Naruto: The Samurai of Konoha [OC, Gradual Growth]

The fire had burned itself out. ROOT was slowly pushing back the mist, and what remained of the battlefield was wreckage.

Shisui was half-kneeling, one hand gripping his blade against the ground, his posture a wreck. Scorch marks covered his clothes in wide patches. Dust and ash across his face and hair.

He was breathing hard.

The fire Release had cost him. No water affinity, no earth—his defensive options were wind, and wind he hadn't spent years mastering. C-rank techniques. Against that inferno, all it had done was feed the flames.

ROOT formed a ring around him. He stayed down, staying aware, tracking every angle.

Danzō came through.

The crowd parted for him. Shisui pushed himself upright with difficulty, both hands on the blade, and faced him.

Danzō stopped at a measured distance. Face neither warm nor cold. He watched Shisui the way someone watches a calculation they already know the answer to.

"Why?" Shisui asked. The word cost something.

Danzō let the question sit for a moment.

"Can you even see it clearly?" he said at last. "The right and wrong of the Leaf and the Uchiha?"

"You thought possessing Mangekyō power was enough to change the village?" A trace of contempt moved through his expression. "Shisui. You've overestimated your own worth."

Shisui's grip tightened on the blade. He didn't look away.

"Fugaku Uchiha never really thought of you. Your Kotoamatsukami made him pay you slightly more attention—nothing more. You tried to play both sides, to maneuver between the Leaf and the Uchiha." Danzō paused. "To everyone involved, you were simply a piece that wouldn't follow instructions."

"And now—" His left eye opened slowly. What had been still water became something cold and reptilian. "Neither the Leaf nor the Uchiha can afford to let a variable like Kotoamatsukami keep walking around."

"Your eyes."

He tilted his head, almost contemplative.

"I'll keep them safe for you."

He moved.

Arrow-fast, crossing the distance before the sentence had finished settling.

Shisui's Sharingan spun to full speed. Every option processed in an instant—ROOT on all sides, nowhere to dodge without getting caught, no way to fight Danzo head-on with chakra reserves this low. Two paths: Kotoamatsukami, or that jutsu. Either one would gut his ocular power and kill every plan he had left.

Danzō was already in front of him.

Left hand clawing for Shisui's eye.

Shisui got his right arm up, deflected the hand, caught Danzō's left wrist and reversed the grip. Left hand drove the blade up and through.

A sound. A physical impact.

The blade came out the other side of Danzō's back. No resistance. Still warm.

Genjutsu? Sharingan said otherwise—both chakra signatures reading clean, every motion accounted for. This had happened. This was real.

Then Danzō's arm evaporated from his grip.

The blade in his left hand was dry. Not a mark on it.

A flash—something white behind his eyes—

Ice-cold contact pressed just above his right eyebrow.

His heart stopped.

Izanagi.

Impossible—

The blade clattered to the ground.

"—Ah!"

Wind erupted from him like a detonation, chakra tearing outward in every direction. ROOT uniforms snapped and whipped. Trees at the edge of the clearing shook.

Shisui was hunched over, right hand pressed against the right side of his face. Blood poured through his fingers. Down his cheek, off his chin, spattering the earth below.

His left hand came up and formed seals.

The two blades—one fallen, one planted in the earth ten feet away—rose into the air. Flames wreathed them both. They launched at Danzō simultaneously.

Danzō moved to intercept, eyes still on Shisui's remaining eye—then his attention snapped to the space behind Shisui.

Something was forming there. Vast and green and not quite solid. Flickering in and out like a flame in wind.

He pulled back fast. Cleared the fire-wrapped tantō, vaulted backward, put thirty meters between himself and whatever that was.

Shisui still stood where he'd been. Around him the air churned, violent and directionless. The flame blades caught the current and began to spiral—rising, rotating, pulling the fire upward into a massive burning column.

Danzō watched the green shape behind Shisui flicker. Never resolving into anything solid. Never quite going away.

"With only one eye," he said, "how are you opening Susano'o?"

Then: "Take him down."

ROOT swarmed in. The fire-tornado stopped them at the boundary. Three white-coated figures stepped forward from the crowd, already forming seals.

"Not water—high-level wind."

Three replacements stepped up.

"Wind Release: Vacuum Great Sphere!"

Three massive spheres of compressed air launched simultaneously, slamming into the fire-tornado from different angles. Fire and wind met in the air above the battlefield, tore at each other—and both collapsed. A sudden stillness.

The black-coated ROOT flooded in.

The blow came from behind Shisui.

Boom.

A spiral blade the size of a building—green and blazing and wrong—swept through the formation like a scythe through paper. ROOT scattered. Men flew. The sound hit a beat after the motion, a concussive roll of pressure that knocked more off their feet.

Boom.

Armor materialized—piece by piece—over the flickering shape behind Shisui. A figure was assembling itself from light and steam and pressure: mountain-tall, wreathed in green fire, joints venting white vapor in steady bursts. Like a god stepping down from somewhere. Like something ancient and furious climbing out of the dark.

It tilted its head back and screamed at the clouds.

Shisui straightened. Took his hand away from his right eye.

Where his right eye had been: a sunken, hollow socket. Closed and empty. Just—gone.

His left eye was open.

The pattern in it was not a standard Sharingan. Four crescent moons, interlaced. Vivid crimson. Terrible and strange and precise.

The giant's own eyes opened—two points of cold light, looking down.

At the battlefield below. At the people still standing on it.

Takehaya Susanoo. The god who does not obey.

The spiral sword rose again. Thunder in the space it moved through. Wind and green fire carved through everything below—

Boom.

Dozens of ROOT ceased to exist. Blood hung in the air like mist, and slowly fell, mapping the outline of the giant that had made it.

The Susano'o's shadow swallowed what remained of the setting sun.

"Only one eye," Danzō said quietly, watching the green demon filling the sky above them. Something moved in his left eye that had not been there before. "And still—"

......

They ran.

The sword came down anyway.

Ten meters of earth collapsed. A trench opened up where the ground had been—deep and ragged, blasting upward in a column of dust and steam and pressure so violent that ROOT still in the air were tumbled, scattered, carried a hundred meters before they hit the ground. Not all of them got back up.

Danzō landed two hundred meters out, his remaining subordinates reforming around him. Black-coats: a handful. White-coats: fewer.

He looked back.

"Tremendous power," he said. He meant it.

"Lord Danzō. What are your orders?"

"Hold. Don't engage."

His eye stayed locked on Shisui.

The Susano'o had raised its left arm. The chakra gathering in its open palm was not subtle—dense, catastrophic, the air around it starting to warp. Three red magatama orbited in the space above that hand, slow at first, then faster, the Yasaka Magatama resolving into recognizable shape.

"Lord Danzō—" His sensor-type's voice went flat with effort. "That energy signature—"

He felt it too. If that connected—one more Izanagi, one more eye, and he would survive. His ROOT would not. And he'd have nothing left with which to face whatever Susano'o did next.

He pressed his fingers lightly against the warm shape inside his left sleeve.

"Retreat."

They vanished.

Your other eye will be mine eventually, Shisui.

......

The Yasaka Magatama held.

Three red orbs orbiting in the Susano'o's palm, fully formed, fully charged—just waiting. Long after Danzō's chakra signature had dropped off the edge of every sense Shisui had left, it held.

Then he let it go.

The three orbs came apart. Blue light. Scattered across the air.

Gone.

The Susano'o exhaled—one last rush of steam from every joint—and began to dissolve. Green fire dying out, armor plates fading, the giant figure coming apart at the edges until there was nothing left but evening air.

Shisui's knees hit the ground.

He stayed there for a moment, hands braced, breathing.

Then he found something to push against, got upright, and moved.

Itachi had only just left when Fugaku came through the door.

He stopped when he saw Shin. A brief pause—the kind that registered something unexpected rather than something unwelcome. Then his gaze moved over the room: Sasuke on the floor, Shin across from him, both of them with legs that had clearly taken damage. The medicine bottle sitting nearby.

He gave a quiet nod.

"Dad." Sasuke called from the floor.

"Fugaku-san." Shin inclined his head.

"Hm."

Mikoto looked up from beside Sasuke. "The clan meeting's done?" Something careful in her voice. "Itachi left in a hurry—did something happen?"

"Nothing." Fugaku's attention settled on Shin. Stayed there long enough that Shin felt it.

"Take Sasuke to his room. The medicine."

Mikoto looked between the two of them. Whatever this was, she decided it wasn't her question to ask. She moved to help Sasuke up.

Sasuke went with her, but glanced back at Shin once—curious, and slightly uncertain.

Then they were gone.

The room went quiet.

Fugaku sat cross-legged on the floor across from Shin. Not close. His expression at rest was simply serious—Shin was starting to understand that wasn't intentional weight, it was just his face—but the silence that followed had gravity in it anyway.

Neither of them spoke.

"Your leg," Fugaku said.

"Overtraining. Taijutsu class."

"..."

More silence. Shin genuinely wasn't sure which angle to approach this from. Clan head. Enemy. The cause of something that had nearly killed him. But also—Mikoto's story of old friendships, a name given to an infant, the apology that Shin hadn't known to expect.

"I heard about the hospital."

Shin blinked. "Oh."

"I'm sorry."

He looked up.

Fugaku met his eyes without looking away. "The genjutsu wasn't my intention. But it came from me—you nearly died because of it. An apology doesn't fix that." A pause, brief and considered. "Whether you accept it or not is your right."

"..."

"You're Tsukasa's child. I'll make it right."

"..."

"And—" The faintest shift. Not quite softening, but something adjacent to it. "I hope you and Sasuke will get along at school."

Fugaku stood. Walked through to the back room.

That was apparently the end of it.

Shin sat with what had just happened.

He was still sitting with it when Sasuke came back in, limping, and lowered himself to the floor beside him. "Shin." Just his name, quiet—enough to pull him back.

"What did he say to you?"

Shin turned it over for a moment. "He asked me to look after you at school."

Sasuke: "???"

Shin watched him go through the full progression. The blank pause first. Then the dawning outrage. Then a sustained series of statements about how that was completely unnecessary and who exactly had asked for that and did Shin understand that he was more than capable of—

Shin's expression did something he didn't entirely control.

He's still eight, he thought. So am I, technically. When did that stop feeling real.

He stayed a little longer, then said his goodbyes. Mikoto tried to see him out—he declined, politely but without room for negotiation.

If Tsume ever saw that, there would be consequences.

At the door, Sasuke said something that functionally meant be careful while maintaining complete plausible deniability about having said anything affectionate at all.

Shin went home.

......

By the time the Uchiha compound gate was behind him, the sky had gone properly dark. The first stars out. The air cooler.

He almost missed her.

She was standing in front of his gate. Hovering—turning slightly, turning back—the particular fidget of someone who had been waiting long enough that they'd run out of things to do with themselves.

Ino?