He continued to spend his days cramming into his head the contents of the papers he approved while thinking about the matter with the Land of Earth. Both tasks were important, and neither had room for errors. He no longer heard the voices of his staff when he fell into this meditative state of concentration. Over the last few days, it had become a matter of course that he only noticed a person after they had called his name loudly several times.
At the last meeting of the Five Kages, he had seeded the threat of Konoha in the minds of the other Kages, which was good, but now he was at a dead end. He’d told Naruto that they had to take the initiative, but he still had no concrete plan. Currently, his only option was to sit like a passive observer and watch for Iwagakure’s next move.
He heard from Ro and Soku on a regular basis. Apparently, Iwagakure had begun to accept fewer missions. Shikamaru assumed they most likely intended to keep as many ninja as possible on standby in the village so that they’d be ready to mobilize whenever the order came in from the Land of Earth. He couldn’t simply sit back and wait for the day of destruction. He could see a way forward, but the details were hazy.
This nut wouldn’t crack if they only had ninja talking to each other. At the end of the day, the ninja bowed to the plans of the daimyo of the five great nations. Shikamaru could forsee a situation like the one developing because a daimyo’s greed would disrupt the delicate balance of power.
He needed a radical plan to break this stalemate. For ninja, battle may be their core nature, but he sought coexistence among them, a peaceful world without fighting. Perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad thing for the ninja to disappear as the world moved toward peace. Some might have laughed this away as an immature fantasy, but Shikamaru was looking for eternal peace. A tragedy like the last great war must never be allowed happen ever again.
If there was no more war, then there would be no more need for the ninja. But the ninja jutsu and chakra systems were beneficial to society at large. If non-ninja could wield them effectively, then they would be even more useful. But that transfer of knowledge could only ever begin once there was an unshakeable peace. If ninja techniques were used for evil, their power could destroy the world, something that had been made amply clear to all in the last great war. Which was exactly why ninja techniques should only be shared when people had abandoned the path of hatred.
The road to achievingthis ideal world was still very rocky, but Shikamaru would never give up. He believed the day would come. Otherwise, there would have been no meaning in sacrificing time with his family to his work like this.
“…ru.” From far off in the distance, someone was calling him.
A woman.
The thought passed through his mind as his hand calmly pressed his stamp down.
“…kamaru.”
Too loud.
“Shikamaru!”
An angry roar was loud enough to scatter his thoughts. He jerked his head up to find a familiar face before him. Leaning forward, hand deftly placed between two mountains of paper, was the daughter of his former master.
“What? Mirai?”
“Don’t ‘what’ me! Do you know how long I’ve been calling your name?” Scowling at Shikamaru’s stunned response, Sarutobi Mirai, child of Sarutobi Asuma, took her hand off the desk and put it on her hip. “You should really do something about that habit of not noticing what’s going on around you.”
“I’m thinking about serious business here,” he told her. “I don’t have time for trivialities.”
“And what are you planning to do if someone comes along with their own serious business?”
“They’ll just yell at me like you did.”
“True…”
He could tell by looking at her tense face that Mirai had brought some new trouble for him.
Long, long ago, this girl would lisp “Shika!” and would
throw herself into his arms whenever she saw. She was the only girl he’d raised as master and teacher. He made sure he kept his promise to his own master in heaven to protect when Mirai.. Even with the endless work he was doing to assist Naruto, he’d found the time to teach Mirai the fundamentals of ninjutsu once she started at the academy. Her father, Asuma, was the son of the third Hokage, so Mirai had the blood of a Hokage running through her veins. Her innate ninja abilities were so great that he sometimes thought it presumptuous to say he had taught her anything. After showing her something once, she picked it up immediately; by their next meeting, she would have thoroughly mastered the technique. He often thought that she didn’t really need him.
But Mirai continued to call Shikamaru master and adored him to this day. While it flattered him when she would tell him without hesitation that he’d turned her into a real ninja, it was also embarrassing.
He laid his square seal down on the desk, settled back in his chair, and asked his loyal student, “So what fresh annoyance are you bringing to me today?”
“You know what’s happening in this village in three days, right?” she asked.
“Don’t answer a question with a question,” he said, a smile spreading across his face, and then answered her. “The daimyo of the Land of Fire is coming to the village to meet with Naruto.”
It was a good opportunity. They weren’t going to get any further if they kept this conversation to the ninja alone. A meeting of the daimyo would open up a new front on the game and put a direct stop to the daimyo of the Land of Earth. This was Shikamaru’s secret strategy to break open this stalemate he faced.
In his wildest dreams, he couldn’t have planned for a better opportunity for Madoka Ikkyu, Land of Fire’s daimyo, to visit Konohagakure. Through Naruto, he would get Ikkyu to convene a meeting of the five great nations. If they could make such a summit happen, the likes of which had only been done a handful of times in the long history of the continent, the game would advance to a new level. They had to persuade Ikkyu to call together the other daimyo, whatever it took.