Chapter 178: Itachi's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
"Hey. Are you alright?"
Sasori and Itachi were in a safehouse — one of Itachi's pre-defection caches, still intact, unknown to current Konoha intelligence.
Itachi looked considerably worse than his expression was admitting.
The Tsukuyomi duel had done real damage. Yin chakra depletion at that depth wasn't something you walked off.
"I'll be fine. Two or three days."
He produced a soldier pill from his pouch — black, dense — and swallowed it without ceremony.
"If you die," Sasori said, settling into a corner, "I'd have no objection to turning you into a puppet. A puppet with Mangekyo Sharingan would be quite something."
Itachi didn't bother responding. If he died, Sasori had no guide out of the village. The moment Sasori showed himself without cover, every ninja in Konoha would converge on him. That meant Hiruzen, Tsunade, Jiraiya, Sakura — Sasori was capable, but no one survived that, not here.
"This location is secure. We can stay two weeks without being found."
He intended to recover here, wait for the situation to settle, then find a private moment with Hiruzen. He needed to leave the village through official channels — which meant the Hokage.
That conversation was going to be complicated.
Hiruzen had put Sasuke on the battlefield. That violated their arrangement. Itachi had stayed silent and sent nothing back for years, and the accumulated trust deficit was already serious. Add Kakuzu's damage to the River Country front — which Konoha's leadership was going to be furious about — and the odds of Hiruzen being receptive to anything Itachi said were not good.
And beyond that: Pain. He'd volunteered for this mission. If he returned having accomplished nothing, having gotten himself and Sasori nearly killed in the process, and with his prior unauthorized visit to Konoha with Kisame on the record — Pain's patience was finite.
Too many problems converging at once.
Sasori observed his teammate's silence and didn't probe it. He could read the situation. One wrong move here was fatal for both of them.
He found a corner and sat down.
Time passed.
Itachi's eyes opened.
Sasori was on his feet instantly, facing the entrance.
We said this place was secure.
"Huh? There's a cave here? I've never noticed this before."
A child's voice. Young.
"Konohamaru, it's dark in there, and it's getting late. Let's go."
A second voice.
Sasori's expression went flat and calculating. Three children. Isolated. Witnesses.
He began to move.
Itachi shook his head once.
"Don't touch that one. If we do, we're dead."
Sasori didn't know who Konohamaru was. Itachi did. The Third Hokage's only grandson.
Kill him, and whatever remained of the arrangement with Hiruzen was gone — replaced by the full lethal attention of a grieving old man with nothing left to hold back. And Hiruzen would redirect that fury at Sasuke too.
Sasuke's safety was not negotiable.
"Come on, come on, let's look inside—"
Konohamaru was already pushing toward the cave entrance, dragging his companions, when he walked directly into someone coming out.
He stumbled back.
"Oh! Sasuke-nii-san?"
The face was similar enough in the dark. Close enough that a child wouldn't immediately distinguish.
Before Konohamaru could process the wrongness of it, Itachi's Sharingan filled his vision — and the visions of the other two children with him.
Three children blinked. Their expressions went slack and peaceful.
By the time their eyes refocused, the cave was empty.
Hokage's office.
"Uchiha Itachi?!"
Hiruzen looked at Sasuke with open surprise.
"Yes, Lord Hokage." Sasuke kept his voice even. "He infiltrated Konoha again. He had a companion — Akatsuki affiliation. Approximately sixteen or seventeen years old in appearance, red hair, puppet techniques combined with iron sand manipulation."
Hiruzen absorbed this.
Itachi, again.
What was the message? Displeasure at Sasuke being deployed? A warning?
He turned the iron sand detail over. He couldn't place it immediately. The third Kazekage had vanished years ago — that incident had contributed to the Third Shinobi World War — but no one had ever identified the responsible party. The description didn't fit his mental image of the suspects on that file.
"How did you drive them off?"
Hiruzen studied Sasuke carefully.
Sasuke hesitated. Then he looked at the old man — white-haired, patient, the teacher behind the teacher Sakura trusted without reservation.
He opened his eyes.
Seven-pointed kaleidoscope.
Hiruzen went very still.
"An unknown Uchiha appeared," Sasuke said. "She held Itachi in a Tsukuyomi duel and forced him to retreat. After that I engaged directly."
He described the encounter precisely: Hikaru's Tsukuyomi stopping Itachi cold, his own assault while Itachi's yin chakra was depleted, the sword work, the interruption from Sasori's puppet, the withdrawal.
"They had reason not to escalate further. I let them go rather than risk a two-on-one engagement I wasn't certain I could win."
Hiruzen listened to all of it. When Sasuke finished, the old man was quiet for a long moment.
Then he looked at those eyes again.
Another one.
How many Mangekyo were there supposed to be? The records suggested extraordinary rarity — once in a generation, maybe. And now, in the span of a few years, Konoha's intelligence files had accumulated Itachi, the masked figure, this girl, and now Sasuke.
"Sasuke. Your eyes."
He chose his words carefully.
The fear was simple: that Sasuke had killed someone close to him to awaken the Mangekyo. If that was the case — regardless of Sakura's faith in him, regardless of anything else — Hiruzen would not allow it to pass without consequence.
"They were born to protect someone."
Sasuke said it without looking away.
And then he explained. Everything, in order — the moment on the battlefield, Obito's rod through Sakura's chest, the terror and refusal that had crystallized into something new.
Hiruzen listened.
When it was done, he sat with it for a moment.
Sakura wasn't wrong about you.
He'd had his doubts. He wouldn't pretend otherwise. A boy raised on grief and hatred, carrying the Uchiha name, everything pointed toward a certain trajectory. Hiruzen had been watching for it.
He hadn't seen it. But he hadn't been certain it wasn't there.
Uchiha were, in his experience, constitutionally incapable of hiding things. Especially the Mangekyo-grade ones — brilliant and unstable, every feeling running at full intensity. They were terrible liars precisely because they cared too much to pretend they didn't.
If Sasuke said these eyes came from love, they came from love.
"Sasuke," he said, standing, "Sakura talked to me about you."
Sasuke blinked.
Sakura talked to the Hokage about me?
"She said you were a good person. That you could see through to the truth of things — and that even when carrying hatred, you never stopped putting your companions first."
Hiruzen settled onto the couch beside him.
I'm— she said that?
Of course she did. That's accurate. She's right. She has good judgment.
Sasuke's mouth had done something involuntary. He straightened his face.
Not surprised. Obviously. That's just correct assessment.
"Sakura proposed developing your abilities seriously. That's why Kakashi became your teacher."
Oh.
The pieces arranged themselves. Kakashi's assignment hadn't been administrative coincidence. Someone had engineered it. Someone who thought several moves ahead and kept the reasoning to herself.
That explains a lot, actually.
"I was concerned hatred might blind you," Hiruzen said, leaning back. "Looking at you now, I think I was wrong."
"Lord Hokage—"
Hiruzen stood before Sasuke could finish, crossed to the desk, and placed a scroll in front of him.
Sasuke looked at it.
"Open it."
The old man smiled with the particular warmth of someone who has been waiting to give something away.
Sasuke unrolled the scroll and read the first line.
His breath stopped.
"This is Kumogakure's most guarded military secret. Passed only to successive Raikage. With this technique, the Third Raikage held back ten thousand Iwagakure ninja alone."
Hiruzen's voice was unhurried, deliberate.
"Now it belongs to you."
"Sasuke."
"What?"
"Uchiha Itachi?!"
Sakura had stepped out after dinner, heading toward the detention block, when the ANBU mobilization swept past her — too large, too fast, too purposeful to ignore.
She'd grabbed one by the mask strap.
"Yes, Lady Sakura. I apologize — I have orders, I need to—"
He was already gone before she confirmed the release.
"That weasel. What's he doing here this time."
She watched the ANBU dissolve into the dark and didn't follow.
If the old man needed her, he'd have said so. Jiraiya and Tsunade hadn't been called up either — this was performative, a show of presence to run Itachi off, not a genuine engagement. Which meant Hiruzen was probably already back-channeling with him privately.
Dirty intelligence deals. She wanted no part of it.
As long as that particular weasel didn't cross directly in front of her, the calculus was simple: he was useful to the old man's long game, he was useful as the future donor of Eternal Mangekyo eyes, and personally fighting him right now created more problems than it solved.
If he did cross in front of her, however—
She was, genuinely, the worst possible matchup for him. Genjutsu: she had Inner Sakura sitting like armor on her chakra system, and Itachi would bounce off it. Ninjutsu: she'd been punching through S-rank techniques since River Country. Taijutsu: she was a taijutsu specialist fighting a ninjutsu specialist, which was just arithmetic.
Fun thought. Not tonight.
She continued toward the detention block, quietly pleased about the conversation she was about to have with a condemned man about the meaning of his remaining usefulness to the world.
Impure World Reincarnation. Senju Tobirama. Yang-release.
Finally.
The forest thinned around her as the path became less traveled. The detention block sat at the edge of the Forest of Death — appropriate, she'd always thought, in a grim administrative way.
She was nearly there when her feet stopped moving.
She looked at the two figures resting under a tree ahead of her.
...
This village is enormous.
How.
Itachi and Sasori looked back at her.
Itachi, for a man with blood still drying at the corner of one eye and a yin chakra deficit that should have had him horizontal, was maintaining composure with professional discipline.
Sasori looked like he'd had a very bad several hours and was at the end of his patience with it.
"You're the one who killed the Raikage," Sasori said, not quite to himself.
Whatever calculation he'd been running — isolated target, remote location, no witnesses — had just hit an unexpected variable.
Itachi began to say something.
"Magnetic Style — Iron Sand Drizzle!"
Sasori had finished calculating and landed on attack immediately.
The Third Kazekage's puppet materialized, iron sand whipping into formation overhead, a thousand small spikes aligning—
"You started it."
Sakura put her hand on the Impure World Reincarnation scroll, tucked it into her pouch, and moved.
One step. The ground fractured from her heel outward.
She hit the iron sand formation at full speed, fists moving through three consecutive strikes that turned the spikes to powder before they could close, and she was already past them—
Sasori threw the puppet itself between them.
"Fire Release — Great Fireball!"
Itachi, on his feet now, committed to the technique. At this range there was no dodge — she was inside the minimum evasion distance.
She pivoted, one hand raised, pink chakra blazing up like a wall—
The fireball hit it and came apart. Sparks flew sideways. The core of the technique scattered.
Itachi pulled back immediately.
Same result as before. She's exactly what I remember from the intelligence reports.
Every technique-based approach was going to produce the same answer. She was a taijutsu fighter who had restructured herself to be immune to the things ninjutsu fighters used against people who got too close. Against her, Itachi's toolkit was limited to — at full health and full yin chakra reserves — Susano'o. He currently had neither.
Retreating is the only rational option.
"Useless pink brat!" Sasori, who had come within centimeters of having Sakura's fist go through his puppet-modified chest, was operating on fury now. "Magnetic Style — poison mist!"
The Third Kazekage's mouth opened. Purple vapor poured out in a cloud, dense and fast-moving, spreading faster than the night air could disperse it.
Specially synthesized. Three minutes.
He watched it reach her and allowed himself a moment of satisfaction, already mentally composing the design for what she'd look like as a puppet—
(Chapter end)
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