"What the hell are you doing? They were just a bunch of orphan children, Sakumo!"
The white-haired man named Sakumo Hatake raised his head to look at the Jiraiya standing before him.
He too was filled with guilt about the building in flames a few meters behind him, but it was against his principles to refuse a mission from the Hokage-sama. Even if the mission was to attack an orphanage, or slaughter a civilian community, or even slaughter young children, he couldn't make exceptions.
Jiraya today set out to return to Konoha after three years away to teach the boy he believed to be a child of destiny and two of his friends, but coincidentally on the way he encountered a ninja looting an orphanage.
After a long battle to punish the ninja, Jiraya realized that this ninja was not simple at all, because the ninja had easily destroyed the entire orphanage while fighting him.
After Jiraya managed to scratch his opponent's face with a sudden attack, the mask on the ninja's face fell to the ground, and for a while, silence fell.
When Jiraya saw that it was Hatake Sakumo who had committed the inhuman act of slaughtering the orphanage, he immediately cursed him in anger, but after a while, he fell silent again because he saw that Sakumo's eyes were reddened and two small drops were slipping down from his eyes.
After Jiraya's fiery personality was extinguished by the shock of seeing a tough ninja-like Sakumo crying, he took a moment to think and realized that Sakumo was doing what he did at someone's command.
Jiraya was about to vomit with a feeling of nausea deep in the pit of his stomach when they both heard a cry coming from the ruined house.
After the sound of a small baby's cry echoed through the dark forest for a while, Sakumo drew his sword and began to walk slowly, but after a few steps he heard the sound of a summoning technique and at the same moment he felt the strongest killing intent he had ever felt in his life.
He turned his head a little and looked behind him to see three pairs of eyes staring at him through the dark forest.
Hatake stopped moving, wondering what to do, and the only sound in the forest was that of the baby crying again. Sakumo Hatake thought for a while and then remembered the purpose of his mission.
According to what Danzo had told him, these children were the test subjects used by an S-rank fugitive to create a new bloodline. In other words, these children were stable animals, like sheep raised to be eaten by humans. Their fate was to die in extraordinary pain.
Hatake felt that if he did not kill this last baby, he would fail in his mission and, most importantly, the deaths of all the children he had killed would be meaningless. Fortunately, as a ninja renowned for his intelligence, after a brief hesitation, he found a way to make it up to God, calm Jirayaa down a little, and complete the mission.
"Jirayaa... Can you keep a secret?"
Jiraya heard Hatake Sakumo's tired voice and decided to talk to him first and then do what he was about to do. Meanwhile, the two old frogs summoned by Jiraya looked at each other out of the corner of their eyes and remained silent, sensing Jiraya's intent to kill.
When Sakumo received Jiraya's approval, he released his sword and told him of his plan as he continued walking towards the orphanage.
"Jiraya... can you do me a favor and tell people that when you returned to the village, you found a baby and met me on your way to the orphanage and then you entrusted this baby to me to raise?"
Jiraya understood what he meant after hearing those words, but still didn't trust him.
Sakumo left his sword behind and walked towards the ruins of the orphanage, while Jiraya continued to observe him and continue to intensify his chakra. Although he had encountered hints of Konoha's dark side in the past, this time was different.
Fortunately, Sakumo was as bored as he was, and all he could do now was to relieve himself by saving the life of this last remaining child.
Sakumo dug a little into the ruins and pulled out a small baby that had luckily survived in a void. As he looked at the baby's dark eyes and dark hair, the baby stopped crying and looked at him innocently with wide-open eyes.
As soon as the baby stopped crying, Jiraiya misunderstood the situation and blew a powerful ball of flame. Meanwhile, Sakumo, who was completely emotionally broken while looking into the baby's eyes, could only collect some chakra on his back in response to the fireball.
Jiraya saw Sakumo fall to the ground after being dragged for tens of meters, half of his body burnt, but his main attention was on the child in Sakumo's arms. The child started crying again after this attack, but Jiraya realized he had misunderstood and canceled the summoning technique.
Even though Sakumo was in pain from the fireball, he felt no anger. What he had been forced to do today had only left him with self-hate.
If he hadn't known that the third shinobi war was about to begin around the time the second shinobi war was ending, he would have announced to the village that he wanted to retire without hesitation.
While Jiraya was tending to Sakumo's wounds for his mistake and trying to get to the bottom of what happened there, Sakumo told Jiraya that he would be the father of this child in the future, and then the two of them walked back to the village.
The baby in Sakumo's arms was suggesting to himself that everything he had seen all this time had been a dream. Right?
Well, of course, a baby can't have such thoughts at this age when it looks like a newborn, but who says this baby is a normal baby?