Hiruzen Sarutobi had watched boys become men on battlefields.
He had watched men become monsters in laboratories.
He had watched monsters put on nice clothes and smile for diplomats, and then shake hands like their fingers hadn't ever been inside someone else's ribcage.
So when the feathers began to fall—soft as snow, too pretty for a shinobi arena—his first instinct wasn't wonder.
They weren't real down; they were ghostly smears of light that didn't follow the wind, shimmering with an oily, iridescent sheen that tasted like stale incense and cold iron at the back of the throat.
It was counting.
How many heartbeats until panic became a stampede. How many bodies packed into the stands. How many shinobi placed at what angles. How many exits. How many children. How many foolish civilians who would try to run up the stairs because that was where authority sat, as if power could shield them like a roof.
The genjutsu came down like a curtain.
The air suddenly thickened with the scent of scorched bronze and ozone, a heavy, metallic weight that seemed to press directly against the brain as the village below began to slump into a forced, unnatural sleep.
Not violent. Not crude. Elegant, almost courteous—sweet and coaxing, the kind of weight that didn't demand surrender so much as offer relief.
Hiruzen did not accept invitations.
His chakra snapped through his coils with practiced cruelty. The illusion shivered as it brushed him, tried to cling to the back of his eyelids like a warm hand-
He felt a sharp, high-pitched whine behind his eyes—a vibration that rattled his teeth as his own internal heat rose to incinerate the syrupy, gray-pink numbness trying to coat his thoughts.
-and broke. Not with fireworks. With a simple refusal.
Below, thousands slumped.
Heads lolled. Bodies folded forward onto knees like praying. Others collapsed sideways into neighbors. A sea of sleeping mouths, open and helpless. The worst kind of helpless: the kind that didn't even know it was dying yet.
Hiruzen's fingers tightened on the railing.
To his right, the Fire Daimyō's attendants were already falling. One dropped a lacquered fan and it clacked against stone like a tiny, stupid bell.
ANBU moved—fast, efficient—catching bodies before they hit. Hands under shoulders, hands under the Daimyō's arms, hands pulling the soft important weight of politics away from the edge of the box.
The world outside the Kage seats began to shift into two speeds at once. The slow, syrupy collapse of the genjutsu. The sudden sharp movements of those who resisted it.
In the center of the box, the Kazekage remained upright.
Too upright.
His posture didn't soften into sleep. His breathing didn't change. He sat like a man listening to a song he'd paid for and was pleased with the melody.
Hiruzen turned his head.
The Kazekage's eyes met his through the painted mask.
And something in Hiruzen's chest went cold—old and familiar.
Not fear.
Regret.
Because he recognized that chakra signature the way you recognized a smell you'd tried to forget. Not the shape of it—Orochimaru could mimic shape. It was the texture, the slick wrongness under everything, like oil over water. Like warmth that did not belong to any living thing.
Hiruzen let himself look directly at him.
"Orochimaru," he said quietly.
The Kazekage's mouth curved, and the smile underneath the mask was already visible in the way his eyes sharpened.
"Good," the man replied, voice pitched wrong—too smooth for Rasa, too amused for a leader pretending at diplomacy. "I'd hate to disappoint you, sensei."
The word sensei landed like a knife placed gently on a table: polite, deliberate, meant to be noticed.
Hiruzen didn't flinch. He couldn't afford to. Not with the Daimyō pale and slack in ANBU arms. Not with the elders either dozing or fighting the genjutsu through sheer spite. Not with the village's lungs filling with smoke below.
"You took his place," Hiruzen said.
"Oh?" Orochimaru tilted his head, as if genuinely impressed. "And here I thought age had dulled you. You still see beneath the costume."
"Costumes are your weakness," Hiruzen replied. "You always wanted to be seen."
Orochimaru's smile widened like a crack opening.
Hiruzen's eyes flicked once—fast, automatic—to the shadowed edge of the box.
Danzō Shimura sat there as he always did: half swallowed by darkness, face calm, one visible eye half-lidded in contemplation.
Not asleep.
Not startled.
Watching.
Hiruzen filed it away without changing his expression. Later, if there was a later, he would pry that calm open with both hands.
Down in the arena, shinobi began to move in coordinated lines.
Not Leaf.
Sound headbands flashed like bruises. Sand uniforms slipped between rows, knives low and intimate. This wasn't a riot. It wasn't a panicked skirmish.
It was a plan being executed on schedule.
Hiruzen's ANBU captain landed in a crouch beside him, breath controlled, eyes scanning. "Hokage-sama—"
"Evacuate the Fire Daimyō," Hiruzen said.
The ANBU hesitated. "But—"
"Now."
The captain vanished in a blur with attendants and their sleeping charge. Another ANBU moved immediately for the elders, hands already under shoulders.
Danzō didn't rise.
Didn't even glance at the Daimyō.
Hiruzen did not allow himself the luxury of anger yet. Anger burned chakra. He would need every thread.
He returned his gaze to Orochimaru.
"Why," he asked, "now?"
Orochimaru's eyes gleamed. "Because you're old."
Simple. Childish. Delivered like a punchline.
"And because," Orochimaru continued, voice bright as poison, "you're still trying to keep all your little pieces in place. Alliances. Treaties. Theater." His fingers rose, slow and theatrical, to the edge of the Kazekage's mask. "You've built a village out of rules and called it peace."
Hiruzen's expression did not change.
"You built yourself out of hunger," he said, "and called it truth."
Orochimaru laughed softly. "Ah. Still moralizing. Even now."
He peeled the mask away.
The skin beneath was pale and stretched too smooth over bone. His eyes gleamed with delighted emptiness—the look of a child who'd finally gotten permission to break something expensive.
Orochimaru. Not Rasa. Not a Kage. Not a diplomat.
A genius. A traitor. A wound Hiruzen had let fester because he'd loved the boy too much and feared the man too little.
The box seats suddenly felt smaller.
"Hiruzen," Orochimaru said, and his voice lost the mimicry entirely. "Welcome to my exam."
"Still calling it an exam," Hiruzen said, standing with the ease of someone who had been standing up for war his entire life. "Because if you call it learning, you don't have to call it murder."
Orochimaru's gaze sharpened, pleased rather than offended. "And if you call it duty, you don't have to call it failure."
Their words slid around each other like blades testing for weak points.
Hiruzen moved first.
Not dramatic. Not loud. A simple shift of weight and intent, chakra rising under skin like heat under coals.
Orochimaru's hands blurred through seals.
Four Sound shinobi dropped onto the corners of the rooftop box like nails hammered into a coffin lid. Their hands slapped tags onto stone—black, shimmering—at four points that mattered.
A barrier flared to life.
The light was a bruising, deep-violet glare that scorched the air along its edges, creating a jagged shimmer of heat that warped the village outside into a fractured, broken mess of stone and smoke.
Violet-tinged, clear and absolute. The air pressure inside it changed instantly. Hiruzen felt it in his ears.
Pop.
The air pressure inside the box spiked instantly—a sudden, heavy shift that made his ears pop and left a low, rhythmic thrum vibrating through the marrow of his bones.
He felt the way sound thickened, as if the world had been wrapped in glass.
Outside the barrier, Konoha kept moving—Leaf ANBU leaping, civilians being dragged, shinobi clashing. But the chaos came muffled, distant.
Inside?
Inside was just him.
The stadium's roar vanished, swallowed by a hollow, airless silence that smelled of hot asphalt and burnt hair, making the loose roof tiles beneath his sandals buzz with a raw, angry heat.
Orochimaru.
And the coffin they'd made out of politics.
Hiruzen's mouth went dry—not from fear, but from recognition.
Four Violet Flames Formation.
They weren't trying to kill him in the general chaos. They were isolating him. Making sure Konoha's head couldn't bark orders while its body burned.
Orochimaru watched him take it in and smiled wider.
"You taught me well," he murmured. "Even your enemies know how you think."
"And yet you still have to lock the door," Hiruzen said. "Afraid someone will hear you beg?"
Orochimaru's eyes flashed with amusement. "Begging is for people who think someone will save them."
Hiruzen exhaled once.