Tobirama stared at Fugaku and said quietly, "After the meeting ended, I found Yamato from the other timeline and asked him about some of the details..."
"He told me that when the other Itachi was four years old, you took him onto the battlefield. Later, he joined the ANBU and served as a double agent between the Uchiha and the village. By thirteen, he'd become an ANBU squad captain..."
Fugaku's expression froze, and he blurted out, "How could anyone take a child that young onto a battlefield?! What an asshole..."
But even as he said it, the anger on Fugaku's face gradually turned into embarrassment, and his gaze began to wander.
Because there was no one harder for Fugaku to fool than himself.
Back then, Fugaku had also wanted his eldest son to grow into a pillar of the Uchiha as early as possible. He had even planned to take Itachi onto the battlefield during the Third Shinobi World War...
It was only after enduring relentless criticism from Isshin and a furious scolding from Seisui that Fugaku abandoned the idea and switched to a more hands-off style of parenting...
Itachi had been left in Seisui's care, while Sasuke spent every day hanging around with the ramen guy...
And somehow, both of them had turned out pretty well!
Tobirama stared at Fugaku.
Fugaku coughed lightly. "Well... that big guy really did help me quite a bit..."
The other Itachi might have been a monster.
But the other Fugaku certainly hadn't been any better...
He was the very definition of indecisive.
One moment he wanted to move closer to Konoha, the next he wanted to rebel, constantly fighting a war between the two halves of his own brain.
"Ah, I wonder what Senju Tobirama would think if he knew about the other Itachi..."
Fugaku sighed and said with a bitter smile, "Maybe he'd burst out laughing and think that was exactly the kind of Uchiha he liked best..."
Tobirama's mind filled with question marks.
'Kid, what the hell are you talking about?'
Going by the stereotype, what Fugaku said did make sense...
After all, the other Itachi had exterminated the Uchiha Clan.
But Tobirama didn't see it that way at all.
Quite the opposite. The kind of Uchiha he was most wary of was precisely someone like Itachi from that other timeline!
He had the ability to get things done, but his head was an absolute mess. On top of that, he'd developed his own twisted system of logic, making his actions almost impossible to predict...
If an Uchiha like the Itachi from the other timeline appeared among the current clan...
Tobirama would absolutely place him under intensive surveillance and stamp him out the moment he showed dangerous signs, before he could harm the development of either the village or the Uchiha.
'That bastard Uchiha Madara disguised himself as me, and the cleverest part was using my established reputation to curse himself out. Even I fell for it...'
A gleam flashed through Tobirama's eyes.
Whether back when he was a Senju or now in this life as an Uchiha, he'd always been rather good at "copying" things...
Now that trick belonged to him!
Itachi, Fugaku, and even that Second Hokage named Senju Tobirama...
Today, Uchiha Seisui was going to tear into every last one of them!
"That Senju Tobirama was an asshole too..."
"The policies he imposed on the Uchiha eventually produced the bitter consequences seen in the other timeline!"
Fugaku nodded, clearly agreeing with every word.
Seisui truly was an Uchiha!
So objective...
Tobirama continued calmly, "Itachi, visitors from another timeline arrived today. In that timeline, another version of you slaughtered the entire Uchiha Clan in a single night, became a rogue ninja, and even coveted Sasuke's eyes..."
Itachi's little face scrunched up tightly. Unable to help himself, he pointed at his own face.
"Me...? I slaughtered the entire clan?"
"Seisui-nii, Otōsan, I don't mean anything by this, but how exactly did I even manage that? My greatest wish in life is to join the Police Force and work a regular nine-to-five job..."
"Otōsan, Isshin-ojiichan, Seisui-nii, Tomie-sensei, Obito-nii, Shisui-nii..."
Itachi counted them off on his fingers, looking utterly bewildered. "It was really me?"
For a moment, looking at Itachi's completely confused expression, neither Fugaku nor Tobirama could quite keep a straight face.
If Itachi were extremely powerful, then the crimes committed by his counterpart in the other timeline would seem much more serious here...
Because he would actually possess the ability to commit them.
But in the Konoha of today, Itachi was merely a reasonably talented child.
Wiping out the Uchiha Clan was honestly an incredibly difficult proposition around here...
In Fugaku's opinion, anyone who wanted to massacre their Uchiha would probably need to be a top-tier powerhouse at least on the Hokage's level, or perhaps Uchiha Madara at his true peak...
And even then, doing it all in one night would be impossible.
After all, they had the Flying Thunder God and Kamui, not to mention Tomie and Isshin's Mangekyō, which gave them an absurd margin for error.
And that wasn't even considering the current Uchiha with three-tomoe Sharingan. Practically every one of them had Izanagi passively prepared through the Transcription Seal. With Hashirama cells transplanted into them, they could even replenish their extra lives...
"Hmm..."
That made Tobirama think of something else.
People always said that when members of the Uchiha Clan suffered intense emotional trauma, they were more likely to awaken the Mangekyō Sharingan...
Yet when Itachi from the other timeline massacred the clan, not a single new Mangekyō emerged among them...
Compare that to the Uchiha here.
Strictly speaking, both Isshin and Fugaku had awakened their Mangekyō out of a desire to "protect."
One believed Seisui was working himself too hard, while the other awakened his after losing a friend...
Even Tomie's Mangekyō hadn't come from overwhelmingly negative emotions. What she had felt was frustration at her own lack of strength...
As for Obito, although Sarutobi Hiruzen had kept the reason for his awakening under strict secrecy, the fact that Obito could serve in the Hokage Guard and had earned his beloved student's trust was enough for Tobirama to believe there was nothing wrong with him...
'It seems some of my old ideas really were biased.'
'The Mangekyō comes from "gaining love and then losing love," but the most important thing is to give them "love" in the first place...'
'"Love" is the true source of the Mangekyō's ocular power. Hiruzen's Will of Fire gave them that love while also giving the Uchiha a collective they could love, so they wouldn't be driven to extremes by a temporary gain or loss...'
Uchiha Seisui couldn't help wondering just how Senju Tobirama had come up with such terrible policies in the first place.
He really needed to go stir things up against that guy on the shinobi forums too!
"Itachi, you don't need to put too much psychological pressure on yourself. Besides you, very few of the shinobi from the other timeline ended up well. To be precise, most of them did some pretty..."
"The Hokage has already issued a clear statement on the matter and repeatedly emphasized that those are events from another timeline. They have nothing whatsoever to do with our Konoha or our Will of Fire."
Tobirama coughed lightly. "The only reason I called you here today, Itachi, is so you can learn from the mistakes made in that other timeline and avoid making those mistakes yourself..."
Hearing that the Hokage had already drawn such a firm distinction, Itachi felt considerably relieved.
No matter how obsessed his father became while training his Magnet Release, he had always held the Hokage in extraordinary respect...
During the great reckoning meeting, Fugaku's back had broken out in a cold sweat more than once...
What happened in that other timeline was simply too terrifying.
And his counterpart there had been far too pathetic and despair-inducing.
Yet when those tragedies were examined closely, all of them had been changed here because of the Hokage...
"I understand, Seisui-nii."
Itachi nodded solemnly. "I'll take this lesson seriously and make sure I never repeat those mistakes!"
Tobirama nodded and began his analysis.
"This matter is actually quite simple..."
"First, there's the problem of how the Uchiha Clan was governed..."
"Because of the other timeline's Senju Tobirama and his misguided policies, resentment within the village was deliberately redirected toward the Uchiha Clan, consciously driving a wedge between them and Konoha's other clans..."
"And the Uchiha over there failed to respond effectively. Instead, they became absorbed in that situation and allowed themselves to decline in strength and become isolated without allies. They didn't react until the problem had already become terminal."
"Under those circumstances, even if Konoha in that other timeline was terrible, it still held a certain advantage over an Uchiha Clan that constantly dwelled on its former glory, seethed with resentment, and lacked the strength to do anything about it."
Tobirama looked at Fugaku.
"And then we add you as his father..."
Fugaku hurriedly waved his hands. "Not me! That wasn't me!"
"Oh..." Tobirama rolled his eyes.
If he and Isshin hadn't taken such a hard line with him, that very nearly would have been you!
"And then we add the other Fugaku taking Itachi onto the battlefield when he was still a small child, forcing a kid who lacked sufficient experience and understanding to view problems through this so-called 'Hokage mindset'..."
"A Hokage is supposed to consider problems from the perspective of the whole and avoid letting too much personal emotion influence his judgment. The other Itachi did exactly that, except he followed that logic in a completely one-sided way and stripped away his own identity as an 'Uchiha.'"
"So when he killed his clansmen, perhaps he didn't even think of himself as an Uchiha. He merely saw himself as a defender of Konoha purging elements that threatened the Will of Fire..."
Tobirama quietly spoke words that sent chills down their spines.
Both Fugaku and Itachi fell silent.
But father and son actually had the same question in their minds...
Wasn't that... kind of how a Hokage was supposed to think?
Tobirama keenly noticed what they were thinking and couldn't help feeling that his beloved student Hiruzen arranging for him to reincarnate as an Uchiha had truly been the right decision...
These people desperately needed him!
"A Hokage does need to consider the bigger picture. But love doesn't mean loving only the whole. You also have to love every living person within it..."
"The whole is made up of individuals."
"The interests of the whole are the combined interests of every individual. Only when the two work together can internal conflict be minimized as much as possible and the village continue forward in the long term..."
"In the other timeline, what Itachi, Danzō, and the others did had already crossed into the territory of extrajudicial punishment. That would inevitably destroy the credibility of the entire village!"
"That's precisely why our Hokage has always emphasized 'institutionalization' and 'procedural justice,' while continuously refining the concrete implementation of the Will of Fire..."
Tobirama spoke at length.
Who in Konoha had studied the Will of Fire more diligently than anyone else?
Many people would give different answers to that question...
Some would say Hizashi. Others would say Hiruko, or perhaps Orochimaru.
But only Tobirama knew the truth...
No one understood every single word his beloved student had ever said better than he did!
While visiting the Research Department, Sarutobi Hiruzen had once told Orochimaru, "A student need not be inferior to his sensei, nor must a sensei always surpass his student. Some learn the Way sooner, while each person has their own field of expertise..."
Tobirama wholeheartedly agreed.
When it came to the Will of Fire, he really did have some things to learn from Hiruzen...
"Danzō and Itachi from the other timeline, along with that Hokage who shares Sarutobi Hiruzen's name—if they could ambiguously sanction such ruthless action against the Uchiha Clan, what would the other shinobi clans think?"
"If you don't protect the actual people, there can be no prosperous whole..."
"Someone like the other Itachi didn't love Konoha at all, nor did he truly believe in the Will of Fire. He was simply acting however he pleased, sacrificing the Uchiha to indulge his own self-righteous sense of martyrdom..."
Tobirama's gaze turned cold.
"He never once considered that exterminating the Uchiha Clan would actually result in even greater casualties for the village. How would they deal with the external situation? How would they stabilize the internal disorder?"
"He simply washed his hands of everything, became a rogue ninja, and walked away with that twisted sense of satisfaction in his heart."
"He's useless. A lazy, useless bastard..."
The three tomoe in Tobirama's eyes slowly revolved. Although they weren't Mangekyō, the ocular power reflected within them was enough to make even Fugaku, who possessed the Mangekyō, slightly startled.
"Being Hokage is exhausting."
"Actual village administration is filled with contradictions and complicated situations—the emotions of individuals, reconciling human nature, the tangled web of internal factions and the balancing of their interests, interference from outside forces..."
"All of those things have to be considered. Only after looking at the entire situation can you choose the best among the available options, find the broadest possible common ground, and make a decision."
"Someone like the other Itachi..."
"A 'Hokage mindset'? Don't make me laugh. Don't disgrace the title of Hokage like that!"
At this point, Tobirama deliberately looked at Itachi and said softly, "Itachi, hasn't someone told you before that, as Fugaku's son, only wanting to become a member of the Police Force shows a lack of ambition?"
Itachi instinctively nodded. "They have..."
"No. You're doing just fine."
"First do what you're capable of doing, then try to do what you want to do. There's nothing wrong with keeping your feet firmly on the ground."
Tobirama spoke earnestly.
Itachi broke into a happy smile.
That really was what he thought...
Graduate, find a way to secure a stable position, then spend the rest of his life quietly doing his job. That sounded pretty good to him...
Hokage?
He'd honestly never fantasized about it...
There were simply too many mountains standing in Itachi's way. His understanding of himself had become remarkably clear from a very young age, especially with his younger brother Sasuke's astonishing talent right there in front of him...
The kid spent every day running around outside and eating ramen, yet somehow managed to awaken the Sharingan out of nowhere...
How was that supposed to be fair?
Itachi considered himself quite emotionally stable. He had never been jealous of his younger brother's talent.
His most urgent priority right now was simply graduating successfully under Obito-sensei...
Because Obito-sensei, wielder of the perfectly fair Dual Kamui, had already declared:
Every Academy student's graduation requirements are different! Itachi, you're an Uchiha, so I have to hold you to a stricter standard and make you an example for everyone else...
"As for why he slaughtered the entire clan."
Tobirama sneered. "Logically speaking, if he were really looking at the situation from the village's perspective, then in a Konoha like that, what Itachi should have done was quickly suppress the small number of radicals..."
"But at the very least, he should have preserved a future for the Uchiha. That would have been barely defensible, because once the two sides started fighting, the damage inflicted on both the Uchiha and the other Konoha would have been maximized..."
Fugaku instinctively nodded.
There was actually precedent for this sort of thing in the shinobi world: Nakamaro of Kirigakure.
He had sacrificed those clansmen who were recklessly courting their own destruction. But compared to what happened in the other timeline, he had preserved the Kaguya Clan's bloodline. It was difficult to say who had been right or wrong, but it was certainly better than Itachi allowing the Uchiha Clan to be completely exterminated...
"But why didn't the other Itachi do that?"
"Because he was afraid..."
Tobirama sneered. "Perhaps he knew that compared to exterminating the clan, doing that would have been the better choice for both the village and the Uchiha. But then what would happen to his family?"
"After he struck down his own clansmen like that, the surviving Uchiha who had lost their loved ones would naturally want revenge, both emotionally and by every reasonable standard. And the obvious target would be his younger brother..."
"So, to prevent his actions from creating even stronger Uchiha, Itachi chose to kill them all so there would be no one left to take revenge on Sasuke."
"And as the sole surviving Uchiha, Konoha would be extraordinarily tolerant toward Sasuke. Even if he did something like defect from the village, they would accommodate him as much as possible."
"So now do you understand why the other Itachi did what he did, Fugaku...?"
Fugaku listened in stunned silence.
Did Seisui understand the Uchiha a little too well?
"To sum it up, he was a twisted madman who believed he possessed a Hokage's mindset, yet had no real compassion in his heart and understood absolutely nothing about the Will of Fire..."
"He acted out of self-righteous sentimentality, but in reality, he sacrificed his entire clan to protect and elevate his younger brother, while bringing catastrophic consequences upon both the Uchiha and the village..."
"Even the other Sasuke had his entire life ruined by what he did."
Tobirama spoke in a grave voice.
Fugaku was just about to say something when Tobirama gestured for him to shut up.
He wasn't finished tearing into them yet...
"The other Fugaku was an idiot too. No wonder he managed to father a lunatic like that."
"He took such a young child onto the battlefield. Did the man possess even the most basic sense of logic? He couldn't even figure out what he himself wanted to do. He wouldn't resist when he should have, then acted tough when he shouldn't have fought..."
"Indecisive, timid, constantly hesitating, and then when the decisive moment finally arrived, he gave up on fighting and self-righteously let Itachi do it for him..."
"Disgusting!"
Tobirama slammed the table and roared, "Did he think the Uchiha Clan was his personal property? He was the clan head, yet instead of taking responsibility for the clan as a whole and for the village, all he did was run away from everything!"
"Dying isn't the hard part. Living is! That father and son are nothing but a pair of maggots!"
Fugaku and Itachi exchanged glances before both unconsciously lowered their heads, not daring to make a sound.
"And then there's Senju Tobirama from the other timeline..."
"He was Hokage, yet he couldn't treat the Uchiha who joined the village fairly. What happened to putting past grievances behind them once the two sides joined together in Konoha? A useless bastard who couldn't even keep his word!"
"If he wanted to discriminate against them, he should've simply refused to let the Uchiha join Konoha in the first place!"
"No wonder the Great Clan Head fought the First Hokage. If you're treated unfairly, that's exactly what you should do!"
Tobirama let loose to his heart's content.
He had copied Uchiha Madara's trick of cursing himself out to conceal his identity exactly as it was...
Was Senju Tobirama the kind of man who admitted his mistakes?
Obviously not.
So no matter how anyone analyzed it, Seisui couldn't possibly be Tobirama.
This was also Tobirama's way of decisively cutting ties with his previous identity...
That identity really couldn't be salvaged anymore. The amount of blame piled onto it was downright terrifying...
Forget Tobirama himself—even Uchiha Madara couldn't carry that much.
If Tobirama knew that even the Sage of Six Paths had started piling more onto it and was now calling himself "Tobirama," he would probably be extremely grateful that he'd made this decision so early...
'What, am I your damn septic tank now?!'
'Every single thing you can't explain just gets dumped onto me...'
'You think I can digest all that?!'
Fugaku and Itachi kept their heads lowered as they listened, seriously reflecting on everything they had heard.
Seisui had come in and torn into everyone!
"Come to think of it..."
"Our timeline's Second Hokage seems..."
Fugaku thought for a moment and discovered a blind spot.
Wasn't he basically the same as the one from the other timeline?
But Itachi stubbornly raised his head at that moment and objected, "Otōsan, you can't say that! You have to remember that the Third Hokage was the Second Hokage's student..."
"The Third respected the Second Hokage so much. There has to be a reason for that. You're only looking at the surface. I believe the Third Hokage's fair treatment of the Uchiha was influenced by the Second Hokage during his earlier years..."
Tobirama froze internally.
'Whoa...'
'Hiruzen's reputation is actually good enough to improve mine a little too?'
To tell the truth, Tobirama had never even considered that...
At this very moment, he was also reflecting on the extermination of the Uchiha Clan by Itachi in the other timeline, the emergence of multiple controllable Mangekyō Uchiha in this timeline, and everything he'd experienced while living among the Uchiha...
Tobirama had realized that some of his past decisions contained serious mistakes.
If Hiruzen hadn't repaired the rift between the Uchiha and Konoha, perhaps the tragedy of the other timeline might eventually have played out in the Konoha he knew...
Perhaps it wouldn't have become quite that absurd, but things certainly wouldn't have ended well...
The potential of the Uchiha Clan needed to be properly brought out through the Will of Fire, while their supposedly extreme tendencies and ideas could be tempered through love and fairness...
"Huh?"
Fugaku looked at Itachi and ground his teeth. "Listen here, you little..."
"The Third Hokage said the Second Hokage possessed the Will of Fire... Otōsan, are you saying the Hokage was wrong? That's not what they taught me at the Academy..."
Itachi tilted his head inquisitively.
Fugaku's expression darkened.
'You little brat...'
'When did you learn to pull this move?!'
But Fugaku genuinely didn't dare hit Itachi over something like this, because his son's classmates weren't exactly ordinary people either...
There was Yamato, who had been raised by Mito, and Kabuto, the student of Hokage Advisor Orochimaru.
Fugaku understood perfectly well that the Hokage would never blame him over something like this.
Even after the other version of Fugaku and everyone else had behaved so absurdly, the great-hearted Sarutobi Hiruzen had still taken the blame upon himself...
But the more Hiruzen acted like that, the more Fugaku felt compelled to appreciate it from the bottom of his heart. So even though everyone understood perfectly well what Tobirama had been like...
For Sarutobi Hiruzen's sake, they still had to give Tobirama some of that damn respect!
'This kid's all right. As expected of someone I helped raise from childhood...'
Tobirama felt somewhat satisfied.
But what pleased him even more was that his beloved student had spent ten straight years "covering for him"...
No...
Objectively explaining him!
At long last, the next generation's assessment of Tobirama had become a little fairer!
Of course, Tobirama himself couldn't say anything. He even had to look somewhat uncomfortable about it.
That would make his disguise even harder to see through...
"Enough about the Second Hokage..."
"Itachi, don't put too much pressure on yourself. Let me tell you what happened to some of the others..."
Tobirama gave Itachi the full collection of stories about Konoha's dazzling constellation of human-shaped disasters from the other timeline, leaving the boy's head spinning.
Although his counterpart in the other timeline was certainly one of the standouts...
The others weren't much better...
That made Itachi feel a little better about himself.
"The other Yamato seems to have turned out okay... Seisui-nii, what about Kabuto?"
Itachi asked, sounding slightly unwilling to accept defeat.
"He got mixed up with the other timeline's Orochimaru, became a spy, and got screwed over by Danzō..."
Tobirama pondered for a moment.
"What happens after that, I don't know. But I can sense that their shinobi world is currently approaching a point where all its accumulated contradictions are about to erupt..."
"If the Dragon Vein can be stabilized, the people and events over there will rapidly come to light. We'll also be able to obtain more information and valuable intelligence."
Fugaku's eyes lit up.
"Seisui, from what I heard the Hokage say, we might have a chance to go over there and provide support..."
"I want to be in the first group!"
A fierce magnetic field rose around Fugaku. The Mangekyō pattern in his eyes gleamed like blood as he declared solemnly, "Even though this happened in another timeline, and the Hokage has already drawn a strict distinction between their actions and ours..."
"I still can't get this matter out of my head!"
"Whether it's for the Will of Fire or for the Uchiha, I believe I need to correct the other Itachi's mistake and make him understand that mistakes have consequences..."
His own son truly was innocent...
But Fugaku's hands were itching like crazy!
And his Mangekyō ability, Takeminakata, was telling him in some mysterious way that Fugaku's somewhat will-driven Magnet Release might break through its current bottleneck once he finally got this matter off his chest...
This was also the cleanest possible way for Fugaku to distance himself from his counterpart!
"I support it!"
Itachi promptly raised his hand.
He absolutely had to distance himself from that other version of himself...
As for what Father intended to do to that bastard, Itachi didn't care...
He wished him all the best!
"That really would be a good solution..."
"But we'll still have to see how Orochimaru's work progresses. The Dragon Vein is mysterious, after all... The safest approach would be to have Yamato and the others from the other timeline make several more trips first, so we can verify its stability..."
Tobirama said softly, "At the end of the day, they're still outsiders from another village."
"If we can bring over the Sasuke from the other timeline and question him as well, that would be even better..."
Fugaku unconsciously nodded while thinking to himself, 'As expected of someone descended from the Second Hokage. Even with the kindhearted Uchiha blood tempering that side of him, and even after he so seriously criticized the man himself, sometimes the moment Seisui opens his mouth, you can still hear the resemblance...'
But Fugaku didn't dislike that aspect of Seisui.
Because Seisui was unquestionably an Uchiha who possessed the Will of Fire...
And besides the Hokage's light, the village also needed someone to exist within the shadows.
"The other Itachi..."
Fugaku gazed into the distance as though he could see all the way into the other timeline. His eyes sharpened.
"You'd better hope you never meet me!"
Meanwhile, on the other side of Konoha...
The atmosphere at Minato's home couldn't have been more different from Fugaku's.
Little Naruto, having returned home, placed some meat into the other timeline Naruto's bowl and said with complete sincerity,
"Oniisan, eat some more! You've been through a lot. You need to build your strength back up..."
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