By late afternoon, Uchiha Akira and Kurama Yun finally made it back.
The rogue ninja Hisamoto was dead. The delay had been too long, and the man had succumbed to the lethal overdose of sedatives Tetsumaru had "cautiously" administered.
Determining the exact cause of death was impossible, but once Akira realized the man was beyond saving, he had simply taken the head and left the rest. It was a brutal, pragmatic solution.
After his subordinates turned in the loot and the mission objectives, Tetsumaru shooed the two "mud monkeys" away to wash up and rest. He, meanwhile, returned to his obsessive tinkering with his insects.
In the previous night's battle, Tetsumaru had deployed over a hundred thousand insects. He had lost exactly 12,400.
And that was against the Stone, who weren't even specialized in pest control. If he had been fighting the Cloud or the Sand, would his entire swarm have been wiped out?
He'd fought plenty of Suna-nin while in Squad Ueno and it had never felt this difficult. Tetsumaru sat down and meticulously listed the differences between his old squad and his new one. After filtering out the variables, he identified two core issues.
In Squad Ueno, Captain Ueno Hayato was the "Main DPS." Everyone else, including Tetsumaru, played a support role. In his new squad, Tetsumaru was the heavy hitter, but his mindset was still stuck in "Support" mode.
Back then, his bugs were used for scouting and ambushes. Last night, he had launched a proactive, frontal assault. Once the enemy reacted and organized their ninjutsu, the lethality was horrifying.
The conclusion was glaring: Tetsumaru's insects weren't yet qualified to act as a primary offensive force. Their ability to spearhead a frontal charge was severely lacking.
Am I capable of carrying the burden of a "Main"? Tetsumaru wondered.
Being the "Main" meant holding the line during a crisis. It meant drawing the enemy's fire. You needed enough defense to survive being focused down. Tetsumaru was confident in his personal defense; he had never stopped upgrading his Armor Beetles, and he was currently on the fifth iteration since the war began.
However, most ninjas were "glass cannons"—low health, astronomical attack power. This required the squad's heavy hitter to have a "one-shot, one-kill" capability to decide the flow of battle.
To put it bluntly: a ninja with low attack power is like a tank in a game with no "Taunt" skill. If you can't hurt the enemy, they'll just ignore you, no matter how high your defense is.
This was Tetsumaru's bottleneck. He lacked a definitive way to convert his massive chakra reserves into overwhelming combat power.
There was also the matter of "Sunk Cost." After perfecting his swarm tactics with Puppetry and Summoning, he had spent over six months pouring resources into insect development. With a "Legion Zerg" numbering in the millions, his path was set. To switch styles now wouldn't just be "cutting his losses"—it would be a total amputation. It would be agonizing and likely fatal to his career.
He was in a slump.
While Tetsumaru agonized over his weaknesses, the Root ninjas had already filed their report for the day.
Shimura Danzo had received word of the rogue's elimination. Naturally, his interest was piqued by the name at the top of the report: Aburame Tetsumaru. Root had absorbed many Aburame since its inception; adding one more was perfectly logical.
Tetsumaru was clearly a branch member. Danzo's usual playbook was simple: demand that the clan surrender a genius heir like Aburame Shibi, wait for the inevitable outrage and refusal, and then "magnanimously" settle for the talented branch member he wanted in the first place.
It was a tired old trick, but because clans instinctively sacrificed branch members to protect their primary bloodlines, it worked every single time. Danzo navigated these political waters like a shark.
Of course, some clans were off-limits. The Hyuga branch members bore the Caged Bird Seal, meaning their lives and deaths were controlled by the Main House. Danzo refused to have subordinates who answered to another master.
The Uchiha were openly hostile. Under the current leadership—which was far more aggressive than the "soft" Fugaku of the future—they rejected every one of Danzo's requests. They even used their authority over the Police Force to detain Root agents operating within the village, once even surrounding the Root headquarters to demand Danzo hand over a prisoner.
Danzo opened Tetsumaru's personnel file and studied it with clinical focus.
"Top of his class at the Academy. Refused early graduation during wartime. Not taken as an apprentice by any of the Sannin after graduation... Hmph. It seems Hiruzen has taken a dislike to him. Good. That removes any political friction."
"Mission success rate: 100%?" Perfect for Root.
"Massive chakra reserves. Poor compatibility with standard Aburame Secret Arts. Suspected Senju bloodline?"
Danzo pulled up Aburame Aiko's file but quickly confirmed she wasn't a Senju descendant. Tetsumaru's maternal grandfather had joined the village as a lone wolf during its founding; his lineage was clear.
"Low presence. Extremely difficult to detect via sensory methods."
High chakra, low presence? This was the textbook definition of a natural-born assassin. He was perfect for Root.
But as Danzo reached the final section of the report, his mood soured. It felt as if he had bitten into a piece of fruit only to find half a worm. He closed the file with a dark expression and tossed it to a subordinate.
"File it away."
Root claimed it could forge any ninja into a tool for the village, but in reality, there were three types Danzo rejected:
Uchiha: He didn't want the people; he just wanted their eyes.
Hyuga: Already mentioned.
Akimichi: Their combat style literally shook the earth. They were the antithesis of "covert operations."
Later, Danzo would add a fourth category: pure Taijutsu specialists. One such ninja had actually asked to join Root, and Danzo had rejected him with disdain. He even grew to dislike the Inuzuka; ninjas who lacked "brains" were too prone to blowing their cover or causing unnecessary scenes. The risk was simply too high.
Tetsumaru fell into the same category as the Akimichi. His combat method—summoning a massive, buzzing tide of insects—was far too "loud." Worse, according to the report, he couldn't even perform missions independently of his swarm.
Useless, Danzo thought.
Thirty years later, after Root had been disbanded and its classified files leaked, Tetsumaru would discover that he had been rejected for being "too noisy." He would feel an overwhelming sense of relief. Gods, thank the heavens for being unwanted.
Looking back at the frustration of his failed research, the pain of being bankrupted by his bugs, and the despair of hitting a dead end, he would realize that "blessings and disasters are two sides of the same coin" was an immutable truth.
Back in the present, Tetsumaru was still grappling with his "Main DPS" problem.
The first solution he ruled out was going in himself. Even after a year of war, and even with his "trump cards" upgraded, he knew his true combat power was nowhere near that of a Jonin.
In the first half of the year, Squad Ueno had fought thirty-one battles. Captain Ueno, acting as the core, had faced no fewer than twenty life-or-death crises. The man was a walking miracle of luck; twenty brushes with death and he'd only come away with minor scratches.
Tetsumaru didn't have that talent. When they faced the Jinchuriki, the Captain had only lost a tuft of hair while Tetsumaru had been so broken he had to be sent back to the village for a month.
Tetsumaru was just a Chunin. He didn't have plot armor. Standing on the front lines was just a fancy way of committing suicide. Besides, even if he did grow strong enough to face an elite Jonin, why would he? If he could get the job done safely from a distance, why take the risk?
The second solution he ruled out was recruiting a "carry" for his squad. That depended on the luck of the draw from Headquarters, and as established: he wasn't lucky.
The third and final option—the only one left on the table—was breeding a more powerful combat insect. He was currently pushing this plan forward with everything he had.
Using the "Reality-Warp" property of chakra, he could theoretically combine any insects he wanted. The problem was the lack of a high-tier biological blueprint. He needed something like the Giant Centipede used by the Path of Pain. Without a legendary base to work from, he was stuck cross-breeding his current stock and hoping for a mutation.
Back to the RNG grind, Tetsumaru sighed. He'd been at this for six months with zero results.
After checking on his subordinates (who were fast asleep), he inspected the development of the larvae in his portable incubators. He cleared out the dead eggs and realized he had nothing left to do.
Being on the front lines, his "lab" was too primitive for serious engineering.
The only thing left to kill time was the most grueling work of all: organizing Chakra Runes.
Before graduation, Tetsumaru had mapped out every rune possible from combinations of up to five hand seals.
1-seal runes: 12
2-seal runes: 33
3-seal runes: 165
4-seal runes: 742
5-seal runes: 2,970
Total: 3,922 runes.
Combinations involving six or more seals were beyond him—his hand speed simply couldn't meet the requirement for the complex sequencing.
It had been a long, miserable slog. Mapping those runes had taken eight months of his life and left him with permanent dark circles under his eyes. After graduation, he had taken a page out of Mendeleev's book, attempting to label and arrange them to find a pattern—a Chakra Rune Periodic Table.
As he organized and compared them, Tetsumaru made a startling discovery: many runes had overlapping attributes. Some were just "weak" versions of others.
A "Strong" rune would often influence or radiate a cluster of "Weak" runes. These weak versions were influenced by multiple strong runes, making their attributes seem chaotic and ever-changing.
However, no matter how complex the weak runes seemed, they could always be replaced by a strong one.
Tetsumaru shifted his research focus: he began hunting for the "Core Runes."
It was a nightmare of a task. Except for a few singular runes, most Core Runes had attributes that were constantly shifting. He had to compare the potency of every attribute one by one.
Fortunately, Tetsumaru didn't mind the tedium. He preferred work where patience guaranteed progress; at least it didn't require him to be "lucky."
He pulled another all-nighter without finding a new Core Rune. As the first light of dawn hit the camp, he calmly packed his tools and began his morning exercise.
By the time he finished his workout and prepared breakfast, Akira and Yun had finally woken up. They both looked like wilted plants; they clearly weren't in any shape for a new mission today. On the front, accepting a mission when you weren't at 100% was a death sentence.
Tetsumaru gave them the day off. He told them to eat, do some light recovery training, and sleep through the afternoon.
He headed to the Mission Center to mark his squad as "unavailable." Upon doing so, he was notified that the camp was now under Level 2 Alert. Squads without active missions were forbidden from leaving the camp, and individual missions were suspended. Everyone had to be ready for an immediate deployment order from Headquarters.
Level 2? Tetsumaru scratched his head. He hated that status. It meant you couldn't go anywhere or do anything, yet nine times out of ten, nothing happened all day. It was just a lot of waiting.
He decided to go back and sleep; once he was rested, he'd get back to the runes.
When he returned to the campsite, Akira and Yun were practicing their respective arts. He stood to the side and watched.
Yun's Genjutsu practice was invisible to an outsider, but Akira's ninjutsu work was fascinating. He would practice for a while, flip through a clan scroll, and then resume.
Tetsumaru soon recognized the patterns. Akira was practicing classic Uchiha Combat Doctrines:
Opening: Great Fireball Technique.
Chain A (Offensive): Transition into Body Flicker.
Chain B (Offensive): Transition into Shurikenjutsu.
Chain C (Deceptive): Transition into Transformation.
Chain D (Interference): Transition into Phoenix Sage Fire.
Chain E (Trap): Transition into a second Great Fireball.
It sounded simple, but these were the foundational tactics that had made the Uchiha world-famous. The hidden details—how to read the enemy's reaction, how to smooth the transition between phases, how to manage chakra output and resonance—were all clan secrets.
For over a century, these tactics had been refined by countless Uchiha geniuses. They were polished to a mirror sheen. They were constantly imitated by others, but never surpassed.
The power of the Sharingan wasn't just in combat; its ability to observe and analyze one's own body made training exponentially more efficient. It was a massive advantage for clan heritage.
Using the Sharingan only for fighting, Tetsumaru thought, is a tragic waste of the world's strongest Bloodline Limit.
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