Rough red bricks, a kunai flying right past his scalp, and the perfect body outline traced out by four ninja tools in a dead-end alley.
Asuma’s throat bobbed violently.
He forced down the fear in his heart, lowered his head, steadied his chopsticks, and pretended to keep eating as if nothing were wrong.
“Mm, what about him?”
Hiruzen quietly watched the subtle shifts in his expression and pressed on.
“What do you make of him?”
Asuma’s chewing slowed.
His brows knit tight, and he stayed silent for several seconds.
What flashed through his mind wasn’t the chase or the despair, but Yoru’s face in that dead-end alley, utterly free of killing intent once he’d put all his weapons away.
The way he’d brushed the gravel off his uniform, and finally, the moment he’d handed over that pair of brand-new sandals.
A smile as bright and clean as a clear day in April.
Asuma swallowed his rice, set down his chopsticks, and looked dead serious.
“I think he’s someone who loves and hates openly.”
Asuma paused, then added,
“But his personality’s too strange. Both he and Obito are completely unlike any Uchiha I’ve ever met.”
Hiruzen’s chopsticks hovered in midair.
“Unlike?”
“Yeah.”
Asuma touched his nose, his expression turning deeply conflicted.
The motion tugged at the wound on his lip, making him gasp in pain.
“The Uchiha I usually see all have their noses in the air, walking around like they want to write ‘I’m the best in the world’ across their faces.”
“But Yoru’s not like that.”
Asuma’s tone carried an indescribable complexity.
“He’s arrogant, sure, but not the kind of arrogant that looks down on people.”
“He does whatever he pleases, but… after he beats you up, he gives you shoes.”
Asuma looked down at his feet.
Today he’d changed into an ordinary pair of shoes.
Yesterday’s brand-new sandals had been shoved into the deepest corner of his closet.
To this day, he was convinced it had been his own muscle spasms that made him trip over and over.
“That kind of person… anyway, he’s pretty weird.”
Hiruzen set the teacup back on the table and rubbed the rim with a fingertip, his gaze fixed.
Loves and hates openly, gives you shoes after beating you up.
If he hadn’t watched the whole thing with his own eyes in the crystal ball, he’d have very nearly believed this account.
Asuma yawned and got up to head for his room.
He paused as he passed his father, as if stating some objective fact that had nothing to do with him.
“Oh, and—his kunai throwing is really accurate. More accurate than Kakashi.”
Biwako, clearing the dishes, noticed Hiruzen still sitting in his seat.
He held the teacup without drinking, his gaze fixed on some blurry point on the tabletop.
“Still thinking about what happened today?” she asked softly.
Hiruzen didn’t answer directly.
He rose slowly, walked to the living room window, and pushed it open a crack.
The night wind poured in through the gap, stirring the loose hair on his forehead.
His gaze crossed the uneven rooftops of the Sarutobi compound toward the silhouette of the Uchiha clan grounds in the distance, sunk deep in the night.
In Hiruzen’s mind, the scenes from the crystal ball replayed frame by frame.
The unrestrained recklessness of chasing someone across half the village with a red brick; the absolute, precise control of pinning a perfect human outline with four kunai.
And finally, that sincere face, switched on effortlessly without a single flaw.
This seven-year-old child had a depth and a seasoned touch far beyond his peers.
Even a child like Asuma, raised in the Hokage’s own home, had been completely won over by the boy’s mix of hard and soft tactics, unable to hold any grudge.
Hiruzen turned around and leaned against the window frame, arms crossed over his chest.
His thoughts were dragged, against his will, into a deeper political quagmire.
The rift between Konoha’s leadership and the Uchiha clan was widening at a visible pace.
The voices from Danzo’s camp were growing harsher.
That old friend of his reiterated at every elder council that the Uchiha had to be strictly controlled—or even hollowed out entirely.
The White Fang had never agreed with these radical measures.
But that young man was too idealistic, always believing that as long as one was sincere enough, every estrangement could be dissolved.
Naive.
Hiruzen closed his eyes.
If the fire were only on one side, he could still put it out.
But inside the Uchiha, it was burning too.
The hawks, led by the Great Elder, were fiercely hardline, convinced to the marrow that Konoha owed the descendants of the village’s founders.
The dark fire fermented from that sense of humiliation had seeped through the whole compound.
Clan Head Fugaku moved cautiously, barely maintaining a balance between the hawks and the doves.
But Hiruzen knew very well: that Fugaku could hold them down didn’t mean he had no wish to rebel—only that the time had not yet come.
Both sides were testing the edge of the cliff, and standing in the middle, his strength to keep the balance was being drained away bit by bit.
Hiruzen opened his eyes, his gaze sharpening once more.
His fingers tapped the window frame unconsciously, a steady rhythm.
He recalled another scene he’d seen in the crystal ball during the day.
In years past, Uchiha freshmen would form their own clique from day one, shutting everyone else out.
But this year, Obito had gone out of his way to get along with the civilian girl Rin Nohara.
The two of them had even done physical training together on the playground after school.
This had torn wide open the sealed iron curtain of the Uchiha.
Yoru especially—Hiruzen could read his background from just a few casual glances.
Peak-Genin chakra, abnormal precision with ninja tools, and a knack for psychological maneuvering far beyond a seven-year-old’s.
He’d shown no awe at all in the face of the Hokage’s son.
A genius like that was bound to be a core figure of the Uchiha clan in the future.
A thought took slow, clear shape in Hiruzen’s mind.
If he could win Uchiha Yoru over to the Hokage’s faction— on one hand, Yoru could become a key window for Konoha’s leadership into the internal movements of the Uchiha.
On the other, an Uchiha genius willing to actively mix with other clans, unbound by family status, even able to make outsiders warm to him, was in himself the finest icebreaker for melting that estrangement.
Given enough importance and guided by the Will of Fire— he could become a bridge between Konoha and the Uchiha, and even a fine piece for checking the hawks within the clan.
Biwako untied her apron and walked over, patting Hiruzen’s shoulder gently.
“It’s late, get some rest. You’ve got government affairs to deal with tomorrow.”
Hiruzen came back to himself and nodded.
He took one last look toward the pitch-black direction outside the window and slowly closed it.
“A different kind of Uchiha…”
Hiruzen reached out and switched off the living room light, murmuring to himself in the dark.
In those eyes weathered by the vicissitudes of life lay both the deep calculation of a Hokage and a faint, exceedingly fragile hope.
Perhaps, among this generation of youngsters, there really could grow a few fine saplings not bound by narrow family thinking.
The lights of the Sarutobi compound went out one by one, and Konoha sank into deep sleep.
Meanwhile—
Uchiha Yoru, on whom the Third Hokage had pinned such high hopes as Konoha’s future bridge, was sprawled spread-eagle on the wooden bed in his old bedroom, without a shred of dignity.
He wasn’t sleeping at all.
Yoru’s eyes shone bright in the darkness, fixed on the translucent system panel hovering in his mind.
His gaze was locked on the number in the top-right corner.
Current balance: 93,550 points.
Ninety-three thousand five hundred and fifty!
Less than seven thousand short of the hundred-thousand mark.
The ten-pull mechanism was about to unlock, the legendary hidden prize pool within reach.
“Heh… heh heh heh…”
Yoru stared at that string of numbers, letting out a long, utterly unrestrained, deeply unsettling laugh in the empty bedroom.
The laughter carried through the thin wooden walls, setting off a burst of anxious barking from the black dog in the neighboring yard.
A stray cat passing over the roof was so spooked by the neurotic laughter that its fur stood on end, and it fled into the night without looking back.