9 Chapter 9: Back to Konoha

Kaemon whistled, he held Danzo's head by the hair and stared at the red Mangekyo Sharingan that had turned to face him even when traveling at top speed. "Damn Uchiha hacks…", Kaemon muttered and pulled up his face mask. A ninja this old and this slow should not have been able to even react, but the Uchiha Dojutsu did.

Continuing to grumble, Kaemon opened up a sealing scroll and went to seal the rest of the body but stopped when he felt something wrong. 'Strange, Danzo smells like rotting wood... Why? Flesh should not smell like this…', Kaemon scrunched his nose at the confusing smell. It was even stranger that only one half of Danzo's body had the chemical wood rot emanating from it. Curious, Kaemon lit up a flare and tossed it a few feet away so that he could study Danzo's corpse.

What he found made him want to vomit. A face was growing out of a shoulder of an entire arm that looked grafted onto his body through some sick kind of surgery. The skin was white and shriveled, but Kaemon could feel the massive life force emanating from the grotesque limb. The containment cast had also hidden several Sharingan eyes that all gazed lifelessly back at him.

'This needs to be reported immediately…', Kaemon thought and quickly sealed the body in a body and head scroll after removing the Sharingan eyes and placing them in protective stasis containers he retrieved the lab that he had previously run through. With everything sealed away, Kaemon followed his nose and began his run back to Konoha at full speed. Returning Shisui's eye could be put off for a day, especially with Tsunade and what's her face looking after him. Kaemon grinned. "You better thank me Shisui, I'm letting you spend some time with the Kato chick you had a crush on in the academy!", Kaemon said to himself as he sped through the dark tunnels back to the forests of the Land of Fire.

****Note**** This is a creative choice by me the author, I know Danzo did not have the full Sharingan arm until after the Uchiha Massacre in cannon. I just wanted more crimes that Danzo committed cause I hate the guy. Please don't complain about it because the bastard is dead and is no longer able to mess anything else up, aside from the remnants of ROOT running to Orochimaru...

Shisui woke with a start. He immediately tried to get up and assess where he was but felt like his body was filled with lead. The small jerk of motion when he woke hurt so much he was forced to collapse back onto the cot he was laying on with a groan of pain. He quickly internally flared his chakra to dispel any potential genjutsu only to find his situation unchanged.

"Please don't move, you are recovering from a nearly fatal poisoning", a sharp warning rang out from a nearby desk. Shisui painfully turned his head to see a blurry form of a dark-haired woman standing and walking over to him. 'Wait… How the fuck can I see!?!', Shisui thought confusedly. Though blurry, he could still see colors and shapes. He should be dead. He should be blind. That poison used on him by Danzo was no laughing matter, even if Kaemon managed to get him to a hospital. Kaemon saved him. Fuck.

Shisui gave a choked chuckle to himself and thought, 'He's never going to let me forget this'. Shisui said and let his head rest back on the pillow. The two of them had been doing it ever since they met in the academy. Always one-upping the other. Then during the war, the game evolved into who saved the other. Kaemon was ahead by one Kumo STRIKE (Kumogakure's ANBU division. I like the idea of each village having a different black ops division name like CIA vs MI6) sent to steal the Sharingan from the young prodigy. Shisui never got to return the favor. Kaemon got nailed with a tailed beast bomb all because he wasn't fast enough to rescue his rival and best friend. It was how he got the Mangekyo. Now he was back, and the wily son of a bitch saved him again.

Shisui grimaced, 'I can't call Kaemon a son of a bitch to his face again, last time I did that he learned a new raiton jutsu and used me for target practice. The entire time he was screaming that his mom wasn't an Inuzuka so I shouldn't call her that… What an idiot! A raiton prodigy and killing machine, but still an idiot. I wonder how he has changed since then?'. Shisui shook himself out of his exhausted musing.

Halfway across the Land of Fire, Kaemon sneezes as he runs back to Konohagakure at supersonic speeds and rubs his nose and giddily thinks, 'I'm being praised by someone!'. The wolf ninja promptly resumes his light jog.

'Now the real question is where am I?', Shisui thought and studied his surroundings. He didn't smell like a hospital. The smell of chemicals overshadowing death was quite distinctive and not present. He smelled alcohol. The brown ceiling looked like wood but was too blurry to tell at the moment. He was on a cot of some sort and his shirt had been removed while he was unconscious. He wasn't alone. The dark-haired woman had approached him with green hands, what he recognized as some sort of medical ninjutsu. She had been taking notes after concentration on the jutsu, it was probably a diagnostic jutsu.

"It's surprising that you regained consciousness that quickly. It's good to know that Tsunade-sama hasn't lost her touch", a woman's voice said cheerily. 'Tsunade. Sananin. Ally. Safe', Shisuimentally processed immediately relaxed, well relaxed for a ninja. He wasn't absolutely certain he was safe yet, but he was alive and not in a genjutsu.

"You're friend with the wolf mask left to retrieve your stolen eye. I will transplant it back to you once you have recovered a bit, for now just focus on resting. Tsunade-sama will return soon, I have a feeling she would like to hear what has been happening in Konoha", the medic-nin said with a tired smile. She hadn't slept much as she had been monitoring Shisui's vitals throughout the night. Shisui nodded slightly with a grim look thinking of what to say, 'Tsunade needs to return. The Uchiha might rebel and Danzo is likely to eliminate them before they do. Konoha need's their princess to return'.

"I will get you something to eat. Do NOT try to leave. I am quite good with healing ligaments and tendons, especially when they are cleanly cut", the woman said with a smile that was not a smile when she saw Shisui looking around for any exits. Hearing the obvious threat from a talented medic-nin who apparently was also serving lady Tsunade, Shisui gulped and nodded slightly.

"Good. I will return soon", the blurry woman said and exited the room. Shisui let go of the breath he didn't know he was holding once he heard the door close. 'That is one scary nurse… She sounds familiar like I met her a long time ago… I wonder what she looks like… I bet she's pretty… Oooh! Hot medic-nins!… This could turn into real-life Icha-Icha! Shisui time to get your game on!...', Shisui thought to himself mentally drooling for a moment and then tried to move into a more salacious pose.

'Shit… I can't move a muscle… and I can't see… I should work on getting battle-ready first… I'll ask her out later...', Shisui mentally sighed before he began the process of internally checking the chakra pathways to his eye.

At the bar in the casino, a shattered cup made the other patrons in the vicinity turn their heads to see a beautiful well endowed blonde woman scowling at a shattered sake bottle in her hand. A letter addressed from her sensei lay unopened in front of her. 'I feel like I need to punch a pervert right now…', Tsunade thought.

A large white-haired man sprinting through the forests of the Land of Fire to Konoha slipped off a branch only managing to catch himself with a hand on the same branch he had fallen off of. Jiraiya of the Sannin looked to the sky with a teardrop in his eye and a huge shit-eating grin on his face, and shouted to the sky, "I wish you better luck than I, brother in arms! May you win the heart of your sexy doct--". Jiraiya stopped when a shiver went down his spine. 'I feel like Tsunade is about to hit me, but I can't sense her anywhere… Better run!', and the toad sage doubled his previous speed and disappeared into the forest.

Sarutobi Hiruzen sat at his desk in the Hokage's office, or what is his desk for only a little longer. Hundreds of files sit on his desk, taken from ROOT compounds that detail hundreds of atrocities committed in the name of the village hidden in the leaves. Human experimentation, done by Orochimaru but paid for by ROOT, assassinations of leaf ninja who 'jeopardized Konoha's interests' including himself, the late Hyugaa matron, and Hatake Sakumo, the buying out of civilian council seats to place Danzo's allies on the board, the list went on and on each document striking Hiruzen like a hammer blow. These files were also only those that they had managed to recover, many were burned or destroyed before they could get to them.

'I don't even want to smoke right now…', the Sandaime thought to himself wearily. He turned to look out his window at the village he had been protecting his whole life. The third Hokage was a broken man who allowed an evil man to almost destroy the thing he had worked so hard for.

"ANBU, report, has Danzo been found?", Hiruzen said quietly to the ninja hidden in the shadows of the room. The white-masked ANBU captain dog stepped forward and shook his head negative. The Sandaime clicked his tongue in frustration, 'This was a cluster fuck worthy of Jiriyah's novels and we didn't even catch him'. Sarutobi resumed looking over the village, which was for the most part intact despite the massive battle just a few hours before.

Nara Shikaku walked into the room bags under his eyes more pronounced after the operation that was both a rousing success and abysmal failure. They had saved many children from the various clans and orphans from across the elemental nations, they had uncovered several plots that would have crippled Konoha in the long run or started the next great ninja war, they had found data of heinous experiments that once finally combed through would probably bring medical ninjutsu forward 100 years of progress. But they had not found the man responsible for it all, and they had only managed to freeze a fraction of the man's total assets. ROOT had been destroyed in Konoha, but it still survived. The Nara patriarch sighed heavily. He really needed Shikamaru to grow up so he could retire.

"The children have been moved out of the ROOT compounds and into the now severely overcapacity orphanages throughout the village. The good news is that upon seeing where the ex-ROOT orphans were taken to and seeing the conditions of the orphanages himself, Aburame Shibi has taken it upon him and his clan to care for them until they are all successfully entered into the current system and we have managed to replace the employees who worked for Danzo, so we have one less thing off of our plate", Shikaku said as the Sandaime rose a single eyebrow in interest.

"Shibi also muttered something about an inefficient system and subhuman living conditions that needed to be rectified," Shikaku said with a slight smile. He had also been appalled at the condition of the orphanages. It was another example of the willful ignorance that he and the other clan heads had for the village. The Aburame clan does indeed hold their position as a noble clan well, there was no hesitation upon seeing the mess that the orphanages were in. Shikaku also knew that the Aburame clan values the collective above all, and the fact that a part of the collective of Konoha was so neglected irked the man to no end.

Sarutobi nodded. He had also seen the mess the orphanages were in before he came back to his office. He had originally placed the orphanages under Danzo's administrative duties. Hiruzen sighed once again. What an idiot he had been. Just as he turned back to look out onto the village, the wizened Hokage heard a distant thundercrack boom over the trees. Impossible on a cloudless morning such as now.

One of the ANBU in the shadows stepped forward, "Hokage-sama, a man in a wolf mask suddenly appeared at the front gates. He bears a Konoha symbol on his arm". Hiruzen smiled. Inuzuka Kaemon had returned.

"Inform Inuzuka Tsume, I will personally go to confirm this man's identity. Shikaku, thank you for your work. Get some rest. We have much to do in the coming days", Hiruzen said and began making his way to the door, "Tiger, Dog, follow me". The Hokage Shushined once he was outside the tower making way to the front gate with all haste only to find Izumo and Kotetsu clinging to a large blond man crying tears of Joy.

Inuzuka Kaemon smiled at the antics of his old classmates and looked wistfully into the village, "It's good to be home!".