Danzo Again: Revenge After Three Years

Pero swung his palm down.

Smack!

"Hh... hh..."

Hanzō's head was slapped straight into his chest cavity. His desire to survive could only make his body produce a leaking wheeze, and before long, he lost all signs of life.

He casually tossed Hanzō's body aside and used his bio-electric field to strip the grime from his hand.

"All right, that nuisance is dealt with. One more to go."

Pero looked into the distance.

"Hanzō and Danzo set this trap together. That old bastard Danzo shouldn't have gone far."

Pero slowly closed his eyes, activating his super-hearing.

His extraordinary hearing gradually spread outward. Soon, all kinds of sounds reached his ears...

He picked out the information he wanted from those sounds.

"What's all that noise? Damn it! Lord Yahiko's in trouble! Hurry, save the leader!"

"They've fought their way right to Konoha's gates! Danzo, you aren't even in Konoha! Where are you hiding? Huh?"

Konoha was still at war, with the fighting right on its doorstep. Could this be the Battle of Kikyo Pass?

Hanzō and Danzo had already joined forces against the Akatsuki, yet the Third Shinobi World War wasn't over? As he remembered it, this part of the story should have happened shortly after the war ended.

It seemed his involvement had changed this world's plot beyond recognition.

But it didn't matter.

He continued searching through the sounds his mind had analyzed.

"Lord Danzo, hurry! That killing machine is back." There was a trace of fear in the voice.

"Stay here and cover my retreat. That brat's gotten stronger again. That useless Hanzō! He failed to finish them off back then."

Found you.

A cruel smile curled Pero's lips.

He hadn't expected Danzo to still remember him.

The memories of being hunted for three whole months surfaced in Pero's mind.

Before he obtained the system, Danzo had learned of their existence through Amegakure.

In Danzo's view, Jiraiya was cultivating enemies for Konoha, especially since Pero refused to join Konoha.

After Pero left the Akatsuki, Danzo began hunting him.

For three months, he hid wherever he could, killing countless Root shinobi with his own hands.

Through battle after battle, his taijutsu went from clumsy to proficient.

Despite his rapid improvement, two fists could not beat four hands, much less shinobi who could spew fire and whip up wind.

Finally, on his twelfth birthday, he was cornered.

He still remembered the densely packed figures on the opposite mountaintop.

He knew full well he didn't have long to live.

He had come to this world hoping to change it, only for everything to come to nothing.

He fought with all his might until his strength ran out and he fell to his knees.

At last, he saw Danzo nearby, wearing a triumphant smile.

He seemed to have accepted his fate and faced death, watching the kunai grow larger in his vision.

Then came that crisp notification chime.

Everything suddenly changed.

[Ding! Congratulations on reaching age 12, host. The system has been unlocked. Host's life is in danger. Kryptonian bloodline awakening.]

"Pero?" Konan's voice pulled Pero out of his memories.

Pero set Konan down from his arms, stroked his head, and smiled faintly.

"I'll be right back. Wait here."

Konan looked at Pero blankly. She didn't know what he was going to do, but he surely had his reasons.

Pero's eyes pierced through layer after layer of obstacles, finding Danzo and his guards in the direction the voices had come from.

In the original plot, Danzo had inadvertently witnessed the power of the Rinnegan. Meanwhile, the Akatsuki's original goal and its method of bringing peace to the world actually meant changing the old order of the Shinobi World.

To preserve Konoha's superior strength, and to further his own goal of ruling Konoha, Danzo joined forces with Hanzo of the Salamander to dismantle the Akatsuki.

He hadn't expected Hanzō and Amegakure to be so impatient this time, working together against the Akatsuki so many years early.

Was it because I revealed the plot ahead of time?

Danzo's shadow lay behind many wars. In Pero's eyes, that old bastard had to die.

Only with his death could the Shinobi World take its first step toward peace.

Without dwelling on it, Pero slowly floated up, waved to Konan, and vanished in an instant.

The shock wave produced by his high-speed movement uprooted the trees in the forest.

Pero announced his arrival in an utterly domineering fashion.

On a mountaintop several kilometers away.

"My lord, hurry! He's here!" A Root shinobi stood on the mountaintop, watching the distant forest split open like a zipper. At first, the figure was only the size of a mung bean. In a blink, he was right in front of him.

You want to leave? Not a chance.

Pero threw a punch forward. Its pressure swept over the Root shinobi, churning him into a bloody mist.

At that critical instant, Danzo completed the final step.

"Reverse Summoning Technique!"

Pero looked at the mountaintop flattened by the wind of his punch and raised an eyebrow.

Reverse Summoning Technique? Summoning himself away by reversing the Summoning Technique's formula? Pretty quick reaction.

His eyes instantly saw across a thousand miles toward Konoha.

With his super-vision, he saw Danzo appear on the floor of a secret room, writhing like a maggot.

He raised an eyebrow, revealing an amused smile.

"You think you can get away?"

With that, he picked up two pebbles, hefted them a couple of times, and coated them in a layer of his bio-electric field.

He hurled them hard toward Konoha.

The pebbles broke the sound barrier as they left his hand, turning into a streaking meteor that hurtled toward Konoha at tremendous speed.

Konoha, Root headquarters, secret room.

Bang! A cloud of smoke appeared in the center of the room.

Screams rang out from within it.

"Aaaah! Damn brat!!" Danzo writhed on the floor, blood gushing freely from his missing right forearm and his right leg, severed at the hip.

"Brat, I'll kill you! I'll tear you to pieces!!!"

"Someone! Get in here!!!" Having just escaped danger, Danzo was still gripped by fear. He clutched his blood-spurting arm stump and screamed himself hoarse for help.

The moment his words fell.

Violent tremors came from above the secret room.

Danzo seemed to sense something. Endless terror instantly filled his lone eye.

His facial muscles contorted, tears and snot streaming uncontrollably as he let out a despairing wail.

"No... don't!! I can't die! I haven't become Hokage yet!! Save me!"

The next instant, two pebbles burst through the wall and smashed Danzo's skull to pieces.

Creak.

The tremendous noise drew the guards stationed around the room.

The secret room's door opened, and an Anbu wearing a fox mask poked his head inside.

"Lord Danzo, were you calling me? Lord... Danzo!!"

Seeing the carnage inside the secret room, the Anbu let out a piercing shriek!

"Medical team! Someone, hurry! Medical team!!!"

With Danzo dealt with.

Pero slowly landed in front of Yahiko, looking at him teasingly.

"Well? Still sticking to that theory of peace without force? If I hadn't been here, wouldn't you all have died here?"

Knowing the plot from his previous life, he naturally scoffed at Yahiko's ideal. Fine as the ideal was, in Naruto's dark world, it seemed especially naive.

Pero thought Yahiko was exactly like Naruto, with the same ideals and the same talk-no-jutsu.

After learning that someone else in the world shared his ideas and optimism, Yahiko kept pestering Pero to tell him who it was.

Pero couldn't exactly say he was someone from ten years in the future, so he could only give vague, evasive answers each time.

Following the original plot, Yahiko, as the Akatsuki's leader, would sooner or later go discuss his ideals with Hanzō, only to fall into Hanzō and Danzo's trap.

To save Konan, whom Hanzō held hostage, he would willingly impale himself on Nagato's kunai.

That incident would drive Nagato into darkness and lead him to make the world "know pain."

So Pero had repeatedly warned Yahiko and Nagato that they had to be wary of Hanzō.

He hadn't expected them to remain so stubborn and come to discuss an alliance anyway.

Yahiko's throat bobbed as he swallowed.

He looked at Pero, then at the two bottomless trenches in the ground, his eyes filled with shock and a trace of lingering fear.

"Before... I did insist that we shouldn't bring peace to the world through force." He walked up to Pero.

"But now, now I've changed my mind."

Pero raised an eyebrow. "How so?"

Before Yahiko could say another word, Nagato spoke up beside him. He looked at Pero, his Rinnegan filled with unprecedented resolve and trust.

"Because I believe that, from now on, you are the foundation of peace."

As soon as he finished, a resentful voice rang out from afar.

"Pero, you jerk!! You left me so far away and didn't bring me back!! You even told me to wait there!"

The three turned to see Konan flying toward them furiously, a pair of pure white paper wings spread wide.

With Konan joining them, the four exchanged some banter, easing the atmosphere a little.

Pero shook his head helplessly. His gaze moved among the three before finally settling on Nagato's still somewhat unreconciled face.

"After what happened today, do you think the Akatsuki can still be that naive peace organization that does everything it can to avoid force?"

"I thought you'd take my words to heart." Pero shrugged. "When you chose the path of peace, you were already making an enemy of the world."

"The nations and shinobi villages won't just hand over their power."

"They'll only worry that an alliance with you would threaten their position."

Watching Nagato's expression grow increasingly blank, Pero noticed his hands trembling and decided to give him something even stronger.

"Did you know, Nagato? Just now, Yahiko was already prepared to kill himself by having you kill him with your own hands."

"No! That's impossible!" Nagato jerked his head up, his eyes full of disbelief. "I... I would never do something like that!"

He instinctively turned to Yahiko for confirmation.

But Yahiko avoided Nagato's gaze.

Nagato stepped forward and grabbed Yahiko's shoulders with both hands, asking in a trembling voice, "Say something, Yahiko!"

Yahiko lowered his head and gently bit his lower lip.

"Nagato, you're the savior our teacher spoke of. You have the Sage of Six Paths' eyes, don't you?"

Yahiko had once accidentally overheard a conversation between Nagato and Jiraiya, learning that Nagato might be the prophesied Child of Destiny.

Subconsciously, he already valued Nagato's life above his own.

He believed that, so long as it could bring peace to the Shinobi World, he could pay any price, including his own life.

Given that cruel confirmation, Nagato staggered back two steps in disbelief.

He felt his world collapse at that moment.

The hatred of war, the pain of losing loved ones, and the anger at the world's injustice that he had suppressed for over a decade overwhelmed his reason in that instant.

A cold, eerie surge of chakra suddenly erupted from his body!

"Nagato? What's wrong!" Sensing something amiss, Konan immediately spread her wings, shielding Pero and Yahiko behind her.

Pero frowned almost imperceptibly.

He shifted his gaze to Nagato's feet.

There, a pitch-black, shadowlike substance was emerging from the ground.

An incorporeal hand gripped Nagato's ankle tightly.

"So there was a failsafe after all."

Madara Uchiha.