Pre-Chapter A/N:Welcome to October, guys! Let's smash whatever goals we've set ourselves this year. More chapters on my patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)— same username as here and link in bio. Experimenting with two chapters a week, we'll see how long I can keep this up for.
"Prepare for a march down to Suna," I said the second the news reached me, because there was no other thing that could be done. Chiyo had done her piece, she had done her worst, and instead of an amusing bug that I believed I could swat dead at any time, she had gone and made an actual problem of herself. She had gotten my attention, and through her, I would show the world that my attention was not something anyone wanted to have. Not something anyone survived having.
"We can't," Uraume said. She had come in here with Toshiro, Uzume, and Shikahime by her sides. A group I felt was because she didn't want to be alone when breaking the news to me, but now I was beginning to realize they were not for the news itself, but for what happened after.
"What do you mean we can't?" I tried not to put any of the rage I felt into my voice. If she was refusing me, then there had to be a good reason.
"Look at yourself, Shori. Even you aren't anywhere close to fighting fit. The rest of our forces are worse. We've taken the city for the time being, but Iwa saboteurs are a dime a dozen. They keep rigging buildings up to explode around us. A task that has probably been made much easier by the fact that you and the Raikage were competing to see who could tear down more of the village in your fight. And then there is the fact that we haven't found the escaped civilians and children yet. They have some means of avoiding detection that fools even the Byakugan, and the Inuzuka say the scents lead all over the place. The Aburame are trying to track them now, but we don't know how long that will take. To be honest, Shori, we can't attack Suna now. We'd get destroyed," she said. I looked from her to Uzume, to Shika, and even to Toshiro. They were all in agreement. And they were all wrong.
"So you would have me do nothing while Tsunade's blood cries out for vengeance?"
"We would have you be the Hokage that Konoha needs. We won a great victory here, but it wasn't without cost. We've lost so much already. If we start another battle now, we might win, but there will be no Konoha afterwards."
"You're exaggerating," I said.
"No. I've seen the accounts. I've seen the costs. We need to get this generation back to train the next one, or Konoha will essentially be starting from scratch. We cannot afford more war."
"You would have me make peace with my cousin's killer? You would have me fail her in death just as I failed her in life?" I said with a sigh.
"No. You don't have to make peace. You just have to recognize that Konoha cannot go to battle now. We are asking you to put the needs of the village above everything else. This generation needs to pass down their skills, and they need to do it fast, or we'd find ourselves in trouble," she said.
"Then I will do it myself. I'll take Suna by storm and make what the Raikage and I did here look like a warning shot," I said. I could feel it within me. I'd never tried to fire one before, but something told me that in two or three Tailed Beast Bombs, Suna would have little left standing to contest me anymore.
"And you can use a Tailed Beast Bomb with your power, can you?" I heard Kurama's voice in my head.
'What?'
"You forget our agreement way too often, brat. I let you use my chakra to fight your enemies, and then you fight my enemies when I decide I want you to."
'Yes, I remember that being our deal. And Suna is my enemy.'
"Maybe. Maybe that is so. But you will not use my chakra to slaughter thousands of civilians. Not when I will be able to feel the pain of those lives being snuffed out. Killing some humans in the middle of combat is one thing, but setting out to kill thousands of them for vengeance against a single woman? Is that the peace in this world that you wondered about bringing?"
'I never said I was all that interested in peace. I said it would be fun to fulfill the Sage's dream, but peace isn't really my business, Kurama.'
"So you won't help me kill this monster that took my cousin from me?"
"The second we find this Chiyo woman, I will flood your body with enough of my chakra to light up a small village. But that is for when we find her. We shall not use the innocents of a village as leverage for that."
'And since when did you care about humans or keeping them alive?' I asked.
"My father, for whatever reason, cared about your wretched species. Why do you think my siblings and I refrained from destroying you all the first dozen times you dared to cross the line? We've had more than enough chances to do it, trust me. We could allow you to gather in your cities in your numbers, and only a few Tailed Beast Bombs would bring everything on this planet to its knees. And then who would poison the seas, who would flood my nose with the smell of negative emotions, who would create the art and beauty that your species does so effortlessly? Hagoromo believed in your kind, and I will do the same as he did. For better or for worse, I will believe. And that belief means I will not permit my chakra to be used in senseless slaughter. And I will not permit you to engage in senseless slaughter while I remain within you as well."
"Come on, man. Come on." I didn't even know I'd spoken out loud until I saw the startled looks on my friends' faces.
"Leave," I said, and to their credit, they wasted no time in doing so. I closed my eyes and opened them right in front of Kurama. We were at the beach. The same beach I'd met that woman what felt like a lifetime ago.
"Really, man?" I asked him, looking up at the massive fox. It had taken me a while to get used to his size. Because saying he was massive was understating things. The whales were massive. Even the Boss Whales and the Great Whale Sage were only a tiny bit bigger than he was. And they were sea creatures. Being a creature of the sea meant they didn't have to deal with things like gravity in the same way that would have limited their growth. It also meant that since I only saw them underwater, I never had the full scale of their size made so apparent to me as it presently was with Kurama.
"Yes. Really. I have seen your memories. What happens when you turn unfettered destructive power on a city of people. I have only seen representations of it from your memories, and I have no desire for my power to be used to bring that kind of pain to this world."
"What are you talking about?" I asked, not quite certain of what he was referring to. Was he talking about the Ten-Tails' Tailed Beast Bomb and what it did to Frost? Those places had been abandoned.
"Hiroshima and Nagasaki," he said with a growl.
"Oh, you meant nukes. It's not the same thing, is it? That was science, and this is our power."
"Is it not the same? You meant to destroy Suna with my power. You meant to show the world that you were one to be feared, a being whose ill will they would not want to garner by any means. Tell me how it is different."
"The nuclear bomb caused an arms race. It led to a different era of war. What I do to Suna could end war as far as Konoha is concerned. No one would want to fuck with a village whose Kage can level a whole city with a single attack. The capital cities would fear us. The shinobi villages would fear us. Peace in our time," I said.
"What did the Soviet Union of your world do the second they saw the Americans release their bomb?" he asked with a growl.
"They tried to make their own," I said. But that wasn't possible here—
"And why isn't it?"
"You need a perfect jinchuriki to do it. I doubt they're just going to stumble into one."
"No, but they will search and search. They will seal my brothers and sisters over and over again with the hopes of replicating the power you want to so carelessly display. And one day they will succeed. And one day after that, you will see the power you seek to show the world brought down on your own village. On your own people."
"You are the most powerful of the Tailed Beasts. Together, we'd beat back anything they bring," I said. Nothing he was saying made any sense. What did it matter if they tried? We are stronger. Konoha still had Kushina with the Eight-Tails and Isane with the Four-Tails.
"You still are not listening, Shorirama Senju. Power invites challenge. I will not consent to having my power used in such a manner. That is it," he said, metaphorically slamming the door shut on the conversation.
"You think I won't find some way to make Suna pay without you? How long do you think it's going to take me to design a seal to send them back to the fucking Stone Age? How many Rasenshurikens do you think it will take me to smite them? It will be harder without your help, but not impossible. Far from impossible."
"Indeed. Because you find yourself so upset by their actions. By what Chiyo did, huh?"
"Yes. Yes, of course."
"I'm the one person you cannot lie to, Shorirama. Even if you manage to lie to yourself, you can never lie to me. So tell me again. Who are you angry at?" I froze at his words. I wanted to say Suna. I was so fucking pissed at them. How dare they take my cousin from me? But it wasn't true. Not really, at least.
"Chiyo. She had no business fucking being here. Yeah, I killed her son and whatever, but she didn't go crazy in canon when Sakumo did it, and besides, it was war. They were shinobi. They were ready to die for their villages, just like I was ready to kill for mine, and that was it. We fought, they lost. She should have just taken it and moved on."
"Really? Just like you're taking Tsunade's death and moving on?"
"Different things. If she'd died to an Iwa ninja or something, it would make sense. But Suna had no fucking business being here. Chiyo had only struck at her because she felt it would hurt me. Is it not reasonable that I want to teach her a lesson for daring to try something like that in the first place?"
"You do a good job of avoiding the real questions, Shorirama. But tell me, who are you angry at?"
"Chiyo."
"You killed her son and daughter-in-law. Left her grandson an orphan. Who are you angry at, Shori?"
"Suna."
"They have no business with this. Chances are that Chiyo did this either by tricking her kage into giving her permission or she had defeated everyone else to the point that no one could argue with her when she said what she wanted. So tell me, Shorirama Senju, who are you angry at?"
"Damn it, I'm angry at myself. Is that what you want to hear? That I am fucking pissed with myself for even bringing her here in the first place? That the last time my cousin and I spoke, we were at each other's throats and I never got to apologize before she died?"
"Is that what you want to hear? That I regret fighting with her over the Hiruzen thing? That I regret not trusting her enough to leave her in the village like I had wanted to. Now she is dead. Now my cousin is dead, and I will have to tell Mito that another one of her family members is dead. That I got her killed fighting in a war. That she's lost a grandchild to Konoha's war machine after I promised her nothing like this would happen on my watch. That I could do nothing while some crazy puppeteer from Suna who had no fucking business being here stabbed her, doused her in acid, and then decapitated her?"
"Yes. Because it is the truth. And now that you know that you are the one you are truly angry at, do you see why causing indiscriminate destruction does nothing to help your problem? You will blame yourself no less after you cause the damage… You will be no less angry. You will hate yourself no less. So instead of doing what you want to do now and rush into things, what if you took the time to think things through first? Rest, recoup your strength, consolidate this victory, revel in it, and when the time comes, you will have your revenge—whatever shape that ends up taking."
"And you will not help?"
"Did you intend to use me as a crutch when we first met, Shorirama Senju? What use have I for a weak partner? I have seen your memories of Madara more times than I can count, and even with my chakra, you are still not strong enough. Either you will get stronger and we will win, or you will remain weak, and we will lose," he said.
"How long have you been thinking about this?" I asked. Because this could not have been a spur-of-the-moment thing. It had to be something that he'd been thinking about for a minute or so now.
"You almost lost to the Raikage there. Naruto, with only the first stage of my chakra cloak, was able to hold his own and then was able to win with just Sage Mode," he said, looking at me.
"That was a very different fight. He was stronger than whatever it was Naruto fought. Maybe it was Edo Tensei not managing to bring him back at full power, or maybe it was Naruto having a stronger element of surprise, or he could just be plain stronger thanks to the same butterfly effect shit Chiyo seems to have going on," I said, shooting down that point. In the wider scheme of things, I had to be at least as strong as Naruto was when he fought Juubito. That was about Stage Two Chakra Cloak, yeah.
"Do that math again, but do it without my chakra," Kurama said, leaning down towards me.
"What?"
"You just had a thought that you were as strong as Stage Two Chakra Cloak Naruto. I said do the math again. How strong are you without my chakra, Shorirama Senju?" he asked.
I began to think about it. That was a much different question. Without his chakra meant I had Sage Mode, but a less powerful one than the purer Sage Mode I could get if I balanced it against a fusion of my chakra and his. I also had the Hiraishin. But I had to stop deceiving myself. I was good enough with it—but I was no Minato. Using it in combat meant I had to spend time thinking about it. It was a useful means of dodging attacks, but in truth, that was most of what I used it for, where Minato in canon had turned it into a whole fighting style. No, my bread and butter would always be lethal taijutsu and overwhelming ninjutsu. And where did that put me?
"Stage One Chakra Cloak Naruto?" I asked.
He actually chuckled.
"You wish. You'd beat Sage Naruto, probably. I give you good odds. But that Stage One Chakra Cloak? The one that had enough chakra to send shadow clones to every part of a war effort while still fighting on his own against a Rinnegan wielder and six jinchuriki? You'd lose, Shorirama Senju."
"So what are you trying to say? That I'm weak? I train every day to get stronger as it is. What is telling me what I haven't achieved supposed to do?"
"It's supposed to teach you that you have bigger problems than finding people to blame for your mistakes and failings. Tsunade is dead. You think it is your fault. You might even be right. But she is dead, and there is nothing you can do about it. Wasting precious time with silly and dangerous acts of violence against innocents would both fail to help you feel better and might come to hurt you down the line. Madara remains alive, and I assure you that you are far from at the level necessary to even be more than a stumbling block when facing that man."
"Everything comes down to him, huh? How come you get to focus on your revenge while I don't get to focus on mine?" I sniped.
"Because I have asked you to kill Madara, not the whole Uchiha clan," he roared back.
I took a step backwards while the giant fox sighed to himself.
"There was no need for me to scream. I just see so much of myself in you, Shorirama. I remember the first time humanity caused me pain. I remember what I did to get over it, and I assure you it was far from pretty, and I felt no better for it. I just want you to avoid making the same mistakes I did. The same mistakes so many have. You have the potential to lead this world to so much more. A human with a true understanding of my father's dream. I used to hope for times like this. You give me hope, and you can bring that to the rest of the world. I will not ask you to abandon your revenge, but I will ask you to dig only two graves, not thousands, in your search.
A/N: And so we get some big bro Kurama to round things off a bit, yeah. Next six up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)(same username as here and link in bio), support me there and read them early.