Hidden Leaf, Hidden Talents 97 (Patreon)

-Kawazumi Outpost - Danzo-

The outpost smelled wrong.

Not the cook fires, not the dust that hours of continuous arrivals had ground into every flat surface, not the smell of tents still going up along the eastern wall. Those were honest smells. Danzo understood them. They belonged to a camp doing what camps were built to do.

What sat underneath all of it was silence where there should not have been silence.

He walked behind the escort nin and kept his face pointed forward while his eyes went elsewhere. There were supposed to be people here. His people. Placed before the front lines even stabilized, each one slotted into a different corner of the outpost's daily machinery, each one invisible because invisibility was the first thing he trained into them and the last thing he let them unlearn. He kept them separate for the same reason he'd always kept them separate. One man breaks under interrogation and the whole structure comes apart. It was more work to set up that way. It was also the reason his networks survived things that killed other people's networks.

Four operatives. Not one had reached him.

He checked as he walked. He knew exactly where each of his people should have been, and at what hour, doing what task. He looked for all four of them and found none of them.

That was a problem. A significant one.

The escort shinobi ahead of him were moving fast, Hiruzen slung between two of them, his head lolling with every jostled step. The man had taken a wound to the head that would have dropped anyone else on the battlefield and kept them there. Hiruzen had instead opted to remain alive, which was, Danzo supposed, very much in character.

Danzo walked behind them and did not let himself be distracted by this.

Still, the alleys between the storage depots bothered him.

He could not explain it well. Nothing looked wrong. No bodies. No dragged marks. No broken crates left in the road.

Everything looked quiet.

He passed a two story supply depot and checked the roof without thinking. Then the mouth of the alley. Then the narrow gap between the tents across the way.

All empty.

Danzo had lived too long in the shadows to trust empty places.

Empty and safe were never the same thing.

And right now, the quiet around these alleys felt strange, as if something was hiding just beyond sight, holding its breath.

A crow stood on the fence post to his left, quietly adjusting its wings. Its dark eyes turned toward him.

He gave it a short glance, then looked away.

Crows always followed armies.

That was normal.

He kept walking.

The senior medics were already moving when the escort nin came through the door. The juniors were not. Three of them froze in a cluster near the supply shelves, staring at the unconscious figure being carried in, and Danzo watched one of them mouth something that was probably the Hokage's name or possibly a prayer. A grey-haired medic smacked the nearest one on the back of the head and all three of them found their feet again.

Danzo stepped aside, gave the room what it needed, waited until Hiruzen was on a cot with competent hands over him. Then he pulled two of the escort nin to the entrance. His instructions were short. Guard the door. They nodded and he walked out.

HQ was a ten-minute walk through a camp. He arrived, found Commander Minoru, and spent the better part of an hour receiving the complete picture. Front lines. Casualties. Enemy positions, the ones still holding and the ones that had folded. Minoru was thorough and told him everything relevant to the war. Danzo nodded in the right places and asked the right questions while he spent the entire hour thinking about his missing agents.

When Minoru finished, Danzo thanked him and left. There was still one thing left to check, and it couldn't wait. The quartermaster's office was at the eastern end of the supply row, between a food depot and a storage room that appeared to specialize in cart wheels. Danzo tried the door and stepped inside.

The place was empty.

He stood just inside the door and looked the room over. Shelves, crates, everything labeled and stacked by someone who cared about order. A desk in the back that someone cared about considerably less, half buried under request forms in various states of completion. The smell of ink and sawdust and old wood. Nothing out of place. Nothing that shouldn't have been there.

He did a circuit of the room. The back alcove, the narrow gap behind the shelving, the space under the lowest shelf. Empty. Empty. Empty.

He stopped behind the desk.

Every network he built had a failsafe baked into it. A single agent whose job was, in the plainest possible terms, to do nothing. No active work. No contact schedule. Just exist, do whatever role they'd been given, do it competently enough that their supervisors wrote average reports and moved on. The primary agents he'd lost had patterns. Habits. The behavioral tells that accumulated over weeks of operational work whether you wanted them to or not. Something in this outpost had read those tells and put his people in the ground. The failsafe agent had no tells. They'd done nothing worth noticing. Which meant they were probably fine. He opened the ledger to make sure.

The quartermaster logged every request. Food, equipment, gear replacements, medical supplies. A record of the outpost's needs and the meeting of those needs. Every entry carried a date, a name, a description of what was requisitioned and why.

He found it on the third page.

A replacement belt. An extra blanket. Filed three days ago under a specific name.

He read it once. He didn't need to read it twice.

The signal was simple by design. The failsafe didn't contact him. They didn't have to. All they had to do was file one requisition when the network went dark, a specific item under a specific name, and Danzo would find it when he checked. No meeting. No message passed between hands. No moment of exposure that could be traced back to either of them. Just a line in a ledger that meant nothing to anyone. A replacement belt and an extra blanket told him everything he'd arranged to be told. His people were gone.

Unfortunately, the signal didn't tell him how bad it was, or how it happened, or how many of his people were dead as opposed to simply missing. It wasn't designed to. It was designed to tell him one thing, and it had told him that one thing, and now he knew it.

He closed the ledger and stood in the quiet of the empty office. Outside, the outpost went about its business. Boots and sandals on packed earth. A food seller somewhere near the square was in the middle of a very loud, very personal argument with someone about a pile of leftover meat that had apparently been abandoned since whenever that free barbecue had started.

Danzo tapped his leg on the floor, thinking. His people had been taken cleanly. No bodies surfaced, no alerts raised, no ripple in the outpost's daily routine that anyone had thought to mention to him. That wasn't enemy action from outside. That was someone who knew exactly where to look and exactly how to do it without leaving anything behind. An inside job, or close enough to one that the distinction didn't matter. It didn't take long for a name to rise to the top of that particular list. Shinji. The boy's name kept turning up at the edge of every calculation, the same way a bad tooth kept finding his tongue. He'd made a move against the boy once. It had not gone well. A grudge after that was not unreasonable. Danzo would have done the same.

The problem was what to do about it now.

He looked out the window. Down in the square, six clones were finishing off the barbecue remnants that an entire outpost worth of hungry shinobi had apparently made a collective effort to leave behind. Two more on the street. Just present. Just visible. Just reminding him they were there, in case he'd forgotten. He hadn't forgotten. Tobirama-sensei had a saying, the village's greatest threats never announced themselves at the gate. They grew up inside the walls, fed on good intentions, and by the time anyone named them for what they were the roots had gone too deep. Danzo had believed that for years. He believed it more now than he ever had. Iwa and Suna and Kumo were problems he understood. Brutal but solvable, given enough time and enough bodies willing to do the work. This boy, this endlessly multiplying boy with his grudges and his clones, was cut from the same cloth as those detestable Uchiha who had decided, at various points in history, that their personal feelings outweighed their obligations to the village. Different face, same rot underneath. And Hiruzen had let it reach this point. Had looked at every warning sign, every report, every opportunity to act, and had found a reason each time to wait a little longer and trust a little more. Danzo sighed. Sensei would have wept.

Danzo pulled himself back from that thought before it became self-indulgent. Intel first. He needed to reach the failsafe agent before anything else. He moved toward the door and his eyes crossed the window on the way. He stopped. The clones were gone. All six of them, the meat half-finished on the grill.

He stood very still and looked at the empty square for a moment. Then he looked to the other street and found two chunin already heading his way, unhurried, like men on a walk rather than soldiers in a frontline outpost.

He watched them through the glass.

Something was wrong with them.

He couldn't put a name to it, but if their body language wasn't enough, their expressions were. That drowsy, utterly unbothered look.

It annoyed him greatly.

Worse, it reminded him of someone.

Danzo frowned slightly.

He had seen that expression before.

They stopped outside and knocked twice, and before the sound had even finished, the door swung open and both of them walked through it without waiting for an answer.

Danzo put the ledger back exactly where he'd found it. Straightened the edge so it matched the indent in the dust. Checked the desk surface, adjusted the nearest stack of request forms by a finger's width, and moved to the back alcove without rushing. He stepped behind the crates, pressed his back to the wall, and went still.

The door opened six seconds later.

Both of them came in with the same unhurried step he'd watched through the glass. He heard them moving through the room, checking shelves, crates, and the desk.

"Found it yet?"

"No, give me a second." The ledger opened, pages rustled. "Hey, this guy uses three different ink colors. Red, black, and blue. What do you think that's about?"

"No idea. Maybe he just likes variety."

"Mm. Maybe." More pages turning. "Actually no, look. Red shows up maybe twice a page. Black's everywhere. And blue." A pause. "Blue keeps showing up next to the same types of requests over and over. Extra rations. Non-essential gear." Another pause. "I think blue means he thinks it's stupid but he has to do it anyway. Look at how much blue there is in here. This man is suffering in silence."

"Found it yet?"

A soft chuckle. "Yeah, just found it."

Something in that mocking lilt moved Danzo's feet before his brain caught up. He went sideways hard, hit the floor, rolled. The tanto came in right where he'd been standing and took a chunk out of the wall with it, sending grit and plaster into his face. He came up behind the crates with his guard raised and his eyes already on both of them.

The one on the left looked at him. "Oh, there we go. Found the rat."

"Rat?" The one on the right actually looked offended on Danzo's behalf. "That's rude. This isn't a rat. That's the esteemed elder of Konoha. One of the most powerful men in the village." A pause. "I do have one question though." His smile widened. "What is the esteemed elder of Konoha doing skulking around back there? Because I have to say, it does look a little ratlike.”

"Who are you people?" Danzo's eyes moved between them. "Konoha nin attacking a Konoha elder. Is this betrayal? Mutiny? Do you understand what you're doing right now?"

They exchanged a glance and both of them laughed, like men who'd just heard something funny.

"Betrayal." The one on the left tilted his head. "That's a bit dramatic, don't you think, elder?"

"Come on now." The one on the right had started moving, angling wide to the left. "You've figured it out already, haven't you? Of course you have. You're elder Danzo, the Shadow of Konoha. Give yourself some credit."

The one on the left had started moving too, drifting the opposite direction at the same unhurried pace. The room was not large and it was getting smaller.

"We're professionals, Elder Danzo. This doesn't have to hurt." The right nin said it the way a dentist might, warm and completely unbothered. "You've had a long career. Let it end well. I'll make it quick." He paused. "I'm actually very good at quick."

"Mm." The left nin nodded. "We've done worse. This is actually us being nice." A small pause. "It probably doesn't feel that way. But it is."

The two of them kept moving and the gap kept closing and Danzo turned his weight onto his back foot without letting it show on his face.

He went for the window. Danzo was not a man who ran, but he was absolutely a man who retreated to more favorable ground, and right now more favorable ground was anywhere that wasn't this room. The outpost needed to be warned. Minoru needed to be warned about this traitorous bastard.

The wall screamed before he reached it.

KRRSHHK.

A line of superheated chakra carved through plaster and wood and window frame in one diagonal sweep, making Danzo feel the heat peel across his right side. He twisted midair on pure reflex, folding his body sideways, and for one single stupid second he thought he'd made it.

Then the fire in his right arm told him otherwise.

"Kh—" He was already hitting the floor, rolling on instinct, biting down on the rest of it before he'd even finished landing. He came up on one knee tasting copper.

He looked at the arm. The sleeve was soaked black, heavy with blood, still wet against his skin. He tried to move his fingers. Nothing moved. Just a deep grinding from somewhere inside the arm, and nothing else. He heard the creak of the window frame and was already moving.

The newcomer slipped off the sill and landed lightly on the floor, already smiling. "Prime's behind you, Elder. But not as far behind as I thought.” His eyes flicked to the arm. “Shame about the arm, though."

What followed was a few desperate minutes.

Danzo moved like a cornered animal, sharp and relentless. He struck, slipped past one clone, then another, forcing small openings that led nowhere. The room filled with the sound of steel scraping steel and feet sliding across broken plaster. He aimed for the door once. The window once more. Each time a blade pushed him back.

Minutes passed.

If this had been the Danzo of later years, the one strengthened by forbidden grafts and stolen eyes, this fight might have looked very different.

The result would still end in defeat.

But he would not be standing here now like a trapped animal.

Right now, Danzo was only an elite jonin of Konoha, skilled and ruthless, yet still a man of flesh and blood.

And against Shinji and his clones, that was not enough.

Now Danzo stood in the middle of the room, breathing hard.

Blood covered his sleeve and dripped down his hand. His right arm hung low at his side, barely attached after too many cuts. Even looking at it made the stomach twist.

The clones stood around him in a loose ring.

No one attacked.

They were smiling, quietly watching him the way a cat watches a tired mouse.

Danzo looked at them.

They were waiting for something.

Words. Pleas. Terms.

Danzo felt a cold irritation settle in his chest.

He would not negotiate. The thought arrived and he didn't dignify it with a full second. Negotiating with a traitor was legitimizing a traitor, and Danzo had never once in his life legitimized something he intended to destroy. Whatever these clones wanted to say to him, whatever terms Shinji thought he could extract from this situation, none of it warranted a response. Terrorists did not receive responses. Traitors did not receive responses.

What they received, eventually, was consequences.

But not today.

Today was for surviving.

He had never been more certain of anything.

He had never been more wrong.

…

-Clone #63-

#63 stood in the doorway and looked at what the office had become.

The walls had been carved open. Three long gouges cut across the plaster, deep enough to expose the wood underneath. The edges were clean and sharp, clear signs of compressed wind chakra.

That was not all.

Several parts of the wall had simply been blown apart, leaving holes large enough for a man to walk through.

Danzo had not gone quietly. He'd gone out swinging, wind jutsu punching through walls as he clawed for the exit, carving chunks out of every clone that moved to stop him. Which was, from the clones' perspective, roughly as threatening as a man punching smoke. They kept coming. He kept swinging. At some point it stopped being a fight and started being something closer to a nature documentary. It had ended the way nature documentaries usually ended for the animal that was outnumbered.

His eyes moved to the floor. Danzo was there, pinned flat by three blades, one through each hand, one through the neck. The blood had stopped spreading. It had made its point and run out of places to go.

#63 crouched down next to him. Patted his cheek twice, not unkindly. "Tough break, old man. That's what you get for making a move on my people." He chuckled softly, then reached for the two stuck blades and pulled them free, collecting both in his left hand like a man pocketing loose change.

The third blade was the neck one, which meant it came out wet. More than he'd anticipated, a short dark arc across the floorboards. He flicked the excess off with a snap of the wrist, then wiped the blade clean on Danzo's sleeve.

He was still looking at the stain when the light at the window suddenly dimmed.

Shadows filled the frame.

He looked up.

Nin, which was expected. You didn't put wind jutsu through three walls in the middle of a functioning outpost and then wonder why people showed up. They were already at the exits, already still, already exactly where they needed to be.

Commander Minoru was standing in the hole Danzo had made in the wall. Arms crossed. The laugh lines that usually did most of the work on that face had taken the day off.

"What," Minoru said, "do you think you are doing."

It wasn't really a question.

#63 looked at the three blades in his hand, then at Danzo on the floor, then at Minoru.

"Ah." 63 brightened. "Good timing actually. I was just about to go find someone to report this."

"Report—" Minoru’s expression twisted slightly. "You were going to report… this?"

"Attempted assassination of a Konoha jonin by a sitting village elder." 63 nodded seriously. "Very serious business. I'm glad you're here, Commander. This is exactly the kind of thing that needs to go through proper channels."

Minoru stared at him for a long moment.

"Shinji."

#63 raised both hands, blades and all. "Alright, alright. Jokes aside." He dropped the easy smile by about half. "Danzo's been running ops against me for months. This wasn't random, this was the third attempt, I think. He made his move, I made mine." A small shrug. "Chiyo's memories should cover the full picture if you want it verified. I'm not gonna pretend this looks clean. But I am gonna tell you it was self-defense, and I'm gonna keep telling you that because it's true."

Minoru looked at him for a long moment, then slowly let the breath leave his nose.

“Come with me.”

When they reached the command building, Minoru pushed open the door and led him into the office inside.

Minoru sat behind the desk.

He didn’t invite #63 to sit.

#63 started to speak. “Commander, about what happened—”

“I know,” Minoru cut in. “I put the pieces together a while ago.”

Then he sighed.

“I already knew something was wrong.”

#63 tilted his head slightly.

Minoru rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“It started small,” he continued. “A shinobi dead in the barracks. Another one near the storage yard. Then another.” His fingers tapped once on the desk. “At first it looked random. But it wasn’t.”

They weren’t just any shinobi.

They were people who had access to the prison holding Chiyo.

Guards. Runners. Clerks. Interrogation assistants.

Small roles.

Unimportant on paper.

But every one of them knew what was in that cell.

“And after the autopsies,” Minoru said quietly, “we found something.”

A pause.

“Seals.”

On their tongues.

Small enough to miss entirely if you weren't looking for them.

#63 blinked.

Minoru watched his reaction, then continued.

“That’s when I realized something ugly was happening inside this outpost.”

He leaned back in his chair.

"My best guess was a spy network. Someone eliminating witnesses before the Chiyo situation became an official problem." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I had maybe four theories. None of them were 'the elder is trying to kill one of my jonin and the jonin is trying to kill him back.'"

He sighed lightly. “At least not until my Yamanaka finished going through Chiyo’s memories.”

His gaze moved to #63.

To Shinji.

To the boy whose clones had just killed one of the most powerful elders in the village.

Minoru shook his head slowly.

"And that's the only reason you're sitting in that chair right now instead of being carried to the prison."

#63 opened his mouth.

Minoru raised a hand.

“Don’t interrupt.”

The clone obediently closed it again.

Minoru leaned forward.

“Because something was already wrong in this outpost. Because I suspected something bigger than you and your clones running around causing trouble.”

He tapped the desk again.

“But that does not give you the right to deliver justice by yourself.”

The lecture began after that.

Minoru talked about chain of command.

About discipline.

About how villages collapsed the moment shinobi started deciding their own rules.

He explained, patiently at first, then with increasing exasperation, that killing a village elder in the middle of a frontline outpost was not something you just did, regardless of how much the elder in question deserved it.

#63 listened.

He nodded in the appropriate places.

At the same time, he privately thanked Tsunade-sensei.

Being her student was turning out to be extremely helpful right now.

Especially since the man currently lecturing him across the desk was her uncle.

If this had been some random shinobi with no connections, the situation would likely look very different.

At best, there would have been far more than a lecture.

At worst… there might not have been a lecture at all.

With the Third Hokage half-dead and recovering, the village’s power structure had shifted in interesting ways.

His sensei.

Orochimaru-senpai.

And Jiraiya papa.

Three names that currently sat very close to the top of Konoha.

Which meant, by association, so did he.

Nepotism, he reflected calmly, was truly one of civilization’s greatest inventions.

Bored, he tried to say something.

Minoru immediately told him to be quiet and kept going.

So the clone sat there and let it happen, which was, in his experience, the only thing you could do when a commander got going.

…

Meanwhile, far to the north, near the border of the Land of Lightning…

The tavern buzzed with laughter and chatter.

Voices rose and fell like waves, cups knocked against wooden tables, and somewhere near the back someone tried to sing while already drunk beyond reason. Warm lantern light spread across the room and painted everything in gold. For one evening, the war outside the village walls felt far away.

Shinji’s clone, #82, sat with his shoulders finally relaxed.

He held a cup of cheap sake and stared into it for a moment. The liquid reflected the lantern light like tiny suns. His body still carried the faint soreness of a long mission, but his heart felt strangely light.

One holiday, he reminded himself.

After tonight, they would head west with Jiraiya. Suna waited there. River too. Iwa beyond them. Three battlefields pressing toward each other like hungry wolves.

But that was tomorrow.

Minato lifted his cup with a bright smile.

“To a successful mission.”

Jiraiya raised his own drink with far less dignity.

“And to surviving long enough to drink afterward. That part matters more.”

Their cups touched.

#82 took a sip and winced slightly.

Cheap.

Very cheap.

He placed the cup down and glanced at Jiraiya.

“You’re supposed to be one of Konoha’s best. Couldn’t you pick a better tavern?”

Jiraiya leaned back with a loud laugh.

“Kid, this place has history. Legendary shinobi have drunk here before.”

Minato tilted his head. “Really?”

“Absolutely.”

“Who?”

Jiraiya scratched his chin.

“…Well, me. Right now.”

#82 stared at him.

Minato burst into laughter, covering his mouth with one hand.

“You made that up just now.”

Jiraiya pointed at him like a teacher catching a student cheating.

“And yet you still came here. That means my persuasion skill is flawless.”

#82 sighed and poured himself another cup.

Still cheap.

Still awful.

Yet somehow it tasted better now.

For a moment the three of them simply sat there, listening to the warm noise of the tavern.

Then Jiraiya looked at the clone again.

His eyes narrowed slightly, though the corner of his mouth still held a grin.

“You know,” he said slowly, “I was there when your clone army tried to bully the Raikage.”

#82 raised an eyebrow.

“…Bully is a strong word.”

Jiraiya snorted into his drink.

“I’ll give you credit. You tried.” He waved a hand lazily. “Fifty exploding clones isn’t a bad idea. Definitely memorable.”

#82 frowned slightly.

“That was supposed to work.”

“Oh, it worked,” Jiraiya said easily. “Just not the way you wanted.”

He leaned back in his chair.

“From the latest intel, the Raikage was injured. Not badly, but enough to slow him down.”

Minato blinked in surprise.

“Really?”

“Yeah.” Jiraiya shrugged. “Which honestly makes the whole thing more ridiculous.”

#82 narrowed his eyes.

“How so?”

Jiraiya tapped the table.

“Because even injured, the man still went back to the village and helped his people wrestle a rampaging bijuu.”

Minato exhaled softly. “The Eight-Tails…”

Jiraiya nodded.

“Kumo lost a lot of shinobi containing it. Way more than they wanted to.”

He glanced at #82 again, expression amused but approving.

“So yeah. Your suicidal clone circus actually bought us something.”

#82 tilted his head.

“Meaning?”

“It means the western front gets breathing room,” Jiraiya said. “Their attention is stuck at home cleaning up their own disaster.”

Minato smiled gently.

“That means the mission succeeded.”

Jiraiya lifted his cup again.

“So don’t look so bitter, kid. You did good.”

#82 stared into his sake.

The lantern light trembled in the cheap liquid.

A chain of exploding clones.

An explosion big enough to wipe out a few houses.

And somehow the Raikage had still blasted out of it at full speed.

According to the latest intel, the man was injured, but still alive.

#82 felt a faint sting of irritation.

He had honestly believed that kind of explosion would end the problem permanently.

Apparently not.

Which meant the Raikage was even stronger than he had estimated.

…That was mildly depressing.

Then he muttered quietly,

“…The Raikage still surviving is deeply disappointing.”

Minato choked on his drink.

Jiraiya burst into booming laughter.

“That’s the spirit! If a monster like that died from a few exploding clones, the world would be a boring place.”

He slammed his cup down on the table.

“Alright! Since we are celebrating, I have a proposal!”

#82 immediately felt suspicious.

“A proposal?”

Jiraiya grinned like a mischievous child.

“We compete.”

“…In what?”

“Storytelling.”

Minato tilted his head again, a curious smile forming.

“Storytelling? In a tavern? That sounds less like a competition and more like you trying to trick someone into embarrassing themselves.”

Jiraiya scratched his cheek without the slightest hint of guilt.

“Well, yes. That’s part of the fun.”

He pointed at them proudly.

“Every shinobi has embarrassing stories. Whoever tells the best one wins.”

#82 narrowed his eyes.

“Wins what?”

Jiraiya grinned wider.

“The loser pays the whole bill.”

Minato laughed again.

#82 stared at both of them, then looked down at the growing stack of empty sake cups.

A terrible feeling grew in his chest.

Stories…

He quietly searched his past life memories for something he could use.

An embarrassing moment. A stupid mistake. Anything.

None of them held a story worth telling.

His gaze returned to the table.

The stack of empty sake cups suddenly looked much more expensive.

And he had just gotten some ryo earlier today.

Battlefield ryo. Picked up from enemy corpses after the fight. The quiet bonus nobody talked about.

He had been saving it.

The plan was simple. Find a proper tavern later. Buy expensive sake. Drink it slowly before he eventually disappeared.

A small luxury for a short-lived existence.

Now that money was about to disappear into this cheap place.

#82 felt a quiet wave of annoyance.

Very unfortunate.

“…I regret coming here.”