As flames flickered, Sarutobi Hiruzen took a deep drag from his pipe. The dancing flame sputtered a couple of times before going out. His life seemed to depend on the old man's relentless breathing, one breath in and one breath out.
The deification campaign had gone off without a hitch, and Sarutobi could live with that. After all these years, the difference between him and his old comrade Shimura Danzō was that the old man always wanted to control everything. He couldn't accept anything happening outside his grasp.
Once he'd made a plan, he always assumed everyone would play their part exactly as he envisioned.
But Sarutobi had seen through that long ago. Getting what you want wasn't life; life was full of unexpected turns.
Setting a goal to accomplish something and then managing to reach it despite all the unexpected twists was already pretty good.
Sarutobi had three goals for this war.
First, to shift the conflicts within Konoha Village outward. By waging a war against an external enemy, he could divert everyone's attention and use outside pressure to unite the village.
Second, to create a few more war heroes for Konoha, which was running short on successors, and ease its shortage of talent.
Third, to capitalize on a great victory and force the Konoha clans to join the village, making those clans that wouldn't even send their people to the Ninja Academy realize that Konoha Village had gained the strength to stand up to them—and even surpass them.
If they still clung to their own interests and refused to join Konoha, then Konoha no longer needed them.
After all these years, Konoha was still just Konoha: a few dozen ninja clans clustered together, with no sense of being a unified whole. Each clan valued its secret techniques above everything else.
That wasn't good for Konoha's development.
Sarutobi felt the time had come for a change. He would show Konoha the strength of its civilian ninjas.
A large force of affordable civilian ninjas, who could be trained in a sustainable way, was the main fighting force on the battlefield. Clan ninjas, raised with a massive investment of resources, were no longer suited to the world as it stood.
Sarutobi even understood that no matter how powerful a Kage was, if he truly fought ten thousand ninjas, he might still fight until he was exhausted and die.
Training ten thousand civilian ninjas would be difficult for the village, but it wasn't impossible. And there was an unexpected bonus: a few especially capable fighters might emerge from their ranks.
But raising a single Kage was a matter of doing everything one could and leaving the rest to fate.
That was why the way forward was universal education for everyone in Konoha, with a focus on nurturing talent. In Sarutobi's eyes, clans that only wanted to train their own people were rotten to the core.
Unfortunately, people were selfish. If Konoha focused on training clan ninjas, the clans would naturally welcome it.
But asking the clans to contribute people, effort, and money to train civilians was something they couldn't accept.
Sarutobi had thought up all sorts of ways to force them to get involved.
For example, he could have clan ninjas serve as jōnin instructors, leading the rising clan Genin and the Konoha Genin who had just graduated from the Ninja Academy. Time would build bonds between them.
A group as a whole might have its own tendencies, but its individual members were just ordinary people. People had feelings, and all it took to build those feelings between them was time.
Sarutobi believed that given enough time, the clans would see the bright spots in Konoha's civilians too. Once they accepted them, the obstacles to what came next would be fewer.
Next, Sarutobi would use the victories won by civilian ninjas to earn them great prestige, perhaps even putting forward a hero from civilian origins.
With that as the basis, he would introduce a new law in Konoha: from then on, barring special circumstances, anyone who wanted to become a Konoha Genin would have to graduate from the Ninja Academy.
That would bring the clans and civilians closer together. Years of shared experiences would inevitably forge bonds.
These days, the clans did send their younger members to school, but it was only a token gesture. They went to the academy just so the next generation, who would eventually join Konoha's political circles, could show their faces.
At home, they continued training their own clan's ninja muscle. They weren't willing to contribute to Konoha's education at all.
Sarutobi had already chosen the person he wanted to draw the clans into Konoha's ninja academy: Minato Namikaze.
A civilian ninja with exceptional talent.
Thank the Second Hokage for developing the Flying Thunder God Technique.
The First Hokage hadn't been wrong. It really was a forbidden technique, because it wasn't a jutsu that a human could truly control.
Space-Time Ninjutsu was far too impractical to spread widely.
If all you wanted was to move from one point to another, then while the Body Flicker Technique wasn't as fast as the Flying Thunder God Technique, it was still fast enough to meet a ninja's needs. A jutsu that was so difficult to master, yet offered little practical increase in combat strength, was meaningless.
But Minato Namikaze was a man with an unusual talent among civilians. He had managed to develop a way to use the jutsu to move between multiple points.
His extraordinary reflexes let him appear at different locations across the battlefield at the same time, and respond appropriately to the situation at each destination.
No other ninja could do that. The Flying Thunder God Technique would probably be lost after him. So far, Sarutobi hadn't seen anyone else capable of using it to that extent.
Even the Second Hokage, who had developed the technique, had only used it to travel quickly.
So Sarutobi had come up with the idea of promoting this newcomer. Besides, the young man had married the daughter of a major clan despite being a civilian.
The clans probably wouldn't reject him as much, he thought. At least the smaller clans wouldn't have much reason to turn him away.
Now all that was needed was a great victory.
Prestige was a hard thing to pin down. Without a reputation backed by distinguished war records, a ninja's strength wouldn't inspire fear. And a ninja who wasn't feared would always have someone come after him, only to die at the hands of some nobody.
Was Hanzo of the Salamander, known as the demigod, really that strong?
The truth was, the Five Great Nations had wanted a buffer zone between them, and that was what had brought him to prominence. But that had also built his reputation and made him powerful.
Back then, the Sannin, still young, might not have been able to defeat him. But now, all three of his students—each of whom he had named one of the Sannin—were at least as strong as he was.
That was the power of prestige.
It was intangible, but it could always have an unimaginable effect.
Minato had exceptional talent and the right background. All he lacked now was prestige.
Originally, Sarutobi had hoped that this prestige would come from the efforts of Konoha's civilian ninjas. The bulk of Konoha's ninjas would serve as the main force on the front lines, with clan ninjas mixed in as spectators, and the battlefield commander, Minato Namikaze, would earn a reputation from it all.
But this time, something went wrong. The mass-produced civilian ninjas hadn't brought victory. They'd brought disaster.
Even the clan ninjas had been swept up in their rout.
If Minato Namikaze hadn't been able to turn the tide, Sarutobi might have botched everything this time.
A close call, a close call.
Though the result was quite different from what he'd imagined, the outcome was still the same.
Konoha had won a great victory after all, and that victory had ultimately created Minato Namikaze's legend.
The clansmen Minato had saved on the battlefield would naturally be grateful to him. When the time came, they would probably stand by his side to some degree.
Now all that remained was a grand performance in Konoha Village.
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