Chapter 64: Mangekyo power and controlling Mukai

Mukai's betrayal didn't come as a surprise to me. I understood his personality clearly and knew that his family was his biggest weakness especially his ill son.

However, I never expected it to come so early and even cause me to miss the chance to find Tsunade and bring her back to gain her help to protect the village and maybe even help to resurrect Minato and Kushina fully and not use such a temporary tactic like the Spirit Transformation Jutsu.

Maybe the situation could have changed with her here as another Kage level ninja especially with her unmatched medical skills which would boost both the morale and survivability of our ninjas to a whole new level in this hopeless situation.

What annoyed me the most about this is that it brought back some of the bad memories from my past life that I couldn't forget.

In my past life, I lived in poverty after my parent's unfortunate death, the incident that turned me into an orphan and kept me scarred for life to the point that remembering it caused me to awaken the Mangekyo Sharingan.

However; I eventually fought through it along with all the pain and trauma I was experiencing at that point in my life.

At last, thanks to all my hard work I was able to create a small business with my best friend, a friend that I trusted with my life at the time and it saved me from my poverty.

Some more time passed, and we both got even more successful as we developed our business into something bigger. However, with success came confidence, and following that confidence came arrogance.

Being young I was blinded with my success and became less calculating in my approach and thanks to my lonely heart at the time I didn't notice the changes happening to my best friend, or maybe I didn't want to notice...

My greedy 'best friend' wanted the business all to himself, so he concocted a very simple but destructive scheme, he visited my house with his girlfriend and idiot me didn't suspect anything and welcomed them happily.

However, he took an opportunity to go to the bathroom and secretly hid many illegal drugs and weapons in my house.

Clearly, after he left, he called the police and I was quickly arrested because of this and what followed was betrayal from other workers of our business who he paid to assassinate my character and frame me for things I didn't do.

Basically, he used everything in the book of treacheries to convince the court to make him the sole owner of the business and I had to go to jail for some years because of this incident.

It taught me a very harsh lesson and I learned the harsh way how trusting people without any hesitation is a recipe for disaster and it gave a new meaning to the saying 'Money changes people'. No, it simply shows who they truly are!

As I escaped from my memories I couldn't help but think 'Did I become reckless?' as I looked back at my previous decisions especially the one about recruiting Mukai.

'I recruited a man that chose to betray the village he was living in for years because of his family, so him betraying me for the same reason is expected. However, I never thought it would come this soon huh? Or did I naively think I could change him?' I couldn't help but rethink why I decided to do this.

'It must be my save and load ability. it made me less careful knowing I can simply go back in time and fix my mistakes which resulted in me misjudging and overlooking many things like what led to the current situation...' I decided to be more careful in the future before I turned my focus back to Mukai who's still looking at me perplexed.

"Where did you find Tsunade?" I asked him something I really needed to know for my future plans.

Mukai seemed surprised at me asking this out of all the things he was waiting to be asked about like why he betrayed me and whatnot.

Still, he chose to remain silent and decided to not answer my question 'Sorry I can't tell you this or Kumo will go back on their words if Tsunade comes here, i can't risk Murata's only chance in life' thought Mukai while he observed my weird calmness in this situation,and he understood that this was merely the calm before the storm.

I calmly looked at his decision and decided to try to provoke him a little "Not answering huh? I wonder, from where you get all this courage knowing your family is still here in Konoha"

Hearing my clear threat, Mukai looked at me menacingly "Don't force my hand kid, I really don't want to kill you"

I shook my head at him "No, don't be mistaken, right now I am the one who's conflicted on whether to kill you or not"

Mukai eyes went wide and looked like he heard the most hilarious joke " hah, kid do you really think that I showed you every-" he was about to continue saying that he never showed his full strength bla bla bla but I quickly cut him off.

"Shut up" I said as I looked at him with dead eyes as if looking at a corpse and he suddenly froze not because of what I said or the fact that he saw my eyes changing into Mangekyo Sharingan.

No! He froze because of the dark aura that enveloped the air around me, and an overwhelming sense of fear hit him as he saw with his Byakugan something he never thought he could see.

Death!

"Mukai, I will ask you one last time, are you a friend or an enemy?" I said and what I got as an answer is Mukai who finally felt his life was at risk trying to close the distance on me to use his gentle fist to immobilize me.

I sadly shook my head before I calmly muttered "Jikininki.." blood started dripping from my right eye as for Mukai he simply stopped in his tracks and stood rooted in place like a statue before he bowed to me.

I regretfully sighed before i turned around and walked back to the Hokage office with Mukai following obediently behind me and the only indication of a conflict happening is the blood still dripping from my face...

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Meanwhile, inside the Hokage tower, all the clan heads and high-level ninja were invited to an urgent meeting but it wasn't the usual meeting for managing Konoha. No this was a war meeting, and currently, Shikaku as the Jonin commander was standing in front of everyone.

In front of him was a board that showed the map of the world and he was pointing at the land of fire and showing its borders with the other great lands highlighted in red, meaning a very deadly area. This was where the war's going to take place.

They were currently discussing how to relocate their manpower to defend against the multiple fronts and Shikaku proposed a plan based on the elements superiority theory because one of the advantages of Konoha's ninja is that they don't specialize in one type of release like Kumo for example that specializes mostly in lightning release.

Instead, here different clans have different specializations and secret arts, and based on this the plan for war was made...

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AN: Jikininki are Japanese mythical creatures, they are humans that transformed into shapeless beings with an insatiable hunger for eating corpses. They symbolize the human nature, always wishing for more, never being happy with what they have...

So what do you guys think the ability he gained from this is, it's really ironic to be honest