Chapter 459: Judgment Concluded
A textbook case. A person who found his ultimate pleasure in inflicting pain and taking lives, driven by nothing that could be called desperation, tragic history, or even a twisted sense of justice. Just bloodlust dressed up in religious clothing. Hidan was a clean, unambiguous sample of what pure evil looked like when it had no other complexity to hide behind.
Shisui had already made his decision about what to do with him.
The specifics of how to handle it could be worked out afterward. Right now his job was to finish the assessments. He signaled the guard to lower Hidan's cell door, cutting off the continued stream of curses and threats inside, and moved on to the next cell.
The second cell held two former members of the Seven Swordsmen of the Mist: Kushimaru Kuriarare and Jinpachi Munashi. The atmosphere here was different from Hidan's. Less feverish. More compressed, more restless.
Both were bound in the same chakra-suppressing chains that limited their movement and chakra output, but they were visibly more composed than Hidan. Their weapons had been confiscated on capture. Kushimaru's Silent Killing blade had been secured in the base storage. The Executioner's Blade had been claimed without much ceremony by Zabuza as a spoil of war, and no one had seriously expected to get it back.
When Shisui and Deidara entered, Kushimaru raised his head immediately, his voice rough.
"You. What happened to Ranmaru? Did Pain keep his end of the deal and look after him properly?"
The boy he was asking about was Ranmaru, the one he'd kept close, the one with the unusual red eyes.
Jinpachi, beside him, was less contained about his impatience. "How much longer are we supposed to sit here? Dying on a battlefield is one thing. Rotting away in a dark hole without even knowing why, that's a harder way to go."
Shisui answered neither of them. His purpose here was assessment. He set the Karmic Reflection Mirror in front of both men at a readable distance and waited.
The faint blue text surfaced first for Jinpachi Munashi.
Subject: Jinpachi Munashi
Direct warfare/non-mission killing: None
Total suffering value (weighted): Low
Karmic Index: 0.3
Judgment: A life like the pale moonlight reflected off a blade. Cold, indirect, the edge always bloodstained, yet not because the blade itself hungered for heat.
The framework of this judgment is somewhat lenient with you, not because your hands are innocent, but because you compressed your own will and moral judgment to near nonexistence, choosing to become a weapon that followed its wielder without question.
Your harmful acts wear the labels of mission, assignment, and contract. Those who pointed you bear the primary responsibility. You, as a blade so effective it forgot it still had the option to refuse, are classified by the rules as an instrument. And an instrument does not carry the guilt of the hand that swings it.
Shisui read the text and felt a small, tired twinge of irony. The mirror had a way of saying things that were accurate and uncomfortable at the same time.
Hidan represented pure active malice, something that enjoyed what it did and would have done it regardless of any instruction. Jinpachi was the opposite. A man who had stripped himself of independent moral judgment so completely that the rules could barely blame him for it, not because he was innocent, but because the version of him that could choose had been retired so long ago it barely left a trace in his karmic record. The wrong he carried was not a desire to harm. It was the choice, made at some earlier point, to stop being the kind of person who could refuse.
There was something bleak about that distinction that went beyond simple classification.
Deidara had disappeared at some point during the assessments, which was unsurprising. Watching what he called boring judgment proceedings could not compete with whatever new explosion he was currently designing in his workshop.
Shisui walked out of the holding area alone.
Based on the karmic reports from the mirror, his conclusions about each prisoner had taken shape clearly. The results were, in their own way, grim.
Only one person on the list qualified for release: Jinpachi Munashi.
He was the single prisoner whose killing had remained entirely within the bounds of assigned missions. The mirror's retroactive reading found no incidents of harm inflicted on people outside his mission parameters for personal reasons, no cruelty for its own sake, no one who died simply because he enjoyed it or lost control. A blade that only cut what it was aimed at. He would be released.
Getting Zabuza to give the Executioner's Blade back was, of course, not going to happen.
Kushimaru Kuriarare's situation was considerably worse. His pattern of behavior had turned killing into something ritualistic and aesthetic, something he extracted a specific kind of satisfaction from. Under that motivation, his blade had inevitably reached beyond mission targets. There were people in his record who had died without any connection to a legitimate assignment, people whose only role in his story was that they happened to be present when he was in the mood. His index was much higher than Jinpachi's, and his behavior had crossed the line from instrumental killing into something that included gratification as a component. He would not be released.
As for Hiruko, who had already been sealed inside the Sword of Totsuka during the earlier battle, he could stay exactly where he was, adrift in that eternal illusory sea. The mirror didn't need to weigh in on a verdict that had already been carried out.
Then there was the unexpected acquisition Deidara had brought back, the wandering old physician. The mirror had been illuminating on that front.
Subject: Shinn
Identity confirmed: Surface identity as a wandering healer traveling the shinobi world; actual identity as the mastermind behind the Takigakure restoration plan, controller and researcher of Zero-Tails, practitioner of forbidden body reanimation techniques and dark medical ninjutsu.
Direct warfare/non-mission killing: Human experimentation; sustained emotional manipulation and psychological destruction of a dependent individual; planning and executing a terror attack on a civilian settlement (Hoshigakure Fortress assault). All of the above fall under this category.
Total suffering value (weighted): High. Multiple compounding factors including long-term psychological harm, scale of operations, and deliberate targeting of vulnerable individuals.
Karmic Index: 8.5
Judgment: You wear the white robes of a healer, and inside them you have hidden a hunger spanning decades and a hatred built on nothing real. The so-called restoration you pursued was never more than a veil stretched over an appetite that could not be filled. You wanted to burn other people's lives and souls as fuel for your own ambitions.
The Zero-Tails you sought and controlled was a mirror of everything you refused to look at in yourself. The more desperately you chased resurrection and power, the more clearly you revealed that you had already become the most pitiable offering on your own altar of resentment.
The rules of this judgment offer you no clemency. What you planned and carried out was not war between nations. It was terror aimed at civilians and the existing order. What you did to human bodies was not the execution of any official task. It was atrocity committed for private ambition.
Your heaviest sin was this: you found a girl who had lost everything and wanted only to be warm, and you built a cage of manufactured affection around her, and you let her burn herself down as lamp oil for the altar of your ambitions.
Shisui pressed two fingers against his temple.
The only person in the entire prisoner population who barely qualified as something other than a genuine threat to the world was Jinpachi Munashi. One out of the lot of them.
He allowed himself a moment to process that fact, and then set it aside. There was still one more stop to make before the day's business was done.
He walked away from the holding area through a different corridor, quieter and less traveled. Toward the deeper section of the base.
In front of a particular door he stopped. He took a key from inside his vest, turned it in the lock, and knocked twice before pushing the door open.
"Yuu. It's me."
The room was technically classified as a cell. In practice it did not look like one.
It was not large, but it had been furnished with quiet care. A bed, a desk, a bookshelf stocked with braille volumes, a few small potted plants, a compact kitchen area in the corner. The air carried a faint, clean scent of soapwort that had become, over time, something Shisui associated specifically with this space.
Uchiha Yuu, a woman now fully into her twenties, lay on the bed asleep. Her black hair was spread across the plain pillow. Her face was still. Her chest rose and fell in a steady, unbothered rhythm.
Shisui sat down on the edge of the bed. It was only now, with the door closed behind him, that he let his own posture soften. He breathed out slowly.
He looked at her sleeping face. The health in her cheeks. The quiet in her expression.
The lines that were usually tight in his face came loose without him deciding to let them.
But alongside the relief, a quieter worry surfaced.
Something had been off recently.
Shisui's brow drew slightly together as he looked at her more carefully. Over the past weeks, he had come by in the daytime and found her in this kind of deep sleep more and more frequently. Her routines were normally steady and predictable. But this month there had been several occasions, like today, where she had been asleep in the middle of the afternoon, and when she woke she always seemed to carry a heaviness behind her eyes that didn't fully lift.
He stayed seated beside her, watching her breathe, not yet willing to wake her, thinking about what it might mean.