The two Root shinobi wore Konoha forehead protectors. Beneath their loose outer uniforms, they had mesh body suits, and both their arms and legs were wrapped all over in bandages.
They walked up to Uchiha Yoru with smiles on their faces, but those smiles looked worse than crying. Aside from their eyes and brows being curved, and the corners of their mouths being lifted, not a single muscle on their faces could be said to be smiling.
That abnormal expression triggered the uncanny valley effect, producing an intense feeling of strangeness, horror, and disgust.
Compared to this, the smile of Sai, a Root shinobi more than ten years later, was actually pretty decent. At least he still looked human.
One of the shinobi raised a scroll, stared fixedly at Uchiha Yoru, and with that smiling expression and a dull, lifeless tone, said, "Chūnin Uchiha Yoru, you have been appointed captain of a shinobi squad. We are genin assigned to your team."
After a pause, as if he had thought about it for a moment, the two shinobi bowed together and said in unison, "Please take care of us."
Uchiha Yoru: "..."
Miwa Masayo: "..."
What kind of plan was this?
They had directly used an official order to appoint Uchiha Yoru as team captain, then sent Root shinobi to join his squad as genin underlings.
This was outright forcing things through with brute strength. Did it really have to be this crude?
These two shinobi moved stiffly and obscurely. Anyone with eyes could tell at a glance that they weren't normal people, much less normal shinobi.
And with the abundant chakra in their bodies, plus the strong chakra fluctuations beneath the bandages around their arms and legs, these were at minimum tokubetsu jōnin-class shinobi. Did they really think he was blind?
And besides, since when was a command appointing a chūnin as captain delivered by the genin who were supposed to serve under him? There wasn't the slightest sense of official procedure in that.
Uchiha Yoru clapped his hands together.
He understood.
Shimura Danzō had done this on purpose. He was openly and blatantly planting watchers at Yoru's side, relying on the fact that Yoru could not openly resist the order.
So what if he knew there was something wrong with the command?
Refuse the order? This was a genuine order with a formal record. A shinobi disobeying orders on the front lines would become an undeniable missing-nin, an enemy all Konoha shinobi had the right to kill.
And then the second order would follow.
The entire camp would be mobilized to hunt down Uchiha Yoru.
Obey the order, and Uchiha Yoru would have no choice but to leave camp with two assassins ready to stab him in the back at any moment, marching under a second command straight into the encirclement the Root shinobi had prepared for him.
Once he died, the records of those two orders would be destroyed. Uchiha Yoru would be painted as someone who had abandoned the shinobi camp without cause, under suspicion of treason.
So even if he died, it would be for nothing.
Whether or not Shimura Danzō had deliberately designed this to disgust people, the scheme was crude enough to move one to tears. Anyone who wasn't an idiot could see there was a problem at a glance.
But the truly formidable point of this conspiracy was that it relied on the Hokage's authority, using borrowed power to bully from above.
Uchiha Yoru thought it through from every angle, only to realize that in the current situation, it somehow formed a kind of logical closed loop. For a moment, he could not think of any way to break it.
But to say it was completely unsolvable would not be true either.
A conspiracy was still a conspiracy. The moment it was dragged into the open, the balance of victory and defeat would reverse instantly.
At the end of the day, this was not an overt stratagem—nothing like a true masterpiece of grand wisdom, where the scheme could be laid out openly before the enemy and still leave them utterly helpless.
At that thought, Uchiha Yoru smiled brightly and said to the two wooden-faced shinobi, "Haha, this is my first time serving as a captain. Why don't you two introduce yourselves?"
The numbers that almost slipped from their mouths were forcibly blocked back by the Tongue Eradication Curse Seal. The two wooden figures stood there stupidly for a full three minutes before finally speaking.
"I am Ryōta."
"I am Osamu."
Uchiha Yoru: "... damn it! So they were looking down on me after all!"
Miwa Masayo asked, "Yoru, why did you blurt out what you were thinking in front of them, nya?"
Uchiha Yoru shook his head. "No need to worry. These two wooden blocks are not Root shinobi. They're Root weapons. There's no need to be careful in front of them…"
"Because… they only know how to obey orders. They don't have enough intelligence to distinguish what counts as information."
A trace of sympathy appeared in Uchiha Yoru's eyes, along with a faint thread of pity. He sighed and said, "I was wondering why Root thought so highly of me that they'd send two tokubetsu jōnin to my side as assassins. Turns out they're two weapons whose minds have already been ruined."
Miwa Masayo climbed onto her servant's shoulder and observed the two carefully with wide eyes. "These are the same kind of weapons you interrogated last time after catching one, nya?"
"Mm. Let me confirm." Uchiha Yoru turned to the two wooden blocks and ordered, "In my capacity as squad captain, I command the two of you to stick out your tongues."
The moment they heard the word "command," the two Root shinobi obeyed without hesitation, sticking out their tongues to reveal the black-and-blue seal patterns inked there like tattoos.
Though it was his first time seeing it, Uchiha Yoru guessed the effect of the seal immediately and smiled. "It should be the Tongue Eradication Curse Seal. I didn't expect it to already be complete. And with this kind of mechanical response, I can confirm they really are mindless weapons."
Uchiha Yoru opened his Sharingan and carefully memorized the Tongue Eradication Curse Seal. For someone who had just begun studying sealing techniques, this thing had considerable reference value.
The Tongue Eradication Curse Seal represented Root's highest current level of sealing technique research.
Its level was extremely high.
So high, in fact, that Uchiha Yoru could not understand it at all for now.
These two wooden blocks also represented a certain level of Root's method for training subordinates. But that level could only be described as absolute trash. Using the feedback from the order itself, Uchiha Yoru managed to break into their minds with almost laughable ease—without even opening his Sharingan, and without using genjutsu.
The mind was the most important core of any intelligent lifeform.
Not just humans—even the minds of ninja cats and ninja dogs were things Uchiha Yoru could not invade directly.
His original intent in attacking their minds had been his usual method. First shake the opponent's mental world, tear open a crack, plant suggestion seeds inside, then repeatedly tug on those suggestions to influence the target's will—just like what he had done in the early days of the study group with the various genin.
Who would have thought that the very first step of "shaking" would shatter the target's mental barrier entirely, letting Uchiha Yoru walk straight in?
The instant he broke through, he was so shocked he thought it was some kind of mental or genjutsu trap—something like the Tsukuyomi of Uchiha Itachi's Mangekyō in the future, dragging an enemy into one's own inner world, imprisoning them there, and then thoroughly bullying them with home-field advantage.
Just as Uchiha Yoru, full of fear and unease, prepared to flee, he saw the mental world of the Root weapon.
It was a shattered world on the verge of collapse.
Several enormous rules manifested as thick iron chains, crisscrossing through the entire world, slowly pushing it toward disintegration.
At the cracks along the boundary of the mental world, countless fragments of mind were continuously breaking away, drifting down like autumn leaves into the unknown void beyond.
The minds of these two weapons were being destroyed.
Their lives had already entered a countdown.
Uchiha Yoru estimated that within three to four months at most, they would lose consciousness completely and become true living corpses or vegetables.
Within such a broken, collapsing world, the mind could no longer hide its secrets.
All information was laid bare.
Though the losses were severe, Uchiha Yoru still quickly pieced together their origins.
To sum it up, there was no technical sophistication whatsoever in the creation of these mindless weapons.
Take children under the age of four with shinobi potential. Subject them to inhuman training volumes. Force them to ingest large doses of forbidden drugs that destroyed their foundations. Through repeated attrition, rapidly produce shinobi at or above the level of a chūnin.
Root clearly did not value these fast-grown shinobi very highly, because their physical foundations were ruined. Not only could they no longer increase in strength, their peak state would also last only five or six short years. Soon after, bodily deterioration and premature aging would leave them weak and broken.
So Root used violent methods to brainwash them, taught them extremely dangerous forbidden techniques, then through another round of selection, obtained weapons skilled at dying together with the enemy.
This was the most traditional kind of shinobi training in the shinobi world.
It was said that back in the era when samurai ruled the world, this was exactly how shinobi had been trained. The whole point was the total absence of humanity. There was not the slightest trace of spiritual insight or technique in it. No one who trained shinobi this way had ever expected them to survive to the age of twenty.
Clearly, Orochimaru had not yet entered Root's foundational technological reform. Root shinobi and human-shaped weapons had not yet merged into one.
The Root shinobi Uchiha Yoru remembered from the future—people like Sai, with near-zero emotional fluctuation but intact intelligence, sharp reactions, and strength with room to grow—had not yet appeared.
After observing for a while and finding no further information worth valuing, Uchiha Yoru prepared to leave.
But his movement froze instantly.
It was not because someone had attacked him.
It was because someone was crying for help.
The plea was extremely faint, intermittent, drifting and wavering, as though this shattered mental world had somehow given birth to a ghost.
It was enough to make one's hair stand on end.
Uchiha Yoru was stunned.
The voice crying for help came from the weapon calling himself Ryōta.
And when the original owner of that plea revealed itself within the mental world, the thing displayed a body so complex it made Uchiha Yoru's scalp go numb.
It was a patchwork monstrosity.
The being that cried for help contained many different components within itself—the child brought into Root at age four, the child trained into a tokubetsu jōnin by the age of eight, and the man-eating monster born after his personality was destroyed at eleven. Taking the four-year-old child as the most complete core, all of those pieces had been kneaded together into a creature beyond description.
The monster had seven or eight faces, but not one was complete. Every incomplete face was twisted in pain, tears and mucus streaming down. It had a total of eight eyes of various sizes, all staring fixedly at Uchiha Yoru. Five or six mouths and noses opened and closed, releasing soft mutters and murmurings.
The sheer Lovecraftian quality of it made Uchiha Yoru feel an eerie sense of familiarity.
He was speechless.
Shimura Danzō truly was something else. He had actually managed to create a Cthulhu-like monster inside the shinobi world. If this thing could manifest beyond the mind, it would absolutely cause enormous trouble.
The creature in the mental world was extremely weak, yet its uneasy panting and low muttering were impossible to ignore. Even Uchiha Yoru himself found his mind a little unsettled now.
And suddenly, Uchiha Yoru's eyes lit up.
This thing was very interesting.
Though he had not awakened the Mangekyō Sharingan, his ocular power had long since exceeded the normal standards of a three-tomoe Sharingan. On top of that, he was skilled in stillness and meditative standing. He dared say that the toughness of his spirit was no less than that of a true Mangekyō wielder.
If this creature could shake even him, then its power to assault the mind was absolutely considerable. If it could be freed from its weak state, and if he supported it from behind, then as a mental weapon, its power would certainly be most satisfactory.
There was even the tiniest possibility that it might directly shatter an enemy's mental defenses head-on and decide the battle in a single strike.
Uchiha Yoru said happily, "I've decided. From now on, your name is Little K."
"Little K will definitely become a splendid little Cthulhu one day. But you absolutely must remember not to grow too grotesque."
"Because I dislike ugly things. If you grow into something too hideous, I won't be able to resist killing you."
The monster fixed within the mental world of the Root living weapon could not truly hear Uchiha Yoru's words.
But instinctively, it sensed some vast terror.
It could not help trembling all over.
Uchiha Yoru suddenly speaking, and with such completely nonsensical content at that, left Miwa Masayo on his shoulder utterly baffled. With the powerful intuitive sensitivity of a ninja cat, the calico cat sensed a trace of something strange and looked around uneasily, but failed to find anything odd.
She pawed at her servant and asked, "Who are you talking to, nya?"
Uchiha Yoru pointed at the living weapon and said, "Inside that fellow's mind, I found a very interesting mental monster. I just named it Little K."
"It sounds like something terrifying, nya. The fur on my tail is standing up!"
"It is a little scary, but as a weapon it's not bad."
"In any case, stay away from me, nya."
"Alright, alright."
Considering that he could not kill the Root weapons just yet, Uchiha Yoru suppressed his greed and planted several thousand suggestion seeds inside Little K within the mental world of the Root weapon.
He fully activated them into a logical chain, tightly bundling Little K into a cocoon, then extended the chains outward like dog leashes to bind the entire mental world, fixing both Little K and the world itself firmly in place so that a sudden collapse would not destroy this interesting mental monster.
After finishing all that, Uchiha Yoru checked the other weapon as well.
Unfortunately, he did not find a second mental monster.
That was normal enough.
Life always had the power to create miracles, but miracles were, by their nature, extremely rare. Behind every miracle of life lay the corpses of countless other lives that had struggled and failed and died.
To get even one Little K already left Uchiha Yoru thoroughly satisfied.
After all, this was something he had fleeced from Root. The sense of it being spoils of war felt rather nice.
After thinking for a moment, he also reinforced the other shinobi's mind—the one who called himself Osamu.
Once that was done, ownership of both Root weapons had changed hands.
The living assassins Root had sent had become Uchiha Yoru's most loyal weapons, and in the coming clash, they were certain to give the Root shinobi a very big surprise.
…
The order Uchiha Yoru had expected arrived in his hands a few hours later.
It commanded him to depart that night and reach a valley in central Hot Water Country by five o'clock the following morning, where he would receive the next stage of his mission.
The mission content was very ordinary.
To prevent high-secrecy tasks from being leaked, the Five Great Shinobi Villages often divided a single mission into two or more segments, ensuring that during the early stages of transmission and execution, the full operation would not be exposed.
Uchiha Yoru did not depart at the time the mission required.
The moment he received the mission, he took the two living weapons and Miwa Masayo and left camp.
First he hurried southwest back into the Land of Fire. Then, following the border between the Land of Fire and the Land of Hot Water, he moved northwest. Several hours later he entered the Land of Hot Water again, advanced directly north until he had passed beyond the mission point, and only then turned back southeast, quietly approaching the mission site.
Departing early. Taking a detour of a hundred li. Arriving from the reverse direction.
This was one of Konoha shinobi's standard anti-tail techniques.
The Root shinobi following behind him were just as familiar with these methods as with the backs of their hands. One of them could not help letting out a sneer. "Stupid Uchiha. Using such an old trick. If it weren't to prevent accidents, we wouldn't need to waste so much effort taking this long route."
The Root shinobi leading them snorted coldly and rebuked him. "Silence. What does running a bit farther matter? This is a mission personally issued by Lord Danzō. We must ensure nothing at all goes wrong."
"Yes!"
"Stay close. We can't let this Uchiha leave our line of sight, but we also can't let him discover us too early."
"Understood, Captain!"
By the time a pale white glow spread along the eastern horizon, Uchiha Yoru had arrived at the mission location a full two hours early. After sending one of the weapons ahead to scout inside the valley, he led the rest of the team in.
Immediately, four Root shinobi who had followed him the entire way moved to block him, while three more appeared on each side of the valley and another three in front. Without a word, they charged straight at Uchiha Yoru.
The Root shinobi showed no surprise whatsoever at Uchiha Yoru's early arrival. Nor did any of them speak. They did not even bother producing some Root order and declaring Uchiha Yoru a target or enemy.
They simply rushed in without hesitation, launching a first wave of attacks with shuriken and kunai. Then they drew their gleaming ninja blades and went straight into close-quarters combat.
Behind Uchiha Yoru, the two living weapons also drew their blades, sending two bright arcs of steel through the darkness of the valley.
But those two arcs struck the Root shinobi on the flanks.
The Root shinobi, cold and silent, some of them even deliberately affecting icy composure, instantly lost control of themselves when struck. Shocked and confused cries burst out from them.
"What?"
"How is this possible?"
"No way!"
Every Root shinobi knew the value of living weapons.
They existed to die together with the enemy.
Their bodies always carried at least ten explosive tags.
They were mobile self-detonating bombs.
But now their original side's suicide weapons had defected.
The Root shinobi all understood exactly how dangerous that was. They no longer cared about the mission target, Uchiha Yoru. Leaving only a few to monitor him, they concentrated their full efforts on attacking the two weapons.
If they did not destroy those two living weapons first, the pair could blast a giant opening in the encirclement at any moment, and Uchiha Yoru would seize that chance to escape.
And since the living weapons' betrayal was very likely Uchiha Yoru's doing, then unless this hidden danger was eliminated first, Root's mission was destined to fail.
Read 50 chapters ahead on P@treon -> [email protected]/SorenSwiftTL (replace @ with a)