There were plenty of wandering shinobi active throughout the Land of Fire. Some came from small, drifting ninja clans; others were missing-nin who had fled from villages scattered across the continent. As long as they weren't defectors from one of the Five Great Nations, though, they usually didn't amount to more than a nuisance.
After all, the smaller hidden villages were only so strong to begin with, and their rogue shinobi were rarely exceptional. In a real fight, many so-called jonin from lesser villages might not even be able to defeat an elite chunin from one of the great powers. They were troublesome, yes—but only in the way gnats were troublesome, not storms.
If shinobi from one of the other great villages got involved, however, the situation changed completely.
None of that was what bothered Kitahara Kaede most. Once the mission was over, he still had to act as squad leader and submit the official report.
"Why do I still have to write a mission summary after becoming a ninja? Is that even reasonable?"
Because a wandering shinobi had appeared during the assignment, the difficulty had exceeded the original mission grade. That meant extra pay, but it also meant the report had to be rewritten from scratch.
Still, there had been another gain on this trip—one far more tangible than a bumped-up mission reward. Inside the bandits' stronghold, they had found a hidden cache holding a staggering ten million ryo, all looted from merchants traveling the trade route. The money clearly hadn't been moved yet, which meant it had fallen straight into the hands of Kitahara Kaede and his team.
Of course, on a mission like this, there was no way they could hand in the result and pretend the money didn't exist. In the end, Kitahara Kaede made a practical decision: half of it would go to the village, and in exchange, Konoha would quietly overlook the rest. Of the remaining five million, he took three, while the other two each received one million.
Neither Hyuga Keiko nor Xiang Tianyuanlong had any objection. Without Kitahara Kaede, they would have died in that mountain stronghold. And even one million ryo was already an astronomical sum to people at their level.
Judging by the number of missions a normal chunin could accept—and the speed at which those missions were completed—many would never save a million ryo in their entire lives. That was without even factoring in the possibility of dying before they ever had the chance.
By the time Kitahara Kaede finally finished writing the mission summary, it was already deep into the night.
But instead of going straight to bed, he opened his diary.
***
May 14th, Clear. [Ugh, why do we still have to work like livestock writing reports in the ninja world? Is this really fair? This mission nearly turned Xiang Tianyuanlong into cannon fodder. Living in a world this dangerous is brutal. You could die at any time, especially when you don't have the protagonist's plot armor.]
Inside the Hatake clan compound, Kakashi Hatake sensed the diary had updated and opened it at once. The first thing he saw was Kitahara Kaede's utterly unserious complaint.
Plot armor?
Kakashi didn't quite understand the term, but from the way it was phrased, he could vaguely guess at the meaning.
His lips twitched. The part about Kitahara Kaede's teammate nearly dying hadn't stirred much in him at all. He had seen that kind of thing too many times in his life for it to leave a mark.
But when he read the complaint about having to write after-action reports, he actually laughed out loud. That pain, at least, he understood perfectly. For many shinobi, writing a mission report was more agonizing than the mission itself.
Then his eyes moved to the next line—and the smile vanished.
However, the Sharingan is still absurdly useful. The moment I awakened it, my chakra increased by at least another third in a very short time. No wonder there have always been rumors that if you face an Uchiha one-on-one, your best option is to run, and that the safest fight is two-on-one.
Unfortunately, there are too few classic battles involving Sharingan users. The most iconic ones are only two: the brief clash between Mr. Fifty-Fifty and the one-versus-seven fight, and then the great ocean battle of Water Release.]
Kakashi sucked in a sharp breath.
Awakened the Sharingan?
What exactly had he just read?
Everyone knew the Sharingan was the Uchiha clan's unique dōjutsu, a bloodline limit that outsiders simply could not awaken on their own. Kakashi possessed one too, but his was different. It had been entrusted to him by his teammate, Obito Uchiha, as a dying gift—the proof that had carried him into the rank of jonin.
Because he was not an Uchiha, he couldn't deactivate it at will. The eye remained open, constantly draining chakra, turning what should have been one of his strengths into a weakness people mocked behind his back.
The Hatake clan was no weak civilian family, either. It was a real shinobi clan with history and inheritance. They were not known for monstrous chakra reserves, true, but after generations of cultivation, their chakra was still far beyond that of ordinary civilians.
And even so, his Sharingan exhausted him.
So Kakashi understood this point better than anyone: what he had was not an awakening. It was a transplant. A member of the Uchiha clan—or at least someone with Uchiha blood—was the only kind of person who could truly awaken that eye.
His expression turned grave at once. He pulled out Kitahara Kaede's file again and flipped through it with practiced speed.
The record was simple and clear. Kitahara Kaede's ancestors were ordinary villagers native to Konoha. There was no documented link to the Uchiha clan at all.
Could there have been some trace amount of Uchiha blood on his father's side? Or his mother's?
That was the only explanation Kakashi could come up with. If the file was accurate, then any connection would have to be so old it predated Konoha's founding—back in the Warring States era, before the village system even existed.
And even if that was true, the bloodline should have been diluted to the point of near nothingness. Otherwise, the Kitahara family's talent would never have remained so ordinary for so long.
Yet the method of awakening described in the diary was unmistakably consistent with the Uchiha clan's traditions. In a moment of danger, while watching a teammate nearly die, that dormant blood had been forced awake—and the Sharingan had answered.
Kakashi knew that pattern all too well.
One of his own teammates had awakened the Sharingan in desperation once. In the face of life and death, the eye had opened—and the enemy had died for it.
Reading Kitahara Kaede's words, Kakashi could practically picture the scene: Xiang Tianyuanlong on the verge of being killed, Kaede pushed into an instant of absolute crisis, the faint thread of ancient Uchiha blood buried somewhere inside him suddenly igniting. And from that spark, the Sharingan had emerged.
It was the most standard way for the eye to be born.
Even so, Kakashi was stunned. A bloodline so thin it didn't even appear in the family records had still produced an awakening? That was incredible.
If that was true, then what did it mean?
Aside from Itachi and Sasuke, was there now another Uchiha in the shinobi world?
Could someone like Kitahara Kaede even be considered part of the Uchiha clan?
And then there was the other line—the one that kept hooking at Kakashi's mind.
A Sharingan battle.
In the past, that wouldn't have meant much. The Uchiha had once been a great clan, and internal sparring between Sharingan users would not have been unusual. But now? In the whole of Konoha, only Uchiha Sasuke remained.
And if Kakashi was being honest, he only counted himself as half a user at best.
"The brief clash between Mr. Fifty-Fifty and the one-versus-seven fight…"
Kakashi fell silent.
He knew, with uncomfortable certainty, that the so-called Mr. Fifty-Fifty was probably him.
But who exactly was the one that could fight seven at once?