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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.

With the five great ninja nations having chosen a path of cooperation, the number of battles in the surface world ruled by the daimyos had also decreased remarkably in recent times. Requests for A- and B-rank work—the dangerous missions—were also on the decline. But the situation was not as simple as that. The number of comparatively easy C- and D-rank requests had shrunk as well.

Shikamaru had heard about this problem promptly, given that he had a seat at headquarters. But just because the number of requests was declining didn’t necessarily mean there was something specific they could do about it. As an alliance, they had reached the conclusion that they would watch how things progressed for the time being.

But a man had appeared to link the issue of the declining requests with another problem from after the Great War—Kakashi, sitting at the desk in front of him. The problem Kakashi had his eye on: the ninja who had started going rogue in the five great shinobi nations about a year earlier. Once a month, a new ninja would desert from each village, making twelve ninja per village up to that point. Combining the five villages, a total of sixty shinobi had disappeared, all of them young, single men.

Desertion was a serious crime. Naturally, the villages had sent out pursuers. But they had not been able to catch even one of the missing ninja.

“Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to send backup and have Sai investigating this the whole time. I should have pulled him in and let him catch his breath before heading back to the Land of Silence.”

“It’s too late to second-guess yourself now.”

“You’re right.”

After leaving the village to investigate the matter of the rogue ninja, Sai had found a small clue and reported back just over a month ago. Kakashi had the idea that the rogue ninja and the sharp drop in work requests might be closely related, and so he told Sai to continue his investigation and dispatched additional members of the Anbu to back him up.

The clue Sai had arrived at: the Land of Silence.

The continent was made up of the five great nations, home to the five great hidden shinobi villages, with medium-sized and minor countries wedged between these, all vying for power. To the far west was the Land of Silence. With no shinobi village and absolutely no contact with any other nation, it was called the Land of Silence for its quiet ways and refusal to share its stories. Like the other lands, it was populated with citizens ruled by a daimyo, but absolutely no other details slipped out of this closed country.

And Sai said that somehow, Konoha’s rogue ninja had escaped there. That was not the only bit of information fueling concern. Some of the Konoha ninja who had gone missing in the Great War were there too. Rogue and missing ninja were gathering in the Land of Silence. But to what end?

Kakashi saw that this was the reason for the sudden drop in requests to the alliance.

“What do you think’s happened to Sai?”

“He’s alive.”

“I think so too.” Beneath the mask, Kakashi’s mouth pulled itself into a smile. “This fixation on the man Gengo, the letter’s practically oozing with it—it reads something like admiration.” He touched the letter, written in Sai’s flowing brush strokes.

Shikamaru picked up on his words, as though reading his mind. “I don’t want to believe it, but Sai might have been taken in by this Gengo.”

“He’s purehearted, that guy.”

“If he’s alive, we have to save him.”

“We do.” Kakashi’s scarred left eye was colored with a dark shadow, and Shikamaru was acutely aware of what this capable Hokage was not saying.

There was something more important than saving their comrade.

Shikamaru brought it out into the open himself. “If the situation in the Land of Silence is like Sai says, and they are active in the way that you suspect, Lord Hokage, then we have to strike as soon as possible.”

“I know.”

Shikamaru didn’t stop. “It’s been two years since the Great War. The villages have finally gotten their feet back under them, but currently no nation has even half the power they once had.”

“We can’t go to war.”

“Exactly.”

Letting out another heavy sigh, Kakashi stood up. He walked around the desk strewn with scrolls and documents to stand next to Shikamaru. “Looks like you have the same idea I do.”

“Yes.”

“In that case, you probably know what I’m thinking?”

“You want to go yourself.”

In his youth, Kakashi had made some noise as a member of the Anbu, a capable warrior even in this special unit, the sole purpose of which was to take on dark, clandestine missions. Shikamaru saw a darkness whispering deep in Kakashi’s eyes, twisted into a bow shape by his smile.

“You’re the Lord Hokage,” Shikamaru spit out, staring straight into this darkness. “You more than understand your own position. You must already be aware that your wish cannot be granted.”

“Your head works as fast as Master Minato’s ninjutsu.”

Shikamaru stared, not responding.

“Anyway, if it’s like Sai said, then the key to the Land of Silence is this man Gengo.” Kakashi tossed his words at the silent Shikamaru.

“Yes.”

“If we can do something about him, then we’ll no longer have a problem, right?”

“I think so too.”

“So then…” Kakashi placed his hands on his hips like an old man and stretched deeply. “Who do you think I should send?”

“I’ll go.”

“What?” Kakashi’s eyes grew round. “Don’t you have a pretty big role to play already? You’re shouldering a part of the alliance as Konoha’s representative. You don’t need to go doing assassination work anymore.”

Assassination…

Kakashi had said it. By putting into words the thought they shared, he had made it real. If it came to a fight between the Allied Shinobi and the Land of Silence, the alliance might be thrown into confusion once more, after it had finally and at great cost pulled itself together into its current stable form. And with each nation utterly and thoroughly exhausted, there wasn’t a soul anywhere looking for a new fight.

If they believed Sai’s letter, assassinating Gengo would be the most effective method of silencing the Land of Silence.

“The fewer people who know about this, the better.”

“That doesn’t mean you need to go.”

“My friends have been captured. Please let me do this.”

Kakashi held his tongue, as if his objections had been squashed by Shikamaru’s insistence.

Shikamaru thought about it. Kakashi was right; he didn’t have to go. A critical part of the work of someone higher up the chain was selecting the right person for the job and entrusting them with the necessary tasks. Even still, Shikamaru had volunteered.

He didn’t know why, really. He just could not for the life of him stand by and do nothing.