Danzō looked at Setsu Yamanaka again.
She had grown up almost entirely under his nose.
Exceptional in nearly every way.
Useful enough to border on irreplaceable.
And yet he still did not know how much of the little girl from before Root remained inside her.
How much did she still remember from those first ten years of her life?
How long could a human being imitate obedience without eventually betraying what they truly felt?
More importantly, could someone with Setsu's degree of internal spiritual control perhaps deliberately fool even the constant surveillance placed around her for all these years?
Danzō did not know.
That alone was enough.
He did not gamble with uncertainties he could remove later.
His gaze lingered on her for another moment.
And there was another matter.
Setsu was not exceptional only as a kunoichi.
Danzō had spent most of his life craving power.
Influence.
Control.
Authority.
It would have been absurd to pretend that made him immune to more ordinary desires.
What man was?
Especially when the woman in question had spent years standing so close to him.
Setsu was beautiful.
Unusually so.
Even Danzō, disciplined enough to deliberately starve most distractions before they could interfere with his ambitions, had noticed that long ago.
More than noticed.
The attraction had remained for years.
Probably since not long after she had started first growing into adulthood.
She seemed almost within reach.
That was precisely the problem.
Setsu was a thorned rose.
Her mastery of spiritual techniques had advanced far enough that even a Kage-level shinobi would be foolish to treat her carelessly.
One mistake.
One moment of lowered awareness.
One strange technique aimed somewhere the body could not defend normally.
That was enough.
And there were very few moments when a man was more distracted, vulnerable, or physically relaxed than during pleasure.
Danzō had no interest in discovering what Setsu might be capable of under those circumstances.
Greed was useful.
Stupidity was not.
That was why he had never pushed the matter.
Not seriously.
He had not even indulged in the smaller habits lesser men might have tried.
Suggestive remarks.
Unwanted touches.
Casual pressure simply because rank allowed it.
Partly because Setsu was dangerous.
Mostly because she was too useful.
He did not know how she would react if he crossed that line openly.
Perhaps she would submit.
Perhaps resentment would sharpen into something harder to control or self-destructive.
Worst-case scenario, and he could end up gaining nothing while ruining the literal 'finest tool' on his journey of ascension to truly running this village one day or even... the world.
That was a very poor trade.
Not yet.
Danzō reminded himself of that again as his eyes briefly traced the shape concealed beneath her uniform and memory supplied the face hidden behind the mask.
Not yet.
She had the Root seal, of course.
All operatives did.
But Danzō was under no illusion about what that meant.
The Cursed Tongue Eradication Seal was useful.
Nothing more.
He had never considered himself the sort of sealing genius capable of producing something truly absolute.
The Hyūga ancestors, on the other hand, had created something far closer to perfection.
The Caged Bird Seal.
Danzō admired it.
Privately, perhaps more than he admired most things about the clan itself.
A single cursed seal that protected the Byakugan, punished disobedience, and tied an entire branch family to the authority of another generation after generation.
Elegant.
Brutal.
Effective.
Exactly the sort of instrument Danzō respected.
Unfortunately, Hiruzen had never granted him meaningful access to it.
The Hyūga, usually far more accommodating than the Uchiha, resisted fiercely whenever Root recruitment came too close to the secrets surrounding their dōjutsu and branch family system.
For obvious reasons.
The Byakugan was the foundation of their position in the shinobi world.
The Caged Bird Seal was the mechanism that kept it from leaking outward.
Handing either over to Danzō would mean surrendering the two things that kept the clan secure.
Hiruzen had chosen not to force the issue.
So Danzō had been left to develop his own answer.
It had taken years.
Resources.
Seal specialists.
Experimentation.
Eventually Root produced the Cursed Tongue Eradication Seal.
Useful, but crude by comparison.
It reacted to a specific forbidden intent.
An operative attempted to reveal incriminating information about Root or Danzō, and the seal paralyzed the tongue and body before the disclosure could be completed.
A safeguard.
Not true control.
The seal could stop betrayal.
It could not stop hatred.
Could not prevent independent thought.
Could not make an unwilling person want what Danzō wanted.
That distinction had irritated him for years.
Recently, however, a possible solution had finally appeared on the horizon.
Not merely something that might make Setsu safe enough to possess without reservation.
Something far more valuable.
A method that could potentially solve the lingering defect of Root's entire first generation.
Absolute obedience.
Every remaining clan talent reduced to what Danzō had always wanted them to be.
Tools that did not merely obey.
Tools that could no longer choose otherwise.
The problem was obtaining it. And that, unfortunately, was proving much more difficult.
...
Setsu left Danzō's office soon afterward.
Her posture remained straight.
Her steps measured.
Her breathing perfectly even.
Nothing about her looked different from when she had entered.
Inside, she was furious.
How could she not have noticed?
For years now, there had been small changes in the way Danzō looked at her.
Nothing obvious.
Nothing he would ever be stupid enough to say aloud.
A glance held a little too long.
Attention that had nothing to do with a report.
The occasional expression that belonged less to a commander evaluating a subordinate and more to a man looking at a woman.
They had become harder to miss over the last decade.
Setsu hated him more for it.
Taking her freedom had apparently not been enough.
Taking her clan.
Her name, in every way that mattered.
Her future.
Her right to decide what kind of life she wanted.
And now, eventually, he wanted that too?
Her body?
Setsu's jaw tightened beneath the mask.
He could dream.
If it ever came to that, she would rather die.
The thought was not dramatic.
It was simply true.
People might have wondered why, if she hated Root so much, she had never simply fled.
It was not as though opportunities had never appeared.
There had been missions where the escort around her was weaker than usual.
Long-distance assignments.
Operations near borders.
Moments where, with enough preparation, she might have killed the shinobi watching her and disappeared for several hours before anyone understood what had happened.
Setsu had considered all of them.
And rejected them.
Because she knew exactly what followed.
Konoha was the strongest hidden village in the world.
Its intelligence network extended throughout the Land of Fire and far beyond it.
Its borders were watched.
Its roads were watched.
Even Setsu could not survive the full weight of Root hunting her indefinitely.
Much less Konoha itself.
Even if just Danzō personally caught up with her, she had no illusions about the outcome.
He was way stronger.
Especially if he was fully on guard.
Setsu had also seen what happened to people who tried.
Some of Root's more impulsive first generation, like her, had defected before.
Danzō made sure the rest of them understood the result.
Not publicly.
That would have been inefficient.
But openly enough within Root.
One man had managed to remain missing for almost a month.
When they brought him back, he had still been arrogant enough to spit at the floor.
Two weeks later, he begged to be killed.
Another had tried to take information with her.
Setsu never learned exactly what happened in the interrogation chamber.
She only remembered hearing her voice through two stone doors.
Afterward, returning to ordinary Root life would probably have felt merciful.
Danzō liked examples.
Setsu had no interest in becoming one.
For years, the only realistic path she saw involved another Great Village.
Somewhere powerful enough that Konoha could not simply cross the border, take her, and leave.
Kumogakure.
Iwagakure.
A village that would look at her abilities and decide she was more valuable alive and protected than returned.
That had been the core of her escape planning for a long time.
Unfortunately, wanting such an arrangement and creating one were very different things.
First, she needed the right mission.
Then enough distance from Root surveillance.
Then a clean break.
Then time to reach a foreign contact point before Konoha realized what she was doing.
And before any of that, ideally, she needed some assurance that the village on the other side would actually take her.
That was the hardest part.
Root watched communications.
Konoha's counterintelligence apparatus, thanks to Danzo, was the best in the world. Even she had to admit that point.
Setsu had spent years thinking through possible intermediaries, dead drops, merchants, missing nin, disguised messages, indirect approaches.
Every route created another vulnerability.
What if the contact was compromised?
What if some spy or informant started feeding small information back to Konoha later, and she just inexplicably died while on assignment for that other village one day?
After all, Konoha's intelligence capabilities, thanks to Root again, were also widely recognised as the best in the world.
What if the other village accepted her offer only long enough to extract what she knew?
What if Danzō convinced Hiruzen to offer them something valuable enough that returning one kunoichi became an easy political concession?
Or worse, what if some powerful enough Konoha agent already existed inside their intelligence structure and the entire approach reached Danzō's desk before Setsu even crossed the border?
She knew too much about how these systems worked to trust any of them casually.
Ironically, knowledge made escape harder.
So she waited.
Not passively.
Never passively.
She watched.
Prepared.
Collected possibilities.
And refused to gamble everything on a route she considered worse than fifty-fifty.
Lately, however, the world had begun rapidly changing.
Relations between the Great Villages were deteriorating again.
Military spending.
More intelligence operations.
Nothing had become open war, or even proxy conflict, yet.
But Setsu had lived through similar times already.
Due to her current position, she easily recognized the smell of another great war soon.
Perhaps not this year.
Perhaps not even the year after.
Or even for much longer.
But if another major shinobi war began, everything changed.
Root's attention would fracture.
Konoha's manpower would scatter across fronts.
Borders would become more chaotic.
Foreign intelligence services would become desperate for defectors and information.
Moving between territories would become more dangerous, certainly.
It would also become much easier to disappear inside the confusion.
Her chances would not improve slightly.
They would multiply.
For the first time in years, Setsu could see something resembling a real opening ahead.
Not freedom yet.
But a road toward it.
That was enough.
She continued through the underground corridor.
Then, annoyingly, her thoughts returned to the young adult from earlier.
Fugaku Uchiha.
Or more precisely, to what she had touched inside him.
That strange rupture.
The impossible depth.
Those brief images that made no sense and yet had felt too coherent to dismiss.
Machines.
Structures.
Things she had no names for.
It should have been irrelevant.
One abnormal target among many.
A curiosity.
Nothing more.
And yet her mind kept returning to it.
Setsu exhaled slowly through her nose and thought.
"Maybe I'm overthinking it."
Then the corner of her mouth moved faintly beneath the mask.
"But if I'm not..."
She pictured the unconscious sixteen-year-old again.
"I wonder how many more surprises you plan on giving me, Uchiha."