Chapter 150: The Development of Another World
"Spacing out again?"
"Ah, sorry, Tsunade. I do not know why, but I could have sworn I just saw you walk out."
"What are you talking about? I have been right here the whole time."
Seeing her boyfriend standing behind her in a daze, Tsunade let out a quiet sigh, then stepped forward and stood shoulder to shoulder with him.
"Everyone is on edge after Aizen Sousuke disappeared. But if you, as captain of the Second Division, collapse now, what then? You are the one who leads the Covert Force."
"Yes. At a time like this, we have to endure, even if we are only forcing ourselves to."
"That is more like the man I know."
Kato Dan smiled back at her, gentle and warm, and for a moment it felt as if they were still seventeen, still living in that brief, carefree spring.
But the sight that spread out before them was nothing like their youth.
The Seireitei lay in ruins.
Countless Shinigami of Konoha, dressed in black uniforms with the Hidden Leaf symbol tied to their shoulders, ran through the shattered streets, using kido and chakra tools to brace walls, mend foundations, and slowly restore the Seireitei to something like its original shape.
Ever since Aizen Sousuke had voluntarily left this world, transferring himself from the Divine Tree to another, the already tense calm had thinned to the breaking point.
The Army Without Borders rushed from front to front, stamping out fires wherever they could.
But looking at the results, it was hard to call it fire suppression.
It looked more like someone tossing oil into a dozen different blazes at once. The flames of conflict in the ninja world rose higher with every passing month.
As its members themselves had said, the Hueco Mundo faction was essentially a research organization. Once Aizen Sousuke, the one politically minded member among them, departed, they withdrew from the Land of Fire's alliance without hesitation and officially became an independent research body.
They devoted themselves entirely to the technologies and future world Otsutsuki Urashiki had described, the ones Hatake Kakashi had brought back from the other side. They dedicated themselves to prying open the next layer of advancement.
After Madara Uchiha's successful resurrection, he released Obito Uchiha and Rin Nohara and began spreading his concept of a twin world.
The idea of living in another world drew people's attention like a tide.
But what truly unsettled the nations most was not the fantasy of a second reality.
It was the question of why Aizen Sousuke had vanished so suddenly.
With that pillar of the modern shinobi order gone, the once stable factions began to crack, then crumble, and finally bare their teeth at one another.
Even within Konoha, friction flared around the Shinigami and their related powers. Some members of the Uchiha clan wanted to follow Madara. Some shinobi, tempted by talk of an infinite world and endless possibility, wanted to leave the village entirely.
Perhaps the age of the chakra network was simply an era destined for this kind of chaos.
Things that sounded beautiful at a distance proved all too capable of leading people astray once they came close.
On the surface, the impact still looked limited.
There had been riots and disruptions in the Seireitei, and a number of offenders had been thrown into the Abyss. Beyond that, the structure of the world did not seem dramatically altered.
But everyone understood that Aizen Sousuke's departure was likely the signal for the true outbreak of an unprecedented Third Shinobi World War.
Otsutsuki Urashiki's arrival, and the infinitely evolving future he preached, frightened many.
Madara's vision of a relaxed twin world unsettled them in a different way, a quiet dread, as if the ground underfoot no longer felt real.
Those deceived, tempted or pulled along by these visions outnumbered even those who had been swallowed up in the Moon Dream.
The previous Moon Dream had ultimately been a plan to leave the world.
Madara himself had still returned.
And the price for taking part had looked deceptively small. A little loyalty, a portion of their chakra, a segment of their will. Compared with the promise of a perfect dream, what was that.
After being bombarded by the propaganda of the Army Without Borders and the Hueco Mundo projects, many shinobi had long since begun to blur the line of loyalty.
At times it seemed questionable whether loyalty had ever truly existed.
In this complicated, drifting situation, Kato Dan, as captain of Konoha's Covert Force, had more to worry about than anyone.
He had to monitor the chakra network for unfamiliar signal sources.
He had to dispatch his squads to track anomalous readings across the world.
He had to sort and bind the floods of intelligence, then compress them into coherent reports for Hokage Minato Namikaze.
And worst of all, despite all this relentless work, the situation did not improve.
Even Tsunade of the Fourth Division was constantly deployed on missions. Other divisions burned themselves down to the bone in the name of Konoha's defense.
Yet the scale and complexity of the crisis had long since outrun what any single person could influence.
What Aizen had been doing before, they realized, had not been peacekeeping.
He had simply been holding the war back, trapping it in a distant, uncertain tomorrow.
Now that he was gone, the war was naturally seized and driven forward by those with their own agendas.
The power of the weapons and theories he had given the world had never truly been tested on a real battlefield.
Simulations lacked the blood and screaming and ruin that made war real.
So, for smaller lands and hidden villages, taking the gamble became almost inevitable.
They had nothing to lose.
Their sovereignty had always been precarious under the pressure of the Great Nations. Their research and development lagged behind. Any genius they nurtured was either stolen by higher offers or quietly silenced. The Army Without Borders could never cover every fracture in their walls.
So what were they waiting for, if not the chance to overturn the table.
If they now held the power to reshuffle the entire order of the shinobi world, then they were willing to be the spark that lit the powder trail.
They had been suppressed by the great powers for too long.
The only reason they had not already exploded was Aizen's obsessive balancing act, his constant adjustments and maneuvers. He kept the scales level through a tangled web of open and secret cooperation, trade offs and compromises.
But now that Aizen was gone, that balance between the great powers was collapsing.
And it was the smaller nations that were pushing hardest against the breaking point.
They understood better than anyone whose hands had been holding the world together.
Now that those hands were gone, there was no reason to pretend any longer.
Whether it was the newly risen courts of the Shinigami or the hidden villages in the shadows, everyone was quietly sharpening their blades for the war to come.
The leaders, however, sat atop their towers, too busy or too indifferent to truly care.
In the end, war rarely touched them directly.
The few individuals who could stand against an entire hidden village on their own and still sincerely cared about the prospect of world war were rare.
Most people were made of more ordinary material.
Whether shinobi or Shinigami, the majority were ultimately driven by hatred and the hunger to kill.
As long as they did not die in the first wave, the rest would sort itself out in their minds.
"...We must keep this war from starting."
In the captain's council chamber of the Seireitei, Hiruzen Sarutobi sat at the head of the table and spoke in a low voice to the assembled captains of Konoha's Thirteen Divisions.
"After Aizen left, we finally understood that the peace of this era was bound to him more tightly than we wanted to admit. But now that he has gone in search of some greater truth, we cannot immediately start slaughtering each other like wild animals in his absence."
"If we do that, are we not proving that we were nothing more than his pets, his slaves, waiting for our master to leave before baring our teeth."
"Every one of us here takes the word peace seriously. No one sitting in this room thinks it is a joke. We all remember the war years. The scars of those battles still ache in our villages."
"In short, Konoha's position is this. We will stop this war, no matter the cost, no matter the methods. Even if we must resort to extreme tools like assassination or incitement, we will keep any conflict within limits we can accept. These small nations do not understand what a true war means. So we will teach them. We will remind them who holds authority in this world."
"..."
The captains exchanged glances.
They gave their formal agreement, but it was clear that many of them were unconvinced.
Most of the Thirteen Divisions were composed of people originally drawn from Aizen Sousuke's circle, woven together through his projects and theories. His faction had never particularly cared about politics. Their passion was research.
The fact that Nono Yakushi, captain of the Twelfth Division, had refused to attend the meeting at all said enough. For many of them, war was something distant and almost dull.
They believed, with quiet certainty, that they could survive it.
They could protect the people they cared about.
Given that, why should they feel compelled to either stop the war or encourage it.
Whether they chose to push it forward or smother it depended entirely on their mood.
If they wanted escalation, they could simply step into the field themselves and fan the flames.
If they preferred peace, they could whisper through the Army Without Borders and the communication channels between villages, damping things down.
The cohesion of both the shinobi world and the individual villages had grown weaker with every new theory and power that appeared.
As new forces surged up and old structures began to crack, arrogance blossomed like mold in damp timber.
At the very peak of that arrogance had been Aizen Sousuke, the man who defined the world's order and operated it like a machine.
Now he had chosen to walk away.
So the question of who would become the second pillar of the world's power suddenly became very interesting.
"...I agree with Captain Commander Sarutobi. We need to prevent a large scale war this time."
The captain of the Sixth Division, Uchiha Kagami, smoothed the edges of the delight in his expression, then rose to his feet in support of the Captain Commander's words.
As the one who saw himself as the inheritor of Konoha's spirit, Kagami had never forgiven Aizen Sousuke.
The moment he learned the full extent of Las Noches, he had wanted to lead an army to its gates, drag Aizen out in chains and put him on trial in public.
When news came that Aizen had left this world, Kagami had very nearly laughed out loud in the middle of the briefing.
Even now, whenever his thoughts brushed that fact, he felt the corner of his mouth twitch, and had to force it still.
Fortunately, he noticed quickly that several captains were giving him unfriendly looks. He swallowed his impulse to grin and instead spoke with composed seriousness.
"Our long standing stance in Konoha," Kagami said, "is that we do not want war on our own soil, and we do not want war in this world."
"Unless a war is started by Konoha, with the explicit goal of bringing shared prosperity to the world, we oppose any outbreak of large scale conflict. War means blood and death. None of us here enjoy that."
He glanced along the rows of captains in their white haori, reading their faces. Some listened carefully, some stared into space, some looked as if they did not care either way.
"Although I dislike Aizen Sousuke," Kagami continued, "I have to acknowledge that his existence was the root of countless people's ambitions. His departure means that those ambitions no longer have any restraint."
"Our peace cannot be something Aizen Sousuke grants us from above. Our peace must be something we forge for ourselves. Konoha needs to clearly declare this to the world. In terms of propaganda, we are behind the Army Without Borders. We lag even behind Hueco Mundo, and the Cloud shinobi are not far behind us. But in this matter, we hold the moral high ground."
"Konoha has always walked the path of peace. We can use this crisis to extend our influence. The younger generation has no real understanding of war. We can even hold simulated military exercises on the network, and show those restless, war hungry people what real battle looks like. Let them think whether they would be heroes on the field, or the nameless corpses torn apart in the first exchange."
"This crisis can be our opportunity to broaden Konoha's approach."
"..."
When did he get that smart.
You were trampled by Aizen for years, and now that he is gone, you suddenly start sounding like a strategist.
Several captains could not help thinking it.
It seemed that with Aizen's departure, everyone had started to look at the world with a little more care.
The one person who could make them feel truly at ease, the one who made them believe he would always be there to take responsibility in the end, had really left.
In that vacuum, some of the previously arrogant and reckless began to quietly reconsider their place.
Others who had once felt smothered by stronger powers began to see an opening for themselves.
That was what a world war really was at its core.
Some people believed that if they stirred up war, they could grasp greater benefits.
Some thought it would raise their social standing.
Some were simply foolish and reckless, unable or unwilling to imagine consequences, wanting war for war's own sake.
The ninja world had never lacked any of those types.
Before, the reason they had not caused more damage was because Aizen Sousuke had always been quick to recruit those with true ability into Las Noches, folding their ambition into his own projects.
Those who had ambition without power could not shake the Army Without Borders no matter how hard they tried.
Now, however, the Army Without Borders was stretched thin.
Las Noches was fraying at the edges, its operations stripped of coherence. Without its leader, its internal fractures and arguments were suddenly visible.
With both of those stabilizing weights slipping, it was only natural that the rest of the world would begin to sway.
If Konoha now seized the banner of peace and declared itself the world's military police, promising to strike any nation that attempted to start a war, it would certainly win prestige.
But it would also paint a target on its own back.
If someone managed to ignite a true large scale conflict, then the village that had publicly sworn to enforce peace would inevitably be the first everyone turned on.
A united shinobi world might descend on Konoha at once.
For most of the captains in this room, that was unacceptable.
Especially for Hiruzen, who could read their reluctance at a glance.
If they themselves did not believe in these lofty statements, how could they expect the rest of the world to accept that Konoha fought for everyone's sake, and not for its own advantage.
He could not even guarantee that the squads he sent out would not help themselves along the way.
Raiding and theft had been common practice in earlier wars.
There might now be a chakra network for surveillance, but techniques for concealing or distorting information were developing just as quickly.
Everything was a double edged sword.
Even Kato Dan, commander of the Star Unit, did not seem particularly moved by talk of war.
As a Shinigami, his sense of distance from the human world had only grown.
He was more troubled by the shadow of Tsunade he had glimpsed when he reversed his perspective from the other timeline, and the way that memory had forced him to rethink certain technologies and abilities.
As for some great conflict in the shinobi world… from the perspective of the Seireitei, what did it really matter.
Konoha would not fall.
That much was certain.
They were the greatest village in the world.
Whatever storms raged outside, it was hard to imagine those waves sweeping over the Seireitei and truly washing it away.
With that distance, their motivation to act directly naturally dulled.
Looking at the captains lost in their own thoughts, Hiruzen Sarutobi let out a breath he had been holding behind his teeth.
He was a Shinigami now as well.
He understood that unique indifference that settled in when your body no longer belonged to the mortal world.
Even humans found it difficult to genuinely empathize with the lives of monkeys.
To a being of death, the human world was that much further away.
The longer someone lived as a Shinigami, the fainter that human empathy became.
"That is enough for today," Hiruzen said at last. "I will speak to Minato about our approach to peace."
He looked at the captains one more time.
"I understand that as Shinigami, you do not want to concern yourselves with the affairs of the living world. But do not forget that you were humans once."
"..."
No one answered.
Faced with that vast, quiet indifference, Hiruzen could not find any more words that would reach them.
He simply turned, gathered his haori around him, and walked out of the council chamber alone.
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