Uchiha Obito and Uchiha Madara.
One wanted to pull off his grand master plan for the sake of love.
The other was currently sacrificing love for the sake of the damn world.
During this whole Date A Live campaign Madara was running with Granny Chiyo, he hadn't come up completely empty-handed.
To his actual surprise, he realized the villagers in Sunagakure were way more human than the psychos back in Konoha.
Sure, he and Hashirama were currently walking around in their original bodies, and the highly respected Granny Chiyo was escorting them.
Anyone with half a working brain cell knew better than to come looking for trouble.
But Madara could still spot the difference in the finer details.
Right now, Sunagakure was extremely harmonious.
There wasn't any obvious malice directed at them, other ninja, or even ordinary civilians.
After Madara found out the sitting Kazekage was the jinchūriki of Shukaku, the One-Tail, he figured he'd gather some intel in advance to prep for his revival and eventual Tailed Beast hunt.
The info he dug up, though, was pretty damn surprising.
Gaara had been bullied as a kid and back then, Gaara was a literal homicidal maniac.
At first glance, it made it look like the people of Sunagakure would rather risk getting slaughtered than abandon their precious ninja way of bullying people.
But that wasn't actually the case.
First off, Gaara's scumbag dad, Rasa, had personally spearheaded the bullying campaign and ordered others to do it too.
Second, unless they specifically got an order from Rasa, no sane adult dared to mess with Gaara.
The only idiots who wanted to bully Gaara were ignorant, fearless little brats.
And the second those kids got caught by adults and dragged home for a brutal beating, they wised up real quick.
Completely unlike Konoha.
Over there, from full-grown adults to toddlers, everybody just bullied whoever the hell they crossed paths with.
They didn't give a damn if the target was strong or weak.
They didn't care if the victim might completely snap and slaughter their entire bloodline in retaliation!
They'd still stubbornly carry out their toxic ninja way of bullying.
They were basically a village of bloodthirsty peasants!
If you didn't know any better, you'd think they were like those NPCs in recent trashy novels—each one blessed with some "divine quota" where, as long as they got murdered by a protagonist, they'd get isekai'd into another world and become filthy rich.
Otherwise, there was absolutely no logical way to explain why Konoha's villagers were so insanely obsessed with bullying people.
And whenever this topic came up, one specific guy inevitably got dragged into the conversation.
That guy was the White Fang—the poor bastard bullied into suicide by Konoha's villagers, who also happened to be Granny Chiyo's mortal enemy.
"A kind and great shinobi, he broke the rules to save his comrades, and even after the whole village turned on him, he still chose not to hurt anyone else. Instead, he... sigh. What a pity," Senju Hashirama lamented.
"Wrong! That man, Hatake Sakumo, was an absolute coward." Madara let out a cold snort, shutting Hashirama's pity party down.
"No, Madara, that's going way too far." Hashirama frowned.
Even if Madara was trying to score points with Granny Chiyo and wanted to validate her feelings, he couldn't just twist black into white like that.
"Hashirama, you hold Uchiha Itachi in extremely high regard, don't you? You think he was just like you—someone willing to shoulder the darkness of the village..." Madara drawled.
"In that case, has it ever crossed your mind that if Hatake Sakumo truly cared about the village and the sake of future generations, he should have shouldered that darkness too?"
"What exactly do you mean?"
Hashirama sensed that Madara wasn't just sweet-talking Granny Chiyo this time.
There was actual weight behind those words, so Hashirama instantly dropped the goofy act.
"If he genuinely cared about the village and wanted it to improve, the very first thing he should have done was march straight to the Hokage and force him to deal with the damn problem..."
"?"
Hearing that, Hashirama completely froze.
'Not immediately slaughter everyone to his heart's content? Is this still Madara? Can love truly change a man?'
"If the Hokage couldn't handle it, or just tried to brush him off, then the second thing he should have done was slaughter every single bastard who ran their mouths, as fast as humanly possible."
"Now that's more like it!" Hashirama instantly relaxed, patting his chest and letting out a relieved breath.
Madara shot Hashirama a deeply confused look, then pressed on.
"And right after that, he should have assassinated the useless Hokage who refused to take action. Whether he succeeded or failed, only then would he count as a qualified hero. Otherwise, he's nothing but a total failure. As for offing himself? That makes him the biggest coward of them all."
"Yes, yes, exactly. That sounds right."
Hearing these classic, unhinged Madara takes, Hashirama finally felt a sense of comfortable normalcy.
Then his brain actually processed what Madara had just said.
His face fell, and he frantically waved his hands.
"Wait, no, no, no! Madara, how the heck can you suggest something like that?!"
"What the hell is wrong with it? By doing exactly that, he would've sacrificed his own reputation to send a bloody message to future generations: if anyone dared treat a war hero like garbage and pushed them into a corner, they would be walking straight into their own graves.
"Only extreme violence could deter those inherently evil villagers of Konoha. Hell, to be perfectly honest, even with that kind of bloody deterrence, I doubt those idiots would take it seriously. Maybe only through generation after generation of 'White Fangs' stacking bodies could Konoha's rotten culture finally be cured.
That is what a true war hero should be. Not some weakling who kills himself after getting bullied, completely enabling the abusers and giving them a free pass to terrorize people even more recklessly in the future!" Madara barked.
Hashirama listened, and for some bizarre reason, it actually made a twisted amount of sense.
The crux of the issue was that Madara's unhinged theory perfectly mirrored the exact logic Hashirama used when he backstabbed Madara in the past, as well as the justification behind Uchiha Itachi's massacre—bearing the darkness for the sake of the village.
"But at the end of the day, they aren't committing some great, unforgivable evil, right? To slaughter them just for running their mouths... wouldn't that be a little much?" Hashirama's brows pulled into a tight knot.
In truth, he'd already wrestled with this exact thought a few days ago in Konoha.
Sure, those brats had jumped Madara, and they had definitely been infected by Konoha's toxic culture, but at their core, they couldn't be labeled as pure evil villains just yet.
Wouldn't it be way too extreme to solve the problem with a complete massacre?
Was there really no way to fix it through education?
"Hashirama, do you still not get it? It is precisely these small evils, these petty, daily cruelties, that breed the true darkness of the shinobi world!
"Can you guarantee that every single ninja in the future, from childhood to adulthood, will be as stupidly cheerful as Might Guy, flashing a blinding thumbs-up even while getting spit on?
"Can you guarantee they'll all be as cowardly as Hatake Sakumo, quietly hanging themselves in the privacy of their own homes because they're too damn scared of troubling others by doing it in the street?
"Can you actually guarantee that?
"If, in the future, even one normal person snaps from the bullying and is forced to defect from your precious village, how do you plan to handle it? Will you just hunt them down and kill them too, exactly like you killed me?
"And what happens when, one day, Konoha is no longer stronger than the monster they created?
"Konoha will be burned to ashes because of your weak decisions! It's you, Hashirama! You allowed Konoha's literal tumors to fester instead of cutting them out, and instead, you ruthlessly purged the healthy cells that tried to fix the damn problem!"
As Madara grew more and more heated, Hashirama inexplicably felt a heavy wave of guilt crash over him.
Madara was so aggressively agitated, almost like he was speaking from deep, personal pain.
'Could it be...' Hashirama thought, horrified.
'Did Madara actually defect from Konoha back then because he was being bullied too?'
But who the hell could have possibly bullied Uchiha Madara back then?
'Tobirama?'
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