---
A week had passed since the day Alaric had rewritten the seal on the stomach of the Nine-Tails' Jinchūriki.
Konoha had settled into a rhythm of restoration. The air was clear, the streets were busy, and the pervasive sense of dread that had lingered after the invasion had largely evaporated. It was peaceful. Peaceful enough that, for a fleeting moment while sipping his morning coffee on the veranda, Alaric had entertained the thought of bringing his family here.
He imagined Kassandra sparring with Guy, his son playing in the ninja academy, the Kenways establishing a trade empire in the Fire Nation.
'No,' Alaric dismissed the thought, watching a koi fish break the surface of his pond. 'Not yet.'
The world was deceptive. It looked calm, but monsters lurked in the periphery. Obito Uchiha was pulling strings from the shadows. Black Zetsu was rewriting history. The Akatsuki were will be out to gather Tailed Beasts.
If Alaric wanted to, he could hunt them down. He could teleport to the Rain Village, kick down the door, and incinerate Pein, but he didn't know if Pein would be there in this timeline.
He could hunt Itachi and Kisame. But the Elemental Nations were vast, and without precise intel on their current hideouts in this specific timeline, it would be a game of whack-a-mole.
'Traveling is tedious,' Alaric sighed, lighting a fresh cigar. 'I'll wait for them to come out of their holes. Besides... I have a student to mold.'
For the past seven days, the Kenway Compound had become a private academy for one.
Alaric didn't teach Haku new ice jutsus or physical conditioning. He taught him the beautiful language named Fuinjutsu.
Alaric's mastery was Ascendant. To him, seals weren't just drawings; they were programming code for reality. He sometimes wondered what would happen if he bought the "Sage" level from the System Shop, but remembering at his money that was in the System Inventory from the other world, he decided ignorance was bliss for now.
Haku, as it turned out, was a prodigy.
On the first day, Alaric had stripped away the mysticism. He made Haku trace seals that were already infused with live chakra.
"Don't just draw it," Alaric had instructed, hovering over Haku's shoulder with a critical eye. "Feel the flow. Ink is just the conductor. Your chakra is the electricity."
Haku practiced for twelve hours straight. He activated pre-written storage seals until his fingers cramped. He rewrote the same basic storage seal dozens of times, refining the strokes. By sunset, his kanji were clean, his ink infusion was stable, and he could instinctively sense the internal dimensional space of a scroll.
On the second day, they moved to live sealing.
"Seal this," Alaric tossed a kunai.
Haku caught it and slapped a paper tag onto it. Poof. Sealed.
"Now this." Alaric threw a senbon. Then a chair. Then a bucket of water.
Haku learned the hard way that instability had consequences. When he rushed a seal for a water bucket, the ink destabilized, splashing him with chakra-superheated water.
"Focus," Alaric chided, healing the burn on Haku's hand with a touch. "The seal rejected the object because your parameters were too narrow. You tried to seal 'water'. You should have sealed 'liquid volume'."
Haku absorbed the lesson. By the end of the day, he could reliably seal and release objects, simplifying the strokes naturally to suit his own chakra signature.
Day three was about architecture.
"Seals have layers," Alaric explained, drawing a 3D diagram in the air with golden chakra. "Containment layer. Trigger layer. Anchor points. Redundancy."
He forced Haku to remove layers from a complex seal one by one to watch how it collapsed. Haku watched fascinated as a barrier seal imploded, learning to diagnose the failure points. He began to visualize seals not as flat drawings, but as multi-dimensional constructs.
Days four through seven were the crucible.
"Level Two," Alaric announced. "Triggers and Conditions."
Haku learned to tie activation to specific chakra signatures—making a seal that only he could open. He practiced with time-delay seals attached to non-lethal explosive tags.
BOOM.
"Too early," Alaric noted from behind a wood wall as Haku coughed in the smoke of a premature detonation.
"I... I miscalculated the decay rate of the ink," Haku wheezed.
"Fix it."
Haku struggled. He faced misfires, delayed releases that didn't release, and triggers that were too sensitive. For a perfectionist like him, it was frustrating. He sat in the garden, staring at a failed tag, disappointment etched on his face.
"I am stuck, Sensei," Haku admitted quietly. "I cannot get the timing right."
Alaric sat down beside him. "You've been doing this for a week, Haku. Most seal masters study for years to get to where you are. You're trying to sprint a marathon."
He patted Haku's shoulder. "It's like a language. You know the words. Now you're learning the grammar. It takes time to write poetry."
Haku looked at the seal again. He saw the logic. The beauty. It was complex math and art intertwined.
"I will try again," Haku said, determination returning.
'He's resilient,' Alaric thought, watching Haku pick up the brush. 'If he overcomes this wall, I'll teach him Conditional Logic. If This, Then That.'
---Hokage Tower---
It was a quiet afternoon. Alaric was currently floating outside the Hokage Tower, leaning casually against the vertical exterior wall three stories up, defying gravity with zero effort.
He took a drag from his cigar, looking down at the village.
One major event had occurred in the background of Haku's training. Orochimaru had been executed.
It wasn't public. No crowds, no speeches. Just a quiet room, a few ANBU, and a sword. It would have horrified the civilians too much to know a Sannin had fallen so low.
But before the end, the snake had sung.
Alaric's Truth Seal… the one tied to the soul… had worked perfectly. Orochimaru had spilled everything. The location of his Northern, Southern, and Island labs. The list of his experiments. The mechanics of the Cursed Seal.
And the horrifying confirmation of his soul fragments.
'Sasuke is safe,' Alaric mused, blowing smoke at a passing bird. 'I modified his mark and made it better. But Anko... and whoever else carries the Heaven or Earth seals... they are walking horcruxes.'
He checked the time. Hiruzen should be done with his paperwork.
Alaric activated Kamui.
His body swirled into a vortex, phasing through the reinforced concrete wall of the tower.
---Hokage's Office---
Hiruzen Sarutobi let out a long, bone-deep sigh as he signed the final document of the day. He placed his pen down, rubbing his tired eyes. The village restoration budget was a nightmare, but at least the funds were there.
"I take it you're finished."
Hiruzen flinched violently, his hand reaching for a kunai before he registered the voice. He looked up to see Alaric standing in the middle of his office as if he had been there all along.
"Brat," Hiruzen grumbled, his heart rate settling. "Why appear out of nowhere? Go through the door like a gentleman. You'll give an old man a heart attack."
"Your secretary would stare me to death if I just barged in," Alaric chuckled, walking over to the front of the desk.
He didn't stand on ceremony. He flicked his finger upward.
Creaaaak.
The floorboards groaned and reshaped themselves. A perfectly polished wooden stool grew out of the floor in seconds. Alaric sat down, crossing his legs.
Hiruzen watched the casual display of Wood Release and shook his head, a wry smile on his face. "I will never get used to that. I thought only the Shodaime had the Mokuton."
"Oh?" Alaric raised a brow, tapping ash into a conjured tray. "Don't you have Tenzo? The ANBU captain? I heard Danzo uses Mokuton as well, albeit... limited."
The mention of the name made the atmosphere in the room drop ten degrees.
'Danzo has Mokuton!?' Hiruzen's eyes widened slightly before he sighed, a sound of deep frustration. "It seems you might know where Danzo is... I've upped the investigations. We raided the ROOT facilities beneath the village. We discovered... horrifying things. Records of assassinations, kidnapping, conditioning. We eliminated or captured all the agents present."
Hiruzen looked at Alaric, his gaze sharp. "But nothing on Danzo. He vanished."
"Hmm…" Alaric stared at Hiruzen for a moment, weighing his next words. "Before that, I have something else to tell you."
"Hm?" Hiruzen raised a brow, but nodded. He valued Alaric's intel. The man had practically saved the village single-handedly. "Go ahead."
"Seeing how it's been a week since I met them, I would take it that Jiraiya and Naruto will be coming back with Tsunade in a day or two," Alaric said.
"Hopefully," Hiruzen nodded. "That is the schedule."
"Anyways," Alaric continued, leaning forward. "When I was fixing Naruto's seal... I sensed three unique chakra signatures inside it."
Hiruzen froze.
"The first is volatile and heavy, which is obviously the Nine-Tails," Alaric counted on his fingers. "However... the second and third were very small. Dormant. But I could sense the resemblance of their chakra to Naruto's own."
Alaric looked Hiruzen in the eye.
"If I had to guess... those chakra fragments belong to Naruto's parents. Conditioned to activate if Naruto ever loses control over the Nine-Tails, or perhaps when he tries to control its power in the future. A failsafe. A final message."
Hiruzen's eyes widened, genuine shock painting his features. Jiraiya had told him that Alaric knew about Minato. But this?
"Minato... and Kushina..." Hiruzen whispered, his voice trembling with emotion. "They left a part of themselves behind?"
It made sense. They were masters of Fuinjutsu. Of course they would leave a safeguard for their son.
"So they are watching over him," Hiruzen murmured, a tear glistening in his eye. "Even now."
Alaric sat back, letting the old man have his moment. He had felt the signatures… warm, protective, and unmistakably parental.
"Now," Alaric's tone shifted. It became colder. "About Danzo."
Hiruzen looked up, bracing himself.
"I killed him."
"!!!"
Hiruzen's eyes snapped wide. He gripped the edge of his desk, his knuckles turning white. He gritted his teeth, a surge of Kage-level chakra flaring for a brief second before he forced it down.
"Alaric..." Hiruzen said, his voice low and dangerous. "You better explain."
"Yessir," Alaric replied calmly. He grabbed his cigar, put it in his mouth, and took a long drag. He didn't look apologetic. He looked like a man reporting the weather.
"He tried to control me," Alaric said simply. "He confronted me on the monument. He didn't like that I was an unsecured variable. He used Shisui Uchiha's sharingan ability, Kotoamatsukami, to try and rewrite my mind."
Hiruzen gasped. "Shisui's eye... Danzo had it?"
"When he realized I was immune," Alaric continued, "he tried to kill me. Vacuum bullets, sealing jutsus, the works. He tried to remove a threat to his power."
Alaric exhaled smoke, watching it curl toward the ceiling.
"So what I did was just defending myself."
"Still," Hiruzen sighed, slumping back in his chair, the fight leaving him. He massaged his temples, a headache blooming behind his eyes. "He was an elder of the council. A comrade from the First War. You should have just incapacitated him. Brought him to justice."
"You yourself know that's not how the world works, old man," Alaric said, his voice hard. "Kill or be killed. That's how it's always been, isn't it? I mean, I had to kill him multiple times because he kept using Izanagi."
"Izanagi..." Hiruzen closed his eyes. "He went that far?"
"Yes, and also… he played a major role in helping Orochimaru conduct his experiments," Alaric added, piling on the dirt. "While you tasked Itachi with preventing the coup, Danzo manipulated him into a mass genocide to steal eyes. His arm... the one he kept hidden? It was made of Hashirama's cells and embedded with ten Sharingan. He was a monster, old man. A monster you let grow in your shadow."
A long silence passed. The grandfather clock in the corner ticked loudly.
Hiruzen Sarutobi felt the weight of his failures crushing him. He had suspected. He had known Danzo was dark. But hearing the extent of it... the desecration of his teacher's body, the theft of the Uchiha eyes...
'I was too soft,' Hiruzen thought bitterly. 'I let my sentimentality blind me to the rot at the roots.'
He looked at Alaric. The man who had done what Hiruzen couldn't.
"The body?" Hiruzen asked hoarsely.
"Incinerated," Alaric said. "No trace left."
Hiruzen nodded slowly. "Then Danzo Shimura is missing. Presumed fled or dead. The investigation will continue... indefinitely."
He accepted the lie. He had to.
Seeing that the heavy lifting was done, Alaric sighed, relaxing his posture. "Well, the reason why I gave you this much information… truthfully… is that I wish for you to give me a pass."
"A pass?"
"I will train my student outside the village," Alaric stated.
"..." Hiruzen looked at him, his eyes dull but calculating. "How long?"
Alaric thought about it, taking a final drag from his cigar. "A year. Maybe more. Maybe make the kid a bounty hunter for money. Get him some real-world experience of much stronger opponents before the world goes to hell."
"...That's okay," Hiruzen answered after a moment. He reached for a blank scroll and a brush. He wrote quickly, stamped it with the Hokage seal, and tossed it to Alaric. "I approve your request. Indefinite leave for training purposes."
"So you're training your already strong student for the next Chunin Exams?" Hiruzen asked.
"Yeah," Alaric caught the scroll, tucking it into his coat. "But he'll probably be the only one to come back and take them. I have to visit somewhere else. Home, you could say."
"Home..." Hiruzen murmured. "I see."
"I'll probably be back in like three years," Alaric added, standing up. "Just in time for the real show."
'Real show? what's he talking about?' Hiruzen thought. 'Is there something that's going to happen in three years time?'
"..."
"..."
"..."
"Fine," Hiruzen sighed, looking at the stack of paperwork that never seemed to end. "When will you be leaving?"
Alaric grinned, turning toward the wall he had phased through.
"Today."
.
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