Year 47 of the Konoha calendar.
Sasori and Yuji were both fifteen.
Within Sunagakure, both had become figures the village could not easily do without.
Sasori held a key position in the Anbu and had taken on the Kage Guard role. Yuji headed the Medical Department and had demonstrated, through everything he had built over the past years, a capacity to shape the village's future that the senior officials had long since stopped questioning.
Since stepping back from active battlefield deployment, Yuji had spent most of his time on village affairs, the hospital, the pharmaceutical industry, the internal restructuring that had happened in the shadows.
The personal training he had managed to fit in was real but limited. Every hour had been pointed at moving the plan forward, and the plan had reached the step of the Third Kazekage's death.
Through it all, he had been watching the broader ninja world and cross-referencing what he observed against the timeline he carried in his memory.
Year 43 - Uchiha Shisui was born. Year 44 - Kakashi made Chunin. Might Guy graduated from the Academy. Year 45 - Sakumo Hatake took his own life. Konoha had tried to contain that news, but it leaked eventually, reaching the other villages with the usual delay that intelligence traveled at.
Yuji hadn't been with Sasori when the news arrived. When they met afterward, Sasori said only: "Konoha is nothing more than this."
That said something. The Second Ninja World War had made the Three Legendary Sannin famous, but no honest accounting of that conflict could exclude Sakumo Hatake from its outcome.
His presence on the battlefield had been a different kind of force entirely. The intelligence alone that the White Fang was leading an operation had cost Kumogakure their nerve before the first engagement even began.
That was not hyperbole, it was a documented effect on enemy battle intent. Yuji and Sasori had participated in the war's final stages. What they had experienced, compared to what the White Fang had moved through from the beginning, was a ripple against a current.
And after all of it, Sakumo had failed one mission. The gains he had delivered to Konoha across years of service were not weighed against that single failure. The companions he had saved accused him. The village that had called him a hero turned, and the turning was rapid and complete.
This was the ecology of ninja villages. Sunagakure operated on the same logic. The final conversation with the Kazekage had made it explicit, if Yuji had continued pressing on the Daimyo issue and made an enemy of the Third, everything he had built within the village could have been dismantled methodically.
Mission records reviewed for flaws, narrative shifted, the goodwill accumulated with villagers and lower ranks eroded by repetition. Even genuine affection had limits. A genius who became inconvenient could be made into a liability with enough patience.
Yuji understood this clearly. It was one of the real reasons the Third had to go.
Year 46 - Itachi was born. Obito and his cohort graduated from the Academy.
This year was the inflection point. The conditions for the Third Ninja World War were assembling.
Yuji sat in the hospital office and worked through the implications.
He wanted more than economic gains from this war. He wanted him and Sasori to emerge from it with the kind of battlefield reputation that would make the succession question answer itself.
In terms of pure military record and accumulated resume, Rasa still held an advantage over both of them. The Kazekage's death had created a leadership vacuum, but the village would not move quickly to fill it, there were too many other pressures, and no clear timeline. That gap needed to be used.
When the war came, he and Sasori had to establish something undeniable in a short window of time.
The factory was nearly complete. Production would begin within weeks. Intelligence from the village's networks confirmed that all four of the other Great Villages had become aware of the new medicines by now.
Konoha had moved fastest in response, but the medicinal herb supply across the ninja world had already been largely purchased and stockpiled.
Without raw materials, research and imitation were theoretical exercises. And with the war coming, there would be no time to conduct them anyway.
The timing had held.
Yuji allowed himself a quiet moment of satisfaction and then moved on.
Nearly a month had passed since the Kazekage's disappearance. The village's senior officials had finally begun moving toward the obvious conclusion, because no legitimate explanation could account for a sitting Kage being absent for this long without any word.
The discussion had shifted toward the possibility of assassination. Personnel had been quietly dispatched to investigate across the ninja world, with suspicion focused primarily on the other four Great Villages.
Konoha sat at the top of that list, the history between the two villages was long and the grievances were real.
They were not wrong that a major village was behind it. They simply weren't looking in the right direction.
The village itself, on the surface, showed nothing of this internal tension. The pharmaceutical industry's momentum had filled the streets and the public mood with something that looked like genuine prosperity. The general population was immersed in it.
Only the senior officials understood how precarious the situation actually was beneath that surface.
Two knocks at the door.
"Come in."
Shiori opened it halfway. "Karura is here."
Yuji was on his feet immediately and out of the office before the sentence fully landed.
In the corridor near the hospital entrance, he found her, visibly pregnant, seated in a chair, Yashamaru standing beside her. When she saw him she tried to rise, and he stopped her with a gesture before she got halfway up.
"You're pregnant. Don't make large movements."
He looked around briefly. "Where's Rasa?"
"He has things to attend to," Karura said, with her characteristic gentleness. "I'm only here for a check-up. There's no need for him to come."
Yuji kept his expression pleasant.
'Scumbag,' he thought.
His wife walking around with a full belly, coming to medical appointments alone with only her brother for company, and Rasa was elsewhere attending to things.
...
BOnus @100 PS
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