrow arched. So that's what this was about. She'd known Tsunade was up to something; for months, she'd felt the distinctive pop of Tsunade using the custom Flying Raijin 3 seal she'd gifted her, zipping in and out of the village with the furtive energy of a squirrel hoarding explosive tags.
She'd assumed it was for a secret gambling den or a hidden sake brewery. This was… marginally more ambitious.
"Vaguely," Azula said, playing it cool. "A passing thought."
"Well, I turned your passing thought into a reality!" Tsunade proclaimed, puffing out her chest. "Months of research, and one highly questionable exchange with a Sand Village chakra theorist later… I've got it! I can activate it! And I want to go to the Warring States period. I want to find my grandfather in his prime and know if I have reached that level."
Azula's mind, a supercomputer of strategy and snark, immediately cross-referenced this plan with Tsunade's legendary, reality-bending bad luck.
A vision flashed before her eyes: not of a noble battle between grandchild and grandfather, but of them accidentally landing in a timeline where the shinobi world was ruled by sentient, hostile cabbages. A weird, skeptical grimace twisted her features.
"A fascinating goal," Azula began, choosing her words with the care of a bomb disposal expert. "But hear me out, a wager, if you will. Given that your 'Jutsu Success Rate' has a permanent negative modifier thanks to a curse placed upon you by every gambling god in existence, I propose we're more likely to be unceremoniously dumped into an active, and undoubtedly inconvenient, world-scale conflict. The Fourth Great Ninja War, for instance."
Tsunade released her, crossing her arms under her… let's be charitable and call them 'formidable assets.' A pair of pillows so generous they could suffocate Azula. And they had.
"Hmph! You doubt me?" she sniffed, a familiar, competitive fire igniting in her eyes. It was the same fire that appeared right before she bet the deed to the Hokage Tower on a single hand of cards.
"I've prepared for months! My calculations are flawless! And if I'm right…" A slow, predatory smirk spread across her lips. "If I win this bet… I get to be the top. For a week. No—a month! Scratch that, if I win, I am the designated top for an entire, glorious year."
Azula couldn't help but let a single, weary bead of sweat trace a path down her temple. This obsession.
She fondly recalled the blushing, stuttering girl from their first kiss, a vision of tentative expectation. Now, she was a force of nature with the libido of a rabbit and the negotiation skills of a Tsuchikage in a mineral-rights dispute. She had… matured. Aggressively. … … … Meanwhile, in an alternate universe, the Fourth Great Ninja War was well underway, and it could only be described as the most profoundly weird military engagement in history.
It's not every day you see the Five Great Shinobi Villages not only ally but actively engage in what can only be called competitive simping for a kunoichi from another village, right, Sakura?
The scene was pure, unadulterated chaos. The reanimated Hokage—Hashirama, Tobirama, Hiruzen, and Minato—had just about finished processing the existential horror of their coffee-can resurrection. The Allied Shinobi Forces were collectively trembling.
Sasuke was striking a pose so brooding it created its own localized weather system. Naruto was yelling about bonds and ramen with equal fervor. And Obito was in the middle of a monologue so edgy it could have sliced the moon in half.
Then, without so much as a courtesy poof, the universe dumped two new problems right into the epicenter.
A pillar of golden fire and crackling lightning tore a temporary skylight into the heavens.
From it, Azula descended like a wrathful goddess, landing with a grace that seemed to personally offend the laws of physics.
Tsunade, on the other hand, arrived with all the elegance of a sack of anvils, stumbling into a standing position and brushing dust off her shoulders as if she'd just tripped over a curb, not fractured spacetime.
The battlefield fell into a silence so deep you could hear a pin drop, followed by the sound of a thousand jaws hitting the floor.
Azula blinked, her Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan spinning with a lazy, almost bored flicker, like she was trying out a new brand of funky-colored contact lenses. She took in the sea of stunned faces, the reanimated legends, the glowing Juubi, and the general air of apocalyptic melodrama.
She turned to her disoriented wife. "…Okay," she said, her voice flat. "It seems my assessment of your catastrophic luck was, if anything, generous. You lose the bet. Again."
Tsunade, finally steady, brushed a piece of what she hoped was just ash from her sleeve. "Oh, cram it with your 'I-told-you-so's. Just tell me where we've teleported so I can—"
Her voice died in her throat. Her eyes locked onto a very specific, very familiar, and very dead face in the crowd of former Hokage. Her brain short-circuited. The math wasn't mathing.
She pointed a trembling finger at the Second Hokage. "…Granduncle Tobirama?!"
"Tsunade?? And… who the hell is—" Hiruzen was the first to react, before everyone turned to Azula, who came near Tsunade while observing the situation that was different from the Fourth Ninja War she remembered.
The dust of the reanimated battlefield hadn't even settled before the first family drama of the post-mortem era began.
Tobirama Senju, the Nidaime Hokage and proud founder of the Uchiha Police Force (a gesture of stunningly misplaced optimism), was the first to notice.
His sharp, analytical eyes, which had once devised the most lethal water-style jutsus, now narrowed into slits of pure, unadulterated suspicion. They were locked onto the infamous Mangekyo pattern spinning calmly in Azula's eyes.
His gaze then slid to where the Uchiha's hand was casually entwined with his beloved grand-niece's. The cognitive dissonance was physically painful.
"Tsunade," he began, his voice a low, gravelly rumble of authority and ancestral disappointment. "Why is a member of the Uchiha clan currently holding my niece's hand as if, as if..."
Now, Tsunade had seen some things. Traveling with Azula had desensitized her to nonsense on a cosmic scale, from philosophical debates about the merits of absolute tyranny over breakfast to casually incinerating entire platoons of White Zetsu for blocking the scenic view.
But hearing her grand-uncle's vintage, dust-covered prejudice was the specific brand of nonsense that made her eye twitch.
She didn't waste time on a verbal rebuttal. Why debate a ghost about his outdated family feuds when you could offer a physical, earth-shattering counter-argument?
There was no shunshin flash, no puff of smoke. One moment she was standing beside Azula, a vein throbbing dangerously on her forehead. The next, the very air cracked as she vanished and reappeared directly in front of Tobirama, her fist already en route to his face in a move Jiraiya would have lovingly dubbed the 'Fist of Affectionate Re-education.'
BAM!
The impact wasn't just a hit; it was a geological event. Tobirama's Edo Tensei body became a blur of white, red, and blue, skidding backward ten meters across the torn earth, kicking up a comical plume of dusty debris like a chalkboard eraser being slammed against a wall.
As he came to a halt, his head ringing like a temple bell, Tsunade's voice cut through the silence, sweet as poison.
"Keep talking like that, old man," she chirped, flexing her fingers, "and I'll send you back to the Pure Land so fast you'll need to be reanimated twice just to finish your sentence."
The collective shock on the battlefield was palpable. But for Tobirama, it was a personal, spiritual cataclysm.
The sheer, unadulterated shock of it all was so profound that the bystanders swore they saw a phantom flicker of a Mangekyo Sharingan in his widened eyes—a purely hypothetical one, activated not by trauma or loss, but by the sheer, universe-defying whiplash of being punched into next week by his own cute, pigtailed grand-niece.
For an Uchiha!
The emotional whiplash was enough to give a dead man a migraine.
From the sidelines, a sound erupted that was entirely inappropriate for the somber atmosphere of a world war. "HAHAHAHA!"
It was, of course, Hashirama Senju, the God of Shinobi and the world's most enthusiastic grandfather. He was clutching his stomach, tears of mirth streaming down his face.
"Tobirama! I told you not to say such things about the Uchiha! You totally deserved that!" he bellowed, his laughter echoing across the plains.
But deep down, beneath the jovial exterior, even Hashirama was absolutely floored. The speed Tsunade had displayed, without a hint of Sage Mode, was on a level that made his own reflexes feel a tad sluggish.
And more than that, he could feel it—a strange, vibrant connection thrumming between Tsunade, the strange Uchiha girl, and himself.
It was a chakra signature bursting with a ridiculous, almost offensive amount of vitality, a life force so potent it felt… familiar. It was something he had never, ever felt in another person, let alone two.
Just as the rest of the Alliance was trying to process this bizarre family intervention, a certain young master, who wouldn't recognize Mount Tai if it fell on him, decided to contribute to the chaos.
Sasuke Uchiha, brimming with the power of his Eternal Mangekyo and the conviction that he was now the main character of reality, saw only one thing: an imposter. An Uchiha he didn't recognize, holding hands with a Senju.
It was an offense to his newly rediscovered clan pride. Without a word of warning, his hand crackled to life with a thousand shrieking birds.
The Chidori screamed toward Azula's back.
Azula, for her part, didn't even have the decency to look surprised. She let out a soft, almost bored sigh, as if someone had just spilled a drink.
She clearly hadn't provoked anyone, and yet here she was, being assaulted by a moody teenager with a lightning-based identity crisis. She didn't bother to move, didn't bother to flinch.
Sasuke's triumphant thrust, the pinnacle of his brother-slaying technique, pierced directly toward her heart.
At least, that's what he thought.
To his utter, soul-crushing disbelief, the famous Chidori didn't even rumple her clothes.
It simply fizzled out against a subtle, almost lazily applied coating of chakra reinforcement—a basic defensive technique any competent Jōnin could manage.
It was the equivalent of bringing a legendary, thunderous broadsword to a fight, only to have it stopped by a politely held-up napkin.
The screeching lightning died, leaving an awkward silence and a very confused Sasuke.
Azula slowly turned, a single, perfectly sculpted eyebrow arched in an expression of mild, academic curiosity.
"Well, now," she purred, her voice dripping with condescending amusement. "Care to explain your unsolicited and frankly pathetic attempt at assassination, boy?"
She assessed this volatile, brooding nephew of hers and decided then and there that if he didn't provide a sufficiently entertaining answer, she would be more than happy to administer the same kind of corrective beating she'd once given his perpetually stressed father.
Sasuke felt a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. It was a primal, predatory sensation, the same feeling he'd had in the Forest of Death when Orochimaru's killing intent had washed over him. His Eternal Mangekyo, the power that was supposed to make him the strongest, felt utterly irrelevant.
'Damn it! I've become so much stronger! How is this possible?!' he screamed internally, his ego crumbling like a sandcastle at high tide.
But the icy pressure around his spine was a more immediate concern than his shattered pride. Feeling the distinct sensation that his next words would determine whether he kept all his limbs, he snarled, anger masking his profound confusion and fear.
"Who are you," he demanded, "and why are you impersonating an Uchiha?!"