Sasuke's Anbu Squad

The night wind carried a slight chill.

Sasuke Uchiha walked alone along the bank of the Naka River.

Under the moonlight, the river shimmered with flecks of silver, and the sound of rushing water was especially clear in the silent night.

He had walked this road countless times before.

Each time, it felt as if he were retracing a stretch of time he could never return to.

At the end of this embankment lay the former grounds of the Uchiha clan.

Or, more precisely, what had once been their clan grounds.

Sasuke stopped.

The sight before him was worlds apart from the home in his memory.

Most of the Uchiha-style buildings had been torn down and rebuilt, replaced by estates and shops belonging to several other ninja clans.

Sarutobi, Shimura, Yamanaka, Nara, Akimichi... the holdings of these families now occupied the land that had once belonged to the Uchiha.

Only the area around Naka Shrine still retained its original appearance.

Or rather, it retained the original appearance of ruins.

A crude wooden fence surrounded the area, with a warning sign hanging from it.

"Dangerous Area. No admittance."

Sasuke thought it was nothing more than a superficial measure meant to keep up appearances.

What he did not know was that, to Konoha's higher-ups, the real "danger" had long since vanished with the massacre that night.

All that remained were broken walls and ruins, and the lingering, inescapable memory of blood.

Sasuke lightly vaulted over the fence and landed in the open space before the shrine.

Moonlight spilled through gaps in the clouds, illuminating the desolate ground.

The shrine's main building had mostly collapsed, leaving only a few charred wooden pillars stubbornly standing, like the bones of a dead giant.

The altar that had once enshrined the ancestors of the Uchiha clan