The Butterfly Effect

At the Jonin meeting, Danzo looked utterly incredulous, questioning his own existence—it was downright comical.

He had considered the possibility that Kakashi would be fine, but never in this manner. He had assumed the final outcome would be Minato Namikaze paying a heavy price to protect his student. He had already planned to use the name of righteousness and the village to squeeze Minato dry, ideally ousting him from the race for the Next Hokage entirely!

But what he never expected was that before Minato even said a word, the Jonin had unanimously declared Kakashi innocent. Then, a Jonin who had long harbored grievances against Danzo let out a rude snicker. "Elder Danzo, what's the matter? Disappointed that Kakashi didn't end up ruined?"

Danzo shot to his feet in fury. "How dare you! Everything I do is for Konoha! What kind of man do you take me for?!"

Years of internal strife had taught Danzo to quickly realize he'd been set up. He frantically masked his panic and loss of composure with anger, finally snapping, "You'll regret this!" before storming out early.

Back at his Root base, Danzo immediately summoned his subordinates, demanding a thorough investigation into the recent upheavals in the village!

Obito Uchiha and Might Guy were just kids, careless in their actions and oblivious to secrecy, so Root's ninjas took less than an hour to trace the source of the intelligence clearly. When Danzo received the compiled report from his men, he crushed the record scroll in a fit of rage.

"Uchiha! So it's that inherently evil Uchiha clan spreading rumors about me!! I always said leaving that wicked clan in the village was a disaster!"

This outcome infuriated him even more than Minato being tacitly acknowledged as the Next Hokage. Because Danzo's two lifelong obsessions were becoming Hokage and suppressing the Uchiha! He had schemed against the Uchiha his entire life, never imagining that in his twilight years, a ten-year-old Uchiha brat would screw him over so badly!

How could he stay calm? He was absolutely livid!

He had planned to hold off a few more years, avoiding action against the Uchiha during wartime, but now it was becoming unbearable!

Uchiha! Minato Namikaze!

Danzo chanted these two names over and over in his mind, the madness in his eyes deepening with each repetition!

Perhaps Shiba Seika himself never imagined that his casual spark, lit just for amusement in Kakashi's heart, would inadvertently fan the flames of Konoha's internal strife!

But this time, Shiba Seika couldn't stay entirely out of it. Soon, Danzo snapped back to reality and grilled his subordinate. "And what about this so-called clansman from the Land of Rain? How did that evil Uchiha brat come up with such a method to frame me?"

The subordinate stared back at Danzo in shock, as if asking: Sir, you're asking me?

Danzo was about to explode. "How could I possibly have a clansman in the Land of Rain?! Are you fools actually believing the Uchiha's slander?!"

The surrounding subordinates all lowered their heads, avoiding Danzo's gaze. The thing was, it fit Danzo's usual underhanded tactics so well that even Root members had bought the rumor.

After venting, Danzo finally ordered, "Investigate! Within a week, I want the complete intel on this Akatsuki Organization!"

A subordinate nervously asked, "Lord Danzo, who should handle this?"

Root was severely understaffed. The war had brought Root multiple expansions and immense power, but also heavier burdens. They were intermittently ambitious but perpetually short-handed. Both active battlefields needed spies and intelligence agents, while Iwagakure and Kirigakure, yet to enter the fray, required extensive monitoring. They even had to keep some ninjas in the village on standby to meet Danzo's erratic demands. Root had no spare hands!

Danzo realized this too, pacing irritably around the base before slapping his forehead. "Then assign Yūno Ryōma to handle it. Have him get it done quickly!"

"But what about Lord Orochimaru?"

"I'll write to him personally!"

Yūno Ryōma, Root's second-in-command after Danzo, was currently cooperating with Orochimaru in the Sunagakure war zone, handling intelligence infiltration there. Orochimaru and Danzo had a long-standing partnership, and Orochimaru had even briefly joined Root, so Root usually supported his work. As a frontline commander, Orochimaru had Root's full backing against Sunagakure, while Minato, fighting Kumogakure in the north, wasn't so lucky.

But that day, a scroll arrived abruptly at the front, ordering Yūno Ryōma, who had been stationed in the Sunagakure theater for months, to head to the Land of Rain immediately!

At that moment, even as Danzo's loyalist and Root's second-in-command, Yūno Ryōma couldn't help but want to curse. "Damn it! What is Lord Danzo thinking?! Didn't he get my message from a few days ago? We've been taking heavy losses in the Sunagakure theater lately! That madwoman Pakura keeps targeting our intelligence agents for some reason! I asked him for reinforcements, and he sends me to the Land of Rain to investigate his clansman?! Am I the crazy one, or is he?!"

Yūno Ryōma couldn't even bear to imagine how furious Orochimaru would be if he abandoned the mess and left now, with the snake serving as the frontline's highest commander.

Oh, well. That viper wouldn't wear his intense emotions on his face, but he would definitely hold a grudge against Root for this. Yūno Ryōma was absolutely certain of that.

As one of the few legitimate intelligence operatives in the organization, Yūno Ryōma let out a deeply weary sigh and asked the Root ninja delivering the message.

"Did Lord Danzo give any instructions on how to explain this to Orochimaru?"

The Root ninja kept his head lowered. "Lord Danzo only said he would write to Orochimaru personally."

What good would a letter do?

Could words make up for the missing intelligence support? What was there to compensate with?

No matter how useless Sunagakure was, they had still thrown their full force into the fight, yet Konoha could only spare less than a third of its ninja for Orochimaru's war zone.

And that number might shrink even further.

If intelligence support was cut on top of that, they'd be counting entirely on Orochimaru to pull off some miracle and go berserk.

Let's just say that every victory Konoha achieved in the Third Great Ninja War in the original story lived up to the name of a miracle.

But Yūno Ryōma had no way out. He could only obey orders.

At the same time, in the temporary command post, Orochimaru's face was as dark as water. He let a snake swallow Danzo's letter whole, then slowly spread a smile across his face—chilling and sinister.

His bond with Danzo had likely reached its end here.

And it all stemmed from that one little butterfly outside fate's design—Shiba Seika.

The faint breezes stirred by his wings, fluttering again and again, were finally about to converge into a hurricane that would jolt Konoha awake.