Dear Sixth Hokage,
I don’t have much time, so I will be brief.
With regard to the matter of concern, I have concluded my investigation to a certain extent. However, not one of my ten companions has returned, and I am now alone. It is not certain whether they are dead or alive. But there seems to be no doubt that they were detected by the enemy.
Allow me to get right to the point.
The state of affairs in the Land of Silence is several times more serious than you suspected, Hokage. If the land is left to continue as is, the Allied Shinobi will be faced with a predicament at some point. In fact, I believe this situation could potentially change the framework of the world itself.
There is a man at work in this land. His name is Gengo. Gengo is the Land of Silence, and the Land of Silence is Gengo. It would be no exaggeration to say that everything in the Land of Silence is for Gengo.
Fascinating.
That is the most appropriate word to describe him.
Gengo may very well change the world. Perhaps that’s something I want. The ninja is a creature with so little in the way of salvation, don’t you think? We endure, thus we are ninja. Is that really enough?
Lord Hokage.
Kakashi.
I don’t know myself anymore…
Lifting his face from the letter, Shikamaru let out a short sigh. Before him, Kakashi sat with his elbows up on the desk. He wasn’t wearing the conical hat he always wore when he went out as Hokage or was on official Hokage business, and his hair brushed against his forehead, having grown somewhat over the last two years. His face from the nose down was, as always, covered by a mask. Resting his chin on clasped hands, Kakashi stared silently at Shikamaru. “What do you think?” he asked, coolly.
The Hokage’s office. They were the only ones there.
“Why did Sai send a cartoon beast and not return himself?”
“Good question.” Kakashi lifted his chin from his hands and threw himself back in his chair. Sticking his chin out and staring at the ceiling above him, he sighed even more heavily than Shikamaru had. “From that letter, it seems like everyone other than Sai has already fallen into enemy hands or been killed.”
“Looks like.”
“Sai was leading a team of ten masters, the cream of the crop, even amongst members of the Anbu. I can’t believe they would be so careless as to expose themselves to the enemy. This enemy must be fairly adept too.” As he spoke, Kakashi twirled around in his chair. He disappeared from view behind the backrest, then reappeared as he spun all the way around again. No matter how dire the situation, Kakashi never tensed up.
Normally, the more urgent something was, the more a person froze up, both mentally and physically. But Kakashi tried to keep his thinking loose by deliberately doing something frivolous, like whirling around in his chair. A competent ninja, he had likely come by this behavior naturally through surviving long years of battle and bloodshed.
“Mm-hmm.” Shikamaru opened his mouth, a tense look on his face, as Kakashi stared absentmindedly at the ceiling. “So break them out, I guess.”
“Yeah,” came Kakashi’s immediate, brief reply, face still turned away from Shikamaru and up at the ceiling.
“If he’s sending this kind of letter,” Shikamaru continued, “then he should have returned to the village himself and reported to you, Lord Hokage—”
“How many times have I told you to call me Kakashi?” Kakashi finally looked at Shikamaru. “When did you get so stiff? You used to be more relaxed, it was nice.”
“I can’t be a child forever.”
“Naruto’s still a ‘child’ even now.”
“That guy is who he is.”
“Oh, is that it…” Kakashi got a sad look in his eyes before dropping them down to the letter from Sai spread out on the desk. Sai’s Cartoon Beast Mimicry transformed a written message into an animal, dispatched it to its destination, and turned the beast back into the original text when it arrived at a blank scroll. The jet-black falcon Shikamaru had seen on the roof was the message Kakashi was reading now. “The state of affairs in the Land of Silence is several times worse than I thought, huh?”
“So I suppose we should assume that the majority of the ninja who disappeared in the Great War and any recent rogue ninja are in the Land of Silence, then?”
“If Sai is making declarations like this, I suppose so.”
“The Land of Silence…”
Everything went back to the events of two years earlier.
Many had been sacrificed in the Fourth Great Ninja War brought about by Uchiha Madara and Uchiha Obito. The shinobi of the five great nations, faced with supernatural powers beyond the realm of the human, joined together to stand against them. In the end, they managed to defeat Otsutsuki Kaguya, the one controlling Madara from the shadows, and end the war.
A time of peace came, and the nations started dealing with the aftermath of the intense struggle, which was when identifying the dead and the missing became a more pressing matter. The battle had been fierce enough to alter the terrain of the continent, so those who left behind corpses were lucky. Given this, many more were identified as missing than dead in the villages: somewhere around ten thousand people in the five great nations, sacrifices of the Great War—a war that threatened to destroy not only the ninja villages, but the world itself. Some said they were lucky to have made it through with only thousands lost.
But Shikamaru didn’t think so. Even one death was a death. Even one unavoidable sacrifice was too many.
In the Great War, he had lost a friend, Hyuga Neji. To Shikamaru, Neji was not a number, not one in ten thousand. His friend’s death itself was everything. And the same could be said for any one of the people lost in the war. He felt the death of a single person could never be explained away in a simple word like “sacrifice.”
Which was exactly why they could not allow a war to break out.
“So just how many of the missing drifted into the Land of Silence exactly?” Kakashi muttered, interrupting Shikamaru’s thoughts.
Just as Kakashi noted, Shikamaru was aware that of the ninja who had gone missing at the end of the Great War, more than a few had survived and gone into hiding. He had first realized this at the Allied Shinobi headquarters. All work requests came through the alliance headquarters, allowing him to see before anyone else the number and types of requests coming in. In an unusual turn a year earlier, the number of ninja requests had dropped so much that the change was practically visible.