Chapter 257: Six Years Later
The Fire Daimyo did not refuse. He chose instead to be generous, producing a considerable sum in real coin, and even told Konoha's envoy with a smile that if there were any funding shortfalls along the way, they should simply say so — he would sell whatever needed selling and make sure the money reached the village.
Not everyone around him shared his enthusiasm, of course.
A number of the lord's advisors were furious. What gave Konoha's ninja the right to demand payment on the grounds of fighting a threat posed by Orochimaru and Uchiha Madara? Those two were Konoha's rogue ninja. Konoha's unfinished business. Konoha's mess to clean up.
The Fire Daimyo shut that down quickly. The loudest voices were reprimanded sharply. But at the same time, he quietly redirected a significant sum toward the organization under his direct authority — the Daimyo's Guard Corps — and issued instructions to its current commander to expand the group's capabilities as aggressively as possible.
Whatever the lord's true thoughts were on the matter, the practical result was that Konoha collected its payment without difficulty. Once the Fire Daimyo had opened his purse, the daimyo of the surrounding smaller countries followed, each of them paying with varying degrees of reluctance.
Then Konoha moved.
It moved like a thunderclap.
Every one of Uchiha Madara's known hideouts within the Land of Fire and the surrounding countries was dismantled and swept clean. The bandits and highway criminals that the strike teams encountered along the way were cleared out as a matter of course.
Orochimaru's research base in the Land of Vegetables was destroyed as well. What they recovered inside was difficult to look at — dozens upon dozens of "materials," ninja from all across the world, over a hundred people imprisoned in underground cells and subjected to experiments that defied description. They were freed.
But despite losing that many subjects at once, Orochimaru did not surface. He and Uchiha Madara both went completely silent and stayed that way.
The cleanup operation then extended to the other four great nations. Every hideout belonging to Madara and Orochimaru that had been extracted from Tatsuhata's memories was found and destroyed.
The two of them were never found.
The ninja world, against most expectations, returned to a peace it had not seen in a long time.
The five great villages turned their attention inward — treating their wounds, rebuilding their strength, recovering from the losses that years of war and upheaval had ground into them. There was nothing Ritsu could do about the fugitives themselves. The ninja world was genuinely vast, and if Orochimaru and Madara had chosen to disappear into some remote corner of it, there was no finding them.
Days passed. Then months.
The troubles that arose were small — the kind that a few dispatched ninja could resolve without incident. The ninja world, broadly speaking, was peaceful and stable.
That peace was the most powerful thing Hyuga Ritsu could have done for his own reputation as Fifth Hokage. Every day that it held added to the weight his name carried in the village.
Six years passed in what felt like a breath.
April.
The weather in Konoha was exactly what it should be. The spring wind lifted pink petals from the trees and carried them drifting through the streets, and the air had a faint sweetness to it. The road to the ninja academy was busy with people.
Today was the first day of school.
The returning students were nothing new, but the incoming six-year-olds had come with their parents, and the added company made the commute noticeably more lively than usual. The laughter and the crying and the bickering of children carried on the warm spring air.
Then a small figure launched itself off the top of a wall.
The boy landed with both fists on his hips, looked back up at the wall he had just scaled, and let out a triumphant laugh. "Sasuke! If you think you're better than me, climb over!"
Yellow hair, bright blue eyes, and six whisker-like marks on his cheeks. He was grinning so wide his eyes had nearly disappeared.
Passersby who caught sight of him tended to smile without quite meaning to.
This distinctive-looking boy was the orphan of the Fourth Hokage and the apprentice of the Fifth — Namikaze Naruto. For the past couple of years he had been one of the most recognized faces in the village, endlessly running through every corner of it. Most residents knew him by now: the boy with the unusual past and the future that was already shaping up to be something extraordinary.
"You won't get away with that, Naruto!"
The indignant voice came from the other side of the wall.
Two seconds later a boy with black, spiky hair dropped over the top of it. The Uchiha fan crest was embroidered at his collar. Uchiha Sasuke — youngest son of Uchiha Fugaku, the Uchiha clan head.
"A wall like that is nothing to an Uchiha."
Sasuke stood with his arms folded, looking pleased with himself.
Naruto's brow furrowed. "You couldn't get over a wall the same height as this one last week."
"That was last week. I went back and had my brother train me afterward. Climbing walls is easy for me now." He wasn't entirely sure what the full expression meant, but he had picked it up from adults and it sounded impressive enough.
Naruto scratched his head, his eyes darting around as he tried to think of something he could do that Sasuke couldn't.
He didn't get the chance.
Two light chops landed on both their heads.
"If either of you runs off on me again, you can turn around and go home right now. You'll spend today's first day of school standing in a corner." The woman's voice was unhurried and soft, which somehow made it more alarming to both boys than shouting would have been.
"I'm sorry, sensei's wife." Naruto bowed his head immediately with the efficiency of someone who had been through this before.
"I'm sorry too, Aika-aunt." Sasuke followed suit.
"You two..."
The woman, whose features were strikingly lovely, let out a sigh of genuine exasperation. They had both been so endearing as small children. But somewhere around age five, something had shifted, and for the past two years she had lost count of how many times she had been driven to knock their heads together. She was already quietly worrying about what she would do when her own son reached the same age — Ryuchi was five years old now, and there was no guarantee he wouldn't end up exactly like these two.
"Aika-aunt, I'm really sorry," Sasuke tried again after a moment of silence, pivoting smoothly. "It's Naruto's fault. He said he wanted to race and I never would have run off otherwise."
"Hey! You're the one who said your brother trained you and you were definitely faster than me now. I just said let's see. And you were still slower."
"I was faster at the start!"
The two boys squared up against each other like a pair of roosters.
Uchiha Aika had a strong urge to grab both of them and carry them home for a thorough scolding, but today was a special day. Today was Naruto's and Sasuke's very first day of school. Starting it with an absence was a waste.
She swallowed her irritation.
Though she wasn't letting them off entirely.
Two more firm chops quieted them down.
Then she reached behind her and gently pulled forward the small girl who had been standing there this whole time. "The two of you aren't the only ones starting school today. Hinata is going with you. Do you have any idea how worried she was when you disappeared just now?"
The girl had pale, clear skin and white eyes without a trace of color in them. Being pushed suddenly to the front made her face go red. She looked down and couldn't quite bring herself to meet either boy's gaze.
Namikaze Naruto. Uchiha Sasuke. Hyuga Hinata.
Uchiha Aika's task this morning was to deliver all three to school.
The reason it had fallen to her was simple enough. Naruto was her husband Hyuga Ritsu's apprentice, and with the Fourth Hokage and his wife both gone and Master Jiraiya off wandering somewhere unspecified, getting Naruto to school was Ritsu's responsibility. He had originally planned to take the boy himself — but something apparently urgent had come up first thing in the morning, and he had left for the Hokage Building in a hurry, handing the task to his wife before he went.
Sasuke had shown up on his own initiative. Uchiha Aika and Sasuke's mother Uchiha Mikoto were cousins, and the two boys had met through Aika. One visit home with Naruto in tow had been enough — the two of them had taken to each other immediately and been largely inseparable since. Going to school together had apparently been decided between them before dawn, because Sasuke had been at the door early.
Hinata had arrived shortly after. Her mother's health had been poor and she was confined to bed; her father was occupied with her care. With no one else available, Hyuga Hizashi had brought his niece to Aika and asked the clan head's wife if she could walk her to school.
One child or three, the walk was the same distance.
Aika cradled Hinata against her side and steered the still-bickering boys forward, toward the academy that was now visible not far ahead.
A footnote worth mentioning: the reason Aika was still called Uchiha Aika rather than Hyuga Aika after marrying Ritsu was simply because Ritsu had never thought she needed to change it. The Fourth Hokage hadn't asked Kushina to take his name either. It suited Ritsu that way. Besides, there was something undeniably strange about the idea of calling someone Hyuga Aika when looking at her revealed a pair of bright red Sharingan. The Sharingan and the Uchiha name were inseparable in a way that felt wrong to undo.
"Come on, Hinata."
Naruto was bold, as always.
He reached out and took the small girl's hand with a grin. "I'll protect you once we get to school, don't worry — hey, Hinata? Are you okay? What's wrong?"
The girl's face, already flushed, had gone the color of a ripe tomato. She crumpled gently sideways.
Aika caught her before she hit the ground, gathered her up, and held her with a look of profound helplessness at the unconscious face.
This child was a little too... precocious.
She fainted because someone held her hand?
Though to be fair, the girl was clearly going to be a beauty when she grew up — already a lovely child. Naruto had no idea how lucky he was. That hopeless boy.
"I cannot believe he handed this to me," Aika muttered under her breath, working her way through several imagined versions of what she intended to say to her husband tonight before her mood evened out enough to continue walking.
She carried Hinata, corralled the two boys who were already starting another argument, and moved steadily toward the academy.
Behind them, on a nearby rooftop, a young man with white hair and a face mask stood quietly watching Namikaze Naruto walk away. Not far from him, half-concealed in the branches of a tree, a boy with black hair and deeply shadowed eyes observed Uchiha Sasuke's retreating figure through the gaps in the leaves. His gaze was sharp and steady.
The two of them had noticed each other almost immediately.
"Kakashi-senpai."
The black-haired boy spoke first.
"Itachi. You came too."
"I wanted to see Sasuke off."
"Same. For Naruto."
A brief exchange, and then a comfortable silence settled between them. A few seconds later, Kakashi tilted his head slightly. "Want to... walk together?"
The two of them weren't strangers to each other — not because of the children, but because they both knew Uchiha Shisui, and it was through Shisui that they had met.
Uchiha Itachi was only ten years old, but he was a talent of a different order. He had graduated from the academy at seven. Just recently he had cleared the chunin exams entirely on his own. He was already a fully recognized chunin, and his name was anything but quiet.
"Together."
Itachi agreed without hesitation.
The two of them fell into step behind the group and followed at a distance, silent and unobtrusive, escorting the children without being asked. It had to be said, though, that the escort was entirely unnecessary. This was Konoha. The safest, most peaceful place in the ninja world.
Six years of peace had done its work. Many people had quietly set aside the memory of the turbulence that had come before.
Then —
An explosion.
The sound rolled out and faded across the village. The source was unmistakably inside the Hyuga clan grounds. A column of fire climbed high enough to draw the eyes of half the village.
Then a shaft of white light dropped out of the sky.
The fire and the rising smoke hadn't even reached their peak before the white light pressed them back down and erased them entirely, smoothing over every trace as though nothing had happened at all. Someone watching from a distance might have thought they had imagined it.
They hadn't.
Hatake Kakashi and Uchiha Itachi — three Sharingan eyes between them — had seen it clearly. A genuine, enormous explosion had just occurred inside the Hyuga clan grounds, and the location appeared to be the Tamae Shrine.
Neither of them was unfamiliar with that part of the clan grounds. Kakashi visited regularly to check on the child the Fourth Hokage had left behind. Itachi came regularly to see his younger brother. They both knew the layout well.
Without a word between them, they were already moving toward Aika and the children.
At the same moment, in the Tamae Shrine — now reduced to rubble across a third of its area — Hyuga Ritsu stood on what remained of a broken corridor pillar, his white robes hanging loose around him, long hair falling free. His expression was unreadable. He looked out at the ruins in front of him without moving.
Six years had left almost no mark on him. He looked very much as he always had — young, poised, carrying the same quiet assurance he had worn since long before it was warranted.