31: Clash
Dozens of ROOT shinobi dropped from the trees at once.
The sound of it alone was enough to make a lesser person flinch—a rush of displaced air and the crack of boots meeting earth from every direction. Looking up, there was nothing but dark shapes blotting out the sky.
Shisui had already known they were there.
He'd felt them settling into position in the surrounding forest in the moments before—chakra signatures held deliberately still, patient the way trained killers were patient. So when they moved, he moved with them. Body snapping backward before his mind had finished the count, clearing the spot where he'd been standing.
His hand found the kodachi at his back. The Sharingan spun to life in both eyes.
Half his attention stayed on Danzō.
The ROOT shinobi landed in formation—black uniforms, standard-issue kodachi drawn in the same motion—and came at him again without breaking stride.
He knew the math. Too many, nowhere to go, and the man who'd ordered this standing just far enough away to watch. Getting tangled up in a melee with a hundred of them wasn't a fight. It was a eulogy.
Don't stay. Break through and run.
He moved away from Danzō—toward open ground, away from the formation—and Body Flickered.
On Danzō's face, something like contempt appeared briefly, and then didn't.
Shisui cleared fifty meters. He saw it before he reached it.
A dark line across the ground. The black seal pattern rose before he'd fully registered it—expanding upward, spreading wide, the chakra forming into something vast and net-like that rose into the air and hung there above the path forward.
He stopped hard.
Two chakra signatures in the flanking trees. One on each side. They'd planned for exactly this.
The net isn't the trap. I'm already in it.
The ROOT closed behind him.
No time. He turned, drew the kodachi, and went in.
Steel rang against steel. Their blades came at him from multiple angles and he was already elsewhere—leaving only a smear of motion in the air, an afterimage where he'd been. They couldn't track him. A few of them tried; they got cut. The rest adapted quickly, shifting to a defensive formation—blades up, bodies compressing, creating a lattice rather than individual targets, and letting the outer ring adjust.
He was fast. They were many.
More of them fell than he'd expected, though. They'd adapted to his speed, not to what he did with it.
Then he did something different.
Blue chakra bloomed along the kodachi. Not a surface coating—an extension, the energy reaching forward and sharpening the edge until the short sword had the effective reach of something twice its length. He stopped running. Stopped relying on the gap between his speed and their reactions.
He met them head-on instead.
The nearest ROOT shinobi brought his blade up to parry and felt the blue edge make contact—felt it wrap around the steel somehow, curling and clinging like a living thing he couldn't shake loose.
He didn't have time to understand it.
The chakra flared red.
Boom.
The explosion was close enough that Shisui felt the pressure against his face. The ROOT shinobi lay on the ground, smoke rising from what had been a person seconds before. He was already moving to the next one.
That one had seen what happened and tried to backpedal. Too slow. The blade went through.
Costs too much. Use it sparingly.
He used it twice more before the black-uniformed fighters broke rank and scattered backward, regrouping at range. Then the shuriken came.
Dozens of them. More than dozens. The air filled with steel.
He read the arcs through the Sharingan—angles, trajectories, the cluster-patterns of mass throws—but reading them and dodging them were different problems when there were this many. He deflected what he could with the kodachi. The rest he gave up on cleanly avoiding.
They found him. Shallow wounds, most of them, the angles turned at the last instant—but many, and the blood running down his arm and side was a resource he couldn't afford to keep spending.
Range. Fine.
He launched himself skyward.
The ROOT tracked him in formation—shuriken following his arc, perfectly calculated, a field of steel in pursuit. He came down hard, one knee hitting earth, and drove the kodachi into the ground. Both hands moved through seals. Chakra built in his chest.
"Wind Release: Great Breakthrough!"
The gust came out of him like a compressed thunder crack—a rolling wave of pressure that met the incoming shuriken and scattered them sideways, raking them into the trees or spinning them into the dirt.
The ROOT didn't pause. More came.
They know. They're waiting for me to run out of chakra.
He reached back and tugged up his sleeve—exposing the bandaged forearm, the fū seal still intact on the cloth. White smoke. Two large pinwheel-bladed shuriken materialized in his hands, wide enough to feel unwieldy, except that they weren't.
Blue chakra along the edges. Fire waiting in it.
Wind Shuriken: Flame Pinwheels.
He hurled them both.
They left his hands screaming, and as they spun the blue shifted to orange—fire catching on the rotation, trailing heat, two spiraling blades of flame cutting through the air fast enough to make the surrounding foliage lean away from their passage. He moved sideways immediately, clearing the projectile return.
The pinwheels tore through the next volley in a single pass, burning everything they touched out of the air.
Then, still spinning, still burning, they continued toward the back of the formation.
Toward Danzō.
The man didn't move.
The white-coated ROOT—the ones who'd been standing in the outer ring this whole time, bird-mask faces tilted slightly, watching—converged in front of him. Their leader's voice cut through the noise.
"Water Release squad!"
Three of them formed seals simultaneously. Their hands locked into the Snake sign.
"Water Release: Water Encampment Wall!"
The barrier rose from nothing—a flat curtain of water several meters across, hanging in the air between the pinwheels and their target. The first blade hit it and the contact was immediate: a burst of steam, a roar, and then fire and vapor expanding outward in both directions. The explosion swallowed the water wall and most of the visibility with it.
The sound of the second pinwheel hadn't stopped.
"—there's another one—"
It came through the steam. Trailing water vapor, still burning, but the angle had changed. It was curving. Moving in an arc that the laws of spinning blades had no business producing.
Because of the wire.
"It's on a wire! Earth Release squad—"
"Water Style: Wild Water Wave!"
"Water Release: Water Dragon Bullet!"
"Water Release: Water Encampment Wall!"
Three jutsu went up in the path of the second pinwheel. It curved around them. The wire in Shisui's teeth traced its path through the steam—he was already letting it out, feeding it slack, steering the blade around everything they threw in its way.
Earth walls erupted in front of Danzō. Four of them, staggered.
Shisui bit down harder on the wire, feeling the tension shift, and with his free hand moved through a rapid chain of seals. Fire appeared at the corner of his mouth—thin, almost delicate-looking—and then it was racing along the wire's length toward the distant pinwheel.
Fire Release: Dragon Fire Jutsu.
He let go of the wire. His other hand finished the seal and a second kodachi appeared from the storage seal on his arm, handle-first.
The black-uniformed ROOT were already rushing him from the near side, the white-coated squad's shout having given them their direction. He didn't meet them with the deflection technique this time.
Just fire.
The blade caught it immediately.
Dance of the Blade.
He went into them.
The formation buckled. Blades and fire and the sharp smell of burning fabric. ROOT shinobi fell. The ones who'd seen what had happened to their teammates with the blue-edge technique had the wrong reaction—they hesitated instead of pressing, gave him the fraction of a second he needed to get through, and by the time they corrected for it they were already past him.
Behind him, on the other end of the battlefield: the second pinwheel reached the earth walls. The Dragon Fire reached the pinwheel at the same moment.
The explosion was not small.
Fire roared upward—the water steam igniting, the earth walls cracking from the concussion, the wire fire spreading outward along its full length before burning out. For a long moment the fire-light drowned out everything else, and the sky above the trees darkened with smoke.
When it faded, a single white-coated ROOT operative stood in front of Danzō with water still steaming off his jacket, hands still held in the final seal.
"Lord Danzō—are you—"
Danzō's expression hadn't changed.
"Shisui Uchiha." He said the name the way someone might annotate a record. "Renowned for genjutsu and Body Flicker. Yet his Fire Release carries this much force." A pause, genuine rather than theatrical. "He does the Uchiha name justice."
Several miles away, the sound of the explosions reached an ANBU patrol.
A ROOT operative stepped into their path before they'd taken two steps toward the noise.
“Lord Danzō is conducting jutsu experiments in this area, we ask that you not disturb him."
The masks were almost identical to theirs. Different shapes, if you knew what you were looking for.
The patrol leader glanced at his squad. A beat. Then he tilted her head toward the youngest member.
“Report to the Hokage.”
The young ANBU disappeared. The ROOT operative watched him go and didn't move.
"The Fifth," Hiruzen Sarutobi said, and sounded like a man who'd just remembered a headache.
He was standing slightly behind Homura, which was unusual, and the particular crease between his eyebrows was the one that appeared when a problem refused to cooperate with any reasonable timeline.
"Who in the younger generation could realistically carry that weight," Homura said. It wasn't quite a question.
"Shikaku Nara could. Capability, reputation—both more than sufficient."
Hiruzen shook his head. "Shikaku has every quality the position needs. But he's a clan shinobi. Half the other clans would push back simply on principle, regardless of his actual record."
He paused. "And Shikaku himself probably wouldn't agree. As a deputy—managing operations, supporting the Hokage from below—he'd be exactly the right person. But the hat itself..."
Homura turned this over. "Kakashi Hatake. Youngest generation to have the credentials, the right lineage, the right teacher. Strong enough. Known to both shinobi and civilian communities alike."
"Kakashi." Hiruzen repeated the name with the tone of a man who'd just thought of something else entirely. He stayed there for a moment.
"Well?" Homura said, not patiently.
Hiruzen cleared his throat. "Too young. He's only recently left ANBU, and that posting leaves marks. A few more years and I think he becomes a genuine option." A beat. "But—"
He shifted his weight slightly. "After what happened to his team. His teacher. He may not want it."
The silence that followed was not entirely comfortable.
"You still have two students," Homura said.
Hiruzen's expression did something unflattering. "Jiraiya, that fool—if he'd been willing to accept the hat, I would have retired years ago." He pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose. "And Tsunade. Gone for years without so much as a single letter."
"Send someone to find her."
"I did." Hiruzen pinched his forehead. "The retrieval team came back with broken bones. Carefully calculated injuries. Not quite bad enough to cause permanent damage."
Homura opened his mouth.
"And even if I managed to bring her back," Hiruzen said, "do you remember why she left? Do you actually want to have that conversation?"
Homura closed his mouth.
Hiruzen sighed. It was the kind of sigh that had accumulated a great deal of history.
"We wait," he said. "That's all."
Shisui was flagging.
Not in the way that meant tired—though he was—but in a specific way that had nothing to do with physical endurance. The narrowing at the edges of his vision, the moment where everything blurred and then didn't fully resolve. The Sharingan burning through the last of its fuel.
Damn it.
Breaking the genjutsu maintained inside Shin cost him most of his right eye's prowess. He'd left the remaining power of his right eye inside the kid—all of it, deliberately—and what he was running on now was the remnant. Barely enough to sustain a basic Sharingan.
The left eye was different. That power was permanent. But permanent didn't mean unlimited, and the ability of his left eye was a single-use instrument aimed at a single target. Burning it here, against ROOT foot soldiers, for a tactician's convenience—that wasn't an option.
He stepped back, widened the distance.
Then he closed both eyes, breathed once, and opened them.
Black irises. The Sharingan was gone.
A pause in the formation. Not hesitation—ROOT didn't hesitate—but a brief recalibration, the way a machine adjusted when its readings changed.
"He's deactivated the Sharingan."
At the far end of the field, Danzō's brow shifted almost imperceptibly. He didn't understand the choice—it made no tactical sense from the outside—but the gesture read like calculation rather than failure.
The white-coated operatives near him stirred.
"Lord Danzō, your orders?"
"Without the Sharingan, Shisui Uchiha won't press close-range combat." Danzō's voice was even. "Adjust your positioning accordingly."
"Understood."