Chiba Shun answered Aoki Yuu with an easy smile. "Of course we should use it. Everything he suggested is correct, and all of it benefits the Ninja Academy." He tapped the desk lightly with one finger, voice calm but certain. "I doubt those ideas were really his. Danzo and Konoha's higher-ups probably fed them to him so he could seize control of our academy from the inside."
Aoki Yuu gave a slow nod. "Then we'll proceed exactly like that. You handle the details."
Shun nodded back without complaint. He understood his position very clearly now. Aoki Yuu was the one giving orders, and he was the one who had to run until his legs gave out to make those orders real.
Still, he had no intention of grumbling. Aoki Yuu had been generous from the start, backing him with funding and even handing him eight ninjutsu scrolls. That alone was more support than Shun had received in years.
"By the way," Aoki Yuu said, as if only just remembering, "what did you think of the people who came for interviews today? Those wounded veterans too - can they really be teachers?"
"Of course they can," Shun replied at once. "They're perfect for it. They may be here to retire, but their battlefield experience still has value. We can use it to shape those kids properly." He spoke without lowering his voice at all. "Before they teach, I'll train them first - what they can say, what they can't say, how to say the first kind, and how to reshape the second."
Aoki Yuu stared at him for a moment, clearly at a loss. Sometimes Shun tossed out dark, cold-blooded ideas so casually that even he, a Cloud ninja, could not keep up. But since it all served the academy, he let it pass with a wave of his hand.
"Fine. Do it your way." Then he paused and asked one more question. "And those children you coached a few days ago - how did that go?"
Shun did not hesitate. "They'll become cannon fodder at best. Maybe one or two of them will manage to master a C-rank technique in the future, but that is their ceiling." His tone remained even, almost detached. "Senior Aoki, you should give up on them. Not just that group - even among the two thousand already enrolled, I don't believe there's a true genius."
Disappointment flickered across Aoki Yuu's face, and Shun caught it immediately. "But that's only for now," he added. "If the academy grows influential enough to take in the children who would otherwise be claimed by other ninjas, then the talent you're waiting for might appear among them."
Aoki Yuu snorted softly, as if seeing straight through him. He knew Shun was trying to keep him from wavering. Even so, he only waved a hand. "All right. We'll keep following your plan."
Far away in Konoha, deep beneath the village, Danzo sat inside a dim underground base built only in recent years. This was not yet the fully developed Root of the future. It was still growing, still gathering fangs, still being sharpened in the dark. Many of the figures who would become terrifying later were nothing more than children under training now.
Danzo himself had only recently stepped into the shadows for good. After helping Hiruzen Sarutobi win the Second Shinobi World War and stabilize his position as Hokage, he had officially withdrawn from the light and begun constructing Root in earnest. Even now, he had not fully adjusted to living in the dark, and lately his mood had been especially foul.
Today was worse than usual. He had just returned from Hiruzen's side, where the Hokage had shown off his three legendary disciples - deliberately or not, it hardly mattered. To Danzo, it was still provocation.
A masked subordinate appeared beside him in a blur. The Root ninja removed his mask, dropped to one knee, and bowed his head. "Lord Danzo, the operative who infiltrated Kumogakure under the alias Matsuda Sanji is dead."
Danzo's expression did not change. The room seemed to grow colder anyway.
"Before dying, he sent back intelligence," the subordinate continued. "The mission failed. According to plan, Matsuda Sanji had already approached Chiba Shun, a newly promoted Kumogakure chunin, and intended to enter the Ninja Academy through him."
At that, Danzo finally spoke. "The Ninja Academy of Kumogakure?"
"Yes, Lord Danzo." The subordinate kept his head lowered. "A few years ago, due to our interference, the academy projects in Kumogakure, Kirigakure, and Sunagakure all stalled. Only Iwagakure recovered, largely because Onoki personally oversaw its development. Logically, Kumogakure's academy should have needed another five to ten years before it had any chance of taking shape."
He paused, then continued. "But now Kumogakure's academy has suddenly expanded enrollment and appears to have gained the Raikage's full support. Matsuda Sanji moved to infiltrate it and sabotage it from within. To facilitate that, we also supplied him with experience and methods related to establishing ninja schools."
Danzo's face darkened. "Trash." The single word was spoken without force, yet it carried the weight of a death sentence. "Add Chiba Shun to the assassination list. Eliminate him immediately."
"Yes." The Root ninja answered crisply, then vanished with the Body Flicker Technique.
Once he was alone, Danzo's brows drew together. "Onoki..." he murmured to himself. In his mind, only a man like Onoki - another kage, another figure who stood high enough to matter - deserved to be considered a true opponent.
As for a nobody like Chiba Shun, Danzo did not spare him a second thought after issuing the order. In his heart, he was the Hokage in the shadows. A tool that interfered with his will was already as good as dead.
Shun, of course, had no idea that he had entered Danzo's line of sight so quickly. At the moment, he was still buried under work for the academy, with no room to think about enemies he could not yet see.
A few days later, after a storm of preparations, the Ninja Academy finally opened in earnest. Because the students varied so widely in age, the more than two thousand enrollees were divided into two broad groups.
The first group was preschool. These were the younger children, roughly two to five years old. Their curriculum was simple: basic literacy, character recognition, handwriting practice, games with a ninja flavor, and simple daily exercises to build routine and discipline.
But more important than any of that was ideological education. That subject was mandatory for every age group in the school. The teaching materials had been compiled by Chiba Shun himself, and every instructor assigned to it had been personally trained by him first.
The second group entered formal ninja training. These students were six to ten years old, and from the very beginning their lives revolved around skills useful to a shinobi. Taijutsu training came first, chakra refinement after that, and then all kinds of practical drills: how to use ninja tools, how to move under command on a battlefield, how to function as part of a larger unit, how to obey without hesitation.
For now, no true ninjutsu classes had been established for them. The talent of those two thousand children was simply too average. Teaching flashy techniques to a group like that would waste time, energy, and resources.
When the academy had first been founded, Kumogakure's original apprenticeship system had never been abolished. Even now, plenty of children still studied directly under chunin or jonin, learning on missions and improving at a frightening pace. As a result, the academy's enrollment remained limited through the next year. The most promising seedlings were still being taken away before they ever reached it.
Shun's own life was just as packed. He was no longer short on money, which meant his days could finally be divided properly. Outside his academy work, he spent half his chakra every day practicing ninjutsu and taijutsu with almost obsessive discipline.
Half was the perfect amount. If he pushed any farther, his food and recovery would no longer keep up. He had learned that lesson the hard way years ago, and he had no intention of repeating it now that his path was finally opening.
For a long time, life in Kumogakure remained quiet. Because most of the academy's students were orphans who studied, ate, and slept inside the school itself, the academy gradually faded from ordinary village conversation. It was there, certainly, but most people stopped paying attention to it.
Then, half a year later, the village suddenly noticed something strange. New faces had begun appearing all over Kumogakure - unfamiliar genin-looking children carrying out simple jobs in the streets.
They helped farmers in the fields. They swept courtyards and cleaned houses. They watched over younger children, searched for missing pets, ran errands, and handled the sort of trivial tasks that piled up endlessly in any village. At first people only stared, but curiosity spread quickly.
Where had these children come from? Why had no one seen them before? And why were they acting like proper mission-takers when many of them were barely more than kids?
The answer spread almost as fast as the questions. They came from the Ninja Academy - the very same academy most villagers had already forgotten. After six months of systematic training, the oldest students had been released under Shun's arrangement to carry out missions.
Naturally, this had happened only with the Third Raikage's approval. The children were not yet true ninjas, but they had been authorized to take on the lowest level of work: D-rank missions, the kind that helped villagers with troublesome but not dangerous tasks.
For Kumogakure, still weakened by the losses of the Second Shinobi World War, that was good news in itself. The village leadership welcomed any method that could ease the shortage of manpower. More than that, they wanted to see whether the academy could produce visible results.
The villagers, however, cared less about the Raikage's long-term vision than about something far more immediate. News broke that these children kept eighty percent of the reward money from the missions they completed.
That number stunned everyone.
People knew how the usual system worked. Someone like Shun, back when he had first become a genin and followed a squad leader, had to hand over at least half of what he earned. Before he was even recognized as a full genin, around eighty percent of his team's earnings had gone straight to the leader. And that was before the separate fees for guidance and instruction were added on top.
But the academy children kept eighty percent for themselves. The rest went to the institution. They also received instruction from academy teachers for free. The more people thought about it, the more their calculations started to shift.
What did ordinary families actually want from turning their children into ninjas? Very few people would honestly answer "for the village" or "for the Land of Lightning." Most wanted a better life. Ninjas earned more. Ninjas had opportunities common people did not.
And suddenly, when they set aside pride and looked at the numbers, the academy seemed far more cost-effective - at least in the early stages. A child could study there, learn the basics, earn mission money early, and do so without being bled dry by a squad leader from the beginning.
As for the future, hadn't the academy already announced that strong chunin and jonin from the village would be allowed to visit and choose subordinates from among its students? If that policy held, then a child could learn broadly at the academy first, build a foundation, and only later join a squad leader after already becoming useful.
To many households, that sounded like saving a huge amount of money.
The news spread like wildfire. Before long, the entire Hidden Cloud Village was talking about the academy. Even ninjas who had children of their own began to weigh the advantages and disadvantages in private.
Still, most of them were asking a different question from the common villagers. They were less interested in profit than in quality. Just how much could a child actually learn there?
That question brought visitors streaming in one after another. People came to see the Ninja Academy with their own eyes. They wanted proof, not promises.
And what they saw left many of them stunned.
There were dedicated academic teachers who started with the absolute basics - reading, writing, arithmetic - then pushed further into things relevant to shinobi life, like calculating a kunai's trajectory or understanding the proper use of explosive tags. There were specialized chunin for sword instruction, specialized taijutsu instructors for body training and fundamental combat methods, specialists who taught trap-setting and trap-detection, and others who lectured on battlefield survival and war experience.
Everything was broken into systems. Everything was categorized. Everything that a child would otherwise have to learn piecemeal, expensively, and unevenly from a squad leader was gathered into one place and taught with intent.
Under the old structure, following a captain often meant becoming good at only one thing - whatever that captain knew and felt like teaching. At the academy, by contrast, students were exposed to almost every basic skill a shinobi needed just to stand on the battlefield and not die immediately.
And unlike the old structure, this knowledge did not come itemized with hidden prices attached.
As those visiting parents and ninjas walked through the grounds, watched the classes, and listened to the instruction, something subtle began to change in their eyes. The Ninja Academy was no longer a desperate holding pen for orphans or a failed imitation of Konoha. It was beginning to look like a real institution.
Shun did not celebrate openly when he noticed the shift. He only stood in the shadows of the training ground and watched the visitors watching the students. That was enough for him. Public opinion in a village like Kumogakure never changed in a single day, but once it started to turn, it could gather force with frightening speed.
If things continued like this, then sooner or later families would send their own children through the gates willingly. And once that happened, the academy would finally get what it lacked most: a wider pool, a larger scale, and with it the chance to draw in the talent that had always slipped through its fingers.
Only then could it stop merely producing cannon fodder and begin shaping real ninjas.
As for Chiba Shun, he could already feel the next stage approaching. The academy was growing roots. And when those roots spread deep enough through Kumogakure, whatever Danzo or anyone else planned to do from the shadows would no longer be so easy.