The uproar woke Uchiha Jin.
It was not the soft, polite clatter of the village at rest but the hard, urgent staccato of running feet, the shouted names, the low metallic hum of alarm. Outside his window torches flared like a second dawn. Something had broken the night.
He sat up without ceremony. For a second his mind checked the most immediate thing — the system's panel, chakra readouts, the warmth of the bed — then a colder thought pushed through: Hinata Aya. He had finished the night's work and gone to sleep satisfied; the rest was supposed to be somebody else's problem.
Now it sounded like the whole clan was awake.
In the courtyard the Uchiha guard moved with clipped efficiency. ANBU and Jonin streamed past the gate, lacquered armor and dark masks flickering. Someone shouted his name. Footsteps pounded toward the Uchiha compound.
Shisui was at his door before Jin had a chance to stand. His face was pale, eyes wide in a way Jin had rarely seen. Kazama and Aya were with him, breathless.
"Jin," Shisui said without preamble, voice a tight thread, "the Hyūga—there's been an attack. Nine dead. Nine Byakugan gone."
The words were a hit in the chest. Hot and then very cold. Jin felt the room narrow, the air thicken.
He stood slowly. The bed creaked. "How bad?"
"Core area. Main-house vicinity," Nara Kazama said. He was unusually steady. "It's a massacre. The elders are already—" He stopped. There were things you couldn't say calmly. The Hyūga elders' fury was its own cataclysm.
Jin's mouth went dry and something like a pleasant boredom slid away. He slotted two facts together and they made a third: the attack would draw every kind of scrutiny — Hyūga, Konoha, elders of every clan, and the Hokage's men. If the Byakugan had been taken, powerful eyes were missing from the world; the Hyūga main family would not be appeased. The witch-hunt would begin.
"Shisui," Jin said, his voice flat, "how quickly will Hiashi move? Where is the investigation directed?"
Shisui exhaled. "Hiashi's already called the clan council. They want heads tonight — the patrolers, the branch guards. They're talking executions." He let the word hang like glass. "They want someone to blame immediately."
"And Konoha?" Hinata Aya's face had gone white; she clutched her sleeves. Jin's answer to her came from the parts of his brain that had learned to navigate power: "Hokage-level attention. This touches every treaty and balance. Sarutobi will be called. Danzo will smell leverage. Fugaku will watch for the clan's advantage."
Silence settled. Outside a bell tolled in slow, terrible intervals — a signal, perhaps, that something irreplaceable had been lost.
Jin moved without melodrama. He pulled on a robe and stepped out with them. The compound swarmed: elders gathering, Jonin in harsh knots of heated conversation, the Sentinels concentrating on the Hyūga direction like compass needles. Word traveled quicker than lantern light.
Near the gate a messenger from the Hyūga arrived, stamping snow off a cloak. He delivered the accusation to Uchiha Fugaku in curt, trembling words. Fugaku's expression was unreadable; he spoke softly into a hand. Within minutes an order moved like a shadow — the Uchiha were on alert, but Fugaku's jaw tightened not with rage but calculation. This was a current that could be ridden.
Inside the Hyūga compound, the scene was worse than the rumors had promised. Torches showed up the white of severed eyes, the smashed silk of ceremonial garments, the shock on faces that had been bred to compose themselves. Hiashi moved among his people like a man with no map; rage burned him, but so did a deeper terror. The clan had been breached in the one place they believed safest.
The elders' voices rose to a roar. "Execute the patrol!" someone shouted. "Whoever failed," another insisted. Blood needed an accounting, and the Hyūga heart was an old, precise machine for blame.
Hiashi stopped them. The main head's knuckles were white on his staff. His voice cut across them — not weak, but raw. "We will not spill more Hyūga blood on a single night without proof." He saw the eyes on him — the elders, the frightened branch families, the clansmen who wanted someone to punish. "We will find the murderer. But we will not condemn the living in a fever."
His restraint landed like a stone. It bought minutes, hours. Everyone needed minutes.
Minutes were what Jin had, too. He moved through them with a cold efficiency. The facts he already owned:
— The killer wanted Byakugan — likely to display them, to sell them, or to use them.
— Whoever took them was either extremely skilled, sometimes aided by inside information, or reckless enough to burn dozens of eyes in a single night.
— The Hyūga's immediate reaction would be to lash inward — punish branch patrols — but once the scent led outwards, the situation touched Konoha politics.
He had created the immediate crisis; now he needed to bend the fallout.
Shisui's eyes cut to him. "Jin. What did you do?"
Jin did not look guilty in the way a coward looks guilty; he looked like someone rearranging a chessboard. "I did what had to be done," he said. He hesitated, then chose direction: realignment over confession. "Listen — if the clan blames the branch patrols, they will execute them. That will not stop the investigation; it will only bury it in family fury. Hiashi will look desperate; Danzo will say Konoha's leaders are weak. Fugaku will use the chaos to accelerate the Uchiha claims." He counted off the consequences like a ledger. "We need to create a story that calms the main family's hunger for revenge and redirects scrutiny away from anything that could be traced back to me."
"And that story is?" Kazama asked.
Jin's mouth flattened. He had to be quick, and his plan had to be tidy.
"We claim evidence of an external attack," Jin said. "Kumogakure raiders were known to slip in two years ago. Someone can attribute the penetrations and the missing eyes to a Kiri–Kumo skullduggery operation. If the Hyūga believe foreign thieves took the Byakugan, they will ask the Hokage to retaliate — not purge their own patrols. The village will be forced to cooperate, and Danzo will have to choose between public war and hidden manipulation. That buys us breathing room."
Shisui's jaw clicked. "You mean fake a foreign signature."
"Not fake." Jin shook his head. "Plant convincing artifacts, use the swords we collected from Kirigakure as proof, and we'll manufacture a trail. The Hyūga elders will accept a narrative that leaves them dignity — outraged at outsiders, not themselves. The Hokage will send investigators and negotiations, not immediate executions."
Hinata's face went ashen and wet. "You would blame other villages for this?"
"We'll make it plausible," Jin said. "And we'll make sure it cannot be traced back to us." He flicked his eyes toward the Uchiha guard. "If even a hint ties back to the Uchiha, Fugaku will be cheered into action. We need to be invisible."
Nara Kazama's voice held a new edge. "This is dangerous. If Danzo finds the planted trail is false…"
"Then we will have a different answer ready," Jin said calmly. "Danzo will always sniff; he is Root, and he loves to dig. We have two tasks tonight: one, make the Hyūga accept an external culprit; two, misdirect the beginning of the trail so that only a few scattered Kiri blades and the evidence of swordsmen appear. And three — if anyone insists on DNA or clan proof, we will burn it down to ash." He did not relish arson, but he was precise about outcomes.
Shisui's hand tightened reflexively on the hilt at his hip. "You know that a false flag could start a war."
"I know," Jin said. "And I know Hiashi wants his clan intact. He will prefer targeted vengeance against an enemy, not self-cleansing. The Hokage will also prefer that route. That keeps us out of an immediate blood purge."
Hinata whispered, "And the people we killed?"
"You ask as if they were strangers," Jin said quietly. There was a pause in which something like regret flickered across his face, then vanished. "We minimize the damage to the living and to our cover. We'll make sure the Hyūga find the killers outside their walls. For Aya — I will make sure your name is clear."
Shisui's fingers moved against Jin's sleeve. He didn't like it, but his expression sharpened into resolve. "Do it cleanly. Don't give Danzo a handle."
They worked with the urgency of people who build false roofs before a storm: Jin ordered the collection of Kirigakure blades, the placement of a few stolen artifacts he had kept, instructions to an agent in the night who knew how to leave tracks that looked Kiri-made. Nara Kazama used his clan's shadows to mask footprints; Hinata, trembling, supplied maps of guard routes and details about which patrols the blame should fall upon to make the narrative credible.
All the while, Jin used Observation Haki to map the emotional state of the elders and the rhythms of rumor. It let him place his manipulations where they would stick.
By dawn, the first, tidy thread of a story had a head and a tail: foreign raiders had stolen the Byakugan. The Hyūga, enraged but relieved of the need to execute their own, demanded recompense and investigative support. The Hokage would move cautiously, as always, with diplomacy — not summary executions.
It was a fragile arrangement — a bandage over a gaping wound — but it bought Jin what he wanted most: time.
Time to get stronger. Time for contingencies. Time to make sure that, when the next crisis came, he would no longer be the man who had to steal eyes and run in the night.
He looked at Shisui, at Kazama, at Aya. "This night belongs to the Hyūga," he said softly. "Tomorrow belongs to us."
Shisui's eyes flickered with something like pain and pride. "Don't sleep too easy, Jin. This will circle back."
"Everything circles back," Jin replied, and for the first time in a long while, his smile was not lazy — it was a promise.
Behind them, the village woke. Men and women moved to knot the story into law. Somewhere in the Hokage office Sarutobi Hiruzen was already being told the outline, and behind him Danzo's fingers tapped on a table. The pieces would fall where pieces always fell — in complicated, human ways.
Jin folded himself back toward sleep with one calculation fixed in his chest: the blade of choice had been drawn. The next moves belonged to those who could see the board, and now he could see several turns ahead.