Chapter 23: Unearthing the Roots of Hatred
"I…"
For a long moment, Hizashi was silent, his face a mask of conflict. He had spoken in a moment of passionate anger, and now the weight of the revealed secret hung heavily between them.
Reitō's hand shot out, gripping Hizashi's arm with a strength that belied his weakened state. The excitement in his heart was a cold, vibrating thing, a wire pulled taut. "Brother Hizashi," he implored, his voice low and intense, stripping away all pretense. "You must tell me. What happened to them?"
Seeing the absolute, grim seriousness in Reitō's pale eyes—eyes that had just endured unspeakable torture—Hizashi's resistance crumbled. He let out a slow, weary breath, the sigh of someone relinquishing a burden they were never meant to carry alone.
"I only learned the details myself yesterday," he began, his voice dropping to a near-whisper, as if the walls of the humble branch house might have ears. "I overheard my father speaking of it with another elder… He did not know I was listening."
Under Reitō's unblinking, laser-focused gaze, Hizashi unfolded the buried truth.
"The flaw in your Byakugan… it was not an accident of war, Reitō. It was a deliberate act of clan 'justice.' Your parents… they questioned an order. They dared to suggest a different strategy on a mission that would have put fewer branch members at risk. They argued for the lives of their teams. For this, they were deemed insubordinate, their loyalty questioned."
Hizashi's voice grew thick with disgust. "The punishment was not just for them. It was to make an example. Hyūga Ryōtomo was the enforcing elder. The 'correction' he administered to your mother… it was severe. It damaged the very chakra pathways connected to her Byakugan. The injury was so profound, so maliciously precise, that when you were born, the legacy of that violence was written into your eyes. Your myopia, the limits of your range… they are not a birth defect. They are a birthright of cruelty, a scar passed from mother to son."
The world seemed to tilt on its axis for Reitō. The foundational story of his life—the tragic, heroic death of his parents on a mission, the honorable wound that explained his weakness—dissolved into ash, revealing a much darker, more intimate crime. The constant, low-grade humiliation of his "flawed" eyes, the source of a lifetime of mockery, was not fate. It was a message. A brand.
"Who…" Reitō's voice was a dry rasp, barely recognizable. "Who killed them? The mission… was it truly an accident?"
Hizashi looked away, unable to meet the raw pain now blazing in Reitō's face. "The 'mission' that took their lives came soon after. The details are sealed. But the whispers… the whispers among the older branch members say the odds were… convenient. And the one who signed off on the mission roster, who approved the desperate, last-minute strategy that left them isolated… was the same elder who had administered the punishment."
He didn't need to say the name. The shape of the monster was already clear in the cold, hollow space growing inside Reitō's chest.
Hyūga Ryōtomo.
The pieces of a lifelong puzzle clicked into a horrifying picture. The elder's immediate, visceral hatred. Mōri's relentless, seemingly personal bullying. It wasn't just about hierarchy or random cruelty. It was about guilt. It was about silencing the living reminder of their crime, about ensuring the son could never grow strong enough to question the fate of the parents.
A sound tore from Reitō's throat, not a scream, but a guttural, animal noise of pure, volcanic rage. "He killed them. He broke my mother and then he buried them. And he dares to sit in judgment over me?" The fury was so immense it felt cold, crystallizing into a diamond-hard core of purpose within him. "I will kill him. I will tear that house down around his ears. I will make the name Ryōtomo a curse in this clan."
"Reitō, listen to me!" Hizashi grabbed his shoulders, his own eyes wide with alarm. "You must bury this rage. Swallow it, hide it deep. If you show even a flicker of this knowledge, if Ryōtomo suspects you know, he will not wait for an excuse. He will erase you. Your only path is strength. Silent, undeniable strength. You must focus everything on becoming a Jonin. Only with that rank, with the recognition and protection of the village itself, will you be out of his immediate reach. The clan's autonomy has limits, but only for those Konoha deems too valuable to lose."
The words were a lifeline thrown into a maelstrom of hate. Reitō's chest heaved with ragged breaths. The desire for immediate, bloody vengeance warred with the cold, logical truth of Hizashi's warning. He was a child, weakened, marked, and watched. Ryōtomo was an elder, a master of the Gentle Fist, with the full authority of the Main Family behind him. A direct challenge now would be suicide.
He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, the chaotic fury was gone, replaced by a glacial, focused resolve. "One day," he promised, the words an oath spoken to the ghosts in the room. "One day, I will settle this debt. And on that day, I will not just break the man. I will break the Cage he uses to rule."
A fierce, answering fire lit in Hizashi's eyes. "Then we share this goal. We will work for it, in secret, in silence. But for now, you must play the part. You must be the dutiful, if chastened, branch member. Do not let Ryōtomo or his venomous son see a hint of what you know. Your entire being must be bent on growth. Tomorrow, the Academy begins. That is your new battlefield. Do not be late."
The Academy. In the storm of revelation, Reitō had almost forgotten. The world outside the Hyūga compound still existed. Nodding, he forced the world-shattering truth into a locked compartment of his mind. It would fuel him, but it could not control him. Not yet.
After Hizashi left, the silence in the room was different. It was no longer the quiet of convalescence, but the tense, purposeful silence of a forge where a weapon was being tempered. The anger was a coal in his belly, heating his resolve.
Elsewhere, in the pristine training grounds reserved for the Main Family, Hyūga Mōri let out a sharp, triumphant cry. Before him, a training post bore a perfect, palm-shaped depression, the wood cracked in a precise, spider-web pattern from the force of a Gentle Fist strike. Around his temples, veins pulsed vividly.
He had done it. The Byakugan, clear and potent, was active in his eyes.
A smug, vindicated smile spread across his face. "Do you see it?" he murmured to himself, though his two attendants were already bowing and offering effusive congratulations. "This is true heritage. This is born genius." The memory of Reitō's pained, hate-filled gaze flashed in his mind, but now it was tempered by this newfound power. "Hyūga Reitō… at the clan competition, I will grind your face into the dirt. I will show everyone what a real Hyūga looks like."
His expression then darkened, the smile turning cruel. "But why wait for the competition? A weed is easier to pluck when it's still small and surprised."
The morning of the Academy's opening arrived. Reitō stood before the small, cracked mirror in his room. The face that looked back was still pale, shadows lingering under the eyes from pain and sleepless nights. But the eyes themselves… they were different. The lingering fog of confusion and inherited shame was gone, burned away by a fire of terrible knowledge. They held a cold, diamond-hard focus. Today was not just the first day of school. It was the first step on a path he now understood with agonizing clarity.
He adjusted his forehead protector, ensuring it sat squarely over the Caged Bird seal—the mark of his subjugation and the reminder of his debt. He took a deep, steadying breath, drawing the mantle of calm around the inferno within.
As he opened his door and stepped into the morning light, he found his path blocked.
Hyūga Mōri stood there, flanked by his two shadows, a look of casual, entitled arrogance on his face. The faint, telltale traces of recently-activated Byakugan were just fading from around his eyes.
"Is there a problem?" Reitō asked, his voice flat, devoid of any emotion, his newly-resolved gaze meeting Mōri's directly. The ordinary morning air between them crackled with the unspoken history of murder, punishment, and a hatred that now had a name and a face.