If this looks like a repeat chapter to you go back and read the last one, i release the chapters in the wrong order and dident relize mb.
so i switched the content of the last one for todays chapter ——————————————————————————————– Hiruzen read the report twice before setting it down.
It was a small thing: new academy graduates, placement assignments, the ordinary.
Most of it he skimmed.
This one, he didn’t.
Three graduates.
Three Uchiha, all under ten years old.
Combat evaluations placing one at elite chunin, two at special jōnin strength, with Shizuku bordering on jōnin strength.
All three bypassing standard genin team placement entirely to join the Uchiha Military Police, under direct clan authority.
He read the evaluator’s notes a second time, the same woman’s handwriting he recognized from a dozen other reports over the years.
She wasn’t prone to exaggeration.
If she’d written special jōnin, she meant it.
He sat with the report for a long moment.
The placement itself wasn’t against any rule.
The Uchiha always had decision-making over where their own members served.
He couldn’t fault Fugaku for using a legitimate process.
What troubled him wasn’t the legality.
It was the pattern.
Two of the most exceptional young talents to come out of the Academy in a generation, absorbed directly into the clan’s own force rather than placed under a jōnin who would report their abilities up the standard chain of command.
Instead, they are kept close exactly where clan leadership, rather than the village, retained the clearest view of their development and could influence them.
He thought of the girl specifically, the same one whose Academy evaluation had crossed his desk years ago, the one Danzo had once stood in this very office and demanded outright.
Now testing near full jōnin before the age of ten, and quietly folded into an institution that answered, in practice if not on paper, to Fugaku long before it answered to him.
He didn’t believe Fugaku intended anything hostile by it.
The younger man was ambitious, certainly, more ambitious than his predecessor had been at the same age, but ambition alone wasn’t disloyalty.
Hiruzen had led this village through enough years and enough men to know the difference, or believed he did.
Still.
The war would need talent like this eventually, out on the front rather than patrolling within the village’s own walls.
And the same voices already muttering about the Uchiha’s absence from the fighting would only grow louder once word of this placement spread past administrative channels.
He made a note to have a quiet word with Fugaku.
Just a conversation, framed as concern for the war effort rather than suspicion of the clan itself, to see how the man responded to being gently reminded that the village was watching.
He set the report aside and reached for the next item in the stack, though his attention lingered on it a moment longer.
— Danzo heard about it from a source considerably faster than Hiruzen, and he was considerably less pleased than Hiruzen had been.
He read the summary once, standing in the same windowless room he had read the first report on her in.
Special jōnin strength.
Near full jōnin, in the girl’s case.
Exactly the outcome the academy evaluation had predicted years ago, exactly the potential he had personally identified and attempted to recruit, and Hiruzen had done nothing with it except let the clan quietly claim it for itself.
He had asked for this.
Specifically, precisely, in Hiruzen’s own office, years earlier, recruit them now, shape them properly, before their minds become shaped.
He had been refused, on the grounds that they were children who deserved to be raised rather than trained as instruments, and it would cause conflict with the Uchiha.
And now, without any of the discipline Root would have provided, without any of the ideological grounding that came from proper handling, the girl had reached this level of strength anyway, not through the village, but through her clan.
It confirmed everything he had argued years ago.
It also confirmed that his warning had gone entirely unheeded, and that the outcome he had predicted exceptional potential, left unshaped by anyone with the discipline to direct it properly- had been claimed by a different faction.
That was, in some respects, worse than waste.
Waste could still eventually be redirected.
A resource absorbed into an enemy’s power structure was considerably harder to extract.
He considered his options, turning each one over slowly.
A direct approach was closed to him now.
Attempting to recruit either sibling out of an active clan institution would be impossible, and would hand Fugaku every justification he needed to escalate whatever suspicion already existed between them since the incident with the operative.
Patience, then.
The clan’s arrangement gave the girl safety and structure now, but it was not guaranteed to last.
Children grew.
Loyalties, even ones built on genuine affection, occasionally shifted when circumstances changed.
If she was ever deployed during the war, it might be simplest to have her killed in the field.
Or, if a cleaner option presented itself, Root could simply take her instead, back to one of the bases, before the clan or the village could do anything.
He set the report down and allowed himself some satisfaction beneath the irritation.