Warning: This chapter contains themes of suicide. Proceed with caution…

CHAPTER 29

That night, they came after Minato.

The Hokage had dismissed Cat for the night, leaving only Tiger on night watch. Or rather, Tiger's wood clone. Regardless, Minato tucked into bed with his wife and went to sleep, trusting his guard to protect him from the inevitable.

A wise man would have something bad this coming; Minato, as Hokage, was doing too much too quickly. Angering the wrong people and agitating his enemies. His act of liquidating the assets of a disgraced Councillor ruffled many feathers but it wasn't the deciding factor that sealed Minato's fate; it was Shibi's audit report of the village that the Third Hokage handed to the Fourth, especially the fact that Minato wanted it published for public view.

Minato needed to die. He would be a martyr of the people, sure, but a replacement was already ready to take his place. Normalcy would return.

Fitting for the motivations of the ROOT operatives, it was a temperate night. There was no moon or stars in the sky, scarcely any wind and there was some activity in town. They swarmed over the short, wrought iron fence and stomped on the perfectly manicured front lawn, rushing up the walls of the suburban house and circling the window of the master's bedroom.

They could see him and his wife, back to the window and spooning.

They didn't know that Minato was wide awake, pressing his face into the back of his wife's head and holding her close as she snored softly. His detection seals on the fence sensed each of his assassins, roughly seventeen in total, but Minato purposefully deactivated the defensive measures. He didn't move to face them. He didn't need to.

Minato braced himself, but the ROOT ninjas didn't break down Minato's window.

Tiger perched on the roof of his superior's home. Two ROOT ninjas soundlessly clambered onto the roof with him. They merged seamlessly into the dim atmosphere, wearing pitch black clothes and eggshell white masks, treading through the shadows on the roof life phantoms of the night. Tiger stood up and levelled them with an even stare, his emotionless Tiger mask barely reflecting the streetlamps.

"Master orders you to stand down," one of the ninjas said, bringing out a scroll from inside his shinobi vest. "You are just to contain the target's wife. Don't let her use the Kyuubi."

Tiger hummed, looking down at the offered scroll that contained, in Danzo's words, his new orders. He was no longer to masquerade as the Hokage's ANBU guard but to play a part in the Hokage's death.

The boy collected the scroll and pushed his mask up, showing his face to his ROOT comrades. He unfurled the scroll and his eyes narrowed, soaking in the little light from the streetlamps and skimmed his eyes over each stroke on the scroll, recognising his master's rigid, hard handwriting and seeing at the bottom his master's seal.

Tenzo frowned when the scroll lit on fire in his hands, crumpling into ash and softly blowing into the wind. It was a countermeasure to make sure Danzo's words didn't enter the wrong hands.

The boy rubbed the soot off his hands and looked up at his comrades.

"Are you ready?"

Tenzo pursed his lips and scratched his chin. He paced a little to the left, turned and walked to the right, clicking his tongue all the while and itching the top of his head, before he finally stopped in front of his comrade and shook his head, a hesitant, regretful look on his cringed face. "No."

The ROOT ninja, whose face was hidden under an expressionless mask, was visibly stunned by Tenzo's response. He looked around at the other ninja he came with, receiving only a confused shrug. He returned his stare to Tenzo, seeing the antsy boy cross and uncross his arms uncomfortably, shrugging.

The ninja asked Tenzo in a slow, deliberate tone, "You're not ready for the mission?"

"Yes," Tenzo nodded, stopping himself and then shaking his head, "I mean no." he cleared his throat and gulped. "I won't do it. Go back and tell Master Danzo I won't do it."

The two operatives were stunned silent, frozen in absolute confusion.

CORE had full liberty to decline missions passed onto them from ROOT Commanders, but not when it came to Danzo Shimura; no mission could be denied when a verified seal from Danzo was presented. And it had never happened before.

Until tonight.

Tenzo shrugged again, uncomfortable with the silence. The atmosphere gradually became more tense, and the boy noticed how rigid the two operatives were becoming. The ninja behind the one addressing Tenzo slowly pulled out a ninjato, a short, lethally sharp blade that glinted mutely in the dim night, holding the knife out to the side and bending his knees, coiling like a serpent about to strike.

Tenzo gulped again. This was new territory.

He had never in all the years he served Danzo, from the day he was born to tonight, failed to obey an order from Danzo. But he, or rather the original Tenzo, had made up his mind. Tenzo had made up his mind since Kakashi's escape.

The real Tenzo had used the confusion and disorganisation of the ROOT Archive crumbling to gather as much information about his brother, Ninety-Nine, and about his siblings. He made thousands of copies of the documents he found and stored them with Sage. He, and Sage, didn't like what he found.

Danzo's gradual manipulation of Naruto during his first few months in the Academy and the foggy, heavily redacted portion surrounding Sakumo Hatake's death. Then there was Danzo altering his brother's memories through Fuu Yamanaka, making him forget about his adopted father and his friends in the Academy, diving headfirst into ROOT, and subsequently CORE. Even going further back, to the day of Naruto's birth, the records on those were redacted line-by-line, leaving nothing to the imagination that Danzo had a hand in that too.

But the worst thing that Tenzo uncovered, among the many other things he found, was Danzo's treachery.

Ninety-Nine's torturous training. The years of breaking down the boy using inhuman and unethical methods, and leaving him in pieces, leaving the boy to pick himself up using his will to live and sheer stubbornness alone. While the rest of CORE were trained fairly normally, albeit rigorously and mercilessly, with only the benefit of some rest and treatment of their injuries.

Ninety-Nine got nothing. Tenzo's brother was run ragged to the point of nearly dying. Every time.

Then there were the missions.

Ninety-Nine was put through no less than eight in a day, while the rest of them barely went on two. Not counting long-term missions. And at the end of each mission, which Ninety-Nine would go on with a sibling or two as teammates, he was sent on a solo mission at the end of the day, bone tired, beaten till patches of his body turned blue, barely able to breathe from exhaustion, and bleary-eyed from psychological damage.

Those solo missions were ploys. Danzo pushed Tenzo's brother toward death. For one particular mission some years ago, where Ninety-Nine was sent to track a runaway that fled in the direction of Suna. This was so that Tenzo's brother would fall into a sandpit and die, and if not for Morty…

Tenzo clamped his eyes shut and clenched his fists.

"I won't do this anymore…" he shook his head, exhaling sadly and opening his eyes. His face was dipped and his arms shrugged helplessly. "I'm out."

"You defy a direct order from Lord Danzo, Operative Ten. You know the consequences." The operative before Tenzo grunted, pulling out a tanto. He and the operative behind him settled into a warning stance, moving in sync.

Tenzo half-smiled, already regretting his decision. "I know."

The second ninja whistled shrilly, projecting the sound in such a way that it resembled the distant call of a night bird, and the other fifteen ROOT ninjas that had come to assassinate the Hokage surged onto the roof, pouring up from all sides and surrounding Tenzo. Their feet scarcely made a sound on that wide roof, standing weightlessly like sentient darkness. Their eerily emotionless masks faced Tenzo. Their intentions were not understated. Some slowly and quietly pulled out blades, crouching low, and some even curled one of their hands into the ram seal.

Tenzo was a CORE operative. A monster of Danzo's own making. They would sooner slit their throats than go easy on the boy.

"Operative Ten," the first ninja called in a hushed tone, his words almost lost in the soft breeze flowing down the street. His tone, though light and cold, carried a deathly warning. Tenzo flicked his eyes from a cluster of operatives on his left and looked at the man. The boy clenched and unclenched his hands, popping his knuckles, "You have one chance. Return to the fold, or you will burn tonight."

"No." Tenzo inhaled, inflating his chest and lifting his shoulders, then he exhaled, allowing his arms to slump. He searched for courage, but deep down he was shaken. "I'm…I'm done following his orders. I'd rather die."

"Then your fate is sealed."

Following the leader of the group's statement, four operatives—one in front of Tenzo, the other on his left, another behind him, and finally on his right—clapped their hands and unfurled scrolls from seals on their palms, slapping the scrolls on the roof and barking in unison.

"Dead Zone!"

Tenzo grated his teeth and opened his stance, pulling out the tanto sheathed on his back as a translucent dome of air covered the roof. The boy's head began to ring at the deathly silence inside the dome.

Not so much as the sound of his beating heart could be heard. His breathing was muted. The distant horns and chatter from the town were drowned out by absolute silence. They were utterly disconnected from the rest of the world, draped in an atmosphere that was completely absent of sound and could not be detected by outsiders, as anyone looking up at the Hokage's roof that night would only see an illusion of the blank night sky. Nothing would escape the dome.

Tenzo couldn't even hear the scuff of feet as the shinobi swarmed him. He leapt back as a shadow snapped at his feet, whirling around in the air and thrusting a barrage of shuriken that peppered the Nara operative, killing them instantly but not releasing pressure from Tenzo, who was still dazed by the complete silence inside the dome.

He deflected a cut to his stomach and slammed a kick to his right, pushing off and stabbing through the neck of a kunoichi, yanking his blade out of her head and pushing her into a cluster of ninjas, who deftly went around her and darted to Tenzo. A ninja got close enough to grab Tenzo's wrist but was dragged down into the boy's knee, shattering his mask and caving in his face, flung off the roof.

Then the bomb on Tenzo's wrist exploded, though the heavy suppression seals on the roof contained the blast, only ripping away the left side of Tenzo's upper body and parts of his jaw. He collapsed onto a knee and panted, clutching the gaping hole that was his shoulder.

That was when the dead ninjas started combusting.

It happened instantaneously, bursting on fire in giant plumes of red and blue, incinerating their bodies to ash, and in utter quietness, throwing heat and light onto Tenzo as he wound around and used his shin to block a kick, ducked under a haymaker and then punched his fist onto the roof of the Hokage's house.

"Wood Release: Birdcage."

A tangle of branches roared up from the roof and caught some ninjas, squeezing them till their limbs snapped, blood gushed from their eyeholes as their eyes and brain burst from the pressure of the branches, and then they combusted as well, quickly turning to festering ash. The roof became a mess of twisted branches, blood and ash, smoking dangerously hot but cooled by the nightly breeze.

Many ninjas dodged the grasp of the branches, cutting any that coiled to them with their blades. The four ninjas that activated the seal were not spared, caught by branches and crushed into a paste, unable to defend themselves since their hands were preoccupied.

The dome of silence still stayed above them though, as the seals themselves were still intact.

Tenzo wheezed and clutched his head, swearing again at the insistent silence ringing between his ears. He was low on chakra and he was badly injured; the last jutsu took out more than half of his reserves. He was only still corporeal because wood clones didn't dispel unless they were destroyed, leaving no remnants. He blindly threw himself to the right, away from a scorching sword stroke that aimed to split him in half, and staggered to his feet, facing the remaining seven ninjas that stalked toward him, marching carefully with their blades held out and their faces stoic.

The boy stopped when he got to the edge of the Hokage's roof, glancing back and muttering another swear.

"There's nowhere to go, traitor," the leader of the team signed. "Die with dignity."

Tenzo scoffed. They zipped to the boy and he flicked through ten one-handed seals, speeding to them as well with his head lowered and his final resolution burning in his dark eyes. He threw himself onto the first ninja, surprising the leader when the boy impaled himself on his sword and slumped over him, only catching Tenzo's slight smile and hearing the boy's whispered jutsu.

"Eternal Rest."

The boy's body swelled up suddenly and exploded, showering spiked wood and poisoned barbs everywhere, peeling open the ninjas that came after him with thorns, bristles, sharp branches, and touch bark. The suicide jutsu scorched the whole roof in jagged tree chunks. Parts of the shrapnel tore apart the four seals, abruptly destroying the dome of silence.

Tenzo was gone and the ninjas coated in shrapnel gasped, gaping blood oozed from every part of their body; lungs were perforated with thorns, necks and skulls were shattered by the pressure of the explosion, and they were draped head to toe in viciously sharp sapling and bushes. Four ninjas were long dead and the other three couldn't move, for if they tried, their wounds would be aggravated and the thorns of the trees would stab deeper into their bodies, forcing them to stay still.

Worse yet, the wooden shrapnel of thorns and spikes embedded in the flesh and organs of the ninjas started to grow, sprouting vines and trees that dug their roots into the roof, tightening around the shinobi and compressing them further, constricting them of their blood.

A long, agonizing groan escaped the living, growing bush, stuck in grotesque positions as they bled to death. The four corpses inside the bush imploded, burned to ash and setting the bush alight, incinerating those still unfortunate to be alive.

Minato appeared on the roof in a yellow flash. The red fire ebbed brightly, casting uneven shadows on the Hokage's stoic face, watching the ROOT ninjas burn to death with his hands behind his back and not moving to help them. The fire melted the mask of one of the ninjas, painfully trickling down her forehead and jaw as the flames licked her skin, and she looked at the Hokage with a vacant stare. Her lips were parted, exhaling a prolonged breathless groan but the agony of her situation didn't translate in her eyes.

Her eyes were devoid of life.

They were dead before she even took her last breath.

Her skin blackened and her eyelids lowered, slowly shutting as she opened her mouth wider.

"This…will never end!" she croaked soundlessly, having had her lungs and vocal cords destroyed, leaning back and biting down on her tongue. The suicide seal activated and she spasmed, shaking and jarring the burning bush as cyanide poured through her bloodstream. Foam dribbled from her mouth. The thorns stuck in her flesh dug deeper and tore muscle, drawing more blood, and then she burst on fire as well. Her suffering finally ended.

The others followed suit, ending themselves by biting on their tongues, burning in the inferno.

"Poor bastards…" Minato murmured to himself.

"Water release: Ember Dousing technique." Tenzo, the real Tenzo, emerged from Minato's shadow, breathing water from his mouth and dousing the fire on the Hokage's roof. It was a small-scale jutsu that used very little chakra to put out small fires. When he was done, he pulled his hands apart and spat on the ground, wiping his bottom lip.

The two of them stared down at the piles of ash and twisted branches. The boy wandered forward, nudging small chunks of bone that hadn't been incinerated by the fire.

"It's impossible to get a positive link to…to…" Tenzo coughed into his fist, fighting years of conditioning and training, trying to put himself into his brother Ninety-Nine's mindset, finally saying, "It's impossible to link this to Danzo, Lord Hokage."

"I see that…" Minato mused, crossing his arms and squinting at his burned, sodden roof. "I'm mainly worried about the cost of fixing my roof. These are quality shingles. You just know that the tyrants at the HOA are going to try to rip me off."

Tenzo looked over his shoulder at the man, incredulous, "Sir?"

Minato cracked a smile. "Lighten up, kid. We'll need patience to pull out Danzo's roots from this village."

"Still, I told you this won't work." Tenzo pushed his hands into his pockets and faced the street, subconsciously watching to see if there were any stragglers his clone didn't get. He had just returned from seeing Sage, not expecting Danzo to send a whole army just to assassinate the Fourth Hokage, and subdue the Kyuubi jinchuriki. The boy continued, "Everyone in ROOT has these same seals." The boy looked at Minato with dull, lightless eyes. "Just so our corpses aren't tied back to him."

"Good thing I removed your seal," Minato remarked, putting his hands on his hips.

Tenzo only grunted, looking down at the mangled branches and ash.

"You know…" Minato said after a short pause, drawing Tenzo's attention back to him. The man waved a small card from Iron Country, containing Naruto's message that arrived that morning via Hawk. "Naruto said I should trust you. He didn't say why." Tenzo glanced at the card in Minato's hand. He rubbed his nose and turned away again, hiking up his shoulders. "Why should I trust you, Tenzo?"

The boy screwed his mouth to the side. The only sound that could be heard was the faint sizzle of ash being cooled by still water, until the boy said, "I had selective blindness." He threw a wince at the Hokage, who listened to him. "I saw what I wanted to see and refused to believe otherwise."

"What did you see?"

"My brother was put through hell. Worked to the bone every day. Sent on suicide missions alone." Tenzo pursed his lips. His hands trembled in his pockets. He hunched his shoulders again. "We thought he was Danzo's favourite; that's why he's worked harder than everyone else. The rest of us…CORE…we didn't see even a quarter of what my brother endured. He lived through all of that and was still there for us. Picking us up when we couldn't go on any longer." The boy looked over at Minato. His eyes glistened with unshed tears and he smiled shakily, saying, "I hate that he doesn't hate us."

"Naruto doesn't have one hateful bone in his body." Minato smiled, lilting a bit and adding, "Except for the one that hates Danzo, but other than that, Naruto doesn't do hate, if you know what I mean."

Tenzo smiled, rubbing his nose and sniffing. "Yeah."

"So, you're okay with tearing down everything Danzo's built?" Minato approached the boy, standing a little bit away and placing a comforting hand on Tenzo's shoulder, saying, "You've served him all your life. Are you sure you're okay with defecting?"

Tenzo breathed out, looking for his resolve. He bobbed his head. "I love my brother, Lord Hokage." His eyes steeled over with frosty intentions. "And I hate Danzo for hating him."

Minato beamed. "Then we have a common enemy. Perfect."

Danzo knew CORE Operative Ten had defected the moment the boy's tracker blipped off. The same with One and One-Hundred (Sandy), who disappeared off the face of the earth many hours ago somewhere in the northern region. They countered the seals on their tongues, likely using the same technique Ninety-Nine had used, and were now completely off the grid. The assassination of the Fourth Hokage was a complete failure and, even worse, the Hokage now knew the lengths Danzo would take to execute him; it could agitate the Hokage further to take more severe measures against Danzo, the Elders, and the other powers that be in the village.

The publicised audit report was just the tip of the iceberg.

Still, that was the least of Danzo's worries.

News of Tenzo, One, and Sandy's defection from ROOT washed through CORE like a roaring typhoon, spreading gossip and whispers that moved like a contagion. But unlike when Naruto defected, something more dangerous bubbled beneath the surface.

Tenzo had planted some seeds of disloyalty, dissent, and conspiracy among his siblings' moments before he deactivated his tracker, and they were going to bear fruit, and when that happened, all hell would break loose.

Authors note

Jutsu List

Dead Zone: The seal creates a containment area that is dead silent inside, and undetectable outside as the dome will change to match the environment it is located. The containment area is relatively small, only able to contain 15 feet by 15 feet, and 15 feet high. However, it is not a barrier that keeps all within it; it is simply a general area of complete, near-tangible silence that is undetectable by outsiders. Any action taken within the containment area, save from the detonation of a large-scale bomb, would remain stifled and invisible to bystanders. This is a new seal that has been developed by ROOT, in collaboration with Orochimaru. The purpose of the seal was to hide entrances to their hideouts, but mass production became difficult due to the complexities of the seal; level eight chakra suppressors, chakra dampners, illusionary seals, boundary seals, and others. Orochimaru's defection and disappearance essentially shut down the development of the seal. Only four copies of the seal existed and they were destroyed during the failed assassination of the Fourth Hokage.

Wood Release: Birdcage: This is a fairly simple B-rank wood release technique. The technique requires up to thirty hand seals but true mastery of the bloodline reduces hand seals to one motion; striking the ground. The jutsu violently sprouts heat-sensitive branches and roots from the floor, which go after anything with a pulse, besides the user, and squeezes them to death. The jutsu is not rated so highly because enemies that can adapt on their feet can simply cut the roots/branches down, making the technique mainly used for surprise, short-range attacks.

Eternal Rest: This is a forbidden wood release technique recovered from the Senju clan Archives. The wood release user effectively sacrifices their lives and becomes a tree-based bomb, detonating and maiming anyone within a 50 - 100 foot radius with thorns and bramble. Then the shrapnel acts as seeds and grows on whatever surface they find themselves, including inside the targets, growing trees from them that bear jagged spikes and thorns. It is a cruel jutsu that was forbidden because, even as it could not be dodged when properly used, it provided an inhumanly slow death for the target.

End

That's that about that. The next chapter will be Minato's swearing-in as Hokage. We'll jump forward in a few days.

See you when I see you.

Foy.