Chapter 405: Konoha Divine City
Morning light came through the cloud cover in angled columns, cutting between the battlements of the city wall and spreading across the streets below in wide gold sheets.
Scattered through the city at different intersections, dozens of enormous stone statues stood in the light. Some were carved as armed warriors mid-stance, some as eagles with wings fully extended, some as coiled serpents. The craftsmanship was old in its aesthetic, each figure carrying the deliberate weight of something made to last. In the morning sun the stone texture caught the light with a warmth that made the material look almost alive.
They were decorative fixtures to most of the people who walked past them daily. To a small number of people who knew what they were looking at, they were something else entirely. Reincarnation Eye chakra could animate them inside a second. Any serious external threat would encounter the city's passive defenses becoming active before the threat had time to understand what was happening.
The patrols moved through the wide streets in organized columns. Each group was led by a shinobi in the standardized Divine Nation uniform, bearing their clan insignia on the chest and the nation's headband on their brow. Behind each leader moved a column of Reincarnation Eye puppets, their motion precise and uniform, their spacing exact, their response time several times faster than any human unit.
The street layout had been designed around the patrols from the beginning. Different colored paving stones marked separate lanes for puppet movement, horse-drawn traffic, and foot traffic, each lane directionally indicated with embedded arrows. The system moved large numbers of people and vehicles and automated units through the same space without conflict, and it did this continuously, all day, without requiring active management beyond the shinobi leaders' supervision.
The residents of Konoha Divine City had long since stopped noticing any of it. Children grabbed the legs of passing puppets out of curiosity and ran laughing from their parents' exasperated shouts. Merchants had their preferred timing windows for deliveries that avoided the heaviest patrol density. The city had absorbed its unusual infrastructure into the texture of daily life the way any city absorbs whatever it is built around.
Visitors had a different experience.
"Hey, uncle — are those actually puppets? They look completely real."
Zabuza turned his head with an expression that communicated clearly that the person talking was trying his patience.
The boy walking behind him was perhaps fourteen or fifteen, with an open, curious face and the habit of looking at everything simultaneously rather than watching where he was going. He moved through the unfamiliar city with his neck on a constant swivel, interested in every detail, apparently unaware that this was exactly the kind of behavior that drew unwanted attention.
"Arato." Zabuza's voice carried the particular flat warning tone of someone who has given this speech before. "Stop looking around like that. If someone decides you're gathering intelligence, I am not coming to get you out of whatever they put you in."
"Ehh," Arato said, scratching the back of his head with the easy grin of someone who had absorbed the tone without absorbing the content. "Uncle, you don't need to be so tense. The Five Nations are gone. The Uchiha Divine Nation is the only thing there is. There are no enemies left to be gathering intelligence for."
"You absolute idiot." Zabuza stopped walking long enough to turn around fully. The killing intent in his voice had the quality of someone who meant it and was choosing restraint. "The stronger a nation is, the more enemies it has. The enemies here didn't disappear. They went underground. And they haven't all died yet."
"And stop calling me uncle. Call me Zabuza-sama."
"I'm not your uncle. You're a tool I picked up."
"Sure, sure, Zabuza-sama," Arato said, with the exact tone of someone using the correct words in the entirely wrong spirit, already turning his head back toward the nearest patrol.
Zabuza resumed walking and said nothing further because there was nothing further that worked.
He had sold Haku to Uchiha Yasushi years ago, trading the boy for a Three-Tomoe Sharingan. The calculation at the time had been straightforward. A Sharingan at that quality was a meaningful power increase. The transaction was clean.
What he had not accounted for was what it meant to install an eye that did not belong to you. The Sharingan required its own chakra to sustain itself, and in the absence of a natural Uchiha body to draw from, it drew from whoever was hosting it. The drain was continuous and significant. He had spent the first several months after the transplant managing a chakra deficit that made serious combat a losing proposition before it started.
He still had not taken it out. He had thought about it. The eye was genuinely dangerous to carry and the cost was real and ongoing. But the capability it provided when he had the reserves to support it had saved him more times than he wanted to count. Replacing it with nothing seemed like a different kind of loss.
So he had found a quiet region well outside the war's main corridors and spent time adapting, training, letting his body find an accommodation with the thing in his skull.
That was where he found Arato.
The boy was alone in the kind of way that meant there was nobody left. Zabuza had seen it before and knew the specifics without needing them explained. He had no intention of getting involved. It was not his situation.
He still did not know exactly why he had stopped.
Maybe the boy's face when Zabuza first saw him had reminded him of something. Maybe it was Haku, somewhere in the back of his mind, the one transaction in a long life of transactions that he still could not look at directly. Whatever the reason, he had pulled the boy back from the edge of dying and the boy had woken up and called him uncle and never stopped.
Nothing worked against it. Insults did not work. Ignoring it did not work. Physical punishment produced brief silence followed by the same thing resuming with the same inexhaustible warmth, as though the boy simply did not have the wiring to process hostility as rejection.
After about a week Zabuza had noticed the chakra levels.
The amount of chakra naturally present in the boy's system was not normal. It was not even exceptionally talented shinobi not-normal. It was the kind of not-normal that reminded him of the Seven Swordsmen's stories about that one Mist nin from years back, the human tailed beast, the anomaly who had made everyone in the room quietly reconsider their own capabilities.
The combination of that chakra volume and the learning speed the boy demonstrated with every technique Zabuza showed him had made the decision for him before Zabuza consciously made it. He was taking the boy with him.
Arato was a name Zabuza had given him because the boy needed one and it fit. Nothing more attached to it than that.
Several years of mutual reluctant cohabitation later, Zabuza would not have said out loud that the boy was like a son to him. He would have denied it with complete sincerity. But he would also not have come to Konoha Divine City for any reason except this one, because he had no good feelings about this place and every practical one pointed away from it.
The Sharingan in his eye socket — still present, still draining, still useful — pressed against the inside of his palm through his clothes as he touched it briefly through the fabric.
He was going to trade it. Use it for something that might open a path for the boy.
Ahead of him and a very long way up, visible from what Zabuza estimated was close to a hundred metres away if you knew where to look, the city's central monument rose above the interior walls. The scale of it made the Hokage Rock carvings look like something a child had scratched into a hillside for practice. Looking at the thing, he genuinely could not determine what kind of technique had produced it. The scale put it outside anything he had a reference for.
He did not look at it longer than he needed to.
"Come on," he said to Arato, who was already looking at something else. "Stop standing there."
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