Akatsuki Ninja Village.
The Ninja Academy's third training ground.
The weather was perfect today. Sunshine poured down, a gentle breeze stirred, and the air held a sense of peace.
A fine day for confessing your feelings or going on an outing.
"Hahaha! If you can beat me this time, I'll be your girlfriend!"
"Hmph! Don't get cocky! How dare you underestimate me?"
"I'm not going to lose!"
Not far away, Uchiha Madara stood beneath a tree with his arms crossed, watching the innocent children on the training ground. Though perhaps they were growing up a little too fast.
His face, cold as ever, wore a textbook deadpan expression.
In Akatsuki Ninja Village, Madara's cover identity was that of a newly hired teacher and homeroom instructor at the Ninja Academy.
He had been on the job for a while now.
Truth be told, setting aside his grand ambitions and all the fighting and killing of the past, life in this bustling, vibrant village had treated him fairly well lately. His quality of life had improved by leaps and bounds!
But recently, he had been in a terrible mood.
It wasn't because Madara disliked the children before him. It was the pressure of teaching them.
On paper, Makoto had assigned Madara a class focused on training combat ninjas. It was a perfect match for his expertise.
But the Ninja Academy in Akatsuki Ninja Village was nothing like Konoha's, which trained only traditional ninjas. Here, children had to learn far more than conventional combat skills. Their coursework included a great deal of science, heavily weighted classes in political thought and the fundamentals of Ninja World economics, and more... For Madara, an old relic who had fought his way out of the heaps of dead in the Warring States Period, it was an unprecedented