Kakashi Hatake had always been fairly confident in his own strength. Even Kitahara Kaede's diary had described him as Konoha's world-famous technician, one of the strongest shinobi alive beneath the Kage. Against ordinary opponents, he had never doubted himself.
But what if the enemy stood at the Kage level? Then what?
He had rarely thought that question through to the end. After all, a monster of that class almost never appeared before ordinary people. And when someone like that did step onto the battlefield in person, it usually meant one thing: a war between villages was close at hand.
Just like the so-called Konoha Crush plan.
That possibility weighed on him more heavily than anything else. If Orochimaru really was involved, then a plan that ought to have sounded absurd suddenly became terrifyingly plausible. A Kage-level monster was more than enough to turn madness into reality.
And from the tone of Kitahara Kaede's diary, the attack did not sound far off.
Kaede had never written down an exact date, but Kakashi chose to assume the worst. Assume the diary was real. Assume he had not been trapped in some elaborate genjutsu. Assume Kitahara Kaede was not playing some incomprehensible joke.
If all of that was true, then the timeline could not be too distant. A year. Maybe two at most.
The clue was Sasuke.
Judging by the boy's appearance in the strange video, Sasuke Uchiha looked twelve, maybe thirteen. Old enough that he should no longer be in the Academy. And if Kakashi in that future scene had personally used the Evil Sealing Method on him, then there was only one reasonable explanation—Sasuke had become his subordinate.
The thought brought back an old memory. The Third Hokage had asked him before whether he intended to take a genin team. Kakashi had not refused.
He had understood the old man's purpose well enough. The Hokage probably thought his years in the ANBU had steeped him in too much darkness, so he wanted to drag him back into the sunlight by making him a jonin instructor. It was not the first time such an arrangement had been proposed, but until now, none of the students he'd tested had been worthy of passing.
Apparently, Sasuke was different.
'Orochimaru's target... is Sasuke?' Kakashi murmured, the realization settling over him like ice.
Only then did he fully connect it with the thing he had seen his future self suppress in that video. The cursed seal.
He was not unfamiliar with that power. He had encountered traces of it during his time in the ANBU, and even during the brief period when he had been entangled with Danzo's Root. More importantly, there was someone in Konoha right now who bore a similar mark—Mitarashi Anko, Orochimaru's former disciple.
For the current Kakashi, there were not many people left in the village whom he still cared about deeply. At the Academy, there were only two names that truly mattered.
One was Sasuke Uchiha, the last remnant of Obito's clan within Konoha, and the final survivor of the once-proud Uchiha in the ninja world. The other was Naruto Uzumaki, the only son his teacher, the Fourth Hokage Minato Namikaze, had left behind.
And now it seemed Orochimaru had already set his sights on Sasuke. Not only had he planted a cursed seal on the boy, he was even trying to lure him away.
Kakashi understood at once why that might work. Sasuke Uchiha's obsession with revenge ran too deep. A child who had seen his entire clan slaughtered could hardly be expected to let hatred go.
He did not know Sasuke especially well, but he knew enough. The boy was the top student of his year at the Academy, praised as a worthy heir to the Uchiha name.
But to Kakashi, that title—top student—was still little more than a child's honor. Geniuses also had ranks of their own.
Above the students who merely led their class were the early graduates. Above them were monsters like Kakashi himself, who had become chunin at an age when most children had only just entered school. And above even that... stood Uchiha Itachi.
Itachi was different. He was one of the few people Kakashi had ever acknowledged as more naturally gifted than himself. In terms of pure shinobi talent, Itachi had gone beyond genius and stepped into something rarer, something frightening. The last person Kakashi had seen with that kind of brilliance might have been Minato-sensei.
If Sasuke continued as he was now, no matter how desperately he trained, he would never catch up to his brother. If that hopelessness drove him into Orochimaru's hands, then everything fit together with cruel logic.
But would the future truly unfold that way? Kakashi did not know.
He only knew one thing with absolute certainty: this was not something he could afford to dismiss.
Should he report it to the Third Hokage?
The moment he considered it seriously, another problem rose up in front of him. Would the old man even believe him? How could he explain the existence of the diary? More importantly... could the diary even be shown to anyone else?
That question left him no less troubled than the rest.
Who exactly was this Kitahara Kaede?
***
Unaware that Hatake Kakashi had already fixed his attention on him, Kitahara Kaede rose early the next morning and headed to the Hokage Building to receive his squad's next mission. As the team's acting leader, this had already become part of his routine.
In Konoha, some jobs could be selected by the shinobi themselves, while others were assigned from above. More capable ninja were naturally trusted with more dangerous missions; the ordinary ones were left with the work no one wanted.
With one chunin and two genin under him, Kaede's team was usually restricted to C-rank assignments. B-rank jobs generally required a team made entirely of chunin. As for A-rank missions, those were the domain of squads led by jonin.
So when Kaede stepped into the mission hall and saw who was sitting there that morning, he could not help being a little surprised.
The person overseeing the desk today was the Third Hokage himself.
That was unusual. The Hokage did not normally spend his time handing out missions in person. There were only a handful of days each month when he appeared here at all.
Kaede's feelings toward Sarutobi Hiruzen were complicated.
Back on Earth, in all the conspiracy theories and revisionist debates he'd seen online, the Third Hokage was often painted as some sinister mastermind hiding in plain sight, an old fox whose hands were blacker than anyone else's. But after coming to this world and living in it, Kaede found that version hard to accept at face value.
Did Hiruzen have flaws? Of course. Had he mishandled major matters? Definitely. But in Kaede's eyes, that did not automatically make him the all-powerful shadow villain people loved to imagine.
If anything, Kaede sometimes felt the stranger truth was simpler: the story from his previous life had been altered and stretched as it went on. In the early days, Hiruzen Sarutobi had been praised as the strongest Hokage in history. Later developments made that claim feel increasingly awkward.
But this was no longer a manga, no longer an anime, and certainly no longer a forum argument. This was a real world. Things that could once be waved away as narrative inconsistency might have entirely different explanations here.
And Kaede did not dare gamble his life on assumptions.
'Team Kitahara Kaede, right?' Sarutobi Hiruzen glanced at him through the haze of his pipe smoke, then looked down at the papers before him. His voice was calm, almost casual, as though he were discussing the weather rather than a ninja's livelihood.
'There's a C-rank mission here. You three can handle it.'