A long scroll unfurled slowly before Hinata's eyes. The ink was still fresh enough to smell, proof that it had been printed not long ago. And the contents recorded on it were nothing less than the entirety of the Scroll of Seals.
Ever since that night when she'd used the camera she always carried to photograph the Scroll's contents, Hinata had forced herself to temporarily forget the whole affair. The Third Hokage was no fool—even a whiff of suspicion could send him digging, and digging hard.
So it wasn't until the Konoha Publishing Factory she'd proposed was officially up and running that Hinata finally chose an unremarkable window of time and ordered one of the factory's ordinary photo developers to process the film containing those images of forbidden techniques. Then she'd had all the prints duplicated.
By any shinobi-world standard, the Scroll of Seals was an undisputed treasure trove of ninjutsu. It could be considered the distilled essence of every technique Konoha had developed over its century-plus of existence. Without Naruto's plot armor, even Hinata would have had almost no chance of getting her hands on it. Actually obtaining it was one thing; breaking the seals protecting it afterward was an entirely separate, unsolvable problem.
But regardless, the fact remained: she now possessed this collection of forbidden arts, and she had every reason to believe she'd pulled it off without leaving a single trace.
"I don't have any pressing need for new ninjutsu at the moment, but I'm more than happy to browse."
Opening her Byakugan with practiced caution, Hinata didn't mind activating her full field of vision. The last thing she wanted was to be deep in fascinated reading only to have someone barge in unannounced.
This time, since she could take her time, Hinata didn't rush through the pages the way she had before. The Scroll of Seals truly lived up to its reputation as the accumulated brilliance of generations of Konoha shinobi. Many of the forbidden techniques it contained were so extreme that even Hinata felt a chill reading them. In a certain sense, the creators of these techniques had genuinely crossed the line into outright insanity.
Forbidden arts that used living humans as sacrificial offerings were scattered throughout. The most widely known—Impure World Reincarnation—went without saying. But there were also methods that mutated a living person's body into toxins and corpse-worms, then weaponized those things against enemies.
If those techniques at least had the decency to use someone else's body as the sacrifice, then the Eight Branches Technique took the concept a step further by making the user themselves the offering. This jutsu fundamentally removed the practitioner from the category of "human." Its core principle was to fuse the user's body with a summoned white serpent, granting monstrous regeneration and mobility at the cost of one's humanity.
Unsurprisingly, the only person in the entire Naruto franchise who had successfully used the Eight Branches Technique was one of the Legendary Sannin—Orochimaru. All those descriptions of him as "no longer human" weren't exaggerations in the slightest. Orochimaru had well and truly ceased to be human. He was a giant snake wearing human skin.
"Seems like... no matter the era, humanity's capacity for madness doesn't change with the level of technology."
Muttering this confirmation to herself, Hinata did, to a degree, set aside some of her dismissiveness toward the shinobi of this world. For her, this was undeniably a place of cultural backwardness and systemic decay. But these blood-soaked forbidden techniques made one thing abundantly clear: the beings called "shinobi" approached killing and survival with a ferocity and ingenuity that demanded a certain respect.
"Hmph. Still—I won't lose. Hm?"
Just then, her gaze flickered. A thoroughly unremarkable technique leapt out at her from the page. It appeared to have been added relatively late, and the handwriting carried a strange sense of hesitation—as if the person recording it hadn't been sure whether it belonged here at all.
"Chimera Technique? What's this?"
The name made Hinata's eyebrow twitch upward. Out of professional habit from her previous life, she might not have cared for the Naruto franchise, but she prided herself on having a thorough command of every detail within it. This so-called "Chimera Technique," however, drew a complete blank no matter how hard she searched her memory.
"Suspicious indeed. Could it be something that never appeared in the main storyline? If so, it's either too weak to matter... or strong enough to break the plot's balance."
She ran the analysis quickly and arrived at that conclusion, then focused her attention to see exactly what kind of technique could have earned a place in the Scroll of Seals.
But at that moment, Hinata's eyes narrowed. In her Byakugan's field of vision, she could clearly see Sasuke walking down the corridor—and heading straight for her room.
What does this hothead want?
Frowning, Hinata swiftly rolled up her copy of the Scroll of Seals and pressed herself cautiously against the wall. Sasuke was the type to fixate on things, and when he sought someone out voluntarily, it was almost never good news.
In the original story, when he went to Kakashi on his own initiative, it was to learn Lightning Blade. When he sought out Naruto, it was to fight him. The first time he approached Orochimaru voluntarily, it was to train under him. The second time, he ran a sword clean through the man. And when he finally went to find his brother, it was to cut him down too.
In short, being sought out by Sasuke was decidedly not a positive sign. Either he was there to learn something, or he was there to kill you.
Sakura, credit where it was due, had been far smarter about this. She was always the one who went to Sasuke first, and the result was a reasonably successful marriage and a daughter.
Superstitious as it might sound, Hinata didn't consider these coincidences at all.
The takeaway was clear: Sasuke was someone intensely goal-oriented and, on some fundamental level, extraordinary coldness and selfishness. When someone like that came to you, it was either to extract value or to put you in the ground.
Perhaps that analysis was a bit one-sided, but it was more than sufficient for interpreting Sasuke's current behavior.
Hinata had never been the type to judge people by their inner motives. She only cared about observable actions. Whether Sasuke's warped personality was the product of an agonizing past, or whether he'd one day have a change of heart and become an anonymous guardian of the shinobi world—none of that concerned her. All she knew was that right now, Sasuke was undeniably a willful, selfish, cold-blooded stoic.
Maybe he'd grow out of it eventually, but Hinata had zero intention of being his whetstone.
"Hinata, are you there?"
Standing before her door in the corridor, Sasuke's voice carried a note of genuine hesitation. For him, what he was about to do wasn't exactly unexpected—from the day he'd first encountered Hinata, he'd always known this moment would come.
Hinata pulled open the sliding door with a cold expression. She'd long since factored in the Naruto franchise's proud tradition of students turning on their masters, but surely this particular hothead wasn't ready to make his move just yet?
"What is it, Sasuke? Hit a wall with the Ame no Habakiri training?"
She met his gaze head-on and made no effort to hide the fact that her Byakugan was active. With someone like him, you couldn't be too careful.
"No. I have a request."
Sasuke shook his head, took a deep breath, and spoke with clear resolve. "Fight me. One-on-one."
True, they'd clashed several times before, all ending in Sasuke's defeat. But as a shinobi, he had no intention of giving up on challenging Hinata. Previously, he'd hoped to bring Naruto along for a two-on-one attempt, but now... he no longer wanted the dead-last involved.
"Oh? Interesting. You want to gauge your current limits? Using me as the benchmark?"
The request eased the tension in Hinata's brow. Good. This particular Sasuke was undeniably shameless, but at least he rarely lied outright. If he was framing this as a request for a duel, then that was probably all there was to it.
"Exactly. And as descendants of the Uchiha and Hyuga clans, I'd think you'd have some interest in seeing how we measure up against each other."
Sasuke held her gaze, steadying himself. Hinata's presence had grown increasingly daunting of late, but if he could strip away all that oppressive authority and see her simply as a fellow practitioner of the Sacred Fists, then at least they could meet on relatively equal footing.
"Fine. But I don't waste effort for nothing. So if you lose—you know the drill. There will be consequences."
Hinata narrowed her eyes. Sasuke's timing was anything but random: he'd chosen the exact interval between completing one phase of training and beginning the next. His intent was to test where they both stood before their levels rose again after learning their ultimate techniques.
Or was it something else?
"Thinking I've grown attached to power and influence?"
Left hand on her hip, Hinata's lips curled into a smile with just a hint of ferocity. She raised her right hand, her tone brimming with confidence. "Then let's go. Or—would you rather start right now?"
That last line carried an unmistakable edge of danger. Sasuke's nerves tensed instinctively. He could read what it meant, but he didn't back down. Instead, he gave a slight nod. "Yeah. This is a shinobi's fight, not a samurai's duel. So—now... begin!!"
BOOM!!
A roar of blazing fire erupted the instant Sasuke finished speaking. Hinata, grin twisted with savage delight, drove her fist into the spot where Sasuke had been standing without a shred of hesitation. The boy who'd thrown himself backward with a look of shock burst apart with a poof into a burning log.
But the Body Replacement Technique didn't slow Hinata's judgment for even a heartbeat. The pale-eyed girl launched herself upward in one fluid, unhesitating leap toward the rooftop. Sasuke, having dodged the opening blow, bolted for the tree line nearby. The Byakugan could see through most situations at a macro level, but fine detail was its weakness—meaning dense forest terrain would still create obstacles for her in combat.
Now then—this was the kind of interaction that belonged to the two of them alone!