That night.
The fun of team selection ended quickly.
With too few students to form full three-man cells, Naruto and Konome Taketori were paired as a duo.
Naruto's joy was impossible to miss.
He flashed a sparkling grin like Might Guy himself.
Konome watched Sasuke walk away with his backpack and felt how little people shared each other's sorrows.
After tonight, that proud boy would die.
What remained would be a grieving avenger.
Old memories stirred in Konome.
The same rebellion, the same night of slaughter. Of the vast Taketori clan, only she and Kimimaro survived.
Fates so alike.
It made her quiet.
She hurried back to the Hatake compound and went nowhere else, lying flat on the bed and waiting for it to end.
Near dawn.
Only when her Byakugan saw Kakashi Hatake drag himself home did she finally sleep.
Konoha had won. Nothing had gone awry.
After the Uchiha were exterminated, Konoha would slide fully into peacetime, and her quiet growth would face no more waves.
If I were strong enough, none of this would have happened.
Her mind blurred.
In her dreams,
she stood again on the field where she first awoke.
Severed limbs. Blood everywhere.
Her father, torn in half, howled and clawed for the light.
She could not tell for a moment whether that belonged to her past life or this one.
…
Scrtch.
A pen tip gouged the paper with a sharp scratch.
Sweat beaded on Sawada Fuka's brow.
Her hand shook as she wrote.
The intelligence under her pen could shake the world.
The Uchiha, the clan that once pacified the Warring States alongside the Senju, had been wiped out. Every man, woman, and child, with only a boy named Uchiha Sasuke left alive.
She had suspected something when ANBU encircled the district.
She had not expected Konoha to move with such clean precision.
In under an hour, the clan known as Konoha's strongest was gone.
So much for unbeatable one-on-one Sharingan.
So much for the elite jonin with three tomoe.
Against overwhelming numbers, such talk meant nothing.
Dozens of chunin and jonin fought in concert. Water Release suppression, genjutsu interference, sealing arrays, surprise attacks with ninja tools.
If you were touched once,
countless clan arts, secret techniques, and unfamiliar, bizarre ninjutsu you had never even heard of piled on at once.
Battle IQ. Information analysis.
When a hundred different jutsu fly at you together, what are you going to analyze with.
A few Uchiha jonin howled for rebellion and tried to make a stand.
Waiting for them was a merciless dogpile by a hundred peers carrying hard counters to their style.
They lasted less than seven seconds.
The so-called peerless Uchiha were beaten to their knees.
Hands and feet crushed.
Chakra drained by an unknown secret art.
Steel cables looped their necks and twisted heads off clean.
Still warm, the bodies were met by specialists whose only job was to harvest eyes.
Two Uchiha, driven mad with grief, had eyes redden and chakra flare as if to trigger some ultimate technique.
The moment their chakra spiked, sensor-nin watching from afar gave the sign.
Seals came down like a storm.
Dense patterns crawled across faces and bodies as if someone were writing a novel on their skin.
After that,
the Uchiha stood like puppets and never moved again.
ANBU strength was so saturated they killed as they went and cleaned bodies at the same time. By the time the clan was erased, every Sharingan had been collected.
They even sorted them.
One-tomoe and two-tomoe filled two big jars.
Each pair of three-tomoe was bottled separately and sealed into scrolls for transport.
The mighty Uchiha, in the face of a ninja village formed by many clans large and small, were sheep in a slaughterhouse.
Even trading their lives was not an option.
Two ANBU took serious wounds. They were surrounded at once by a dozen medical-nin.
Stabilized in a few breaths. While fighting still raged here, enemies just knocked down over there were already healed and back on their feet.
Terrifying.
She had not seen it with her own eyes,
but the way her sparrow in the Academy trembled telling the tale made Sawada Fuka shake all over.
This was the power of a shinobi village.
The age when great clans ruled the Warring States was over. Any clan blind to the times would be pushed off the stage of history.
Uchiha, Senju, Uzumaki, all the same.
Fuka organized the explosive report, then slid it into a hollow pen tube.
She had only two swifts left. She had sent both back to Kumogakure days ago, and neither had returned.
By now they should have flown back.
Why was it taking so long.
Her nerves would not settle.
The first report was one thing.
The later intel on Sun-Chasing Konome was her main assignment's core. There was no room for sloppiness.
She did not know if Kumogakure would act on that risky guess.
As her worry peaked,
a soft tapping sounded at the little kitchen window.
A signal.
Her swift was back.
Fuka's eyes lit. She ran to the window.
Outside, it was indeed her bird.
A tiny scroll was tied to its leg. It pecked the glass with its beak, tap by tap.
She threw the window open and let it in.
She untied the scroll,
set food and water in front of the swift, and sat to read.
She unrolled the paper.
Unknown formulas were written across it, and three items nested inside.
A letter, a photograph, a whistle.
Fuka lifted the photo first.
A cave.
Four shinobi with Kumogakure forehead protectors had surrounded a tall youth with orange hair.
She knew him at a glance.
Jūgo, the one who lost control and destroyed her hometown.
Kumogakure had captured him.
Joy flashed in her eyes and she tore open the letter.
Pen in hand, she translated the coded lines one by one.
By the time she finished the first section, she was shaking with relief.
First, her spy work was acknowledged and commended.
Kumogakure kept its promises.
If she brought the Byakugan bearer back alive, she would be showered with wealth and honors, named a Hero of the Cloud, and watch Jūgo executed before her eyes.
Her children would be eligible to inherit the secret of Lightning Release Chakra Mode, and more.
She barely glanced at the tempting rewards.
All she wanted was to end a life lived by the knife as a spy, to avenge her family, and to live in quiet happiness.
Her wishes were that simple.
She read on.
Compared to the long list of promises, the next part was brief and clear.
The operatives had departed on elephant-birds and would reach Konoha in two days.
They were to locate the suspected Byakugan bearer and the Nine-Tails jinchuriki. If the two were together, even better. At the right moment, spread the scroll on the ground and trigger the sealing formula with blood.
Once captured, blow the bone whistle and take them back to Kumogakure aboard the elephant-birds.
The plan was not detailed, but the process was plain.
Fuka knew of the elephant-birds.
They were giant avians that lived only in Kumogakure's high mountains. Rumor said they weighed up to seven hundred kilos. Properly trained, they carried riders into the sky with ease.
So the idea was to drop from the air and fly off with the targets immediately.
Reckless.
Fuka found the plan both hasty and greedy, yet when she thought about it, it matched the Cloud's temperament.
If you were dropping straight in, speed was everything.
Best was to strike when the jinchuriki and the Byakugan bearer were together and far from Konoha's center, to avoid reinforcements.
She suddenly remembered the latest message from the sparrow assigned to watch Konome at the Academy.
In four days the Academy would hold a field survival exercise.
The two were classmates. They would use the same training ground.
Academy staff numbered maybe ten chunin, most of them theory types weak in live combat, plus a single jonin, Kazama Etsu, just out of the hospital and still unsteady.
Thinking of Training Ground Zero's vast area and its distance from Konoha's center, Sawada Fuka had a plan already forming.
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