Naruto had just been swallowed whole by a giant toad and vanished to Mount Myōboku before Sakura even arrived with backup.
Staring at the ravaged explosive-scarred clearing, Sakura sank to her knees in dramatic grief.
"Waaah... now I am all alone..."
Standing just two feet away, Ino stared at her teammate in deadpan silence.
'What am I, a potted plant? Am I not even classified as a human being to this girl?'
"What happened here?" Tsunade asked, yawning loudly as she strolled into the clearing.
After hearing Sakura's tearful, panicked explanation, Tsunade felt a strange wave of unease.
The Second Hokage attacked Jiraiya, chased him out of the village and Naruto followed them?
And Orochimaru was somehow behind this?
'No, that shit did not add up.'
The Tsunade of the past might have suspected the snake Sannin, but she was a hardened politician now.
After a moment of logical consideration, she realized Makoto was currently in the Hidden Rain Village, and Hashirama Senju—the God of Shinobi whom Orochimaru could not physically control—was sitting right next to him.
Orochimaru did not have the spine to pull a stunt like attacking Konoha without the First Hokage immediately folding him like a lawn chair.
'Could it be a staged training exercise?' Tsunade had a strong hunch and decided to contact the Rain Village later to confirm the conspiracy.
For now, she just needed to quiet her loud, distraught disciple.
"Sakura, don't be so dramatic. I will dispatch an ANBU squad to sweep the area. Naruto is fine." Tsunade waved her hand dismissively.
"Kakashi, my office. Now."
Tsunade sat at the heavy oak Hokage's desk, her fingers steepled and her chin resting on her knuckles in a pose of ultimate authority.
"Lord Hokage, leave the investigation into Orochimaru to me. Naruto is my subordinate, and I will take full military responsibility for tracking him down," Kakashi declared dutifully, stepping forward before Tsunade could even speak.
However, he had entirely misjudged the reason the Hokage had summoned him to her private office.
"No, Kakashi, that is not why you are here. I already have leads on that nonsense, so you can drop the hero act."
Tsunade reached under her desk and pulled out a massive, heavy stack of handwritten manuscript pages, slamming them onto the wood.
"Kakashi, I need a personal favor. I wrote some literature and I need you to publish it under your established pen name to launder some royalty money for my debts."
"Huh?" Kakashi stood frozen, his visible eye wide.
'Why me again? Did Tsunade hear about my publishing deal from Makoto and decide to exploit my industry connections?'
The problem was, Kakashi had volunteered to help Makoto publish his unhinged novels because the lore was genuinely fascinating.
He had no idea the Slug Sannin even knew how to write a cohesive sentence, let alone literature.
Kakashi hesitantly leaned forward and lowered his head to glance at the top page of the manuscript.
He could only pray that Tsunade's writing was at least half as decent as Jiraiya's, otherwise he would have to find a polite way to decline a direct order from his military dictator.
"What in the fucking fuck is this?!"
After reading just the opening lines, Kakashi could not contain his sheer horror.
The wildly inappropriate, deeply cursed world-building had hit him like a physical blow to the stomach.
"Hokage-sama, what is this about an ancient era where a monk, after aggressively having sex with a giant slug, became known as the 'Sage of the Six Paths'?!"
"Ahem," Tsunade coughed, her face flushing slightly as she realized why her elite Jonin was having a mental breakdown.
She quickly backpedaled her explanation. "I'm merely acting as a humble historian recording local folklore. A... friend of mine... dictated these historical facts to me."
"Don't worry, Hokage-sama. I understand perfectly." Kakashi carefully folded the cursed manuscript as if handling a live volatile explosive and tucked it deep into his waist pouch.
What "friend of mine"? You are the friend.
The Legendary Sannin are all degenerates after alll!
"Kakashi, you have done Konoha a great service today. I'm officially recording this as an S-rank meritorious deed." Tsunade pulled out an official ledger and made a swift entry with her pen.
"It was nothing, Hokage-sama. You don't need to falsify military records for a book deal..."
"Kakashi, with such a monumental administrative achievement, it's clear you are destined to be the Sixth Hokage. Once you help me distribute this smut to the publishers, come back here and shadow me so you can learn how to handle the village's paperwork."
Tsunade interrupted Kakashi's modest reply before he could finish digging his own grave.
With the abrupt departure of Sarutobi Hiruzen—her core undead workforce—Tsunade had already begun aggressively plotting her early retirement.
Even if she could delegate her troubles to Shizune, her assistant was merely human and would eventually die of sheer exhaustion.
Conversely, Tsunade was the only person alive who possessed infinite, regenerating stamina without needing to be an Edo Tensei zombie, thanks to Makoto's stone.
But she absolutely refused to be reduced to a tireless desk slave while her two undead zombie grandfathers constantly micromanaged her existence from afar!
She needed a scapegoat.
Fast.
"Um...Hokage-sama, does this not feel like a corrupt political appointment?" Kakashi stammered, utterly bewildered.
How had he, Konoha's notorious latecomer and avid reader of porn, suddenly become the prime candidate for military dictator?
And for "meritorious service"? All he was about to do was act as a ghostwriter for the Hokage's bizarre porn!
Is this how real political power worked?
You just take the blame for the perverted hobbies of your superiors, and you get handed the keys to the nation?
"Hokage-sama, actually, I still have to train my team..."
"Eh~"
Tsunade interrupted him again.
She rose from her seat, walked around the heavy desk, and clamped a terrifyingly strong hand onto Kakashi's shoulder.
"Don't worry about the workload. When the time comes to wear the hat, you can always just force your friends to do the heavy lifting for you."
"Remember, the new administrative system Makoto designed decentralizes authority, giving the Kage ample time for rest and drinking. That is the fundamental pillar of our new democracy."
Kakashi sweatdropped.
He remembered reading the memos about the new system.
But that made things even stranger. If she could just delegate tasks to a council, why could Tsunade not simply ask others for help instead of abdicating?
Why the desperate rush to pass on the title?
"...Don't overthink it. You have exactly three days to finish distributing these documents to the publishers and report back to this office. Otherwise..." Tsunade cracked her knuckles loudly, feigning a lethal threat.
In truth, she did not actually know what to threaten Kakashi with.
It was far more effective to say nothing and let the notoriously paranoid ninja imagine the gruesome consequences himself.
The real reason she refused to ask for help and stay in office was simple: as long as the Senju brothers were still roaming the earth to judge her work ethic, she could not comfortably sleep at her desk!
"Understood," Kakashi replied with a pained grimace, having no choice but to comply with the corruption.
After Kakashi left, Tsunade used the communication relay to contact the Hidden Rain Village and verify the situation.
"So that is what happened. Quite a resourceful, traumatic method."
Tsunade wholeheartedly approved of Tobirama's plan to stage a theatrical performance to force Naruto to study.
That blond brat was the type to climb onto the Hokage monument and vandalize it if left unsupervised for three days.
In a storybook, he would be the kind of loud protagonist whose growth was entirely driven by external tragedies and plot, rather than someone who possessed actual self-discipline.
The kid needed to learn the harsh, terrifying realities of the ninja world to actually do his homework.
Sasuke required emotional reasoning to stay on the right path, but Naruto required sheer unadulterated panic.
...
Naruto was violently spat out into the mud.
He collapsed face-first onto the damp ground, unconscious and actively dying from the toxic methane gases churning inside the giant toad's stomach.
"Is that not Jiraiya-chan idiot disciple? Pa, come take a look at this!" Sage Shima, clutching a small woven basket of fresh groceries, stepped directly onto Naruto's blond head.
"Oh dear, he has been severely poisoned! We need to administer the sacred antidote immediately," Sage Fukasaku exclaimed, squatting down next to the boy.
The old toad quickly rummaged around in his pockets and pulled out two massive, pulsating squirming fat grubs.
Without a second thought, he forcefully pried Naruto's jaws apart and shoved the live bugs deep into his mouth.
Even in his deeply unconscious state, Naruto's body rejected the culinary nightmare, his face scrunching up in pure disgust as he tried to spit them out.
Seeing the boy's resistance, Sage Fukasaku calmly delivered a swift, brutal kick to Naruto's lower jaw, forcing the raw bugs straight down his throat.
...
Deep inside the Eight Trigrams Seal within Naruto's abdomen.
The giant Nine-Tails violently gagged and retched on the floor of its cage, tasting the raw squirming grubs through their shared sensory link.
"Damn toads!" the fox wheezed, fighting for its life against the sheer horror of Mount Myōboku's cuisine!
---------
Read 40 chapters ahead and support me on patreon.
patreon (.)com/Newbietranslator