The cavern was unrecognizable.
Once, Root's subterranean headquarters had stretched like a spiderweb beneath Konoha — a clinical maze of reinforced concrete, chakra-dampening barriers, surgical theaters, cryo-chambers, and the kind of archives that never existed on paper. Now, it was just debris and smoke. The once-flawless symmetry of the corridors had collapsed inward. Fractured rebar jutted out like exposed bones. Flickering seal-tags tried weakly to hold power grids together. The air reeked of burnt blood, melted metal, and the sterile tang of lost control.
In the center of it all, Danzō Shimura is laying on a special medical bed.
His cloak was torn, soaked in blood and ash. His right arm — the one bearing a grotesque lattice of implanted Sharingan — was shattered, hanging uselessly and showing some bone. Five of the eyes had burned out during the chaos. Only one remained: pulsing faintly, like a dying candle trying to remember what it meant to be lit.
He coughed once. Blood hit the floor in thick, dark ropes.
Still, he was alive. Thanks to Izanagi. Barely alive.
The irony was not lost on him, a jutsu designed to rewrite death had left him with a body that could no longer carry the weight of his own legacy.
Footsteps approached—limping, slow, careful.
A senior Root researcher, coat torn, holding a scorched tablet with trembling fingers, emerged from the blackened corridor. He bowed, but hesitated to speak. Danzō lifted his head slowly, like a machine being reactivated under protest.
"Give it to me. All of it." Said Danzō raspily.
"Sir… the status report is incomplete. Half the systems are offline—"
"Give. It. To me." Danzō repeated forcefully.
The man swallowed.
"Prison Sector 4 collapsed completely. We lost Subjects Ten, Thirteen, and Sixty-Six. No chakra signatures. No remains."
"Ten was flame-immune. Sixty-Six absorbed sound waves through her skin..." Murmured Danzō.
"They were near the central detonation point. We also lost experimental clones Alpha through Gamma. The tanks ruptured. The control seals melted. Sir… they never even activated."
Danzō's lips parted, but no sound came out. The researcher uneasily continued:
"The jutsu archive was hit. Sections B and C are… gone. Scrolls on chakra duplication, the Mirror Pulse array, the Recursive Summoning Ritual—destroyed."
"Years… years of testing... Danzō said but he had to take a litle break to shake off the emotion from his voice. Years of silence and sacrifice."
The researcher lowered his voice further.
"We tried to stabilize the chakra current around the primary freezer before the cave-in. Vaults B and D failed. The Sharingan collection… was inside."
Silence.
The lights above flickered. Danzō stared into the stone floor, the remains of cables and bone. Then— He laughed. Just once. Low. Dry. Full of something far too cracked to be humor, then hoarsely said:
"All of it. Gone. For a beast with a grudge and a child's giggle."
His eye narrowed. The last Sharingan spun slowly, lazily—like a dying planet around a black sun.
"Tell me about the surface."
The researcher shifted uncomfortably.
"Sarutobi lives. Missing an arm. He's reassumed the Hokage seat. Civilian casualties were... mitigated. The ANBU squads absorbed most of the destruction."
"And Root?"
"...Only two full squads survived. By pure chance — they were on field operations. Everyone stationed here... is gone."
Danzō closed his eye.
Root. A black tree of shadows. Decades of pruning, grafting, bending toward his vision. And now its trunk lay split, its roots burned away.
A small voice broke the silence. It was a young recruit who asked with a soft voice:
"Lord Danzō… should we begin recovery?"
Three children stood in the shadows nearby—new recruits, barely teenagers. Blood on their uniforms. None of it their own. Still alive, but shaken.
Danzō forced himself upright, groaning with effort. Every muscle screamed, but he managed to plant his good arm against the wall and rise. The children's eyes went wide. They had never seen him wounded. Never imagined he could bleed.
He smiled. It was not warm.
"Yes. Begin recovery protocols. You will coordinate extraction of memory cores from Vault E. Distribute ration packs to surviving personnel. Find the bodies. Burn them if necessary. Hide the damage."
"And the surface? Do we inform Hokage Sarutobi?" Asked the child ninja, trying to maintain a composed voice.
"No. He'll do what he always does—send thoughts and prayers while the real work happens below."
The researcher spoke again, his voice quieter now:
"Sir… there's something else. The Kyūbi. The attack… it was strange"
Danzō turned to him slowly.
"From the surviving on duty Yamanaka reports..."
Danzō's eye narrowed.
"It was intelligent. Playful, almost. Like… it was enjoying itself."
A long silence.
"That wasn't a fox. That was the epitome of evil..." Danzō affirmed slowly, forcefully.
He looked down at his own ruined arm, at the last spinning eye embedded in his skin. He flexed it weakly.
"One eye left. One last cheat against fate."
Then ordered the recruits firmly:
"You will never speak of what you saw here. You will never speak of my weakness. Root was burned today, but seeds bloom in ash. We are not finished."
The three children straightened, fists to their hearts then confirmed in unison:
"Yes, Lord Danzō."
He turned back to the researcher.
"We start over again. Not with weapons this time. With ghosts. Let them build their village above. We'll build the future below."
The darkness pulsed around them, thick with failure, smoke, and silent vows. Far away, the Kyūbi slept inside a child, smiling in a prison made of hopes and dreams.
And the man who had once ruled Konoha's shadows started over again—in ruin, in silence, in fire. And sudenly, unnoticeably, something wet fell on the ground from Danzō's original eye. Drop after drop at first, but finally left alone he could no longer hold it. Silently the frustration broke the last dam, and so Danzō cried.