The clash with Alice had taught Arthur a bitter lesson: he could not fight the entire world alone.
To help compensate for such a setback, he needed a team. But standard recruits were useless to him. They asked questions and they had morals. Arthur needed an organization of his own that could go unmatched in any scenario, built from the ground up.
Who better to satisfy his needs than the fallen ninjas of the world?
All of them could be aligned into one, so long as he coerced them correctly.
His first target was in Blood Prison. He had breached the facility by bypassing the guards. And when he found Tayuya, who had been transported here after her defeat, he ripped Orochimaru's curse mark straight from her flesh.
An ultimatum was then given: stay in a cage or join him. She chose the latter.
His next step was acquiring the bodies of the dead. But his political cover as John required maintenance. So he returned to the Water Country to sign trade agreements that kept up appearances.
Then the door opened.
Two men walked in. They wore black cloaks patterned with red clouds. Who else could they be other than Itachi Uchiha and Kisame Hoshigaki?
They were hunting Arthur, acting on rumours that he had survived the clash in the Tea Country.
When they stood right in front of him, entirely unaware that the politician sitting behind the desk was the man they were looking for, they questioned his whereabouts.
Arthur played his part well and acted like a standard bureaucrat.
But Itachi was thorough. The Uchiha decided to leave no loose ends and planned to erase Arthur's memories of their visit via his Sharingan.
Arthur had no choice but to use his chakra.
The room exploded, causing the two Akatsuki members to know he was a threat.
An epic chase tore through the building and spilled into the streets as Arthur deflected, dodged, and ran toward the outskirts. Many had seen him, but that hadn't mattered; he had to get far from them.
By the end of it, backed into a corner, Arthur was forced to use his Flying raijin and teleport entirely out of the country.
Needless to say, those two S-class criminals were far stronger than expected.
Arthur was a rogue on the run again, and the Akatsuki were actively hunting him. Most men would hide. Arthur simply adapted.
The Water Country was therefore deemed unsafe for the moment. He also needed capital to fund his incoming army. So, he traveled to the Land of Money, where he walked into a high-stakes casino, sat down at the poker tables, and systematically drained the house of its wealth.
It was fairly easy to cheat, predict, or simply just know how to gamble when one had chakra at their disposal.
During his time there, he met a woman named Diana, one of the richest elites in the region. She took a mild interest in his stoic nature, but Arthur's focus was more so on the chips at the time.
He would have gladly stayed to win more, but the casino bosses grew paranoid at his streak. They believed he was cheating. Before the enforcers could get a read on him in the back rooms, Arthur packed his winnings and vanished.
The vast funds were taken to Tanzaku Town. There, he rented the town's largest casino outright and used his property rights to declare a local holiday known as "Hokage Day."
The townsfolk loved the idea, so they helped him throw a festival while being completely unaware that the entire event was a snare to lure in Tsunade.
Arthur knew Tsunade had recently been inaugurated as the new Hokage after Hiruzen fell into a coma. He also knew she had a crippling gambling addiction.
The bait had worked when Tsunade ventured to Tanzaku Town to celebrate and play.
Arthur, using a transformation and the same name as her former lover, Dan, sat across from her at a private poker table. There, he purposely lost multiple times in a row just to entice her into placing a daring bet.
"There's not really anything I want…" he said at the time. "Your heart's not for sale either, so how about a small piece of property in the Leaf Village?"
The stakes climbed higher and higher after he eventually cornered her into wagering the deed to her village's primary funeral lot.
A known gambling addict like her accepted and lost.
When Arthur acquired that land, no one in the Leaf suspected a thing, especially since he offered to pay five million ryō out of his own pocket for the lot's renovations. It looked like an act of charity. But under the cover of night, while the construction tarps hid his work, he dug up the necessary graves.
DNA of the village's strongest fallen shinobi was both extracted, sealed in vials, and taken to the Cayman Jungles.
"Gosh," Brie whispered to herself, looking up at the throne. "It really is hard for you, isn't it?"
She felt a wave of genuine pity. The sheer volume of effort he put into his work was staggering. How could such a man when he was so busy moving the pieces across the board?
What Brie didn't know was that his schedule was even tighter than she imagined. Because, while he was winning at casinos and robbing graves, he had a promise to keep to Jada.
So he ventured to the Hot Spring Village, donning his Hoshikaze persona just to teach her. William tagged along, driven by an obvious infatuation with the girl.
Arthur had played his role as the brutal mentor perfectly by showcasing how to actually fight.
When a damsel in distress asked them for help, they obliged and infiltrated a facility of criminals. One of them almost gouged out Jada's eyes until Arthur stepped in and crushed the attacker.
After receiving their gratitude, he went into seclusion to reanimate certain ninjas like Shikamaru and Ino—mainly to train.
But things did not stay quiet once he returned to the Water Country as John. The consequences of his escape from the Akatsuki finally caught up to him because 'John' was revealed to be a trained shinobi.
That put Arthur's political persona under heavy scrutiny. Nonetheless, the citizens still adored him, believing him to be an upright leader.
Not all had felt this way.
One day, Arthur returned to see the progress at Sun Stream Plaza, only to find Mei Terumi and her elite guards investigating the area. They would eventually hook him up to a lie detector in front of a crowd as they interrogated his dealings.
Arthur passed the test flawlessly.
But Mei was sharp. The machine said he was innocent, but her instincts told her he was still a threat. So she chose to have him monitored at all times.
The suspicion annoyed him.
At that moment, he knew his time in the country was over.
His sole purpose for coming to the region was to build Sun Stream Plaza. He had poured millions into it, and the massive hub was only seventy-five percent complete. He was not about to leave his investment behind for Mei to confiscate.
So he decided to flee.
A chase ensued through the district as Ao followed his chakra signature. But even with Ao's stolen Byakugan, Arthur managed to teleport away.
He was gone, and so was his building since he had secured the plaza with various Flying raijin marks prior.
Not a single person in the Water Country understood what had happened.
Arthur had lost an entire country's political infrastructure, but he gained what he desired most.
And with the plaza dropped in the Cayman Jungles, he immediately set to finishing its construction.
"That's when we met again," Brie reminded herself, smiling faintly at the memory.
Arthur had walked into her office and dropped the disguise. He explained, in a perfectly flat tone, that he was trying to fix a corpse. And he was entirely serious.
Having brought Brie into the Cayman Jungles, she was awestruck at the laboratory he had designed.
The two would later begin work on reconstructing Rin's body. They didn't just recreate the girl who died in the war, but they also crafted a body befitting what she would look like had she lived and grown up alongside Kakashi and Obito.
The muscles were reshaped and the tissues were matched until a perfect vessel was built. But a vessel was just flesh.
When Arthur said he was going to create an organization, he didn't mean a dead one; he needed her to breathe.
His research pointed him to a kunoichi named Ryūzetsu. She possessed a rare, forbidden technique that could transfer life force, effectively reviving the dead. Arthur knew of her, but he also knew her technique had a fatal flaw: it required the user to trade their own life force for the subject.
Arthur needed Ryūzetsu to cast it, yet he couldn't afford to let her die. She was going to be a valuable asset if he could cheat the toll.
And that's just what he tried.
He ventured to the Land of Wind on foot and infiltrated the Sand Village. There, he found the Puppet Brigade's classified files on their own resurrection methods. Now armed with the Sand's research, he tracked down Ryūzetsu and lured her away from her village before trapping her in a genjutsu.
Ryūzetsu willingly accepted to learn the Puppet Brigade's resurrection technique and use it alongside her own forbidden technique.
To bypass the fatal cost, Arthur needed a massive, external chakra pool to act as a battery. So he introduced Ryūzetsu to the Six-Tails, who would replenish her chakra and keep her from dying after using the technique.
The variables locked together perfectly when Rin Nohara drew a breath.
On that day, Arthur had become the first shinobi in history to truly conquer death.
Brie stopped to look at him for a moment.
Tucked under his arm looked to be a book. She had rarely seen Arthur do anything like read before. So with her interest piqued, she approached the throne to get a better look.
"K. J. V…?" she whispered. Her head slowly crept closer to see. But when she saw his hands cover the book, she looked up, only to see him awake. "Ugh! My lord, I was—I was just coming to deliver my research notes on—!"
"Why are you yelling…?"
After her awkward exchange, Brie would eventually leave with a satisfied smile on her face. All his work seemed to be paying off, and she hoped to see the end of it one day.
Arthur himself continued to sit on the throne. He closed his eyes to sense where Rin and her team were. They were still walking on foot, having just passed the Fire Country's borders successfully.
"Hey, Rin," Kaiyo intoned on their trek. "Shigeru and I are in the same clan, so we know a lot about each other. But we don't really know much about you. Like, how did you and lord Arthur meet?"
Shigeru tried to berate Kaiyo for asking personal questions until Rin obliged, "It's fine. I don't mind sharing this story with someone other than Tayuya-sensei."
Before Arthur knew it, he fell asleep again.