Note: Up to this point (from Orochimaru escaping Konoha with Kakashi and Minato taking the Hokage's position from Hiruzen Sarutobi to Naruto's fight with his siblings in Higashiyama) only four days have passed…XD

This chapter is going to be a slightly winded one since it discusses Konoha's economy and some political stuff. Bleck. It's all important, though, so please bear with it.

Enjoy…

CHAPTER 28

When the people of Konoha propped Minato Namikaze up to be the Hokage, it wasn't some random choice.

Minato was one of them.

He wasn't born with a silver spoon, had no parents, had no money, and had no prospects. The only reason he was even allowed into the Ninja Academy was because the village was recuperating from the Second Ninja War and the Third Hokage needed to revive his Shinobi Force, rightly anticipating another war about to break out at any moment.

While in the Academy, Minato was like a magnet, gaining friends among the students of the school and valid supporters from the teachers. He was popular and charismatic, winning over even the staunchest person, managing to even get the parents and friends of the students and teachers to hear about his exceptional record in school. It was due to one of these parents that Jiraiya of the Sannin heard of him and recruited him to be his student.

The rest was history.

The very night Minato pulled the Hokage seat away from Hiruzen Sarutobi he got right down to work. Luckily for him, the clan heads of all the clans handed the mantle to their successors, seeing it as the perfect time for the next generation to take charge of Konoha.

Rightly so.

Minato heralded a new age in Konoha.

He had a to-do list. That list only got longer when he uncovered how relaxed and freewheeling the former Hokage led the village, allowing his Council to run rampant and giving far too much freedom to the Village Elders. Hiruzen might as well have handed them the full authority of the Hokage, while the man merely signed whatever papers they presented to him without so much as glancing at it.

Minato put a stop to that immediately.

The first problem Minato attacked was the village's bloated budget. Konoha was haemorrhaging money, throwing money on pointless ventures and excessively inflating salaries. Taxes collected weren't being properly accounted for. Building contractors outside of Konoha that just so happened to be related to Council members were sucking up all of Konoha's funds with nothing to show for it, while more affordable and better contractors inside of Konoha were wasting their talents.

Minato ordered one of his closest friends, Shibi Aburame, to conduct a full audit of all of the departments, offices, and clans in Konoha. Top to bottom. If they were getting money from Konoha's budget, Shibi was authorised to kick down their doors and demand their financial records. Any resistance or hesitation would be at their own risk.

Minato was due for a detailed report in four days.

Next, Minato attacked price hikes on food in the markets.

Konoha was in a special, geographic position where it had warm summers, mild winters, and plenty of rainfall. The village could grow a large assortment of grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, and some herbs and spices, along with many animals for rearing, as well as beekeeping. Only when it came to tropical fruits like mangoes and pineapples, and sugarcanes and coconuts did Konoha struggle to produce, which could be imported from neighbouring nations. When Minato was growing up, he used to hear stories of the Second Hokage's time when the sheer volume of food Konoha used to produce was so much that it needed to be sold in massive amounts to Suna, Wave, Kiri, and even Kumo, just to reduce the stress of Konoha's Warehouses.

Now, over 80% of the food in Konoha's markets is imported.

On his second day as Hokage, bright and early, the Fourth Hokage performed an inspection of the village's many food warehouses—over thirty large facilities that were strategically located close to as many farms as possible—, and walked with his assistants and guards across all of the farms and greenhouses within Konoha, and visited the markets. This task quickly took all hours of the second day and drew a massive crowd around Minato. People were curious to see their new Hokage, shake his hands, and watch why he was gracing them with his presence. But at the end of the day, it was fruitful because Minato pinpointed where the problem of high prices came from.

The farmers dealt with private middlemen and not with the village's food warehouses, and certainly not directly with the retailers in the markets. The private middlemen forced a price hike when they hoarded some of the products they got from farmers, driving costs up when they inevitably sold to retailers. When the retailers couldn't afford the high price from the middlemen, the middlemen exported the crops and animals, keeping all of the profits for themselves.

Konoha's warehouses were nearly empty.

The private warehouses were bursting with food, both crop and animal products.

When asked why the farmers didn't sell their products to any of Konoha's warehouses, who in turn resold to retailers at a heavily lowered price, the farmers informed Minato that the managers of the village's stores severely undervalued their products, calling far lower prices than what their goods were worth, forcing them to go to middlemen who bought from them at the market value. Farmers were put in a bad position when they couldn't sell their goods.

Minato dug deeper and found out that the Councillor in charge of the village's warehouse owned most private food warehouses.

Minato's outrage was cold that day.

He promptly stripped that Councillor of his position and all of his assets froze his accounts inside Fire Country, and repossessed assets in accounts outside of the country. The man's assets sizeably boosted Konoha's funds. The funds seized from the man were completely transferred into Konoha's bank account moments after the man lost his position, and the list of assets previously owned by the former Councillor, including the private warehouses and the food inside them, reached Minato's table by nightfall. Minato left the man and his family less than poor, using him as an example to the rest of his Council.

The disgraced Councillor was set to face Konoha's Tribunal some days after Minato's Swearing-In ceremony.

Minato wasn't there to play around.

His actions caused an uproar in the Council, particularly the civilian side, but Minato wasn't yet done.

Using his authority as Hokage, he shut down all of the private middlemen food stores and compensated the owners of those stores with a few hundred ryu, absorbing those stores into Konoha's collection and flushing any leftover products inside these repossessed stores into the market, reselling them at lower prices. There were no longer going to be any private middlemen or wholesalers in Konoha. Everyone and everything bought and sold went through Konoha's food warehouses, which were controlled by Konoha's Department of Commerce, which was Headed by a new civilian councillor. Minato instated a fixed market price for each food product sold by farmers to Konoha's stores, as well as a set price for reselling, ensuring that no party was scammed or went into loss. The effect wasn't immediate but these actions hammered food prices down in a matter of weeks. Food flooded the markets at drastically slashed prices.

For this one act, the people sang Minato's praises to the high heavens.

But Minato wasn't done.

While his act of absorbing all private warehouses into the Department of Commerce was still taking effect, on the fourth day, Minato looked into rebuilding all of the buildings destroyed by the previous war. Since Konoha was still recuperating from the last war, which ended only sixteen days ago. That problem was glaring. Dropping food prices alleviated a lot of the stress of the average person in the village, though that left out those that were made homeless by the destruction, those that were orphaned in the crisis, and those that were crippled and injured in the mayhem.

Much of the fighting only glanced at Konoha, though that didn't mean some places weren't bombarded by Iwa's bombs. Homes outside of Konoha's walls and refugee camps close to the village still fell under Minato's responsibility. The village hospital was overrun by patients. The doctors and medicine were stretched thin, and the clinics and pharmacies were low on supplies. The orphanage was filled to the brim, so much so that the beds needed to be shared by at least three children and some needed to sleep on blankets on the ground; this particularly pained Minato because the general room he used to live in was overpopulated. His former bed was bowlegged by the weight of the children stuffed on it.

Minato had so many memories from his time at the orphanage, good and bad, and they all built him up to who he is today. Now for its present residents, it was only a place of discomfort, suffering and hunger. There were too many mouths to feed and too few people managing this surge in orphans.

The retirement home was in a woeful state. There weren't enough social workers to take care of the old folk who had lost their homes and were unable to live with their children, who were already struggling as it were.

Scores of people were left without stable homes, surviving on handouts from the Hokage's office and meal tickets. To the Third Hokage's credit, he didn't allow the rise or dominance of any criminal gang inside Konoha, but that was only because of the countermeasures the Second Hokage put in place to stomp out any criminal activity, empowering Konoha's Police and ANBU.

The roads leading out of the village were broken and unsafe. Traders and merchants tasked with exporting products needed to hire heavy security to ensure their lives; security Konoha couldn't spare.

There was a surge in mission requests outside of the village and this was where most of Konoha's funds were coming from.

Ninja morale was at an all-time low, with the shinobi and kunoichi only hanging on became Minato had successfully taken his place, holding onto hope that something good with come of it. The Hokage's success in reducing food prices was a good sign for them.

Then there was fixing Konoha's relations with other villages like Suna, Kiri, and Kumo, as well as large nations like Iron Country and Snow. Konoha's Embassy on Earth was less than a week old and was already severely underfunded, and that made it difficult to directly control the new Earth Daimyo and supervise the Tsuchikage.

The state of education in the Academies was also poor, with the teachers using outdated curriculums and not catering to the needs of the entire class, only the exceptional cases while those that needed further help were left to their own devices. Again, to the Third Hokage's credit, he gave teachers all the necessary tools to teach and made education for children 100% free, which Minato benefited from, but that didn't cover buying textbooks and notebooks, school lunches, basic weapons, and afterschool lessons. There was also zero teacher welfare outside of regular salaries. Anything other than regular classes was entirely up to the student and their wards/parents, and often these wards/parents had no money to spend on those necessities. Like Minato.

For his whole First and Second years as a student of the Academy, he had to wear fourth-hand clothes handed down to him from older children in the orphanage, and he had to plead with his friends in school to borrow him textbooks, some shuriken, and a kunai. The Matron, seeing how brilliant one of her wards was, spent money from her pocket to buy Minato a notebook. Minato used that notebook for his first two years of schooling, and he still had it in his office as a nice memento. In his last two years in the Academy, Jiraiya stepped in and fully sponsored the rest of his stay in the Academy.

The same couldn't be said for every other person in the Academy.

The Konoha Hiruzen Sarutobi handed over to Minato Namikaze was in pieces.

Minato wasn't bothered by it.

He was a patient, calculating man.

He took those problems one at a time, starting with the housing crisis. For that, he needed money. Plenty of money.

Fortunately for him, Shibi Aburame came with that money in his auditing report.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

8:57 PM

Hokage's Office

Minato was like a kid at a candy store.

There was a lethal edge to his excited smile as he flipped through Shibi's report. The Aburame was sat on the chair in front of the Hokage's desk; he sat rigidly, keeping his hands on his knees and his back straight, staring at Minato with an impassive, emotionless look on his face. The hive underneath the young clan head's skin crawled and thrummed in anticipation, waiting for the blonde Kage's verdict on his report.

It was a five-hundred-page binder, meticulously colour-coded and numbered, alphabetically arranging each department, office, and clan. Shibi had been done with the report within the three days but he was a thorough man. Shibi wanted his report to be clear and orderly.

The gleaming look in Minato's eyes showed the man that his superior was pleased with the work; Minato licked his thumb and flipped to another page, muttering something as he read the lines in the report, snorting and smirking, shaking his head and turning to another page.

The other people in the office raptly watched this sight. One person, Shikaku Nara, posted himself on Minato's right, curiously leaning over the Hokage's shoulder with his hands behind his back, also reading the report. He would have loved to be done with the day and be tucking into bed for the night beside his wife but perusing Shibi's report was an important matter, and as someone within Minato's inner circle, Shikaku was perfectly poised to advise his friend on his next steps.

Besides, Shikaku was well aware of the mess Minato had inherited. As clan head, he had a role in fixing his father's misgivings and correcting the Nara clan's reputation in the eyes of the Hokage.

Asuma Sarutobi was lounging on the large window in the office, eyes threatening to close and lulled into blissful wakefulness by the warm wind ebbing from outside. His right hand idly tapped the window sill, half monitoring the Hokage and the Nara clan head, and half wondering why he agreed to hang around after official hours. He cast a pitiful look to his left, straining his neck a little to locate the masked girl wedged into the corner of the office, staying by herself and not speaking a word.

Her Cat ANBU mask turned a bit to look at him, sharing a silent message between them before it returned to her charge, the Hokage. Somewhere else in the office, neither Asuma nor Cat knew where, was a second ANBU shinobi guarding the Hokage. He wore the Tiger ANBU mask and didn't seem to want to relate with his comrades during breaks; he was on the younger side, about thirteen or fourteen, and he had great commendations from Minato and Kushina.

Asuma and Cat hadn't yet seen Tiger in a fight but supposedly he was a Wood release user.

They didn't know why Minato decided to recruit the young prodigies of ANBU to be in his security unit, but they protected the man dutifully.

Neither knew that Minato saw the older members of ANBU as compromised and under Danzo's employ. That was why Shikaku Nara, besides being the Nara clan head, was also appointed as the ANBU Commander. Shikaku's main job was to pull out Danzo's ROOT from Konoha's ANBU ranks. Little by little. One after the other.

Finally, the last person in the office was the Council's newest member, Mebuki Haruno, Head of the Commerce Department.

She was a civilian that Minato brought back from the Fire Country National Bank. Mebuki was also one of Minato's former teachers; teaching Local Governance and Foreign Policy in his Fourth Year in the Academy. She was Minato's favourite teacher and he was Mebuki's favourite student.

Mebuki Haruno was a large, pink-haired woman who swallowed up the two-seater couch on the right of the Hokage's desk. Her hair was styled into a smooth bob, framing her wide face. She wore heavy eyeshadow and deep red lipstick, as well as face powder that made her face noticeably paler than her tanned body. She adjusted herself on the couch, uncomfortable in her baggy, silk shirt and pants with a pair of slippers laid loosely in front of the couch, leaving her feet bare. She wriggled her toes and snorted, clearing some phlegm from her throat.

She was picking her nails. Her boredom and discomfort were apparent to all of them, but they were hardly paying her any attention.

Minato chuckled, shaking his head again. He looked up at Mebuki, his lips slanted incredulously. "Listen to this, Miss Buki," he coughed into his fist and read from the report, "Konoha's Elders are allocated a weekly allowance for their efforts in reforming Konoha's Education Sector. Homura Mitokado is the Chairman of the Civilian Academy Board and Koharu Utatane is the Chairperson of the Shinobi Academy Board, and they are paid a monthly salary for these positions. They haven't attended a School Board Meeting in the last twenty-five years. Meeting reports have been sent to them but no replies have been returned."

Mebuki smothered her laugh behind her hands.

Minato pushed the report to Shikaku, who readily picked it up and continued reading. "Those old bags have been doing nothing since the day Hiruzen became Hokage. They haven't done anything for the schools. They can't even justify why their heading the School Boards."

"How much is the village saving if we axe their salaries?" Mebuki asked, her voice was croaky and deep, signs of a chronic smoker.

"Millions." Minato grinned.

"And their allowances?"

"Another few million." Minato sat back in his seat, rubbing his chin and musing aloud, "That's not even taking into account how much we're saving from removing them from the Council." He clicked his tongue. His irritation was beginning to show, briefly making the room frigid. "The money we'll save could easily hire more teachers to help update our curriculum. Build roads. Restore the orphanage and old folks' homes. Help with retirement benefits for our shinobi."

"What else?" the woman motioned for the man to continue, shifting a bit to lean on the armrest of the couch.

"We're pouring money into our hospitals and there's nothing to show for it." The Hokage jutted his chin to Shibi.

The Aburame continued, speaking in plain words, "Orochimaru had a contract with the hospital to supply medicine and cures, but his supplies were too little and too overpriced. It was agreed that the Department of Health would send Orochimaru some cash every day, and in return, Orochimaru would give the hospital some drugs. Now that he's gone, we have no drug supplier since the contract was written in such a way that only Orochimaru could supply the village with medicine."

Minato leaned forward on his desk and laced his fingers under his chin, chuckling. "Keep going."

"For the past four days, the Department of Health has still been sending someone the money for Orochimaru's supplies."

Mebuki's eyes widened. "You're saying we're buying medicine from a supplier that isn't even around anymore." Minato nodded. "We're buying nothing?" Minato nodded again. Mebuki's eyes darkened. "Who is this person?"

"Guess." Minato's eyes narrowed his frosty blue eyes and the temperature of the room fluctuated again.

"Lord Third?" Mebuki said hesitantly.

"Surprisingly, no."

"It's Danzo," Shikaku sighed, snapping the report shut and tossing it onto Minato's desk.

From the corner of the office, Cat stiffened. Tiredness fled from Asuma's body, feeling the creeping silence that stifled all sound and movement in the room. Even Shikaku and Shibi feared to breathe, flicking their eyes to Mebuki, and then to the Hokage. A heavy weight fell on them, pressing down on them like an invisible giant hand that ground the heel of its hand on the occupants of the room.

It became hard to breathe.

Mebuki croaked and clutched her chest.

Cat and Asuma gagged, gasping for air. In Cat's case, she slumped against the wall and her hand grabbed the mask on her face, tensing so hard that veins throbbed on her wrist and fingers, fighting the urge to pull the mask off.

"Minato, take it easy…" Shikaku breathed calmly, speaking lowly and steadily setting a hand on the Hokage's shoulder.

Minato blinked and the killer intent vanished, flicking off like a switch. He stood up and rolled his shoulders. "Sorry about that." He strolled to a water dispenser and got a paper cup, pouring some water inside and hurrying to Mebuki as she coughed haggardly, giving her the water with an apologetic smile. "Here."

The large woman gulped the water, placing one hand on her chest as she did so. She smacked her fat lips when she finished downing the water, touching the corners of her lips with a corner of her collar.

Minato waited for her to settle back down, and then he moved away with his hands behind his back. His expression was stormy and dark, walking to Cat and patting her shoulder gently, helping her to the windowsill, where Minato made her sit with Asuma, wordlessly ordering her to be at ease. This time, he contained his murderous intent tightly inside his chest. He couldn't afford to harm one of his allies with his foul moods.

"My bad, you guys." He covered his mouth, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.

"Something needs to be done about him." Shikaku levelled the Hokage with a steely look. His small irises conveyed an urgent message without so much as mentioning Danzo's name.

"Yes," Minato agreed. He motioned flippantly to a corner of the office, drawing a few eyes to the area but no one saw anything. Suddenly, the ninjas in the room detected, rather than sensed, the presence of another ANBU. Formerly, he had been erasing his presence but with the attention now on him, he was there like he had been standing in plain view all the while, wedged into the corner like Cat had been in a sleeveless black shirt and shinobi pants, a dark ANBU vest and black shoes.

The boy's Tiger mask silently turned from Minato to Shikaku.

They might have wildly different reasons for doing so, but Tiger and Shikaku worked together inside ANBU toward the same goal: Remove ROOT from ANBU.

"But that won't be for a little while." Minato moved behind Shibi, passing the Aburame and standing by the photographs of the previous village leaders, from Hashirama Senju, Tobirama Senju, and Hiruzen Sarutobi. They didn't notice when Tiger erased his presence again, seemingly melting out of their mind's eye and out of their notice. "For now, I'll just have to make do clipping his wings."

The others stayed still as Minato stayed where he was, speaking as if he was addressing his predecessors.

"They're the rot eating away the core of this village." Minato's hands opened and closed, clicking as he cracked his knuckles. "The Elders…the pigs hiding in the Council…their stooges in the village…. They're in the way of the village's progress."

"Then scrap everything," Mebuki audaciously proposed, surprising even Shibi, who turned around and looked at her with widened eyes and a marginally agape mouth. The large woman nodded, firmly behind her words. "Yes. If Konoha's corruption is so deep, then dismantle all the departments and start from scratch. You need to break some eggs to make an omelette, Minato."

"That'll cause mayhem, Miss Buki," Minato said, chastising his former teacher. He still hadn't turned from the framed portraits of his predecessors. "What I'll do is flush out our problems and plug all of the holes, so my successors don't go through what I'm going through now." He didn't wait for his words to sink in, jabbing his thumb over his shoulder at the audit report on his desk, and Shibi. "I want your report summarised and plastered on the news by tomorrow morning." The mouths of everyone in the room dropped, shocked still by Minato's declaration, more so by the mischievous grin on his face when he turned to them. "I want it across every television, heard from every radio, and written in every newspaper. I want to hear analysts breaking down the report all the way in the Fire Capital, maybe even further away."

"That would cause mayhem," Shibi whispered, almost soundless in his horror. He slowly got up, saying, "The people would turn on the Third Hokage. They would turn on the Council."

Konoha was supposedly making hundreds of millions of ryu in profit a year but the money barely impacted the people. The bloated budget leaked heavily into several pockets and was subsequently squirrelled away, either out of the village into foreign bank accounts or invested into assets, like real estate.

Places like the orphanage, the Academies, the village's hospital, clinic and pharmacy, and Konoha's Embassy in Earth Country only saw less than 20% of the money, hardly enough to keep the lights on if not for some donations made by certain Council members in order to improve their public image.

The dangerous grin on Minato's face sharpened and he closed his eyes. "That way, the people won't object to what I'll do next."

"What'll you do?" Shikaku asked.

"Exactly what I did to the former Head of Commerce." Minato shrugged.

He was going to go through the report word-by-word, locating every hole in Konoha's budget and sealing it shut. Council members who were found to be corrupt would have their assets and money seized, whether it was located inside the country or outside. Anyone who tried to hide anything from the Hokage would be thrown into the T until they were more compliant. They would lose their positions and their honours, and their reputations would be muddied forever, and Minato would toss them to the wolves. No blood would be shed but the people of Konoha would effectively exile them into the wilderness.

They were finished.

Even Konoha's Elders.

If Minato had simply pulled them off their seats as Council members, they could possibly rally an uproar in the village to oppose him. But, if the people clearly understood how badly they were destroying the village, they would support the Hokage wholeheartedly.

The people in the Hokage's office now realised that Minato Namikaze only looked at situations in the long term. He analysed a problem from multiple angles and acted accordingly. Minato understood that, despite effectively being a dictator whose word was law, his power and authority only took him as far as the people allowed it.

He needed to get them behind his every action.

He wasn't a once-in-a-lifetime genius for nothing.

Shikaku got chills. Mebuki was lost for words. Shibi stuttered weakly, slumping back into his chair, unable to think of an argument for the Hokage's decision. He was painfully resolved to no longer sleep that night, given the monumental size of his task; summarising a five-hundred-page audit report and then giving it to new stations in the village.

The Nara picked up a copy of the report on the Hokage's desk and tossed it to Minato, who caught it and swiftly sealed it into a storage seal in the palm of his hand.

"Feel free to have some ANBU assist you in summarising the report. You can use your clanmates if that's more suitable for you. As long as the summary is accurate." The Hokage's statement calmed Shibi a little, and the Aburame nodded tiredly, rubbing his throbbing brow. Minato went to the coat rack and retrieved a white robe with red flames at the bottom, neatly swinging it behind him and over his body. He snapped his fingers as if remembering something. "Put some copies of the report in the village library and the school libraries. Hell, send a copy to the National Library. I want your report everywhere. Push it into as many faces as humanly possible." He gave the gloomy, overworked Aburame an encouraging thumb up. "That'll be all. Dismissed."

He took the Hokage's cap from the coatrack and left the office. Cat, Tiger, and Asuma hurried after him. One of the Hokage's assistants, woozy for being woken up at their desk, waited patiently at the door for the others inside the office to leave, intending to lock up the office after they were gone.

Meanwhile, Minato, putting thoughts of work out of his mind, moved with eager steps down the flight of stairs and exited the Hokage's Tower, heading home to be with his wife. They had a tradition of watching Iron Country soap operas together every evening, and their favourite show was just about to start.

Authors note

The Ages of Some Characters

Itachi, Yugao, Kakashi, Asuma, Naruto, Lio (and others) - 6-13

New Clan head's - 21-25

Minato and Kushina - 24

The Legendary Sannin – early 40s

Hiruzen Sarutobi, Danzo Shimura and Konoha Elders - mid 50s

Done

That's that about that. What do you think?

See you when I see you.

Foy.