The night air over the Konoha forward camp was cool and carried the scent of pine, damp earth, and the faint, ever-present undertone of blood and antiseptic. It was a marked improvement from the stench of ozone and charred flesh Hiruzen had left behind just a few days earlier.
He moved through the periphery as a shadow, his arrival silent and unannounced. Despite the late hour, the camp was a hive of subdued activity. Lanterns cast pools of warm, yellow light on shinobi mending their equipment, others updating logistics scrolls, and medics moving between tents with quiet purpose. There was a tension in the air, the ingrained habit of war, but it was layered over a newfound stability.
'My efforts… the sacrifice… it has given them this,' Hiruzen thought, the observation a small, cold comfort against the immense weight of the cost. The stability here felt fragile, but it was real. He saw it in the set of a sentry's shoulders, not hunched against an expected assault, but simply alert. He saw it in the fact that children—genin, barely more than children, were actually sleeping in their tents instead of huddling in foxholes.
He moved directly toward the heart of the camp, the command tent. It was larger than the others, its canvas walls reinforced with subtle chakra-resistant seals.
Inside, the air was thick with the smell of ink, sweat, and the peculiar, clean scent of active chakra paper. A harried-looking jonin commander with a scar bisecting his eyebrow was leaning over a large map, his finger tracing supply lines. When he looked up and saw the Hokage standing there, his face went slack with shock. The man straightened so quickly he nearly upset an inkpot.
"Lord Hokage! I wasn't— We had no word of your—"
Hiruzen raised a hand, a small, gentle gesture that carried the absolute authority of his office. The man fell silent instantly.
"There is no need for ceremony," Hiruzen said, his voice soft but layered with an undeniable fatigue that seemed to deepen the lines on his face.
"I require only access to the relay network. I have urgent information to pass."
The commander, a man named Katsuo, nodded rapidly, his professional composure slamming back into place. "Of course, Lord Hokage. Right away. The Yamanaka on duty is in the adjacent chamber. I will ensure you have complete privacy."
He gave a sharp bow and retreated from the tent, pulling the flap closed behind him.
Alone for a moment, Hiruzen allowed his shoulders to slump by a fraction of an inch. His eyes scanned the command center. Maps were pinned to boards, marked with the ebb and flow of divisions. A complex communications array, a masterwork of Uzumaki-inspired fuinjutsu, hummed on a central table, its glowing lines pulsing with latent energy. Mission logs lay in neat stacks. His gaze lingered on a roster, a brief moment of mundane curiosity piercing the fog of high-level strategy. 'Which division does this unit belong to…? The Third? The Fifth?'
Before the thought could fully form, a voice, clear and resonant, spoke directly into the heart of his mind. It was not a sound, but a presence, polite and deferential.
"Lord Third… this is Yamanaka Aoto. The channel is secure. Who do you wish to contact?"
Hiruzen closed his eyes, focusing his will, sending the thought back along the psychic wire. "Nara Shiba. Second Division Commander."
"Connecting you now, sir. One moment," the Yamanaka's mental voice replied.
There was a pause, a sensation of vast distance being bridged. Then, a new presence settled in his mind. It was calm, analytical, and deeply familiar—the feel of a master strategist at work.
"Lord Third," came the voice of Nara Shiba. There was no surprise, only a focused readiness.
Hiruzen did not waste words. The message was too monumental for preamble.
"The war is over."
There was the briefest of silences on the other end, a fractional hitch in the steady stream of Shiba's cognitive presence. It was the Nara equivalent of a gasp of astonishment.
"Did the plan work?" Shiba asked, his mental tone sharpening with professional interest. He had every right to ask; he was the architect. It was his brilliant, ruthless mind that had designed the "Kumo Jinchuriki Destabilisation" strategy, the convoluted series of feints, intelligence leaks, and Sannin deployments meant to turn Kumo's greatest weapons against them.
"It worked," Hiruzen responded, "Almost too perfectly."
"I see," Shiba's voice was contemplative.
"And Jiraiya? The Sannin?" The Hokage asked.
"They are en route back. Their part in this is concluded."
Hiruzen paused then, the weight of the next revelation settling upon him. He reached for his pipe, a small, familiar comfort. With a tiny application of chakra, a spark ignited at his fingertip and he lit the tobacco, taking a long, slow draw. The scent of cherry-blossom tobacco filled the sealed tent, a tiny island of personal ritual in a sea of chaos.
"There is a complication, Shiba," he sent, the thought heavy. "It wasn't just Matatabi and Gyūki."
"Oh?"
"The Six-Tails appeared as well. Saiken. Rampaging on Kumo's doorstep."
The shock from Shiba's end was palpable this time, a ripple of genuine disruption in the telepathic link.
"The Six-Tails… Kumo kidnapped Ayame, the host, months ago." Shiba connected the dots with lightning speed. "Lord Hokage… were the Sannin instructed to force its release as well? Was that a contingency I was not aware of?"
"I did no such thing," Hiruzen's mental voice was firm, final. "I gave no order for the Six-Tails."
He let the implication hang in the psychic space between them, a dark and unsettling truth.
"Someone else acted independently," Hiruzen continued, the words tasting of ash. "A third party. Meaning there was another player in this war, moving pieces on the board, and we were not aware of them."
"Kirigakure?" Shiba's thought was immediate, logical. "A false flag? An attempt to further implicate Kumo and drive a wedge into their alliance with Iwa?"
"No," Hiruzen dismissed it. "Hiroshi was there. His shock was genuine. The rage in his eyes when he saw Saiken… that was not the look of a man whose plan had come to fruition. It was the look of a man seeing his worst fears realized. This was not Kiri's doing."
There was a long silence from Shiba's end. When his voice returned, it had shed all traces of clinical detachment and was now grave, somber.
"Lord Hokage… this aligns with intelligence I have been hesitant to act upon, given our other priorities." A wave of focused data, of intercepted whispers and fragmented agent reports, flowed along the connection. "Kirigakure has been unstable for a considerable time. The Mizukage's influence has been deteriorating, his power challenged by internal factions and the great clans. This was happening even before the Great War began."
The pieces, terrifying and dark, began to click into place in Hiruzen's mind. A hidden player. A destabilised Kiri. A Mizukage whose hold was slipping.
And then came Shiba's final, ominous thought, delivered with the cold certainty of a shogi master predicting the endgame ten moves in advance.
"At this rate… with the war ended and his power base this fractured… Hiroshi won't remain Mizukage for long."
Hiruzen froze, the pipe halfway to his lips. The implication hit him not like a wave, but like a slow, creeping frost, icing over his veins. The war was over, but the victory was already rotting from within. The real threat wasn't just the visible armies of Stone, Sand and Lightning; it was the shadows gathering in the mist, the puppeteer who had just revealed themselves by moving a piece no one else had seen, and the terrifying political vacuum about to be created in a village of assassins.
A vulnerable Kage meant a power grab. A power grab in Kiri meant a coup. A coup meant a new, unpredictable, and likely far more ruthless regime rising to power on an island shrouded in blood and secrecy. The world had not just become peaceful; it had become infinitely more dangerous.
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