Fugaku was left alone again.
The moment the door closed, his thoughts returned to the same question.
What next?
But before deciding where he wanted to go, he needed a clear picture of where he actually stood.
His training had begun long before most children ever entered the Academy.
Until twelve, the normal peacetime graduation age, he had been taught almost entirely inside the clan by some of the best instructors the Uchiha, or even the entire village, could provide.
Everything the Academy covered.
And considerably more.
Taijutsu.
Genjutsu.
Fire Release.
Other fundamental ninjutsu.
Chakra control.
Basic fieldcraft.
All weapon and shinobi tool handling.
Tactical judgment.
Clan history.
Police procedure.
The fundamentals expected from someone who would eventually inherit both the clan and its main institution.
His training had also been far more personalized than anything a classroom could offer.
One teacher correcting one weakness.
Another pushing a specific strength.
Senior Uchiha sparring with him personally.
His father occasionally intervening when he thought the others were becoming too forgiving.
Fugaku had never attended the Academy.
Most Uchiha did not.
What would have been the point?
Graduating from the village system only mattered if the village intended to properly use you afterward.
And increasingly, Konoha did not.
The discrimination was rarely crude enough to be stated openly.
That would have been inconvenient.
Instead, the Uchiha simply found fewer doors open to them.
Sensitive or senior administrative positions.
ANBU.
Promotions outside the Police.
Even routine mission work was harder to access than it should have been.
The explanation was always polite.
The village trusted the Uchiha with the Military Police.
Their responsibilities there were too important.
Their strength was needed to maintain internal order.
How flattering.
Fugaku understood the real function now.
Keep them concentrated.
Keep them institutionally separate.
Keep their careers dependent on one structure.
Then slowly narrow the structure itself.
A cage did not stop being a cage because someone polished the bars.
Still, the training inside that cage had been excellent.
Fugaku's Fire Release had already reached the point where he could competently use A-rank techniques.
His shurikenjutsu was among the best of his generation.
His taijutsu was strong.
His conditioning unusually good.
His chakra control precise.
And genjutsu had always been his greatest strength.
That last part almost made him laugh now.
Future Fugaku would eventually become famous as Wicked Eye Fugaku.
And three days ago, the current version had been dropped by something close enough to genjutsu to make the irony painful.
Fugaku was still curious about whoever had done it.
A Yamanaka, probably.
Or something based on Yamanaka techniques.
Anyway, whoever the Yamanaka bastard was, Fugaku owed him one.
But nobody from the future memories fit perfectly.
Fū Yamanaka certainly had never shown anything on that level.
Another reminder that reality had more people in it than the story had bothered naming.
Before the awakening, Fugaku had lacked real mission experience compared to shinobi who spent their adolescence constantly deployed outside the village.
That was another quiet weakness the Uchiha had accumulated since the Warring States era.
Less battlefield exposure.
Less dangerous mission work.
More policing.
More internal duties.
Safer, in one sense.
Worse for producing monsters.
Fugaku had at least compensated through serious sparring.
Not ceremonial matches.
Real clan sparring against senior fighters who had no reason to protect his pride.
He had fought captains.
Senior captains.
Occasionally men much stronger than himself.
He had lost plenty.
Held his own often enough.
Before the re-awakening, his own estimate was that only four Uchiha clearly stood above him.
His father.
Something similar to a Quasi-Kage in Fugaku's impression.
And the three Elite Jōnin Vice-Commanders directly beneath him, leading the three major practical Force divisions.
For a sixteen-year-old, that was excellent.
Looking at the wider world?
Not enough.
Not even close.
History did not care that he was impressive for his age.
Not to mention that, for example, Obito had awakened the Mangekyō younger than him and immediately become terrifying.
Itachi would do the same, also around thirteen.
Kakashi at sixteen was probably already a more dangerous and experienced shinobi than Fugaku had been three days ago.
So Fugaku felt no temptation to become complacent just because one strange night had suddenly given him the Mangekyō and several other advantages.
If anything, the comparison only made the next step clearer.
He had been talented.
Now he needed to become exceptional.
At twelve, Fugaku was finally allowed to enter the Military Police.
First came several months of boring patrol work.
Then two years of administrative duty, where he spent more time handling reports, records, complaints, and internal paperwork than doing anything remotely impressive.
After that, he was moved into Security and Detention, where he finally began participating in more serious work.
Arrests.
Prisoner handling.
A few incidents involving active shinobi who resisted.
Nothing major, and never alone, but enough to give him some real combat exposure outside clan training.
Only recently had an opening appeared in Investigation.
That was when Takehito finally allowed him to move into a captain's position of his own.
Looking back, the progression was obvious.
None of it had been random.
Patrol taught him the streets.
Administration taught him how the institution actually functioned.
Security taught him how arrests and force worked in practice.
Investigation finally gave him command and judgment of his own.
Every step had been arranged by his father.
Not to slow him down.
To make sure that when Fugaku eventually inherited the Police, there was no part of it he understood only from reports.
The Military Police itself averaged around two hundred and fifty members.
At the top stood the Commander, Fugaku's father, and beneath him the three Vice Commanders.
Then came eight Senior Captains.
Those men were generally around jōnin level too, just like Fugaku, but that similarity in strength was misleading.
They had years more experience, broader institutional knowledge, and usually oversaw several ordinary captains and their teams.
Fugaku, meanwhile, had only just become a Captain.
The reason he had reached that rank before accumulating much direct Investigation experience was simple, and it had little to do with nepotism.
It was the same reason all those eight Senior Captains were, almost by design, men of similar "Jonin" power.
This world ultimately rewarded strength.
Specialized expertise mattered, sometimes enormously, but much of it could be delegated.
Fugaku's own team demonstrated that well enough.
Besides him, there was one Senior Officer and three ordinary Officers.
Between them, they could cover practical skills he personally lacked.
Street contacts. Routine investigative procedure.
The Uchiha valued such things.
They simply did not value them above combat power when deciding who should command.
A brilliant forensic expert might help solve murders far better than some jōnin Uchiha, but that did not automatically make him command material in their culture.
Because eventually an investigation might end at the door of an A-rank missing nin.
At that point, the better paperwork stopped mattering quite as much.
The commander needed to be able to kick the door down and survive whatever came through it.
That was the logic.
Strength brought status because strength was useful in the most final way possible.
As long as someone was not incompetent in everything else, a powerful shinobi would naturally rise.
Previous Fugaku already possessed enough combat ability for even Senior Captain rank.
What he lacked was experience.
There were roughly twenty-five to thirty ordinary Captains, like him, across the Force, most around high chūnin level and weaker than previous Fugaku.
Given a few years, assuming he performed well, moving upward would have been the expected path.
Below them sat the real bulk of the operational Force.
Around one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty field officers.
The majority were low to mid chunin with some genins sprinkled at the bottom.
Among these people, even if a smaller portion didn't possess Sharingan, their Uchiha bloodline still carried them forward in other ways.
This was where actual policing expertise also became much more important for the job.
Interrogators.
Evidence specialists.
Patrol veterans.
Tracking specialists.
People who might never command a large unit but were exceptionally good at one practical part of the job.
Then came another sixty to ninety administrative personnel.
Clerks.
Record keepers.
Messengers.
Schedulers.
This was also the only part of the Military Police where non-Uchiha could still be found in meaningful numbers.
Even that was shrinking.
The clan had become increasingly reluctant to share what little institutional power it still possessed with outsiders, especially other shinobi clans.
Understandable.
And, in a way, self-defeating.
The more Konoha pushed the Uchiha inward, the more tightly the clan clung to the Police.
The more tightly they clung to it, the more isolated the institution became.
Then the village could point at that isolation as proof that the Uchiha were separating themselves.
A door slowly being closed from both sides.
Except only one side still controlled the building around it.
The Force itself was split into three real operational branches.
Patrol and Response was the most visible.
The officers everyone in Konoha actually saw.
They walked the streets, broke up fights, responded to disturbances, handled crowds, and reached incidents first when something went wrong.
It was also where most young Uchiha, like Fugaku, began their careers after basic training.
Investigation was quieter.
Criminal cases. Witnesses. Crime scenes.
Building enough of a case that someone could actually be arrested, prosecuted, or even cooperating with the Hokage when the matter became politically sensitive.
That was Fugaku's branch now.
Then came Security and Detention.
Prisons.
Prisoner transport.
Guarding "important" facilities, the Hokage felt at ease delegating to "them".
High-risk detainees.
Arrests that were expected to become violent.
Its strongest units were probably the most combat-heavy teams in the entire Police Force.
If Investigation found the dangerous man, Security was often the group sent to actually put him in chains.
Everything else fell under administration and records rather than forming a true fourth operational branch.
Personnel. Budgets. Logistics. Archives. Criminal records. Case coordination. External communications.
Older Uchiha often ended up there after leaving active duty, alongside civilians with useful administrative skills.
Taken together, the system looked impressive.
And for a long time, the clan had treated it as proof of status.
Konoha had "trusted" the Uchiha with internal security.
The Sharingan made them "naturally suited" to policing.
The Force gave the clan purpose, authority, salaries, command positions, and a permanent institutional role inside the village.
It was also the cage Tobirama had built around them.
A method to contain them, before they stopped being useful and the village, Tobirama's greatest project, grew naturally.
Until then, keep the Uchiha concentrated in one profession and node in the network. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Keep them away from the normal shinobi life.
Keep them away from the village's most important military and political networks.
Then let everyone else spend generations being stopped, questioned, arrested, and occasionally beaten by men wearing the Uchiha crest.
Resentment came naturally after that.
Eventually the stereotype became self-sustaining.
Uchiha were policemen.
Not statesmen.
Certainly not Hokage material.
The cruel part was that the more the clan sensed its position weakening, the more tightly it clung to the Police as the last major piece of authority it still controlled.
Which only made the cage stronger.
In fact, many of these details were far clearer in the real world than they had ever been in the old story.
Fugaku now knew that the Military Police had originally been much more powerful.
The name itself gave part of it away.
Military Police.
For one of the two of Konoha's founding clans.
Not merely street patrols and criminal investigations.
In the early years of Konoha, the institution had also handled functions much closer to internal affairs, counterintelligence, and broader village passive and active defense.
Things that later became associated with ANBU and Root.
By the time Itachi grew up, the Police had been reduced so far that even arresting ordinary shinobi could become "politically complicated".
They had not reached that point yet.
But the trimming had already begun.
Root had taken the largest bite so far.
For now, Hiruzen mostly used ambiguity.
Grey authority. Sensitive matters. Classified operations.
And in fairness, the principle itself was not absurd.
Even in Fugaku's previous life, an ordinary police officer could not simply arrest an intelligence operative in the middle of classified national security work.
The problem was that the Uchiha Police had not originally been ordinary police.
That distinction had been created afterward.
Root was new.
ANBU had existed earlier, but its authority and range had expanded enormously under Hiruzen.
Both developments gradually absorbed functions the Military Police had once possessed.
After the Nine-Tails attack, Hiruzen would go even further and use ANBU directly to constrain the clan.
But the process had started long before that.
The original Military Police had been closer to a combined policing, internal surveillance, counterintelligence, gates, and emergency defense institution.
If enemy shinobi infiltrated or attempted to infiltrate the village, they were involved.
If a Konoha shinobi became a serious internal threat, they were involved.
If something endangered the village from within, they were supposed to be one of the main bodies dealing with it.
That was real power.
And it had been stripped away piece by piece.
Looking back, Fugaku could see the bargain more clearly now.
His grandfather had been patriarch when the First Shinobi World War ended, and Hiruzen became Hokage.
Hiruzen argued that Hashirama's dream had not made the world peaceful, and it was about to become much more dangerous and complex than ever.
Specialized organizations were necessary.
Counterintelligence needed to be separated.
Covert internal security needed its own structure.
The village needed a dedicated gatekeeping and first response force against high-level infiltration and surprise attacks.
Reasonable arguments.
That was what made them effective.
The Uchiha agreed to surrender parts of the Military Police's original authority partly because they hoped it would finally open the rest of Konoha to them and let them lower their guard if they ever had it.
Less concentration inside one institution.
More normal village integration.
More mission access.
More appointments.
More political participation.
That part never really came.
The carrot disappeared first.
The cage remained.
And Fugaku's grandfather had not possessed much room to resist anyway.
Before Konoha, the Senju alone had been strong enough to fight the Uchiha to exhaustion.
After the village formed, and the clan already weakened, resisting Hiruzen meant resisting the Senju plus everyone else who joined after and now stood behind Konoha and his faction and following Tobirama's footsteps.
By Hiruzen's time, that imbalance was even worse.
So the clan compromised.
Again.
And again.
Each compromise looked manageable on its own.
Only decades later did the full pattern become obvious.
Fugaku was not about to make the opposite mistake either.
He would not reduce everything to Danzō.
Some people in his previous life had treated the man as if he were the convenient source of every rotten thing that ever happened in Konoha.
That was too easy.
In the real world, a Hokage did not somehow "fail to notice" what his closest political ally was doing for decades.
Hiruzen was not an idiot.
Root had grown under his rule.
So had the Hokage's own power.
While Danzō absorbed counterintelligence and covert internal security, Hiruzen steadily expanded ANBU into a permanent personal force loyal directly to the Hokage.
ANBU inside the Hokage Building.
ANBU stationed inside secret bunkers in the rear mountain.
ANBU positioned throughout sensitive parts of the village.
Layer by layer, functions once associated with the Military Police were transferred elsewhere.
Root gained power.
The Hokage gained power.
The Uchiha lost it.
That was not something Fugaku intended to dismiss as one ambitious subordinate getting out of control.
And there was an even uglier purpose behind the process.
It did not merely isolate the Uchiha politically as Edo Tobirama finally "admitted" to Sasuke.
It weakened them biologically and militarily over generations.
The Sharingan developed through pressure.
Danger.
Combat.
Extreme experience.
Take a warrior clan famous for its dōjutsu, remove it from major missions, reduce battlefield exposure, concentrate its members into increasingly mundane policing, and eventually fewer Uchiha would ever receive the experiences capable of pushing those eyes to their limits.
You did not have to confiscate the Sharingan.
You could simply create a system that produced fewer great ones.
Fugaku's expression cooled.
That was one lesson Takehito would need to hear when they spoke again.
Probably several times.