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[— Manga Scene —]
After Kabuto informed Orochimaru that the preliminaries had ended and that the final exams would begin soon, the latter remained silent for a moment as he contemplated the stillness around him.
"Anyway, this country is peaceful…"
Orochimaru said as he looked outside.
"Rather, I should say it knows nothing but peace…"
Then he added in a mocking tone:
"The other lands are busy strengthening their military power."
"Can you kill them now?"
Kabuto asked from behind him.
"I think so…"
Orochimaru answered with a faint smile.
"But I'm not sure. First, I'll enjoy killing that old man…"
"Really?"
Kabuto asked, then watched his master in a brief silence.
"It seems to me you're still hesitating…"
Orochimaru did not answer directly, so Kabuto continued, laying out what he had concluded.
"The hidden powers are on the verge of clashing in a long and violent conflict…"
"And the Sound Village is one of them."
"You're trying to provoke it…"
Orochimaru remained silent, then the conversation tilted toward someone else.
"That exceptional person, am I right?"
Orochimaru said.
"Uchiha Sasuke, correct?"
Kabuto replied as he adjusted his glasses.
"Heh heh."
A short laugh escaped Orochimaru.
"Your guess is excellent. You understand me well."
Kabuto said.
"When I was gathering information on Sasuke-kun, I wanted to gather information on those three as well."
"I was brazen enough to take their attacks so I could learn their abilities…"
Then he paused a little before adding:
"It seems I still haven't earned your full trust yet… have I?"
A smile barely appeared on Orochimaru's face.
"Do I really need to explain to you that you are my right-hand man, and that your place with me cannot be compared to those children?"
"That alone is proof of my trust in you…"
Then he turned toward him and said:
"Therefore…"
"I'll ask you to look after Sasuke-kun…"
"I gave him the Cursed Seal, and then Kakashi sealed it."
"I want you to abduct him now, before the darkness fades from his mind…"
"All right. That's nothing, really."
Kabuto answered, though he did not completely hide his observation.
"It's not like you to be this impatient…"
"There's something I'm concerned about."
Orochimaru quickly understood what he meant, then said as he raised his eyes to him:
"Regarding Uzumaki Naruto, correct?"
"Sasuke-kun is full of vengeance, he lives to avenge himself on his older brother Itachi."
Kabuto said, recalling what he had gathered.
"He cannot die until he achieves his goal…"
"But when he fought me and attacked me, even though he knew how dangerous that was…"
His words halted for a moment, then he continued:
"I thought he was the type to be cautious with his life…"
[— End Scene —]
In the art store in Konoha, Hatake Sakumo's gaze did not linger long on Sasuke's name, nor on Naruto's mention, nor even on the Sound Village.
It settled on one sentence alone.
First, I'll enjoy killing that old man.
It was a statement far more explicit than it should have been, but what drew him to it was not its bluntness alone. It was the calm with which it had been spoken. A man who talks about killing his teacher or his leader in such a tone is not usually a man swept along by a passing burst of anger. He is a man who has crossed a long distance within himself before allowing such a sentence to reach his tongue.
Sakumo slowly lifted his eyes from the volume.
In the quiet corner of the shop, Orochimaru was sitting alone as usual, making no attempt to share the reading with anyone, and not even showing that discomfort usually found on the face of someone who has just glimpsed an unpleasant image of himself in the pages. The volume rested in his hands, and his fingers turned the pages with steady calm, as if the scene had not surprised him, as if the future had not placed an accusation before him, but had merely revealed something he already knew.
Sakumo kept his eyes on him for a moment longer.
What disturbed him most about Orochimaru was not the statement itself, but the absence of surprise on his present face. If what he had read were truly far from him, some sign of aversion would have appeared, or mockery, or at least that defensive coldness men resort to when they see an image they do not wish to acknowledge. But this stillness… was worse.
It was the stillness of a man who could already see the road ahead, even if he had not yet walked it.
And in that exact moment, Sakumo did not think of Orochimaru merely as a gifted shinobi, nor simply as one of the Third Hokage's disciples. He thought of him as a man who might one day reach a point where his teacher would seem to him no more than the final obstacle.
That was why the danger, in his eyes, did not seem connected to a sudden hatred.
But to a conviction slowly fermenting.
And while Sakumo watched him from afar, Orochimaru in that same corner kept turning the next page, paying little mind to the murmurs beginning to spread through the shop.
…
Orochimaru was not surprised by the scene.
In truth, there was something within him closer to cold curiosity than to shock. It was not the sentence spoken by his future self that caught his attention first, but the way Kabuto had picked up on his hesitation between the words, then proceeded to link the villages, the finals, Sasuke, and Naruto together with a lightness possessed only by a mind that learned at an unsettling speed.
To see a boy like that standing beside him in the future, reading him with such precision, was no ordinary thing.
As for the other sentence…
First, I'll enjoy killing that old man.
He repeated it in his mind once, then once again, without a change in his expression.
'Has it truly gone that far?'
The question within him was not one of self-reproach, nor one of regret. It was a question of understanding. The question of a man who had looked upon a glimpse of his coming path, then paused at one particular point to examine it the way one examines a rare specimen.
'What makes the bond between a disciple and his teacher descend to such a degree of cold harshness?'
'Was the cause the village?'
'Or power?'
'Or that kind of distance that begins small, then widens year after year until, in the end, only the old name remains, stripped of its old meaning?'
Orochimaru closed his eyes for a brief second, then opened them again.
In his memory, Sarutobi Hiruzen was not merely a powerful shinobi seated in the chair of rule. He was the teacher who knew how to extend his hand to those who deserved it, how to bestow knowledge with measured generosity, and how to look at his three disciples as though they were a different future that could be shaped. If his future self had uttered such a sentence about him, then it could not have been merely a disagreement over a decision, nor a simple professional rift.
'No. Something deeper than that must have happened.'
'Something that ultimately made the teacher stand completely on the opposite side from me.'
And yet Orochimaru did not feel constriction.
He felt interest.
The idea was disturbing enough to stir his curiosity, and obscure enough to deserve contemplation. If the future had driven him to speak of his teacher with such tranquil cruelty, then either that future had witnessed a disappointment not to be taken lightly, or it had witnessed the maturation of a conviction that no longer saw any value in preserving the bonds of yesterday.
Then his thoughts inclined slightly in another direction.
'Kabuto.'
That boy had not merely gathered information in those pages. He had caught the tone, noticed the hesitation, and read what lay behind the plan itself. He was not an ordinary subordinate, nor merely an intelligent tool in someone's hands. He was a mind advancing toward its master step by step without troubling him by doing so.
Orochimaru's smile widened slightly.
Perhaps that was the clearest part of the entire scene.
Not Sasuke.
Nor Naruto.
Not even the sentence about the old man.
But Kabuto himself.
A young man who saw more than he was told, and knew how to keep his distance without stepping outside obedience.
And that type was rare.
So at last Orochimaru lifted his head from the volume, and his voice emerged calm, as though he were merely fixing a small observation in place for himself:
"I think I'm beginning to like that boy, Kabuto…"
The sentence had barely settled in the air when another voice came from the opposite side.
"Is that the future you aspire to, Orochimaru? Killing your teacher?"
It was Jiraiya who spoke, and the irritation on his face was too obvious to hide. Beside him, Tsunade was less loud than he was, but no less sharp in her presence.
"If that's what you're thinking while reading these pages so calmly…"
She said, folding her arms.
"Then it's worse than it seems."
Jiraiya raised an eyebrow and stared directly at Orochimaru.
"I thought you would at least deny it."
He said.
"Or laugh. Or say the manga is exaggerating. But you're sitting here as though you're looking at nothing more than an appointment postponed."
"And your teacher is where you decide to begin?"
Tsunade added with cold anger.
"That is not the future of a great man. That is the future of a man who has completely lost his mind."
The words kept coming at him, one after another, sharp and clear, but Orochimaru did not pay them the slightest attention.
He lifted his eyes to them for only a passing moment, then returned to turning the next page.
In his view, the matter was too cold to deserve defending himself over, and too rich to spoil with a hasty argument.
And so he remained silent.
And his silence, in that moment, was more irritating to them than any answer could have been.
…
Not far away, Sarutobi Hiruzen was watching the entire scene with eyes from which nothing had escaped.
Three disciples.
One sitting in troubling calm, and two standing before him, driven by disgust and shock into words they had not tried to soften.
Hiruzen's gaze remained fixed on them longer than usual.
He was not seeing a passing quarrel between young people who had read a disturbing chapter.
He was seeing an early imbalance in a scale he had long believed he understood well.
Jiraiya was not angry merely because the manga had mentioned him being killed by his own disciple.
He was angry because the idea itself seemed more possible than it should have.
Tsunade was not objecting to the sentence as though it were a poor exaggeration.
She was objecting to it as if something in Orochimaru's present silence had made her catch the scent of truth in it.
And Orochimaru…
Orochimaru had not tried to deny it.
He had not tried to calm them.
He had not even tried to seem bothered.
And there, precisely there, the true weight drove itself into Hiruzen's chest.
For the first time since the manga had begun, he did not feel that he was merely reading a possible future for the village's events. He felt that he was glimpsing a personal outcome as well, one that concerned him himself, not only as Hokage, but as the teacher who had raised those three with his own hand.
If the future had led one of them to look upon him as an old man who ought to be killed first, then that meant something had not cracked in the village alone.
It had cracked in the bond itself.
And within him, a question stirred that was not comfortable in the least.
'At what point does a teacher truly begin to lose his disciple?'
'Does it begin when he fails to see him as he truly is?'
'Or when he sees in him only what he himself wishes to see?'
'Or when he confuses genius with discipline, and leaves a small distance to widen in silence until it becomes an abyss?'
Hiruzen was not a man who succumbed easily to reflection, but this time he found no room in himself for his usual luxury of merely observing from afar. The pages had not shown him only a threat coming from beyond the walls. They had shown him a more bitter possibility: that in the future he might have to stand against one of those he had once called his disciples.
And while Jiraiya and Tsunade continued directing their reproach at Orochimaru, Hiruzen remained silent.
His silence was not emptiness.
It was the silence of a man trying to measure the cost before it arrived.
As Hokage, he knew what this page meant: a direct threat, a plan moving under the cover of the exams, and an ambition that did not stop at the borders of the village. But as a teacher, he knew something else, something crueller: if this future proved true, time would not ask him only to protect Konoha.
It would ask him to admit that one of his disciples had gone so far that even returning had become doubtful.
That thought was heavier than the explicit threat itself.
Because one can prepare for foreign enemies.
But when the danger rises from within the very name you spent long years calling by the title of disciple…
Then it is no longer an ordinary battle.
Hiruzen raised his eyes once more to Orochimaru, then to Jiraiya and Tsunade.
All three were still here, beneath the same roof, and at an age where the distance between them ought to have remained bridgeable.
But the manga, with a single page, had made that certainty far less comforting.
That was why Hiruzen did not feel only fear of death at the end of the chapter.
He felt something calmer, and heavier.
He felt that when the future came, it would not be kind to him at all.
"Sigh… it seems this manga is going to become more troublesome from now on."
After all those stormy thoughts within himself, this was the only comment Hiruzen made, one that Danzo answered with a cold chuckle.
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Upcoming chapter titles (spoilers):
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Chapter 199: Kakashi vs. Kabuto!
Chapter 200: The Great Ninja Appears, Jiraiya! (End of Volume Ten)
Chapter 201: Echoes of Volume Ten and the Emotional Anime Episode!
Chapter 202: System Level 8!
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