It was better not to mention this to Yukina and the others.
Back at the camp, as he stepped into the office and watched Yukina busily handling official work, so occupied that she could barely even greet him, Chiba silently buried the matter of Hokoma deep in his heart.
He simply had not expected that Senior Hokoma had once carried the burden of an entire clan on his shoulders—a clan that had once been quite illustrious.
Nor had he expected that a single war could drain that clan of everything it had, leaving behind only that two-story house and Senior Hokoma himself.
Even that two-story house would likely be reclaimed as public property after it was left ownerless and eventually assigned to someone else in need.
Truly...
Other than those clans that survived into Naruto's era, how many clans had fought and died for the village during the First Great Ninja War, the Second Great Ninja War, and even the current Third Great Ninja War, only for their entire clans to be wiped out? Even the Uchiha Clan, hailed in the future as Konoha's strongest clan, would likely be swallowed by the river of time. It would go from prosperity to decline in a single night. Though Sasuke and, later, Sarada would remain, who could say that after those two generations, the clan's bloodline would still endure in this Naruto World?
Watching Yukina work with focused concentration, Chiba suppressed the matter of Hokoma, then slowly sat down, his heart filled with melancholy.
If even such an illustrious clan could vanish soundlessly in the midst of war, then even if I change history and save Minato Namikaze and Kushina, I could still lose them again at any moment. Lose them without a sound.
Against a behemoth like fate, do I really