Night had fallen.
There were barely any people left on the streets.
Most of Konoha’s villagers had already gone to sleep.
Compared to Kazan’s previous world, entertainment options here were rather limited.
Yet on a certain street in the southern part of the village, two little brats had transformed into construction workers and were busy repairing the road they had destroyed not long ago.
“What time is it already? I’m exhausted!”
Kazan looked up at the sky.
It had to be at least eleven o’clock by now.
Repairing the street was far more troublesome than he’d expected.
Maybe that was simply because destroying something was always much easier than creating it.
“You should consider yourself lucky. Fighting inside the village without authorization is against the rules. Normally, we’d be sitting in the Police Force right now getting interrogated by the Uchiha.”
On the other side of the road, Kakashi focused on laying bricks.
“I’d rather sit in the Police Force than do this.”
People in Konoha feared the Uchiha, but Kazan knew they were really just a bunch of hopeless tsunderes who cared far too much about their feelings.
He had personally tested it.
Once, after getting caught by members of the Uchiha Police Force for causing trouble, Kazan had showered them with an overwhelming amount of goodwill.
The Uchiha officers, whose expressions had initially been colder than ice, immediately did a complete one-eighty.
Over the years, the Uchiha Police Force hadn’t exactly had an easy time doing its job.
If you wanted to enforce the law properly, you were bound to anger plenty of villagers and make people afraid of you.
Even though the Nine-Tails incident had yet to happen, many of Konoha’s villagers already disliked the Uchiha deep down.
So when Kazan expressed understanding for their difficulties and even voiced the frustrations the Uchiha themselves couldn’t say aloud, he immediately earned their favor.
Compared to Hiruzen Sarutobi, the Uchiha were much easier to deal with.
Kakashi didn’t understand that.
His opinion of the Uchiha was the same as most villagers’.
They were a group who took advantage of their authority in the Police Force, spent most of their time inside the village, and only knew how to throw their weight around against their own people.
That was the Uchiha.
Still, Kakashi didn’t actually care about them.
Whatever relationship the Uchiha had with the village had nothing to do with him.
What he cared about was Kazan’s opinion of his father.
Their fight and conversation earlier had made Kakashi feel that Kazan was somehow different from everyone else in the village.
“My father…”
“Your dad’s dead. I know.”
“That’s not what I meant!”
Kakashi turned around angrily.
Most of his face was hidden behind his mask, but Kazan could practically feel him grinding his teeth.
“Then what do you mean?”
Kakashi took a deep breath.
“What kind of person do you think he was?”
“A really cool guy. Compared to you, Senior Sakumo Hatake was way cooler.”
“I’m not talking about his appearance!”
“Neither am I!”
Kakashi froze.
He could see the seriousness in Kazan’s eyes.
After a moment, he took a deep breath and said,
“In the shinobi world, completing the mission comes before everything else. Anyone who willingly abandons a mission is trash.”
“But those who abandon their comrades for the sake of a mission are worse than trash.”
Kazan answered without missing a beat.
It was such a classic line that even after all these years, he still remembered it vividly.
Kakashi’s pupils widened.
Those words had clearly shaken something deep inside him.
Seeing that, Kazan continued,
“I don’t think your father did anything wrong. At the very least, I wouldn’t stand by and let any of my comrades die in front of me—including you.”
Kazan had spent a long time thinking about it and concluded that the easiest way to obtain the Multiple Shadow Clone Technique was probably through Kakashi.
The technique was recorded in the Scroll of Seals.
There was no way Kazan could get his hands on that.
He couldn’t exactly sneak into the heavily guarded Hokage’s office, which was crawling with ANBU, just to steal the Multiple Shadow Clone Technique.
Kakashi, however…
There was a chance his father had left the technique among his inheritance.
So Kazan wanted to build a good relationship with Kakashi and obtain the technique through him.
Of course, Kakashi had no idea that the bastard in front of him had such shameless ulterior motives.
At this moment, his emotions were in turmoil.
It was a completely different opinion from anything he had heard over the past few years.
Kazan spoke of his father with nothing but respect and approval.
There was no condemnation.
No cursing.
“Those who abandon their comrades for the sake of a mission are worse than trash…”
The words repeated over and over in Kakashi’s mind.
After a while, he turned his head away and spoke in a slightly awkward tone.
“You should worry about yourself first. You can’t even use ninjutsu.”
Why does his tone sound so soft all of a sudden?
Handling these little kids really wasn’t difficult.
He stretched and casually remarked,
“At this rate, I don’t think the two of us are going to finish this tonight.”
“Kakashi, don’t you have some way to speed things up? I still have school tomorrow.”
“No. And at this hour, no one’s coming to help us either.”
Kakashi continued laying bricks.
But after a while, something suddenly occurred to him.
“Although… my father did have a technique that might help. It can create physical clones.”
“But I haven’t learned it myself, so don’t start thinking you can slack off!”
The Multiple Shadow Clone Technique.
That was the technique Kakashi was talking about.
However, his father had once told him that the technique carried certain risks, which was why Kakashi had never learned it.
Physical clones?
That had to mean Shadow Clones.
“A clone technique that creates physical bodies? Can you teach it to me?”
Kazan immediately seized the opportunity.
He had absolutely no shame.
He didn’t care that he’d just beaten Kakashi up earlier.
The moment he saw an opening, he reached out and asked for the technique directly.
He figured his words just now had probably raised Kakashi’s favorability quite a bit.
Surely asking him to cough up a little reward wasn’t too much.
“Aren’t you uninterested in ninjutsu?”
As expected, Kakashi didn’t immediately refuse.
There were far too few people in Konoha who understood his father and acknowledged his choices.
“That’s nonsense. I’m just bad at ninjutsu, so I had no choice but to focus on taijutsu. I’m actually very eager to learn.”
Was Kakashi stupid?
How could the Shadow Clone Technique possibly be compared to ordinary ninjutsu?
That King of Deserters had casually declared he’d work two hundred times harder and then leveled up like crazy.
In just two years, he’d mastered all of the Six Powers and Haki, even developing some so-called Honesty Impact that blew off one of Avalo Pizarro’s arms, earning him recognition as one of the future candidates for Marine Admiral.
Kazan wasn’t greedy.
Five, six, seven, maybe eight times the training speed would be enough.
That wasn’t unreasonable, right?
Kakashi’s instincts told him that Kazan wasn’t telling the truth.
Still, he didn’t mind letting Kazan learn the technique.
Because in Kazan, his father’s ninja way continued to live on.
Kakashi believed that if his father were still alive, he would probably agree as well.
Probably…