What Kind of Coup Can You Stage When Hearts Aren't United?

"Why not just assassinate that brat Itachi ahead of time..."

Uchiha Sōken silently hardened his resolve.

Danzo could take the blame, anyway. If he pinned it on Danzo, no one in the clan would likely suspect him. As for Sasuke being unable to awaken the Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan after Itachi Uchiha was killed... he would deal with that hurdle first. If he could not get past the Night of the Massacre, the future would have nothing to do with him anyway.

Walking along the streets of the clan compound, Uchiha Sōken let out a silent sigh.

Assassinating Itachi Uchiha was just talk.

Assassination was not his specialty. Killing Itachi Uchiha, who had already awakened the Two Tomoe, then framing Danzo for it... there were simply too many uncertainties. Not to mention that he might not even be able to kill an Itachi Uchiha blessed with such extraordinary luck—even if he succeeded, if it were exposed that he had done it...

"Sōken!"

A shout from above reached his ears.

Uchiha Sōken stopped walking.

His unreliable train of thought was interrupted. Looking up toward the source of the voice, he saw a man with a button nose, a rarity among the Uchiha Clan.

"...Shisui, you're back!"

"I got back today."

Uchiha Shisui leaped down from the roof of the Okonomiyaki Shop. Tejaki-san, who was sitting on a small stool outside the entrance reading the newspaper, did not so much as raise an eyelid. Ninjas! They were the sort who refused to use perfectly good roads and loved climbing onto rooftops whenever they could. In all of Konoha, there probably was not a single roof tile that had not been stepped on by a ninja.

"Sōken, you look so troubled. What happened?"

Uchiha Shisui naturally stepped closer and walked beside Uchiha Sōken.

They were close friends who had gone through the Third Shinobi War together, comrades who had fought for their lives side by side against the Mist Ninja on the Eastern Front. But...

"What else could it be? You know what the situation in the clan is like!"

At those words, the faint smile on Shisui's face vanished at once, and an inescapable gloom clouded his features.

"You didn't attend the gathering the night before last, so I'll tell you plainly: the resentment the clan members have been bottling up is growing worse and worse. Quite a few from the Neutral Faction have joined the Radical Faction, and the number supporting an armed coup has increased considerably. The key point is that this time, even the clan head didn't try to smooth things over. Even the two Elders from the opposition aren't as firm in their stance as they used to be..."

Sōken quietly relayed every detail of the clan gathering to Shisui.

He, too, opposed a coup. No—more precisely, in his view, an armed coup should only be considered as the very last resort, when there was truly no other option. A choice that wounded the enemy for eight hundred while costing oneself a thousand was nothing but drinking poison to quench thirst. Even if the coup succeeded, their losses would surely be devastating. What would they use afterward to deal with the wolves and tigers surrounding the Land of Fire?

Moreover, the coup might not succeed at all.

The Uchiha Clan was not weak now, but neither was it particularly strong. It had long since lost the glory it once possessed. Though it was still called Konoha's Best clan, how much of that was sincere and how much was mockery depended on who you asked.

There were quite a lot of Jonin in the clan, but not more than the Jonin from Konoha's other clans and civilian ninja combined.

Worse still, the only person known to have awakened the Mangekyō Sharingan, Uchiha Shisui, was a man who had risen above the "narrow-mindedness of his clan" and embraced the Will of Fire passed down by the older generation. He could never betray the village. In that respect, he was only a little better than Obito and Itachi—he would rather kill himself than raise a hand against his fellow clansmen.

Fugaku Uchiha, the clan head who was suspected of having awakened the Mangekyō Sharingan, faced with the blade his son had raised... chose not to resist in order to avoid blood relatives killing one another. Perhaps he had found peace in that choice, but the rest of the clan members had all been left to suffer.

What could a clan this divided use to stage a coup?

Sōken could not see even the slightest hope of a successful coup.

"Ugh! In the end, I'm still too weak. If only I could become stronger..."

Sōken clenched his fist.

Then he weakly let it fall.

Getting stronger was not something that could happen overnight. During the Third Shinobi War, merely struggling to survive on the battlefield had taken all his strength. Then, not long after the war finally ended, the Nine-Tails' Rampage erupted and immediately pushed the Uchiha Clan to the edge of a cliff.

In such turbulent and perilous times, simply staying alive was exhausting enough.

"Has it really gotten this bad..." Shisui furrowed his brow in pain. He cherished his clansmen, but he loved the village just as much. When the two came into irreconcilable conflict, even heading toward a conclusion where only one could survive, he was bound to endure immense suffering.

Later, when he threw himself into the river, he wrote in his suicide note: [I have grown tired of missions. If things continue like this, the Uchiha Clan has no future, so I no longer wish to go on this way.]

By then, Shisui had likely already been crushed by the deep despair of a future he could not see.

Suicide was a choice only someone driven to the utmost depths of despair would make.

Especially someone like Shisui, gentle and cheerful by nature—if he had not been desperate beyond measure, how could he possibly have chosen such a tragic end?

"Sōken, is there really... no way to stop... the clansmen's actions?"

"There is! As long as the village leadership stops deliberately suppressing and making things difficult for us, at the very least the Radical Faction won't dominate the clan. There are actually quite a few clansmen who oppose a coup, but... the endless oppression with no end in sight, it really is... hard not to resent it!"

"The Hokage, he also..."

Shisui opened his mouth, wanting to offer a few words in defense of the Third.

"Shisui, I know this is an aftereffect of the Nine-Tails' Rampage. If I put myself in his shoes, if I were the Hokage, I would certainly be wary of the Uchiha Clan too. But the problem is that incident truly had nothing to do with us! At present, you should be the only one in the clan who has awakened the Mangekyō Sharingan, and you awakened it after the Nine-Tails' Rampage."

"The clansmen won't understand how tirelessly the Hokage works for the village's peace. They... no, we—we have only felt the village's endless malice. You serve in the Anbu, but you should know how terrible the reputation of our clansmen in the Police Force is, right?"

Ignoring Shisui, who was about to speak, Sōken looked around and pointed at a three-story building not far away. "Shisui, let's go over there. You just finished a mission, so if you don't have anything to do... how about the two of us have a proper talk?"

"All right!"

Shisui nodded in agreement.

There was no reason to refuse.

Troubled as he was, he also needed someone to confide in. It was rather pitiful, really. As one of the Uchiha Clan's foremost experts, he actually had very few friends. Too many people saw him as someone to admire, rather than a friend they could treat as an equal.

If not for Uchiha Sōken, the only person in the clan Shisui could get along and play with was Itachi Uchiha, who was several years younger than him.

But Itachi was still too young, not someone Shisui could vent to. In the original history, he had no like-minded friend to hear his troubles, so he could only bottle everything up inside. Even before Itachi, he had to force a smile onto his face. That was probably how the pressure and despair had built up.

Fortunately, history had changed somewhat. With a friend like Uchiha Sōken, Shisui now had someone he could confide his inner anguish to.

Though some of their views did not entirely align.