Time shifts back to a few days earlier.
Ame no Kuni front line.
The low, leaden sky sagged. Endless cold rain drenched the sodden earth of Ame no Kuni, turning the muddy trenches into wide, murky pits.
The air reeked of wet soil, blood, and the stubborn stench of rotting medicinal herbs. In Konoha's hastily assembled command post, oil lamps guttered and threw dim light.
A huge situation map, its edges soaked by rain, sprawled across the table. Tiny flags marking friend and foe bristled over it like a hedgehog's spines.
Shimura Danzō sat at the head. Days of strain had swollen the bags under his eyes like two overripe prunes, and bloodshot veins crawled across the whites. Even the mantle signifying Konoha's supreme battlefield command was spattered with dried mud and ink.
"Trash. An entire platoon, wiped out again by that old hag Chiyo's poison mist." Danzō slammed a fist into the oak tabletop. The dull thud sent several dossiers skidding off a corner.
"Hanzō's poison rain piled over Suna's stiffening toxins, this damned Ame no Kuni is one giant gas chamber. What comes in every day is not the wounded, it is meat waiting to die." He pinched the bridge of his nose. His temples throbbed. He felt like an old wolf trapped in a pit, snarling without relief.
Watching the death toll climb coldly on reports, hearing the wails from the front, this was a slow knife carving flesh. It would drive a shinobi mad.
What made it feel like swallowing flies was Tsunade.
The granddaughter of the Shodai, grandniece of the Nidaime, Konoha's princess, now blazed like a beacon in the field hospital.
Every time that golden hair appeared in a tent of the gravely wounded, the green glow of Shōsen no Jutsu (Mystical Palm Technique) bloomed, and that soft yet massive Katsuyu split and spread to cover the injured, the camp would rise in honest gratitude. "Thank you, Tsunade-sama."
Those words pricked Danzō's ears like needles.
It was him, Shimura Danzō, sitting here, wringing his mind dry to analyze intelligence, deploy forces, bearing the pressure of supreme command, stitching together a collapsing line.
Yet who received the thanks of those mud leggers?
Tsunade.
It was she who dragged men the reports had already consigned to the dead back from the Gate of Hell, again and again.
Her names, "saint of medical ninjutsu," "slug princess," spread among soldiers and junior officers, and even began to overshadow him, the commander in the center.
That honor, that popular support, should have been the harvest after victory, the laurel that lifted Danzō to the summit.
And now?
All of it was flowing to Tsunade, a flood he could not ignore.
"Damn woman." Danzō swore under his breath, a gleam of gloom cutting through his eyes.
More than once, in the insomnia of exhausted nights, a dangerous thought born of frustrated jealousy had stirred. If, if there were no Tsunade, casualties would spike, morale would crumble, the war would turn even bloodier. Yet in the end, the honor of a pyrrhic victory, or of grinding the enemy down, would fall wholly to Danzō. He was the commander of this meat-grinder.
The thought flickered up, and he stamped it out.
"No." He forced it down at once.
Without Tsunade, the front would collapse immediately.
Chiyo's new toxins kept coming. Hanzō's rain-nin were ghosts.
With no medical pillar from Tsunade and that disgusting but indispensable Katsuyu, they would never last to the day Suna ran dry.
If the front shattered for lack of medical support, Danzō knew the man in the Hokage's office would not spare him.
That seemingly gentle Hiruzen would seize the chance and dump every charge and chamber pot on Danzō's head.
"Hokage's aide fails, leading to the collapse of the Ame no Kuni front"?
That one line could end his political life on the spot and nail him to a pillar of shame forever. What talk of Hokage then.
"Danzō-sama, urgent transmission." A masked Root operative slipped into the tent like a ghost, knelt on one knee, and presented a tightly sealed scroll with both hands. Rain dripped from his cold armor onto the floor.
Danzō's heart sank. At times like this, the word "urgent" was the last thing he wanted.
He snatched the scroll, poured chakra into his fingertips, and ripped the sealing script open.
The scroll unfurled.
The first was from Konoha's Hokage Tower, bearing the flaming seal of the Sandaime, Hiruzen.
Special order. One of the Sannin, Tsunade-hime, upon receipt is to immediately disengage from the front and return to Konoha headquarters at once, without fail. Signed: Hokage Hiruzen.
(Addendum: matter is classified. Details will be given in person.)
"Recall Tsunade?" Danzō's brows knotted.
The front was deadlocked, the poison threat unresolved. Recall Orochimaru and Jiraiya, fine, but summon away Tsunade, the medical core, at this exact moment? Had the Hiruzen gone mad?
He burned to know why, but the scroll held only the cold order and the word "classified."
A fresh sting of being shut out from the inner circle rose. He was the highest commander on the battlefield, yet he was not told why a core general had to be pulled back urgently.
He almost tore open the second scroll in anger.
This one came from Root's secret node in Konoha, his true ears.
Its phrasing was colder and more detailed.
Though the body was not to be reproduced, a handful of conclusory phrases pierced Danzō's mind like ice awls:
… mental power outburst … a massive psychic shock blanketing the entire village … preliminary center point of the burst, Kamiyama Ryo … triggered widespread panic, chaos, hidden damage to infrastructure … estimated energy level of the shock source, Kage class or higher … destructive power and range assessed as follows, data attached … extreme hazard …
"Kamiyama… Ryo?" Danzō clenched the scroll so hard it almost tore.
The name branded itself on his memory like a red-hot iron.
In an instant he recalled the smoke-filled office years ago, how highly he had valued that fearsome commoner brat, how he had asked Hiruzen to place that born Root seedling in his hand.
And then?
"The light on him, it grows best under the sun, inheritor of the Will of Fire. Hiruzen takes all." That damned refusal, heavy with moral superiority, rang in his ears.
And that damned line.
"I, Danzō, refuse."
Smothered.
A suffocation that could flip his blood surged from his soles to his crown.
Years flashed like lantern slides. His desire to bring the boy named Ryo into Root, Hiruzen's rejection, the pivot to demanding control of the jinchūriki Uzumaki Kushina, Hiruzen parading Mito to refuse again, and finally, even the bright prospect of Ryo was cut off when Tsunade took him as a disciple. All that bottled fury found a fuse in this instant.
"Ah."
Bloodshot eyes drilled into the name on the scroll, Ryo. This brat had thrown Konoha into a terror like that.
But this power. This potential. This report's assessment of Kage and above.
It was power Danzō had recognized years ago, tried to claim for Root, to forge into Konoha's sharpest hidden blade.
It should have been his. Root's.
Now that strength, that fang he had craved, had once again been snatched and flaunted by the one man he hated most, Hiruzen.
"Hiruzen." Danzō ground his back molars. His breath came hard. His chest heaved, every inhalation heavy with resentment and venom.
"You stole from me again. You greedy thief. That power, that Ryo, should have been my blade. Mine." Helpless rage and the sting of betrayal gnawed at him.
He could already see Hiruzen in the Konoha office, smugly admiring the tool named Ryo, while pushing all blame for rear-area disruption onto someone else.
Why? Why did all good assets and seedlings fall into Hiruzen's lap? Disgusting.
He shielded the jinchūriki. He hoarded a potential stock like Ryo. Was the fat harvest all his orchard?
Blood rushed to Danzō's head.
He hammered the table. The oil lamp shuddered hard, light and shadow careening across the tent walls.
(To be continued.)
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◇ One bonus chapter will be released for every 200 Power Stones.
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