Kiyohara and Kurenai walked side by side through the noisy streets of the little rear-line town. The place was crowded with merchants, off-duty shinobi, and people hauling goods from one outpost to another. Compared to the killing fields on the front, it almost felt like another world.
"What are you going to do with all that?" Kurenai asked softly, glancing at the slightly bulging sealing scroll on Kiyohara's back. The lollipop in her mouth had already melted down a little, and the lingering sweetness on her tongue seemed to ease some of the tension coiled in her body.
"Sell what I can. Repair what I need." Kiyohara's answer was as concise as ever. "Equipment doesn't maintain itself."
He turned into a narrow alley and stopped in front of the same shop he had visited before. Inside, the old owner was still standing behind the counter, spectacles low on his nose, as if he had never moved at all.
Kiyohara set the sealing scroll on the counter and released it with a tap. A puff of white smoke burst upward, and when it cleared, a pile of Kirigakure armor, ninja tools, and assorted personal effects covered the tabletop.
The shop owner inspected the lot with a practiced eye, sorting armor from steel, usable tools from scrap. "Standard Kirigakure jonin armor. Damaged, but the material's good. Melt it down, reforge it, sell the remainder..." He paused, then named the price. "One hundred and fifty thousand ryō."
Most of that value came from Ao's gear. Kiyohara was satisfied enough not to haggle further. He then took out his own ninja sword and laid it across the counter.
"Maintain the blade," he said. "And add a hanging ring to the pommel."
The shopkeeper raised a brow. "Adding a ring? Planning to throw it?"
"A sword is still metal," Kiyohara replied. "Metal can fly."
The old craftsman snorted, half amused, half impressed. "Repairs and modifications will cost this much." He quoted a sum, then added, "If you want anything else done, say it now."
Kiyohara nodded and pushed most of the money from the sale forward. "Do it quickly. And with whatever remains, get me two Fūma shuriken."
Large shuriken were expensive, but worth it. Their killing power at medium range, their suppression value in chaotic combat, and their flexibility in traps made them useful enough to justify the cost.
"Come back this evening for the sword," Master Yamada said. He stowed the money and blade, then brought out two folded Fūma shuriken with careful hands.
Kurenai stood off to the side, quietly watching the whole exchange. Kiyohara bargained, assessed, purchased, and planned as though all of it were as natural to him as breathing. The same thought came back to her again—this guy was a shinobi in the most old-fashioned sense of the word.
"You're really... thorough," she said at last.
Kiyohara sealed the newly purchased Fūma shuriken into an empty scroll and glanced at her. "You can talk about ideals after you survive."
Kurenai had no answer to that. In wartime, survival itself had weight. It consumed attention, planning, money, and luck. Anyone who ignored that fact died early and left behind a pretty story for someone else to mourn.
As he walked out of the shop, Kiyohara's mind drifted somewhere else entirely. Kirigakure still hadn't launched its full invasion. When it did, mist shinobi would spread through the Land of Fire in large numbers, and sooner or later, the current of events would drag everyone toward the future he already knew.
In the original timeline, the Three-Tails incident happened near the western side of the Land of Fire, close to the Land of Grass. Geographically, it made little sense for Kirigakure. Strategically, it made perfect sense if Madara Uchiha was the one arranging the board.
How would Obito fall this time? Kiyohara wondered. Madara's goal had never really been Rin's death itself. What he wanted was Obito's collapse. The woman mattered only because she was the shortest path into that darkness.
Rin was useful to Kiyohara in very practical ways—she was a good teammate, a gifted medic, and currently his only real avenue into medical ninjutsu. If possible, he would rather keep her alive. But whether that aligned with Madara's plans was another matter entirely.
Madara was the sort of man who looked down on almost everyone in the world except his younger brother. To a person like that, other people's lives weren't pieces, not even sacrifices. They were scenery. If they happened to be useful in shaping Obito into the pawn he needed, then they remained. If not, they vanished.
Theoretically, losing the most important person in your life was not limited to death. Kiyohara suddenly recalled a fallen king, kneeling in ruins before an emptiness he could never reclaim. My beloved is gone forever, and all that remains is ash. Would that kind of shock be enough to break Obito too?
He wasn't certain. But he did know this much: the sooner Obito fell into darkness, the sooner Madara might stop paying attention to the people around him. And if Madara's gaze turned away from Kiyohara, that would be a very good thing indeed.
***
For the next two weeks, Kiyohara settled into a rigid routine. Whenever he had free time, he went to Rin to practice medical ninjutsu and deepen their working relationship. The rest of his time he spent in safe, isolated places behind the lines, training.
In battle, chakra alone did not decide life and death. Intelligence did. What you knew, when you knew it, and how quickly you acted on it could matter more than raw power. Jiraiya had once gambled his life just to uncover the truth behind Pain's Six Paths. That alone was proof enough.
Because of that, shinobi generally understood one unwritten rule: when someone was training, you left them alone. Disturbing a shinobi in the middle of dangerous practice wasn't just rude. It was reckless.
Kiyohara moved through the woods with his sword in hand, cutting, stepping, turning, resetting. After inheriting the young Kiyohara's talent and insight, his progress in swordsmanship had become absurdly fast. Every slash now carried the weight of years he himself had never lived.
The fundamentals were astonishingly solid. Grip. Footwork. Distance. Timing. The transmission of force from the soles of the feet through the waist and shoulders into the blade. What had once felt awkward and theoretical had become instinctive.
Once he had practiced the basics enough to raise a fine sheen of sweat over his skin and steady his breathing into a long, even rhythm, he entered a state of focus so pure it almost felt like falling inward. Before, sword training had always required conscious effort. Now, concentration came naturally.
That too, he realized, was a kind of talent. To abandon everything else and sink completely into one thing—that was what allowed some people to leap ahead while others crawled.
Next, he worked on the output of Lightning Release: Lightning Flow Technique, trying to sustain it with greater precision rather than brute force. Chakra wasn't infinite. Even Kakashi, the benchmark Kiyohara always used for a regular jōnin, could only afford a handful of Raikiri uses in his earlier years.
The blade hummed softly. Pale arcs of electricity crawled along its edge, flickering like living veins. Kiyohara moved, and in the span of a few breaths, several thick tree trunks serving as targets were silently severed in smooth, clean lines.
He lowered the sword and exhaled. Sweat rolled down from his temples. The past twenty days of training had been brutal—demanding more concentration, finer control, and stricter discipline than anything he had done before—but the results were obvious.
After that came Konoha Style: Willow. Kiyohara drew on Yin Release chakra and fed it into the sword style. For a heartbeat, it looked as if dozens of blades had appeared in the air at once, spinning and weaving around him. His own figure blurred, elusive and unreal, drifting like a willow branch in high wind.
An hour later, he finished training and headed back toward camp. Aside from routine missions and patrol work, the last two weeks had been relatively peaceful. But Kiyohara knew better than to trust peace in wartime. It was usually only the silence between one disaster and the next.
The war was intensifying. More shinobi were dying every day. Every front was hungry for bodies, and even the rear lines were no longer safe in any meaningful sense.
All the while, Kiyohara continued waiting for the next last words to arrive. If the previous pattern held, he should receive a new will in about ten days.
That expectation was still turning in his mind when he returned to base and was immediately handed a summons. A conscription order.
***
The center of the camp was already crowded by the time Kiyohara arrived. Genin, chūnin, special jōnin, and full jōnin gathered in dense clusters, the air tense with the familiar mood of soldiers who knew another operation was coming.
Kiyohara was among the last to arrive, but the moment he stepped into the assembly area, his eyes landed on the pale young man standing near the middle of the gathering. Golden vertical pupils. Purple markings around the nose. Magatama earrings.
Orochimaru.
Even in a crowd, he stood out like something that had wandered in from another world. Too pale. Too still. Too interested in everything and everyone in a way that never felt human.
"Why are you so late, Kiyohara?" Rin waved him over. The two of them had grown much closer over the past half month, and the ease in her tone showed it.
Kiyohara walked to her side without taking his eyes off Orochimaru for too long. That man's presence alone was enough to put anyone on edge. Not because Orochimaru was openly hostile, but because he always seemed to be measuring people. Weighing them. Calculating what they might become once cut open and rearranged.
"I was training," Kiyohara said simply.
"Of course you were," Rin replied, almost amused. "You'd probably still be training if someone hadn't dragged you here."
"Training doesn't stop just because the war feels impatient."
Rin gave him a helpless look, but there was warmth in it now. Time, shared danger, and her private lessons in medical ninjutsu had closed some of the distance between them. That was useful. More than useful. It gave him one more stable thread to hold onto in an increasingly unstable world.
At the front of the gathered shinobi, Orochimaru finally raised his head. The murmur across the camp thinned into silence almost instantly. No one wanted to be the person still talking when Orochimaru chose to begin.
Kiyohara watched him from within the crowd, expression calm, mind racing. The next stage of the war was arriving. The calm days were over. Somewhere out there, Obito was recovering beneath a mountain grave. Somewhere else, Madara was watching the board and deciding who would be allowed to live a little longer.
And in ten days, if fortune held, another future would knock on the lid of an urn and speak.
Until then, Kiyohara would keep doing what he had always done.
Survive. Grow stronger. Prepare for the moment the world tried to crush him again.
Because one thing had become clearer than ever: in this story, no one was going to save him unless he was already prepared to save himself.