Chapter 180: Tobirama Returns to the Konoha That Once Trusted Him
Cough.
Itachi pressed a hand to his chest and dragged himself along the forest path, exhaustion finally catching up to everything else.
He'd never carried a deep chakra reserve to begin with. After Hikaru, then Sasuke, then Guy, then Sakura, then Mei — round after round without a real break — his body had reached the end of what it could absorb. Even his assist against Sasori had cost him more than he had to spend.
And to shake Mei, he'd burned Amaterasu again. On top of an already-depleted Tsukuyomi eye and a chakra reserve running on fumes, that decision had its own price tag.
Blood came up. His vision started going dark at the edges.
He genuinely couldn't tell anymore whether his eyesight was failing again or whether he was about to lose consciousness entirely.
Through the haze, he registered a pair of feet in front of him.
"Now what do we have here."
"Came out for some firewood and found you instead."
In the last clear moment before the dark took him, he caught a glimpse of the forehead protector above him — the character for "oil."
Jiraiya.
Why.
Why is everyone in this village awake right now.
Why does every single one of them have a face I recognize.
Elsewhere, in the Uchiha district, Sasuke — reading through the Lightning Release scroll — looked up suddenly.
Kotoamatsukami already wore off?
Not even twelve hours?
That felt short. He'd need to find a way to extend the duration. Next time, he was putting something heavier on Itachi.
Konoha Detention Block.
"Lady Sakura. Here's the one you requested."
The guard marched a prisoner forward and pressed him to his knees, deferential.
Sakura looked at the blue-haired man with his head bowed and raised an eyebrow.
Mizuki.
Still alive. Interesting. She vaguely recalled he'd had some connection to Orochimaru at some point.
Not that it mattered much. Just Orochimaru's discarded leftovers.
"Sa — Sakura. Are you here to save me?"
Mizuki looked up at his former student, knowing it was unlikely and asking anyway.
"You're done here. Go." Sakura waved the guard off. "Let the Hokage know I'm taking custody of this one."
"Understood."
The guard withdrew. Sakura turned her attention to Mizuki, fully restrained, lying on the ground, looking up at her.
"Mizuki-sensei. It's been a while."
"S — Sakura, you're here to get me out, aren't you?"
Mizuki's old swagger — the same confidence he'd once used to manipulate Naruto — was entirely gone. What remained was pure supplication.
"Of course."
She crouched in front of him, eyes curving into a smile.
"Not only will I get you out of here. You're going to become Hokage."
The words landed somewhere absurd. Mizuki's expression, mid-joy at the news of his release, froze solid.
Hokage?
"Sakura — actually, on reflection, I think I'd really rather stay in prison."
Something cold had settled in his stomach.
"Don't be like that. Do you know how much effort it took to get here? I had to fight a Sand missing-nin just to make it to this conversation. Letting that effort go to waste would be rude."
Mizuki had no idea what she was talking about, and no way to find out. News from outside didn't reach the detention block.
"Come on, let's go."
She stood, took the rope binding him, and started walking, dragging him along the ground behind her toward the exit.
His unease climbed with every meter. He started struggling — pointlessly, chakra sealed, body bound, entirely without leverage.
"Sakura, Sakura, what are you actually planning?"
"Sakura, I know I was wrong, please—"
"Sakura, I'm begging you!"
"I have a fiancée waiting for me at home—"
"Let me go! Please!"
"You absolute—"
"I don't want to die! Let me go!"
"I was your teacher! You vicious little—"
"You absolute monster! You vicious little—"
He had started with pleading and worked his way, by the time they reached the tree line, into open insults.
Sakura glanced at him sideways. Mediocre fighter, and apparently a mediocre insult-thrower too. If he was trying to get under her skin with words, he had several centuries of practice ahead of him before that would land.
But the noise was getting tedious.
A pebble materialized in her hand. As he opened his mouth for another round, she flicked it at his temple and knocked him out cold.
"I said you'd become Hokage. You're becoming Hokage."
"A promise is a promise. That's Naruto's ninja way."
She looked down at his unconscious, eye-rolled-back face and nodded, satisfied.
Serving as a vessel for Tobirama's resurrection technically counted. There was no contradiction here.
Borrowing Naruto's principle felt appropriate, given the circumstances. She was confident Naruto wouldn't mind the loan, given their relationship.
She found a spot far enough from anyone — properly isolated, no risk of witnesses — and dropped Mizuki's unconscious body to the ground. She pulled the Impure World Reincarnation scroll from her pouch.
This wasn't Orochimaru's modified version. This was the original — Tobirama's own research, an artifact from an earlier era of the technique.
She didn't need his combat ability for this. Just the intelligence behind it.
Combat capability, she already had plenty of.
She read through the scroll once, fully, and started preparing. Her learning speed made the procedure straightforward — the hand seals weren't far off from a standard summoning technique.
She pulled a small bone fragment from her pocket and placed it on Mizuki's unconscious form.
Hiruzen's gift — an actual finger bone, Tobirama's own. With a relic that distinctive, the summon would be essentially guaranteed: a hundred percent match, pulled directly from the Pure Land.
Where the bone had actually come from, she had elected not to ask.
Hiruzen had, with equal tact, elected not to explain.
"Summoning Jutsu — Impure World Reincarnation!"
The seals fell into place. Her palm hit the ground. Black markings spread outward from Mizuki's position in twisting lines.
Paper fragments materialized from nowhere and converged on him, and Mizuki — apparently conscious again, dragged back by the technique's pull — looked down at the paper covering his body and screamed.
The screaming changed character as the process continued, his voice replaced by something that wasn't quite human anymore.
And then it was finished.
The figure on the ground was no longer Mizuki.
A tall man stood where Mizuki had been, dressed in deep blue armor, his face cold and composed.
Konoha's Second Hokage, Senju Tobirama, had arrived.
Mizuki had, in his own way, technically become Hokage.
Moonlight fell across him, sharpening the severity of his features. He opened his eyes — red, focused, immediately scanning the environment.
"Foolish missing-nin, attempting to use my power for your own ends — I will personally—"
He stopped.
This wasn't right. He'd expected to wake up still bound by Orochimaru's control, still fighting for some measure of independence from that particular nightmare.
Instead, the face in front of him belonged to the same pink-haired girl who had once held off both him and his brother by herself.
"Lord Tobirama. It's been a while."
Sakura smiled and gave a small wave.
Tobirama scanned the surroundings — dense forest, nighttime, no immediate threats — and then registered, through whatever residual awareness the technique granted him, that this particular summoning had been performed by this particular girl.
"You're the one who called me back."
His tone had an edge to it.
Regardless of how the technique was framed, it was a violation of the dead. He understood that intimately — he'd developed the technique himself, and he was now living the consequence of that development. Anyone who reaches into forbidden things eventually gets reached into by them in return.
He had, in fact, watched a defector from his own village use this exact technique as a weapon against the village he'd died defending.
A perfect circle of self-inflicted irony.
"That's not important right now."
Sakura waved a hand, dismissing the objection, and pulled a fresh scroll from her pouch.
"Take a look at this. Yang-release body technique development. We have plenty of time this round."
Tobirama looked at the scroll. His expression did something complicated.
She pulled me out of the Pure Land specifically to consult on a jutsu.
I am dead. I died defending this village. And the response of the next generation is to put me to work.
"This is the reason you summoned me?"
He frowned at her.
The first time he'd encountered this girl, his impression had been genuinely positive. Young enough to still be considered a child, already operating at Hokage-tier on a real battlefield with real consequences. Hiruzen's student — which made her, by extension, his own grand-student of sorts.
And yet here she was, disturbing his rest for a research project.
"Couldn't you have developed this yourself?"
He studied her — slightly taller than the last time he'd seen her, slightly more chakra capacity. Months had passed, evidently.
"I mean — wouldn't that be wasting Lord Tobirama's brilliance?" Sakura deployed flattery without hesitation. "Things other people can't do, you can. Obviously."
She wasn't here for a fight. She needed his cooperation, and that meant his mind needed to be clear and engaged, not adversarial.
"Hmph. You think flattery moves me?"
"Accomplishments mean something when you've earned them yourself."
"If you keep relying on others—"
He paused, regrouped.
"Are you doing this or not."
Sakura, watching him work himself toward a lecture, felt a headache coming on.
"...Fine."
He exhaled.
"Just this once."
What was he supposed to do — refuse his own descendant? Hiruzen had clearly engineered this, which meant the old man had personally arranged the desecration of his grave for the sake of a junior shinobi's research project.
Hiruzen. You did this.
"You really are from the founding line — generous to a fault."
Sakura leaned in, laying it on thick.
"Don't change the subject." Tobirama settled cross-legged on the ground and opened the scroll, angling it to catch the moonlight. "Tell me where you've gotten with the yang-release body technique so far."
If she can't crack this on her own, will she just summon me again next time she's stuck on something?
He could already see the pattern forming. First time established a precedent. Second time, third time. Maybe this habit propagated down through generations of students after her, each one casually yanking him out of the Pure Land for free consulting work.
I'm already dead. Why does death apparently still have this many bad days in it.
"Compress the yang chakra. Stimulate cellular activity, similar to lightning release."
Sakura had barely opened her mouth before he was already correcting her.
"That's wrong. Yang release doesn't stimulate cells. It can't."
"Right, exactly — that's why I need you, Lord Tobirama." Sakura nodded along immediately. "So I was thinking — instead of stimulation, what about nourishment? Cultivating the cells rather than forcing them?"
Tobirama went quiet, thinking it through properly now.
He complained about the situation, but he was actually engaging with the problem — he wasn't going to disappoint his own grand-student on something real.
"Cultivating cells..."
"That's viable. Worth testing."
"For a reference point on cellular cultivation, you'd want to look at—"
He stopped mid-sentence.
My brother.
If this worked the way he was imagining — sustained, gradual cellular reinforcement rather than a burst of stimulation — that profile sounded uncomfortably familiar.
Physical durability with no real ceiling. No clean counter. That was Hashirama's entire combat signature.
Am I describing my brother's biology.
He looked at the pink-haired girl watching him with obvious anticipation and accepted, with some resignation, that there was no graceful way out of this.
"Let's try it."
"If something doesn't add up, we can always pull my brother out too."
A younger sibling in difficulty meant the older one stepped up. That was simply how things worked.
He was not, however, going to be the only one doing free labor from beyond the grave. If Hashirama's biology was the answer, Hashirama could explain it himself.
Sakura had no idea why Tobirama had suddenly brought up Hashirama, but given that the instruction came directly from Tobirama, and given that she was a loyal subject of Konoha who respected Tobirama deeply, she wasn't about to argue.
Note to self: ask the old man for Hashirama's spine tomorrow. Add him to the roster too.
Time passed. Tobirama worked through a genuinely substantial number of viable approaches to cellular cultivation — most of them, by his own admission, essentially reconstructing his brother's biological template from first principles.
After all, the one time he'd actually wanted to study Hashirama's body, his brother had handed over blood samples without a second thought.
Little brothers get spoiled.
As long as it's not a forbidden technique, anything goes.
Dawn broke over the village.
Two figures — one tall, one considerably shorter — stood on the Hokage Monument.
Tobirama looked out over the village he half-recognized.
Decades since he'd died holding the line. The village in front of him bore only a partial resemblance to the one he remembered.
He took it in, arms crossed, satisfaction settling over his features as he surveyed the skyline — and then his eyes caught on something specific. A particular district.
Where the Uchiha compound used to be.
"Sakura. What's that, over there?"
Sakura followed his pointed finger, confused for a moment.
"That's the Konoha shopping district."
She started to continue and then caught up to her own thought.
Wait. Shouldn't that be where the Uchiha district is?
Of course. Of course this old ghost is fixated on the Uchiha.
"They were relocated to a corner of the village after the Nine-Tails incident thirteen years ago." She pointed properly. "There. That's it."
The district sat at the village's edge. Tobirama's sensory range — exceptional even by his own historical standards — registered the area immediately.
Two people. Maybe.
That was not what an ancient, thousand-year clan compound was supposed to register as. Half the visible land looked like it had gone fallow.
"The Uchiha clan was wiped out. There's only Sasuke left now — and a few days ago we found another surviving member."
Sakura explained it readily, taking his confusion at face value.
...
...!
Hiruzen.
You absolute—
Beautifully done.
Tobirama's eyes lit with something close to genuine delight, the corner of his mouth curving up against his will. The pleasure was visible enough that even someone with zero social instincts could have read it off his face from across the room.
"Oh. Is that so. What a shame."
Only two left. Such a tragedy.
"Who did such a terrible thing?"
Whoever it was — give them a medal.
Sakura watched him say words that contradicted his entire face and chose not to point it out.
"His name is Uchiha Itachi. The previous clan head's son."
"Sasuke's older brother."
Excellent!
Itachi!
From this moment, I'm adopting you into the Senju line!
Senju Itachi!
Outstanding work!
You're the best!
"A monster, clearly." Tobirama's voice had gone solemn. "If I ever encounter him, justice will be served."
I'm giving this man a medal.
A historic contribution to peace, both in Konoha and across the wider ninja world.
Sakura watched his mouth threaten to split into a grin and decided not to comment on any of it.
It was visible from space that he was about two seconds from celebrating openly.
"Anyway, moving on—"
"Wait. This Uchiha — no, sorry — Itachi. Where is he currently?"
My grand-student, did you almost say "Senju" there?
She rubbed her temple, resigned.
"He's somewhere in the village right now. Hiding, presumably."
"What?!"
"A talent like this, still in the village?!"
"Send word to Hiruzen — find him immediately!"
"I want to personally reward — I mean punish — him!"
Tobirama's eyes had gone bright with something he wasn't even trying to disguise anymore.
Buddy. You're not even pretending anymore.
☆☆☆
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