Chương 420: CH_11.17 (420)

Hiruzen stared out of the window in his office. His meeting with Takuma, codenamed Ratel, had ended. Even though the reason for the summons was something else, the actual conversation had given him a lot to think about. There was a knock on the door. He turned around to see the ANBU Commander of the Domestic Branch enter his office. Hiruzen raised his hand for everyone, hidden or otherwise, to leave the office and give them space. He didn't want anyone listening to their conversation.

"How was he?" Stag asked.

"He brought a gift." Stag gazed at the puzzle box on the table.

"Is he one of those eccentric types?" he asked.

"It's for your son," Hiruzen said as he returned to his chair.

"Konohamaru?" Stag asked in even more befuddlement. It was a bold move on Hiruzen's part to appoint his eldest son as one of the ANBU Commanders, but he needed someone he could trust to rein in the Domestic Branch while the village was plunged into chaos from the Nine-Tails incident and left weak from the Fourth Hokage's demise. Even though he had been the Hokage for three decades, things had changed in the short while Minato had taken the office as the Fourth Hokage.

He had advised him to clean house and appoint his own people to the staff. The people Hiruzen worked with had been there far too long and had become set in their ways. For a new Hokage to be effective, he didn't need people who would complain at every junction because they were used to things being done a certain way. The Hokage's Office needed new blood. However, that advice became a problem when Hiruzen reassumed control of the office and didn't recognise any of the people there.

Things moved smoothly during the turmoil as everyone in the office set everything else aside and focused on making sure that the village didn't collapse in on itself after the attack. Problems emerged a month or two later when things calmed down and emotions returned to the fray. There was a sentiment among Minato's staff that Hiruzen was destroying everything the former had worked so hard on building.

They didn't oppose him openly because they didn't have the authority, but there was an unseen but noticeable resistance in the day-to-day operations. He tried to find a solution. Perhaps somewhere deep inside, he agreed with the sentiment. In the end, he had to clean house. Any other time, he would've received major pushback to appoint his son as the ANBU Commander, giving the Sarutobi clan substantial power, but things were so chaotic that it got a pass. Hiruzen smiled. It was an immensely thoughtful gift.

"Something for me and Konohamaru to do together."

"I see," Stag said, putting the puzzle set aside. He didn't like to discuss his personal life outside the house, especially not when he was wearing his ANBU mask.

"So, why is he so adamant about going after ROOT? Has he made a connection between his past and ROOT?"

"I can't be sure," Hiruzen shook his head. The conversation had gone in a different direction than he had expected.

"He clearly has personal feelings against them, but it could very well be that he sees them as an opportunity to advance his career." It was common to develop personal feelings against a target while working on a case. In Takuma's face, he had lost a comrade to ROOT. He had ample motivation to hate them.

"Poor kid." Stag sighed.

"But I guess, he's lucky not to come out completely broken after what he went through at such a young age." The air in the room became heavy when both of them thought about Takuma's true past. Hiruzen remembered the day he had heard about the boy. Even all that time ago, ANBU suspected ROOT of nefarious things. ROOT was created to handle many of the things that the Hidden Leaf didn't want to be associated with, but there were limits to what ROOT were allowed to do.

ANBU claimed that, due to a lack of significant oversight, ROOT was overreaching its authority and committing horrendous atrocities. They had found a laboratory, allegedly connected to ROOT, that was conducting highly illegal experiments on human test subjects without following any of the established laws and procedures.

ANBU raided the laboratory, but it seemed someone tipped them off because when ANBU breached inside, they found the equipment trashed, the documents burnt, and a nightmare of dead bodies of test subjects and even the people who worked in the laboratory. It was done hastily, only a couple of hours before the raid, but they had made sure ANBU gained nothing from their raid—nothing but a single child, three to four years old, who seemed to be one of the test subjects.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. They had tried to kill him like everyone else, but he had miraculously managed to cling to life. He was given immediate treatment, which saved his life, but he spent three months in a coma. When he finally woke up, the child refused to say a single word as though he were mute. He woke up every night screaming from nightmares to the point that there was a period of time where he refused to sleep.

Even a Yamanaka operative didn't dare peek inside his mind because it was broken and traumatised to a point that delving inside was a danger for both parties. It took over a year and a half and a lot of dedicated care to put together the broken child, but even then, it was advised that any attempts to delve into his mind or even simply trying to question him about his time in the laboratory would undo all the progress they had made. Hiruzen decided to give the child a chance at a normal life.

He ordered a forged identity and sealed all records under the highest level of security clearance—something that could only be accessed by the Hokage and the ANBU Commander—and even misplaced those documents in the wrong place so that even if someone tried to find them, they would fail. That child was Takuma. Hiruzen thought he would live a peaceful life as a civilian, only for the child to decide he wanted to be a shinobi. When asked why? He said that he wanted to become strong to protect himself.

In the end, they didn't find any evidence against ROOT, but it was clear they were involved. All of that had led to the current situation, where the child with a horrendous past because of ROOT was now hunting them down. They didn't think Takuma knew that ROOT were his torturer. He had never mentioned them, and they had done everything to separate him from his experiences as part of the healing process.

"It could be a problem," Stag said with a sigh.

"If he has made the connection, then he's running on a much more visceral hatred than the death of a friend, and that sort of internal motivation is never good in the long term. If he hasn't made the connection, we risk him eventually finding out and that causing him to spiral out because of his past trauma..."

"But, it's his choice, isn't it?" Hiruzen gave him a look to explain further. Stag continued, "Regardless of whether he has made the connection or not, it's his choice, isn't it? We don't have much choice in the matter."

"We can distance him from ROOT," Hiruzen said.

"And how would we explain it? Sidelining Ratel in itself isn't a problem, but how are you going to convince Weasel without revealing Ratel's history?" Stag said. Ratel was an operative without much influence to resist an order from the ANBU Commander or Hokage, but an ANBU Captain wouldn't just take it sitting down without a valid reason.

"And..."

"And?" Hiruzen asked.

"I know you care about his well-being, father—" Hiruzen was surprised because his son never called him father or treated him as such when he was working as ANBU Commander Stag.

"—but I'm not thrilled about being unable to use the best performing operative in the initiative. Unless you order it, I plan to keep him hunting after ROOT. The eradication of ROOT needs to happen as soon as possible for the good of the village before my time at ANBU comes to an end." There was only one way Stag would lose his position as the ANBU Commander: it was when Hiruzen would vacate his position and the next Hokage would choose a new commander.

Hiruzen had already retired once, and his second term had already crossed a decade—even if no one was talking about it, everyone knew that a new Hokage was bound to be chosen as soon as the next year. Hiruzen gazed at his eldest son. They never had the conversation, but he knew that his son was waiting for the day he would step down as the Hokage, so he, too, could retire from ANBU. A decade at the department had taken its toll on Hatake Kakashi, codenamed Fox; Hiruzen's son had been with ANBU for much longer.

He had a young child at home who rarely saw his parents, both of whom were in ANBU. Perhaps it's time, Hiruzen thought with a sigh. ———. Choosing his team wasn't the only thing Takuma needed to do. Running an anti-ROOT squad under Weasel came with its own dedicated resources, including funding, separate from the support of the initiative. Part of those resources was a dedicated contact at the Leaf Intelligence Division's Analysis Team.

"The person dealing with your squad will be Chūnin Yamanaka Nukashi," said the liaison handling the Analysis Team.

"He's been in the Analysis Team for a decade. This will be his first time working with an ANBU squad." Which meant it would take him time to get used to how ANBU operated. The liaison smiled.

"Which means you can push him around a little bit." That too, Takuma thought. He believed in treating his partners well and expected them to treat him well in return, but it was always reciprocated, and sometimes, a certain firmness was required to ensure things churned forward smoothly.

"Do you know anyone on the team?" he asked the liaison.

"No. Why do you ask?"

"The best way to ensure cooperation and preferential treatment is to build a rapport. The team leader is important, but you need a good relationship with the people who actually do the work. I need to connect with the analysts who are going to be sifting through the information, so they'll be on the lookout for information that might be useful to us, at least more than they might for someone they don't have a personal connection to."

They arrived at the Analyst Team's headquarters, which was not the first time he had seen it. He saw it at least once a month when he went to lunch with Taro. But it was his first time going inside. They were led to a conference room. On the way there, no one really seemed to be surprised to see ANBU there because that's how common it was for the Analyst Team to work with ANBU. The moment Takuma entered the room, he was hit by the overwhelming scent of a strong cologne.

"Welcome," Chūnin Yamanaka Nukashi got up from his chair around the conference table with a beaming smile. It had to be him because if it were anyone else, they would've been excluded from the meeting, but it was hard to do that with the boss. As that man came to shake his hand, Takuma was taken aback because when he looked around the table for the people, he saw Taro sitting there with his usual, completely disinterested look.