Hinata's expression shifted—the lingering ease between them slowly hardening, then draining into a livid, anger-laced pallor. Haku's refusal had made one thing perfectly clear: this was her final act of retaliation.
Even having submitted entirely to what Hinata wanted from her, in the end she had still refused Hinata's recruitment with quiet derision.
It was like a punchline to a cruel joke, aimed squarely at Hinata—mocking everything that had passed between them, mocking the closeness Hinata had offered, mocking the notion Hinata had let herself believe: that Haku had already been broken.
Hinata's right hand snapped up, and a sharp slap landed clean across Haku's left cheek. The sound rang out in the small underground room. Haku's face turned to the right; a thin line of bright blood traced the corner of her reddened mouth.
And yet her eyes kept that same unhurried serenity. Her expression never changed.
Hinata's own eyes trembled almost imperceptibly. She leaned in. Her hands moved—rigid, almost mechanical—fingers closing around Haku's throat. The atmosphere in the underground room shifted. The darkness pressed closer, as if trying to coax the most inflexible parts of a person's soul to the surface.
"...Forget it."
It might have been a long time or a short one; she couldn't have said. Hinata released fingers she had never really tightened, gathered the clothing scattered around her in silence, and dressed. When she had finished, she moved to the ladder and paused, her back still turned.
"You can die. I don't want you anymore. But leave your body behind—Ice Release Kekkei Genkai is too rare to waste."
"Of course. Thank you. Then—I wish you good fortune in your battles ahead."
From the tatami, Haku sat up and placed her hands in her lap, inclining her head with composed formality. "Farewell, Hinata-sama."
No reply. Hinata lifted the panel and left behind the darkness that had seemed, for a moment, boundless. The fury in her eyes had already cooled—replaced by something forged and even, like tempered steel.
Not everything would ever go the way she planned. No matter how promising the beginning, that was simply true. Just as no single person could make every soul in the world love the same thing—this kind of failure would not shake her resolve. Hard work and genuine investment were no guarantee of success. Not even when you staked yourself on it.
"What a pity... something that beautiful, that could have been such a cherished companion for so long."
Arms folded, Hinata raised her eyes toward the soft silver-white moonlight filtering down from above. That quality of light—like water, like something you couldn't quite hold—reminded her, for some reason, of Haku's smile. Gentle in appearance. Most likely just a projection, a story humans told themselves.
"And you—will you be any different, my pretty little slave? Sai."
She didn't turn around as she said it. From the shadow of the corridor's corner, Sai sank to one knee. The black-and-white of his attendant's uniform made his slight frame look even thinner than usual. Head lowered, he spoke softly.
"Hinata-sama may think of me as she would any cherished possession. Whatever her smile, whatever her posture—I can imitate them."
"Heh... baka. If something you love gets broken—making another one in its image doesn't make it the same thing. And I don't find it easy to love anything in the first place. Never mind. Let's go."
A faint, humorless smile curved Hinata's mouth. She turned and walked on. There was nothing left to do but keep moving. When the thing you had wanted to cherish was gone, the only answer was to go on looking.
---
Root's underground base was as sparse and echoing as ever. In the aftermath of the Third's order to disband Root, the vast majority of its shinobi had been stripped of their identities and scattered into ANBU's various units and squads. It was not, as decisions went, a wise one—most Root agents maintained fierce loyalty to Danzo, and being absorbed into ANBU's general structure only gave him sharper visibility into the village's movements than before.
The genuinely wise course of action would have been to let those shinobi die—not by mass execution, which would have been too obvious, but quietly: mission by mission, through assignments that carried no expectation of return, trimming those roots from Konoha's foundation one by one.
But Danzo and the Third's relationship had always been too entangled to cut cleanly, and even knowing what the correct answer was, the Third had still chosen the messier, more dangerous approach.
"The Third is too stubborn. So are those elders and their conservative bloc. That's why Konoha keeps growing weaker."
His back to Hinata, Danzo used the fingers of his unbound left hand to bring the candle flame up higher, widening the circle of light. Hinata gazed at the enormous wooden mass that had been—and in some sense still was—the remains of the First Hokage's body. She didn't bother responding to his commentary. The man's ambition was no secret, and he disliked being interrupted or needled around.
"Give me a territory outside Konoha's direct control—somewhere I can reconvene my former forces. Only then can Root be rebuilt into something that genuinely strengthens this village. A tree needs strong roots before any wind can trouble it."
Danzo's voice was flat, unhurried, as if outcomes and logistics were already decided and he was simply announcing them. That manner of speaking was, in its way, its own form of tribute to the white-eyed girl standing across from him.
"Build a new city outside Konoha. Hold the launch events there exclusively. Use it as a dedicated commercial district for Fox Tales merchandise—figures, audio recordings, special edition collections, artbooks, merchandise clothing, the works. Securing the rights from the Third is your problem."
Without making any effort at concealment, Hinata drew out the Scroll of Seals she had been studying and found again the forbidden technique that had caught her attention last time: the Chimera Technique. Its underlying principle was not complicated—it used living biological material as sacrificial substrate and forcibly merged discrete organisms into a single hybrid entity through ninjutsu. The hybrid inherited everything from all contributing bodies: chakra capacity, physical conditioning, and most importantly, Kekkei Genkai.
"So that's your thinking. A stable income base and a foothold—yes, that would accelerate Root's reconstruction considerably. I see. That's what you want to use."
Danzo stepped closer, glancing at the scroll in Hinata's hands, then spoke without inflection. "My advice: don't experiment with this on your own body. We ran our own trials—fusion subjects suffer severe biological rejection, and the more powerful the individual, the higher the chance of physical collapse. You are the Hyuga Clan's eldest daughter. Your body cannot be risked."
"The city's name will be Akihabara. I'll send you the detailed development plan in due course. I'd also recommend getting the figure trading rights with Akatsuki formally transferred through here—and when you negotiate the tax split with Konoha's side, lock in the numbers early. Late-stage renegotiation over money never ends cleanly."
Hinata read the scroll with full attention. On the surface, her words and Danzo's seemed to bear no relation to each other. Examined carefully, those few spare exchanges contained a dense, intricate ledger of mutual interest.
"Very well. If there's anything further, have Sai relay it."
A tap of his walking staff, and Danzo's silhouette dissolved back into the underground dark. Everything he had come for had been accomplished. The work of persuading the Third and the Council was his to handle now.
Hinata remained, looking up at the vast, almost wooden shape of the First Hokage's remains. Her mouth curved—just slightly. She drew the kunai from the back of her belt and pressed its edge to the remains' left ear, beginning to cut downward in a controlled line.
The blade was sharp. The body was not. It resisted like thick, dense rubber—nothing at all like flesh—and it took a full five minutes of sustained effort to separate the ear cleanly. Once the kunai pulled free, she watched the wound begin to move: slowly, steadily, unmistakably alive. New tissue grew back from the cut edge, exactly as it always had.
"Truly remarkable. Even in death, the First Hokage-sama continues to provide for his village."
Hinata said it as a kind of compliment—clinical, genuine—then stored the severed ear away and turned to leave the underground base. There was research to begin.
---
The walk back to her room took no more than half an hour. When she lifted the floor panel and descended into the underground room again, the knowledge landed in her chest before she had fully registered the scene: the girl who slept here was gone.
The room had been quietly tidied. It held the serene, orderly quality of a space from which all restlessness had departed—a place that had been prepared, with care, for exactly this. Haku lay in the center of the tatami, hands folded neatly across her chest, expression peaceful. No wounds anywhere on her body. Even her appearance had been attended to, as if in final arrangement.
The shallow rise and fall of her chest continued. The soft sound of breath persisted. But these were only the body's instinctive rhythms—meat and muscle performing their function by reflex. The soul that had given them direction was no longer present.
She had left of her own will—surrendered her body and let her soul slip into death. That kind of dying didn't come easily. Only someone whose desire for death ran clear and unclouded, from the surface all the way down, could manage it.
Exactly as Hinata had told her: leave your body behind. You are permitted to die.
Hinata knelt silently at Haku's side. She gathered the girl's body in her arms and pressed one last, quiet kiss to the center of her brow.
"Such a pity... something this beautiful..."
"And yet... such a perfect fit."