Naruto's return home from school finally brought the naming debate to an abrupt halt.
Akio never did find out what name they'd settled on. Not that it mattered; he'd come up with several himself and figured he could choose later, depending on how things turned out.
Blond hair or red hair, he wasn't worried in the slightest.
Even if they somehow ended up with another boy, Akio had already resigned himself to fate.
Fine. I'll survive.
"Hopefully Naruto matures a little faster once he has a little sister," Akio murmured, watching Naruto bounce around the house nonstop ever since learning about Kushina's pregnancy.
"Kids in the shinobi world really do grow up fast. At least he'll never have to wonder whether he was picked up from a trash heap."
Something crossed Akio's mind, and he let out a quiet sigh.
"Back then… I was definitely a late bloomer."
As expected, once Naruto knew, his classmates knew.
Once his classmates knew, their parents knew.
Before long, nearly all of Konoha knew.
Hiruzen even sought Akio out personally, asking whether Kushina planned to return to the Land of Whirlpools for the delivery. When Akio shook his head, Hiruzen assured him that Konoha's defenses would be reinforced to the highest level.
Akio didn't object. In fact, he intended to do the opposite of what everyone expected.
Come March next year, he planned to quietly whisk Kushina and the others away, to the moon.
A perfect decoy. Allies misdirected, enemies misled.
Just thinking about it made him grin.
Pregnancy, of course, lasted close to ten months.
Technically closer to 280 days but either way, it was a long stretch.
Life had to go on. Akio couldn't possibly spend every day camped out at Kushina's house, obsessively monitoring the baby's growth.
Kushina would've loved that idea.
Akio shut it down immediately.
I'm not a walking ultrasound machine, he thought dryly.
Checking in every few days was more than enough.
Besides, he had work to do.
First, he arranged for Toneri, Sasuke, and Naruto to form a team.
Getting them together was easy enough.
Toneri listened to Akio without question.
Naruto was easy to convince.
Sasuke… required authority.
Still, the team barely mattered compared to Akatsuki. The whole effort earned Akio only a small gain, far short of what he needed. Konoha had already been thoroughly "harvested" for progress; squeezing out more would take time.
Akio sensed that once he pushed his Yin affinity to its limit, something extraordinary awaited him.
"Yin governs the mind and the soul," he mused.
"If the space it opens is within the brain… and corresponds to the First Gate… that's essentially unlocking true insight."
He smiled.
At that point, no one's keeping up.
Still, haste made mistakes.
Even once everything was ready, he planned to wait until after Kushina recovered from childbirth. The last thing he needed was another unpredictable transformation derailing everything.
With time finally on his hands, Akio returned to researching spatial nodes.
He'd obtained the complete Gentle Fist system from the Hyūga long ago, but had procrastinated on fully mapping the nodes.
Once he actually committed, the task proved simpler than expected.
In a single month, he traversed the entire shinobi world through spatial jumps and identified the pattern.
The world was effectively divided into a sixteen-by-sixteen grid, traversed in a serpentine route from the upper left.
Ending up over the ocean so often wasn't bad luck, the seas simply covered more ground than land.
Definitely not bad luck.
Still, he wasn't fully smooth with the technique yet.
"One strike… two… one hundred seventy-eight…" Akio muttered, tapping points in space.
"One hundred ninety-nine, this is it."
In the next instant, he reappeared on a mountain near Konoha.
"Finally," he exhaled.
The constant travel through empty wastelands hadn't been exhausting, just painfully boring.
"Time to head back and check on little Moon"
He stopped.
On the far side of the mountain, three familiar chakra signatures registered in his senses.
"Itachi. Shisui. And Fugaku's eldest… Uchiha Unsho?"
Akio frowned.
"What are they doing out here sparring?"
Curious, he moved closer without being noticed.
The three sat in a triangle on wooden stools, brows furrowed in deep thought. Itachi and Shisui were still in ANBU gear, masks removed.
Akio blinked.
"…Are they playing cards? No...wait. This is one of those serious 'philosophical discussions,' isn't it?"
They turned at the sound of his voice, all three freezing.
"Great-Grandfather?!"
"What are you doing here?"
Akio folded his arms.
"I should be asking you that. What business do you have on my mountain?"
The three exchanged looks.
"We didn't know it belonged to you," Itachi said quickly.
"We'll leave immediately."
Akio laughed.
"Nice try. Why don't you tell me what you don't want me to know?"
Silence.
Seeing the three of them together confirmed Akio's suspicions.
One Senju. Two Uchiha.
All earnest, all idealistic.
They were trying to resolve the Senju–Uchiha conflict.
"Why not include Obito?" Akio asked lightly.
Shisui hesitated.
"…He's not great at keeping things subtle."
Akio chuckled.
"He's more reliable than you think.
…Actually, no. I don't believe that either."
Then his expression turned serious.
"So, what's your plan? The Uchiha elders were stubborn to begin with and this whole mess wasn't exactly in their favor. Even I don't have an easy solution."
Unsho spoke up quietly.
"Akio-sama… the Uchiha no longer have elders."
Akio blinked.
"You removed them?"
Itachi explained softly. The battle earlier that year hadn't been bloodless. The Senju lost three elite jōnin. The Uchiha lost their second and third elders.
"I see," Akio said slowly.
"And the first elder right. He collapsed when Sasuke awakened his Sharingan."
Itachi tugged gently at Akio's sleeve.
"That was Unsho's great-grandfather."
"Ah."
Akio coughed.
"…Right. My mistake."
He changed the subject smoothly.
"So, this really is the best opportunity to settle things?"
The three exchanged glances.
Itachi nodded.
"If you're willing to be involved… we believe we can succeed."
---
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