The trio stood at the shattered threshold of Tanigakure, the wind whistling a hollow dirge through the ruins before them. The scene was one of methodical, brutal dissolution. The village's main gate lay in splinters, half-buried under collapsed sections of the outer wall. The walls themselves, following the natural curve of the gorge, were not merely broken but systematically breached in multiple locations—gaping wounds of shattered rock and twisted reinforcement bars.
Black, sooty burn marks streaked up the cliff faces from fire-style techniques. Craters pockmarked the ground, some filled with stagnant, rusty water. Abandoned defensive positions—makeshift barricades of furniture and sandbags—stood like skeletal sentinels, their purpose rendered utterly futile.
The silence was the most profound element. No chatter from a market or distant shouts of children or drills from a training ground. The only sounds were the relentless rush of the river far below and the mournful sigh of the wind through broken structures. It was the silence of a corpse not yet cold, of life violently evacuated.
Hiruzen's face darkened into a stormfront of grim recognition. His eyes scanned the pattern of destruction—the targeted breaches, the scorch marks at strategic chokepoints. This wasn't random banditry or a natural disaster. This was a shinobi operation. A sacking.
Beside him, Kakashi let out a low, sharp exhale, the sound cutting through the eerie quiet.
"They… they razed it."
Renjiro said nothing. His gaze was analytical, sweeping across the ruins, but a cold knot was tightening in his stomach. He noted the absence of guards, of any perimeter watch.
'Abandoned?' he wondered. 'Or were there no survivors left to stand watch?' Almost reflexively, he extended his chakra field in a subtle, diffuse wave, a sonar pulse of awareness.
The feedback was faint, weak, but present—small clusters of low, flickering chakra signatures huddled deep within the labyrinth of broken homes and caves further in the gorge.
Life, but life clinging by a thread.
As they picked their way carefully through the rubble of the main entrance, a flicker of movement caught Renjiro's eyes. Through a gap in a collapsed wall, about fifty meters away, he saw them: a woman and a young boy.
The woman was painfully thin, her face pale and smudged with dirt, her clothes hanging loose. The boy, no more than six, clung to her leg, his eyes enormous in his gaunt face. They were staring at the three intruders with a fear that was animalistic in its intensity.
Kakashi, perhaps hoping his younger appearance seemed less threatening, raised a hand in a slow, non-threatening gesture. "We are shinobi of Konohagakure. We mean you no harm."
The boy looked up at his mother, his voice a tiny, trembling reed in the vast silence. "Who are they, Kaa-chan?"
The mother's eyes, hollow with exhaustion and trauma, fixed on the distinctive forehead protector they wore. Her lips moved, the words barely audible but carrying perfectly in the dead air.
"Konoha shinobi."
The reaction was instantaneous. Not relief, not hope. Pure, unadulterated fear. The woman snatched up her son, spinning away from the gap, and fled deeper into the ruins with a speed born of desperation. The sight was a physical blow to Renjiro.
Konoha's name, here, did not symbolise protection or alliance. It inspired terror. The unsettling wrongness of it settled over him like a fine, toxic dust.
Tanigakure, the Village Hidden in the Valleys. A minor ally situated precariously between the Land of Fire and the Land of Wind. Its loyalty had been to Konoha, a strategic buffer against Sunagakure's expansion. During the war, Suna had swept through here like a scouring sandstorm.
Tanigakure had held, had likely sent desperate pleas for aid to their powerful ally. And no aid had come. Tanigakure had been deemed expendable. The village hadn't been destroyed by its enemies out of hatred; it had been broken by its ally's calculated neglect.
More survivors began to appear, emerging from shells of buildings and cave mouths like wary ghosts. They did not approach. They gathered in small clusters at a distance, their eyes tracking the three Konoha shinobi with a mix of emotions that made the air thick and difficult to breathe. There was resentment, raw and fresh in the set of a man's jaw as he turned away. There was suspicion in the way mothers pulled children behind them. And there was a profound, soul-crushing exhaustion that seemed to emanate from them all. The hostility wasn't loud or violent; it was a passive, suffocating thing—a collective withdrawal, a silent accusation that was more powerful than any shout. Renjiro could feel it on his skin, this curdled loyalty, this bitter residue of trust betrayed.
Hiruzen stopped in what might have been the village's central square, now just a clearing of debris. He turned to face the gathering, silent crowd.
"People of Tanigakure," he began, and the weight of his title and his years gave the simple address a crushing gravity.
"I am Hiruzen Sarutobi, the Third Hokage of Konohagakure. I look upon your home, and I see the failure of my village written in these stones." He did not offer excuses about strategy or capacity. He named the failure directly.
"We called you Ally. You called upon us in your hour of greatest need. And we did not come. Our eyes were turned to other battles, and we believed… I believed… this frontier could hold. That belief was a mistake paid for with your blood, your homes, your peace."
He took a slow breath, "No words can rebuild what was lost. But Konoha's debt is real. We will provide materials for reconstruction. We will send healers and builders. We will station a permanent diplomatic and security detachment here until your walls are whole and your people feel safe again. This is not pity. It is the bare minimum of honour, returned too late." He then did something Renjiro had never seen. The old Hokage bowed, not a slight nod, but a deep, formal bow from the waist, holding it for three long seconds before straightening.
"On behalf of Konohagakure, I offer you our most sincere and humble apology."
Renjiro watched the villagers' reactions. Some of the hardened suspicion softened, tears welling in a few eyes at the simple acknowledgement of their suffering. Others remained stony, arms crossed, their trust too deeply shattered for words or bows to mend.
And as he watched, a slow, familiar anger began to burn in Renjiro's own chest. It was a cold, directed fury—at the abstract, heartless machinery of village leadership that made such "necessary sacrifices," at Hiruzen for presiding over it, at the entire shinobi system that balanced lives like ledger entries.
'Of course,' he thought, the cynicism acidic in his mind.
'This is what you get with Hiruzen. The Professor who presides over an era of endless war and the slow rot of his own village. Arguably the worst Hokage in history. Even the Uchiha part of me couldn't force me to say Tobirama was worse than him.'
While his anger felt hot, personal, a part of it startled him. This level of vitriol towards the Hokage… was it his? Or were these the bleeding-through echoes of the original Renjiro?
The ruins of Tanigakure became a grotesque mirror. It was not Uzushiogakure—this village still had survivors; its destruction was not total genocide.
But the pattern was identical: a smaller, loyal ally, left exposed on the strategic periphery, chewed up by the gears of great village politics. 'Loyalty doesn't guarantee survival,' the chilling thought echoed. 'It just makes you a more predictable casualty.'
Beside him, Kakashi was silent, his single visible eye fixed on the bowed back of his Hokage. Internally, a different, parallel recognition clicked into place. He wasn't thinking of lost villages, but of his father, who was praised as a hero, then driven to suicide by the village's scorn for choosing comrades over a mission.
The system had used him, broken him, and offered hollow praise only after the fact. He saw the same pattern here: praise, aid, and apology, delivered only after the breaking was complete. The unfairness wasn't an accident; it was a feature of the world they served.
As Hiruzen concluded his arrangements with a trembling village elder, Renjiro turned away, looking out over the shattered valley. His introspection took a dangerous, new turn. For years since his transmigration, his goal had been survival, then strength. Strength to protect himself, to navigate the dangers of this world. But standing here, amid the consequences of power not used, of influence not wielded, a glaring question formed.
'Has simply being a strong shinobi been enough? Was it his Shinobi Way?'
He had saved lives on the battlefield, yes. But battles were just the symptoms. The disease was here, in decisions made in quiet rooms that doomed places like this. Strength alone was a tool, but it was a reactive one. It stopped a blade already in motion. It did nothing to change the hand that guided the blade.
A treacherous, ambitious thought took root, fragile but tenacious. 'Maybe influence matters more than raw power. Maybe understanding the ledger… isn't enough. Maybe you have to seize the pen.'
The political games of the council, Fugaku's desperate machinations, even Hiruzen's weary guilt—they were all part of a system that allocated suffering. To change outcomes, to prevent the next Tanigakure, the next Uzushiogakure, perhaps you couldn't just be a weapon in the system. You had to reshape the system itself.
The realisation was as unsettling as the ruins around him. He was standing at the edge of a larger, more terrifying role than he had ever considered, a role fraught with compromise, moral ambiguity, and crushing responsibility. And the most frightening part was that, looking at the broken village and the broken trust, he could no longer convincingly tell himself he didn't want it.
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