Concerns

While Dazen thought about his future suffering he didn't expect that something much worse was about to happen, in the Hokage's office in the center of the village Hiruzen was reading a report with a very serious expression, when he finished he passed it to Shikaku who also read it with same expression.

When Shikaku finished reading, he placed the report on the table and sighed as he said, "The situation doesn't look good, the fighting in the small countries is escalating day by day, if this continues soon the big nations will have to intervene and when that happens we we will be at war again."

Hiruzen looked at Shikaku and replied: "Since the last wars the strength of the largest nations has decreased greatly and with that these small nations have had the opportunity to increase their strength and influence by creating their own academies and ninja forces and with that many of the missions have been taken over by these nations reducing the income of the 5 main countries which generated even more instability the large nations are increasingly in conflict with these small countries if another war starts it will be much bigger and bloodier than the others."

Shikaku continued: "And to make matters worse, the leaf continues to recover from the last war, if we enter into a conflict like this, I can't imagine what the consequences would be, our forces might not be able to withstand it."

Hiruzen sighed and as he spoke: " The Leaf is always the target of all villages for being the strongest in the last war, if not for Tsunade creating the medical unit and proposing ninja squads with at least one medical ninja our conditions would be much worse than that the current and certainly in this next war the situation will not differ with the leaf ninjas having to fight with the other 4 large villages."

Shikaku was silent as he thought Konoha's current situation was not good at all, the last war greatly diminished its strength and now with the increase in strength of other smaller countries even the economic condition was starting to get worse and worse if the situation continues Thus, Konoha would have no other option than to get involved in these conflicts to reduce the influence of small countries.

Shikaku looked at Hiruzen and asked, "What will be our next move?"

Hiruzen thought a little before answering: "For now we will not get directly involved, but we will organize secret missions aiming to disrupting the length of missions by smaller villages with a decrease in the percentage of successful long missions, these villages became increasingly discredited and I will also talk to Danzo to create small incidents such as deaths among innocent civilians and cases of excessive violence and blame these villages, which will make whoever hires them be frowned upon by the people and no Daimiyo wants that."

Shikaku looked at Hiruzen in silence, despite not liking the tactic he knew there was only way a new war of these proportions would be terrible, he could not even imagine the number of deaths from such a conflict.

Shikaku replied, "It will cool things down a bit, but I don't think it will be enough to stop the conflict."

Hiruzen: "First we will observe how our strategy works and depending on what happens we will take action, you can go, now I will talk to the Anbu leaders to organize the missions and then with the advisors we will plan how to undermine the influence of these small villages."

Shikaku replied as he left, "Alright, call me if anything happens."

Hiruzen watched him as Shikaku left: 'I think this is the first time I've heard him say to call him if anything happens, it would be funny if it weren't for this bad situation we're in.'

Hiruzen got up and went towards the window and looked at the Hokage monuments as he thought, 'I hope the situation doesn't get any worse from this point, the village's strength has barely started to recover, it looks like in these next few months I will have than asking them to have a greater focus on academia and to graduate students earlier to fill the gaps more quickly when they grow up.'

Hiruzen returned to his desk to fill out the remaining paperwork not knowing that the next war was very close and would be much worse than anything he could imagine.

In the meantime, Dazen arrived home and began to reorganize his training plan: 'Okay, this afternoon, instead of the academy jutsus, I will train the elementary jutsus and the Shunshin no Jutsu, after all, despite being a low-level technique, it was used by basically every ninja, even the high level ones, so mastery of this jutsu was mandatory and at night I will train the change of nature with the leaf, I hope to be able to master all of this by the end of next year.'