So things had developed exactly like this, and honestly it wasn't surprising.
Sasuke gripped a kunai and kept his attention spread across the entire area around the small storage structure, scanning for anything out of place. What didn't add up was the most obvious thing: not a single guard. For what was supposed to be a high-value location, the complete absence of visible security was wrong in a way that every page of his ninja training told him to treat as a trap.
Pitfalls. Net snares. Explosive tags. Triggered genjutsu that rewrote your entire environment. Summoned creatures waiting inside a seal. Any of these could constitute a trap—especially in a place that looked important but showed no obvious defense. Which meant—
"Amazing~! Nobody here! Let me find that scroll!"
Naruto had looked left, looked right, confirmed no guards, and was already trotting toward the shrine door.
"Wait—Naruto."
Sasuke grabbed him by the scruff of the neck. Good. He had talked himself into this venture because the Scroll of Seals genuinely existed and genuinely contained Hokage-level techniques, and he was not going to let the idiot blow it in the first thirty seconds.
"What is it? We need to move before someone shows up."
Sasuke resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. "There isn't a single guard near what's supposedly a critical location. Does that not seem strange to you?"
"...Oh. Yeah. Actually."
Good. He could work with that.
"They probably just went out for a late snack or something! Lucky us! Ahahaha~!"
Naruto burst into his catastrophically stupid laugh, blew straight past Sasuke's grip, and wrenched the shrine door open.
Sasuke's hand hung in the air.
He waited for the shuriken. The net. The genjutsu. The gaping maw of something summoned. He was prepared for all of these.
Nothing came.
Naruto rummaged around inside the shrine, emerged beaming, and hoisted a scroll that stood as tall as he did. "Look, look—Sasuke! This is it!"
A long silence.
"......"
Sasuke experienced, in sequence: disbelief, the creeping certainty that reality had personally singled him out to be made a fool of, and a white-hot offense directed at the entire concept of ninja common sense. His elaborate theoretical framework for defeating complex traps had just been rendered worthless by a boy who decided the guards went out for ramen.
He turned on his heel.
"Hey, hey—where are you going? We got the Scroll of Seals!"
"Shut up, you absolute disaster," Sasuke bit out—then stopped himself, and turned back. The scroll was right there.
In the Third's office, Hiruzen Sarutobi regarded the crystal ball with mild sympathy. He had removed the guards and disarmed the traps specifically to account for Naruto being involved. In hindsight, it had perhaps overcorrected. He hoped the Uchiha boy's pride would recover in a reasonable timeframe.
The crystal ball shifted to a new scene: the Hyuga estate gate, evening light.
Kakashi stood before Hinata, still posing as a cameraman, looking genuinely uneasy. "Lady Hinata, I apologize for coming at this hour. But something about this doesn't feel right."
Hinata looked at him. "You're saying someone called Mizuki put them up to stealing the Scroll of Seals."
A flat statement, not a question. The look on Kakashi's face confirmed she'd already mapped it.
A thin sense of wrongness moved through her, quickly analyzed. This main-plot event should only have happened at the graduation exam two months from now. Butterfly effect, then. But there was something else she had always found suspicious, even back when she'd first read the source material: the Scroll of Seals was supposed to be the single most valuable artifact in Konoha's archives—comparable to something out of a wuxia epic—so how had Naruto, someone who hadn't even reached genin level, stolen it so easily? And in a world where sealing arts were among the most sophisticated techniques known to shinobi, why had he been able to open the scroll's seals without any trouble at all?
"Yes. I feel like... it might not be entirely a good thing," Kakashi offered carefully.
He was watching her face. She could feel it. The Third had sent him—not just to inform her, but to watch her reaction.
She had already turned it over before Kakashi finished speaking. Combine those two observations with the fact that Kakashi had been sent specifically to notify her: it all pointed the same direction. This was a test. A controlled one. Without Iruka's intervention in the original story, Naruto would have fallen into the abyss—the darkness a child carries when the entire world has told him he is its enemy. And if that had happened, the Third would have given the order. In the canon arc, the mass evacuation of everyone in the area wasn't theater: it was preparation. Preparation to put down the Nine-Tails jinchūriki if he went dark—the same way Yashamaru's cruel words had been meant for Gaara. If Iruka had been replaced by someone like that, Naruto would have become something far worse than Gaara. The ninja already lying in wait around the area would have moved in immediately.
That old man was cut from the same stone as Hashirama. For the village, either of them would have killed anyone without flinching.
And the Third had noticed. He had already noticed the difference between her and the original Hinata. No evidence, no pretext to act—but the noticing was enough. This test was partly about Naruto. It was also about her. If she remained loyal, he wouldn't care whether she was a transmigrator or something else entirely. If she showed so much as a flicker of defecting—of steering Naruto and Sasuke against Konoha—the operatives waiting at those perimeter walls would handle it.
She would end up like Hizashi Hyuga. A sacrifice for the village.
The corner of Hinata's mouth curved.
Because the moment she understood the game, the game changed in her favor.
"Good. Go back. Don't breathe a word of this to anyone—those two idiots are mine to deal with."
She sent Kakashi away, activated her Byakugan, and jumped into the trees. Naruto and Sasuke wouldn't have gone far. Their goal was simply to learn, and they had every reason to stay nearby.
And there had to be techniques inside the Scroll of Seals that suited her—she was certain of it.
"Aaargh~! Why is the very first jutsu the one I'm worst at?!"
Just as she'd expected: sitting in the middle of a forest clearing, Naruto had his head in his hands in an expression of pure suffering. Beside him, Sasuke looked up from his own section of the scroll with minimal patience.
"It's the Multiple Shadow Clone Jutsu, not Clone Technique. They're completely different. Do you want to learn it or not?"
"Fine, fine—give me my half, then. It's still a clone technique, isn't it?!"
Naruto spread his section of the scroll flat and studied the Multiple Shadow Clone Jutsu entry closely, grinding through the hand seal descriptions and usage notes. Sasuke picked up his own half and worked through it in methodical silence.
He found what he was looking for quickly.
An A-rank Lightning Release jutsu: Chidori.
Sasuke set aside the S-rank entries he'd been staring at with envy—they were for a different day, and he was honest enough to know it. What he needed right now was something deployable against Hinata: a close-range technique that could punch through her guard with real force, fast enough that her Byakugan couldn't entirely nullify it, combining his existing lightning affinity with the right jutsu framework. Chidori fit every criterion. Just as Naruto had locked onto Multiple Shadow Clone Jutsu as his target, Sasuke locked onto Chidori as his. Whatever time they had left before someone showed up, he would use it well.
"Found you."
The voice came from directly above.
Both boys looked up. Hinata stood on the branch above them in the moonlight—arms folded, white eyes cool and still, silver light catching in the pale irises like two cold moons.
"W-what?! Hinata—how are you here?"
Naruto's stammer got cut short by Sasuke yanking him backward in a hard retreat—because the moment he registered the voice, Sasuke was already moving, and the instinct was right. Hinata dropped from the branch at the same instant: both gauntlets on her hands flaring with red flames, both fists driving toward the exact spot where Naruto had been crouching just a second before.
The impact detonated against the earth. Fire and smoke billowed outward, swallowing the entire clearing in a curtain of hot, roiling haze.