Hiruzen, had you gotten ahead of me again? Slowly closing his eyes, thick with killing intent, Danzo suppressed the regret in his heart. Yet a complicated thought flashed through his mind.
Curse mark...
That boy had actually mastered curse marks already.
And he had ruthlessly placed such a curse mark on his closest friend... even taught it to Kakashi to avoid suspicion! But what was truly impressive was that, with this torrential rain, he had directly placed Uchiha Hirohiko completely under his own watch.
That chess piece...
Had somehow just been lost!
After that thought, the face that appeared to be resting with closed eyes could not help but twitch.
Though it might not seem related, Uchiha Hirohiko was an extremely important chess piece to him.
A very important safeguard.
Back when Uchiha Hirohiko had suddenly gone berserk and injured several members of the Uchiha Clan, he had known that Uchiha Hirohiko would be the best chess piece.
At the time, there had already been reports that Taki Chiba had died in battle, and his Root operatives on the battlefield had sent back similar news. But as the leader of Root, the commander who stood at the forefront of the Five Great Ninja Villages' covert struggles, he did not believe that Taki Chiba—the thorn in his side all these years—was necessarily dead.
Through all his years of intelligence work, assassinations, and clandestine confrontations with the other Five Great Ninja Villages, he had seen many miraculous escapes from death, as if someone had come back to life. He had seen such cases, more or less, in his own village, the other four great ninja villages, and even some smaller ninja villages.
Of course, such cases were extremely rare. By "more or less," he meant that the number had never exceeded the