Pre-Chapter A/N:Another chapter on time? Guess my lock-in is going pretty well. If you haven't already, I recommend turning on notifications for my stuff so you can see when new stuff drops right as it drops. Next four chapters on my patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)— same username as here and link in bio. Discount on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) so do check that out.
"How dare you?" The Daimyo hissed down at me. Oh, that was a mistake. To take that tone with me. The Daimyo were useful tools in my conquest. Right now, they were being brought onside to ensure that when the time came they would withdraw support for their hidden villages and place their anchors with mine. But that did not mean I would take insults from them without reprisal.
"How dare I? How dare you? You looked me in the eye and said you knew nothing of the New Stone. You dared to lie to me, and now I have come to collect. Because Konoha will never leave a debt unpaid, and we will not be mocked," I said.
"Unhand him now," he said, glossing over what I said.
"No. Your armies are nothing before me. Your samurai are nothing. Your shinobi guards are nothing. I am the reason you should fear both the dark and the light. Because my wrath is unending," I said.
"What—" he began.
"Now, I will let you off with a warning. The New Stone is dead, crushed under the might of Konoha. I trust you will do your best to ensure that nothing of the sort rises again. And if you feel tempted to do so…" I dragged my hostage until he stood in front of me. A kick to the back of his knees forced him to the ground in front of me. I reached up for his hair and dragged it up, baring his neck for all to see.
"Stop him," he shouted for his guards. They listened. A mistake, that was. There were six guardian shinobi in the throne room. I had killed two already. One remained at the back trying to layer genjutsu. I snapped each one the second they tried to latch on to my consciousness. The other three weaved seals in unison as they moved. The ground between us turned into mud. One failed to react in time and was taken into the depths I had created. The other two jumped in the air. The mud followed them, hardening and turning into clones of me.
The man to the left was too slow to react and ate a rasengan to the face, his blood splattering in all directions. The man to the right breathed out a firestorm on my clone. Sadly for him, I was engaged to Uzume Uchiha. A little heat never bothered me. My clone ripped his flames from his control, diving through them, and putting him down with a tap to the heart. The genjutsu master to the back did the smart thing. He dropped his weapons and fled the room through the wall. Wise.
With his guards dead or fled, I smiled at the Daimyo before I ran my blade across his bastard son's throat, blood spraying across the throne room. A silent application of water release chakra caused the blood to fly farther than natural, splattering the man with his son's life.
"If I have to come back here, I will take one of your legitimate ones and then I will remove your cock and place it around your neck as a necklace," I said before body flickering up the stairs to the throne and leaning over him. The samurai that had burst into the throne room remained frozen at the entrance, shocked at what they were seeing.
"Look in my eyes, Daimyo. You know I am being serious now. Do not forget this. You will be tempted to consider this a great insult. You might ignore the warning I just gave and decide to do something stupid— perhaps you will declare war, or maybe you will take the indirect route of placing a bounty on my head, or you will attempt economic warfare. All of them will be stupid. Why? Because if I so much as feel like you are planning something untoward, you will die the next day," I said to him before grabbing hold of his neck. I placed my hiraishin marker there.
"On your neck is a seal now. If I will it, I will be here, right next to you from anywhere in the world. Do not give me reason to come back, Daimyo. Take the deal we agreed and hold on to it. You will become an even wealthier and more powerful man with time, and most importantly, you will live," I whispered in his ear, and then I was gone. My hiraishin taking me back to the Hokage office in less than a second.
"Oh, Hokage-sama. You have returned," my secretary said, poking her head into the office. She had been signalled by one of the ANBU, I knew. It was cute that they thought these small systems they built for themselves were somehow passing by without my notice. Unfortunately for them, and perhaps myself, I had become a bit too paranoid to allow anything go without notice or investigation.
That was the plague of the powerful perhaps. To constantly fear becoming powerless. To fear all my plans coming undone because of another's actions. So I watched everything with caution. I had spies in two different companies— Shika and Shiba, and then I had Uraume spying on my spies while I had other spies who spied on Uraume. All of it wasteful, but all of it necessary. Nothing could escape my notice because the easiest way to kill a king was with a knife in the back.
"Your team waits for you in the reception," she said next. That fact I had already figured. The Byakugan was a powerful tool, after all, and even without it, Kushina practically radiated chakra when she wasn't actively suppressing it and anyone could feel her this close.
"Send them in," I said in the end.
"Yes, Hokage-sama," she said, stepping back and leaving the room and heading back to the waiting room to tell the children they could come in. Children. I still thought of them as such even though the difference between these people and the people that had been assigned to my team all those years ago was night and day.
Three of them came in, one following the other in quick succession with Kushina taking the lead and Mikoto bringing up the rear. I planted a bright smile on my face as I spotted the bright one on hers. She was so grown now. It had snuck up on me, her growth. It felt like just yesterday that I held her on my shoulders as I walked her to the academy while she ranted and raved about all the people there who got on her bad side. It felt even less time had passed since the three of them had barely reached up to my waist and hatched a plan to trap me in a rudimentary paralysis seal to steal the bells from my waist.
"So, Sensei. We have it," Minato said, speaking for the lot of them.
"Hand it over then," I said, stretching out my hand.
"Nuh-uh. We want double pay," Kushina said. I chuckled. No other team would have dared haggle with their Kage such, but I had been the one to plant the audacity in them. There was to be no fun if everyone treated me like the Kage all the time.
"Fine," I said, and then smirked as all three turned to look at me in shock.
"I told you we should have asked for triple pay," Mikoto moaned, putting her face in her hands.
"No way he'd have agreed to that," Minato said.
"Nah, she's right. I probably would have. Not like I was using the money for anything either way," I said with a shrug. Also it wasn't like I was going to be paying out from my own coffers. The Earth Daimyo's bastard had had a substantial vault in that castle of his. It only made sense that I took it all when I slaughtered them down to the last man— what use did dead men have for ryo or gold.
"Ughhhh," Kushina grunted next.
"Is it too late to ask for more?" Minato tried.
I flashed to the hiraishin seal on his chest, appearing right in his personal space. He flinched backwards and I snatched the compass from the inner pocket of his flak jacket before he could do much to react.
"Yup. Next time haggle better," I said with a smile.
"So what now?" Mikoto asked as I oriented it right side up in my palm.
"Have you been able to get it to work?" I asked.
"Of course, we haven't—" my doubtful look stopped Mikoto's denial in its tracks. I'd trained these children. There was no way they wouldn't play around with it.
"Nope," Minato admitted.
"Would have thought that all that time spent in the temple would have helped you figure it out already," I said, fiddling with the clasp mechanism to open it up.
"Wait, how'd you know we were in the—" I just lifted an eyebrow. Surely they didn't think me stupid. Why else would they have taken so long?
"Never mind. Stupid question," Kushina stopped herself. I just nodded and got to work on the compass. It ran on chakra, yes, that was easy enough to figure out by just touching the thing.
But it needed chakra as just the basic requirement for it to do anything. To get what you wanted out of it though, you had to be understood. Ninshu. Hagoromo had created a tool that ran on Ninshu and needed his particular esoteric art to work.
I focused and opened myself up to be understood in the way Kurama had been teaching me on and off since the year we'd come tighter in our bond. I felt the compass ask me what I sought. I planted an image of the Eight Tails in it and the compass spun for a second before pointing straight at Kushina.
"So it works," Minato said, peering at it.
"Yes it does," I agreed.
"So that means you should have no trouble finding the rest," he said.
I frowned and then without a seal, a copy of myself split from my body. I tossed it the compass and it just whirled around, not locking on to anything.
"Refuses to work for me," he said. I nodded. Of course it could not be that simple. The reason the lessons Kurama and I had had were so sporadic was because ninshu was something that I could not get clones to help with. For some reason they just couldn't use it.
The clone tossed the compass back before dispelling. Once again with no explosion of chakra smoke. My chakra control was one of the skills I was most proud of. Years of effort had taken me to the top 0.1% of the world when it came to it. I couldn't think of anyone with better control than me off the top of my head. Even Kagame paled in comparison. But then she had been slacking in her old age. She assured me that she was my better back when she had been in her prime. Of course that could just be the pride of the old woman talking, but there was no disproving it either way so I left it at that.
"You need to have me with you in person for it to work. And like that's not enough, you can't use it to find something you don't truly understand. Having heard tales about the other tools won't be enough," I said.
"So we do things the old fashioned way then," Kushina said.
"Yes we do," I agreed.
"Now get some rest. In a week, the three of you will be back in action. I want the Bell of a Million Truths from the Iwa temple as well as the Eternal Lightning Rod, wherever that might be," I said. They nodded and left the office in short order.
"Retsu," I called out.
"Yes, Hokage-sama," she replied, sticking her head through the door.
"See to it that each of my students receives double what we pay out for an S-rank mission. Take it from my accounts," I said.
"Each?" she asked doubtfully.
"I'm in a generous mood," I said with a shrug. And I wasn't the one paying for it.
XXXXXX — DEE
"What did they want?" his Kage's voice asked with barely concealed rage as he stepped through the deserted gates of the temple.
"Raikage-dono. What can the Lightning Temple do for you?" one of the monks asked, approaching. Dee recognised that he wore robes that marked him as an Abbot and not just a mere Acolyte or base Monk.
"You heard my question. What did they want?" The man lifted a perfectly manicured eyebrow and stared him down with no fear visible on his face or body. He clearly did not understand that Ay was running out of patience, and very quickly at that.
"The Raikage asked you a question, Monk. Answer it," Dee said, stepping in. If he was being honest, his own rage was burning as well. The fight against the Namikaze had not gone well. Konoha's butcher had raised a trio of monsters as students. Minato Namikaze. He would never forget the way the fight had proceeded. His strength and speed were noted and disregarded with a near casual ease. His best ninjutsu and genjutsu had been parried with ease. And in a matter of minutes, he had been defeated and left unable to act.
He had been used as a hostage against his own Kage. His friend. That was not something that he would be forgetting anytime soon.
"Your Kage has no authority here. This is monk business, not shinobi business. If he has a problem, he should take it up with the Daimyo," the Abbot replied with that same placid smile on his face like none of the chaos around him mattered to him for any reason.
"This is shinobi business. I look around and I see that the destruction here was caused by ninjutsu. If I remember correctly, the Treaty of a Thousand Nights which allowed you to keep your temple at our base was that you would yield to our authority on shinobi matters and cease all practice or teaching of ninjutsu. So either this damage was caused by someone else who was a shinobi and is therefore our business, or this damage was caused by one of your own monks which means that you have broken the treaty and that makes it our business. So which is it, Abbot?" E spoke, stepping forward and appearing face to face with the Abbot who finally yielded to their authority and gave them their due.
"It was Konoha shinobi. Kushina Uzumaki, Minato Namikaze, and Mikoto Uchiha. They are the ones who caused this damage," he said. They knew that already though.
"And what did they want here?" E asked next.
"That, my friend, is monk business, I fear. No treaty will make us divulge it," he said.
"You will answer or you will be made to answer," Ay said, stepping forward to take the helm now that it seemed that E's approach had failed. E yielded easily to his Kage. Good. Dee did not necessarily like the man. He thought him pretentious and overly self-important but he could not deny that he was good at what he did. Both as a shinobi and a total servant to their Kage. For that at least, he would tolerate him.
"You may torture me as much as you wish. But I will not answer the question. Nothing will make me," he said, and Dee believed him— or rather believed that he thought so. Dee could tell when a man was lying or blustering. This man was doing neither of that. He did genuinely believe that the torture of Kumo would not break him. How amusing. Dee had seen what Kumo's inquisitors could do to a man, and he knew there was no secret they would fail to find out. It was just a matter of time and access.
"Want to test that?" his Kage asked, knowing just as surely that he would find the secret no matter what.
"Enough, Head Abbot Ryu. This temple cannot take another loss," an older man in Abbot robes said as he walked forwards.
"Suki?"
"There is no point keeping the secret. Someone has divulged it to Konoha. I suspect that selfish bastard Kisuke. There is no need keeping the secret in a world where our fellows betray us and leak parts of it to outsiders," he said, stepping next to the one that had now been identified as the Head Abbot.
"The Konoha shinobi came for something known as the Compass of Finding. It was one of the treasures of the Sage of Six Paths left to us for safekeeping. We took care of it for generations and kept it secret until today when we were invaded and attacked," he said.
"What could it do, this Compass of Finding?" E asked, a gleam in his eyes.
"It could help in locating any thing the user understood and wanted to find," Suki said.
"So Konoha must intend to find the other treasures then? That explains why they would take the compass," E said.
"Indeed. They are making a bid for uniting them," he said in agreement.
"Then we shall stop them. Kumo will not sit idly by and allow Konoha to consolidate more power. But first you must inform me of what the other treasures are and what they can do," Ay spoke now, a shadow in his eyes.
A/N: And so the chapter ends and the story continues. This should be one of the last arcs, worry not. Next five chapters up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) (same username as here and link in bio), support me there and read them early. Had my birthday last week and got another year older (boo), so there's a discount on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) until Wednesday for anyone interested in that (yay)