Chapter 120: Why Are You the Hokage?
Though the hidden village of Konoha was vast, the sheer distance meant nothing to a Jonin moving at full tilt. Wind whipped through the streets, scattering leaves in a frantic spiral as Kou blurred past the civilian districts. In mere moments, she breached the perimeter of the Hokage Building, her boots slamming against the polished wooden floors of the corridor.
A masked figure materialized from the shadows, dropping directly into her path. It was an Anbu operative—specifically, the squad leader who had accompanied Kou on her most recent assignment. He planted his feet squarely in the center of the hallway, a physical barricade of dark armor and cold steel.
"Hokage-sama is currently in a meeting," the Anbu stated, his voice muffled and stern behind his porcelain mask. "Entry is strictly forbidden without a direct summons."
Kou didn't even break her stride. Her hand snapped to the hilt of her ninjato, drawing the blade in a blinding arc of silver. The sudden, lethal strike forced the squad leader to leap backward to avoid being cleaved in two. Taking advantage of that split-second opening, Kou channeled chakra into her legs and vanished in a blur of the Body Flicker Technique, bypassing him entirely.
Jiraiya and Tsunade, hot on her heels and gasping for breath, nearly collided with the displaced guard. "Sorry! So sorry about that!" Jiraiya threw a hasty, apologetic wave over his shoulder, desperately pumping his legs to keep pace with the enraged Uchiha.
The Anbu captain righted himself, his hand hovering over his own weapon. He considered giving chase, but the strict directives Sakumo had laid out during the morning briefing echoed in his mind. He hesitated, ultimately lowering his guard and letting her go. In truth, he respected the young girl. She was exceptionally powerful, fiercely reliable, and, above all, obedient. During their joint operations, she executed every command with ruthless efficiency and zero complaints. To leave an elite operative of her caliber rotting at home on suspension felt like a tragic waste of talent.
Bang!
The heavy oak doors of the Hokage's office flew open, rebounding violently against the walls. Kou marched into the room, her chest heaving as she fought a losing battle to suppress the tempest of emotions raging inside her. She completely ignored the designated spot reserved for mission reports, her boots thudding aggressively against the floorboards.
She bypassed protocol entirely, marching straight up to the massive conference table. Her normally stoic expression was visibly fracturing. Micro-tremors wracked her shoulders, and her jaw was locked so tightly it looked ready to shatter. The fragile string of her sanity was stretched taut, teetering dangerously on the precipice of snapping.
"Hokage-sama," Kou demanded, her voice trembling with a dangerous edge. "Why did you suspend my missions?"
Jiraiya and Tsunade finally skidded into the room, chests heaving as they gasped for air. Their eyes widened in horror as they took in the scene. Several high-level Konoha officials were seated around the table, their gazes locked onto the intruding Uchiha. Jiraiya's eye twitched. He immediately dropped into a deep, panicked bow, elbowing Tsunade to do the same.
"We apologize!" Jiraiya blurted out, sweat beading on his forehead. "Kou didn't mean to intrude! We'll drag her out of here right now!"
While the Fourth Hokage was widely renowned for her incredibly lenient temper toward her subordinates, barging into a high-level executive meeting was a massive breach of protocol. With the village elders and top brass present, smoothing over this kind of scene would be a nightmare.
Jiraiya reached out, grabbing Kou's arm to haul her backward. But Kou—who had never so much as raised her voice at him before—violently wrenched herself free, shoving him away without a shred of hesitation.
She planted her feet, her dark eyes burning with a desperate, stubborn fire. When she spoke, it sounded less like a demand and more like a raw, bleeding plea.
"Why suspend my missions?" she ground out, emphasizing every single syllable. "I have never failed a mission. Not once."
"Anbu Uchiha Kou, are you openly questioning the Hokage's orders?" a harsh, raspy voice barked. "Who gave you the audacity?"
Danzo, who was already nursing a bruised ego from a recent beating, felt his temper ignite at the sight of such blatant arrogance. His solitary eye narrowed into a vicious glare, and he opened his mouth to summon the guards outside to drag the insolent girl away.
Stelle simply raised a hand, her lazy gesture instantly cutting Danzo off. The Anbu guards who had materialized at the doorway caught her subtle signal. They immediately melted back into the shadows, pulling the heavy doors shut behind them with a soft click.
The Fourth Hokage casually set her pen down on the mahogany desk. "Suspending your missions is for your own good, Kou," Stelle said, her tone infuriatingly calm and measured. "And for the good of your teammates. Anbu operations are volatile. They are accompanied by life-and-death crises. If a mistake on your part ends up harming your squad or yourself, that is a responsibility you simply cannot bear."
Her gentle, reasonable tone sounded like it was designed to soothe a frightened child, but it acted like gasoline on the roaring fire of Kou's fury.
Kou stared dead ahead at Stelle, who sat comfortably in the seat of supreme authority. Slowly, a twisted, bitter look of mockery surfaced in the Uchiha's pitch-black eyes. It was a hollow, self-deprecating sneer, as if she were laughing at some cruel cosmic joke.
"It was clearly a mistake caused by the squad leader's faulty intelligence," Kou spat, her voice dripping with venom. "I was the one who stepped up. I handled the aftermath on the spot and saved the operation. So why am I still the one being punished in the end? This hypocritical excuse of yours is truly pathetic."
She let out a dry, humorless chuckle. "I think the truth is much simpler. Hokage-sama just feels that I am a defective, uncontrollable tool. A broken weapon that needs to be discarded."
Stelle's brow furrowed just a fraction. "Kou, calm down. You are overreacting. It is just a trivial matter; no one is going to care about this in the long run. Give it some time, and everyone will forget it ever happened."
A trivial matter?
Kou froze, utterly stunned by the casual dismissal. The air seemed to get sucked out of her lungs. Something that had nearly shattered her entire foundation of faith—something that had driven her to the absolute brink of madness—was just a trivial matter in the Hokage's mouth?
Then what was the point? What was the point of any of her suffering?
A look of deep, unmatched sorrow bled into Kou's dark eyes. It was a suffocating, bottomless sadness that sent a violent spike of unease straight through Jiraiya's chest.
What the hell happened during those ten days I was away? Jiraiya thought, panic rising in his throat. It was only ten days! Why is she completely falling apart?
He had spent months agonizing over her, painstakingly pulling her out of the darkness inch by inch. Yet now, right before his eyes, she was sinking back into that suffocating abyss. How could everything unravel so fast? He never should have left the village for that damn mission.
Desperate, Jiraiya grabbed her hand again, his voice cracking with a raw, pleading note. "Kou, please. Let's just go back, okay? Hokage-sama doing this... it really must be for your own good. Just calm down first. I'll help you figure this out, I promise."
Kou slowly lowered her gaze, staring blankly at Jiraiya's large, calloused hand wrapped around her wrist.
In the next second, she reached over and methodically pried his fingers away, one by one. Her movements were cold and deliberate. It was the very first time she had ever truly rejected him, and the absolute finality in her gesture felt like a physical blow to his gut.
When Kou finally raised her head to look back at the woman sitting in the Hokage's chair, the frantic, out-of-control hysteria was gone. In its place was a chilling, hollow persistence. She looked like a lost soul desperately clawing for a single, defining answer.
"I just don't understand," Kou whispered, her voice eerily steady. "If, as Hokage-sama says, this is just a trivial matter... then why am I the one being treated like a criminal? Why am I the one being viewed with such heavy suspicion?"
She took a slow step forward. "I am a shinobi of Konoha. That villager was a complete newcomer. Why wasn't he the one interrogated first? Is it because I am the anomaly here?"
Her eyes darted around the room, manic energy bleeding back into her posture. "But I shouldn't be! I was personally trained by Danzo-sama! I am one of the most outstanding operatives of Root! My code name is Kou. The First. Not Otsu, not Hei... I am the first!"
She whipped her head toward Danzo. Her tone fractured into bewildered desperation, sounding exactly like a lost child who couldn't find her way home. She stared at the scarred elder, desperately hoping the familiar figure would point her toward a path she could understand.
But as her gaze locked onto Danzo's face, a horrifying realization washed over her. The man sitting there... he wasn't the Shimura Danzo she knew. The fragile spark of hope in her pupils instantly died, replaced by a terrifying, empty void.
"Ah... I forgot," Kou murmured, tilting her head at an unnatural angle. "The Danzo-sama of this world hasn't even established Root yet. Is it... is it because of this woman?"
Kou snapped her neck back toward the desk, her pitch-black eyes drilling into Stelle with murderous intent.
"Why are you the Hokage here?" she demanded, her voice echoing off the walls. "Hiruzen-sama should be the Sandaime! And Danzo-sama was the rightful candidate for the Fourth Hokage! This world is completely wrong. It's terrible. You are the anomaly that shouldn't exist..."
With a sharp hiss of steel, she fully drew the ninjato from her waist.
Behold: a masterclass in how to lethally offend four of the most powerful figures in Konoha with a single sentence and a single drawn blade.
Up until that exact moment, the executives in the room had simply assumed Kou was suffering from a mental breakdown. They thought she had poor psychological endurance and was just spouting delirious nonsense—a traumatized child throwing a violent tantrum who merely needed a harsh disciplinary lesson.
But that final sentence was like taking a lit torch to a hornet's nest soaked in explosive tags.
She had directly sowed vicious political discord among the village leadership, openly declared that Ida Stelle had no right to exist, and then bared her steel. What was her endgame? Was she going to violently rally for the Third Hokage to seize power? Was she going to declare a bloody coup because Root couldn't exist without her version of Danzo?
In that split second, every single person seated at the conference table—with the sole exception of Stelle herself—exploded into motion. They all shared one singular, unified goal: to make Uchiha Kou shut her mouth permanently.
Four terrifyingly powerful figures vanished from their spots, materializing in front of Kou almost simultaneously.
Why four?
Because Sakumo Hatake, the legendary White Fang and Anbu Commander who had been standing silently on guard in the shadows, had also joined the fray.
As someone fully aware of Kou's true identity and capabilities, Sakumo knew he didn't have the luxury of holding back. With these four titans attacking in unison, even the Second Kazekage, Shamon, would be instantly pulverized into bloody dust, let alone a lone Uchiha. A single, casual Taijutsu strike from any one of them would have been enough to shatter her bones.
However, despite their overwhelming might, not a single one of them was as fast as Jiraiya.
Although Jiraiya was currently only a Chunin, he had the distinct advantage of standing right next to her. The very millisecond he heard the first half of her treasonous sentence, his instincts screamed that something was catastrophically wrong.
Moving purely on desperate instinct, before the final syllable even left Kou's lips, Jiraiya swung his arm. His heavy palm ruthlessly struck Kou across the face, the sharp crack of the slap echoing through the tense office.
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