Itachi didn’t want to believe what he saw before his eyes.
In a windowless room in the basement of the building given to the Anbu, monitors were crowded together, their screens full of sights familiar to Itachi.
“The Nine Tails incident. The village officials suspected Uchiha involvement,” Kakashi remarked, standing beside him.
Itachi listened, staring at the monitors.
“Not satisfied with just isolating the clan compound on the edge of the village, they started monitoring everything in the compound, twenty-four seven.”
“And that’s this room?”
“It is.”
His Anbu comrades were controlling the images with the countless buttons and levers in front of the monitors. He couldn’t see the expressions on their faces because of the masks they wore, but despite this, he felt fairly certain that they were relaxed. That was the extent to which his comrades had let down their guard. And no wonder. For them, this was a monotonous job, simply staring at monitors. They didn’t give a thought to how monumental it was for the Uchiha clan.
“So, we can see everything?”
“We don’t need to check on each and every little thing, but basically.”
“I understand. I will under no circumstances inform the clan.”
There was no way he could tell them. If they found out that every corner of the compound was being monitored twenty-four hours a day, the rage his father and the others felt would become even more intense. It would simply add ample fuel to the fire for those who were clamoring for a coup.
Itachi had been sent to the Anbu by his father as a spy to investigate the true state of affairs in the village. If he were to faithfully fulfill that role, he should report this fact to the clan immediately. The moment he abandoned the idea of telling them, he abandoned the idea that he was a clan spy.
“From now on, you’re going to be monitoring here all day.”
“You’re telling me to watch my clan comrades?”
Abruptly, the man in the monkey mask, who had been sitting in front of the monitors, listening quietly to the exchange between Kakashi and Itachi, stood up. “Whether they’re your clan comrades or not, a mission is a mission. Your clan drew in sNine Tails. So they’re being monitored. Accept reality, newbie.”
“Kou.” Kakashi spoke the name of the man in the mask reprovingly.
Their colleague next to Kou whirled around in his chair, and turned his mask toward Kakashi. It was the round face of a cat. “His little sister was killed by the Nine Tails. So he doesn’t have the best impression of the Uchiha clan.”
“Don’t involve your personal feelings in a mission,” Kakashi told them.
“I understand. I’m sorry.” Kou came closer, head hanging. He bowed neatly, and passed by Kakashi. “All right, you’re up, newbie,” he said, unhappily.
The round face of the cat trailed after him.
“Oh, you’re here, good,” Kakashi said, looking at the door the two men had disappeared through.
Standing in front of it was the ninja who had been with Danzo, Sugaru.
It had already been just over four hours since Kakashi left. Sugaru had not said a single word. Itachi had never been particularly good at small talk anyway, so he didn’t find the silence painful. The time simply passed, with the two of them staring intently at the monitors.
It was pure chance that he saw it.
Although it was his mission, Itachi’s blood was not cold enough to allow him to coolly watch over the lives of his brethren. He frequently switched the monitor image before his eyes, trying as much as possible not to stay in one place. By viewing a series of moments like this, he managed to maintain his presence of mind somehow. He had trained to memorize a scene with a single glance, so Itachi was confident that he was amply executing his professional duties.
At one of these momentary fragments, he felt the faintest sense that something was off, and he stopped his hand.
The composition he expected, from the gates of Nakano Shrine. The stone paving of the path stretched straight out from the stone gates to the main building of the shrine. But the space precisely in the middle, between the gates and the main building, looked slightly twisted to Itachi’s eyes. Just for a fraction of a second.
The scene in the monitor had already regained its stillness. It had been a faint disturbance that Sugaru most likely hadn’t noticed. If anyone else had seen it, they would no doubt have thought it was simply the wind shaking the camera.
But Itachi had seen that disturbance before. The scene near the center of the stone paving had been disturbed by a vortex centered on one point. Almost like the surrounding space was being sucked into that point.
The man in the mask …
The phenomenon shown on the monitor was exactly the same as the jutsu the man in the mask had used when he escaped after he attacked Itachi and his team, during the mission to guard the daimyo of the Land of Fire.
“Why would that man …” Itachi muttered carelessly, before he noticed Sugaru’s presence, and regretted it. But Sugaru’s attention was focused on the monitor before him.
Annoyed by his own inexperience, Itachi dove once more into the sea of his thoughts.
When Tenma died, Itachi had clearly seen the right eye of the man, shining behind the mask. A black dot floated in the center of a crimson eye, three comma-shaped magatamas in the concentric circles. He was certain that the man’s right eye had been a sharingan. Which meant that he was a member of the Uchiha clan.
Over three years had passed since that incident. From time to time, the scene of his teammate’s death would come back to life in his mind. Tenma lost his life, an almost unsightly terror plastered on his face, looking as though he had no idea what was actually happening. Itachi had been astonished at the overwhelming difference in power that existed between himself and the man in the mask. He had despaired at his own powerlessness, and ended up activating his own sharingan. All of which meant that the man in the mask was the man who had awakened Itachi as a true Uchiha ninja.
The murderer of his colleague, and yet, a person he was indebted to. He felt a strange connection with the man in the mask.
Over the last three years, Itachi had wondered any number of times about the man’s true identity. From what he could infer, Itachi had thought the man was perhaps a member of the Uchiha clan, but that changed to a certainty now.
The blur in the video was because of the man in the mask. The man had appeared at Nakano Shrine. The day Tenma died, a sharingan had glittered beneath the attacker’s mask. All of this clearly pointed to him being a member of the Uchiha clan. So then, who exactly in the clan was it?
In the ensuing three years, Itachi had had contact with all the men of the clan living in the village. There was no one with ninjutsu to control space the way the man did. There was also no one with that same voice or aura. And more than anything else, Itachi had a hunch that the man was not someone from the village.
So then, who?
The Uchiha clan had lived in the village of Konohagakure since its founding. And he hadn’t heard of anyone outside the Uchiha clan having the sharingan. Although there were exceptions like Hatake Kakashi, they were still within Konohagakure. If precious kekkei genkai like the sharingan or the byakugan had been leaked outside the village, it would have been a serious affair for the entire nation. There was no way the village records wouldn’t have mentioned it. And as of the present date, there was nothing about the sharingan being leaked to another village.
When he thought about it like this, the possibilities naturally narrowed. The first was that a member of the Uchiha clan thought to have died in the Great War had survived, and become the man in the mask. It was a general rule that if a member of the Uchiha clan died in battle, their sharingan would be brought home by another ninja. So, the man couldn’t have stolen it from a corpse. In which case, it made sense to assume that someone thought to have died was alive, and coming to the compound with his sharingan still in his possession.
The second possibility was that the man in the mask was someone who had broken away from the Uchiha clan. This was less likely than the first option. Because since the founding of Konoha, only one person had ever broken away from the clan and left the village.
Uchiha Madara …
The man who founded Konohagakure together with Hashirama of the Senju clan. He had left the village, and was said to have died in battle with Hashirama in a place called the Valley of the End.
It wasn’t possible for someone who had died to be alive. At this point, Itachi should have abandoned this second option. But for some reason, he couldn’t completely put it aside. He had felt the man’s overwhelming chakra, his powerful presence, for himself, and it had been stronger than that of any ninja Itachi had encountered up to that point.
If a ninja like that had died in battle, then it should have gone down in history. However, nowhere in the records of the great battles of the past was the death of such a capable Uchiha ninja verified.
In which case …
Itachi could consider the idea that Madara was alive.
“… tachi.” A voice came at him from far away.
“Itachi!” Sugaru called Itachi back to reality. “It’s about time to switch shifts.”
“Mm,” Itachi answered vaguely. Even as he had indulged in his thoughts, his fingertip had kept pressing the button. Although he was not watching it at all, the monitor he had his eyes trained on changed from one scene to another in quick succession.
“Are you all right?”
“What do you mean?” he asked in response.
“No … It’s nothing.” Sugaru didn’t say anything more.