The files had a way of telling secrets that people refused to speak aloud.
Sasuke moved through Uchiha Technologies the way a shadow walks through smoke: precise, soundless, immune to courtesies. Uchiha base was chaos subdued into efficiency—scroll-feeds, sealed holos, data-crates stacked like sarcophagi of missions past. He'd come back to collect scraps of what his life had been, to stitch together a map of meaning from fragments. He had expected nothing. What he found was everything.
There, beneath a shelf of Orochimaru's old dossiers—things the snake had taken, stolen, hidden—Sasuke's hand brushed a data-slate. It hummed in a language that seemed older than the village, but when his Sharingan flared, the cipher broke like thin glass. Names, dates, places scrolled past his vision, and each stroke of light was a verdict.
Naruto's lineage, Kushina Uzumaki and Namikaze Minato. The asylum of history in neat files: the orphaned boy, the Whisper of the Valley, the fall, the supposed death, and then the impossible resurrection—the whirlpool rising again like a heart re-planted beneath the sea. He read how the Uzumaki blood had answered Naruto's call; he read reports of elders rising, of ships filled with red banners, of a city bred from coral and sealcraft. Figures—thousands—coalesced on the screen. Names, faces, children and elders and those who had been given up for dead: walking, arriving, kneeling at a dock.
Sasuke felt the world leak away from his feet.
There was calculation at first—logistics, probabilities, the cold arithmetic of a strategist. Then something hotter and sharper rose in his throat: astonishment, then a current that tasted like old loneliness. He had trained for revenge; he had been consumed by it. He had stalked ghosts across wars and learned to live inside the blade. But the sight of thousands — elders who should have been dust, women and men who had carried the weight of extinction like a scar — turning toward Naruto, toward a home being rebuilt from myth, cut him differently.
He had been alone for so long he mistook being seen for being betrayed.
By the time Sasuke found the report that listed Uzumaki numbers — tens of thousands moving toward the Sea City, hundredfold the victims of the Uchiha purge — his chest burned with a jealous heat he'd not let himself name. A voice in the back of his skull whispered: They celebrate the one who was handed what you clawed for. It was smaller than hatred, sharper than grief. It was humiliation.
He left the data-slate open and walked out of the base with the same quiet he'd arrived in. Orochimaru's lab corridors were empty that day; the serpent had retreated into curiosity and survival. Sasuke could imagine the snake's dry amusement and did not bother to seek it. The decision had formed in him like a fist.
If everyone would be gathered there—if Uzumaki pride and protection swelled into a nation—then perhaps the only way to remind the world of fear was to break that center. To make Naruto feel what he had felt. To make him tremble.
Sasuke's travel was a condensation of purpose. He took the fastest roads he could find, choosing stealth over spectacle. He shredded through patrols, slept where a roof could be found, and let the river's trade lanes carry him closer to the Wave. The trip consumed him. Not just distance, but something inside: each step was a small burn of chakra, a deposit of intent. By the time he reached the coast that faced Naruto's newborn city, his reserves were a garden depleted.
The first thing he saw on the shore was a statue — not grand, but unmistakably an image of a towering boy with hair like a blaze, standing over a wave. Someone had set the likeness as a local landmark, a reminder that the whirlpool's son had returned and taken a place in the living memory of the sea. Sasuke's hand shut around his kunai so hard the metal bit his palm. He stepped forward and with a single, vicious strike shattered the statue to rubble. Stone flew; a few fishermen shouted in panic. The satisfaction of damage was small, a spark against the greater hunger.
He ran then, faster than a man should be able to for one drained of spirit. He ran over water when the way demanded it — a trick he'd learned in training, an arrogance of youth. For two hours he pushed himself until his lungs burned; for the next two days he slept and collected the last lingering starches of stamina. He hid on an islet, a thicket of rock and kelp, watching the city's light across the bay and listening to its pulse through the night.
If Naruto had been a child, if the world were as simple as the map he'd once studied, Sasuke might have thought a direct assault would suffice. But Naruto had changed. The reports were incomplete: they spoke of numbers and names, but they did not capture the strange new geometry of Naruto's power. The scrolls didn't say the whirlpool itself had become a congregation of wills; they hadn't measured the Black Heart humming in the sovereign's chest. Sasuke did not know this. He could not have known it — not yet.
So he decided, in his arrogance, to show up and take what he deemed necessary: fear. He wanted to burn the place of new joy down to ash so that the world would again remember the shape of loss he had been taught to worship.
Naruto sensed Sasuke long before Itachi's brief, sharp message blinked into his mind.
Itachi, Naruto said with little ceremony after the message came through, Sasuke's here. He's moving to strike the Uzumaki.
Itachi's silence held weather. When he answered at last, his voice was a quiet blade. "Will you keep him alive?"
Naruto looked at the horizon, at the orange smear of dawn. His hand brushed the Crimson Spiral at his hip, feeling the faint thrum. "I want him to understand, Itachi," he said. "If he dies, nothing is understood."
A long pause. Then, unexpectedly, Itachi's voice softened, but there was a hardness behind it that made Naruto turn to face the man. "I will not intervene, then. If you ask for help, I will not deny you the right to stop him. But know this — if you fail, there will be no one left to stop the consequences. Not even I."
Naruto let that settle like a stone between them. Itachi's choice was what it always had been: a measurement of duty over desire. Naruto nodded. "Then I will meet him."
Itachi added, with the faintest of edges: "You wanted him alive to understand. I wanted him alive so you could understand the weight of that decision."
Naruto did not argue. He only readied himself.
When Sasuke stepped onto the main quay, he expected chaos. He expected sentries to cry alarm, or Uzumaki Wardens to meet him with open spears. Instead, the island was quieter than he'd imagined: people at work, children playing, elders sitting in the shade; the whole place had been built around life, not defense. He felt that like an accusation.
At the end of the jetty, a figure waited — taller than the statue had suggested, broader, with shoulders that carried the difference between a boy and a man. Red hair framed a face without whisker marks — a family resemblance sharpened into something new. This Naruto didn't look like an orphan; he looked like a monarch who had settled into his own skin. He wore simple cloth and a cloak the color of midnight; his presence had the slow certainty of tide.
"Welcome," Naruto said without preamble. "You're late."
Sasuke's jaw tightened. "You built a temple to yourself."
Naruto's smile was small, not cruel. "Stone is an offering. The people are not."
Sasuke's eyes glittered. The heat inside him flared and he advanced a step. "You have gathered the world," he said. "You have taken what little order there was between the nations and turned it into your family. You let everyone forget us."
"You let yourself rot behind revenge," Naruto replied. His voice was even, but something in it carried all the weight of what was not said — the years of absence, the nights alone on stone. "You clung to dying. I built a home."
"A home?" Sasuke barked. "Homes are built on bones if we let them be. I will show you what bones look like."
Naruto's hand slid to the Crimson Spiral at his hip. "This is who I am now," he said. "If you want to test yourself against me, test yourself. But if you come for the people—"
Sasuke laughed, but it was short and hollow. "You think I came to test you? I came to make you feel what you made me feel."
"Then fight me," Naruto said simply. "Not the village. Not the elders. Take me. If you win, burn the place. If you lose…" His eyes softened. "If you lose, walk away and never return to trade the names of your dead for more dead."
Sasuke's expression darkened into a smile like a blade. "You always were naïve. Very well. I accept."
Before either of them moved, a ripple walked along the quay — something like a choir that had practiced silence. The earth around Naruto stuttered, then split into forms. Shadows rose — not monstrous, but ordered and terrible: nine silhouettes, each wearing the echo of a beast or a hero as armor. They were the Generals, but not brutish. They were honed, elegant, a council of guardians.
Sasuke took a breath. He had anticipated footsoldiers, compelled veterans. He had not expected this — living strategy given shape, memory and will baked into them. A cold doubt pried at the edges of his intent.
"Pick three," Naruto said quietly. "Defeat them and I will give you what you want. Fail and you leave with your life."
Sasuke's hands curled. He had spent his life learning to break things. He had spent the last years learning to be ruthless with his purpose. For all that, the sight of those forms shifted a map inside him.
"No distractions," Itachi's voice came at the edge of Sasuke's mind — not speaking to Naruto, but to him. Remember who you are fighting for, the tone said. Not merely for the vengeance that warms you now, but for the dawn you will burn if you lose yourself in it.
Sasuke inhaled and chose his targets, each selection a spoken vow.
The first clash would come like thunder. The island took a breath; the sea held its swell. Two names, once friends, stood on opposite shores of a future neither had wanted. Jealousy had become action. Action was about to become consequence.
And in the quiet before the strike, Naruto thought of all the faces that had come home. He remembered Hanari's hands, the sound of the elders chanting, the children learning calligraphy on bark. He felt the Black Heart thrum — not cold and sovereign, but protective, an animal that had learned to love. He would not let them be a measure of a rival's pain.
Sasuke moved first — as he always had. The world inhaled.