Suspicion and Gravity

The Raikage finally could not hold back. "Wait—are you saying someone was already using Wood Style back then? Not the First Hokage, not anyone from Konoha, but a third party? And this person—or this 'thing'—killed the Mist Village Anbu, yet didn't touch Kakashi or Rin?"

"It didn't touch Kakashi," Mei Terumi corrected. "Rin was already dead. There was no need to touch her."

Silence fell once more.

Ōnoki's aged voice broke the quiet. "In other words, this Wood Style user had existed since at least the time of the Third Shinobi World War. He—or it—had been operating in secret all along and never truly revealed itself. And now, he—or it—has appeared again."

Tsunade raised her head and looked at Kakashi. "You never reported those wood shavings."

"To whom?" Kakashi's voice was calm, but everyone present could hear what lay suppressed beneath that calm. "Report it to the Third Hokage? Tell him I found a pile of wood shavings of unknown origin beside Rin's corpse, and then what? Back then, I couldn't even understand why I was still alive."

Tsunade did not press him further.

Mei Terumi pushed the wood shavings back toward Kakashi. "The fact that you kept them means you always knew something was wrong that day. It wasn't just Rin's death, or the Mist Village Anbu pursuing you. Some force beyond your understanding had intervened in that battle."

Kakashi gathered the wood shavings back into his palm and clenched his fist.

"Lady Mizukage," Kakashi said, "at the scene of that Anbu squad back then, were there any traces besides Wood Style?"

Mei Terumi closed her eyes and reflected for a long time.

"There was one thing." She opened her eyes. "The second search party reported finding signs on a tree roughly three hundred meters from the scene that