Chapter 493: The Fourth Kazekage's End
"Tenzo, head home for tonight."
Kakashi turned toward the junior still standing behind him, whose gaze had been moving back and forth between Naruto and Satsuki since they arrived.
"Looks like Naruto has something he needs to talk to his sensei about."
Tenzo blinked, then nodded. "Right, of course." He gave Kakashi a short bow, then turned toward Naruto and Satsuki with a polite nod in their direction.
"See you tomorrow, Kakashi Senpai."
With that, he turned and walked off into the Konoha night. His silhouette faded quickly into the dark, disappearing around the corner of the street.
Kakashi turned back around to face Naruto. The glow of the night lanterns caught his silver hair, casting shifting light and shadow across the half-masked face beneath.
He spoke in that familiar, unhurried drawl of his. "All right then. What is it you actually came to tell me? I don't believe a pair of newlyweds would come looking for their old sensei just to make small talk."
"Nothing too dramatic."
Naruto's face still wore that easy, sunny smile of his. But there was something underneath it now -- something harder to name. A kind of quiet anticipation.
"It's just that certain things that weren't possible before are possible now, so I wanted to ask what Kakashi Sensei thinks."
"Things that weren't possible before?"
"Right."
Naruto nodded.
"The Sage of Six Paths has entrusted the afterlife to me."
He said it with the same calm one might use to remark on mild weather.
"So, Kakashi Sensei -- is there anyone you want to see? Anyone from the other side you'd want to bring back?"
"...Huh?"
Kakashi went completely still. He blinked. Then blinked again.
...What?
The afterlife. Entrusted. The Sage of Six Paths. Anyone you want to see. Bring back from the other side.
The words made several circuits through his brain and refused to assemble into anything coherent.
He understood each word individually. Why was it that stringing them together produced something he could not make sense of at all?
In that brief moment, his mind ran through several possibilities. Naruto was joking. Naruto was testing him. Naruto had somehow been caught in a genjutsu. Or -- he himself had somehow been caught in a genjutsu.
But if his comprehension was not the problem, then what Naruto was telling him was: he could go to the afterlife.
He could see Obito. He could see Rin. He could see... his father.
"Naruto..."
Kakashi spoke, his voice quieter than usual. That one visible eye narrowed slightly, focused entirely on the blond young man in front of him.
"That's not a funny joke."
His tone was light. But there was something underneath it -- a faint, barely there tremor that he had not intended anyone to hear, himself included.
Naruto had almost never joked with him. Not since their first meeting, not during the mission to the Land of Waves, not through the Chunin Exams, not through any of the time they had spent together since. Naruto was simply not the kind of person who made jokes about things like this.
But still.
The afterlife. Bringing people back. It was too...
"You're right," Naruto said, cutting through the tangle of his thoughts. "Hearing something like this out of nowhere -- it doesn't sound real at all."
"So let's skip the explanation and just go see for yourself."
The moment the words landed, Naruto raised one hand and gave a light, casual wave.
The air tore open.
A black gateway materialized between the three of them from nothing, an irregular oval shape, its edges bleeding with dim light, its interior a pure and bottomless dark.
Yomotsu Hirasaka.
"Come on, Kakashi Sensei." Naruto turned toward it. "Once we're there, you'll understand. Don't worry -- I've had time to renovate the place. It's not frightening at all."
He did not wait for an answer. He simply turned and stepped through the gateway in one clean motion. The dark swallowed him. Uchiha Satsuki followed without a word -- the same composure she showed everyone who was not Naruto or her parents -- and then she too was gone.
The street was quiet.
Kakashi stood alone. The night breeze moved through, lifting a few dry leaves and rolling them past his feet.
He looked at the black gateway still hanging open in the air in front of him. He listened to his own chest. Thump. Thump. Thump. Each beat distinct and loud against the inside of his ribs.
Slowly, he raised one hand and pressed it to his left side. Through the fabric, through the skin, through bone, the heart that had kept time for decades was driving blood through him now at a pace it had never managed before.
Kakashi took a long, slow breath.
Then he stepped forward.
The gateway grew closer with each step. He closed his eye, crossed the threshold, and let the dark take him.
-- -- --
Somewhere in the Pure Land's open wilderness, gold dust was raging through the air.
"River of Sand -- !"
A low, furious shout. The summoned gold dust gathered itself into hundreds of razor-edged spines overhead, a sudden blossoming of metal thorns, then detonated outward in every direction.
A Velociraptor caught one of the spines and was flung backward with the impact, crashing into the ground with a heavy thud dozens of meters away.
But more were coming.
They closed in from every side, bodies low, throat-sounds deep and continuous, amber slit-eyes locked onto the figure at the center of their ring.
No anger in those eyes. Only the cold execution of a directive.
At the center of the encirclement, the man controlling the gold dust was gasping.
He had short brown hair and an unremarkable face -- the kind that disappeared into any crowd the moment you stopped looking for it.
But the thing burning in his eyes right now made that ordinary face into something else entirely. Defiance. Fury.
And beneath both of those: fear with no bottom to it.
His name was Rasa.
In life, he had been the Fourth Kazekage -- the supreme authority of the Hidden Sand, the figure ten thousand Sand shinobi looked to. Now he was a dead soul stranded in open wilderness, surrounded by creatures from another age.
Why should this be happening to him?
The thought churned through him without stopping.
He had not expected this to be waiting after death. The knowledge that had flooded into his awareness when he arrived -- like ice water thrown over him -- had smashed the assumption that death was the end of consequences.
A Sin Index.
A threshold of 2.0.
Those who exceeded it were unfit for the Pure Land. Unfit to be reborn as human. They would reincarnate as animals instead.
And the number hanging above his head in vivid red was perfectly, cruelly legible.
5.5.
I am the Kazekage. The highest authority in the Hidden Sand. By what right --!
He could not accept it.
He could not accept being judged after death. Could not accept some arbitrary number defining the entire shape of his life. Could not accept the possibility that his next existence might be a fish. A rat. A pig.
So when the Pure Land guardians -- the creatures called Velociraptors -- had appeared on the horizon and begun their approach, he had not stopped to ask the obvious question.
Why are the guardians of the afterlife dinosaurs?
That question did not survive even a second inside a mind consumed by fear and defiance.
He only wanted to resist. To escape. To prove that this -- whatever this was -- was not a fitting end for Rasa.
"HRAAAH -- !!"
The Velociraptors' calls erupted again. Several larger ones swept in from the flanks, cutting off the last open ground he had.
Rasa clenched his jaw, slammed his hands together into seals, drove every drop of chakra he had left surging upward --
Then.
THUD. THUD. THUD.
Several heavy impacts, without warning, from somewhere behind him and not far off.
Rasa spun around.
Figures. Dropping from above.
They landed on a rise in the ground several dozen meters away, in various states of composure -- some landing clean, one stumbling before catching balance, one who appeared to have been physically grabbed by someone else to avoid hitting the ground badly.
And from the sound of it, they were arguing.
"Here we are, Brother."
A silver-haired man with a sharp, impassive face glanced at a luminous panel that had appeared in his hand -- something like a screen made of light -- and spoke in a tone stripped of all feeling.
"That appears to be him."
The screen displayed a clean column of text.
SUBJECT: Rasa
IDENTITY CONFIRMED: Fourth Kazekage, Supreme Leader of the Hidden Sand Village. Father of Gaara, Temari, and Kankuro. User of Magnet Style: Gold Dust. Killed by Orochimaru.
CHAIN OF CAUSATION -- PRIMARY THREAD:
Rose to become Fourth Kazekage, inherited a Hidden Sand on the verge of collapse.
Used Gold Dust to ease financial pressure, establishing basic governance but without resolving structural contradictions.
Faced pressure from Konoha; signed a disadvantageous treaty following the Third Shinobi World War.
Managed the One-Tail jinchuriki; regarded his own son Gaara as a failed weapon.
Dispatched Yashamaru to assassinate Gaara -- completely destroyed the parent-child bond, entrenched Gaara's hatred of humanity.
Escalating tensions with Konoha; ultimately agreed to Orochimaru's false alliance plan (Operation: Destroy Konoha); killed by Orochimaru.
SIN ASSESSMENT:
Direct instigation of warfare and non-mission killings: documented.
Psychological abuse and assassination attempt within the family unit: confirmed.
Total suffering caused (partial accounting): moderate to high -- concentrated primarily on a single victim, Gaara; psychological trauma value assessed as extreme.
SIN INDEX: 5.5
The dark-haired man with the naturally open, earnest face read every line carefully. Then his eyes grew wider and wider.
"This can't be real..." Hashirama raised his head and stared at the figure in the distance being circled by Velociraptors, his face a portrait of disbelief.
"He did that... to his own son?!"
"Yes."
Tobirama gave a single nod. His gaze moved from the screen to the desperately struggling figure in the distance. The corner of his mouth pulled upward in something close to contempt.
"It seems later generations of the Hidden Sand made a profoundly poor decision in choosing this person as their Kazekage."
His tone carried no effort to disguise its satisfaction.
The First Kazekage's behavior at the original Five Kage Summit had left Tobirama with no particular warmth toward the Hidden Sand. And now -- he looked again at the line reading "regarded his own son Gaara as a failed weapon," then looked back at the disheveled figure being circled by dinosaurs.
Poetic, he thought.
"Right -- !"
Hashirama suddenly nodded with force, the disbelief on his face giving way to something much more purposeful.
"Let's get this done then!"
He spun around and waved vigorously at the figure standing some distance behind them. "Madara -- ! Come on, we're doing this together -- !"
"..."
The figure standing alone in the shadows did not move.
A long moment passed.
Then a single cold voice came from that direction.
"Do not give me orders, Hashirama."
-- -- --