The tremors reached ROOT's facility twelve seconds after the invasion began.
The underground corridors shuddered. Dust fell from the ceiling in thin streams. A hairline crack ran along the wall of the training room where six ROOT operatives had been in the middle of a sparring rotation.
They stopped. They looked up.
Danzo's voice came through the facility's internal relay within the minute.
"All operatives. Stand down. Remain in position. Do not surface."
The six operatives in the training room returned to neutral stances. They did not question the order. ROOT did not question orders. The words came from above and the bodies below obeyed, and the gap between the two was not supposed to contain anything as wasteful as doubt.
Neji stood among them with his mask on and his Byakugan active.
He could see through the ceiling. Through the rock and the packed earth and the foundation layers of the buildings above them. His range had grown in the weeks since Danzo had begun training him. The facility was deep, but his Byakugan was enough to catch the edges of what was happening on the surface.
He could see people running. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Konoha was under attack and for some reason they were hiding down here instead of helping.
Neji didn't understand why they weren't moving. Wasn't the purpose of ROOT ultimately to protect Konoha from the dark? In a situation like this, it doesn't make sense for them to be idle.
Unless…
Lord Danzo doesn't care about Konoha. He doesn't care about the citizens of the village. It seems all he cares about is his own power and how he can further elevate that. To think the Third Hokage allowed a man such as this to be one of his senior advisors… Neji was starting to understand why Orochimaru, one of his former students, betrayed him. If someone who grew up alongside him was willing to sit by as the village was attacked. The Third Hokage was not as great as he thought.
Neji's hands tightened at his sides.
A ROOT operative beside him, a boy around his age called Sai. Neji stood perfectly still. His mask faced forward. His breathing was even. He showed no reaction to the tremors or the distant sounds of combat filtering through the stone above them.
None of them showed a reaction. They were brainwashed.
Neji's Byakugan pushed further. He strained against the edge of his range, pulling more chakra into his eyes, forcing the field of vision outward through layers of earth that wanted to stay opaque.
Eventually, he found the hospital.
In the hospital, he found two figures that did not belong to Konoha moving through the hospital's east wing. They were heading toward the recovery ward. And they were not engaging any of the Leaf shinobi they passed. They were avoiding them. Slipping through gaps in the defense that the invasion's chaos had created.
They were heading for a specific room.
Neji's balled fist tightened.
He knew which room.
He knew who was in it.
The same village. The same target. The same eyes. Over a decade ago, Kumogakure had sent a diplomat to steal Hinata. Neji's father had died for it. Now, in the middle of an invasion that had every Leaf shinobi's attention pointed at Sand and Sound, two Cloud-nin were walking through the hospital toward the girl they had failed to take the first time.
History repeating.
Neji turned toward the corridor that led to the surface.
"Operative." The voice came from behind him. Another ROOT agent, older, stationed at the relay point. "Lord Danzo's orders are to stay put."
Neji stopped.
He stood in the corridor with his mask on and his fists closed and the Byakugan showing him, in real-time, two enemy shinobi closing the distance to his cousin's hospital bed.
The Hyuga guards posted at her door were engaging a separate group of invaders down the hall. They had been drawn away. The door to Hinata's room was unprotected.
Neji started walking.
"Sparrow." The older agent's voice sharpened. "Stand down."
Neji kept walking.
He reached the stairwell that led to the surface exit. The sealed door was in front of him. He pressed his palm against it and channeled chakra into the release mechanism. The seals recognized his network and the door ground open.
Daylight hit his mask.
He went up.
The streets of Konoha were chaos.
Neji moved across the rooftops in his ROOT blacks, his mask a white blank against the smoke-filled sky. Below him, Sand and Sound shinobi fought Leaf forces in every intersection. Buildings were burning. Civilians were running. The arena, visible to the south, had a column of smoke rising from its center.
He did not engage. He did not stop. He had one target and every second spent on anything else was a second Hinata did not have.
He reached the hospital from the roof.
His Byakugan punched through the building's walls. The two Kumo operatives were inside. They had already reached the recovery ward. The four Hyuga branch member guards who had been posted at Hinata's door were on the corridor floor. Not moving. Their chakra networks were dimming.
Dying.
The larger Kumo operative was inside Hinata's room. He had her over his shoulder. She was unconscious, her hospital gown rumpled, an IV line dangling from her arm where it had been ripped free.
The smaller operative, a lean man with close-cropped hair, was leading the extraction through the hospital's east service corridor. They were heading for the ground-floor exit.
Neji dropped through a window on the third floor.
He landed in the stairwell without a sound. His sandals touched the concrete and his body was already moving downward, taking the stairs three at a time, his Byakugan tracking the two operatives through the walls as they descended toward the first floor.
He reached the service corridor before they did.
He stood at the far end of the hallway with his arms at his sides and his mask facing the direction they would come from. The corridor was empty. The fluorescent lights overhead hummed. A medical cart had been abandoned halfway down the hall, its contents scattered across the linoleum.
Footsteps. Two sets. One heavy, carrying weight. One lighter, moving point.
The smaller operative came around the corner first. His eyes found the masked figure at the end of the corridor and his hand went to the kunai at his hip in the same motion.
"ANBU?" His voice was confused. He recognized the uniform. "The hell is ANBU doing in a hospital?"
Neji did not answer as he got into a Gentle Fist stance.
The larger operative came around the corner behind his partner, Hinata draped over his shoulder like cargo. His eyes found the masked figure and his assessment was faster than his partner's.
"Hyuga," the larger one said. He had seen the veins at the temples, visible at the edges of the porcelain mask. "They've got a Hyuga in ANBU?"
Neji moved.
He crossed the corridor in three steps. The smaller operative's kunai came up in a guard. Neji's palm went through the guard and struck the man's forearm at the tenketsu cluster above the wrist. The arm went dead. The kunai clattered to the floor. Neji's other palm found the man's chest and sealed four tenketsu in a line from his sternum to his collarbone. The operative staggered. Neji pivoted behind him, struck the back of his neck at the brainstem, and the man dropped.
The larger operative was already running. He had Hinata and he had seen what just happened to his partner and his only calculation was distance.
He made it six steps.
"You're within range of my Eight Trigrams."
Neji's hands became a flurry of strikes that the larger operative could not see and could not answer and could not escape. Two palms to the shoulders. Four to the ribs. Eight to the arms and the spine. The man tried to turn, tried to shield Hinata's body with his own, and Neji adjusted his angles to avoid hitting her without slowing the sequence. Sixteen palms. Thirty-two. Sixty-four.
The operative's body locked up from the inside out. His grip on Hinata failed. She slid off his shoulder.
Neji caught her before she hit the floor.
He lowered her gently against the corridor wall. Her head lolled. Her breathing was steady. She was unconscious but unharmed. The IV site on her arm was bleeding slightly where the line had been torn free.
Neji looked at her face.
The last time he had been this close to her, he had been trying to kill her…
He straightened and turned back to the two operatives. The smaller one was dying, his chakra network shut down. The larger one was conscious but paralyzed, his eyes the only part of him that could still move, and those eyes were fixed on the masked figure with the Byakugan who had just dismantled him in under four seconds.
Neji walked to him.
The larger operative's mouth was working. Trying to speak around sealed facial muscles.
"You won't be taking her." Neji's voice came through the mask, flattened by the porcelain. "Not today. Not ever."
He placed two fingers against the operative's temple and pushed a concentrated burst of chakra into the tenketsu cluster behind the ear.
The man's eyes rolled back. He shivered as his soul left his body.
Neji stood in the corridor with two dead Kumo operatives at his feet and his cousin safe against the wall.
He picked Hinata up and carried her back to her room. He laid her on the bed. He pulled the blanket over her. He found a clean bandage in the supply cabinet beside the bed and wrapped the bleeding IV site on her arm.
He stood over her for a moment.
Then he turned to leave.
"Neji."
The voice came from the doorway.
Hiashi Hyuga stood in the frame. His Byakugan was active. His robes were dusty from the invasion's debris and there was a cut across his left hand that he had not bothered to treat. He was breathing harder than a man of his composure usually allowed himself to breathe.
He had run here.
Neji did not move.
"You're alive..."
Neji didn't listen.
"I know it's you." Hiashi's voice was quiet. Certain. "Your height. Your stance. The way you transitioned into the Sixty-Four Palms. I haven't even taught my daughters that technique yet."
Neji stood with his back to Hiashi and his mask facing the window.
"ROOT took you..." It was not a question. "ROOT was supposed to be disbanded. The Third Hokage ordered it dissolved years ago."
Neji said nothing.
"Either the Hokage lied about disbanding it, or Danzo has been running it behind his back." Hiashi's voice carried a weight that was not anger. It was something worse. It was the sound of a man who had failed someone in a way he was only now beginning to understand. "Which is it?"
"It doesn't matter." Neji's voice came through the mask.
"It matters to me. You are my nephew."
"Am I?"
"You are Hizashi's son."
The name hit the room like a stone hitting water.
Neji's shoulders tightened beneath the ROOT uniform.
"I came here to tell you something." Hiashi stepped into the room. "Something I should have told you years ago. Before the exams. Before any of this. I was a coward for waiting, and the price of my cowardice is that I am telling it to a boy wearing a mask he should not be wearing."
Neji did not turn around.
"That day," Hiashi said. "I fully intended to die."
Neji's head moved by a fraction.
"I was prepared to give my life. My body, for Kumogakure's demand. To end the conflict. To protect the clan. I had made my peace with it."
"What are you saying?"
"Your father was not murdered, Neji."
The words hit the air between them and stayed there.
"Hizashi came to me and the family elders the night before the exchange was to take place. He had already decided. I did not ask him. I did not order him. I did not suggest it. He came to me and told me what he was going to do, and when I refused, when I told him that it was my responsibility and my life to give, he struck me."
Neji's breathing changed behind the mask.
"He used the Gentle Fist on me. His own brother. To stop me from dying. He struck me in the chest so that I could not move for the time it took him to walk out the door."
A silence so deep it swallowed the sounds of the invasion outside.
"Before he left, he asked me to relay his final words to you. When you were old enough. When you were ready."
Neji's fists were shaking at his sides.
"He said that he was not dying to protect the main family."
Hiashi's voice did not waver.
"He said he chose to die to protect you. To protect his brother. To protect the clan. To protect the village. He said he had always wanted to defy the Hyuga destiny, even if only once. Just once. He wanted to choose his own path."
The room held its silence.
"He said, 'That is all. I just wanted to choose my own destiny.'"
Neji did not speak.
He stood with his back to Hiashi and his mask facing the window and his fists trembling at his sides. Behind the porcelain, where nobody could see, his eyes were burning. The tears came without permission. They ran down his cheeks inside the mask and collected at the chin of the porcelain and had nowhere to go, pooling against the inside of a dead man's face, wetting the surface that was supposed to erase everything about him that was human.
"You can't expect me to believe that." His voice cracked behind the mask. The porcelain muffled the break but did not hide it.
"I knew you would say that," Hiashi said. "That is why I waited this long. And that is why waiting was wrong."
"Then why now?"
"Because you just saved the girl you nearly killed. Because you came here wearing that mask to protect someone you once tried to destroy. Because I watched four Hyuga guards die in this hallway and you, a boy in a mask who was supposed to be dead, came through the window and did what they could not."
Hiashi paused.
"And because I have waited too long already. I should have told you years ago. I did not, because I was afraid you would not believe me, and I was a coward for letting that fear keep my brother's final words locked inside my chest for a decade."
Neji's shoulders were shaking.
"I wanted to relay my brother's final words to you." Hiashi's voice changed. It lost the tone of a clan head. It lost the tone of authority. What was left was the voice of an older brother who had lost his twin. "Not as the head of the main branch. But as Hizashi's older brother."
Hiashi lowered himself.
His knees touched the hospital floor. His hands came forward and pressed flat against the linoleum. His forehead lowered until it touched the ground.
The head of the Hyuga clan bowed to a branch family member.
Neji stopped breathing.
He had never seen this. No branch member had ever seen this. In the entire history of the Hyuga clan, the main family did not bow to the branch. The main family commanded. The main family sealed. The main family decided who lived and who died and who carried the mark and who did not.
The main family did not put their forehead on the floor.
"Please believe me."
Hiashi's voice came from the ground.
Behind the mask, Neji's face collapsed. The tears he had been fighting broke through completely. His jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached. His chest heaved once, silently. It was the sound of ten years of anger finding the exit it had never been given.
The mask hid all of it.
The porcelain showed nothing. A blank white face, featureless, pointed at a window while the most powerful man in the Hyuga clan pressed his forehead to a hospital floor.
"Please." Neji's voice was a wreck behind the porcelain. "Raise your head."
Hiashi raised his head. He looked at the mask. He could not see his nephew's face. He could not see the tears. He could see only the white blank of ROOT's anonymity, and behind it, the muffled breathing of a boy who was trying very hard not to fall apart.
"You need to go back," Hiashi said quietly. "Before whoever you answer to realizes you're gone."
Neji stood still for a moment longer.
"ROOT." Hiashi said the word carefully. "I don't know if the Hokage is aware it still operates. I don't know who is running it. But I know what it is. And I know what it does to the people inside it."
He stood.
"I will find a way to get you out, Neji. I swear it on your father's memory."
Neji turned his head. Just enough for the edge of the mask to face Hiashi. Not enough to show anything behind it.
"Don't worry about me." The words came out raw. "The people I care about have already done enough."
He crossed to the window.
He stopped on the sill.
"Uncle."
Hiashi's breath caught at the word. Neji had never called him that before.
"Thank you. For telling me."
He dropped from the window and vanished with the body flicker.
Neji did not return to the ROOT facility immediately.
He found a rooftop on the north side of the village where the fighting had already passed through and left nothing but rubble and silence. He sat on the edge of it with his legs hanging over the drop and his mask in his hands.
His face was wet. The inside of the mask was wet. He wiped both with his sleeve and sat there with the porcelain resting in his lap and the sky above him.
Father.
My dream was simple. I wanted to become stronger. When I met Him, I wanted to become strong enough to prove that fate was absolute and that his defiance was meaningless. Now, I want to become stronger for the sake of destroying my fate as a caged bird. And living life as free as I want.
He looked up.
Above the smoke and the ruined rooftops, the sky was wide and pale and full of birds.
There were so many of them today. More than he had ever noticed before.
Flying free.
Neji watched them until the smoke began to thin and the sounds of combat faded into the sounds of a village beginning to count its dead.
He put the mask back on.
He descended from the rooftop and found the entrance to the underground and went back down into the dark.
The birds kept flying above him, visible through the stone to his Byakugan alone, bright shapes against a brightening sky that he could see but could not touch.
Not yet.