Outside the Leaf Village
The army under Kakashi's command stood in a wide arc just beyond the village perimeter, the dark treeline at their backs and open ground stretching out ahead of them. The night air was cold, heavy with the smell of damp earth and distant smoke drifting from the village itself. Even from here, faint flashes of light occasionally reflected off the clouds, signs that the real chaos was unfolding inside.
For now, though, this battlefield belonged to them.
Across from the Leaf shinobi stood dozens of black-robed figures, their faces hidden, their postures unnervingly still. They hadn't tried to infiltrate quietly. They hadn't scattered or hidden. Instead, they had come forward openly, almost deliberately, grouping together as if daring the Leaf forces to engage.
That alone was wrong.
The Leaf army had been on constant patrol since nightfall, sweeping the outskirts in rotating formations, expecting ambushes, assassinations, scattered hit-and-run tactics. That was the Root's usual style. Rats in the dark, blades in the back.
But these ones had chosen to gather.
Kakashi didn't like that.
Still, tactically, the Leaf forces responded exactly as they were trained to. An army fight was preferable to dozens of isolated skirmishes, especially when dealing with enemies of unknown numbers. Unlike prodigies and monsters, people like Ren, Itachi, or even Kakashi himself, the vast majority of shinobi were trained to fight as units.
From the academy onward, cooperation was drilled into them.
Those who didn't make it into four-man Genin teams were funneled into the Genin Corps. The same structure followed upward, Chunin Corps, Jonin Corps, all operating under layered command structures. At the top sat the Jonin Commander, Shikaku Nara, overseeing deployments and formations, mirroring how the ANBU Commander controlled his own shadow army.
Only a select few ever stepped outside that system, answering directly to the Hokage.
This army wasn't made of lone wolves.
It was made to fight together.
When both sides finished gathering, silence settled between them, thick, oppressive, stretching longer than it should have. There were no taunts or signals.
Kakashi stood at the front, visible eye narrowed, fingers flexing once at his side.
'Something's wrong.'
The feeling crawled up his spine, sharp and insistent. He had learned long ago to trust that instinct. It had saved his life more times than skill or jutsu ever had.
Before Kakashi could act on it, the black-robed shinobi moved.
Dozens of them surged forward at once, breaking the silence like glass shattering.
"Contact!" someone shouted from the Leaf side.
The Leaf formation responded instantly. As planned, the front line rushed to meet them, blades drawn, ninjutsu already forming. This was the standard, intercept, lock them down, then collapse from the sides.
The moment the two forces collided, the entire field exploded.
A chain of violent blasts tore through the front ranks, fire and pressure erupting simultaneously. The shockwave ripped across the ground, hurling bodies backward, tearing up soil and stone. Screams were cut off mid-sound as Leaf shinobi were engulfed and erased in an instant.
For half a heartbeat, there was stunned silence.
Then Kakashi's voice cut through the chaos, sharp and commanding.
"Spread out!"
His shout echoed across the battlefield.
"They're suicide bombers!"
The Leaf forces reacted immediately. Years of training snapped into motion. Units broke apart, leaping back and outward, surrounding the remaining black-robed figures in a wide circle, maintaining distance. Faces that moments ago had been disciplined and focused now twisted with anger, fear, and disbelief.
Those weren't shinobi fighting to survive.
They were shinobi sent here to die.
Kakashi's jaw tightened as he took in the scene. The ground was scorched. Craters marked where his men had stood. The remaining black-robed figures didn't charge again. They stood still, unfazed by the deaths of their own.
That confirmed it.
These weren't operatives meant to return.
Slowly, Kakashi reached up and pulled his forehead protector aside.
The left eye beneath it opened fully.
For a fraction of a second it looked ordinary, dark and calm.
Then chakra surged.
A three-tomoe Sharingan spun into existence, its gaze locking onto the battlefield as the world sharpened, slowed, and clarified. Movements, chakra fluctuations, muscle tension, everything became clearer.
Kakashi inhaled once, steadying himself.
Outside the village, a Sharingan blazed.
Inside the village, another Sharingan was already burning bright.
In the Uchiha compound's battlefield, the Sharingan of many Uchiha were open.
The night was far from over, and when it ended, no one could say how many of those eyes would still be looking back at the dawn.
~~~
On the other hand, in the village, the fighting had finally come to a halt.
Not because either of them was exhausted, nor because one had decisively overpowered the other, but because both of them understood, almost instinctively, that the battle had crossed into a different phase.
They stood some distance apart amid the ruined compound, broken earth and scorched stone bearing silent witness to what had transpired. The air still carried the sharp tang of burnt chakra and splintered wood, smoke curling lazily upward as embers died out.
Yoru stood straight.
His armor was battered, edges chipped, plates cracked, layers scarred by wind blades and fire, but it still sat firm on his body. There was no blood on him. No sign of injury beyond superficial damage. His breathing was steady, controlled, unchanged from the beginning of the fight.
Danzo, by contrast, looked like a man who had clawed his way out of a furnace.
His outer robe was gone entirely, burned or shredded somewhere earlier in the compound. What remained of his inner garments clung stubbornly to him, torn in several places, barely holding together enough to preserve some semblance of dignity. His skin was marked with fresh cuts and ugly burns, some cauterized, others still seeping faintly. Every movement carried the stiffness of accumulated damage.
The story of the fight was written plainly on his body.
What had stopped the clash, however, was neither exhaustion nor fear.
It was Danzo's right arm.
Three golden arm braces now lay exposed, heavy and ornate, locked tightly around his forearm. They weren't decorative, each one was etched with sealing formulas so dense that even a casual glance screamed containment. Whatever was beneath them was not meant to be seen, not meant to be released lightly.
Yoru's gaze settled there.
For the first time since the battle began, he spoke.
"You don't really think I don't know what's inside, do you?"
His voice was flat, cold, stripped of emotion.
Danzo's single visible eye narrowed almost imperceptibly.
'Of course he knows…' The thought passed through his mind with a trace of bitterness, but he didn't show it. Instead, he let out a quiet snort and straightened as much as his battered body allowed.
"Hmph," he said. "You knew, and you still did nothing. That tells me enough."
His gaze sharpened, calculating even now.
"It shows that you were interested too," Danzo continued calmly, as if they were discussing policy rather than treason. "In the research. In the possibilities."
He lifted his bound arm slightly, the golden braces catching the dim light.
"What do you say?" he asked. "My notes, my findings, everything I learned. In exchange for letting all of this… pass."
The words hung in the air.
For a moment, there was only silence.
Not the tense silence of combat, but something heavier, stranger.
Yoru didn't respond immediately.
When he finally did, there was a faint note of disbelief in his voice, as though he genuinely hadn't expected to hear those words.
"You want…" He paused, then continued more bluntly, "…what?"
Another beat passed.
"You're actually suggesting that?"
Danzo said nothing. He simply stared back, unblinking, as if the offer itself was proof of his position. Proof that this was still a negotiation, still a game of leverage.
That silence stretched.
Then Yoru sighed.
A slow, tired sound.
"You're messed up," he said simply.
There was no mockery in it, no satisfaction, just an almost clinical assessment.
He raised his hand toward his face, fingers coming to rest against the edge of his mask. For a brief second, he hesitated, not out of fear, but deliberation.
"I don't need your research," Yoru said quietly. "It isn't of any use to me."
Then he pulled the mask away.
The face revealed beneath was calm, unflinching, and unmistakable seeing which Danzo's breath hitched.
His eyes widened despite himself as his gaze locked onto the left eye now exposed. The Mangekyo Sharingan spun slowly there, its pattern burned into his memory from decades ago.
For the first time that night, Danzo looked shaken.
"Kagami…" he whispered.
The name escaped him before he could stop it, laden with disbelief, memory, and something dangerously close to fear.
The truth, once laid bare, left no room for bargaining.
Danzo couldn't stop his fingers from tightening around the hilt of his blade. The hilt creaked softly under the pressure. For the first time in a very long while, his thoughts honed by decades of suspicion, calculation, and survival stalled for a single, dangerous moment.
The man standing in front of him should not exist.
That fact alone was enough to shake him.
Kagami Uchiha was dead. He had been dead for decades. That was the truth as the village knew it, as history recorded it, as even Danzo himself had allowed the world to believe. Kagami Uchiha, one of Tobirama Senju's personal students, had been listed as killed in action during a mission in the chaos-filled years following the First Shinobi War.
Danzo remembered that day clearly.
When the report that Kagami had gone missing after completing the mission came in, they had refused to believe it at first. Team Tobirama did not lose people like that, not Kagami, not someone of his caliber. Entire squads had been mobilized in the aftermath, combing battlefields, forests, ravines, even enemy territory. They searched relentlessly, for a body, for blood, for shattered terrain, for any trace of a fight.
They found nothing.
That was what had unsettled them the most.
There were no scorch marks. No broken trees, no signs of ninjutsu, no remnants of chakra clashes. It was as if Kagami Uchiha had simply vanished from the world, erased without a struggle. For years afterward, the mystery gnawed at them, unanswered and unresolved.
Because it made no sense.
Kagami Uchiha was strong. Stronger than most ever realized.
Among Tobirama's six students, Kagami ranked second only by the narrowest of margins. Even Hiruzen, praised endlessly for his versatility and genius could not easily overpower him when Kagami fought seriously. With his Mangekyo Sharingan, Kagami had been a terrifying opponent, capable of standing toe-to-toe with elite shinobi and walking away alive.
Yet despite that power, he had never once shown ambition.
Not for authority, not for recognition, not even for the Hokage's seat.
While others dreamed of shaping the village in their image, Kagami had been content to support, stabilize and to protect. After Tobirama's death, when the village teetered on the edge of political fracture, Kagami had stood beside Hiruzen without hesitation.
More than that, he had worked alongside Mito Uzumaki, who was still alive then, lending the combined weight of two founding clans to ensure a smooth transfer of power. Senju and Uchiha, standing together. With Kagami's backing, there had been no serious opposition, no internal revolt, no challenge that could threaten Hiruzen's legitimacy.
It was one of the reasons Hiruzen had trusted him so deeply.
And one of the reasons Hiruzen had never stopped searching.
No expense had been spared. Scouts, trackers, informants, even diplomatic pressure on rival villages, everything had been tried.
Years passed.
Then decades.
Still nothing.
Eventually, the village had accepted the official record, Kagami Uchiha, missing and killed in action, it was a devastating loss, yet in the end it was just a name added to the long list of the fallen.
The kindest of the Uchiha, gone without even leaving a grave.
Everyone believed that story.
Everyone except one man.
Danzo Shimura.
Because Danzo had never searched for Kagami's body.
He had known, from the very beginning, that there would be nothing to find.
For the truth was far simpler.
Danzo had killed Kagami Uchiha himself.
Not in battle, not in chaos and definitely not by accident.
He had done it deliberately, with full awareness of what he was destroying.
A teammate.
A stabilizing pillar of the village.
A man whose existence undermined Danzo's own ambitions simply by being who he was.
And now…
Now that same man stood before him, alive.
Danzo's single eye trembled, pupils shrinking as old memories clawed their way to the surface. For the first time since the fight began, uncertainty seeped into him, not fear, not yet, but something dangerously close to disbelief.
The dead do not return.
And yet Kagami Uchiha was here.
Breathing.
Standing.
Watching him.
And Danzo knew, with chilling certainty, that the past he had buried so carefully had finally come to collect its debt.
~~~~~
{Kakashi is fixed now? I don't know, we'll have to wait for the chapters to come.}
{Also, Yoru, or should I say Kagami or maybe ****}
{I am actually giggling in excitement writing this, something I wanted to write for months, no I finally get the chance.}
{Now then, let your imagination go wild, or wait for the truth to finally come out, I'll be waiting, you should too.}