Chapter 498: The Uchiha Contingency
Tobirama was moving alone.
He ran at full speed across the Pure Land's open grassland. The artificial sun Naruto had made for this place had long since set, replaced by a sky packed with stars and a moon that was just as much a product of the rules holding this world together as the sun had been.
Moonlight spread across the plain like water, silver and clear, and the visibility was almost as sharp as daylight.
Hashirama had wanted to come with him.
The moment Tobirama had seen the information on the terminal and his expression changed, Hashirama had noticed something was wrong. He had leaned over and asked what it was. Tobirama had simply shaken his head and said he had something to deal with. Hashirama had immediately moved to follow -- but Tobirama refused him.
Flatly and without room for negotiation.
Because if what he had just read was accurate -- if that number was not a mistake, if that information was not somehow wrong --
Then he had to go find out for himself exactly where he had gone wrong as a teacher.
That thought burned in his chest, pushing out any impulse to explain himself further. He had turned on his heel and been out of the Reincarnation Hall before Hashirama could say anything else.
Now, running, he pulled up the electronic terminal issued to the Pure Land's guardian force.
The display opened in front of him. The target's information was right there, clear and waiting.
Shimura Danzo.
Sin Index: 9.2.
9.2.
A full point higher than the 8.2 he had seen before.
And that 8.2 belonged to Uchiha Madara -- the man who had tried to destroy the Leaf Village, who had spent decades weaving schemes that made the entire shinobi world tremble, the one history had named the Demon of the Shinobi World.
His own student. The one who had followed behind him and learned from him, the one he had personally elevated, the one he had once placed real faith in --
Had a Sin Index higher than Uchiha Madara?
When Tobirama had first seen it, he had genuinely thought he had misread it.
He had to go and see for himself. He had to understand. He had to ask: what in the world happened?
-- -- --
"Wind Style: Vacuum Sphere -- !!"
The air shrieked.
A spiraling sphere of compressed wind launched from Danzo's mouth like a cannonball, tearing into the Velociraptors closing in from every direction.
Several of the ones in front took direct hits and were thrown backward, slamming into the ground dozens of meters away. They struggled, legs spasming beneath them, unable to get up for the moment.
But more were coming from the dark.
Shimura Danzo stood his ground, breathing slightly harder than he would have liked.
He was wearing what he had worn in his final moments of life -- the dark high-collared robe, one eye wrapped in heavy bandaging, one arm similarly bound from shoulder to wrist.
The clothes of his last hour. But the body itself had been returned to its peak. No wounds. No exhaustion. None of the ailments that decades of hard living had quietly accumulated in his joints and organs. Even the Wood Style ability was flowing clearly through him, present and ready.
Death had restored everyone here to their prime.
Danzo's gaze moved coldly across the Velociraptors tightening their ring around him.
These creatures had no jutsu. They formed no seals. They had nothing in the way of technique or refinement. But their fighting instinct was a pure killing machine -- each one with combat capability near chunin level, and they worked together with a coordination that required no words. Advance, hold, fall back -- all of it seamless.
More importantly: they could not be killed.
He had tested that already in the first exchange.
His Wind Style attacks connected. They went down. They convulsed. They lost the ability to fight for a time. But they did not die.
Like every soul here, they could be exhausted, they could be hurt, they could be temporarily disabled. But they could not be truly destroyed.
Before long, every one he knocked down would be back on its feet, coming at him again. Indefinitely.
So this was the "reckoning" of the afterlife.
Danzo thought this without heat.
He was not particularly surprised that the world after death turned out to actually have consequences built into it. From the moment he had understood clearly what kind of person he was and what kind of work he did, some quiet foreknowledge of this had been with him.
If there really was a world after death. If there really was something called judgment -- then he would be going somewhere terrible. He had always known that.
He was not going to claim he had been wronged.
He was not going to stand here and tell himself that everything he had done was for the Leaf Village. On that point, Shimura Danzo had always been clear-eyed about himself. Particularly in his final moments.
He had understood.
He was not a hero who had reluctantly walked into darkness for the village's sake. He was the darkness itself. A piece of the shinobi world that the shinobi world produced and used and could not quite look at directly.
So if there was a reckoning, he accepted it. He accepted it as a fact.
But accepting it as a fact was entirely different from meekly holding out his hands to be taken.
Danzo's expression went colder, sharper. He watched the Velociraptors continue to close in. Spend the next life as a dog? As a monkey?
Absolutely not. Shimura Danzo -- even in the world after death, even faced with something called divine reckoning -- would not go quietly toward any ending he had not chosen himself.
"Stand down. I want to speak with him."
The shout came like a crack of thunder, and a figure dropped from the night sky and landed hard in the space between Danzo and the Velociraptors.
In the moonlight: blue armor reflecting cold light. Silver hair moving in the night breeze. A sharp, unsmiling face with eyes the color of blood, fixed on Danzo without blinking.
That chakra. That familiar, suffocating, unmistakable pressure -- the kind that had made countless enemies reconsider their decisions before they had finished making them.
Danzo's pupils contracted. He recognized the person in front of him. He had not expected to see this man so soon. He had not expected to see this man at all, not here, not like this.
But there he was.
"...Sensei."
In the entire shinobi world, there was only one person whose presence drew honorific speech from Shimura Danzo without him choosing to give it.
The Second Hokage. Tobirama Senju.
At the command, every Velociraptor stopped its advance in the same instant. They drew back several steps, keeping the encirclement intact but holding their ground without pressing forward.
Tobirama did not look at the dinosaurs.
From the moment he landed, his gaze had not moved from Danzo.
And at the same moment, everything the Pure Land's rules held about this soul came flooding into his awareness -- the judgment summary, visible automatically to those who served as guardians here.
SHIMURA DANZO.
Direct instigation of warfare and non-mission killings: extremely high proportion.
(Unauthorized organization of operations; cross-border assassination campaigns; human experimentation; orchestration of clan extermination.)
Total suffering caused (partial accounting): immense.
(Extended timeframe; widespread victims; methods classified as severe.)
Sin Index: 9.2.
And then, the section that followed -- the judgment text, each line pressing into Tobirama's awareness one word at a time.
JUDGMENT:
"You who named yourself Danzo -- who sought to shelter the Leaf in shadow -- sheltered in the end only a graveyard of wrongful deaths and whatever remained of your own conscience."
"In the name of ROOT, you stripped children into blades without tears. In the name of the Leaf, you burned those who opposed you in the fire of conspiracy."
"The eye of love opened on your arm and saw only endless night -- for you took not only his eye, but the survival of the Uchiha name itself."
"You called yourself a guardian of the darkness. But the mirror showed no guardian -- only darkness. No sacrifice -- only taking. No greater cause -- only the self. And that self had other names: power, fear, and the inability to trust or be trusted."
"In the end, the reverse Four Symbols Seal could not consume your enemy. It only compressed the lies of your lifetime into a fossil buried beneath the Leaf."
OVERALL ASSESSMENT: A cancer upon the shinobi world -- feeding on justice, running on conspiracy, profoundly guilty, and unrepentant to the last.
Tobirama read those words and felt the back of his neck prickle.
Orchestration of clan extermination. The destruction of the entire Uchiha clan. Those two phrases, connected in the same sentence -- he could barely accept what his own eyes were showing him.
"Danzo." Tobirama's voice came out louder than he intended. "The Uchiha clan -- what happened to them inside the Leaf Village?!"
He needed it confirmed. He had to hear it directly.
What had he taught Danzo? He had taught him to use the strength of the Uchiha clan -- to make them the sharpest sword the Leaf possessed -- while simultaneously keeping them at arm's length from the inner mechanisms of power, preventing a repeat of the clan's historical missteps. That was the "Uchiha Contingency" he had left behind.
He had never said exterminate them. He had never said erase them entirely from existence. So what was this information telling him? What had actually happened?!