Watching Shinju's retreating back, Itachi's chest tightened with a flicker of panic.
He couldn't let the boy just walk away.
This child knew things he himself did not.
"Please wait—Shinju-kun!"
The words burst out louder than he intended.
Shinju stopped and turned, dark eyes calm, as if he'd expected to be called.
"Is there something else, Itachi-kun?" His address shifted—polite, measured.
Itachi closed the distance in quick steps. The pride of a prodigy had evaporated with the impossible demonstration he'd just witnessed. Now he was simply a junior seeking instruction.
"Shinju-kun, the idea of using air's lift—of stabilizing the tail trace—I've never seen it in any book. How did you arrive at it?"
Shinju's expression stayed even.
"I've read a lot, thought a lot, and learned to draw inferences. Do that long enough, and answers appear."
Vague. Irrefutable. A line that signaled the topic was closed.
Itachi understood he wouldn't get more there. He hesitated, then tried another door.
"Shinju-kun… what are you training for?"
A broad question. Almost rude. But he needed to glimpse more of the boy in front of him.
Shinju glanced back and replied with a question of his own. "And you, Itachi-kun? What drives you to train so hard?"
Itachi's eyes complicated at once. He looked toward the village.
"For… peace," he murmured. "I want the power to protect the village's peace."
"Peace?" Shinju echoed, unreadable. "Do you think Konoha is at peace right now?"
Is it?
Faces flashed through Itachi's mind—his clansmen's simmering resentment, the elders' suspicion of Uchiha, his own misery between two grinding stones.
Silence.
Shinju didn't press. He spoke on, almost idly. "If power is spent propping up a peace full of cracks and lies, it's a cheap thing."
Itachi flinched.
A single sentence had put a finger on the sorest point in his heart.
He couldn't help answering with the creed that had carried him this far. "But sometimes, to protect what matters most, sacrifices are necessary," he said, with a stubbornness that edged on obsession. "For the 'whole' that is the village, we have to give up some 'parts.' That's a Konoha shinobi's resolve."
As he said it, he thought of the Uchiha—of Father and Mother—and, more quietly, of Sasuke.
It was the doctrine poured into him from the moment he joined ANBU.
Hiruzen and Danzo's lesson in the "Will of Fire."
Where Konoha spreads, so spreads the flame.
To keep the great tree alive, sometimes you prune the branches that threaten the trunk.
Painful—but "right."
He had always believed it.
Shinju smiled.
Not scorn. Not contempt. Something like pity.
He looked at Itachi the way one looks at a child lost in a dead-end alley of the mind.
Then he asked a question big enough to turn a world upside down.
"Itachi-kun."
"Have you ever wondered…"
"Why choose at all?"
Itachi went rigid, as if struck by lightning.
Why… choose at all?
What did that even mean?
Village and clan were opposite pans of a scale. When balance broke, you discarded one to save the other. Wasn't that obvious?
Wasn't that the inescapable fate of shinobi?
Reading the shock and confusion written on his face, Shinju continued in a voice so calm it felt cruel.
"What is power for, if not to protect everything?"
"To protect the village—and the clan. Comrades—and family."
"True strength isn't the agony of choosing which side to sacrifice."
He stepped forward and moved past Itachi, close enough that his next words brushed the ear like a god's whisper.
"True strength is being strong enough… to create a new ending where no one has to be sacrificed."
He didn't stop again. His footsteps faded.
Itachi stood alone in the center of the grounds like a statue turned to stone.
Every word had become a razor-edged kunai, carving lines across the convictions he'd held sacred.
Why… must I choose?
Why… can't I protect everything?
Is sacrifice… necessary?
The "greater good" he'd vowed to shoulder, the "resolve" he'd steeled himself to bear—all at once, small. Weak.
Yes.
Choosing sacrifice only proves you aren't strong enough.
Because you're not strong enough, you can't save village and clan together; you smother your lack under a heroic word—"sacrifice."
Shinju, instead, had pointed to a possibility too arrogant to have ever crossed his mind.
Create a brand-new ending.
One where no one dies for the other.
Can such a thing be done?
Itachi's body began to tremble.
He'd thought himself alone on a dark, thorny path toward "peace."
Shinju had hacked open another road through his night.
A road drenched in sunlight, toward a perfect world he'd never dared hope for.
But—by what right?
By what power could he say such a thing?
To create a new ending would take strength beyond terrifying.
Unless…
A wild thought took root and spread.
Minato's return. Kushina's recovery. Could they be connected to that boy?
If he truly wielded power that brushed "creation," something on par with the Sage of Six Paths—then perhaps it was possible.
Then his words weren't arrogance.
They were fact. A fact he intended to make real.
Itachi's head snapped up, eyes following the path Shinju had taken.
The boy felt less like a child than a god walking among men—
A breaker of the rules that governed the shinobi world.
And Itachi, for the first time, could see another way.
A way that did not demand he raise a blade against Father and Mother—nor drown the clan in his own hands.
(End of Chapter)
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