4k words
Chapter 101: The First Major Event of Konoha Year 37, The Shinobi World's Most Beautiful Woman
Konoha Year 37, January 1st.
Without quite noticing when it had happened, thirteen years had passed since Yoru transmigrated into this world.
He still had the better part of a year before his next birthday, but the early adolescent phase of ages ten through twelve was behind him now. He had officially crossed into the next stage, the early teenage years spanning ages thirteen through fifteen.
In a world where the human body was built from one hundred and thirty trillion cells, this stage and the one that followed, the mid-to-late teenage years from sixteen to nineteen, were the two great growth surges. Every shinobi alive passed through both of them without exception.
It was during these two windows that a young ninja who had once seemed ordinary, with an unformed face and a body that hadn't yet found its shape, would change so completely it was as though an entirely different person had emerged.
The clearest example was Naruto Uzumaki from the original story. At twelve, freshly graduated from the academy, he had stood at a hundred and forty-seven centimeters. His strength had grown at a rate even more staggering than his height. By sixteen or seventeen he had already become Konoha's hero and the shinobi world's savior. By nineteen he had taken the fight to the moon itself.
No matter what country they were born in or what circumstances they grew up under, every person in this chakra-filled world had to pass through both surges. Even Jiraiya, who would eventually stand at a hundred and ninety-one centimeters as an adult, had been no exception. Even if someone's body matured a little earlier than average, their strength still couldn't break ahead of schedule. These two growth windows were, in every sense that mattered, the shinobi world's biological locks.
Even Nagato, who had transplanted eyes that gave him the Rinnegan and had mastered all six basic nature transformations in a single year, could not break through them.
Only two people had ever been exceptions.
The first was Itachi Uchiha, who awakened the Mangekyou Sharingan at eleven, stood nearly as tall as Kakashi Hatake during his ANBU years by the time he was thirteen, and in that same year wiped out the Uchiha clan alongside Obito Uchiha. By every measure, the shinobi world's most devoted son had bypassed what should have been impossible.
The second was Yoru, whose body evolved on a six-year cycle, placing him on what he thought of as a stairway to divinity from the age of six onward.
Breaking through these biological locks did not come without cost. Itachi, who had already reached Five Kage-level strength before adulthood, was visibly being consumed by illness before he had even grown up.
Yoru's situation was different. His evolutions came once every six years, and when each one ended, an invisible ceiling settled into place around him. He thought of it as both a limitation and a form of protection. If not for that ceiling, if every evolution had pushed him without pause toward complete transformation, the process might have simply killed him the moment it finished. The near-death sensation he had experienced with each cycle would have held until the body reached full conversion, and then the backlash from that final transformation would have drained him in an instant, sending him to the Pure Land, or perhaps sending him somewhere else entirely.
Having completed two evolutions, Yoru's current build and appearance bore no resemblance to what was typical for someone entering their early teenage years. He looked far closer to a young adult already standing on the far side of both growth surges. The only thing that still matched his age, without releasing his Yin Seal, was his regular chakra capacity, which sat at an all-around jonin level, nothing more.
He was thirteen now. His height had reached a hundred and seventy-eight centimeters. Three more centimeters and he would surpass Orochimaru, standing as tall as Kakashi Hatake at the start of the original story's timeline.
The psychological age that came with being a transmigrator gave him a bearing that matched every centimeter of that height. When he and Tsunade had sat down to discuss academy reform the previous year, there had been none of the usual distance between senior and junior. The ideas he had put forward had been progressive enough to genuinely impress her. More than a year of battlefield command and close-quarters killing had left its mark on his eyes and his presence. Outside of the people who knew him well, most shinobi unconsciously set aside any thought of his actual age when they looked at him.
Among ninja below the ace combatant tier, he had long since stopped being addressed with any informal familiarity. They called him Lord Gojo or Lord Yoru.
If the war hadn't still been dragging on, it wouldn't have been the least bit strange for Hiruzen Sarutobi to assign Yoru as a mentor jonin.
Konoha had begun fighting on three fronts on the same day Yoru first arrived at the border base.
It was also on that day that the shinobi of this era had given him a lesson he hadn't expected, and shown him how different the real world was from what he had seen in the anime.
In the anime, a great many vest-wearing ninja and ANBU had functioned essentially as background characters, the kind that could be dropped by a single kunai or used to demonstrate the scale of a technique. But in the real world, chunin were already field commanders with genuine leadership ability. Many jonin instructors were only tokubetsu jonin level. Full jonin and elite jonin were complete fighters in every sense.
And a Five Kage-level figure like Hanzo of the Salamander, once he had your intelligence, could force even someone with Space-Time abilities like Yoru to manufacture an opening or find an information advantage before a kill could be attempted.
Through his clashes with Hanzo alone, Yoru had come to feel in his bones why Hashirama Senju and Madara Uchiha had been able to deter the entire shinobi world from open warfare. He understood now, in a way that reading the manga had never conveyed, why the pure-blooded Otsutsuki called everyone else in this world lower life forms.
They truly were beings from a different dimension.
Two months had passed since the western border conflict with Amegakure ended.
The passage through Rain Country, sealed for two years, had reopened.
The Sand frontline opposite Sakumo Hatake's forces and the Stone frontline opposite the Danzo line were still grinding on, but neither battle affected the broader flow of the shinobi world. In the eyes of every watching faction, both of those conflicts would end soon enough. And even if they didn't, they would settle into prolonged low-level friction at worst.
The reason the larger war had erupted in the first place was that Hanzo of the Salamander had pinned down the Land of Fire's main border line, creating the opportunity for the Land of Earth and the Land of Wind to find entry points and divide Konoha's forces and high-tier fighters across three separate fronts.
Now that Amegakure had withdrawn, once the Land of Fire finished rebuilding the border base and restored that strategic anchor, the other two frontlines would see their strength surge accordingly.
The Land of Wind and Land of Earth, who had failed to break through in two full years, had even less hope of it now.
What nobody had expected was that neither the Sand nor the Stone frontlines had pulled back. The Stone side had actually intensified its push, suddenly doubling the pressure on Danzo's line and forcing the recovering border defense forces to immediately redeploy soldiers to support that theater.
When that intelligence reached the Sand frontline, Chiyo saw her opening.
Whether her intention was to coordinate with Iwagakure's offensive and draw Konoha's fire from both directions, or to use the chaos to break through the White Fang's line, or to force Konoha's hand into deploying Yoru to her frontline so she could find her chance at revenge, the result was the same. Sand Village had escalated its own offensive in the closing weeks of Konoha Year 36, and both battlefields had erupted into several significant large-scale engagements.
The only mercy was that these clashes were geographically contained. Had they been anywhere near the shinobi world's key trade routes or population centers, the atmosphere across the continent would have been suffocating.
But Chiyo had apparently overestimated her side's fighting strength, or perhaps spending more than a year facing Tsunade exclusively had caused her to overlook a critical piece of information.
The reason she had been able to become Hanzo of the Salamander's greatest rival and reduce even Sakumo Hatake to a bitter stalemate was specific. She possessed one of Sand Village's deepest trump cards, the Chikamatsu Collection, and she had gone further than any other puppeteer, modifying her own arms into puppet limbs equipped with layered defense mechanisms and poison delivery systems, while also patching over the traditional weaknesses of her fighting style. Her overall combat capability was fully Five Kage standard.
Without Tsunade's monstrous physical strength and medical ninjutsu acting as a direct counter to her, Chiyo wouldn't have had any reason to even engage her. And even with that disadvantage, across their multiple exchanges, Chiyo had come out on top more often than not.
But that winning record had led Chiyo to forget something important. She had been able to dominate Tsunade, a taijutsu specialist, even while being countered, because she had the Chikamatsu Collection and puppet arms working in her favor.
Her son and daughter-in-law did not necessarily have the same advantage.
Ninjutsu taijutsu specialists were fundamentally similar to pure taijutsu fighters in one respect: they didn't need hand seals for their attacks. The difference lay in application. Fire Release practitioners of ninjutsu taijutsu tended to fight the same way as their taijutsu counterparts, direct, powerful, and straightforward. Lightning Release practitioners, setting aside certain brute-force fighters from Cloud Village, almost universally favored speed-based suppression or sought the single killing blow. They were assassins at their core.
Yoru and Sakumo Hatake were the clearest examples of what that looked like at the highest level.
Yoru had used speed to create the moment Hanzo was airborne, then exploited a new intelligence advantage to very nearly end the life of the Demigod of the Shinobi World. Throughout the entire exchange, Hanzo had never had the opportunity to destroy Yoru's protective mask and summon his partner to release the poison smoke.
In exactly the same way that Yoru's group and Hanzo had, through repeated clashes, come to thoroughly know one another's methods, over a year of repeated engagements Tsunade had broken the codes behind Chiyo's lethal toxins and acquired solid intelligence on both the Chikamatsu Collection and the puppet arms. The only thing that had stopped her from actually capitalizing on that intelligence was the raw gap in their fighting strength.
Sakumo Hatake was nothing like Tsunade.
As a top-tier assassin above all else, he had been concealing himself throughout. Every exchange he had fought against Chiyo's son and daughter-in-law had been conducted without revealing a single one of his real cards. Instead he had spent every encounter collecting intelligence on the pair, cataloguing their techniques, their timing, their tells.
Out of caution, to guard against a hidden trump card or a combination technique on the scale of what Chiyo herself could deploy, Sakumo had let go of multiple clean opportunities to finish them. He had chosen discipline over speed.
Then came the series of large-scale engagements at the tail end of Konoha Year 36. In those battles, the couple had faced not only Sakumo but the unpredictable pressure of multiple coordinated attackers. They had taken hits. Their puppets had been damaged. And through all of it, not one new technique surfaced. Their combat patterns stayed exactly the same.
That was when Sakumo Hatake became certain. They had no more hidden cards left.
And so Konoha's White Fang finally showed his fangs.
On the night of January 1st, Konoha Year 37, a piece of news tore through both active frontlines. Through reconnaissance squads and ANBU relays, it reached all five great villages within hours and rippled outward across the entire shinobi world before the night was over.
Following the intelligence king Ebizo, Sand Village had now lost two more of its major combatants. Chiyo's son and daughter-in-law.
In raw rank terms, Chiyo's son was only a full all-around jonin, and his wife only a tokubetsu jonin with a specialized talent. But the two of them were extraordinarily skilled puppeteers. Years of working in perfect synchronization, backed by Sand Village's full technical resources, had produced puppets with layered and complementary capabilities, each set designed to cover the other's weaknesses. Their combination techniques carried the kind of explosive force normally reserved for compound ninjutsu. As a pair, they brought something to the battlefield equivalent to what Konoha's Ino-Shika-Cho formation could produce, the ability to punch far above their weight class. They were Sand Village's most unusual ace card.
Before Sakumo had gathered enough intelligence on them, even he had taken damage in exchanges with this couple.
Now both of them were dead at the White Fang's hands.
And like Ebizo before them, they had been killed in a single instant.
The Sand ninja positioned around them, and even Chiyo herself mid-exchange with Tsunade, had not had time to react. Sakumo's speed had been beyond comprehension. His short blade, wrapped in Lightning Release nature transformation, had manifested shape transformation in that singular strike. The arc of the slash curved through the air like a white crescent moon.
Since the war had begun, all four nations had suffered their share of casualties. But among ace-tier combatants, only Ebizo had fallen until now.
The count had just risen by two.
The White Fang of the Leaf. The name rang out across the shinobi world.
And the war had also produced its most wretched figure.
That figure was Chiyo herself, who had now lost her brother, and watched with her own eyes as her son and daughter-in-law were cut down in front of her.
By the accounts that came back, Chiyo had come apart on the spot. The killing intent that poured from her in that moment was described as approaching the level of a jinchuriki. Sakumo had not even been able to retrieve the bodies to extract their memories through the Yamanaka method, pulling his forces into an immediate retreat the moment he saw what was happening.
Had she not been held back by her own Sand ninja, and had she not retained that last thin thread of rational thought tied to her grandson waiting back in the village, Chiyo might well have thrown herself at the White Fang's headquarters then and there.
The news reached Konoha that same night. Orochimaru and Jiraiya, who had both returned to the village on rest leave, were immediately dispatched by Hiruzen Sarutobi to reinforce Sakumo's frontline.
To avoid wasting time on the road, Yoru personally used Flying Thunder God to carry both of them there.
For the first time in over a year, the three of them were reunited with Tsunade and Sakumo Hatake.
"Gulp."
Jiraiya caught sight of Tsunade and swallowed audibly. His eyes seemed to soften into something almost comically besotted as he grinned with more than a hint of shamelessness. "Tsunade, you've gotten even more beautiful."
Tsunade's gaze could have cut glass. "Jiraiya. If you'd like to spend some time in the emergency ward, I'm happy to help arrange that."
"Heh heh."
Jiraiya immediately pulled his wandering eyes back to a more respectable position and stood to the side, rubbing the back of his head with an awkward laugh.
Watching this exchange, Orochimaru felt a quiet, tired resignation.
After all these years, not a single thing had changed. With that approach and that kind of courage, winning Tsunade over was essentially an impossibility.
What followed immediately proved that point by contrast.
"Sakumo-senpai, it's been a long time."
Yoru gave Sakumo Hatake a brief greeting first, then turned to Tsunade with an easy smile. "Tsunade-senpai, long time no see. You've gotten even more beautiful."
The exact same words. Tsunade's response was entirely different.
Her expression brightened and she walked over, giving Yoru a light pat on the chest, and shook her head with something that sounded almost like amazement. "I can't believe how much you've grown in a year. You're almost a full head taller than me now. With a build like that, your chakra volume should be remarkable by any standard. That you completed the Yin Seal at this age tells me it isn't a Yin Release talent problem. Your spiritual energy must be the bottleneck holding you back."
Watching Tsunade's easy familiarity with Yoru, Jiraiya's expression was pure envy, though his mouth moved without his permission. "What bottleneck? Yoru isn't a descendant of the Senju or the Uzumaki. Having that chakra volume at his age is already extraordinary. Obviously not at my level, but still impressive."
The last sentence came with a self-satisfied tilt of his chin.
Nobody bothered to challenge him on it.
Tsunade simply cut him a sideways glance and said nothing.
Because he wasn't wrong.
Jiraiya was in the same category as Kakashi Hatake in this respect. He had possessed enormous chakra reserves from childhood. In fact, it was because he hadn't yet formed a blood contract with a summoning beast that he had unknowingly tapped into Space-Time energy when he recklessly attempted a Summoning Technique on his own, accidentally arriving at Myoboku Mountain, one of the three great sacred summoning grounds.
After signing the contract with Myoboku Mountain, Jiraiya had immediately begun training in senjutsu.
He had been young enough at that time that he almost certainly hadn't yet passed through the early teenage growth window, or had only just crossed into it. What was certain was that he had still been under fifteen.
By comparison, neither Yoru nor Orochimaru currently possessed chakra reserves sufficient to begin senjutsu training. That alone conveyed just how exceptional Jiraiya's reserves truly were. He remained, in the original story, one of only a handful of shinobi capable of using Sage Art: Super Great Ball Rasengan.
While this exchange was happening, Yoru found his gaze settling on Tsunade, and he let himself take a proper look.
A flicker of genuine appreciation passed through his eyes.
Jiraiya's reaction made complete sense. Tsunade had in fact become more beautiful.
Among the many figures whose fates the butterfly effects Yoru had set in motion had altered, Tsunade was one of them. Nawaki's death was still a constant, one of the things Yoru had been unable to change. But in many other respects, her path had been redirected.
The Yin Seal had two known properties. The first was that it locked a person's appearance at the stage in which the seal was completed, preventing any further aging. The second was that through minute, continuous chakra regulation, it kept all of the body's functions performing at their absolute peak indefinitely.
In the original story, Tsunade had completed her Yin Seal during the era of the Third Shinobi World War. By that point she had already passed through her golden years. Her appearance could be locked at that stage, but it could never be returned to an earlier one.
In Yoru's eyes, Tsunade's peak was the Second Shinobi World War era. Twenty-five or twenty-six, with the warmth of youth still present alongside the first bloom of maturity. That balance, that specific combination, was the most beautiful window in a woman's life.
So when the conversation about academy reform had come up, Yoru had taken the opportunity to raise the subject, suggesting she begin cultivating the Yin Seal and even sharing his own experience of developing it. The reasoning had been entirely self-evident.
As he had said before setting out for the front, Yoru had no particular interest in sacrificing himself for this world. But there were certain individuals, people he had known as illustrations on a page in his previous life, toward whom he felt a genuine warmth when he met them in the flesh. If those encounters happened naturally, and if changing their fate required nothing more than a suggestion at the right moment, Yoru didn't mind doing it. Not for any grand reason. Simply because it was pleasant, and he was willing.
Acting on his advice, Tsunade had completed her Yin Seal years ahead of what the original story would have allowed.
With the awakened bloodline heritage of the Senju clan and a chakra reserve that dwarfed most shinobi, the Yin Seal would hold Tsunade's appearance exactly as it was now for the decades ahead.
And the second property of the seal had already been quietly at work for over a year. Beyond the preservation of her face, both her complexion and her figure had shifted slightly. Her skin had become more radiant, and the lines of her body had grown more defined in every direction.
In particular, when she was off the battlefield, she would shed her combat armor and wear only a white shirt and dark blue jacket, which made the already extraordinary proportions she had always possessed substantially more formidable.
This was precisely what had provoked Jiraiya's response just now.
Long straight hair of pale gold, features of precise and breathtaking refinement, a build with curves that announced themselves without apology, the bearing of someone completely at ease in authority, and a strength that placed her among the shinobi world's elite. All of it together, backed by the lineage she carried, made one thing clear.
The title of Shinobi World's Number One Beauty was hers without question.
The five of them talked for a long stretch of time, catching up on everything that had accumulated in their time apart.
Every topic circled back to Yoru.
When Konoha Year 35 was the current year, Yoru had still addressed all of them with the formal suffix reserved for superiors. Now, more than a year later, he called them seniors. And the combat record he had assembled in that interval left every one of them speechless, each privately aware that they couldn't have matched it.
Sakumo Hatake, privately thought to himself that once Yoru came of age, he very much wanted to ask whether he would consider taking Kakashi as a student. He stopped himself from saying it out loud.
The conversation eventually wound down, and Orochimaru shifted to the matter at hand, his expression turning serious.
"Yoru won't be staying here long. With the situation changing suddenly, Danzo-dono's frontline may need his support as well. And his Flying Thunder God is no secret to anyone in the shinobi world at this point. If Sand Village decides to deploy a jinchuriki, they will have prepared for that, and they will not give Yoru an opening to use Flying Thunder God to reposition. Furthermore, given Yoru's current chakra capacity, he can only redirect a single Tailed Beast Ball at most. They may use Tailed Beast Balls as probes and then press the opening when his reserves run low."
"We need to prepare countermeasures for the possibility of Sand Village activating their jinchuriki before that scenario occurs. Disperse the combat and logistics units. Every squad must include a barrier team."
"Until the war is over, Jiraiya and I will both remain here to ensure we can deploy the Four Red Yang Formation if needed."
Sakumo and Tsunade both nodded, their expressions grave.
***
20+advance chapters at patreon.com/Eatinpieces