The Hokage's office no longer felt like a seat of authority. To Sarutobi Hiruzen, it felt like a crumbling tomb, the air thick with the dust of shattered legacy and the stench of betrayal. The formal, scathing indictment from Kumo sat on his desk like a live bomb. But it was the reports flooding in from the ANBU and Torture & Interrogation units since Danzo's confinement that were systematically detonating the foundations of the village he had loved and led for most of his life.
Around him, the faces of his advisors were pale masks of varying degrees of horror and fury. Homura and Koharu, his old teammates, looked hollow, their usual assuredness gone. Shikaku Nara's slumped posture spoke of a bone-deep weariness, while Inoichi Yamanaka's eyes were shadowed with things no man should have to see.
Sarutobi Hiruzen's hand, usually so steady, trembled slightly as he lifted the first report. His voice, when it came, was gravelly and aged beyond its years.
Sarutobi Hiruzen: We will begin with the most immediate geopolitical catastrophe. The Uzumaki.
He looked at a map of the world, his finger tracing from the shattered symbol of Uzushiogakure to Konoha, and then a dotted line to Kumo.
Sarutobi Hiruzen: Our oath-bound allies. Kin of our own Hashirama-sama's wife. We swore to protect them. The official record states we were too slow to respond to the combined assault of Iwa, Kiri, and Kumo.
Shikaku: The official record is a lie. Danzo's private files, found in a seal-keyed vault beneath the ROOT barracks, contain correspondence. He provided detailed intelligence on Uzushiogakure's defensive seal matrices and patrol schedules to the attacking villages' intermediaries. He ensured our "relief force" was delayed by fabricated intelligence on a secondary Iwa incursion that never existed.
Koharu: (Her voice a horrified whisper) He sold them out? Why? The Uzumaki were our greatest allies!
Inoichi: (His tone flat, clinical, which made it worse) Two reasons. First, he feared their Fuinjutsu mastery. He saw it as a power outside the village's direct control. A potential rival to Konoha's and his own dominance. Second, he coveted their unique life-force and chakra. The files speak of a "planned acquisition of genetic samples" post-destruction. He didn't just betray them. He planned to scavenge their corpses for his experiments.
The silence that followed was broken only by the sharp crack of Homura's knuckles as he clenched his fists.
Sarutobi Hiruzen: So T, he near-extinction of a clan, the breaking of our most sacred vow, the loss of Fuinjutsu knowledge that could have fortified our village for generations… was a deliberate act of treason by the head of our own black ops. And now, the scattered remnants, the ones who survived the slaughter he facilitated, have found a home in Kumo. With him. The boy drove us there.
Shikaku: It is worse, Hokage-sama. The intelligence suggests the group Indra brought to Kumo, the fifty Uzumaki, are not just refugees. They are… revitalized. They possess not just sealing prowess, but anomalous physical abilities—extreme strength, vitality. Our analysts suspect Indra did not merely find them. He… found an improved version of them. He has given Kumo what we threw away and then set on fire.
Sarutobi Hiruzen: (He closed his eyes, the weight immense) Continue.
Shikaku placed another file on the desk. This one was thinner, but its contents were denser, more poisonous.
Shikaku: The Uchiha Police Force segregation after the Nine-Tails attack. Danzo's idea. The increased marginalization, the whispered accusations, the withholding of resources. All documented in his memos as "applied pressure to test clan loyalty and create controllable dissent."
Inoichi: My team has interrogated the surviving ROOT operatives involved in surveillance. Their orders were explicit: report any Uchiha gathering, no matter how innocuous, as a "strategy meeting." Fabricate evidence of weapon stockpiling. Spread rumours among the clan of imminent Hokage-ordered purges, and simultaneously whisper to the civilian council of Uchiha coup plans. He created an echo chamber of paranoia, herding the clan toward the very rebellion he then used to justify their extermination.
Homura: But… Itachi. He came to us. He confirmed the coup!
Sarutobi Hiruzen: (A terrible realization dawning) Did he? Or did a thirteen-year-old boy, traumatized by the manipulations of a master spymaster, presented with what seemed like an inevitable bloodbath of his clan against the village, choose what he saw as the lesser of two horrors? A horror Danzo engineered.
Koharu: Itachi's terms… the safety of his brother…
Shikaku: A deal made with the devil who created the crisis. Danzo ensured Sasuke Uchiha lived as a twisted insurance policy and a potential future asset, while eliminating the rest. He didn't just allow the massacre; he was its primary architect. And Fujian Uchiha, Indra's father, sensed it. He sent his family away. He tried to save a piece of his clan from the trap. We murdered him for it, and delivered his genius son, along with a fully justified hatred, directly into the Raikage's hands.
Hiruzen felt the bile rise in his throat. The proud Uchiha, contributors to the village since its founding, driven to the brink and then slaughtered like animals, not because they were an inherent threat, but because one man feared their power and coveted their eyes. And he, the Hokage, had been so preoccupied with maintaining a fragile peace, so trusting in Danzo's brutal "solutions," that he had let it happen.
Inoichi's face was the colour of ash. This report came not from files, but from direct mental incursion into captured ROOT minds and the physical exploration of hidden facilities.
Inoichi: The human experimentation. It is… comprehensive. We have located seven primary facilities and twelve mobile labs. The test subjects… numbered at least one thousand two hundred and forty-three, over thirty years old. Civilians from surrounding lands reported as missing. Konoha shinobi listed as "Missing in Action, body unrecovered." Prisoners of war from other villages.
Sarutobi Hiruzen: Purpose?
Inoichi: (He swallowed hard) The pursuit of Hashirama's cells was the holy grail. But there were branches. Integration of animal DNA for enhanced abilities. Attempted forced awakening of bloodline limits through extreme trauma. Chakra pathway grafting. Compatibility tests for… ocular transplantation.
Shikaku: He was trying to build a super-soldier army, loyal only to him. A private militia to supersede even the ANBU. And the eyes… Uchiha eyes. The files are clear. He had a stockpile. Not just from the massacre, but from before. From Uchiha who died in the war under suspicious circumstances, from ones his agents "collected."
Homura: The Sharingan… he was hoarding them. For himself. For his agents.
Inoichi: He has them. Implanted in his right arm, sealed under bandages. Multiple eyes. And the technique… Izanagi. A forbidden technique that rewrites reality at the cost of an eye's light. He could, in theory, cheat death multiple times.
The sheer, grotesque scale of it was incomprehensible. A thousand lives, snuffed out in cold, clinical darkness, all to feed one man's paranoia and lust for power. This wasn't the "necessary darkness" of a shinobi village. This was the work of a monster who had built a labyrinth of horrors beneath the Village Hidden in the Leaves.
The last folder was the smallest. It was also the heaviest. Sarutobi did not open it. He couldn't.
Sarutobi Hiruzen: Minato. Kushina. Speak.
Shikaku's voice lost all inflection, becoming the dead tone of a man stating facts too terrible to feel.
Shikaku: The security around Kushina Uzumaki's childbirth was the highest priority. The location was known to only seven people: You, me, the two team leaders of the ANBU guard detail, the head midwife, and Danzo. The seal masters were kept deliberately unaware of the exact site.
Inoichi: One of the captured ROOTS, a former cipher clerk, had his memory scrubbed but not thoroughly enough. We recovered a fragment. A coded message, sent via a unique summoning creature—a species of blind earthworm used for ultra-secure, untraceable burrowing transmission. The date matches the day of Naruto's birth. The recipient code-name: "Ghost."
Sarutobi Hiruzen: Obito.
Koharu: It's circumstantial…
Shikaku: The content of the fragment is a set of coordinates and a timing window. "The Fox's cage is weakest at the zenith. The lantern is at these coordinates." The coordinates are a perfect match for the remote valley where Minato and Kushina were hidden. "The lantern" was likely Kushina. Danzo gave Obito the time and the place.
Homura: But why? Minato was the Hokage! He was Konoha's greatest weapon!
Inoichi: Because Minato was a threat. He was young, brilliant, idealistic, and uncontrollable. He had shut Danzo out of key decisions, opposed his methods. Minato represented a new Konoha, one that Danzo could not dominate. And Kushina… she was the last, powerful remnant of the Uzumaki, a clan he had already betrayed. Her death and the Nine-Tails' attack would create chaos, fear, and a need for the kind of strong, ruthless internal security that only Danzo could provide. It would also eliminate a Hokage he couldn't control.
Sarutobi Hiruzen: (His voice broke) He sacrificed his Hokage… he sacrificed a mother and a father… he unleashed the Nine-Tails on his own village… to create an opportunity for power.
The truth landed in the centre of the room with the weight of a meteor. The heroic tragedy of the Fourth Hokage's sacrifice, the foundational trauma of Naruto Uzumaki's life, the near-destruction of Konoha—all of it potentially orchestrated from within.
Sarutobi's pipe, long and cold, clattered to the floor. He did not move to pick it up. He stared at the portraits of the Hokage on the wall. Hashirama, the idealist. Tobirama, the pragmatic builder. Himself, the steward. Minato, the hope. All of them, their legacies now stained, undermined, or murdered by the viper they had allowed to nest at the root of the tree.
Sarutobi Hiruzen: All this… for what? For power? For a twisted vision of Konoha that was just an extension of his own will?
Shikaku: It appears so. His philosophy was one of total control. Anything that threatened that control—a rival clan, a strong Hokage, an independent ally—was eliminated. He saw chaos not as a tragedy, but as a tool. He manufactured it to justify his own expansion of power.
Inoichi: There is more, Hokage-sama. The mental patterns of the ROOT operatives… they are not just trained. They are broken and rebuilt. The Yamanaka techniques used are crude, brutal. These are not shinobi. They are living tools, with no will of their own. He didn't just command loyalty; he erased the capacity for disloyalty.
The full picture was now clear, and it was a portrait of a monster. A man who had, for decades, been the true puppet-master of Konoha's darkest hours, pulling strings that led to genocide, infanticide, and the betrayal of every core value the village claimed to hold.
The silence stretched. The horror of the crimes was matched only by the horrifying understanding of their own complicity.
Koharu: We… we trusted him. We gave him the leash, thinking we could control the dog…
Homura: We saw the results—security, intelligence, a tough response to threats. We chose not to look at the methods. We allowed the "Will of Fire" to be perverted into a will of shadow and blood.
Sarutobi Hiruzen: (He finally looked up, his eyes aged centuries) Do not absolve me. I am the Hokage. The leash was in my hand. I looked away. I accepted his results because they made my rule easier. I allowed the Uchiha to be ostracized. I accepted the necessity of the massacre because Itachi, a child, presented it as the only way. I mourned Minato without questioning how our greatest secret was so perfectly breached. My failure is total. I have not protected this village. I have presided over its moral rot.
He stood, his old bones protesting. He walked to the window, looking out over the village he loved.
Sarutobi Hiruzen: Kumo's indictment is not just an accusation. It is a mirror. And in it, we see not the noble Village Hidden in the Leaves, but a hollow tree, rotten at the root. They have the Uzumaki. They have the last loyal Uchiha. They have a leader who builds and heals. What do we have? Mass graves, stolen eyes, and the ghost of a traitor we created haunting our halls.
Shikaku: The political situation is untenable. The Fire Daimyo will receive Kumo's evidence. Iwa and Suna will salivate at the chance to see Konoha humiliated and weakened. We are isolated. Our military strength is still considerable, but our moral authority is ashes. And our greatest potential threats—Indra and the Raikage—are not reckless warmongers. They are patient architects. They will squeeze us economically, diplomatically, and through intelligence supremacy until we either reform from the ground up or collapse under the weight of our own sins.
The question hung in the air: What now?
Sarutobi Hiruzen turned from the window, a grim resolve hardening his features. The kindly old man was gone, replaced by the stern, tired commander who had fought two wars.
Sarutobi Hiruzen: First, containment. Danzo Shimura is to be stripped of all rank, titles, and honours. He is a war criminal and a traitor. His existence, and the evidence of his crimes, will be presented in full to the Fire Daimyo. We will not hide it. We will expose our own cancer, publicly and completely, before Kumo can use it to gut us.
Homura: The scandal will destroy trust in the office!
Sarutobi Hiruzen: Trust is already destroyed! Our only hope is to burn out the infection ourselves, no matter how painful. Second, reparations. We will open our records to the surviving Uzumaki in Kumo. We will return any stolen Uzumaki artifacts, scrolls, or remains we possess. We will publicly apologize for our failure to protect Uzushiogakure.
Koharu: And the Uchiha?
Sarutobi Hiruzen: The truth of the massacre must be sealed, for now, for Sasuke's safety and the village's stability. But the Uchiha compound will be preserved as a memorial, not a blight. Their contributions to the village will be reinstated in our history books. And Sasuke Uchiha… he must be told a version of the truth that does not make him a target of every patriot seeking revenge for Danzo's crimes. That is a burden for another day.
Shikaku: And Naruto?
Sarutobi Hiruzen flinched. The boy who carried the Nine-Tails, the son of the Hokage Danzo, may have murdered the child he had condemned to a life of loneliness for "the village's stability."
Sarutobi Hiruzen: Naruto Uzumaki… will be told he is the Fourth's son. The decree of secrecy is revoked. He will be moved from that apartment. He will be given access to his father's and mother's legacy. We owe Minato and Kushina that much. And we will begin to treat him as the heir he is, not the weapon we feared.
Inoichi: It is a start. But it does not change the external threat. Indra Uzumaki-Uchiha has every reason to hate us. He is the living embodiment of our failures. And he is not a boy seeking revenge. He is a force of nature, building a new order. We are not just his enemy; we are his antithesis.
Sarutobi Hiruzen: Then we must cease to be that antithesis. We must change. Not just in policy, but in soul. We must become a village worthy of the Will of Fire again. It may be too late to win back what we lost. But it is not too late to prevent our own extinction. We will atone. And we will prepare. For the storm from Kumo is not one of blind lightning. It is a calculated, gathering pressure. And if we do not change, it will not just defeat us; it will render us irrelevant.
The council adjourned, the weight of the revelations pressing down on them. As they filed out, Hiruzen remained, staring at the portrait of Minato, the bright, smiling young man he had failed.
In the forests of Konoha, a young, whiskered boy dreamed of ramen and recognition, unaware his world was about to change. In the Uchiha district, a brooding youth trained with a hatred he didn't fully understand, his destiny already made obsolete by a cousin in a distant mountain village. And deep in a secure cell, Danzo Shimura sat in silence, his mind racing, his arm itching beneath its seals, plotting his next move in a game he believed was far from over.
Konoha's age of shadows was ending, not with a bang, but with the sickening, slow-motion collapse of its own rotten foundations. And from the high, clear skies of Kumo, new eyes watched the dust rise, patient and unblinking.
The silence after his advisors left was absolute. It was the silence of a tomb, and Sarutobi Hiruzen was the corpse sitting at its centre. The files on his desk were no longer parchment and ink. They were ghosts. A thousand ghosts, swirling in the lamplight, whispering accusations in voices he recognized—Uzumaki elders, Uchiha police, young shinobi with hopeful eyes, Minato's confident baritone, Kushida's fiery laugh.
But the loudest ghost, the one that had been whispering for decades, was his own.
It wasn't just about the crimes. It was about the origin. The poison seed from which this forest of horrors had grown. And he had planted it himself.
The rain was cold, a persistent drizzle that seeped into their Armor. They were young, barely more than boys, part of Tobirama-sensei's escort squad. The air was thick with the iron tang of blood and the ozone of lightning release. The Kankaku Force was closing in. Death was a certainty.
Tobirama-sensei, his face as stern and unyielding as the cliff face they were using for cover, turned to them. His red eyes held no fear, only a terrible, calculating resolve.
Tobirama: "I will be the decoy. One of you must be the diversion to draw their immediate pursuit, to sell the ruse. That one will almost certainly die. The other will lead the squad back to the village with the intelligence. That one will live to become the support for the future Hokage."
Hiruzen's heart hammered against his ribs. He looked at his teammates. Homura and Koharu, fierce and loyal. Torifu Akimichi, steadfast. And Danzo. His friend since childhood. Danzo, whose eyes, even then, held a flicker of something harder, more desperate, than the rest. Danzo, who had always been just a step behind him, seething with a silent, brittle pride.
Danzo hesitated. A fraction of a second. His body tensed not to leap forward, but to recoil. The fear of death was a physical wave coming off him.
Hiruzen didn't think. He leapt. "I'll be the decoy, sensei!"
He remembered the look on Tobirama's face. Not surprise, but a deep, weary approval. And the look on Danzo's. Shock, then a shame so profound it curdled into something else—a bitter, burning resentment.
He survived. By luck, by skill, by the grace of the shinobi gods. Tobirama did not. They returned to Konoha, heroes draped in the mantle of a martyr's sacrifice. Hiruzen was hailed as the heir apparent, the student who embodied the Will of Fire.
And Danzo… Danzo was the one who hesitated.
In the weeks that followed, Danzo withdrew. The shame festered. Hiruzen, flush with grief for his sensei and the burden of his new destiny, saw only his friend's pain. heremebred when he and went during when He went to the newly instated Second Hokage, Senju Tobirama's posthumous appointment, echoing in the quiet office.
Hiruzen: "Lord Hokage… about Danzo. He's… struggling. He feels he failed. He needs purpose. A strict hand. He has talent, drive. Will you take him as a personal student? As you did with me? I believe he can be great."
Tobirama had fixed him with those piercing red eyes. He'd been reviewing the personnel files of the new generation. His finger had been resting on a picture of a young, silver-haired prodigy with a calm, intelligent gaze—Sakumo Hatake.
Tobirama: "Hiruzen. Compassion is a leader's strength. But blind compassion is a fatal flaw. The boy Shimura… his chakra is murky. His will is rooted in fear and envy, not in the protection of the collective. The Hatake boy's spirit is clear as a polished blade. His loyalty is to the mission and his comrades, not to the approval of others. To train Shimura is to sharpen a dagger that may one day cut the hand that holds it. To train Hatake is to hone a sword for the village."
Hiruzen, young, idealistic, drowning in guilt for surviving and for his friend's misery, had begged. "Please, Lord Hokage. Give him a chance. I will vouch for him. I will help guide him. He is my friend."
Tobirama had sighed, a sound like wind through dead leaves. He had closed Sakumo's file. "Very well. On your head be it, Hiruzen. Remember this day. Remember the choice you asked me to make."
He had taken Danzo as a student. And Sakumo Hatake, the White Fang, found his guidance elsewhere, becoming a legend through sheer, unadulterated genius and heart.
The Present – The First Corruption
Hiruzen buried his face in his hands. On your head be it. The words were a curse that had come to pass. He had chosen the dagger over the sword. He had asked for the rot to be brought into the heartwood of the tree, and Tobirama, in his last act of mentorship, had granted the wish of his foolish, compassionate heir.
Everything spiralled from that moment.
Sakumo Hatake, the greatest shinobi of his generation, returns from a mission having chosen to save his teammates over completing the objective. The mission failure costs Konoha dearly. The village turns on him. The whispers, the scorn, the cruelty from those who owed him their lives. Hiruzen, as Hokage, had remained publicly silent, believing the village's scorn would blow over. But the whispers were too organized, too venomous. He sees now, with horrific clarity, the hidden hand. Danzo, who had always hated the man who represented the path not taken, the man whose pure light showed up his own murky depths, fuelling the controversy, manipulating the court of public opinion until a hero's spirit broke. Sakumo took his own life, leaving behind a toddler son named Kakashi. Another brilliant light, extinguished.
The first discreet reports of missing persons—low-level civilians, war prisoners—filter to his desk. They are filed as "probable desertion" or "enemy action." Danzo comes to him, speaking of the need for "edge-seeking research" to keep up with Iwa's numbers or Kiri's brutality. He speaks of the "greater good," of sacrifices made in shadow so the village can walk in light. Hiruzen, weary from war, thinking of the big picture, gives tacit approval. "Keep it contained, Danzo. And humane." A naive, grotesque contradiction. The first of a thousand silent screams echoes in a basement he has never visited.
Biwako Sarutobi
Her smile. That was the first thing that always came. Biwako Sarutobi. Not a kunoichi of legendary power, but a woman of immense strength. Her laughter could disarm his darkest moods. Her hands were skilled with medicinal herbs and gentle on his furrowed brow. She saw the weight he carried and never tried to lift it, only to share the space beneath it. She gave him a son, Asuma. She gave him a home that was not an office.
She died on the night of the Nine-Tails attack.
Not in the grand battle against the beast. Not as a hero. She was part of the medical corps mobilization, setting up a triage centre in the eastern district. The intelligence—the precise, damning intelligence Danzo had given Obito—hadn't just led the masked man to Kushina. It had given him the layout of the village's emergency response. Obito, or the Nine-Tails under his influence, had specifically targeted command and logistics points. A massive swipe of a tail, a blast of corrupted chakra, and the eastern triage centre was gone. Reduced to rubble and ash.
He had found her necklace, the one with the Sarutobi clan mon, in the debris. The metal was twisted and scorched.
He had wept then, in private. He had channelled his grief into stabilizing the village, into caring for the orphaned Naruto. He had blamed the mysterious masked attacker, the tragedy of fate.
Now he knew. The man who killed his Biwako, the student of the son he thought of as his own (Minato), had been given the knife by his oldest friend. Danzo's betrayal hadn't just killed a Hokage. It had killed his heart. It had murdered his peace.
The grief, now freshly laced with this venomous truth, transformed into a cold, directed fury. It was a fury that had been buried under decades of duty, compromise, and guilty inaction. It rose now, clean and sharp.
He did not call the guards. He walked alone, his footsteps echoing in the sterile, sealed corridor leading to the maximum-security detainment block deep under the Hokage tower. The ANBU at the final checkpoint saw the look on his face and wordlessly opened the door.
Danzo's cell was not a dungeon. It was a clean, white, chakra-nullifying room. The man sat on a plain cot, his bandaged arm resting in his lap, his single visible eye closed in meditation. He looked like a retired bureaucrat, not a monster. The dissonance made Hiruzen's rage burn colder.
Danzo's eye opened. There was no fear, only a weary, superior calm.
Danzo: "Hiruzen. Come to finally see reason? Or to confess your own failures that led to this necessary unpleasantness?"
Hiruzen did not shout. His voice was low, a river of ice cutting through the still air.
Sarutobi Hiruzen: "I have just finished reading the reports from the basements. All of them."
Danzo: "Then you understand the scope of what was required to protect Konoha from itself. From the weakness of ideals."
Sarutobi Hiruzen: "I understand that I have been sharing tea with a demon for sixty years. I understand that I asked my teacher to nurture a viper."
Danzo's eye narrowed. "Tobirama-sensei was a pragmatist. He would have understood."
Sarutobi Hiruzen: "Tobirama-sensei wanted to train Sakumo Hatake."
The words hung in the air. For the first time, Danzo's composure cracked. A muscle twitched in his jaw. The name of the man who had been his antithesis, the living symbol of the path denied to him, still had power.
Sarutobi Hiruzen: "He saw in Sakumo the clear, loyal blade Konoha needed. I begged him. On my knees, fuelled by childish guilt over your shame and my own survival, I begged him to take you instead. I told him you were my friend. That you could be great. I vouched for you. I planted you in the fertile soil of our village, and for sixty years, I watered your spite, pruned your paranoia, and called it 'managing a necessary darkness.'"
Danzo: "And Konoha survived! It thrived! Through wars I won in the shadows! Through threats I eliminated before they bloomed!"
Sarutobi Hiruzen: "At what cost, Danzo? A thousand souls in your labs? The Uzumaki, our family, sold to the slaughter? The Uchiha, driven to madness and then the grave? My wife?" His voice finally broke on the last word. "Biwako… she died because of a secret you gave to that monster. A monster who was Minato's student! You killed them all. My teacher's chosen successor. My son in spirit. My wife."
He took a step closer, his old frame trembling not with weakness, but with the intensity of his emotion.
Sarutobi Hiruzen: "You were never meant to be Hokage. Not because you hesitated on that riverbank. But because you never understood what the hat means. It is not a crown of control. It is a yoke of responsibility. It is the will to protect every leaf on the tree, even the smallest, the weakest, the most different. You only ever saw the tree as something to be carved into a weapon. You are not a protector. You are a parasite. And I… I was the fool who invited you into the trunk."
Danzo's face had grown pale, his calm shattered. The truth of his own irredeemable nature, stated not as an accusation from an enemy, but as a cold, factual epitaph from the one man whose opinion had ever secretly mattered to him, was a blow no Izanagi could deflect.
Danzo: "You… you are weak, Hiruzen. You always were. Your sentimentality, your 'Will of Fire'… it is a pretty story for children. The world is made of blood and secrets. I did what you lacked the spine to do!"
Sarutobi Hiruzen: "No. You did what I allowed you to do. Because I was too sentimental to see the friend I wanted, instead of the man you were. That ends now. You will stand before the Daimyo. You will answer for every life you took, every trust you betrayed. Your name will be struck from the Konoha scrolls. You will die as you lived: in the shadows, unmoored, and understood only as the disease you are."
He turned to leave, the finality in his tone absolute.
Danzo's voice, suddenly stripped of all pretense, was raw and hollow. "Hiruzen… it was all… for the village."
Sarutobi Hiruzen stopped at the door, not looking back.
Sarutobi Hiruzen: "The village is not a thing, Danzo. It is the people. The people you slaughtered, betrayed, and tortured. You were not its saviour. You were its cancer. And I was the doctor who refused to see it."
He walked out. The heavy door sealed shut behind him, cutting off the sight of the broken old man in the white room. The viper was in the cage. But the garden it had poisoned would take generations to heal.
Walking back through the silent corridors, Hiruzen's mind went to the living. To Kakashi, bearing the weight of his father's tragedy. To Itachi, the child-soldier who carried a burden no one should. To Sasuke, the last leaf of a poisoned branch. And to Naruto. The boy who had the Nine-Tails sealed within him, the son of the Hokage Danzo had helped murder, the child he had condemned to loneliness… who possessed, against all odds, the same stubborn, bright heart as his father and the fierce love of his mother.
He had failed them all. He had failed the legacy of every Hokage before him. The only thing left was to spend whatever time he had left trying to uproot the rot, to give the next generation—Naruto, Sasuke, even the distant, terrifyingly brilliant Indra—a chance to grow in cleaner soil.
He looked up at the Hokage monument. His own stone face looked back, worn by weather and time. I am sorry, he thought to the stone faces of Hashirama, Tobirama, and Minato. I am so sorry.
The ghosts were quiet now. Their accusations had been heard. All that was left was the work.
End of Chapter - 9.