Shikaku Nara was not crying.
If someone had walked into the Nara compound at that moment, they might have assumed the Hokage's advisor was doing exactly what he always did: sitting cross-legged on the tatami, sleeves rolled up, expression flat, surrounded by scrolls. It looked like work. It looked like calm.
It was neither.
The scrolls weren't battle reports. There were no casualty lists, no after-action summaries, no heroic last stands inked in careful script. These were merchant ledgers. Shipping manifests. Loan records. Donation tallies. The kind of paperwork civilians assumed ninja never touched.
Shikaku touched all of it.
He moved through them slowly, methodically, like a man reconstructing a crime scene that no one realized was a crime yet. Numbers were easier than blood. Numbers lied less, if you asked the right questions.
Yoshino knelt across from him, tea gone cold between them. She hadn't asked why the living room had turned into an archive. She hadn't asked why her husband hadn't slept. She knew the look on his face—the one he wore when the world stopped making sense and he decided to rebuild it anyway.
Shikaku stopped on one scroll and tapped it twice with his finger.
"See this?" he said.
Yoshino leaned in. "It looks like a temple donation."
"It's filed as one," Shikaku replied. "But the intermediary isn't religious. It's a trade guild. Fire Country interior. Grain, salt, textiles."
She frowned. "What does that have to do with—"
"The invasion," Shikaku said, finishing the thought without looking up. "Sound and Sand didn't just bankroll this with foreign money. They couldn't have. Too visible. Too traceable."
He slid another scroll beside it. Then another. A constellation of numbers formed, ugly in its precision.
"These are 'anonymous' contributions," he continued. "Moved through five hands. Washed clean. Ends up paying for logistics. Equipment. Travel."
Yoshino's voice dropped. "You're saying—"
"I'm saying," Shikaku interrupted gently, "that when Konoha failed to stop the attack, people didn't just grieve. They recalculated."
He leaned back, staring at the ceiling beams as if they might offer absolution.
"Merchants pay mission fees because they're told it's protection. A standing army. A promise." His mouth twisted. "But the walls were breached. The Hokage died. The streets burned."
Silence pressed in around them.
"So they asked a simpler question," Shikaku went on. "Why keep paying for protection that didn't work?"
Yoshino swallowed. "What did they decide instead?"
Shikaku looked back down at the scrolls. At the sums. At the quiet, patient math.
"They decided it would be cheaper to pay for results."
The words sat between them, heavy and final.
"Not armies," he added. "Not wars. Just… outcomes. If a snake causes this much damage, maybe you don't fund a village. Maybe you fund a knife."
The bell test echoed in his mind—not Kakashi's, but a deeper one, older and crueler. Supply and demand. Fear as currency.
"They're crowdfunding assassination," Shikaku said softly. "Because the state failed them."
Yoshino felt cold. "If that's happening here…"
"…then it's happening everywhere," Shikaku finished.
That was the real terror. Not that they'd been attacked—but that they'd been observed. Measured. Valued. Found wanting long before the first wall cracked.
Grief hadn't just spread. It had been weaponized. Turned into infrastructure.
In the T&I division, Inoichi Yamanaka was having a very bad day for reasons that couldn't be punched.
A stack of captured Sound scrolls sat on his desk, untouched. Not because they were dangerous—because they were useless.
"No chakra seals," his assistant said, frustration bleeding into his voice. "No imprint. No residual thought pattern. There's nothing to hook into."
Inoichi pinched the bridge of his nose. "They're blind-key encrypted."
The assistant blinked. "Meaning?"
"Meaning only the sender and recipient know how to read them," Inoichi said flatly. "No courier mind to crack. No lingering intent. Just information."
He gestured at the scrolls. "This is warfare without a carrier."
T&I had been built to break people. Interrogate memories. Peel secrets out of living brains. This—this was ink and paper laughing at them.
Inoichi turned, staring at a roster pinned to the wall. Active. Inactive. Missing.
His eyes stopped on one name.
Fū Yamanaka.
He didn't need to ask where Fū was. "Missing" was a courtesy. A fiction that made it easier to sleep.
Root didn't lose people. It consumed them.
"We built nets," Inoichi said quietly, more to himself than his assistant. "Mental nets. Thought if we cast them wide enough, nothing dangerous would slip through."
He exhaled. "Turns out the enemy isn't a fish."
The assistant hesitated. "Then what is it?"
Inoichi's gaze hardened. "The water."
Poisoned. Invisible. Already everywhere.
They crossed paths in the Hokage Tower hallway, two men who had been awake too long for different but adjacent reasons.
Shikaku looked thinner than he should have. Inoichi looked older.
Genma stood guard nearby, toothpick long since abandoned, eyes ringed with exhaustion. He nodded once to each of them, professional, hollowed out.
"If Akatsuki walked in through the gate," Inoichi said without preamble, "what else walked past us smiling?"
Shikaku didn't answer immediately. He leaned against the wall, arms folded, mind already moving pieces.
"Our sensor net works," he said finally. "For what it's designed to see."
"Hostile chakra," Inoichi said.
"Exactly." Shikaku's eyes were distant now. "But this wasn't hostile. It was transactional."
He glanced back toward the village, toward markets and homes and civilians who still swept glass out of their doorways.
"The enemy didn't hate us," Shikaku said. "They just shorted our stock."
Inoichi closed his eyes.
Genma shifted his weight, the faintest wince crossing his face as an old injury protested. The physical toll. The visible one.
Shikaku pushed off the wall. "We trusted systems," he said. "Sensors. Protocols. Predictable defenses."
"And people trusted us," Inoichi replied.
Neither of them smiled.
Somewhere down the corridor, unseen, a masked ANBU child passed silently, scroll tucked under his arm.
No one stopped him.