The training ground stayed empty.
Roen stood in the same place he'd stopped.
Didn't move.
The market had fallen behind him, the noise thinning out with distance, but it hadn't gone anywhere. It stayed with him, not as sound, just the shape of it.
Same lines, different mouths. He let it run again, fragments overlapping as they passed through different voices—Uchiha were there, people are saying, the Nine-Tails—and none of it broke apart. That was the problem, not what was being said, but how it held together.
Roen's gaze dipped a little. Rumours didn't move like that, not overnight, not that clean. They usually bent out of shape, lost pieces, picked up new ones depending on who carried them. This hadn't. It stayed pointed, same direction every time, like nothing along the way had touched it.
He shifted his weight slightly. Someone had pushed it, not loud enough to stand out, just enough to set it moving. He didn't bother with who. That wasn't where it led. The fight was already done, Kazuma didn't matter, the Hyūga didn't matter. That wasn't what people were holding onto. It kept coming back to the Uchiha. The accusation, the place it happened, who'd been there. He'd been seen with them more than once, walking in, training, not hiding it. The timing lined up too neatly to ignore. It didn't feel random. It felt placed.
Roen exhaled, slow.
So it wasn't the street. That was just where it showed. Whatever this was, it had already been moving before that, just waiting for somewhere public to land. The timing sat wrong. Things were coming up sooner than they should've. Not how it was supposed to go. It didn't feel random either. Something had nudged it forward. And even if it wasn't about him directly, the name still sat there. Shinra. Too close to the Uchiha, too visible for someone who wanted distance kept.
His gaze stayed ahead.
If it was leaning toward the Uchiha, and he kept showing up beside them, then it didn't stop with them.
It reached him too.
Not separate.
Not watching it from the side.
Just there with it.
Roen didn't react to it. He'd already been seen enough times for that line to draw on its own.
If things kept moving the way they were, it wouldn't stay where it started. It would spread, and when it did, it wouldn't pass him by.
The thought didn't go any further.
It shifted.
Yukihiro.
The name came up on its own, not pulled from what just happened, just there, steady, like it had been waiting in the background the whole time.
Roen's gaze stayed forward.
The system responded.
A thin layer of light settled at the edge of his vision.
[Mission]
Defeat Yukihiro Shinra
Time Limit: 9 Months
Failure Condition:
→ Revert to Day 1
→ All progress lost
Three weeks ago.
That was when it showed up. He hadn't looked at it again since. There was nothing to check. The condition hadn't changed, hadn't bent around anything else happening.
Nine months.
His gaze stayed ahead.
It wasn't much anymore. Not with how fast things had started shifting around him, like the ground was the same but everything on it had begun to move.
Yukihiro sat in front of him.
The village was turning somewhere else.
Neither was waiting.
Roen let the screen fade, but the line stayed where it was. It didn't split into choices. It didn't need to.
Either he got there
or something got to him first.
He stepped forward, the dirt shifting under his foot, no pause in it, just the next step falling into place.