Pre-Chapter A/N: More chapters on my patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)— same username as here and link in bio. Experimenting with two chapters a week, we'll see how long I can keep this up for.
I knocked him out again as I walked back and forth. What was I going to do now? He hadn't done it. Somehow, the bastard was innocent. That meant I'd broken into the home of a sitting clan head, assaulted him, branded him with a seal, and did it all for no good reason. There was only one way this ended, and it wasn't going to be positive for me. I couldn't imagine trying to talk my way out of this one. Maybe if I were officially the Hokage then I could say he was getting up to treason, but with no valid evidence, even that would have been a stretch.
Part of my head just told me to call Uraume. She'd have an idea for how to get rid of this and clean it up. The only issue would be that she'd want to know why I'd done this. "So, Cousin, I was just grave robbing the Konoha cemetery in search of my grandfather's corpse to harvest his cells and use them to make you a new arm and maybe transplant them into myself to see what they do, and then when I didn't find his corpse, I somehow decided Danzo was responsible and broke into his house, beat him up, branded him with a curse seal, and then interrogated him only to find out he wasn't the one who did it." I facepalmed at the explanation. Even to myself, I sounded insane. I had context that she wouldn't, and telling her about that context ran too many risks.
No, I couldn't get Uraume involved in this. Uzume would probably ask fewer questions, but even she would see through any lies I told and get suspicious in no time. I had to think like them, but I couldn't consult them.
First things first, I had to get rid of Danzo himself. There was no chance I could convince him to let this slide. If I were him, there would be no chance I'd forget this or fail to use it to the fullest. He would inevitably try to weaken my position with this, which was not something I could much afford at this present time. Could I make him forget? I laughed at the thought. Genjutsu a Jounin as paranoid as Danzo into forgetting something? Might as well start flying or some shit. Except that the latter was somehow more likely than the former succeeding. There was only one end to this, I just had to decide how to do it.
Danzo needed to die. There's no way I could pass it off as an accident. So it had to be enemy action. Could I fake an invasion of the village by a small team of Iwa nin that ended up killing Danzo? But why would they have come to his home? Danzo was a non-entity in the wider politics between villages. No one would care about him so much as to go to the trouble of assassinating him. No, if Iwa snuck in, they would have better targets: freeing Kitsuchi, Azula, killing me, killing Hiruzen. No one would buy them stopping over to off a random clan head. So, not that. Besides, the Uzumaki clan had taken over the barriers, so an invasion happening on their watch would not end well for them—for us.
So I had to go back to the drawing board. Danzo had to die. The damage to his home meant it had to be combat. But it couldn't be with anyone outside the village. Who did we have in the village with the strength to kill Danzo? Kitsuchi, definitely Azula. Kitsuchi was too useful as a bargaining chip to kill right now, but Azula? There was potential there. Even with my best efforts, she was barely beginning to trust me. It would actually be better to seal the Four Tails into a new host and start afresh. Riku Uzumaki just had a baby girl a few days ago.
Okay, this could work. I just needed a way to motivate her into killing Danzo and come up with an explanation of why she would do so. Even just thinking about it gave me an easy enough solution. I walked over to the man and slashed him across the hand, collecting the blood into a vial. This was as much a ritual as a seal, so I couldn't get it wrong. I knocked him out again when he seemed to be stirring and walked out of the room, leaving a clone behind to monitor the bastard and keep him from getting into trouble.
I went outside, placed my hand on the ground, and turned it into mud. The mud formed into as close a facsimile of Danzo's body as I could form from memory. It just had to be superficially close enough for the golem creation seal to take, but obviously the closer the starting point was to the goal, the less time it took and the more effective the seal was. When I formed the facsimile, I began to weave seals. With how old the technique was, it was no surprise it needed fifty-five whole seals. The maker had clearly relied heavily on the symbolism there—five elements, five nations. I finished that and then felt the seal begin to build within me. I took a kunai and carved the seal into the golem's head. Golem was not the best word to use for this technique, but it was a passable one. You could also consider it a clone with a transformation technique.
When I finished, I took out the vial and poured the blood on the mud model. Where the blood touched, the mud washed away, revealing skin that had flesh and blood beneath it. Well, at least some amount of flesh and blood, I felt my mental connection with the golem form. If this seal had been made after Tobirama invented the Shadow Clone Jutsu, maybe the creator would have been able to integrate my granduncle's thingy with splitting the user's yin chakra in half.
Instead, this one took a large chunk of my chakra to form, and then my mind had to remain with the golem throughout.
I rose as Danzo Shimura. Close enough to him that no one would be able to tell unless they looked too closely. One advantage of having fought the man and run a mission with him was that I'd seen him walk and talk enough times. It wasn't the Sharingan's level of mimicry, but training to learn the Transformation Jutsu at the academy had come with more than just a basic understanding of how to copy the way people walked and talked as part of the curriculum.
I left the house and took a left. Danzo was fond of walking the streets of the village rather than body flickering and using the rooftops like most of the other shinobi did. As I walked, I noticed that Konoha's nightlife was slowly beginning to buzz again. Now that the consensus was no longer that we were going to be dying in a matter of time, they were in far better moods. I waved back to the people who waved in my direction.
"Danzo-san, how are you? Thank you for the help with Satoshi-kun," one civilian woman closing down a store said. I was stumped for a second but adapted in no time, thinking of a reply.
"You are very welcome. It was my pleasure. I do hope he is doing well," I said, not even trying to guess her name. If she felt anything was up with it, then there was no sign, and I was on my way again. The journey to the hospital was filled with encounters like that. Civilian parents thanking him for helping their children learn jutsu, getting them into the academy, buying them kunai and shuriken, all those things. The bastard had been building his own support system under my nose, I thought with a snarl.
I completed the journey under the guise of Danzo Shimura and stopped outside the hospital, staring at the building. Azula remained there. She had seemed initially accepting of my offers but since then, I'd noticed a hesitance on her part. A hesitance that gave me a bad feeling about her loyalties. Ordinarily, I would keep her in place as a possible future resource, but using her to get rid of a threat to my rule was worth it. Especially considering the plan I was coming up with.
I snuck into the hospital using the body of the Clan Head, even as I knew that the Anbu would most assuredly notice a thing or two. My hope was just that they would hold off on intervening until it was too late. And so I moved forward with the plan, sneaking into her room and releasing the guards outside from duty for the night. Considering I'd stepped down to chunin guards for situations like this, rather sending them to war instead of the Anbu, even a single Anbu member with anything above middling competence would be more useful in a war than a three-man squad of chunin. Around the Yonbi jinchuriki, there were countless seals. So many that anyone less than a seal master would have had a terrible time even just trying to puzzle out what all of them did.
A bunch of them were just tracking seals, a few designed to monitor her state and keep her unconscious, making her chakra lay dormant, to preventing her from using ninjutsu with the most of them designed to give me consistent reports on changes that happened to her. Those seals were sounding the alarm now. A shame, she would have given some information on Iwa's training methods and their unique cocktail of drugs and whatnot for making their shinobi so damn big.
A single hand seal ensured that a genjutsu took hold of the Yonbi jinchuriki, taking her even further into Morpheus' realm and then Danzo was moving. Where he had used a secret entrance avoided by high-level shinobi to enter the hospital, he used a different one to leave. One that I was not even all that familiar with, which was interesting. I just knew it existed thanks to my Byakugan, but beyond that there was little I had on it. I didn't know where it led even, but I didn't need to.
So I evacuated myself and the girl the second I stepped out of the immediate view of anyone who might have been watching. I used the Flying Raijin to return to Danzo's house.
"Wake up, Jinchuriki," I called, slapping her across the face with Danzo's appearance layered over my own. I had to do this right. The Iwa Jinchuriki was going to be the one to kill 'Danzo,' and then I was going to let her escape—temporarily.
"Wha?— what? Who are you?"
"I am Danzo Shimura, and you are going to be my weapon." I said grandly, enjoying playing the role with a smile on my face that I covered with the transformation, wearing Danzo's traditional half-frown. If her memories ended up being viewed by the Yamanaka, I needed to give them enough to think that everything was above board and to believe the story I wanted them to.
"What the hell are you talking about?" She asked, trying to push herself to her feet.
"I will become Hokage with your power, Jinchuriki. I will use you to—" I never got to finish the sentence as she formed a single hand seal and shot a stream of lava at my clone that I could tell blocked her vision of my fake body. I triggered the Hiraishin replacement technique, replacing myself with Danzo's real body, and allowing the lava to take him.
"What an idiot," she scowled before finally succeeding in pushing herself to her feet. I watched from the shadows as she left Danzo's house, beginning to try to make her way out of the village. I removed what I could of my traces and obscured what I could not remove the best I could by blowing up sections of the house, and then dropped the barrier. In no time, the alarm was sounded. The Iwa Jinchuriki's escape was noted.
I returned home, substituted with my clone, and joined both Kushina and Grandmother Mito to work on the latest project. A seal for the hospital that would make diagnostic jutsus a breeze. Basically, the seals would act as diagnostics and then display the information in a way the doctors could understand. It would take our health care system to the next level and reduce the burden faced by medical nin as of present and allow civilian doctors to perform some of the more complicated interventions.
They had already finished the actual diagnostic part with the help of my clone so all we had to work on now was the part that made it visible to the civilian doctors. The seal could not be activated by chakra, as it would not be useful enough for civvies, so we still needed to figure out a suitable activation mechanism. Those two problems were what we tackled in tandem. In truth, Mito and I were the ones doing the real work while Kushina shuffled from table to table, watching what we were doing and trying to learn from what she could.
It reminded me of when I had been younger, toddling after Mito and trying to learn as much from her as I could. Well, Kushina at least had the advantage of us being involved in making actually useful seals these days. We were trying to help the village as much as possible from a fuinjutsu standpoint so she got to see multiple theories and methods in practice as we tried this and that. She got a front row seat to real experimentation, ideation, and eventually implementation.
"Shorirama-sama," a voice said from the corner of the room, body flickering in. I had seen his approach so I did not jolt, but Kushina nearly tossed her inkwell to the ground, only Mito's chain managing to catch it in time. I watched the chain with some jealousy but cleared my mind of it. I was a third-generation Uzumaki at best. In truth, I was more Hyuga than either Uzumaki or Senju. It was just lucky that I happened to be born with the vitality and chakra reserves. Missing out on the adamantium sealing chains was just a cost of doing business.
"Report, Shark," I barked.
"The Four Tails has escaped custody. Preliminary reports from witnesses say the last to see her was Danzo Shimura. He is the primary suspect," he said.
"I assume you've gone looking for him," I said rather than asked.
"A body was found at his residence. Forensics are investigating both the body and scene the best they can, but preliminary conclusions are that the Jinchuriki killed the Clan Head after he released her. Anbu are scouring the village for the Jinchuriki at present."
"No need, I have my seal on her," I said.
"I'll be right back, Kushina-chan, Grandmother," I said, pushing myself up from the seiza position we worked on seals in and planted a kiss on the forehead of Kushina and one on the cheeks of Grandmother when she tilted her face in my direction.
In a flicker of space, I was gone.
XXXXXX
Things had gone even better than I had anticipated. My story had stood up to scrutiny even better than expected. The conclusions reached were that Danzo had escaped with the Jinchuriki. He had been negligent in securing her, they had fought, and he had lost. It had been easy for me to track her down and put her down again. Except that this time, it was easily decided that the Tailed Beast be transferred. Since this was the course of action that almost everyone else had been pushing for for a long time, it had moved even faster than expected.
The Uzumaki clan was called to produce another Jinchuriki, and they took the burden well. In a matter of days, Son Goku had a new host, and Konoha created her third Jinchuriki, Isane Uzumaki—a girl so young that she wouldn't be eligible to attend the academy for over half a decade. Far from the war asset I wanted when we captured the Iwa Jinchuriki but better than nothing, at least. Three Jinchuriki from a single clan was probably pushing things as far as power consolidation went, but I didn't really count, and it wasn't like the other clans were lining up for the duty. In fact, both Uraume and Uzume had more or less told me to fuck off (in far more polite terms when I suggested using children from their clans if they weren't comfortable with the Uzumaki power concentration).
The mess meant I could move my plans forward a fair bit. Danzo had been Hiruzen's man through and through and while I hadn't managed to convince anyone to consider the Monkey as a suspect, the association was still a dangerous one for him.
"Shirirama-sama. Team Orochimaru has returned from their mission," Retsu said, walking into the office. I looked up from the scroll with anticipation building in my stomach. A fourth Jinchuriki was probably overkill, but with the rest of the world on our asses, it would be one hell of a deterrent moving forward.
Both of Tsunade's teammates walked into the room, but notably without the two Anbu captains I'd attached to their mission. Jiraiya was visibly limping and while Orochimaru would rather die than show weakness, my Byakugan could see he was favoring one side over the other and that he had heavy bruising on his ribs. They did not kneel as one would ordinarily do before their Kage, instead, standing to give their report. I wondered if I would have to deal with them when the time came to fully supplant Hiruzen—the time was coming, I knew.
"What happened?" I asked.
"Bad intel. We could not find Kiri's Jinchuriki. If they made one, then it was better hidden than we were led to expect. The Anbu insisted that we could ferret out the Jinchuriki with time, but we were made somehow. It was all we could do to escape with this." Jiraiya said and tossed a scroll at me. I opened it, unsealing Kiri's academy records. That had been a tertiary objective. The fact that that was all they managed to secure said a lot.
"I see. I assume Elephant and Giraffe perished during your escape?"
"Affirmative," Orochimaru said.
"Alright then. Go get some rest. We move on Kumo in a matter of weeks," I said.
Both men were shocked, Jiraiya actually took a step back.
"But what about Iwa? They'll pounce on us if we give them an opening like that," he said, and I began to catch them up. Maybe we would be enemies when I took Hiruzen out of the picture, but for now they were Tsunade's teammates and for better or worse, were pretty likable characters (more Jiraiya than Orochimaru in this case even if the latter did have a delightfully sardonic sense of humor).
A/N: RIP Danzo, you will be missed (nah). Next five up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) (same username as here and link in bio), support me there and read them early.