Konoha, Hokage Office.
Uchiha Shūichi pushed open the doors. With a sweep of his gaze, he spotted several shinobi standing inside. To everyone's surprise, they were shinobi from Iwagakure, Kumogakure, and Sunagakure.
Since the Konoha Crush Plan, those three villages had each fallen further than the last, dropping out of the ranks of the major shinobi villages.
Sunagakure's upper ranks had been almost completely wiped out. In the end, Chiyo and Ebizo, that pair of seventy- or eighty-year-old elders, had been forced to step in and take charge, barely keeping the village on the fringes of the major villages.
Iwagakure and Kumogakure were in even worse shape. Nagato Uzumaki had directly struck at their homes, causing devastating casualties. Even now, the combined number of shinobi in the two rebuilding villages had not reached three thousand.
If Sunagakure was constantly struggling along the edge of being a major village, then those two villages had completely fallen from those ranks and could now only be considered small shinobi villages.
As for why these people had come to Konoha, Uchiha Shūichi had already made some guesses before hearing them speak. Among other things, he had learned that Uchiha Madara's White Zetsu army had gone directly to the other shinobi villages, coercing large numbers of shinobi into forming an anti-Konoha shinobi force.
Obviously, those shinobi would not be willing to be controlled by Uchiha Madara and White Zetsu. Some of them had surely escaped and come to seek refuge in Konoha.
Konoha becoming the sole dominant power was certainly no good thing for the other shinobi villages, but did that make Uchiha Madara and his White Zetsu any better?
Not to mention anything else, Uchiha Madara's Rinnegan alone showed that his ties to the Akatsuki Organization were impossible to sever. And everyone knew perfectly