Chapter 253: Nothing to Hide, For Now
The Fifth Hokage's inauguration ceremony concluded without incident. No one was foolish enough to cause trouble on a day like this.
The late winter dawn pushed back the cold and damp that had gathered through the night. Spring was not far off.
Since the new Hokage Building was still little more than a shell, the actual offices had to be relocated. The Police Force headquarters was requisitioned on a temporary basis and everyone was crammed inside.
There was no better option. Every other department building had stood close to the Hokage Building, and close to the Hokage Building meant it had been leveled in the battle. The whole stretch of them was gone. The Police Force headquarters had survived only because of its particular history — it sat slightly apart from the rest, at a remove that had kept it out of the destruction.
The alternative was moving operations back to the clan grounds, and that was something Hyuga Ritsu had no interest in doing. The office and the home were two entirely separate things, and the line between them was not to be blurred. Once that boundary started to fade, something essential about a person's life went with it.
People did not live in order to work.
And so Hyuga Ritsu began his tenure as Fifth Hokage from an office inside the Police Force headquarters, and Konoha entered the era of the Fifth Hokage.
The first thing he did there was receive Yamanaka Inoichi, who had come to report.
"My lord Hokage. Mission accomplished."
Inoichi's voice was thin and his face was the color of old paper. The dark circles under his eyes were beyond concealing. He looked like a lemon that had been wrung dry.
He was carrying two scrolls.
"These are the results from searching Uchiha Tatsuhata's memories."
He stepped forward and set them on the desk.
"You've worked hard, Inoichi."
Hyuga Ritsu took the scrolls but didn't open them yet. "Get some rest after this. The Interrogation Department is going to need you at the top of your game going forward."
"Yes, my lord."
Yamanaka Inoichi could barely contain his emotion as he withdrew. The exhaustion hadn't been for nothing. The way things looked, it wouldn't be long before he was the one running the Interrogation Department. He left in good spirits, eager to sleep off the three days of accumulated fatigue. Excitement could only hold off tiredness for so long.
Once Inoichi was gone, the room held only two people.
Hyuga Ritsu, and Uchiha Tatsuhata — who lay on the floor with his hands and feet bound tight, his chakra pathways completely sealed, motionless as a corpse.
The Yamanaka clan member had worked himself half to death extracting those memories. The one whose memories had been extracted hadn't had an easy time of it either. Having someone sift through your mind wasn't a pleasant experience. It felt like a thin blade moving slowly and deliberately through everything you had ever thought or felt.
But the worst part for Tatsuhata wasn't the pain.
It was that Uchiha Madara and Black Zetsu had never come for him.
Now, lying here again in front of Hyuga Ritsu, he understood for certain that he had been left behind. The Moon's Eye Plan no longer needed him.
He felt some disappointment. Not despair.
He couldn't blame anyone for this. It was his own carelessness. His own failure to be thorough enough, careful enough. He had lost and been taken in a single engagement. That was the truth of it.
The small consolation was that his death wouldn't deal any real blow to the Moon's Eye Plan. The old man Uchiha Madara would continue driving it forward, and the beautiful world they had envisioned would still be built.
"Let's see what useful things turned up inside your head."
Hyuga Ritsu glanced at Tatsuhata, then set that aside for the moment. He opened the scrolls first rather than reaching for the Chimera Technique.
The red scroll held a record of Uchiha Tatsuhata's history — beginning from the day Uchiha Madara had rescued him, running all the way to his attempt to capture Hiruko as a research subject for Orochimaru. The record was incomplete, full of gaps, but its value was undeniable.
Among other things, it documented the locations of numerous secret bases that Uchiha Madara had established at various points across the ninja world. The location of Orochimaru's hidden research base in the Land of Vegetables was also marked precisely on the map.
Madara and Orochimaru would certainly abandon those sites the moment they realized the information had been compromised. But even they couldn't clean everything up in so short a time.
There might be something worth collecting.
Hyuga Ritsu set that thought aside for later, put down the red scroll, and opened the blue one. Ten seconds in, his eyes went wide.
"This..."
Something bright and unmistakable moved through those white eyes.
The blue scroll was a catalogue of jutsu — ninjutsu, genjutsu, secret techniques, and forbidden arts — pulled from Uchiha Tatsuhata's mind. The sheer volume was remarkable. The quality was even more so.
Setting aside the Reanimation Jutsu and the Shadow Walking Technique, which had originated in Konoha to begin with, the remaining techniques drawn from other villages were staggering in their breadth.
"Lightning Release training methods... Hell Stab: One-Finger Nukite. That's the Third Raikage's work, isn't it."
He kept reading.
"Black Lightning secret techniques. You really did strip the Third Raikage clean, didn't you."
He couldn't help the remark.
There was more. Secret Art: Camouflage Concealment. Earth Style: Mountain Soil Technique. Earth Style: Hard Gale Style. Those were almost certainly from Iwagakure — Earth Style was their specialty, and even Konoha's best Earth Style users weren't in the same class as Rock ninja who had devoted themselves to nothing else.
And further still: Wind Style: Wind Blade, Wind Style: Great Sickle Weasel, puppet technique methods. Those had come from the Sand ninja.
Then his eyes stopped.
A single name on the scroll. He went completely still.
Forbidden Art: One's Own Life Reincarnation.
His eyes were wide. The disbelief written across his face was genuine.
"Chiyo actually developed this technique?"
This was one of only two techniques in the entire ninja world capable of bringing the dead back to life. Unlike the Outer Path: Samsara of Heavenly Life Technique, which required the Rinnegan, One's Own Life Reincarnation had no such precondition. The one thing the two techniques shared was the same absolute cost: the life of the caster.
His mind was already moving. He looked down at Tatsuhata lying on the floor.
"Uchiha Tatsuhata. You stole Nagato's corpse. Was this why? Were you planning to use this technique to bring him back?"
The results Yamanaka Inoichi had obtained hadn't included what Tatsuhata had done after taking Nagato's body. That wasn't a failure on Inoichi's part. Memory extraction was genuinely difficult work at the best of times, and even a targeted search for a specific event offered no guarantee of results. Inoichi having come back with this much already placed him at the very top of what the ninja world's mind-reading techniques could accomplish — especially given that the subject was a Mangekyō Sharingan user with an exceptionally powerful will.
Tatsuhata gave no response. He didn't move.
Hyuga Ritsu wasn't particularly concerned whether he answered or not. Going by everything that had followed, Tatsuhata's plan had clearly failed — which would explain why he had ended up working with Orochimaru on the artificial vessel project. That told the story well enough.
His attention returned fully to the scroll.
If Konoha had possessed this technique before, the Fourth Hokage might not have died. It wouldn't have been hard to find someone in the village willing to give their life for Minato's sake. Of course, not everyone could learn a technique like this, so it wasn't certain — but it was possible.
"What a find."
"Of all the things to stumble onto."
He finished reading the entry on One's Own Life Reincarnation and found his mood considerably improved. Not because he was planning to sacrifice himself to save anyone — leaving aside the fact that selfless devotion of that particular kind wasn't in his nature, the technique had the significant limitation of only being able to revive someone who had died recently, with a reasonably intact body.
No, he had other uses in mind for this.
And beyond the technique's practical applications, the Yin Release and Yang Release principles underlying it were valuable knowledge on their own terms. Chiyo of the Sand was a once-in-a-generation talent.
After a moment he reached forward and pressed the call bell on his desk.
Two seconds later the door opened and Yūhi Kurenai stepped inside, her voice quiet. "Lord Hokage, what do you need?"
She had not been left without work when the Fourth Hokage died. Hyuga Ritsu had kept her on as Hokage secretary when he took office. There was no particular reason to replace someone who already knew the job.
"Kurenai, notify the Hokage Advisor, both advisory elders, the Uchiha clan head, and Commander Nara. I need them in my office. Something important to discuss."
The upper power structure of the village had not changed. Both advisory elders had been elevated by Minato, but Hyuga Ritsu saw no reason to replace them — they did good work, and frankly he had no one of his own to promote into those positions. Filling the village's senior leadership with Hyuga clan members was not a path he intended to walk. The optics alone would be damning, and the practical damage to his own clan would far outweigh any advantage.
Better to leave things as they were. Stable. Undisturbed.
"Yes, sir."
Yūhi Kurenai went to carry out the order.
About eight minutes later Nara Shikaku arrived last, looking at the assembled faces and offering a quick apology. "My apologies, Lord Hokage. I was delayed."
"I'm the one who should apologize for pulling you away from whatever you were working on." Hyuga Ritsu waved it off. "But the reason I called you all here at the cost of interrupting your work is that there are things that genuinely need to be arranged, and I think you've already guessed what I'm about to say."
Hiruko looked at the figure lying on the floor. "Inoichi's done with him?"
"This scroll is one part of what he pulled out. Pass it around." Hyuga Ritsu tossed the red scroll to Hiruko.
The scroll moved through the room — Hiruko, then Torikaze, then Fugaku, and finally Nara Shikaku, who read it last and set it back on the desk.
Hyuga Ritsu put it away. He looked around at the group. "Thoughts?"
Hiruko's expression was tight. "We need to find Orochimaru and Uchiha Madara. We can't allow them to keep working. If they actually succeed in creating a vessel that can hold the Rinnegan and use it to bring Madara back properly..." He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to. "It would be a catastrophe for the entire ninja world."
"Uchiha Madara." Akimichi Torikaze shook his head slowly, his expression troubled. "To think that all of this traces back to him, still pulling strings from behind everything. I just..." He trailed off into a long exhale. He had seen that man as a boy — the man who had stood as an equal to the First Hokage. He had never imagined that at his age he would still be dealing with the shadow that man cast. Life had a way of taking turns no one planned for.
Inuzuka Jaw's face was serious. "Lord Hokage, my recommendation is to organize teams immediately and begin clearing out Uchiha Madara's and Orochimaru's known hideouts across the ninja world. We're unlikely to catch either of them, but it still needs to be done."
"We need to be careful, though," Nara Shikaku said. "If a team actually runs into Uchiha Madara or Orochimaru, the situation would become very dangerous."
He phrased it diplomatically. The reality was that almost no one in the village could walk away from an encounter with either of those two. Dangerous didn't begin to cover it.
Uchiha Fugaku had been listening quietly, and there was something bitter sitting in his expression that he couldn't fully suppress. His ancestor was truly something else — not a trace of concern for the descendants he was dragging into this mess. He was grateful, at least, that the Fifth Hokage appeared to take the same position as the Fourth had: no intention of holding the Uchiha clan collectively responsible.
But the unease wouldn't leave him.
He weighed it, and made his decision. "Lord Hokage, the Uchiha clan considers this our responsibility to address. Every jonin in the clan, myself included — use us however you see fit."
He felt it was necessary for the Uchiha to show a clear and active willingness here. Whatever Ritsu's own views, the rest of the village might still look at his clan differently after all of this, and standing visibly on the right side of it was the least they could do.
Hyuga Ritsu looked at him and offered a mild smile. "I'm glad to have the Uchiha clan's help, Fugaku. And for that matter, the Hyuga clan won't be sitting this out either. I'm planning to pull our best people together and organize them into multiple strike teams."
He paused. "That said, Shikaku's point about the danger is correct. With the exception of myself, there's probably no one in this village who can reliably come out ahead against Orochimaru or reanimated Madara. So if something does go wrong out there, I'll move to support immediately. With any luck, maybe we can actually put an end to both of them."