Hiruzen Days
-Konoha-
"Did you say Zabuza Momochi?" Hiruzen Sarutobi interrupted the oral mission report delivered by returning Jonin Sensei of Squad 7, Kakashi Hatake, after his long stay away from the village on mission in the Land of Waves.
Hiruzen sat behind his desk in a donning his ceremonial and secretly super comfortable white and red robe with a draped diamond shaped hat. The outfit possibly the most sensible of the choices made by the Founding Hokage. Before him stood the ragtag genin team that contained this semesters top two graduates and the dead last, and their sensei - a man often compared to a walking talking porn addicted scarecrow.
"Yes." the taciturn shinobi answered.
The value of this debriefing jumped from quaint check in with a promising genin team to high priority in the mind of the Hokage.
"Continue, give as much detail about Momochi and his companions as possible." Hiruzen commanded, then dumped out his pipe into his most important piece of office furniture, the ashtray.
Hearing the change in tone, Kakashi straightened out of his slouched posture and went over the relevant information in his mind, his thoughts interrupted by his loudmouth genin.
"Who cares about those losers, old man!" he shouted in his normal too loud tone, "They totally ducked fighting us, so I guess they have good instincts!"
Hiruzen chuckled at Naruto's enthusiastic assessment, but nodded for Kakashi to start again.
"Zabuza Momochi… was taller than I expected, by about ten centimeters, and looked to have gained an additional eighteen kilos of raw muscle on top of his increased size." Kakashi described the man he saw, "He also looked very unkempt, he wore a mangy beard and his eyebrows and hair looked wild. His companions looked fatigued, but also very sharp as shinobi. There were signs they'd been training recently in the area."
It was uncommon for men to continue growing into their twenties, but not unheard of, and the increased muscle mass likely came from training for his second attempt on the Mizukage, but what little information they'd gained before Kirigakure went completely dark implied the fight against Yagura never manifested. Momochi used unknown means to publicly slay the Fourth Mizukage without a struggle.
"You said you 'almost' came into conflict with his group. What did that entail?" Hiruzen inquired, satisfied with the man's physical description.
"We encountered them on route to the client's home. Their group was set up on the path, cooking a big meal. Zabuza hailed us as Konoha shinobi, and explained that he'd been hired to kill our client, but suspected his client of treachery. He offered to let us retreat while he set up a test for his client, and from the carnage we found, his client failed that test." Hiruzen could see the frown beneath the jonin's face mask.
"We'll have to keep our eyes on Goto Shipping, but I doubt we'll be able to easily prove a hostile takeover." Hiruzen mused aloud.
Shinobi take over of civilian enterprises is expressly forbidden internationally. If the Hidden Villages started seizing commercial ventures, then the other Villages would target those ventures as enemy assets. When companies try to defraud or betray hired shinobi, it is a fairly easy process to seek restitution - set up that way deliberately to avoid the encouragement of street justice - but for missing nin, no court will take the case of an outlaw. Breaking up crime syndicates set up my missing nin takes up a substantial amount of Konoha's intelligence operative. Of course, Momochi flipped the script on his missing nin status, making this simultaneously more difficult and more important to investigate.
"Did he come across as antagonistic during this exchange? What was his demeanor?" the Hokage shifted the train of the report.
"He seemed cooperative and in good humor." Kakashi answered, "But responded with mild verbal aggression to disrespect from one of my genin." Both Kakashi and Hiruzen simultaneously gave Naruto the stink eye, causing the boy to wilt under the stern gazes.
"After retreating, we didn't encounter them again during our stay in the Land of Waves."
"Why does everyone care about that jerk anyways!" Naruto erupted suddenly, crossing his arms over his chest petulantly, "After everyone found out what he did to that Gato guy people started calling him a hero! They even named the big bridge we had to guard after him! I stood there for two months keeping them safe, and they named the bridge after a wandering hobo!"
Sighing with a hand over his lone exposed eye, Kakashi chastised his genin, "Naruto. We've been over this already. By turning on the terrorist organization that hired them, Zabuza's team freed the Land of Waves from a brutal illegitimate regime. It was not our mission to go after those people, we were hired to guard the bridge builder and his bridge until its completion. Stop bringing things up like that, you just sound envious."
"I still think they were just a pack of losers, beating up a bunch of normies doesn't make you a hero!" Naruto spat, his face twisted with a full power frown.
Hiruzen took the time to light up another packed pipe before he ended the awkward silence that followed Naruto's last speech, "About six weeks after your encounter with him, Zabuza Momochi returned to Kirigakure with what remained of the men who attempted the last assassination of the Fourth Mizukage. They sailed a stolen boat right into the village, and met Yagura and his forces at the docks, where through unknown means, Zabuza killed the Fourth without a fight, and took over the village after a display of his powerful chakra." He punctuated this announcement with a heavy exhale of smoke that caused the genins' eyes to water, "Remember this when dealing with rival shinobi in the future. You never truly know the man on the other side. Who he really is, what he's capable of. Intel can be wrong, or simply outdated. You all got lucky this time. You encountered a monster roaming the world, and it let you walk out of its maw. Not everyone gets to walk away."
"In this world, there are kids younger than all of you, that are stronger than me." Kakashi added to his monologue rightly.
The elderly kage and the lanky jonin both nodded in agreement on that point.
After dismissing Squad 7, Hiruzen took a long draw on his pipe and exhaled a heavy stream of smoke.
"What do you think about this, Iruka?" he asked the chunin assisting him this season.
The chunin addressed looked up from his copy of the Bingo Book and frowned.
"I'm not happy with the inconsistencies between the subject's recent behavior and our most recent information on him." Iruka answered firmly, "Such a radical divergence from established intel lowers our confidence in the analysts' conclusions. Now we'll have to wonder what else they might have gotten wrong, and while verification isn't the wrong approach, trust but verify is at the core of the Bingo Book system."
Hiruzen smirked, "Not a bad analysis at the local level, chunin, but I meant on the wider world level." the Hokage took another draw on his pipe, "In the nativity of the Hidden Village system, the biggest miracle wasn't the Senju and Uchiha putting aside their thousand year history of blood feuding, but the formation of Kirigakure at all."
"That's not a take I've heard before." Iruka leaned in to listen intently.
"All of history is liable to local bias, and it's the rare few historians who can ever hope to work with first hand sources from multiple countries." Hiruzen began his explanation, "The reason the formation of Kirigakure was such a miracle, stretches all the way back to the beginning of human inhabitation of the Land of Water." Hiruzen put down his pipe to pour himself a saucer of sake, "For as long as men have lived on those islands, they have never known peace."
"Surely that can't be the case?" Iruka frowned, "How does anyone live like that?"
"They pace themselves." Hiruzen answered and downed his sake before pouring a second saucer, "Large or small, civilian, samurai, or shinobi, there has always been some form of active conflict ongoing in the Land of Water. The hatred runs deep and wide as the sea. The founding Mizukage's campaign to unify the shinobi and create Kirigakure is a poorly documented thing, but from what we have learned, it was a thing of brilliance. Byakuren's wisdom cut through millennia of pain and vengeance, and his strength forced the Land of Water to conform to his vision, but he could not fundamentally change the nature of the people, just shift their focus. He lead them into the First Shinobi World War to turn their violent urges on the outside world, and with his death and the death of his successor, the Land of Water has maintained a slow and cruel civil war ever since, even when fighting in the Second and Third Wars."
"That's insane." Iruka's jaw dropped.
"That's Kirigakure." Hiruzen shrugged, "A place so broken and sadistic they'll march to war while still fighting internally."
"This Zabuza Momochi sounds like he's thrown himself straight into the fire." Iruka mused, thinking about what kind of man it takes to declare himself king of the insane asylum.
"Maybe he has, but from a young age, the man has proven himself capable of speaking the mad language of the Land of Water better than anyone else alive. It was him, that ended the infamous genin graduation test of the Bloody Mist. In one terrible spectacle, he forced the village to reassess and abandon their practice of forcing academy students to kill each other to earn the headband. Now, I worry he's done it again. If he manages to convince the rebels to not fight, like he convinced Kakashi not to fight, then he'll be in charge of the largest force of battle hardened shinobi in the world. All of them with that need for violence rooted deep in their blood."
Hiruzen relit his pipe, grateful for drink and smoke carrying him through the dark labyrinth of his day to day thoughts.
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As wisely requested, an interlude.
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