Late in the afternoon, dust motes drifted in the air as Arthur sat in his throne chair. His head was tilted sideways while resting his jaw against his knuckles, and he was entirely still.
Was he perhaps deep in thought or meditating? No, he was sleeping.
Ever since he'd returned from the past, he had been managing almost everything by himself. And the demands were persistent: days and nights awake, cycling between training, reviewing border security, and signing endless stacks of administrative paperwork.
It was a taxing existence that eventually took its toll on his modified body.
Soon, the doors creaked open as Brie stepped into the hall. She was carrying a thick stack of paper.
"Excuse me, lord Arthur, but I finally finished those research notes in the lab today."
But when she walked down, preparing to deliver her work, she blinked to see him sleeping.
This was the first time she had ever seen him in such a tranquil state. He looked almost normal.
"My lord, are you actually...?" She started to ask but caught herself. In case he truly was resting, the last thing she wanted to do was disturb him. "Wow," she whispered to the empty room. "He really must have done a lot this week."
She stepped quietly to the side of the dais and quietly set the papers down. Then she sat down on the edge of the steps, wrapping her arms around her knees. The silence of the room invited thought as she looked at the man on the throne and began to consider all the things they had gone through.
Brie, as many understood, was the first of his followers that wasn't an animal.
"A lot of things had happened, huh?" she asked herself softly.
Arthur had not kept all of his history a secret from her. So she began to look back at his deeds all the way from when he first set foot inside the Leaf Village.
He was a nobody at the time. He had tried to be someone decent by one day attempting to rescue a slave woman from being raped by a corrupt Leaf shinobi. But the shinobi world did not reward heroics. The girl herself was corrupt. When the bandits arrived, she panicked and blamed Arthur for her bondage just to save her own skin.
Arthur was thrown into a prison cell because of that, where they intended to sell him as a slave to the Water Country.
Sitting in that cell, chained to the stone, made him understand that morality in this world was a fictional concept. It was there he had made a decision: survive no matter the cost.
When he finally broke out and escaped his captors, he came across another trapped girl named Yukimi Iburi. Since she belonged to a clan that could turn their bodies into smoke, Arthur saw an asset.
So he slew her in secret and harvested her Kekkei Genkai.
The process of integrating her blood was dangerous, but it worked because her blood in particular was rich. And it was his first taste of borrowed power.
When he finally made it to the Leaf Village, he found the others, people he claimed to be the closest thing to his friends. They had also called themselves his friends, but Arthur felt no real connection to them.
Unlike him, they had never been betrayed, nor had they ever sat in a slaver's cage. They were playing their own game, so he couldn't trust them.
So he bided his time in silence as he played the part of an average Genin. He even unintentionally helped a girl named Jada Uchiha awaken the Sharingan.
An act like that made him understand that he could not fall behind to anyone, so he broke into Hokage Manor and learned the Flying raijin from the Scroll of Seals.
Then he fought an Ōtsutsuki named Jasper. While Arthur managed to hold his own physically, Jasper had not been fully trying, proving Arthur was fundamentally still weak.
He needed to grow, yet the village was restricting him thanks to the third Hokage's Crystal Ball technique. So Arthur tried resigning as a ninja after he wasn't given a standard team in the academy.
Yet Hiruzen saw Arthur's potential and refused to let him quit. Hiruzen therefore set him off on a solo mission, hoping the road would clear his head and make him reconsider his career.
Arthur used that exact opportunity to hunt outside the country. He tracked down the rogue swordsman Raiga Kurosuki, got help from an Anbu following him to defeat Raiga, then slew Raiga's companion, Ranmaru, to take the boy's eyes—acquiring Arthur his second Kekkei Genkai and Raiga's Boltswords.
When Arthur returned to the Leaf alone, he hid his tracks perfectly. There were suspicions since the Anbu never came back with Arthur, but there was no proof he had done anything since Arthur was never told about the Anbu to begin with.
When the Chūnin Exams were to commence, there was a turning point. Arthur was placed on a random team of generic Genin. He passed the written test like all the others, but the real work began in the Forest of Death.
It was there he finally got the chance to meet the infamous Orochimaru, who was disguised as a Grass ninja named Shion.
Arthur's supposed friends knew Orochimaru was coming for Sasuke. They thought they could outsmart the narrative, so they warned the Leaf Village. The village, therefore, set a trap in the forest to capture the Sannin.
But Arthur found Orochimaru first and warned the Sannin about the ambush.
Orochimaru, pragmatic as ever, changed his plan by hiding in the shadows until the very last second to plant the curse mark on Sasuke without drawing a single blade.
Now all Arthur had to do was advance in the ranks to enact his long-term plots. That required him to finish the exams. But his random teammates were incompetent. While he was busy with Orochimaru, they managed to get their heaven scroll taken by Team 10—Shikamaru, Ino, and Chōji.
His teammates blamed him because he had vanished at the start. That only made him sorely displeased. They were dead weight, so he did what was actually allowed in these exams: he killed them.
Afterwards, he tracked Team 10 through the woods.
When he found them, he offered them a choice to hand over the scrolls. They refused, so he was left with no other choice but to kill Shikamaru and Ino in the process.
Arthur didn't particularly care about their futures or their families since they had nothing to do with his original goal.
Now with the scrolls in his possession, he advanced to the preliminaries.
The battles in the tower were far different than the history Arthur knew. But by the end of it, he found himself matched against Chōji, where he defeated the boy with a single punch, advancing to the finals.
Even then, looking at the other competitors, Arthur felt the limitations of his strength. He was still weak compared to the bigger ninjas of this world.
With the time frame given to train before the finals, he performed the Summoning technique without a contract and was reverse summoned to the Cayman Jungles.
Brie remembered Arthur describing the place before she arrived months later. It was a land inhabited by a tribe of intelligent primates.
Arthur didn't care about their culture or their society. His main goal for coming to their territory was to harness Sage Chakra to acquire his own Sage Mode.
So he spent many days in their domain. Through submerging himself in their special, boiling hot spring water and enduring the agonizing pressure of natural energy, he had finally achieved that legendary transformation.
But he didn't stop there. He never stopped at just taking what he needed.
These primates knew his face. They knew his chakra signature. And their king, Enma, was deeply linked to the Leaf Village. Enma was Hiruzen's personal summon. If that monkey spoke to the Hokage, Arthur's presence and new power would be revealed.
So he performed an act of absolute pragmatism and exterminated them. Brie was shocked when she found out that he had single-handedly burned their homes and broke their bones until the jungle was quiet.
Only one young ape was left—a baby monkey he had named Koko—just so he would have a tether to a summoning animal when he needed it.
"I sure hope he doesn't kill Koko one day," Brie murmured, looking at the floor.
Almost everyone had come to like Koko because of her childish antics. The thought of her dying chilled Brie since she knew well of Arthur's coldness.
The memory of what happened next was still fresh in her mind.
Arthur had eventually returned to the Leaf Village for the finals. There, the past finally caught up to him.
The fathers of Ino and Shikamaru had not stopped looking for answers. That's what led them to finding their children's bodies in the forest. They were intelligent, seasoned shinobi who had gone as far as digging into Chōji's traumatized memories and piecing the puzzle together.
That's how they found out Arthur had killed his own team, slaughtered their children, and had worked with Orochimaru. But they weren't going to call him out just yet.
When the day of the finals arrived, the stadium was packed with nobles, villagers, and shinobi. Arthur stepped into the arena for his match against Sasuke Uchiha.
But before the proctor could begin the fight, Inoichi and Shikaku arrived on the scene with their top-level clansmen to trap Arthur in place. They then presented the overwhelming evidence in front of everyone.
Hiruzen had refused to believe the claims at first. He wanted to see the best in Arthur. But as the evidence mounted, Hiruzen remembered the Anbu operative who had never returned. That's when he finally understood: Arthur was a monster hiding in plain sight.
"The world will regret having made me the villain…"
Those were the last words the Hokage heard before Orochimaru began his unexpected invasion.
Thankfully for Arthur, he had planted that seed, allowing the Sannin to adjust his plans by keeping the Sand Village out of the loop.
Such a plot was the perfect diversion for Arthur to slip from their hands.
In the throne room, Brie looked up at the man sleeping on the throne. It was hard to believe that he was barely half her age.
More so, that was just the start of his long journey.