It was honestly hard to picture just how brutal that one fight between Senju Hashirama and Uchiha Madara had been. For someone as ridiculously overpowered as Hashirama to die on the spot only a few short years later… it meant that battle must have taken something out of him that never came back.
If Kaede Kitahara had that kind of strength, the knot of anxiety in his chest would loosen by a lot.
The more he understood what the future held, the more pressure he felt. He liked to joke that when the time came, Uzumaki Naruto and Uchiha Sasuke would save the world while he lay back and watched.
But he could not actually live that way.
Not when he was the kind of person who would quietly grind away at something like Wind Release: Rasenshuriken on his own time.
Even if the day came when the system handed him that jutsu through a draw, he would still push himself, still look for ways to raise his own combat power instead of throwing all his hopes onto luck. Developing an S-rank technique by yourself was a different kind of hell, though. He might have known the theory and the general direction from his past life, but putting it into practice was another story entirely.
And that was with two major bloodlines folded into his body, his talent boosted to an absurd degree. Without that foundation, he would not even know where to start, let alone understand what he was doing.
Otherwise… why hadn't he tried to develop the Rasengan all these years?
It was an A-rank jutsu. He knew the training method. He knew the steps.
So why?
Because he hadn't been gifted enough.
How dumb did you have to be to not learn the Rasengan?
Apparently, dumb enough existed.
If he kept relying on draws, who knew what year of what monkey he would have to wait before he finally pulled something worthwhile.
Ten days ago, for example, he had only gotten a jutsu that was perfect for showing off.
Uchiha Style Shurikenjutsu.
It was a throwing art developed by the Uchiha Clan, tuned to work in perfect sync with the Sharingan. It wasn't limited to shuriken and kunai either. It extended to darts and anything else you could send flying with precision.
You could even manipulate the trajectory midair, using a later-thrown shuriken to strike the first and redirect it into an unexpected line.
When facing Nagato, Uchiha Itachi had even used that single technique to block Nagato's shared Rinnegan vision.
Itachi really was a monster of talent. In terms of battle instinct and combat sense, he stood at the very top of the entire shinobi world.
There was just one problem.
Itachi was top-tier among shinobi, sure. But what did that matter when the enemies stopped being human in the first place?
"…Well. Vacation's over."
After finishing his treatment, Kaede sat cross-legged and rested for a bit. The chakra he had burned through began to seep back, steady and warm.
This early-stage Sage Body from the Uzumaki Clan had given him more than a swelling chakra pool. His recovery speed had climbed to an almost frightening level.
He still could not compare to cheat-code monsters like Uzumaki Naruto or Senju Hashirama, but even so, it was already beyond what ordinary shinobi could imagine.
The month-long break he had earned from the Land of Waves mission, the one that had been upgraded to S-rank, was gone.
It was time to take missions again.
In peacetime, Konoha wasn't brutally strict about mission quotas. There was only a baseline each year, a minimum number of missions to complete.
Aside from assignments directly handed down by the higher-ups, most missions were optional. Shinobi chose what they wanted to take.
And sometimes, even if you wanted to work, there was nothing to take. The village only received so many requests. It couldn't possibly satisfy everyone.
Most shinobi didn't have family businesses or land to fall back on. They lived on mission pay. Plenty of them scraped by, their lives tight and strained because of it.
Villages even fought each other over commissions.
Later on, the reason Sunagakure had agreed to ally with Orochimaru and strike Konoha in the Konoha Crush plan wasn't some grand ideology. At its core, it was because Konoha had been stealing all the work.
Even the daimyo of their own country preferred handing missions to Konoha.
For a daimyo, it didn't matter who completed the job. As long as it got done, it was fine.
For a village, it was deadly.
Not enough missions meant no money. No money meant you couldn't train the next generation. A weaker next generation meant daimyo and merchants didn't want to hire you. Fewer hires meant even fewer missions and even less money.
A vicious cycle that could grind a village into dust.
Sunagakure had already fallen into that spiral, which was why they had been desperate enough to gamble everything by striking Konoha alongside Orochimaru, searching for a way to survive.
Those were the real contradictions buried underneath Naruto's hot-blooded story, the way the world actually ran. Later, it looked like those conflicts faded, but that was only because Uzumaki Naruto and Uchiha Sasuke stood like two immovable mountains over the entire shinobi world.
Then came the waves of aliens tearing through everything. In that kind of era, village politics stopped mattering. No one even dared to complain.
Without Konoha's main characters around, if one of those aliens got annoyed, a single slap could wipe out a whole village.
Back early on, watching Pain obliterate Konoha in one strike was terrifying. Later? That level of strength was basically the standard. The next generation started at Kage Level, trained a little and hit Super Kage Level, then pushed harder and stepped straight into Six Paths Level.
They didn't even pretend anymore. Why be a ninja at all? Might as well cultivate immortality.
Kaede stopped his training and headed for the Hokage building to meet up with Hyuga Keiko and Amakusa Ryuji.
"We're finally going on a mission," Amakusa groaned the second he saw him. "I swear, lately you've trained me so hard I'm numb."
Back in the academy, he had been a B-class kid, nothing special. Then Kaede grabbed him and dragged him through a stretch of brutal training, and his strength had shot up fast enough to make his own head spin.
He would bet money that the old A-class brats from their year couldn't beat him anymore.
Their class had been painfully average. No legendary prodigies like past generations. Even in A-class, only a handful had made Chunin. If you judged purely by strength, most of them weren't touching Amakusa or Hyuga Keiko.
The three of them stepped into the mission office, only to freeze.
The person overseeing things today wasn't Jonin squad captain Nara Shikaku.
It was Sarutobi Hiruzen himself, the Third Hokage.
"Third Hokage-sama!"
All three of them bowed at once.
"You're here," Hiruzen said, smiling lightly. "Looks like you got decent rest this month. Good timing. I have a mission for you."
He handed a scroll to Kaede, as the team captain.
Kaede unrolled it.
It was a B-rank.
But the content made his brain go blank for a beat.
They were to secretly infiltrate the Land of Wind and enter a desert ruin called Roran, confirming whether the local seal remained intact.
The mission itself wasn't especially difficult. The danger lay in the infiltration. They couldn't alert Sunagakure, which was why the rank had been set at B.
Amakusa and Hyuga Keiko read it and looked normal enough. They had no idea what it truly meant.
Kaede did.
This was tied to The Lost Tower, the time-travel story where Uzumaki Naruto chased the Sunagakure missing-nin Mukade and was thrown into Roran twenty years in the past by the Dragon Vein's chakra.
There, Naruto met a younger Namikaze Minato, before he became the Fourth Hokage, and together they defeated Mukade, who was using the alias Anrokuzan.
Even just the names Roran and Anrokuzan were so blatantly "Chinese-style" that it was hard not to want to complain.
On paper, even with Mukade involved, the mission shouldn't have been that insane. Mukade's strength capped out around jonin level. Even boosted by the Dragon Vein, he topped out at Kage Level.
What made it special was the time travel.
The Dragon Vein's power could actually send people across time.
Kaede's thoughts raced through the movie's plot, then snagged hard on one fact.
This mission wasn't supposed to happen now. It was supposed to be years later, when Uzumaki Naruto was sent under the Fifth Hokage's orders to assist Sunagakure in hunting Mukade.
Because of Kaede's existence, the butterfly effect was getting louder and louder.
That was the only explanation he had.
"This place called Roran," Hiruzen said calmly, "contains a seal left behind by the Fourth Hokage. Something extremely dangerous is sealed within. Your task is to slip in quietly and make sure the seal hasn't been damaged. If you find any instability or signs of leakage, return at once and report to me."
He didn't explain what, exactly, was sealed there. The secret was too big, and it wasn't something a Chunin squad needed to know.
Just as he said, their job was only to verify whether the seal remained intact. If it was weakening or leaking, then the sealing team would be dispatched to reinforce it.
It had been handled like this for more than ten years.
Every year, he sent shinobi to check.
At this point, the only person in Konoha who knew what lay sealed in that Roran ruin was the Third Hokage himself.
He couldn't help remembering what had happened back then, over a decade ago, when a time traveler named Mukade had suddenly appeared out of nowhere. The intel claimed Mukade was trying to build an extremely dangerous weapon in Roran, and even planned to "rule the world."
Hiruzen still didn't know where Mukade had gotten the confidence to say something like that, but he had reacted immediately. He had dispatched a small team made up of three elite jonin: Namikaze Minato, Akimichi Choza, and Aburame Shibi.
As for what happened afterward…
Even he didn't fully know.
When Minato's squad returned, they were completely amnesiac. Their memories had been sealed away. From the sealing method, it looked like Namikaze Minato himself had done it.
At first, Hiruzen hadn't understood.
Later, he had.