"Fine!"
Hashirama's eyes suddenly hardened.
He clenched his fists.
For the sake of the village's future, he had to make a tough call.
This was exactly like pruning a plant that had grown completely crooked.
A necessary sacrifice.
Back in the day, he had been willing to personally strike down his absolute best friend, Uchiha Madara, all for the village.
Now, was he really supposed to go soft in front of a bunch of random brats he'd never even met?
Sure, he could take a step back.
He could just dump the whole mess on his granddaughter Tsunade later, have her investigate the bullying problem, punish the little punks, expel them from the village, and call it a day.
But Senju Hashirama instantly scrapped that idea.
That could work, yeah, but it was just kicking the can down the road.
Shoving the problem onto Tsunade right now was nothing but pure irresponsibility.
It was the exact same thing as turning tail and running the second things got a little messy.
Was that how a Hokage—especially the damn First Hokage—was supposed to act?
Hell no!
The Hokage had to shoulder the darkness and carve out a path of light for the future!
In the original timeline's conversation between Sasuke and the four Edo Tensei Hokage, the reanimated Hashirama actually expressed approval of Uchiha Itachi wiping out his entire clan, saying something crazy like, "Your brother was a better shinobi than I ever was."
Sure, part of that was just humility, part of it was helplessness over a tragedy that had already happened, and part of it was just a verbal tactic to ride Sasuke's emotional wave and guide the kid back to the light.
But none of that changed the simple fact that Hashirama absolutely had that kind of ruthless streak in him.
Thud!
The little brats and Moegi hit the dirt, completely terrified out of their minds.
Killing intent.
Where did that killing intent come from?
You have to understand—even Orochimaru's killing intent was once enough to make a prodigy like Sasuke tremble and freeze solid.
The Second Hokage's aura could easily crush Orochimaru, and the First Hokage's aura could completely steamroll the Second's.
Now that the First Hokage had accidentally leaked just a tiny sliver of his killing intent, it sure as hell wasn't something these toddlers could handle.
Hashirama snapped back to reality and yanked his aura back.
But the brats whose legs had turned to jelly—including a few who had straight-up wet their pants—still couldn't manage to stand.
Only Moegi fared a tiny bit better.
Once the crushing pressure vanished, she managed to twitch and string a few basic thoughts together.
That flash of killing intent left her completely horrified.
'This guy actually wanted to kill us?' she thought frantically. 'Could these two have deliberately set a trap?'
Did they figure out that these Academy punks liked dragging their victims into remote corners, so they set up one guy to play the weak victim while the other swooped in to wreck the bullies?
That kind of suffocating killing intent never should have come from a seemingly honest, goofy-looking kid like this.
Could it be that these two weren't children at all, but fully grown adults using the Transformation Jutsu?
She had to alert the village's ninja right now!
Moegi opened her mouth, but a wave of sheer weakness gripped her throat.
She knew well that if she tried to scream, this guy could snap her neck before she even got a sound out.
Instead of doing something stupid, it was better to save her strength and bail out the kids behind her.
With monumental effort, Moegi snatched a handful of senbon from her pouch and chucked them right at the pants-wetting brats, pinning them with the needles.
"Ah, it hurts!"
"Moegi-nee, what the heck are you doing?!"
The sharp sting of pain completely rebooted the kids' frozen senses.
"I'll hold them off! Run! Find a jōnin! Find the ANBU! Go cry to Lady Hokage for help!" Moegi struggled to her feet, hands blurring through a sequence of seals.
The second the brats got the green light to run, they practically cried tears of relief.
Thanks to the senbon snapping them out of their paralysis, the kids scrambled up and bolted down the street, tumbling and crawling over each other to get away.
As they ran, they wailed like banshees while screaming, "Murder! Help! Murder!"
"Wood Release: Green Technique!"
Moegi finished her hand seals and screamed at the top of her lungs.
A thick earthen wall erupted from the ground.
"Huh?"
Naturally, a basic dirt wall wasn't going to stop Hashirama.
What completely baffled him was the name of the jutsu the little girl just shouted.
Wood Release?
Didn't he just hear that only some lab experiment named Yamato actually inherited Wood Release?
At most, maybe a few sketchy guys had his cells implanted in them.
But this little pipsqueak standing in front of him definitely didn't carry the aura of his cells.
So how the heck was she using Wood Release?
Well.
First of all, Moegi being able to use Wood Release was a weird detail already cemented in the Boruto era lore.
As for where her Wood Release came from? Nobody currently had a clue.
Some folks guessed Moegi might be a secret descendant of the Senju clan.
But the glaring problem there was that the Senju clan only inherited their busted physique, not Wood Release itself.
Wood Release was a kekkei genkai utterly exclusive to Senju Hashirama.
Anyone who used Wood Release after him had either directly or indirectly leeched off Hashirama cells.
Why Moegi could pull it off remained a massive, unsolved plot hole.
But she genuinely could use it.
As for why that specific lore only popped up in the Boruto era, yet Moegi could already bust out Wood Release right now?
The reason was actually simple.
The plot had completely derailed.
The current Yamato didn't need to sub in for Kakashi and babysit Team Seven anymore. Nor did his Wood Release need to act as a dampener for Naruto's Nine-Tails.
So what exactly was Yamato supposed to do with his time? Simple: they made him a standard jōnin instructor and handed him a Genin squad.
Yamato owed the Third Hokage a favor, and this was the perfect chance to pay off that debt by taking charge of Konohamaru's three-man squad.
It was exactly because she had Yamato—an actual Wood Release jōnin—as her squad leader that Moegi, who possessed that weird hidden potential, managed to learn it early.
She unlocked the Wood Release: Greenery Technique that was originally tacked onto her character sheet in the Boruto era...
Uh, wait, no.
Wood Release: Green Technique.
Uchiha Madara also looked mildly surprised.
Where the hell did this kid come from?
How could some random brat on the street use Wood Release now?
He only managed to snag Wood Release after literally chewing off a chunk of Hashirama's flesh and implanting the cells.
What level were these peasants, strutting around using the exact same Wood Release as him and Hashirama?
"Are we absolutely certain this is Wood Release?" Madara stared at the dirt wall, unable to stop himself from asking.
"Yes." Hashirama scratched his head.
No matter how he looked at it, this was literally just a wall of dirt.
Wasn't this just Earth-Style Wall? And yet, it technically classified as Wood Release.
Even during the Boruto era, Moegi mostly spammed Water and Earth Release anyway.
Her Wood Release basically only existed as a fun trivia fact on her character profile—and in that creepy Divine Tree clone based on her, which could actually use the real thing.
Hiss—
After holding her hand seals until she was practically blue in the face, Moegi finally coaxed a single, pathetic tree branch out of the dirt wall.
It broke through the soil and poked straight toward Hashirama's vital spot right as he leaned in to inspect it.
Normally, taking a hit like that would've been totally fine.
But who told Hashirama to install that damn sensory formula?
Fortunately, Hashirama's reflexes were god-tier. He snapped the twig in half before it actually did any damage.
The pain didn't even get a chance to register.
"Boring."
When Madara saw that her legendary Wood Release amounted to a single flimsy twig, he instantly lost interest.
Wood Release did have some busted mechanics, sure, but at its core, the jutsu completely relied on raw stats.
Only the Wood Release used by Hashirama actually counted as true Wood Release.
When anyone else tried using it, if they didn't have the insane chakra reserves to overwhelm everything with pure brute force, they were honestly better off just chucking ordinary Water or Fire Release around.
If you absolutely had to name a kekkei genkai where unique mechanics mattered more than raw power, you'd probably only land on Ōnoki's Particle Style.
However, even though Particle Style relied on erasing matter rather than just hitting hard, the glaring issue was that casting it cost a massive chunk of chakra in the first place.
So yeah, even that boiled right back down to stats.
"So, Ha—chimi, you still chose to just let them run away?" Uchiha Madara watched the brats shrinking into the distance and suddenly posed the question.
"..."
"If you can't stomach doing it yourself, then loan me a little chakra. I'll trap them in a genjutsu and handle the punishment." Uchiha Madara dangled the temptation right in front of him.