The sky above the elemental nations had not gone dark since the rankings began.
Three days. Three days of a screen the size of a continent hanging in the upper atmosphere like a second sun, refusing to set, refusing to dim, refusing to give anyone a break to grieve or gloat or sleep properly. Farmers had stopped pretending to work. Merchants had stopped pretending to sell. Whole armies were sitting in their camps with their heads tipped back, mouths slightly open, waiting.
The screen, which had been gold, turned white.
Not bright white. Old white. The white of a scroll that had been sitting in a temple for two hundred years, sun-faded at the edges, the ink at its center still sharp.
[Ranking Announcement — Position #2]
[Senju Tobirama — Konohagakure — The Second Hokage]
Konoha, which had been settling down to enjoy its third-place high, made a sound.
It was not a cheer.
It was the collective inhale of an entire village realizing the dead were on the leaderboard now, and the dead had apparently been holding back.
In the Hokage Tower, Sarutobi Hiruzen stood up.
He stood up so fast his chair scraped the floor and his pipe rolled off the desk and shattered on the stone, and he did not notice. His hands were flat on the wood. His old eyes were wet before he had decided to let them be.
"Sensei," he said.
Just that. Just the one word, in a voice that hadn't called anyone sensei in thirty years.
Koharu had a hand pressed to her mouth. Homura had taken his glasses off and was cleaning them with a corner of his robe that was not in any way clean. Neither of them spoke. There was nothing to say. The man who had taught them to fold paper into traps when they were six years old was about to be ranked second in the world, ahead of every living shinobi but one, and the village had not been prepared.
The village had never been prepared for Tobirama. That was sort of the whole point of Tobirama.
[GROUP CHAT — WORLD RANKINGS LIVE]
A (Raikage): Hold on hold ON
A (Raikage): SECOND HOKAGE???
A (Raikage): The DEAD GUY???
Mei Terumī: Oh my god.
Mei Terumī: Oh my GOD.
Rasa (Kazekage): He's been dead for fifty years.
Rasa (Kazekage): He's RANKED SECOND while DEAD.
Ōnoki (Tsuchikage): I knew it.
Ōnoki (Tsuchikage): I KNEW IT. My master fought that man. My master told me. Onoki, he said, if you ever see white hair and red eyes at the edge of a battlefield, you walk the other way and you do not look back.
Ōnoki (Tsuchikage): I thought he was being dramatic.
Ōnoki (Tsuchikage): He was UNDERSELLING.
A (Raikage): My grandfather had stories
A (Raikage): I thought they were just stories
Mei Terumī: They are NEVER just stories. Why does no one in this group chat learn.
The footage opened.
Not on a battlefield. Not on a bridge. On a desk.
A wide, low desk in a room with paper screens and lantern light, scrolls stacked in neat towers, brushes lined up by size. A man sat behind the desk in a high-collared blue armor, white hair cropped short and severe, three red marks running from his hairline down his jaw and chin like the tracks of something that had clawed its way out of him and forgotten to finish the job.
His eyes were red. Not Sharingan red. Senju red. The color of a banked fire that had decided, after long thought, not to go out.
He was writing.
The footage held on him for a long second, just writing, the brush moving in fast, precise strokes. Then his hand stopped. He did not look up. He spoke to someone the camera had not yet shown.
"Bring me the Uchiha boy."
His voice was lower than people expected. Drier. The voice of a man who had used it as a weapon often enough to know exactly how much of it to spend.
The footage cut.
It cut to a battlefield.
A wide plain, grass burned to stubble, the bodies of Kumo shinobi spread across the slope in patterns that suggested wind, or weather, or something that moved like both.
Tobirama walked through them.
He was not running. He was not flashing. He was walking, slow, measured, hands loose at his sides, and the air around him was wet. Not from rain. From him. Water condensed out of the empty sky in the space he occupied, beaded on his armor, dripped from the points of his fingers, pooled in his footprints when he lifted his feet.
A Kumo squad came over the ridge. Twelve men. Lightning-style, the dangerous kind, hands already in seals.
Tobirama did not break stride.
He raised one hand, palm up, and the air above his palm folded into a sphere of water the size of a man's head. He flicked his wrist. The sphere broke into twelve spears, each one as thin as a needle, each one moving faster than lightning had any right to be outrun by.
Twelve Kumo shinobi fell at the same time, in the same posture, with the same small dark hole between their eyes.
Tobirama kept walking.
He had not stopped writing, in some other room, on some other day. The footage flickered between the two — the desk, the brush, the scrolls; the field, the water, the dead — and the cut between them got faster and faster until they were happening at the same time, and the implication settled over the watching world like a hand on a shoulder.
He fought wars while doing paperwork.
He invented jutsu while killing people.
He was never, at any point in his life, doing only one thing.
[GROUP CHAT — WORLD RANKINGS LIVE]
A (Raikage): Those were my GRANDFATHER'S men
A (Raikage): I recognize the headbands
A (Raikage): I am watching my family history get DELETED in real time
Mei Terumī: He's multitasking. He's MULTITASKING. He's killing a squad and writing a treatise at the same time.
Rasa (Kazekage): That's the man who invented Hiraishin.
Rasa (Kazekage): Before Minato existed. Before the seals were stable. He invented it and then handed it down through generations like it was a recipe for soup.
Ōnoki (Tsuchikage): He invented Edo Tensei too.
Ōnoki (Tsuchikage): Don't forget that one.
Ōnoki (Tsuchikage): Important detail. Bears on later events. Trust me.
A (Raikage): What do you mean LATER EVENTS
Ōnoki (Tsuchikage): Watch the screen.
The footage shifted again.
Now it was a forest at night. Tobirama was crouched beside a young man with dark hair and a high collar — Sarutobi Hiruzen, twenty years old, face still soft at the edges, eyes already old. Three other young shinobi crouched behind them. Tobirama was speaking, low and fast, drawing a diagram in the dirt with the point of a kunai.
"You will go around the left flank. I will pull their attention to the right. When I die —"
Hiruzen's head jerked up. "Sensei —"
"When I die," Tobirama said, without looking at him, "you will become Hokage. You are not ready. You will have to be ready anyway. The village does not negotiate with what its children are ready for."
He kept drawing.
"Do not waste my death on grief, Hiruzen. Waste it on the village. That is what it is for."
The footage held on the young Hiruzen's face, and the young Hiruzen's face did something complicated, and then Tobirama stood up, and walked into the trees, and did not come back.
In the Hokage Tower, the Third Hokage of Konohagakure no Sato sat down in his chair very slowly, like a man who has been hit. His hand found the edge of the desk. His shoulders shook, once, and then stopped.
"I haven't wasted it, Sensei," he said. "Not all of it. Some of it. Not all."
Koharu, after a long moment, reached over and put her hand on his.
The screen above the world kept playing.
The footage of Tobirama's death was not long. It was not glorious. He drew the entire Kinkaku Force away from his students, alone, into a clearing. He killed twenty of them with water and tags and the kind of taijutsu
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