Chapter 481: The "New Nobility's" Rebellion
Rogue ninja were, in most cases, people without much character. But they were still ninja, and when it came to executing assigned tasks, their competence was generally acceptable.
After the one loose end with Sanba Taro, which Yasushi had dealt with personally, no similar problems surfaced. The legitimate heirs of the noble families died one by one in what appeared to be unrelated accidents, and with all of River Country's "nobility" coordinating to suppress any investigation, not a ripple disturbed the surface.
The noble families' accumulated wealth was absorbed by the rogue ninja. But of the people who actually honored the agreement and forwarded half their takings to the daimyo's palace, there were very few. Kakuzu and a small number of the more disciplined operatives had delivered what they owed. The rest simply stopped acknowledging that the arrangement existed.
This was entirely expected.
They were rogue ninja. Principles were not part of the package.
Money that had entered their hands was not leaving their hands. That was the natural law of the situation.
If Yasushi had been a real daimyo, his options would have been limited: accept the loss and say nothing, or find a major nation's forces to come in and deal with a country full of bandits wearing noble titles. Neither option was good.
But Yasushi was not a real daimyo. He did not care about any of this.
The daimyo palace's reserves were large enough to be genuinely inconvenient to spend quickly. The revenue-sharing arrangement had been a mechanism, not a goal.
What he needed was the nobles dead.
The nobles were dead.
So the next phase could begin.
A new proclamation appeared on walls throughout the city.
"The daimyo is establishing schools? For children? Reading and arithmetic?"
"No fees. Housing and meals provided. Open to anyone, regardless of family means?"
"That can't be real."
"This is the daimyo experimenting with something. You know how they get sudden ideas. Rich families should keep their children well away from this kind of thing. Let the orphans and street children go."
"Exactly. Watch and wait. Don't rush into anything."
Groups of people gathered around the posted announcements and talked in low voices, most of them unwilling to believe what they were reading. Common people understood what nobles were. The idea that a ruling lord was genuinely trying to do something for the people under him required more evidence than a piece of paper on a wall.
Jun was quietly gathering all of this, but she did not intervene or respond to any of it. She compiled the information and brought it back.
"The merchants and common people are cautious about the proclamation. Everyone is waiting to see what happens before committing to anything."
Yasushi was not bothered. He waved a hand and smiled.
"That's fine. People who are comfortable enough to afford their children an education already don't need what I'm offering. Let them wait."
"What I'm actually doing is building a foundation of people who are directly loyal to me."
"The ones with nothing, the ones who have nowhere else to go: they're the more useful raw material anyway."
Jun thought about this, then asked.
"Why not build a ninja school instead? Reading and arithmetic have limited practical applications. Or are you planning to filter through the students first and then teach ninjutsu to the ones who pass?"
Yasushi laughed.
Six Paths Yasushi had lived in the shinobi world for years before his awakening and had developed a deep understanding of how its systems functioned. Young Yasushi had been here for one or two years. When the comparison was between the shinobi world's institutional framework and the one he had grown up with in his past life, he still trusted his past life's model.
"Why does anyone need to learn ninjutsu?"
"I'm a daimyo. What I need isn't fighters. I need people who can manage accounts and collect taxes."
"The children coming through that school become River Country's local officials."
"And when the Uchiha Divine Nation is eventually established, they become its priests and administrators, handling local affairs at every level."
"Their security is someone else's problem. Any ninja hired for protection missions can handle that. They don't need to be able to fight themselves."
"Jun. You need to start thinking about what my actual role is going to be."
"So..." Jun worked through this. "You're creating a new class of people to replace the nobility?"
"Why does there need to be a nobility at all?" Yasushi asked. "Look around. Every noble in this country is dead. Has anything stopped working?"
"No."
"Exactly. Which means River Country can continue to function indefinitely without a noble class."
"What I'm demonstrating with all of this is a proof of concept: nobility is unnecessary. It has always been unnecessary. Everything the noble class claimed about being essential to the country's operation was a lie told to justify their own existence."
"Once people genuinely understand that, the entire basis for noble rule starts to come apart."
"More people will start doing what I'm doing. The structure of power in the existing world will shift."
"Ambitious ninja will stop accepting a system where a group of useless people sit above them and control military funding to limit what their villages can do."
"So we need to show this as clearly as possible while we have the opportunity. The better we make River Country, the more convincing the demonstration."
"Jun. We don't have enough people to change the shinobi world on our own. We need to attract others. This is how we do it."
Jun did not fully follow all of this, but she understood that it mattered to him. She straightened.
"I understand. I'll make sure this gets proper attention."
After she left, Yasushi turned to the country's day-to-day affairs.
Under the old arrangement, layers of officials had managed all of this, with the daimyo receiving periodic reports whenever he was in the mood. But most of those officials had been replaced by rogue ninja who were not going to manage anything. Yasushi had to bring up the actual working staff from below those replaced positions and deal with them directly.
In practice, the work was not complicated. Basic infrastructure. Water management. Famine relief. The classic problems of a pre-modern state, which were largely solved by the same thing: money.
Yasushi set direction, released funds, and let things move.
For simple construction, he put the unemployed to work through public labor programs. For specialized or technically complex tasks, he posted missions and let ninja handle them with chakra. In a world where chakra existed, anything a ninja could solve was faster, cheaper, and better than the alternative. Anything that could not be solved that way was not worth attempting; the cost would be too high.
Governance, like everything else, had to be worth what it cost.
With substantial funds flowing through, River Country entered a period of intense development. Large-scale construction projects created employment. Employment attracted people who needed work. People who needed work became consumers. Their consumption attracted more merchants. More merchants meant more commercial activity, which attracted more people.
The cycle fed itself.
Within a few months, the country looked different. There was life in it that had not been there before.
The daimyo's treasury, on the other hand, was being consumed at a rate that would have alarmed a real daimyo considerably. Centuries of accumulated wealth from the daimyo's line were vanishing in a compressed period of aggressive spending.
Yasushi had also been systematically reducing taxes to stimulate economic activity, which meant money was flowing out of the palace and very little was coming back in. The new tax collectors were still students in the school and would not be operational for some time.
He was not prepared to let rogue ninja collect taxes in noble disguise. He had no way of knowing when they would stop, and the answer was probably never. Better to waive the taxes entirely than to find out what they would do with collection authority.
A few years of reduced revenue would not kill River Country.
But this approach was cutting into the interests of the "new nobility" in ways they had not anticipated, and they were not taking it quietly.
All of them were frauds occupying stolen positions. But possession generated its own psychology: once you were sitting in the seat, the wealth associated with that seat felt like yours. The fact that the treasury held more than anyone could spend quickly was beside the point. Appetite has no ceiling.
Beyond personal greed, they had people to maintain. Subordinates expected to be fed. Dogs needed to eat before they would bite.
Under the influence of their combined grievances, the new nobles began finding each other.
In Seisenji, the largest fief in River Country, a number of them gathered behind closed doors with all servants and guards sent away. The local lord, formerly a regent's aide, a man who went by "Seisenji-dono" in his new role, opened the conversation.
"This cannot continue."
"We've accomplished what was asked of us. But the daimyo has started doing things that make no sense. Infrastructure projects we can't control, tax exemptions that have been announced publicly across the country so every farmer already knows about them."
"He gets to be the generous benefactor. We take the losses."
"He earns the reputation. We get nothing."
This was met with immediate and enthusiastic agreement.
"Exactly. Infrastructure contracts in this country have always gone to our own commercial operations. The daimyo opened everything to competitive bidding and foreign houses took most of the contracts at lower prices. Our businesses have taken significant losses."
"Completely unacceptable."
"He is River Country's daimyo. He should be looking out for River Country's interests, which means our interests. Instead he's been handing advantages to outside merchants."
"Outside merchants have been flooding the capital. He benefits from the activity. We're left out of it."
"We need to make our position known."
"Something has to change."
The room was full of righteous indignation and agreement. When it came to defining what specifically to do about it, the energy evaporated. Eyes moved around the room in a circuit, and eventually settled on the Finance Minister's seat.
"Kakuzu. Your fief is the one most directly affected, isn't it."
"What do you have to say about all this?"
Kakuzu sat in formal noble dress, long sleeves, a small folding fan working in one hand.
"In formal settings," he said pleasantly, "please address me as Shiraishi-dono. Thank you."
"As for the business losses. Yes, significant sums have disappeared, and I am genuinely grieved by this. Deeply grieved."
"However. This was part of the original arrangement, was it not?"
"We accepted the daimyo's commission. We cleared out the existing noble families. In return, the daimyo permitted us to continue in their places."
"The arrangement specified noble status. It did not include commercial preference."
Someone cut him off before he could finish.
"What are you talking about?! Noble status means everything that comes with it! The title, the land, the income, the commercial operations, all of it together! That is what 'taking the place' means! Otherwise what did we even do this for?"
"Is that right." Kakuzu opened the fan and held it at his lips, a gesture that managed to be precisely as condescending as it appeared. "Then let me ask: after taking the nobles' places, how many of you delivered half of what you collected to the capital? As agreed."
The temperature in the room dropped.
Kakuzu appeared entirely unaware of this.
"Since you did not fulfill your half of the arrangement, I don't see why you're surprised that the other party is treating you accordingly."
"If you want to count grievances, I'm actually the one with something to complain about. I'm the one who held to the agreement completely and delivered the Finance Minister's family's full half to the capital."
This redirected the room's energy immediately.
"You actually did that? Then you took the worst of it. Surely you're not going to let that stand."
They expected fury. What they got was a mild smile.
"Not particularly. The arrangement was what it was. I agreed to it. I keep my agreements."
The expressions in the room went unfriendly. Before anyone could build momentum on that, Kakuzu smiled again, and this one had a different quality to it.
"That said. The previous commission has been completed. Which means anything I choose to do from this point forward falls entirely outside the terms of that commission."
"What does that mean?" They pressed closer. "What are you going to do?"
Kakuzu surveyed the room with the unhurried confidence of someone who has already decided.
"If nobles can be replaced," he said, "then why exactly would a daimyo be any different?"
Chapter 482: Releasing the Mad Dogs from Their Cage
Among rogue ninja, people with genuine principles were rare.
They simply hadn't been thinking along these lines before. But once the idea was in the room, minds moved quickly.
"He's right!"
"If nobles can be replaced, why not the daimyo?"
A heavyset man slapped his knee hard, something hungry igniting in his eyes. Beside him, a thin one with a sharp face drummed his fingers against the table.
"Honestly, I've had an uneasy feeling about this whole arrangement from the beginning. I keep thinking: what stops the daimyo from turning on us eventually? He's the daimyo. If he decides to blame everything on us, every major nation's ninja will take his word over ours. We'd have no defense at all."
"If the daimyo's seat was held by one of ours, I'd feel much better about everything."
"We pick someone from among ourselves, put him in the daimyo's robes, sit him on the throne. After that, River Country belongs to us."
"Tax collection? We decide how that works."
The room worked through it noisily and arrived at consensus quickly: replace the daimyo too.
A group of new nobles traveled to the capital under the cover of a formal courtesy visit.
Yasushi read them the moment they entered. They were here for something. That suited him, since he had also been planning to have a conversation that needed to happen, and had prepared accordingly. He welcomed them with a proper banquet, the great hall set up and fully staffed.
By mutual unspoken agreement, neither side brought guards. Too inconvenient for what was coming.
As soon as the banquet began, Yasushi sent all the servants and attendants out. He lifted his cup and smiled.
"River Country has been cleared of its parasites. You all deserve considerable credit for that."
"A toast, with my genuine thanks."
Several pairs of eyes moved around the hall, reading the exits, the columns, the spacing. Everything looked workable. The restraint that had been holding certain people in place began to slip.
More than a few of them did not even bother picking up their cups.
"Daimyo-sama. We are unhappy with the things you've been doing."
"What kind of noble doesn't collect taxes?"
"How could you exempt the agricultural tax?"
"And another thing..."
A chorus of overlapping complaints filled the hall, none of them making any effort to observe the forms of address appropriate to a daimyo. The person sitting at the head of the room had stopped being worth that kind of courtesy in their minds.
Yasushi was not annoyed. He broke into a wide grin and laughed.
"Haha! Excellent! This is exactly the attitude rogue ninja should have!"
"You people have real power and real ability, and yet you were bowing and scraping before a bunch of weaklings. That never made any sense."
"Seeing you like this, not bound anymore by the pretense of your roles, actually puts my mind at ease."
"All that work I put in, and now I can finally release you mad dogs from your cage where you belong!"
The grin on this man who was not afraid of them, who was looking at them with an arrogance that suggested the situation was entirely under his control, pushed the room from dissatisfaction into genuine fury.
"You!"
Cups hit the floor. The Transformation Jutsu dropped. A dozen ninja looked at each other across the room in their actual faces, short blades and kunai coming out, weapons pointing at the head of the table.
"Who are you calling a mad dog?"
"Do you not understand your situation?"
"Every noble in this country is dead. You think a title keeps you safe? You think we're going to do what you say because you're the daimyo?"
The cup shattered on the stone floor.
In the same instant, four purple columns of light erupted from the corners of the daimyo's compound, one from each direction, rising into the sky and then spreading outward at the top, connecting into a translucent cubic barrier that enclosed the entire compound from the ground up.
Every person in the hall went still.
"That's... the Four Violet Flames Formation?"
The shock that ran through the room was physical. People came up out of their seats, staring at Yasushi with open alarm.
"You hired major nation ninja! You're going to wipe us all out!"
The Four Violet Flames Formation was not a secret technique, any major village knew it, but deploying it required four jonin working in coordination, and maintaining it drew steadily from their chakra. A daimyo who wanted to eliminate a room full of rogue ninja would not have stopped at four jonin. There would be a full operation outside.
The calculation ran through every mind in the room in approximately the same two seconds. The blood left more than a few faces. The kind of confidence that came from picking on a soft target had a very specific interaction with the prospect of fighting a prepared and coordinated jonin strike force, and that interaction produced the urge to find an exit immediately.
Eyes began moving toward windows, doors, structural weak points.
Yasushi watched this happen with an expression of genuine disappointment.
"Ah. You just had to smash the cup, didn't you."
"That was supposed to be my move. That's how my version of this scene was supposed to start. You went and did it for me."
"But settle down. I didn't hire anyone from the major villages."
"This barrier is set up to keep people out, not in. The reason I activated it is that I'd rather your identities stay inside this room. Whatever happens between us in here, the guards outside can't get through the barrier to interrupt, and this compound is large enough that no one outside can see anything."
"When we're done in here, we agree on a story and tell it together. Nobody has any reason to doubt us."
"I've already planned for how this ends. A demonstration needs to make an example of a few people. We put the blame on them afterward, say they were impostors who tried to assassinate me, and my head guard took them down. Clean resolution."
The pressure in the room shifted slightly. The rational part of what he was saying landed. But the confidence with which he was delivering it, as though the outcome was already settled in his mind, pushed the anger back up past the relief.
"Get him!"
"Once we have the daimyo, nothing else matters!"
They came fast. More than a dozen ninja moving with genuine coordination, because they were not amateurs. Some hit from the front while others circled to the flanks and a third group cut off the retreat.
From their perspective, a heavyset daimyo with whatever hidden backup he had was not going to survive a combined assault from this many rogue ninja. Get the blade against his throat and the barrier, the posturing, all of it became irrelevant.
Yasushi smiled and clapped his hands together twice.
From behind him, more than a dozen golden chains erupted outward like striking serpents and flowed through the rushing crowd in a single motion, wrapping around every target they reached, and then the floor came up to meet all of them at once.
The crashing and the screaming happened simultaneously.
Bones broke. Blood spread. The impact was comprehensive.
Yasushi had not killed anyone. He had simply stopped them, forcefully, and the bodies scattered across the floor were still breathing. He remained in his seat and rested one foot on the nearest rogue ninja's head, his gaze moving across the room without particular urgency.
"Everyone be quiet. You're not dying. If I wanted you dead you'd already be dead."
The screaming stopped. Nobody made a sound.
Every conscious person in the room stared at the person sitting at the head of the table, their expressions cycling through the specific sequence of someone who has just watched a house cat become something with much larger teeth.
"What are you? Who are you?"
"Where is the real daimyo?"
"I am the daimyo." Yasushi kept the smile in place. "I'm the one who sent you all the commission. The one who told you to go replace the nobles. Have you already forgotten?"
The intake of breath that followed was audible across the room.
"You replaced the daimyo yourself? Before any of this started?"
"You're only realizing this now?"
Yasushi tilted his head at an angle that conveyed something between amusement and mild contempt.
"Think about it for two seconds. The daimyo and the nobles are on the same side. Ninja are the daimyo's dogs. What kind of person tells their own dogs to bite their own children?"
"We were all played from the beginning!"
The anger was genuine and immediate, but the baseline fear under the room had actually lowered. There was something almost grounding about it: the other person in this room was also operating without a legitimate claim to anything. They were all the same kind of creature.
The tension in the hall found a different quality. Yasushi read this and set aside the provocative tone.
"So. You want to be a daimyo."
"Straightforward enough."
"Look at how many small countries this shinobi world has. Dozens of them. Every one of them has a daimyo and a noble class."
"I took River Country first. But that's fine."
"You can all go find your own countries. Take my method and apply it somewhere else. You have more than enough money from what you collected here."
"With enough money, you can recruit your own people. The shinobi world has no shortage of rogue ninja looking for work."
"Money, people, weapons. That's everything you need to take down a small country."
"And I can promise you this: once you've secured a daimyo's position, send me a letter and I will publicly announce my support for you as the first to do so."
"As the daimyo of River Country."
The room changed again. Something clicked into place for several people simultaneously. When a possibility had already been demonstrated to be real by the person sitting in front of you, the arguments against trying it yourself lost their weight quickly.
There were dozens of small countries. Every one of them had a daimyo and nobles who had never faced a serious challenge. If he had taken River Country, why not one of the others?
Breathing became audible. Mental calculations began visibly: which country? Tea Country? Rain Country? Grass Country?
Into the pause of everyone's internal debate, a cold voice cut through.
"I'm not interested in promises."
"I only care about what I can take right now."
"River Country has already been cleaned out. There's no small country better positioned for extraction than this one."
"Rather than starting over somewhere new, I'd rather just take what's already been prepared."
"You're an impostor. Once I beat you, everything you have becomes mine."
Yasushi turned toward the voice.
Kakuzu looked back at him with no fear at all in his expression. Only calculation. Only bare, open interest in a specific outcome.
"Well. The man who actually fought the God of Shinobi."
"No wonder you're confident."
The tone carried a lightness to it. But when Yasushi looked around the room, the posture he held was the one that came from knowing exactly where you stood.
"I knew someone was going to push back regardless. This is fine."
"Anyone else who has something to prove: come now. Let's get it done all at once. Then I don't have to deal with this again."
"Fair warning though: after today, anyone who refuses to follow my orders gets killed."
Whether it was the expression on his face or a genuine misjudgment of relative strength, a significant portion of the room made the decision to test the warning.
"Damn you!"
"Don't write us off!"
"We're rogue ninja that five major nations couldn't finish!"
"Kill him first, then we figure out how to divide River Country between us!"
"That's right, kill him!"
"There's only one of him. Combined chakra, all of us together, we can end this!"
Kakuzu moved first.
He jumped back to open distance, ran through seals at speed, and breathed out a massive fireball that filled the path between them.
"Fire Style: Great Fireball Jutsu!"
The rest of the room followed immediately, everyone adding their best technique to the opening Kakuzu had created.
"Wind Style: Great Breakthrough!"
"Earth Style: Earth Flow Spear!"
The melee fighters closed in from multiple angles, blades drawn, working to seal off every possible dodge path.
Against any major-nation jonin, a coordinated assault like this, with this many people covering this many angles, ended in one way.
Yasushi sat in his chair with one leg crossed over the other, made no movement at all, and let the Mangekyo patterns open fully in both eyes.
"Let me show you what Susanoo looks like."
The explosions arrived in sequence, each one detonating across the enormous energy figure that rose out of nowhere behind and above him. Fire and light and shockwaves hit it in overlapping waves. The entire hall shook. Roof tiles cascaded down. Cracks spread across the stone columns in branching patterns. Smoke and debris filled the air.
Out of the fire and smoke, a skeletal hand the size of a wall reached outward and closed around the cluster of fighters rushing in from the front.
"What is that thing?"
They reversed their momentum, blades coming up and around. More than a dozen steel weapons struck the bone structure in rapid succession, every strike carrying full chakra output, the kind of force that split stone and cut through iron.
The sound it made was dense and ringing and continuous.
The bone was unmarked.
The hand closed casually around one of the fighters. It tightened.
The scream was very short.
What hit the floor afterward had been a person and a weapon and was now neither.
The hall was completely silent.
The fighters who had still been moving forward were frozen exactly where they had stopped, looking up at an energy giant that had only half-emerged and was already taller than the ceiling, its upper portions passing through the roof structure without resistance.
What had been on their faces a moment before was gone. In its place was something that had no forward momentum left in it at all.
Chapter 483: In the Shinobi World, Strength Is Everything
"So that's the Susanoo from the intelligence reports."
"Then you're Uchiha Yasushi. The rogue ninja from Konoha."
Kakuzu and the others looked at those blood-red eyes and the energy giant with its shoulders above the rafters, and felt the ground drop out from under them.
Intelligence had been moving through the shinobi world for weeks. The return of Susanoo among the Uchiha had been the most significant piece in all of it.
The Uchiha clan head had no reason to come to River Country and impersonate a daimyo, which made the answer to who this actually was fairly obvious.
And Sand Village had been spreading the Uchiha Divine Nation intelligence everywhere. Among the Uchiha, Yasushi's name had already become more widely known than Fugaku's.
Yasushi laughed and released the Transformation Jutsu, showing his real face.
"Apparently my reputation has some reach."
"Good. Since you know who I am, that saves us time."
"You know who I am. So why are you still hesitating? Get down and show some respect."
"I'm building the Uchiha Divine Nation and I need people. Join now and you'll have founding merit. That's worth considerably more than any noble title."
Kakuzu produced a deep, short sound of displeasure. The stitched lines across his back and shoulders began to rise, something pressing outward from within, straining against the skin as though whatever lived inside wanted out.
"Don't get ahead of yourself."
"I'll admit you surprised me. But you killed the Third Kazekage and now you think you can stand over us? Think again."
He had been alive for nearly a hundred years. He had survived things that would have ended most people twice over. He had personally fought Senju Hashirama. One young Uchiha was not going to send him to his knees.
With Kakuzu holding his ground, some of the others found their footing again.
"That's right!"
"There's only one of you. We have enough bodies here to bury you by sheer volume!"
"We're rogue ninja!"
"You're nowhere near ready to command people like us!"
Yasushi looked them over with the specific expression of someone who has just eaten something mildly disappointing.
"Among this entire group, there are maybe two or three of you who qualify as S-rank. The rest of you are ordinary."
"You're out here puffing up at me, and I'm standing here telling you: if I let you hit me all day, you couldn't break through my defense."
"And don't think S-rank impresses me into hesitation."
"What I have right now isn't even one percent of my full output."
"You can see it yourself. This Susanoo is just the bone structure. No muscle, no armor attached yet. Not because I can't add them, but because I'm trying not to alarm the guards outside and complicate my plans."
"But if you're going to be unreasonable about this, beating you all badly enough to be convincing and then blaming it on Konoha rogue ninja is not a problem for me."
Yasushi had been in the shinobi world for too short a time and was still operating under the assumption that some of these people were reachable through reason.
That assumption was wrong. Rogue ninja were, almost by definition, people who had already decided that rules applied to other people. They were not going to believe his self-assessment.
"Stop talking!"
"Shinobi settle this with their hands, not their mouths!"
"You beat every single one of us and we'll follow you. That's how this works!"
"But if you think you can just talk your way into commanding us, you're dreaming!"
They screamed this and moved, and this time there was more commitment in it. The techniques they reached for were the ones they actually trusted.
"Secret Art: Flash Thunder!"
"Summoning: Wild Bear of the Plains!"
"Fire Style..."
"Earth Style..."
"Wind Style..."
Yasushi had been relying on the Susanoo's defense and treating the assault as largely irrelevant. Then a crack of thunder arrived and a violent white light detonated directly in front of his eyes, burning through his vision and leaving him seeing nothing but white, tears running down his face from the involuntary reaction.
Before his sight could recover, the sound hit him: an enormous roar from directly above, filling the air from every direction. The white field in his vision darkened as something massive moved across it.
He could not see it yet, but he could feel it. Something had appeared that was large enough to cast the half-emerged Susanoo entirely in shadow.
The Sharingan's regenerative ability pushed through the burned retina quickly. Vision returned.
A bear. An enormous summoned bear, already taller than the hall had been, its head somewhere above where the roof used to be.
It threw its head back and roared. The sound moved outward like a wave. The hall's remaining beams snapped against it. The bear only had to straighten up to destroy them. When it swung its paw, the entire roof structure scattered like paper.
Moonlight came in.
The bear lowered its head and raised that massive paw above the Susanoo's skeletal frame.
This was not something that could be hidden. The Four Violet Flames Formation's barrier was transparent from outside. Everyone in the compound could see this clearly, which meant the story he had been planning was going to need significant revision.
That was genuinely annoying.
"Good advice wasted on someone already dead. You want it this way, we'll do it this way."
The Mangekyo rotated hard. Chakra poured through the lines of the Susanoo in a volume that was not constrained in any way.
The half-formed skeletal figure in the hall expanded upward and outward in a single continuous surge, growing at a rate that covered the first ten meters in less than a second, passing the bear's height, continuing upward until the top of the structure was a bright shape against the night sky, considerably taller than anything else in the city.
Complete form Susanoo.
He was a Perfect Jinchuriki. His chakra reserves had no practical ceiling. He could maintain this form without meaningful cost.
He had not wanted to reveal it here. The ocular strain of the Mangekyo was real, and even with the healing ability, he preferred not to draw on it unnecessarily. And the people he had been fighting up to this point had not required it.
The reason he was using it now was specifically for the impression it would make.
The impression was immediate.
The summoned bear, which had been dominating the space a moment before, was now the smaller figure in the encounter by a considerable margin. It lifted its head and looked up at the energy giant that was standing over it. The ferocity that had been in its enormous eyes was gone. What replaced it was a pure and uncomplicated fear. Its body was shaking. The paw it had raised to strike hung motionless in the air, unable to commit to either completing the swing or pulling back.
The jutsu from the ordinary ninja detonated against the complete Susanoo's surface and dissipated without marking it, small bursts of light that came and went as though they had touched something that simply did not acknowledge them.
Kakuzu, who had halfway released the Earth Grudge Fear from the seams in his body, reversed the process with particular speed and care, pulling everything back and tightening the stitching. He was acutely aware that anything protruding might be misread as continued aggression.
All five of his hearts were hammering simultaneously.
The last time he had felt like this was during a specific encounter with Senju Hashirama, decades ago.
I could actually die here.
He had been fearless then, and stupid about it, and he had been lucky to survive. He was not going to make the same mistake now.
The sound of weapons hitting stone filled the hall as people lost their grip on what they were holding.
The enormous form above them had broken something in the room that a combination of shouting and group confidence had been holding together. It was not about technique or strategy anymore. It was just a matter of scale, and scale communicated a kind of truth that couldn't be argued with.
Nobody moved. Every face carried the same thing.
Yasushi stood in the Susanoo's chest at the height of a building, arms folded, looking down.
This was the first time he had seen the city from this angle. The height was something.
From here, he could see clearly: the guards clustered around the Four Violet Flames Formation barrier looking up with fear in their faces. He could also see, spread across the wider city, the ordinary people moving with the specific unease of a population that has just realized something very unusual is happening nearby, and scattered across several neighborhoods, groups of people who were taking advantage of the distraction.
"Those gangs need to be cleaned out."
He noted this, then brought his attention back down to the room.
He did not need to say anything. As his gaze moved across the assembled rogue ninja, they dropped their weapons and pressed their foreheads to the ground in succession, backsides in the air.
"Good. No one decided to be a hero. No demonstration needed."
He dissolved the Susanoo and landed, standing in front of them in the open air where the hall had been.
He looked around. The hall was gone. Tables, chairs, the roof structure: all of it had been cleared by the expansion. Standing in a field of debris did not project the right image, so he ran a quick Earth Style technique and produced a stone chair from the ground, sat down, and resumed looking like a daimyo.
"I take it no one has further objections to what I've been saying."
"No, no, none at all." A chorus of reassurances ran around the group as everyone hastened to demonstrate sincerity. "We'll do exactly as Uchiha Yasushi-dono says. Not a word of complaint."
"That's more loyalty than I actually need from you."
Yasushi waved it off.
"What I need isn't followers. What I need is ninja who are willing to move against the nobility."
"The shinobi world as it currently exists is absurd. We, ninja, are taking orders and deferring to nobles. What justifies that?"
"They were born into the right family?"
"I want every ninja in the shinobi world to understand, in concrete terms, that the nobility is unnecessary. That everything functions just as well or better without them."
"That's the job."
"Whether you're under my command afterward or not is secondary."
"As for the Uchiha Divine Nation: that's a distant future matter. The shinobi world's structure has to change first."
"We'll discuss specifics later."
He had no real plan yet for how the Divine Nation would actually be built. It was certainly not going to be built on a foundation of rogue ninja. That would require something more substantial, a proper country or a functioning village, as the base.
Rogue ninja were useful for specific tasks. They were not the kind of material you built lasting institutions from.
The assembled group exchanged uncertain looks. They did not follow his reasoning, not fully. But following reasoning was not required.
Kakuzu was the first to commit formally.
"Yasushi-dono can count on us. If nothing else, we have our own futures to consider. We'll move against the daimyo and noble classes in other countries."
"That's what I'm asking for." Yasushi clapped once, but the exasperation in his voice was real. "If you'd been reasonable about this from the start, we wouldn't have had to go through all of this."
"Now the entire capital knows Uchiha Yasushi came through the daimyo's compound."
"The original plan needs adjustment. You're all going to help clean this up before we're done tonight."
"A few shadow clones to fill the dead men's roles temporarily until proper replacements can be arranged."
"We'll meet again soon and map out which countries to target and how to approach each one."
"Keep your noble identities for now. They're useful for recruiting."
"When you're moving between locations, leave clones or substitutes in your place. Don't leave your positions obviously empty."
He finished giving instructions and signaled his own shadow clone to release the Four Violet Flames Formation.
The moment the barrier dropped, the guards who had been waiting outside came in at speed. Whatever they were afraid of, allowing harm to the daimyo was worse than being afraid of it, so they came.
When they cleared the entrance and looked across the compound, they found the daimyo seated in the garden with the assembled nobles, every one of them dressed and composed and visibly unharmed.
The daimyo looked up at them with the expression of someone who finds their guards slightly behind schedule.
"There was no emergency. A candidate came to apply for the position of head guard and demonstrated their abilities. I was impressed and have decided to hire them."
"As for Konoha's outstanding warrant: River Country will send formal correspondence to the village. I expect Sarutobi Hiruzen will extend us the courtesy."
Following the direction of the daimyo's gesture, the guards found two young ninja standing behind the seat. The male was visibly Uchiha, those distinctive red eyes marking him clearly.
There was not much choice about this. The disguise was compromised, which meant Yasushi had to step out of the background and build himself a new cover identity. Head of guard was workable.
"I see."
The guards exchanged glances. Nobody fully believed the application story.
Had the daimyo been put under a genjutsu?
The lead guard quickly ran a quiet genjutsu detection. Yasushi had not been under any technique. The detection came back clean.
That was reassuring enough to relax with, even if the explanation made no complete sense. Noble households had their private arrangements that weren't meant to be understood from the outside.
Their attention shifted to Uchiha Yasushi.
They had all seen what had been standing in the air above the compound a few minutes ago.
A head of guard who could produce something like that.
Whatever concerns they had carried about security felt considerably less pressing than they had before.
Chapter 484: I, Uchiha Yasushi, Have Complete Confidence in My Own Foresight
Exposing his identity was not what he had wanted to do.
But weighing the two problems against each other, a manageable degree of future inconvenience from Konoha was considerably less damaging than having his cover collapse on the spot. He had already sent formal correspondence to Konoha, from River Country's daimyo, requesting that they leave Uchiha Yasushi alone.
Hiruzen's response was exactly what Yasushi had predicted: the old man backed down without much resistance. But the unexpected complications were already arriving.
He was lying on a long chair in the reconstructed hall while Jun gave her report.
"The closest advisor to the Bird Country daimyo has been replaced, but replacing the daimyo himself has no clear opportunity yet."
"The Grass Country operation failed at the infiltration stage and became an assassination attempt instead. No personnel lost, but everyone who participated now has increased bounties."
"Their cover was not blown during the attempt. Grass Country's noble class still doesn't know what's coming..."
A figure appeared in the middle of the hall without warning.
The shinobi world had one significant advantage over other settings: construction went very quickly. The hall that had been leveled a few days ago was standing again.
Jun's report stopped. Her blade was out before the sentence finished, positioned between the newcomer and the room.
"Who are you?"
"How dare you enter the daimyo's compound uninvited?"
The person's gaze passed lightly over Jun's face, moved past her blade, and settled on "Uchiha Yasushi," standing behind the daimyo's chair in the head-guard role.
"So you're Uchiha Yasushi."
"Then why did you give me a false name the first time we met? Why did you tell me you were Uchiha Obito?"
Yasushi looked up and felt something tighten in his chest.
Arato had found him.
His hand moved automatically toward the back of his neck, stopped, and came back. Under the Transformation Jutsu, the Karma Seal was sitting there quietly, doing nothing visible.
In terms of raw combat capability, Yasushi was already positioned at the top of what the shinobi world currently had available. The list of people who could actually threaten him was short. If a fight became unwinnable, he could simply leave.
But the Karma Seal was a different category of problem entirely. It was embedded in him. Running away did not change that.
Combat power addressed most problems. It did not address possession.
And his Karma Seal had come from Arato.
He still did not fully understand the connection between Arato and Isshiki Otsutsuki, which meant he could not accurately assess how much danger was standing in the hall. That uncertainty produced a kind of caution that pure power comparisons didn't.
Yasushi blinked, glanced at the shadow clone standing in the head guard position, and gave the smallest of nods. The shadow clone stepped forward to face Arato with an open and warmly enthusiastic expression.
"That was a harmless little joke! Nothing serious."
"But Arato-san, why have you come all the way to River Country? Is there something you need?"
Before Arato could respond, the palace guards outside finally registered that someone unauthorized was in the hall and came flooding in with weapons drawn and the specific energy of people who have been told their job is to prevent exactly this kind of thing from happening.
"Assassin!"
"Protect the daimyo!"
"Move! Move!"
A cluster of guards surrounded the daimyo's position in rapid formation.
Arato glanced at the heavyset daimyo figure behind the wall of guards with visible mild distaste.
He had grown up in the future, where the daimyo class was a historical category rather than a present reality. He did not have the ingrained deference that characterized most contemporary ninja's relationship with ruling nobles. That absence had only sharpened since arriving in this era, where he had spent enough time watching daimyo and nobles make decisions to form a clear opinion of them.
But he was not here to cause trouble with the current era's ruling structure. That was not his mission.
He turned back to the shadow clone and gestured with a small hand motion.
"I have something to discuss with you. I'll be waiting in the forest outside the north gate."
He turned and left. No hesitation, no posturing, no visible concern about whether Yasushi would follow.
The shadow clone and Yasushi exchanged a look. Yasushi gave a slight nod. The clone moved to follow.
"All of this has been addressed by the head of guard. Everyone out."
Yasushi waved his sleeve in the gesture of a daimyo who has said everything he intends to say on a subject. The guards shifted in place, trying to find a reason to press the matter against an expression that clearly did not welcome one. They filed out.
The moment they were gone, Yasushi caught Jun's eye and tilted his head toward the inner residence. She was on her feet instantly, following the unspoken instruction.
Between the two of them, she had long since learned to read the thing under the surface of his calm. Whatever was producing the urgency he was not showing, it was real.
Once they were inside the study, she asked immediately.
"That Arato. He's not coming with anything good."
"No time to go into it now. Take the daimyo's form and stay here. I need to see this directly."
He dropped one sentence, transformed into Jun's appearance, and moved out of the daimyo's compound at speed toward the northern wall.
The shadow clone would relay everything, but there was a difference between receiving intelligence and being present for it. More importantly, he needed to know whether Isshiki Otsutsuki had come with Arato.
He remembered how Isshiki had been defeated in the original story. A shadow clone trap, exploiting the body's vulnerability. If there was any possibility of setting up a similar situation here, he wanted to be in position.
But that required his actual body to be there, not a clone.
The road outside the city narrowed, the trees thickening on both sides.
His eyes shifted to the Sharingan's crimson, those rotating patterns sweeping methodically across every tree trunk, every shadow under the undergrowth, every gap between stones.
The treetops: nothing. The brush: nothing. Behind the rocks: nothing.
His pace slowed. He was thorough, checking every angle that could conceal a person.
Nothing. Clean and clear in every direction.
His brow came together slightly.
Not here, or too well hidden to detect?
Isshiki's Sukunahikona technique allowed him to reduce his size to the microscopic. Even the Mangekyo Sharingan's perception had limits when the target was that small, and Isshiki could also enter a separate dimensional space that the Sharingan could not pierce.
Finding nothing was not the same as nothing being there.
He drew his presence inward and moved quietly to a position where he could hear without being seen.
"...I didn't think a child could cause this much damage to the shinobi world," Arato was saying. "I was thinking, after I came back from Water Country, I'd take you out of Konoha. Travel the shinobi world together. I wanted you to see, with your own eyes, how people actually live."
"I was certain that with the right guidance from childhood, with a genuinely kind foundation built into you from the start, you wouldn't grow into someone who did terrible things."
"But I looked away for what felt like no time at all, and now look at everything that's happened."
"Hold on, hold on." The shadow clone raised both hands. "What do you mean by the things I've caused? These things were caused by all of you Dragon Vein transmigrators."
"If you hadn't leaked future intelligence into this era, I wouldn't have been nearly killed at six years old."
"Do you think I enjoy going around killing people?"
"I would be perfectly happy spending every day in the village playing with cats, eating, sleeping. That would be a much more pleasant life than this one."
Dragon Vein transmigrator.
Yasushi had come too late and missed the beginning of the conversation. But if Arato was a Dragon Vein transmigrator from the future, then the Karma Seal on his neck was coming from whom exactly? And how had it ended up on him?
Also, the implication in everything Arato was saying was that future Yasushi was not a particularly admirable person.
That made no sense.
He was a straightforward and decent person from another world with no antisocial tendencies. There was no mechanism by which he became someone who did bad things. Everything he was working toward was clearly aimed at making the shinobi world a better place.
Unless... he turned dark later?
The Uchiha clan's particular relationship with kindness was genuinely alarming when you thought about it carefully. The more sincere the kindness, the more dangerous the potential deviation. The gap between genuine good intentions and catastrophic outcomes in that lineage was historically very small.
He settled in and kept listening.
Arato paused after the shadow clone's words landed, was quiet for a moment, then continued.
"The intelligence wasn't leaked by me. But the failure to eliminate those transmigrators cleanly before they could spread what they knew: that is my responsibility."
"I can't argue against that."
"For the trouble it caused you. I'm genuinely sorry."
He bowed. Not a formal or abbreviated version of it. He bent at the waist and held it, with the specific quality of someone who actually means what the gesture is saying.
Even at distance, Yasushi felt it.
Oh. This is a talk-no-jutsu specialist.
His internal assessment was immediate and firm.
You are not Naruto. You do not have the authority to use that technique on me.
The shadow clone had its own tongue and used it.
"You're very sincerely apologizing while having no intention of changing anything, aren't you."
Arato straightened and his expression was entirely serious.
"Recognizing an error means correcting it."
"I remember what those people look like. I'll go after them. I'll try to find and eliminate them before the five major nations do, and prevent any more future intelligence from spreading."
The clone's expression shifted into something that communicated the specific mild pity of encountering someone who is operating with an incomplete picture.
"Every one of the five nations has bounties out on those people. By the time you find them, it'll be ancient history."
"I do what I can and accept what I cannot change. My conscience is clear."
There was no argument in his voice, no defensiveness. He had settled into his own understanding of what he was doing and was not particularly interested in being redirected out of it.
Seeing that the shadow clone was unmoved, Arato set the topic aside.
"Your strength has developed well beyond where I expected. Taking you around the shinobi world the way I originally planned is no longer possible."
"But I have my own purpose here and it requires me to stop the harm you're causing."
"Yasushi. Turn back."
"Stop pursuing this kind of power."
"If you genuinely dislike living this way, why not find a peaceful village somewhere, the kind with clear water and good mountains, and go back to living quietly?"
"Stop there." The shadow clone raised a hand. "What harm am I causing to the shinobi world?"
"You don't get to judge who I am now based on what some future version of me supposedly did."
"Tell me specifically. What exactly does this future version of me do, and how is it harming the shinobi world?"
"The Uchiha Divine Nation."
"Let me tell you something, Arato."
Yasushi had been operating with some degree of caution from concern about the Karma Seal and whatever connection Arato might have to Isshiki. Now that the conversation had established Arato as a Dragon Vein transmigrator from the future, that specific source of caution was gone. What replaced it was the particular confidence of someone who is not going to be redirected.
He pointed at Arato's chest through the shadow clone's gesture.
"I don't know the specifics of what the Uchiha Divine Nation looks like in the future. But I have complete confidence in my own foresight."
"Whatever I build, I will guarantee this: it will be at least ten times better than the garbage that passes for a shinobi world right now."
Something Arato had not been expecting landed in that statement. He went quiet.
Scenes from the future came to him unexpectedly, the things he had seen around Konoha Divine City and the surrounding countryside: those wide clean roads, the buildings that went up further than your neck could comfortably crane to follow, the fields laid out in organized sections, the strange vehicles running through the streets, all the things he had not been able to categorize, the puppets and the scientific ninja tools.
He ran a quick, involuntary comparison between what he had seen of that future and what he was seeing of the present, and the conclusion arrived with a clarity he had not expected.
The shinobi world under the Uchiha Divine Nation was, in concrete observable terms, considerably more developed than what currently existed.
He had noticed plenty of injustice in this era. He was not a naturally sensitive person in that direction, and had generally been registering those things as background without letting them fully form into a connected picture. But with Yasushi's statement sitting in front of him, the pieces connected.
A thought formed in him that was distinctly unwelcome.
Perhaps the Uchiha Divine Nation was not, in itself, a harmful thing.
In the next moment, the chakra in his body moved, and the visions from the Dragon Vein transit returned: the earth splitting, mountains falling, land stripped bare.
The shinobi world in grief.
That was damage done to the world itself. Not the kind of harm that a good system of governance could repair.
He breathed in, and his expression settled back into certainty.
"Yasushi. I'll admit it. Your Uchiha Divine Nation is genuinely better than the current daimyo and noble structure. That's true."
"But the damage done to the shinobi world isn't caused by your Divine Nation. It's caused by you, specifically."
"That's why I have to stop you from getting any stronger."
The shadow clone blinked at him.
"Me, specifically?"
The confusion in the expression was real.
"Is it because of the Mangekyo Sharingan?"
A pause.
"That doesn't work either."
"My Mangekyo techniques are fixed. One is a Yang Release healing technique. And the other one..."
A longer pause.
"Wait. Is there some hidden use of my other technique that I haven't figured out yet?"
After awakening the Mangekyo, Yasushi had examined both his techniques carefully. Standard theory: the Sharingan was the eye of the heart, and Mangekyo techniques emerged in response to something the owner felt most deeply.
He had turned this over many times and still couldn't resolve it.
The White Rabbit of Inaba made sense. Healing injuries. It said something straightforward about the kind of person he was.
But the Curse Binding Transfer. How had he awakened something like that?
It had no combat application whatsoever. Whatever you pulled off someone with it couldn't be redirected onto yourself. It was purely a way of making another person's situation worse without any corresponding benefit to yourself.
What depth of resentment toward another person produced that?
Chapter 485: I Will Stand Above the Highest Heaven!
Yasushi's pause gave Arato the wrong impression.
Arato thought he was wavering.
This was an understandable mistake. He had spent years traveling with Zabuza and had encountered many people who were lost in the pursuit of power, who would use any means and sacrifice anything for it. He had seen that pattern enough times to recognize it quickly.
He categorized Yasushi as another one.
"There are limits to what words can do," Arato said, and his voice carried genuine regret. "It comes down to fists after all."
Yasushi came out of his thoughts and looked at Arato's expression: the specific expression of someone who would prefer not to use force but has determined that the other person has left no alternative.
He laughed out loud.
"Where is that confidence coming from?"
"You're from the future. You already know what Susanoo is. How have you arrived at the conclusion that you can beat me?"
Arato was not moved by the mockery.
"Jutsu are ultimately about the person using them."
"Come on."
"Let me see how strong this future God of the Uchiha actually is."
He crossed the distance in a single jump, came up in front of the shadow clone, and launched a sweeping kick at face level, the air cutting sharp around his leg.
The clone laughed, jumped backward, and threw a dozen golden chains from behind its position, weaving them into a dense net that dropped toward Arato from above.
The clone's body held some tailed beast chakra, but it was a closed reserve: use it and there was less. It had to last.
While closing the distance, Arato had been quietly running through seals. He opened his mouth and a concentrated stream of water shot out, its edges sharp as blades, threading lightning along the surface that hummed with low continuous resonance.
"Water Style: Lightning Rend Water Slash!"
The water column looked narrow. What it did to the chains when it hit them did not match its appearance at all.
Even at the reduced chakra level of a shadow clone, the Adamantine Chains were jonin-grade. Against Arato's water technique they performed like rope. The column cut through the net cleanly, the dense golden weave coming apart into separate pieces that scattered in the air like light rain.
The water column still had momentum. It curved and came after the clone's midsection.
"Tch."
The clone's brow tightened. The Mangekyo patterns opened. Susanoo engaged.
Shadow clone reserves were limited, but depleting them and losing the fight was better than taking a direct hit.
The high-pressure column drove into the Susanoo's skeletal structure with a drilling quality. It cut through, and where it entered, the lightning patterns spread outward from the contact point in branching lines, crawling rapidly across the bone surface.
That was chakra nature transformation producing an amplified attack effect.
The clone pushed more chakra out urgently. Purple energy surged through the bone structure, beginning to layer muscle and armor over the skeleton, gradually forcing the water column back from the inside out.
But Arato's shape disappeared.
Even with Mangekyo-level dynamic vision, the clone nearly lost him.
Arato moved around and behind the Susanoo in a single stride, raised one leg, and swept it at the structure's back section with the motion of someone cracking a whip.
"Open!"
The explosion arrived at the same time as the impact.
The energy giant, which had stopped every previous attack without marking, deformed under this hit. The armor layer and muscle layer blew apart in chunks that scattered outward. The skeleton cracked in multiple places.
The Arato who was fighting looked nothing like the straightforward and mild person who had been standing there talking. Whatever was awake in him now was direct and hot and entirely focused.
"So this is what Susanoo actually is."
He was loud about it. His boot came down toward the clone's face in a follow-up strike.
A voice came from behind him.
"Is it?"
"You can't even tell the difference between a body and a clone. Not exactly sharp."
"What?"
Arato went tense immediately, pulling the kick back and bracing his body in one motion.
A massive force swept into his lower back from the side.
The impact sent him sideways through the air like a cannonball, a sonic ring forming at the point of departure, and then he was gone from the clearing entirely.
He crashed through the treeline. The sound of bones fracturing ran through him repeatedly, blood flooding into his mouth and spraying out in an arc. The trees and rocks along his path went to pieces. A long corridor of destruction opened through the forest, ending where his body hit a cliff face and drove into it.
Wood and stone and raised dust blended into something that looked like smoke from a distance, a raw scar driven into the hillside.
"Oh, you got here. Thank goodness. I was starting to think I was going to embarrass myself today."
The shadow clone let out a relieved laugh and wiped a completely nonexistent sweat from its brow.
"Don't dissolve yet." Yasushi waved the clone back. "I'm not sure about the Isshiki connection but play it safe, stay on perimeter and flag anything unusual."
The clone acknowledged and blinked out of the clearing.
Yasushi moved along the obvious destruction path and found Arato half embedded in the cliff face, cracks radiating outward from the point of impact, loose stone still raining down around him.
Arato was pulling himself out.
Several dry coughs. Some dark blood. Then soft green light moved across his body's surface, something invisible working through the fracture lines, pushing displaced bone back into position, the broken segments knitting back together at visible speed.
"That's a remarkable Yang Release ability."
Yasushi had recognized it immediately. He could produce the same effect himself.
"Healing only matters in a sustained fight, though. When it comes to the final outcome, what decides things is the strength of the attacks."
The Mangekyo patterns in his eyes accelerated. Tailed beast chakra came rolling outward from his body's interior.
The force of it was not subtle. It moved through the air with physical presence, the ground beneath him vibrating at the pressure of it, loose stones shifting and rolling without being touched.
The Susanoo grew with the additional output, expanding steadily past the form it had been in during the fight with the clone, adding layer after layer until it had crossed the threshold into complete form.
When Arato's body finished restoring itself and he looked up, what he saw was the full divine figure, hundreds of meters of armored energy blazing purple against the sky, wings spreading from the ribs, a face clarifying at the top: composed and utterly remote, the expression of something that regards everything below it from a sufficient distance that the distinction between individuals becomes irrelevant.
Yasushi stood on the figure's forehead.
"Pride is the original sin of everything."
His voice carried down, amplified by the Susanoo's chakra field, each word landing with a resonance that felt architectural.
"Arato. The only moment you had a real chance to remove me was the very first time we met."
"You didn't recognize me then. That failure decided everything that followed."
"I don't know who gave you your mission. But my future is already determined. I am the man who will become the God of the Shinobi World."
"This shinobi world has already rotted through. Only I, only Uchiha Yasushi, can put it on the right path."
"For the shinobi world's future. For love and peace."
"I will stand above the highest heaven!"
He spread his arms wide at the top of that declaration.
Even he had to admit: saying it out loud like that felt genuinely good. Something about the declaration, the specific flavor of it, very much in the Uchiha tradition of enormous and sincere proclamations about love and destiny and the future of humanity, gave him a particular clarity of spirit. A sensation of standing at exactly the right altitude.
This was what the Uchiha were made for. Large feelings about large things, directed outward at the whole world.
"Damn you!"
Arato stared up at the enormous form with the specific expression of someone measuring a gap they had not previously been equipped to measure accurately.
He had grown up with talent that allowed him to run through groups of jonin like an exercise. That experience had built in him a quiet assumption: whatever was called the strongest in this world, however strong it actually was, there would be a version of a fight between them where he had some chance. He had not articulated this assumption. He had simply operated from it.
The complete Susanoo standing above him was the first thing that had dismantled it from the outside.
But finding the edges of something that had always been there as an unexamined premise did not extinguish what he knew about himself. The shock did not become despair. His resolve, if anything, crystallized harder under the pressure.
"You've grown this strong already."
"I was too soft. I couldn't bring myself to act against a child."
"I was focused on my own standards of conduct while the shinobi world's survival was at stake. That was arrogance. That was self-indulgence dressed as principle."
"My mistake. So I correct it."
"Even if I die here today. I will stop you."
Hot-blooded narrative had its own logic and did not particularly care about power levels.
Even an ordinary person, having genuinely accepted their own death and committed fully to a single purpose, could exceed their normal limits dramatically. What happened when the person making that commitment was someone the world had designated as the prophesied Savior was more extreme.
As Arato spoke, his eyes went through several changes, moving from shock to a stillness that had no peace in it, settling into something that resembled certainty taken past the point where certainty needs to argue for itself.
His eyes got brighter.
Something inside him was opening.
His chakra output began to climb at a rate that had no mechanical justification.
He was going beyond his normal ceiling.
"Are you kidding me right now?"
Yasushi's internal response to this was the specific envy of watching someone activate an ability you wanted but don't have access to.
He raised his arm. The complete Susanoo brought its staff down toward Arato's position with enough force to split the sky open.
Even with the ceiling broken, Arato's numbers were not matching the complete Susanoo. He did not try to take the hit. Both legs fired, and he went straight up, placing himself at the same altitude as Yasushi on the giant's forehead.
His right arm came up.
Every gram of chakra in his body pushed into that arm.
"Water Style: Lightning Water Vortex Spear!"
A spear of water formed in his grip, lightning circulating through the body of it, condensing at the tip into a rotating drill shape that spun at high speed. At the drill's center, the water was compressed hard enough that it had taken on a density that should not have been possible in liquid, spinning counter to the outer rotation with enormous contained force.
The rotation was tight enough to distort the air around the spearhead.
"Uchiha Yasushi. Prepare yourself!"
He shouted it with everything in him, veins rising in his forehead, and drove the spear downward toward Yasushi's position with all the force and belief and committed certainty that had been building since he arrived in this era.
The collision produced something that resembled a small tactical detonation.
A mushroom cloud formed at the contact point and shot upward. The cloud layer overhead split open in a ring, leaving a hole in the sky large enough to be clearly visible from the city. Sonic booms and shockwaves moved outward in every direction, leveling the remaining forest across a considerable radius, sending a storm of wood fragments and pulverized rock rolling outward in every direction.
The earth moved. Rivers ran the wrong way briefly. Every living thing within a substantial distance felt the moment as something ending.
The capital in the distance shook. The guards on the walls had gone the color of the stones they were standing on. Some were sitting, unable to maintain standing. Some were kneeling, hands pressed together. Several had not noticed that their clothing was wet.
People were running toward the daimyo's compound from multiple directions, looking for someone whose composure might make the situation feel less final.
Yasushi hoped Jun could manage.
But he had no attention to spare for that. The attack landing in front of him required everything.
The Lightning Water Vortex Spear, carrying both water and lightning chakra nature transformations in combination, had enough force to actually matter.
The complete Susanoo's helmet cracked and failed on contact, the defensive capability of that section gone. The muscle layer held for a few breaths longer and then tore apart, sections spinning off in every direction like broken springs.
What held last was the reinforced frontal bone, and the cracks running through it were speaking very clearly about what was coming next.
But Yasushi was not concerned.
Arato's condition was worse than his.