Saving Obito would mean asking whether Madara Uchiha allowed it. That absurd thought drifted through Kiyohara's mind, cold and matter-of-fact. In the end, though, he knew the truth: Madara had chosen Obito because of the frightening selfishness hidden beneath that boy's kindness, the desperate possessiveness no one else could see.
In the ninja world, death was everywhere. No one was exempt from it. Even without Madara Uchiha lurking in the dark, if Obito had suffered the right kind of heartbreak, the same twisted thoughts might still have taken root in him eventually.
After sitting with Kakashi for a few moments and offering what comfort he could, Kiyohara got up and went to find Minato Namikaze. "Lord Minato," he asked directly, "once the bridge is destroyed tomorrow, will my merit be enough for promotion to Chunin?"
"It will," Minato answered without hesitation, his expression serious. "More than enough."
This mission had been brutal from beginning to end, but Kiyohara's performance had been too outstanding to ignore. Even Minato, who held everyone to a high standard, had no intention of holding him back.
"Good." Kiyohara let out a quiet breath and nodded, genuinely satisfied for once.
Becoming a Chunin would bring real advantages. His standing in Konoha would rise. His treatment would improve. People would look at him differently. In a village like this one, rank was never just a line on paper; it changed how people spoke to you, what missions you were assigned, what resources you could access, even how much danger you were expected to shoulder.
Might Duy had lived his whole life being mocked simply because he was a genin, even though he'd possessed enough power to blast apart the Seven Ninja Swordsmen of the Mist with a single kick. If he'd worn a Jonin vest instead, who would have dared laugh at him? Status mattered. Appearance mattered. Titles mattered.
Still, none of that was what Kiyohara cared about most. The truly important thing was something else entirely.
Inside his mind, he addressed the urn again. "Did you hear that? Once I get back, I'll be a Chunin. Can you lend me the rest of your talent a little early?"
Whenever the rogue-nin Kiyohara appeared, his existence seemed to thin a little more. When he wasn't needed, he simply lay back down inside the urn that held his ashes, conserving what little remained of him.
"Wait until you actually become a Chunin, kid," the rogue ninja Kiyohara replied flatly. He clearly had no interest in indulging his shameless younger self.
After a pause, he added, "There's something else. Once a last wish is set, even I can't seem to change it anymore."
"It can't be altered?" Kiyohara rubbed at his chin, thinking.
So that was how it worked. If another will ever arrived in the future, then whoever he became in that timeline would need to choose those final wishes carefully. One careless request, one ridiculous obsession, and an entire opportunity could be wasted.
"Fine." He accepted it with a nod. There was no point dwelling on it now. Once they returned to the village and he was formally promoted, he would be able to absorb everything the rogue ninja Kiyohara had left behind.
And when that happened, his talent for Wind Release and Lightning Release would surge again. Kiyohara had already begun to understand how terrifying that kind of accumulation was. This was not one plus one equaling two. It was experience, instinct, aptitude, and insight colliding together until they became something far more explosive.
These were all his efforts, all his sweat, all the labor of countless possible selves condensed into one body. Thinking that way, Kiyohara felt almost justified in calling himself a genius in advance.
With that thought in mind, he took out one of the things he'd looted earlier: the scroll for Earth Release: Earth Submergence. It was an excellent escape technique, the sort of jutsu that could save your life in a desperate moment. By turning the surrounding ground into something fluid, it allowed the user to move through soil as if swimming underwater.
Kiyohara did not have Earth-nature chakra, but that didn't mean he couldn't learn it. Having the matching nature only made a technique easier to master. It didn't make it impossible otherwise.
During the Fourth Great Ninja War, tens of thousands of shinobi had used Earth Release together to resist the Ten-Tails' Tailed Beast Bomb. There was no way every single one of them had been born with Earth affinity. The proof was already there.
The problem, of course, was cost. Without the corresponding chakra nature, casting it would consume even more chakra than usual. Kiyohara skimmed the scroll several more times and quickly concluded that if he forced himself to use it right now, the drain would be severe.
Even so, it was worth learning. In this world, one more escape route meant one more chance to survive.
***
By the next morning, Kakashi's condition had improved considerably under Rin's care. His face was still pale, and the fresh Sharingan in his left eye gave him an unnerving new air, but he was fit enough to move. Once Minato confirmed that everyone could continue, the group set out again.
They crossed through the forest at speed and eventually arrived before a massive bridge spanning the landscape like a stone spine. Kannabi Bridge. The true objective of the mission. Because the Iwagakure shinobi around the area had died too quickly, the other defensive lines still hadn't fully reacted. That made this the most vulnerable window they were ever going to get.
Kiyohara pulled out stacks of explosive tags from his pack and began sticking them into place. The bridge was enormous, broad enough for several vehicles to pass side by side. Once something of this scale collapsed, it would not be easily repaired with ordinary Earth Release.
After all, constructs made with Earth Release only remained stable as long as chakra sustained them. Once that chakra dispersed, they returned to dirt and rubble. A bridge like this demanded infrastructure, not just brute force.
War really was expensive, Kiyohara thought as he worked. He was helping line explosive tags along the supports while quietly counting the cost in his head. These were all carried by Kakashi's team for the demolition, and there had to be more than two hundred of them in total.
Explosive tags were no cheap commodity. Even people like Nara Shikamaru considered them costly in later years. Yet here they were, burning through an obscene amount of money just to erase one bridge from the map.
With Minato standing nearby, Kiyohara wisely kept those thoughts to himself. This was not the time to grumble about expenses.
"Fall back," Minato ordered once the tags were all in place.
Everyone withdrew to a safe distance. Then Kiyohara and the others formed hand seals and used the chakra left on the surfaces of the tags to trigger the chain detonation.
The explosion came all at once.
A thunderous roar ripped through the forest, shaking the surrounding trees so violently that leaves spun down like a storm of green rain. The great bridge shuddered. Then, under the weight of its own ruined structure, Kannabi Bridge began to collapse in sections.
Stone and timber fell away together. Buildings on the bridge vanished into rising clouds of dust. Debris tumbled downward in a deafening cascade, and for a long moment the whole world seemed swallowed by smoke-colored sand.
"It's finally done," Kiyohara murmured.
Before turning away, he looked back one last time. Destroying Kannabi Bridge was enough to slash straight through Iwagakure's logistics. It would wound them badly. But he did not believe for even a second that the war would simply end here.
Iwagakure was only one of the great villages involved. Kumogakure still remained. Kirigakure still remained. The entire shinobi world was a furnace, and one shattered bridge did not put out the fire.
This war would not truly settle down until all five great powers had bled themselves into exhaustion, until each of them was staring at a shortage of capable shinobi and the looming threat of a generational gap. Only then would peace agreements begin to appear, one by one, not out of goodwill, but because no one had the strength left to keep fighting.
***
Later that night, a small, worn-out team finally arrived at a Konoha outpost. The moment they were given temporary lodgings and time to breathe, Minato turned around and headed off toward the main command camp.
"Heh heh, Minato. You did very well this time."
The one who greeted him was a pale young man with magatama earrings hanging from his ears. Orochimaru. His expression carried that familiar, unreadable amusement, as though everything in the world existed only to be observed, dissected, and understood.
He was mildly surprised that only one Uchiha had died this time. More interestingly, Kakashi seemed to be adapting to the transplanted Sharingan far better than expected. For Orochimaru, that single fact alone was enough to spark several new lines of thought.
Minato said nothing at first. In his eyes, losing a student could never be described as doing well, no matter how successful the mission had been.
"I heard that a civilian brat also performed exceptionally this time," Orochimaru continued, as if the matter had only just occurred to him. "Kiyohara, was it?"
Kakashi's excellence had never been surprising. He was Sakumo Hatake's son, a prodigy raised on inherited swordsmanship and high-level ninjutsu. But Kiyohara should have been ordinary, just another common-born kid thrown into a war too large for him. And yet in this operation, he had performed even better than Kakashi.
"Yes," Minato replied. "Kiyohara did exceptionally well."
He had already submitted the recommendation on the way back. Once the report reached the right hands, Kiyohara's promotion to Chunin was practically a certainty.
"I have other matters to attend to, Lord Orochimaru," Minato said after a moment. "I'll take my leave now."
His relationship with Orochimaru was awkward but clear enough. Jiraiya was Minato's teacher, and both Jiraiya and Orochimaru were disciples of the Third Hokage. By that logic, Orochimaru was his senior in the same line.
"Go ahead," Orochimaru said lightly, already turning his attention back to the intelligence in front of him.
He had only been momentarily intrigued. A commoner with unusual talent inevitably reminded him of himself. Among the Legendary Sannin, Orochimaru was the truest commoner of the three.
Even Jiraiya, for all his wandering and foolishness, possessed inherited advantages: a family summoning scroll and deep ties to Mount Myoboku, one of the three great holy lands. The shinobi world loved to pretend merit was all that mattered, but bloodlines, inheritances, and old connections were always there, quietly shaping the outcome long before the battle began.
Kiyohara, on the other hand, had none of that. Which was precisely what made him interesting.