"I order you to eliminate Hanzō!"

"What does the leader of some small country matter? Everything is for Konoha!"

Danzo answered without the slightest hesitation.

His chin tilted slightly upward as he spoke, the flickering candlelight on the Third's desk reflected in his lone eye.

Water flowed downward, fire burned upward, and Konoha's interests stood above all else.

What Hiruzen Sarutobi heard in those words was not arrogance, but a habit ingrained in Danzo's very bones.

All his life, Danzo had crudely divided everyone in the world into two categories.

Konoha's own people, and outsiders.

In his mind, those outside the village had never truly counted as people.

They were merely pawns to be used, obstacles to be removed, targets to be crushed.

There was no middle ground, no opponent he could negotiate with, and certainly no enemy worthy of respect.

He had never thought there was anything wrong with that logic.

On the contrary, he firmly believed it was the purest form of loyalty to Konoha.

Snuff out every potential threat before it could grow, root out anything that might endanger the village, by any means necessary, without leaving any room for compromise.

Even sacrificing Konoha's own people was a price he would gladly pay.

That was precisely what made Hiruzen most wary of Danzo.

"For Konoha!"

Hiruzen Sarutobi knew better than anyone how much unspeakable darkness lay buried beneath those words.

Decades of assassination lists, secret executions, and purges.

Danzo had perfectly dressed up all his shady deeds as the righteous cause of protecting Konoha.

Missing-nin who had been erased, spies who had been secretly disposed of, prisoners of war used as test subjects.

The final page of every one of their files bore the same cold justification-for Konoha.

Hiruzen never doubted Danzo's intentions.

He truly loved this village deeply enough to willingly dirty his own hands.

He willingly shouldered every curse the world could heap upon him, even insisting, in his obsession, that everyone should be like him: give everything to Konoha, sacrifice everything.

Yet it was precisely this obsessively intense love that kept Hiruzen from ever letting go of the reins.

One careless move, and that excessive loyalty would become a calamity that devoured Konoha.

Bang!

The heavy slam of the door abruptly shattered the standoff in the room.

"Hiruzen, you'll regret this!"

"Danzo, remember: I am Konoha's Hokage."

The doorframe shook violently, the sound lingering.

Hiruzen Sarutobi never raised his head.

In the past, Danzo had slammed the door on his way out because he desperately wanted to prove himself right.

Now, Danzo wanted to force everyone to admit he was right.

The shift was slight, yet the gulf it created was far greater than the entire corridor stretching from the Hokage's Office to the Root Base.

Danzo's vision was ultimately far too narrow.

A truly great leader should be like flowing water, taking in every river and accommodating all things, capable of nourishing all life or breaking through a dam, moving with the current and knowing when to advance or retreat.

But all his life, Danzo had shaped himself into only one thing: a blade.

In a dark, sealed chamber within the Root Base.

Danzo sat upright on an armless hardwood chair, inexplicably holding a sheet of composition paper that had been folded and unfolded so often it had long since yellowed with age.

The handwriting on it was neat and precise, recording the words Amamiya Maki had written:

You don't become acknowledged by the villagers because you become Hokage. You become Hokage because they acknowledge you.

He murmured the sentence once, then gave a cold sneer.

"That business about needing their acknowledgment to become Hokage is bullshit."

Danzo raised his hand and slammed the paper onto the desk.

"When Hiruzen first took office, where would he be today if we old comrades hadn't backed him up?"

"Now that he's secure in the Hokage position, he starts preaching about public support, as though the villagers voted him into office one ballot at a time!"

"Has he forgotten everything that happened back then? Who secretly cleared away everyone who opposed him?"

"Who put down roots in Root and shouldered all his dirty work?"

"Who was the first to step forward and give him wholehearted support when he hesitated over becoming Hokage?"

Danzo slowly closed his eyes, and long-buried memories surged to the surface.

Tobirama Senju had been surrounded by enemies, with the six of them gathered around their teacher.

Tobirama's voice had been resolute: who would stay behind to cover their retreat?

He clearly remembered his own hesitation.

This was Tobirama Senju, the fastest shinobi in the shinobi world, a master of forbidden techniques, and one of Konoha's founders.

Taking his place meant shouldering the crushing weight of all Konoha.

In the brief instant he spent weighing the pros and cons, Hiruzen Sarutobi had already stepped forward.

And he could never forget that final, gentle pat Tobirama had given Hiruzen's shoulder.

It had rankled him for years.

That hand should have landed on his shoulder.

It wasn't that Hiruzen was unworthy. It was that, back then, Danzo had only needed to act a moment sooner.

If only I hadn't hesitated!

If only I'd been the first to step forward and answer, the man sitting in the Hokage's Office today should have been me, Shimura Danzō.

In the dim chamber, Danzo's eye suddenly opened, a sharp gleam flashing within it.

"That's it."

"Konoha needs a war, a real war, to prove who the true hero is!"

"A man sitting in an office reviewing paperwork isn't a Hokage."

"Only the man who carries Konoha's banner and charges through blood at the very front of the battlefield deserves to lead this village."

"Hiruzen secured his position through his battlefield achievements back then. Now it's my turn to prove it to him."

He abruptly raised his hand and pointed at the Root shinobi kneeling in the shadows beside him.

"I order you to eliminate Hanzō!"

The Root shinobi lowered his head in acknowledgment, then flickered out of sight, vanishing instantly into the boundless darkness.

From that moment on, countless elite Root operatives quietly set out for the Land of Rain.

Disguised as traveling merchants and wandering shinobi, they seeped like drops of ink into this perpetually rainy, muddy land.

Most of them had never expected to return alive.

Some would die in sweeps conducted by Amegakure's patrols.

Others would be abandoned entirely, reduced to sacrifices meant to divert attention.

On Danzo's orders, the Root forces already hidden throughout the Land of Rain launched a frenzied assault on Hanzō.

The Land of Rain, Amegakure's council hall.

The unrelenting rain had fallen for three full days and nights.

Water dripped ceaselessly from the eaves, striking the stone paving in a dull, monotonous rhythm, repeating over and over like a silent countdown.

Hanzō sat at the head of the hall, a battle map spread before him, densely marked with the distribution of various forces.

His advisers stood in rows on either side, every face taut as a fully drawn bowstring, the atmosphere unbearably oppressive.

At its core, Hanzō's determination to start this war stemmed from three reasons.

The first was his immense confidence and ambition.

He believed his strength rivaled that of the First Hokage, Hashirama Senju, in his prime.

Hashirama had ended an age of chaos and established a new order of one village per nation.

He, Hanzo of the Salamander, was equally capable of reshaping the shinobi world.

Hashirama had possessed the divine power of Wood Release; he commanded the lethally poisonous summon Ibuse.

Hashirama had had Madara Uchiha as his lifelong nemesis; he would use the Five Great Shinobi Villages as stepping stones to the summit.

At that moment, he was utterly certain that he was the shinobi closest to being a "god" in this age.

The second was his overwhelming hunger for territory and resources.

Despite being renowned throughout the shinobi world as the Demigod, the Land of Rain he ruled was small, impoverished, and drenched in rain year-round.

Its territory was less than a fifth the size of the Land of Fire, with little farmland and scarce resources. It barely managed to produce enough food to sustain itself.

He seethed with resentment.

Why should shinobi villages far weaker than him possess fertile fields and long coastlines?

While he could only cling to this impoverished backwater, where even drying a map depended on the weather?

The third was his need to redirect the country's extreme internal tensions.

The year-round rain had utterly disrupted the Land of Rain's ecosystem.

Floods ravaged the upstream mountains, while poor drainage left the downstream plains waterlogged and the soil saline.

Food production plummeted year after year, and public resentment accumulated until it neared the breaking point.

The number of starving people surged with every passing month.

War against an outside enemy was the oldest and most effective pressure valve for internal strife.

Victory would allow him to plunder food and resources and expand his territory.

Even defeat would let him use an external war to temporarily rally the people and suppress internal unrest.

After the First Shinobi World War ended, the Five Great Nations had joined forces to monopolize resources, passing the entire cost of defeat onto the small nations trapped between them.

The Land of Rain was already a pile of bone-dry kindling. All it needed was one final spark to ignite a sweeping blaze of war.

And Hanzō had decided to light that fire himself.