The air suddenly froze.
Sakumo Hatake narrowed his eyes slightly, his sharp gaze turning as cold as a blade’s edge.
“Foolish thing?” He repeated the phrase, his tone devoid of emotion.
“What foolish thing do you think I’m doing?”
Ryuha did not avert his gaze.
“You want to commit suicide,” he said plainly.
“To end your own life with that White Fang short sword.
“Because you think doing so will atone for your sins, quiet the public outcry, and give the village an answer.”
Sakumo Hatake fell silent.
A few seconds later, he suddenly laughed.
It was a bitter smile, as though he had swallowed raw bile.
“Atonement…
huh.” He looked down at the short sword in front of him.
“Perhaps.
But more than that…
I’m tired.”
He reached out, his fingers gently tracing the blade.
“I’ve been a ninja for thirty years.
“I’ve completed seventeen S-rank missions and one hundred and four A-rank missions.
I’ve killed so many shinobi I’ve lost count.” Sakumo’s voice was calm—terrifyingly so.
“I never doubted my choices.
A mission was a mission, and rules were rules.
A ninja sacrifices everything to complete the mission, including their own life.”
His finger stopped at the edge of the blade.
“But this time…
I chose my comrades.”
He looked up at Ryuha.
“Do you know why?”
Ryuha shook his head.
“Because one of those comrades was a student I trained with my own hands,” Sakumo said.
“Three years ago, when he went on his first mission, I told him: as long as you’re my subordinate, I won’t abandon you.”
He paused, his voice dropping lower.
“I broke my word.
Three years ago, I failed to protect his younger sister, and she died on a mission.
This time, if I stood by and watched him die too…”
Sakumo Hatake did not finish.
But Ryuha understood.
It was guilt that had changed him.
“So you saved them,” Ryuha said.
“I saved them, and the mission failed.” Sakumo pulled at the corner of his mouth.
“The trade agreement between the Land of Fire and the Land of Wind was delayed, causing heavy losses for the village.
The very people I saved are now accusing me…
saying I shouldn’t have saved them, that I made them sinners in the eyes of the village.”
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
“Do you know, kid?
“The most terrifying thing isn’t the enemy’s blade.
It’s the people you protect turning around and stabbing you with theirs.”
Silence descended upon the dojo once more.
The light from the oil lamp seemed to dim further.
Ryuha looked at the man before him.
He could feel the aura of death surrounding Sakumo growing thicker and thicker.
“Lord Sakumo,” Ryuha spoke up, his voice calm.
“Do you believe you were wrong?”
Sakumo opened his eyes and looked at him.
“Wrong?” He laughed bitterly.
“Does right or wrong even matter anymore?
The result is that I brought loss upon the village, forced my comrades to bear a bad name, and put Lord Hokage in a tight spot…
Perhaps from the very beginning, I shouldn’t have made that choice.”
“And if you could do it over again,” Ryuha asked, “would you watch them die?”
Sakumo fell silent.
For a long time.
So long that the lamp wick was nearly burnt out, its light flickering violently.
“I don’t know,” he finally said.
“Maybe…
I would still save them.”
He lowered his head, staring at his hands.
“But this time, right after saving them, I would end my life with this sword.
That way, at least things wouldn’t have turned out like this.”
Ryuha understood.
Sakumo Hatake didn’t regret saving his comrades.
He regretted…
not using death to shoulder the responsibility immediately after saving them.
What a tragic line of thought, yet so typical of a ninja.
“Lord Sakumo.” Ryuha took a step forward.
Sakumo Hatake immediately raised his head, his eyes cold.
“I didn’t come here to preach,” he said.
“I just wanted to tell you one thing.”
“What thing?”
“Kakashi is still outside.”
When he finished speaking, a long silence fell over the dojo.
Soon, the candle flame burned out completely.
Darkness swallowed the dojo for about ten seconds.
Then, Sakumo Hatake slowly stood up.
The oil lamp was out; only moonlight spilled through the paper sliding doors, casting flickering shadows across his face.
“Uchiha kid,” Sakumo said, his voice still hoarse, but laced with something else.
“Did you come to make a fool of me?
Or…”
He paused, his lips twitching into a bitter arc.
“…did the village send you to dispose of a ‘sinner’ like me?”
Ryuha stood in place without answering.
He could feel that the desire for death in Sakumo Hatake had not completely dissipated, only temporarily suppressed.
The exhaustion and despair in those eyes remained as thick as ever.
“For the gossip of those people, for your so-called rules,” Ryuha repeated his previous line of questioning, “you’re going to abandon your son?”
Sakumo closed his eyes.
“I have tarnished the honor of the Hatake clan,” he whispered, every word forced through gritted teeth.
“Living will only bring shame upon Kakashi.
“Dying…
at least preserves a final shred of dignity.”
“Dignity?” Ryuha laughed, a cold sound.
“To leave your six-year-old son fatherless for the sake of so-called dignity, making him live forever in the shadow of ‘my father was a failure’—is that what you call dignity?”
Sakumo snapped his eyes open.
Under the moonlight, anger flared in those eyes, but beneath it lay even greater agony.
“What do you know?!” he growled low.
“How old are you?
Have you ever been on a battlefield?
“Do you know what it feels like to live bearing ‘shame’?!”
“I don’t,” Ryuha said calmly.
“But I know that tonight at the training grounds, when Kakashi was surrounded by people calling him a ‘trash’s son,’ he didn’t cry, and he didn’t run.
He just stood there.”
He looked at Sakumo.
“He’s waiting for you.
Waiting for an explanation, waiting for an answer.
Waiting for his father to tell him.”
Sakumo’s breathing grew heavy and ragged.
“And the answer you’re giving him,” Ryuha Uchiha said, word by word, “is a cold corpse and a sword stained with his father’s blood.”
“Shut up!”
Sakumo’s hand slammed onto his sword hilt.
The aura of a Kage-level powerhouse surged like a towering mountain.
It carried no killer intent toward Ryuha, but rather an explosion of suppressed emotion pushed to the brink of collapse.
That pressure saturated the dojo like a physical entity; the air grew thick and viscous, and the temperature plunged.
If it were an ordinary Genin, they would likely be collapsed on the floor in terror by now.
But Ryuha Uchiha merely pushed up his glasses.
Behind the lenses, his eyes were as still as a deep pool.
“Reasoning with you is useless, isn’t it?” he whispered.
“Then let me show you with your own eyes what kind of future your ‘honor’ will bring to Kakashi.”
The moment the words left his mouth—
Ryuha Uchiha’s hand gripped the hilt behind his waist.
His movement to draw the sword triggered a pre-set “switch.”
“Shatter, Kyoka Suigetsu.”
The silent release command resonated within his heart.
It didn’t start just now—it had started long ago.
From the moment Ryuha stepped into the Hatake compound, Kyoka Suigetsu’s Shikai had already enveloped this space.
The prior conversation, the confrontation—all of it had taken place within this domain.
And now, what Ryuha needed to do was not to “activate” the Genjutsu, but to “reveal” it.
Sakumo Hatake moved the instant Ryuha drew his blade.
The White Fang short sword unsheathed!
How fast was a Kage-level powerhouse?
Ryuha Uchiha’s retinas couldn’t even capture the complete trajectory—he only saw a brilliant white flash of blade light tear through the dark, lunging straight for his throat!
That was a fatal strike refined from thirty years of combat and forged through countless life-or-death battles.
But—
The blade light stopped three inches short of Ryuha’s throat.
Sakumo hadn’t halted his stroke.
His perception had halted.
In Sakumo’s eyes, the scene before him began to warp and distort.
The walls of the dojo melted away into nothingness; the floor turned into flowing liquid.
The moonlight shattered into scattered flecks of light.
Ryuha’s figure blurred, stretched, and reformed…
And then, he “saw”—