A cruel, predatory smile ghosted across Sasuke's face as the words left his lips.
He had no intention of lingering. Toying with the guards at the gate had served its purpose—it had drawn the attention of the administration, it had sown confusion, and it had painted a trail of blood that would lead his hunters exactly where he wanted them. But his mind was already moving past the petty slaughter of grunts. The real prize lay at the summit.
With the unconscious Shimura Sachiko draped over his shoulder like a sack of grain, Sasuke activated Vector Manipulation on the atmospheric pressure beneath his feet. He didn't run; he simply redirected gravity's pull into horizontal momentum, launching himself upward in a blur of displaced air. He scaled the side of the Hokage Tower in three effortless strides, landing silently on the administrative corridor's stone balcony.
The night shift was light. With the bulk of Konoha's security diverted to contain the Uchiha district's fallout, only a skeleton crew remained to guard the heart of village leadership. Two Chunin stood watch outside the inner administrative doors, their posture relaxed, their hands resting casually on their kunai pouches. They hadn't felt the tremors. They hadn't heard the screams. To them, the distant smoke was just another Uchiha training exercise gone wrong.
When they saw a small, blood-spattered boy carrying a heavily pregnant noblewoman toward them, alarm gave way to confusion, then to practiced courtesy.
"Hey," one of the guards called out, stepping forward. His eyes widened as he recognized the silhouette draped over Sasuke's shoulder. "Wait… that's Lady Sachiko. Shimura Danzō-sama's daughter-in-law."
"What happened?" the second guard asked, his voice sharpening as he closed the distance. "Did she collapse? Is she in labor?"
Sasuke stopped a few paces from them. He adjusted his grip, allowing Sachiko's pale face to catch the dim lantern light. Then, he looked up with wide, tear-bright eyes—the perfect picture of a frightened, exhausted child.
"I found her on the road, near the market district," Sasuke stammered, injecting just the right amount of tremor into his voice. "She just… fell down. I tried to wake her up, but she wouldn't move. Please, help her."
The guards exchanged a glance, their suspicion melting into professional concern. The Uchiha massacre was a distant rumor to them; the boy's age and appearance were disarming. They saw a civilian child doing his civic duty.
"Alright, kid. You did good," the first guard said, stepping past him to check on Sachiko's pulse. "Stay right here. I'll get a medical ninja. You—" he pointed to his partner, "—radio the emergency ward and tell them we have a priority maternal case."
"Understood." The second guard turned toward the communication room at the end of the hall.
Sasuke's eyes dropped. The innocent mask didn't slip; it simply calcified into something cold and absolute.
Vector Manipulation.
As the first guard reached for Sachiko, Sasuke's small hand brushed against his wrist. Contact.
In a fraction of a microsecond, the super-brain processor intercepted the kinetic and electrical vectors coursing through the guard's nervous system. It didn't just reverse them. It compressed them. It multiplied the ambient thermal energy of the corridor and the kinetic potential of a casual step into a singular, focused explosion of force directed inward.
BOOM.
The guard's body didn't just bleed out. It detonated. A spherical shockwave of pulverized bone, shattered tissue, and vaporized blood erupted into the hallway, painting the stone walls in a gruesome, abstract mural of crimson. The force blew out the lanterns, plunging the corridor into flickering shadows.
The second guard spun around, his eyes widening in horror. His hand flew to his radio. "Intruder! We need—"
He never finished the sentence.
Sasuke was already behind him. A small, pale hand rested gently on the man's shoulder.
"Remember," Sasuke whispered, his voice carrying the eerie, flat cadence of a child reciting a nursery rhyme. "Don't be a Hokage's lapdog in your next life."
Vector Manipulation: Internal Shockwave.
BOOM.
Another mist of red. Another crumpled uniform hitting the floor.
Sasuke stepped over the remains without looking down. He didn't break stride. He didn't slow. He simply walked toward the Hokage's private office, his Mangekyō Sharingan spinning lazily as it tracked the residual chakra signatures of the hidden ANBU operatives stationed in the ceiling vents and shadowed alcoves.
One by one, he passed them. One by one, he reached out and brushed a finger against a wall, a doorframe, a stray piece of debris. Vector Manipulation transmitted the kinetic payload through the air, a silent, invisible bullet that ruptured capillaries and shattered spines.
Thirteen shinobi fell before they even registered his presence. The administrative wing of the Hokage Tower, once a symbol of Konoha's order and strength, became a slaughterhouse in under two minutes. The floor grew slick. The air grew heavy with the coppery stench of iron and the sweet, sickening smell of disemboweled viscera.
Sasuke stopped before the massive oak doors of the Third Hokage's office. He pushed them open.
The room was untouched. Scrolls lined the shelves. Administrative seals sat neatly stacked on the desk. A half-finished pipe rested in a ceramic ashtray. It was the office of a tired old man trying to hold a crumbling village together with paper and promises.
Sasuke's eyes swept the room, the super-brain mapping spatial vectors and chakra residues instantly. He ignored the obvious documents. He wasn't here for tax reports or mission briefings. He knelt beneath the heavy oak desk and pressed his palm against the underside of the wood.
Hidden compartment. Sealed.
He channeled a thread of his own chakra into the wood. The seal flared to life beneath his fingertips—a complex, interlocking matrix of Uzumaki-style fūinjutsu. The Four Symbols Seal, layered over an Eight Trigrams formation. A masterwork of chakra locking, designed to dissolve upon contact with unauthorized energy and trigger a lethal countermeasure.
To a normal shinobi, it was an impassable wall.
To Sasuke, it was a mathematical equation waiting to be solved.
Scanning. Analyzing. Decoding.
The Mangekyō Sharingan's pattern recognition mapped the seal's spiral structure. The super-brain ran thousands of permutations per second, calculating the exact harmonic frequency required to bypass the locking mechanism without triggering the trap.
"Four Symbols Seal. Eight Trigrams Layer. Found it." Sasuke murmured, his lips curving into a delighted grin.
He applied a precise, microscopic pulse of chakra at three nodal points. The seal shuddered. The intricate lines of light fractured, unraveled, and vanished. The wood clicked. A hidden drawer slid open.
Inside lay a dense, leather-bound scroll, wrapped in reinforced chakra paper. Sasuke lifted it, unrolling it just enough to see the contents. Intelligence reports. Root operational budgets. Classified assessments of the Nine-Tails incident. And at the bottom, a detailed schematic of a specific jinchūriki containment protocol.
Naruto Uzumaki, Sasuke thought, the name rolling through his mind like a bitter pill. The vessel. The orphan. The village's favorite scapegoat.
The Eight Trigrams Sealing Style. Designed not just to contain Kurama, but to deliberately leak the fox's chakra into Naruto's system, slowly poisoning his life force while forcing his body to adapt. Hiruzen's "compassion." A slow, agonizing martyrdom dressed up as a hero's destiny.
Sasuke's grin widened. It was the smile of a predator recognizing a kindred spirit trapped in a cage of someone else's making.
Let them sleep in their lies a little longer, he mused, rolling the scroll and tucking it into his shirt alongside Fugaku's Mangekyō and Shisui's preserved eye. Tonight is for the architects. The fox's brat can wait.
He flashed a hand seal, his Body Flicker displacing the air in a sharp crack, and vanished into the night.
Far below, walking the cobblestone streets back toward the administrative district, the triumvirate of Konoha's leadership moved in grim silence.
Hiruzen Sarutobi led the way, his ceremonial robes traded for mesh armor and dark combat fatigues. The Monkey King, Enma, had been dismissed; the Hokage needed no summon to deal with a rogue child. Behind him walked Danzō Shimura, his bandaged arm clenched tightly around a cane, his single eye burning with cold, vindictive fury. And trailing a few paces back, leaning heavily on the wall for support, was Itachi Uchiha.
"Today's events… were unforeseen," Hiruzen said finally, his voice heavy with the weight of a decision that had aged him a decade in an hour. "Itachi, I apologize for the necessity of declaring Sasuke a traitor. But you understand. With his power, with what he's done… there is no other path."
Itachi didn't look up. His Sharingan was dim, his face a hollow mask of exhaustion. "I understand, Lord Hokage."
"Good." Hiruzen nodded slowly. "You have sacrificed everything for this village. I will not let it be for nothing. You will remain in Konoha. You will heal. When Sasuke's threat is neutralized, the official record will reflect your loyalty. Tonight… tonight we will pretend it was a tragic malfunction. A rogue element we contained."
Itachi closed his eyes. Contained. The word tasted like ash. There was no containment for what Sasuke had become. There was only survival, or extinction.
Beside him, Danzō let out a cold, humorless snort. "Uchiha Sasuke is a festering wound, and you let him bleed out in the open. Itachi… why did you hide his capabilities? Why did we not know the boy possessed a Mangekyō Sharingan before the night of the purge?"
Itachi's jaw tightened. "I didn't know. I couldn't have known. He was seven. The trauma of the massacre, combined with the psychological strain of Tsukuyomi… it forced an evolutionary response I never calculated. I only intended to awaken his base Sharingan. The Mangekyō… it was a variable outside the parameters."
Danzō's eye narrowed to a razor slit. "A variable that has just slaughtered Root operatives, killed my grandson, and declared open war on the village leadership. And you call it a calculation error."
"Enough," Hiruzen cut in, his voice sharp. "We will dissect our failures later. Right now, we secure the tower, assess the damage, and prepare a pursuit strategy."
They reached the base of the Hokage Monument. The grand staircase leading to the administrative wing loomed ahead.
But as they ascended, the wind shifted.
And with it, the smell.
Hiruzen stopped dead. His nostrils flared. The coppery, thick stench of blood hit him like a physical wall. It wasn't the smell of a skirmish. It was the smell of a slaughter.
"Something is wrong," Hiruzen breathed.
Danzō's grip on his cane tightened. "The perimeter is breached. Move."
They didn't run. Shinobi of their caliber didn't run toward danger; they advanced with lethal precision. Hiruzen vaulted the balcony railing, landing silently on the stone corridor. Danzō materialized beside him, his Sharingan peering through the gloom. Itachi followed, his breath catching in his throat.
The corridor was a nightmare.
The walls were painted in arterial spray. Chunks of flesh and pulverized bone littered the floor, sliding like wet gravel under their sandals. The lanterns had been extinguished, leaving only the dim, bloody glow of the moonlight filtering through shattered windows. There were no bodies intact—only remains. Reduced to mist. Compressed into paste. Torn apart from the inside out.
Hiruzen's boots stepped in a puddle of crimson. He looked at the nearest wall. The impact pattern… it wasn't ninjutsu. It wasn't taijutsu. It was pure, concentrated kinetic force, applied with surgical precision to shatter the human body from within.
His eyes, wide and bloodshot, traced the path of destruction down the hall. It led to a single, open door.
The Hokage's office.
"Sasuke…" Hiruzen whispered, the name fracturing into a broken rasp.