"Uchiha Itachi? He is still a child."
The name carried weight even among Konoha's civilians, the kind of weight that accumulates around extraordinary things before anyone has formally agreed to grant it. The eldest son of the Uchiha clan's head. A boy who had demonstrated abilities at levels that did not fit comfortably into any existing framework for measuring talent. Since the village's founding under the First Hokage, Uchiha Itachi was the only ninja recorded to have set foot on an active battlefield at the age of four.
Orochimaru had seen him there, during the Earth Country front. The composure the child carried, the particular stillness of someone who had been born already knowing how to be still, had given even Orochimaru a moment of genuine pause.
"The younger the better," Danzo said, his voice carrying the flat indifference of a man discussing logistics. "More opportunity for formation."
He kept the true reason beneath that. The truth was more specific. Sharingan, in the moment of awakening, already began determining the shape and limit of what it would eventually become. And Mangekyō Sharingan was a reflection of the soul. If the triggering moment was not experienced correctly from the beginning, if the conditions of its awakening were wrong, then the technique that emerged from it would be a burden rather than a weapon. The foundation had to be laid properly, and that required access before the foundation set.
...........
"Danzo-sama." Orochimaru's golden eyes carried a deep and shifting light, the expression of someone measuring risk against desire with genuine care. "A partner of your caliber is not something I would want to lose carelessly. Are you certain you don't want to reconsider your choice of candidate?"
Even Orochimaru, whose insolence was one of his most consistent qualities, would not willingly draw the Uchiha clan's full attention. Even Sarutobi Hiruzen, at the height of his authority in the middle of a shinobi war, had chosen not to take on that particular weight directly.
"Complete the Reincarnation of the Living Corpse technique," Danzo said, "and I will tell you the secret of Mangekyō Sharingan. That is the condition of the arrangement."
"No." Orochimaru's refusal was immediate and without apology. "That reward is not equivalent to the risk. Not in terms of profit and not in terms of danger."
He was genuinely not afraid of Danzo in the way that most people were afraid of Danzo. Having undergone the transformations he had undergone, he retained the option of simply leaving Konoha if the situation demanded it. That option changed the arithmetic of fear considerably.
Danzo looked at him from beneath the bandage. The pale, smiling young man held his ground without flinching.
The silence stretched.
Then Danzo offered a price that even he had not planned to offer until this moment, and the moment required it.
"Complete the technique. Deliver it to me." A pause, deliberate and weighted. "And Yamato will be yours."
...........
Even Orochimaru felt it.
The blood moved differently in his veins for a moment, something ancient and involuntary responding before his reasoning mind could intercept it. A desire gripped him that had no interest in being measured or controlled.
"You." He stopped. Started again. "Are you serious?"
He waited for the confirmation. When it came, in the form of a single nod, Orochimaru's composure came apart in a way it rarely did, wide smile breaking into something that was almost laughter and fully genuine.
"I underestimated you, old man." There was real appreciation in his voice now, the tone he reserved for things that had surprised him past his expectations. "You are prepared to sacrifice the Wood Release of the First Hokage. Is Sharingan truly worth that much?" His golden eyes sharpened with the particular brightness of a man who has just decided he needs to understand something. "I find myself suddenly wanting to see this Tsuki-no-Kagami you are willing to wager a miracle on."
...........
Wood Release.
In the memories inherited from this body, a man named Senju Hashirama occupied the position of an absolute standard, the benchmark against which all other power was measured. The Wood Release was the signature of that standard. Legendary. Nearly divine in its rarity.
But it was power. Impression. The kind of thing that inspired awe in people who had not yet encountered something that operated at a different level entirely.
Compared to Mangekyō Sharingan, which Danzo had now experienced from the inside, which could reach into the original source of the world and draw from what governed all things, Yamato's Wood Release was a second-rate derivation of a technique from the Tao World.
In this dangerous world, personal strength came first. Everything else was negotiable.
...........
"Give me adequate test subjects," Orochimaru said, "and in three years I will give you an answer."
"Too long. One year maximum."
Judging by what the child had already demonstrated, Itachi could awaken his Sharingan by age seven. Once that happened, the window Danzo needed would close. The boy's value to him depended on timing.
"Special vessels will be required." Orochimaru's eyes moved in the particular way they moved when he was already past the question of whether and deep into the question of how. "We should find a suitable reason to move toward the front in the Land of Water."
"Not straightforward," Danzo said. "After the Kikyo Pass, the Mist refocused its attention on its conflict with the Rock. There have been no direct engagements with Konoha in over a year. If we provoke them openly, Hiruzen will object on principle."
Half of the shinobi world's Kekkei Genkai clans called the Land of Water home. The Hōzuki. The Kaguya. The Yuki. The Terumi. Their reputations were not inferior to the Uchiha or the Hyuga, and their internal conflicts were the primary reason the Water Country front had not broken through during the war years, when Konoha had been stretched across four simultaneous fronts.
"There is no active conflict," Orochimaru said, and the ominous quality in his smile deepened as the greedy light moved through his vertical pupils, "but Konoha has not signed a formal peace treaty with the Mist either."
He had wanted to go to the Land of Water for years. The work had simply never allowed it.
"If peace with the Stone works to our advantage," Danzo said, his mind already moving through the architecture of the possibility, "then it may create the conditions to arrange something."
They looked at each other.
The same thought arrived in both minds at the same moment with the ease of people who had been thinking in parallel for long enough that convergence had become automatic.
The Land of Lightning.
...........
The battlefield was loud in the particular way that battles involving legendary shinobi were loud, which was to say that the sound arrived after the fact, trailing behind forces that moved faster than sound had any business keeping pace with.
Jiraiya stood on the head of Gamabunta, pressing every drop of chakra he could extract from himself into the combined techniques of Mount Myōboku. Fire bloomed outward in a formation that had ended encounters with lesser opponents before the second breath.
The enormous man standing in its path patted himself on the shoulder.
Snow-white lightning wrapped his entire body like a second skin, steady and absolute. He looked down at the burned piece of his clothing with mild interest, tore it away, and turned his gaze back toward the blond shinobi on the toad's head with the particular expression of someone who had expected more and was choosing not to say so directly.
"Where is your Hermit Mode?" The Third Raikage's voice carried across the distance without effort. "Fire Release like that is nothing more than a warm bath to me."
"Wait, wait." Jiraiya's voice carried the specific quality of a man maintaining composure through force of will alone, cold sweat tracking down his forehead. "That was my strongest combination technique, not counting senjutsu. Your Lightning Armor has gotten even stronger since last time."
"Fool." The Raikage's tone was not without a certain rough affection, the way a very strong man sometimes speaks to someone he considers worth addressing at all. "Last time you were fighting alongside that sullen old man. I don't particularly like him, but his Wind Release mastery is among the finest in the entire shinobi world. He was the one holding back my Raiton. Even then." A pause that carried its own weight. "You remember how that fight ended."
...........
Of course he remembered.
Jiraiya had walked through hundreds of battles across the length of his life. Most of them had found their place in memory as experiences, things that had happened and been survived and filed away. Only twice had he felt death as a genuine presence rather than a theoretical possibility.
Once against Hanzo of the Salamander.
Once against the Third Raikage.
The objective of that second encounter had been simple. Buy time. Hold the line long enough for the broader situation to shift. The price had been Danzo's right eye and a paralysis that had taken months to fully reverse, and that had been with Danzo present and fighting alongside him.
If I had not entered Hermit Mode in advance, Jiraiya thought, if I had not already reinforced my physical characteristics, my speed, my regeneration before the contact was made, what that technique did to Danzo would have been a preview of what it would have done to me.
"You're alone now," Gamabunta said beneath him, the great toad's voice carrying the rumbling practicality of someone stating a fact that has immediate implications. "Run."
The word had barely settled in the air before Gamabunta's nose registered something that bypassed all reasoning and went directly to instinct.
The smell of Jiraiya's blood.
Deliberate. A specific pattern drawn along the bone of his eye socket, following the line of his cheek with the precision of long practice. The pattern was not decoration. It was a key.
Spatiotemporal fluctuations rippled outward from the points where the blood met skin. The air split open at two locations and two hermit toads stepped through from Mount Myōboku, taking their positions on Jiraiya's shoulders with the unhurried ease of beings answering a summons they had been expecting.
The quality of the air around Jiraiya changed.
Hermit Mode.