"In our asses!"
After that brief, mushroom-trip, idiot's hallucination where the Five Great Nations' rulers convinced themselves they had "numbers advantage," every single one of them dropped the idea of confronting Uchiha Yōrin head-on.
They couldn't win. Not even close. Not "probably lose." Not "might lose." It was flat-out impossible.
A million troops? Pointless. Ten million? Same. The shinobi army would slice them up like vegetables.
And even if they somehow couldn't win on the battlefield, shinobi who specialized in assassination and special operations had nine hundred different ways to kill them anyway.
Nine. Hundred.
The moment they realized the situation had fully slipped out of their hands, those idiots panicked.
If it were a normal internal shinobi civil war, the daimyōs could still play their old game—alliances, betrayals, pitting villages against each other, using shinobi as disposable knives to slaughter one another.
But it wasn't that world anymore.
All shinobi had joined the Ninshū.
Meaning they'd all become the Ninshū's—Uchiha Yōrin's—loyal dogs.
So now the daimyōs were left with only one option:
Send "ordinary people" armies to fight shinobi.
Which was a joke.
A complete joke.
"Misunderstanding! Misunderstanding, okay?! This is all a misunderstanding!"
As fast as they could, the daimyōs sent envoys to every camp, groveling to the "honored shinobi lords," insisting this was all the work of underlings acting on their own.
"Those little island-brained bastards going rogue? Totally normal, right?"
"You killed them? Great! Brilliant! Kill them louder!"
"Now that you've killed them… you won't kill me, right?"
Who knew?
Depends on Yorin-sama's mood, heh heh heh.
So yes—every diplomatic attempt collapsed in record time.
Under the heat of war fever, the Ninshū's army split into five fronts and surged toward the capitals of the Five Great Nations.
More precisely: each major hidden village (plus nearby small-country hidden villages) advanced on its corresponding nation.
And then something happened that even Uchiha Yōrin didn't expect:
The Five Great Villages' morale shot through the roof.
He'd assumed shinobi villages and their nations were too intertwined—too much "you in me, me in you"—and that fighting "their own country" would make people hesitate.
His original plan was to swap matchups:
Kumogakure attacks the Land of Fire, Konoha attacks the Land of Lightning—so everyone could fight without emotional baggage.
But it turned out he didn't need to.
The shinobi rank-and-file were thrilled to go to war with their own daimyō's state. One by one, they were practically frothing with excitement.
Sure, the upper leadership had a bit of hesitation, a bit of regret—but it wasn't enough to stop anything.
Yōrin thought about it and immediately understood why.
When dealing with village leadership, the nobles could at least put on polite masks—smile, flatter, pretend to be "reasonable."
But to the mid- and low-rank shinobi? Noble arrogance oozed out of every pore. Disgusting, obvious, constant.
And it was always the mid- and low-rank people who got contracted for missions.
Decades of that meant one thing:
The anger had piled up past the breaking point.
Normally, in "normal times," shinobi endured. They could swallow humiliation that would crush other people.
But now?
Now they had Yorin-sama.
Now they didn't have to endure.
So the mood became:
"We're going to return every ounce of oppression those bastards poured on us—tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold! I'm going to kill their whole clan!"
Well… not literally "whole clans."
Even fueled by revenge, the shinobi army didn't become a pack of rabid animals.
Their discipline still held.
All violence had to stay on the battlefield.
After combat, prisoners weren't treated kindly, but they weren't casually tortured either.
If someone deserved punishment, there was no random private vengeance—there were interrogations, then public sentencing and execution.
And with genjutsu, interrogation was laughably easy.
Interrogating shinobi could take real work—many were trained to resist.
But pampered nobles? People who got uncomfortable from missing one meal?
Even the most basic illusion could make them sob and confess everything, right down to wetting the bed as children.
So they died.
And under equal law—truly equal law—they had to.
Because the only reason they hadn't died before wasn't that morality or law didn't exist.
It was that above morality and law sat a bigger rule:
Noble privilege.
Once "everyone is equal" became a real principle and privilege was erased, you didn't even need to go further—no radical redistribution required.
Just put their crimes on the table and judge them fairly…
…and most of them were already dead men walking.
So the shinobi army advanced like a flood toward the five capitals, crushing noble militias and hired swords like speed bumps.
Meanwhile, the daimyōs piled troops into their capitals—tens of thousands, even more—desperate to build a wall of bodies.
But even the stupidest among them understood:
Against a shinobi army one-fifth their number, they had almost no chance.
The Fire Daimyō was the same.
Inside the once-bustling, ornate, secretive daimyo palace, his face was pale, his voice weak.
The ministers who normally shouted the loudest now hung their heads like defeated quail.
He looked around and realized the "glorious court" was just a room full of useless trash.
Wooden dolls.
They couldn't produce a single workable plan as Konoha's forces drew closer.
So why were they even being fed?
But he still had to ask, because there was nothing else.
"Speak. What do we do now?"
A loud, dramatic idiot jumped up at once:
"Fight! We must fight! Show those miserable shinobi what real samurai spirit is!!"
The Fire Daimyō's head started ringing.
Of course it did.
He was surrounded idiots.
"In a normal day," that kind of "die for honor" speech might earn fake praise.
But today?
He was done pretending.
"Throw him out."
Even while being dragged away, the idiot kept screaming:
"Honor! Honor, damn it! We nobles can't bow to lowly shinobi! Even if we die—"
The Fire Daimyō snapped, furious:
"Stuff his mouth!"
The screams turned to muffled grunts, but the Daimyō was still shaking with rage, breathing hard.
He replayed his own actions and—bitterly—found no obvious mistake.
Hell, his earlier move to adopt Uchiha Yōrin and name him heir?
In hindsight, that might've been the best play he'd made.
The only problem was Yōrin refused.
"So there must be a path. There has to be… what is it?"
"If I kneel and cry, will he forgive me?"
Probably not.
"So is the Land of Fire—the strongest, greatest nation—really going to die on my watch?"
The thought crushed him. He almost started sobbing.
But if he knew what Uchiha Yōrin was actually thinking, he might've relaxed.
Because Yōrin didn't plan to erase the Five Great Nations right now.
Not yet.
He didn't have enough administrative cadres. If he toppled them immediately, the world would spiral into chaos.
Use the old nobles to govern? That would poison the new regime from day one.
Copy the old aristocratic system wholesale?
Then his "new empire" would rot fast—like a short-lived dynasty that collapses in decades.
So this war wasn't meant to annihilate the Five Great Nations.
It was a rehearsal.
A vaccine.
A brutal demonstration of force meant to teach everyone what the new hierarchy was:
From this point on, the Ninshū would be the master of the world.
And the Five Great Nations?
Just slaves—taken from, used, and discarded at will.
~~~
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