The morning sun broke over the valley's eastern ridge, casting long shadows across stone buildings that had taken four years to feel like home. Keisuke stood at the edge of the settlement's center, his damaged vision reducing the gathered crowd to blurred shapes and movement, but his other senses filled in what his eyes could not.
The scent of incense burning in clay holders. The rustle of formal clothing on bodies unused to ceremony. The quiet breathing of twenty-nine people waiting for something that mattered.
Today, they would acknowledge what they'd become.
Five children—no, young shinobi now—stood in a line before the assembled village. Their ages ranged from ten to thirteen, their postures straight despite the nervousness Keisuke could sense in their chakra signatures. These were the massacre children who'd been too young to remember the compound clearly, who'd grown up with the Ghost Lands as their only home, who'd learned to throw kunai in a valley that smelled of volcanic ash instead of cherry blossoms.
They were the first generation to graduate from the Hidden Uchiha Village's Academy.
Mirai stepped forward, her sixteen years carried with a gravity that made her seem older. She'd organized this ceremony with a precision that reminded Keisuke painfully of Itachi—the careful attention to tradition balanced with practical necessity. She wore her Chunin vest with pride, her three-tomoe Sharingan active and reflecting the morning light.
"You weren't born into peace," Mirai said, her voice carrying across the gathered crowd. "You were born into exile. Into a world that tried to erase us and failed. You grew up learning that survival isn't given—it's earned through strength, through unity, through refusing to disappear just because someone decided we should."
Keisuke listened to the words and felt something shift in his chest. When had the angry girl who'd asked why do we train so much become the woman who spoke of survival with such certainty?
"But you've proven something more important than survival," Mirai continued. "You've proven that the Uchiha don't need Konoha to be strong. Don't need the compound or the Police Force or the village that feared us. You are the proof that we survive, that we grow, that we continue. Not in spite of what happened to us, but because of what we chose to become after."
The five graduates stood taller. Keisuke sensed their pride mixing with determination, young chakra signatures flaring with emotion they didn't quite know how to control yet.
The ceremony was simple compared to what Konoha would have hosted. No Hokage to present forehead protectors. No proud families in the audience—most of these children's families were ash and memory. But there was weight here that transcended elaborate ritual.
Ayame and Shin stepped forward, each carrying a wooden box. Inside were forehead protectors—not stolen, not purchased, but forged in their own smithy by Kaito, engraved with a symbol that wasn't Konoha's leaf.
The Uchiha fan, but different. Simplified. A single fan instead of the traditional two, its edges stylized to suggest both fire and the mountain peaks that surrounded them.
"This is who you are now," Shin said as he tied the first protector around a ten-year-old boy's forehead. The child—Takeshi—trembled slightly, then steadied himself. "Shinobi of the Hidden Uchiha Village. Defender of our people. Keeper of our legacy."
One by one, the graduates received their symbols. One by one, they became something more than refugees.
Keisuke watched through his blurred vision, his Sharingan barely functioning but still able to perceive the emotional resonance of the moment. These children represented something he couldn't have imagined during those first desperate months in the caves—a future beyond simply not dying.
When the ceremony concluded and the gathering dispersed into celebration—modest but genuine, with food saved for special occasions and sake shared among the adults—Keisuke found himself walking the village's perimeter with Hana.
The elderly woman moved slower than she had four years ago, her steps careful on uneven ground, but her mind remained sharp as ever. She'd become the village's informal historian, recording everything in careful script that filled scrolls now stored in their small library.
"They're beautiful, aren't they?" Hana said, gesturing toward where the graduates were being congratulated by younger children. "Despite everything. Despite the horror they witnessed. They're beautiful."
"They're harder than we were at that age," Keisuke said quietly.
"Yes. But also more honest." Hana paused near one of the permanent structures—a communal hall built from volcanic stone and salvaged wood. "They don't pretend the world is kind. They know what it costs to exist. That makes them wiser, I think. Sadder, but wiser."
Keisuke considered this. "Is wisdom worth the price they paid?"
"I don't know," Hana admitted. "But I know they paid it anyway. So we honor that by making sure their wisdom serves something beyond just survival."
They walked in silence for a moment, passing fields where early crops grew in volcanic soil, training grounds where traps waited to be reset, the smithy where smoke rose from Kaito's forge.
"We're at a crossroads," Hana said eventually, her tone shifting from nostalgic to practical. "We've survived. We've stabilized. But what are we now, Keisuke? A clan in exile? A minor shinobi village? A mercenary group with shared blood?"
"Does it matter what we call ourselves?"
"Yes." Hana stopped, turning to face him with an intensity that made her seem decades younger. "Because we need to define ourselves before circumstances define us. Before external pressures or internal conflicts force us into a shape we didn't choose. We've had four years to build. Now we need to decide what we've built."
The question haunted Keisuke through the rest of the day and into the evening, when the village gathered in the communal hall for what had become their version of council meetings—not hierarchical pronouncements, but collective discussion where any voice could be heard.
The hall was packed, all twenty-nine residents present. Torchlight flickered against stone walls, casting dancing shadows that reminded Keisuke uncomfortably of the fires that had consumed the compound. He pushed the memory aside and focused on the present.
"We need to talk about who we are," Keisuke said, standing at the head of the gathering not as unquestioned leader but as facilitator. "What we're building. What we want to become."
The discussion that followed revealed divisions Keisuke had known existed but hadn't fully understood the depth of.
The elderly survivors—the few who'd made it to the Ghost Lands and survived the harsh first years—spoke first. Old Masaru, who'd been a jonin before retirement, stood with hands that trembled from age but a voice that carried conviction.
"We are guardians of tradition," he said. "The Uchiha have existed for centuries. Survived the Warring States period. Built Konoha itself. Our techniques, our philosophies, our way of life—these things matter. If we abandon them, we're not Uchiha anymore. We're just shinobi with Sharingan."
Murmurs of agreement from some, skeptical silence from others.
Ayame stood, her recovered body moving with confidence that still sometimes surprised Keisuke. "With respect, Masaru-san, we can't simply recreate what existed in Konoha. We don't have the resources. We don't have the population. We don't live in a major village with allies and infrastructure." She gestured around the hall. "We have twenty-nine people. Seven of them aren't even Uchiha by blood. How do we preserve traditions designed for a clan of hundreds while adapting to reality?"
"By maintaining what makes us distinct," another elder interjected. "The Fire Festival. The coming-of-age ceremonies. The teaching methods passed down through generations. These things define us."
"No," Mirai said, her voice cutting through with surprising authority for her age. "What defines us is that we survived. That we fought back. That we refused to die quietly when Konoha tried to erase us." Her Sharingan activated, spinning slowly in the torchlight. "Our heritage is why we're here—because the village saw us as threats and eliminated us. We honor that heritage by becoming strong enough that no one can do that again. By making them answer for what they did."
The temperature in the room seemed to rise. Several young adults nodded in agreement with Mirai, their expressions hardening with barely suppressed rage that four years had done little to diminish.
"And how many of our children die in that revenge?" Kaito asked, his blacksmith's hands clasped together. He wasn't Uchiha, had no clan loyalty beyond what he'd built here, which perhaps gave him clarity others lacked. "I came to this settlement because I had nowhere else to go. Because the Hidden Uchiha Village offered safety when the rest of the world offered death. But I didn't come here to watch kids march back to Konoha to die for something that happened before most of them could walk."
"It's not revenge," Mirai countered, her voice rising. "It's justice. There's a difference."
"Is there?" Shin asked quietly, and the room turned to him. "I want them to answer too. Want to watch Danzo burn for what he did. Want Konoha to admit they committed genocide and called it policy. But Mirai... we're not strong enough. Maybe we never will be. Justice that gets us all killed isn't justice. It's suicide with purpose."
The debate spiraled, voices overlapping, old wounds reopening like improperly healed injuries. Keisuke watched it unfold with growing concern, feeling the fragile unity they'd built fracturing along ideological lines that had simmered beneath the surface for years.
The Traditionalists wanted preservation—the Uchiha as they'd been, maintained like precious museum pieces.
The Pragmatists wanted adaptation—survival through flexibility, even if that meant changing what it meant to be Uchiha.
The Militants wanted strength—power sufficient to demand justice, even if the cost was measured in their own blood.
The Isolationists wanted peace—community building without external conflicts that could destroy them.
Each faction was right. Each was also dangerously wrong.
"Enough."
Keisuke's voice wasn't loud, but something in its tone cut through the argument like a blade through silk. The room quieted, dozens of eyes turning toward him.
"We're all right," Keisuke said, moving to the center of the hall where everyone could see him—or rather, could see the blurred shape of him through his damaged vision. "And all wrong. The traditionalists are right that we need to preserve who we are. Our techniques. Our history. The things that make us Uchiha rather than just shinobi with Sharingan."
He turned, addressing each faction in turn. "The pragmatists are right that we need to adapt. That the old ways don't work when you have twenty-nine people in a valley surrounded by mountains. That survival requires flexibility."
Another turn. "The militants are right that Konoha must answer eventually. That what happened to us was genocide, not justice. That the truth matters."
Final turn. "And the isolationists are right that survival comes before revenge. That building lives for our children matters more than destroying ourselves for abstract concepts of justice."
Silence. Then Masaru's weathered voice: "Those positions are contradictory, Keisuke. We can't do all of them."
"Yes, we can," Keisuke said. "We preserve traditions while creating new ones. Build strength while building community. Prepare for eventual confrontation while prioritizing today's survival." He paused, letting the words settle like dust after a storm. "It's not clean. It's not simple. But nothing about us has been simple since the night we fled."
"That's asking us to hold contradictions," Ayame observed, but her tone suggested consideration rather than dismissal.
"We're already contradictions," Keisuke replied. "Survivors of extinction. A clan without a village. Shinobi who answer to no hidden village. Exiles who refuse exile. Everything about our existence contradicts what the shinobi world says should be possible. So we hold one more contradiction—we preserve and adapt, build and prepare, remember and grow."
The debate continued, but the framework shifted. Instead of arguing which faction was correct, they discussed how to implement all four perspectives simultaneously. It took hours, voices hoarse by the end, but gradually a structure emerged.
The Council of Elders would preserve and teach traditional Uchiha techniques, history, philosophy. Make sure the children learned the Fire Stream technique the same way their ancestors had, understood the Sharingan's evolution, knew the stories of Madara and Izuna and the clan's founding.
The Strategic Defense Force, led by Ayame and Shin, would handle external threats, intelligence gathering, alliance building. Make them strong enough to survive in a world designed to kill the vulnerable.
The Community Development Committee would manage internal affairs—agriculture, trade, construction, the daily mechanics of keeping twenty-nine people alive and healthy.
The Academy would train the next generation with both traditional curriculum adapted for their circumstances and practical survival skills the old Konoha Academy never had to teach.
Most importantly, they formalized their identity. Not the Uchiha clan of Konoha. Not a minor village aspiring to major status. Something new that honored the past while acknowledging the present.
They were the Hidden Uchiha Village.
Neither trying to recreate what was lost nor abandoning their heritage. Building something hybrid and strange and entirely theirs.
Two days later, Keisuke stood with the Council of Elders before a large stone they'd dragged to the village's center—a volcanic boulder half the height of a man, its surface rough and dark.
"Words matter," Hana said, her hands already positioning chisel and hammer. "What we inscribe here will be taught to every child. Repeated at every ceremony. This becomes our creed."
They worked through the day, taking turns with the chisel, each member of the council contributing to carving words into stone that would outlast them all. Keisuke's damaged vision made the work difficult, but muscle memory and chakra sense guided his hands. The physical act of creating permanent record felt important in ways he couldn't quite articulate.
By evening, the words stood complete:
We are the Uchiha who survived extinction.
We honor those who fell by refusing to fall ourselves.
We preserve our heritage while forging our future.
We are few, but we are unbroken.
We are hidden, but we are not forgotten.
We are the embers that refused to die.
The village gathered as Hana read the inscription aloud, her voice carrying across the valley. Keisuke watched—sensed, really—the way people responded. Some with tears. Some with straightened spines. Some with clenched fists.
All with pride.
They weren't just survivors anymore. They were founders. Builders. The generation that chose existence over erasure.
The following weeks brought changes that felt both rapid and long-building. The Council of Elders established formal classes on Uchiha history, teaching the youngest children about the Warring States period, the village's founding, the clan's proud legacy—and its tragic end.
The Strategic Defense Force expanded their intelligence network, sending carefully disguised operatives to gather information from border towns and merchant caravans. Word came back piecemeal but concerning: the Hidden Uchiha Village's existence was no longer rumor. It was acknowledged reality.
Some outcast settlements viewed them as potential allies against major village hegemony. Others saw them as threats—powerful shinobi outside normal power structures, dangerous precisely because they answered to no village.
A few saw them as opportunities. Sharingan eyes commanded astronomical prices on the black market.
The Community Development Committee negotiated expanded trade agreements, establishing the village as reliable protection for merchants brave or desperate enough to traverse the Ghost Lands. Money flowed—not much, but enough to purchase supplies they couldn't make themselves.
Gradually, the settlement transformed. Not dramatically. Not suddenly. But consistently.
The Academy formalized its curriculum, blending traditional techniques with practical survival skills. Children learned the Great Fireball technique and also how to identify poisonous plants. Practiced shuriken accuracy and also basic field medicine.
The training grounds expanded, new trap configurations tested and refined. Shin's specialty made their defenses increasingly sophisticated—any attacking force would face challenges designed by someone with Sharingan-enhanced spatial reasoning.
The communal hall hosted regular gatherings now, not just for crises but for planning, celebration, argument. Democracy wasn't the right word—they were still a shinobi settlement where the strong protected the weak—but collective input shaped decisions in ways that would have seemed impossible to Konoha's Uchiha.
Three months after the graduation ceremony, a merchant caravan arrived with news that made the Council call emergency session.
Keisuke sat in the strategy room—a converted storage cave with maps spread across rough tables—listening to Ayame relay intelligence gathered from the caravan's guards.
"Someone from Konoha is asking questions," Ayame said, her tone carefully neutral. "About Uchiha survivors. Not openly—no official missions, no bounty postings. But persistent inquiries. Merchants who've traded with us report being approached, questioned about settlements in the Ghost Lands."
"Could be anyone," Shin added. "Dozens of people in Konoha might want to know if we survived."
"Could be Itachi," Mirai said, her voice hardening around the name. "Checking whether his mission was complete. Whether he needs to finish what he started."
Keisuke felt his jaw tighten. Four years since the massacre, and saying Itachi's name still felt like swallowing broken glass.
"Could be Danzo," Ayame countered. "Making sure the survivors he wanted dead stayed dead. We know he sent ROOT after us once. Why not again?"
"Or," Hana said quietly from her seat in the corner, "it could be Sasuke. If he's heard rumors. If he wants to know whether he's truly alone."
The possibility hung in the air like suspended kunai, dangerous and sharp-edged.
"Each scenario has different implications," Keisuke said, forcing his voice to remain steady despite the emotions churning beneath. "If it's Itachi, we prepare for attack by someone who knows our techniques better than we know ourselves. If it's Danzo, we prepare for ROOT operatives and whatever machinations that involves. If it's Sasuke..."
He trailed off. What did it mean if Sasuke was searching for them? The boy would be thirteen now. Young. Traumatized. Shaped by the same lies Itachi had told him through Tsukuyomi.
"We increase security," Shin said. "Quietly. No obvious fortifications that suggest we're preparing for war, but enhanced patrols. Better early warning systems. Make sure we know if anyone approaches the valley."
"We limit information flow," Ayame added. "Tell the merchants we trade with that discretion about our location is part of our service agreement. Anyone who asks too many questions gets cut off."
"And we prepare," Mirai said, her Sharingan spinning slowly. "Make sure everyone combat-capable knows their positions if we're attacked. Run drills. Four years is long enough for complacency to set in."
The discussion continued, contingencies layered on contingencies, until Keisuke's head throbbed from processing tactical considerations through vision that barely functioned.
When the meeting finally adjourned, he found himself walking the valley's upper ridge—a path he'd memorized so thoroughly that his damaged sight barely mattered. Up here, the air was thinner, colder, free of the volcanic warmth that clung to the valley floor.
Footsteps behind him. Light. Controlled. Three people.
"You don't sleep enough," Ayame said as she, Shin, and Mirai joined him on the ridge.
"Neither do you," Keisuke replied.
"Fair."
They stood together in silence, looking down at the village—small lights flickering against darkness, smoke rising from evening fires, the distant sound of children's laughter cutting through night air.
"Do you think they'll come?" Shin asked. "Konoha. Eventually."
"Yes," Keisuke said. "Not soon, maybe. Not immediately. But eventually, they'll have to acknowledge we exist. And when they do, they'll have to decide what that means."
"What do you think it means?" Mirai's voice carried an edge Keisuke recognized—the anger that lived in her like banked coals, always ready to flare.
"I think it means we're a problem they thought they'd solved," Keisuke said. "Genocide is supposed to be final. Permanent. We're proof it wasn't. That makes us dangerous—not because of our power, though that matters, but because we're evidence. Walking, breathing evidence that Konoha ordered its own citizens eliminated."
"So they'll try again," Mirai stated rather than asked.
"Maybe. Or maybe they'll ignore us. Hope we fade into obscurity." Keisuke turned slightly, his blurred vision unable to see their faces but his chakra sense reading their emotional signatures clearly. "Or maybe, if we're very lucky and very careful, they'll decide we're not worth the cost of destroying."
"That's what you're hoping for?" Ayame's tone suggested disappointment. "That they'll ignore us?"
"I'm hoping we survive long enough for these children"—Keisuke gestured toward the village below—"to have children of their own. To grow up knowing the Uchiha exist not because of what happened to us, but because of what we built after. Everything else is secondary to that."
"Even justice?" Mirai asked.
"Even justice," Keisuke confirmed, and felt Mirai's chakra signature flare with barely controlled frustration. "I want it too, Mirai. Want to watch Danzo answer for Shisui. Want Konoha to admit what they did. Want the world to know we survived. But I want you alive more. Want these children to grow up more. Want the Uchiha to exist in fifty years more."
"Those don't have to be mutually exclusive," Shin said carefully. "Justice and survival. We can want both."
"Yes. But if I have to choose, I choose survival. Every time."
They stood together as stars emerged overhead, ancient light touching a valley that shouldn't exist, illuminating a village built from desperation and determination in equal measure.
The following morning, Keisuke gathered the five new graduates—the first full generation trained by the Hidden Uchiha Village—and led them up to the ridge where he'd stood the previous night.
They followed with barely contained curiosity, young energy making the climb easy where Keisuke's damaged body made it laborious. His vision blurred even basic details, but he knew the path by heart now.
At the ridge's peak, he stopped and gestured to the valley spread below.
"This is what you're protecting," Keisuke said. "Not an abstract concept. Not revenge. Not justice. That." He pointed toward the stone buildings, the training grounds, the fields where crops grew, the people moving through their daily routines. "Twenty-nine people trying to build lives in a world that wants us dead."
The graduates—five children between ten and thirteen, still adjusting to their new forehead protectors—looked down at the village with expressions Keisuke couldn't quite see but could sense through their chakra.
Pride. Uncertainty. Determination. Fear.
"You're the first generation to grow up here," Keisuke continued. "The massacre children—the ones old enough to remember—they know what we lost. What we fled from. The adults lived in Konoha. Trained there. Lost family there. But you..." He paused. "This is your home. Not Konoha. Not some idealized past. Here."
"Is that bad?" Takeshi asked hesitantly, the ten-year-old's voice small against the wind. "That we don't remember Konoha like you do? That this is home instead?"
Keisuke considered the question carefully. "It's different. We carry grief for what was lost. You carry pride for what was built. Both matter. Both are Uchiha."
"But we should remember, right?" a girl named Yuki said. She was twelve, her Sharingan not yet awakened but her dedication to training absolute. "What happened to our parents. Our clan. We should remember what Konoha did."
"Yes," Keisuke agreed. "Remember. Learn the history. Understand what brought us here. But don't let it define you completely. You're not just survivors of the massacre. You're builders of what comes next."
Silence, broken only by wind whistling through volcanic rock.
Then Takeshi again, his voice carrying weight too heavy for ten years: "Will we ever go back? To Konoha? To make them..."
He trailed off, but the unspoken word hung there with crystalline clarity.
Pay.
Keisuke felt the question settle in his chest like a blade he'd swallowed years ago and never quite dislodged. Four years of building, of surviving, of choosing life over revenge—and still the question remained.
"I don't know," Keisuke admitted, and the honesty felt both liberating and terrifying. "Maybe someday. Maybe never. The world is moving in ways we can't control. Konoha knows we exist now. Eventually, that knowledge will force action—from them, from us, from circumstances neither of us can predict."
He turned slightly, addressing all five graduates with his blurred vision seeing them as shapes against sky but his chakra sense reading them clearly. "But I know this: you're not responsible for avenging the past. You're responsible for building the future. We—the adults, the massacre survivors, the ones who remember—we carry that burden. We'll make those choices when they come. But you?"
Keisuke gestured back toward the village. "You protect that. You train to defend it. You become strong enough that no one can take it from you. If revenge comes, if justice demands blood, that's for us to decide. Not you. Not unless you choose it when you're old enough to understand what you're choosing."
The graduates absorbed this in silence, young minds processing concepts of justice and revenge and survival that most genin never had to consider.
"That seems..." Yuki started, then stopped. Started again. "That seems like you're protecting us from something we should help carry."
"Maybe," Keisuke acknowledged. "But you've already carried more than children should. Watched parents die. Fled through forests while being hunted. Learned to kill before you learned to write properly. I'm not protecting you from burdens. I'm trying to make sure the next burdens you carry are ones you choose."
The conversation continued, questions about Konoha and the massacre and what came next flowing with the honest curiosity of youth not yet hardened into absolute positions. Keisuke answered what he could, admitted uncertainty where uncertainty existed, and felt something like hope building in his chest.
These children weren't just surviving. They were thinking. Questioning. Building philosophies that might be wiser than the ones that had led to genocide.
By the time they descended back to the village, afternoon sun was painting the valley in shades of gold and crimson, and Keisuke felt exhausted in ways that had nothing to do with physical exertion.
That evening, alone in his quarters—a small room carved from volcanic rock, sparse but his—Keisuke sat with the historical scrolls Hana had been compiling. She'd documented everything: the political tensions leading to the massacre, the night itself (pieced together from multiple survivors' accounts), the flight, the settlement, four years of slow growth.
The scrolls would be read by future generations. Would become the foundation of whatever history the Hidden Uchiha Village created.
Keisuke unrolled a blank scroll and began writing his own entry, his damaged vision making the characters uneven but readable:
Year Four, Autumn:
We've become something I don't have words for yet. Not quite a clan in the traditional sense—we're too small, too scattered in our origins. Not quite a village—we have no daimyo, no formal recognition, no treaties binding us to the shinobi world's power structures. Something hybrid and strange and entirely ours.
The children are learning. Not just techniques, though they're mastering those with dedication that would have made our ancestors proud. They're learning to question. To think beyond simple revenge or blind loyalty. To hold contradictions—preserving tradition while building something new, remembering the past while focused on the future.
The adults are aging. I'm twenty-three and going blind, which terrifies me less than it should. Perhaps because I've seen enough horror that darkness feels like mercy. Perhaps because I trust the next generation to see what I can't—not just physically, but philosophically. They're building something I couldn't have imagined during those first desperate months in the caves.
We're not strong enough to challenge Konoha. Perhaps we never will be. The major villages have resources, numbers, centuries of infrastructure. We have twenty-nine people and determination that sometimes feels like madness.
But we're strong enough to exist despite them. And sometimes, existence is the greatest form of defiance.
Konoha knows we survived now. Eventually, that knowledge will force confrontation. I don't know what form it will take. Don't know if we'll face ANBU assassins or diplomatic overtures or simply continued surveillance from a distance.
What I know is this: we're ready. Not for every possible scenario—no one can be. But ready to defend what we've built. Ready to preserve the Uchiha in whatever form that takes. Ready to make the choices that come next, whatever they are.
We are the embers that refused to die.
And if the world wants to extinguish us, they'll find those embers have learned to burn.
Keisuke set down his brush and rolled the scroll carefully, placing it with the others in the small cabinet where Hana stored their growing history.
Outside, evening fires were being lit. Children's laughter mixed with adult conversation. The sounds of a community that shouldn't exist but did anyway.
Tomorrow would bring new challenges. Intelligence to analyze. Defenses to strengthen. Children to train. Alliances to maintain.
But tonight, the Hidden Uchiha Village was alive, and that was enough.
Keisuke stepped outside into the cooling evening air, his damaged vision reducing the village to shapes and light and movement, his other senses filling in the rest. Someone was cooking fish over an open fire. Someone else was practicing kata in the training ground, their movements precise even in darkness.
Twenty-nine people, building a future from the ashes of genocide.
Not because they were strong enough to defeat their enemies. Not because justice demanded it. Not even because tradition required preservation.
But because they'd chosen to exist, and existence—stubborn, defiant, beautiful existence—was the greatest victory they could claim.
Keisuke smiled slightly, the expression feeling strange on a face more accustomed to tactical calculation and barely suppressed grief.
Let Konoha come, if they would. Let Danzo send ROOT. Let Itachi check if his mission was complete. Let Sasuke seek answers.
The Hidden Uchiha Village would be ready.
Because they weren't just survivors anymore.
They were founders.
And what they'd founded would not burn easily.