At the same time, dozens of kilometers away, in a hidden Root base along the border, the Division Leader finished scrawling an encrypted report.
He sealed it with practiced precision, then tied it to the leg of a falcon bred for Root alone.
These birds, chakra-enhanced through experimentation, were faster than any messenger shinobi networks for confidentiality and security or ordinary hawks for routine messages, and were reserved only for emergencies. This was one.
The bird launched into the night sky, heading straight for Konoha and Danzo Shimura's desk.
The man was Junsaku Yamanaka, though forbidden from using his real name, instead of a codename, long ago. Years ago, just before his tenth birthday, his parents died on a mission.
As an orphan, he was summoned by the clan patriarch and told he would serve a special, indefinite duty for the clan.
On paper, he left the Academy to become an 'internal guardian', one of the shinobi-level fighters every great clan kept outside the formal village roster to protect compounds, bloodline scrolls, and lineage, but was not a part of Konoha's official central register.
Those units were trained only from their clan manuals and did not need village doctrine.
In recent years, their numbers had thinned a bit as Konoha's central authority grew, especially in smaller clans, but the pretext still worked.
In truth, the clan had already 'sold' him to Danzo Shimura and his newly founded faction, Root, a name chosen with cold poetry and scrubbed his existence from every record.
The organization had been sanctioned in whispers by the Third Hokage, a few years before the more demanding and brutal WW2, built to handle the tasks even ANBU could never publicly or privately touch, or be allowed to be connected with the Hokage brand image.
Assassinations. Kidnappings. Disappearances. Sabotage. Blackmail. Torture. Coercion. Disinformation. False flags. Every kind of work too foul to bear the Leaf's crest.
Root was not ANBU. In ANBU, you wore a mask. In Root, you were owned.
Danzo bound his people with juinjutsu seals that killed treacherous words and perhaps some thoughts of betrayal before they could be spoken and thought of.
Then fed some of them, especially the holders of more important positions, within the orgs like him, measured poisons that required timed antidotes to live.
The brainwashing came last, a final layer of control.
However, Junsaku had joined at ten, before the orphan pipeline was perfected, so he was not like the lifeless eleven-to-fifteen-year-old tools Root later produced.
He remembered normal life. He remembered wanting things. He was in his mid twenties now and not truly brainwashed at all, yet he obeyed perfectly.
Because he was perhaps a more powerful Yamanaka, not only that standard juinjutsu on his tongue, but Danzo even added the toxin chain to make sure no mind trick could slip the knot.
He disliked the man who owned him, but he wanted to live, so he acted the respectful dog and followed every order.
He sometimes pictured the path he had lost. Clan prodigy graduates, rise through the ranks, become an Elite Jonin in strength, perhaps achieve a nominal position of even higher status, salary, and power in Konoha's Interrogation or Intelligence branches, have a few girlfriends, then a wife, children, and a name on record instead of a blank line.
Instead, he was a legal ghost, barred from being connected with his clan, having desires, barred from romantic partners, sent on dangerous jobs without rest year-round, kneeling to Danzo year after year.
Resentment had sedimented slowly until it became part of his bones.
Some differences cut both ways. Root had been born only a few years before the last war, so its first generation had to be older recruits.
It takes ten to fifteen years to grind orphans into perfect tools. He still had memories, and that made it worse. The orphans never knew better. They accepted the rules of the world.
What stung worst of all was that his own clan had sold him out.
They had offered a child and even shared ancient jutsu scrolls in exchange for survival, bowing to Hiruzen's centralizing grip.
For centuries, clans had kept their secrets guarded by their own.
Now they fed both children and heritage to Danzo, cheap bargaining chips to protect themselves.
Junsaku snickered bitterly whenever he thought of it. He had no more love for his clan than he did for Root.
Another difference was talent and training. He was clan-born, with innate skill and a bloodline method.
The clan still trained him in secret techniques even after he vanished into Root.
For Danzo, it was only efficient. Junsaku snickered whenever he thought of it.
The clan had sold a gifted academy child and centuries of jutsu heritage for cheap favors and fear of the Third's pressure. They had traded both flesh and scrolls to keep their place.
He was not alone. Root was full of shinobi cut from similar backgrounds. Danzo did not love the clans, but they were the ones who could anchor Root's top echelon in real combat.
Junsaku had climbed to a Division Leader, now temporarily responsible for the entire inner security of the Land of Fire's northwest border.
He had replaced the more permanent ANBU presence from here after suspicious activity surfaced, told to investigate because he was more qualified.
He had delivered. With intelligence work and a steady diet of dirty tricks, he had pulled apart Iwagakure's conspiracy in this sector, enough for Konoha to draft a plan to erase it.
All that remained was to wait, return, flatter Danzo a little, and lock in the next rung. There was already one Deputy Commander from the Aburame, nominally second only to Danzo within the Root.
If this ended cleanly, he could then become the second in Root's history. A slave with status was better than a slave with none. "Better than nothing," he told himself.
However, Konoha had been struggling with manpower for months by that point.
The global situation had intensified suddenly, stretching the village's shinobi thin.
That was the main reason the higher-ups had delayed authorizing a full cleanup operation, leaving Junsaku to quietly monitor Iwa's infiltrators while the chaos deepened.
But once he reported that the enemy was preparing to move against the minor noble who ruled this border territory, Konoha was forced to act.
Even then, the shortage of hands was so severe that they pushed many fresh genin teams, children still in the incubation stage of their careers, into dangerous assignments to fill the gaps.
It was exactly then that a new message reached Junsaku. A falcon from Danzo himself. Inside was a name Junsaku had never heard before.
Ryusei Nishida.
The order was explicit. Danzo listed the boy's strengths and weaknesses, described where his team would strike the enemy, and instructed Junsaku to kill him with a "borrowed knife" attack during the mission.
Junsaku had received assassination orders from Danzo before, even against fellow Konoha shinobi. But this letter was different.
The detail, the tone, the unusual seriousness, all of it suggested that for some reason this Ryusei mattered far more than the usual disposable target. That, more than the kill itself, unsettled him.
As teams began converging on the sector, Junsaku's subordinates confirmed exactly where Ryusei's squad would arrive.
ANBU informants had already supplied his chakra signature, memorized during secret surveillance in the village, so Junsaku didn't even need to familiarize himself in the field.
He positioned himself on a high vantage point, completely erasing his presence.
There, he relied on his own specialty. Ordinary Yamanaka techniques like the Mind Body Switch or Mind Body Disturbance were designed to target humans directly, sometimes through a medium.
But their effectiveness usually dulled when channeled through animals. Junsaku, however, had spent years perfecting exactly that.
He could sink his soul seamlessly into small creatures, hares, birds, etc, and move through them as naturally as if they were his own limbs.
From that foundation, he had developed something new. An A-rank genjutsu of his own design, best used while his soul was hidden inside an animal.
Subtle and harmless at first glance, its effect crept in like a whisper, strange but almost natural, bypassing normal defenses until it wrapped around the mind.
Perfect for deception, perfect for setting up an enemy to be cut down by another's blade.
He slipped into the field like a ghost, his chakra presence so faint it was almost nonexistent, hopping his consciousness from one animal to another to arrive faster and on time.
Patiently, he stalked Ryusei from a safe distance, waiting for the opening.
When he launched the technique, it worked - at first. The boy faltered, his mind and body caught. Junsaku prepared to let the enemy finish him off.
Then something happened.
Instead of collapsing fully, Ryusei convulsed as if two storms collided inside his skull.
Junsaku felt it through the link; his soul, chakra, even his brain seemed to clash with itself, forming a chaotic vortex unlike anything he had ever sensed.
He couldn't comprehend it. His animal medium, a hare, was abruptly killed in the struggle, severing the link and snapping his soul back into his body.
Panting, shaken, Junsaku remained on the vantage point, recovering from the jutsu's recoil.
For someone of his caliber, an Elite Jonin from a famous clan, armed with unorthodox mastery, even if he was technically attacking from kilometers away, it was rare to find a target that could resist him at all, much less a young genin.
Yet this boy had not only broken free but killed his medium outright, escaping the trap with nothing more than severe aftershocks.
That alone left Junsaku unsettled.
Now, rushing back to report, he was seething.
He knew Danzo's nature - petty, vindictive.
A failure like this, no matter the circumstances, would surely stall his hoped-for promotion.
He had uncovered Iwa's conspiracy on this border, commanded Root forces well, and achieved results that should matter. But Danzo cared only for absolute obedience and flawless results.
So he did what he could: he recorded every detail exactly as ordered. Danzo had specifically instructed that even a failed attack be documented exhaustively.
Still, bitterness burned in him. Ryusei Nishida had humiliated him. He hated the boy, hated him as the reason his career would now stagnate.
Yet beneath that hatred was a thin strand of reluctant fascination.
Something about the way the boy's soul clashed with itself, the impossible way he survived… it was like glimpsing a strange, half-finished experiment.