Rabbit Princess [Gaara] [3]

☾ 7 ☽

"The Land of Silence..."

All of this went back two years ago when countless lives had been sacrificed in the Fourth Great Ninja War brought on 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.

For the duration of the Fourth Great Ninja War, Tsukiko had tried her very best to save as many people as she possibly could. She hadn't felt the same amount of pressure or horror from their enemies as the other Shinobi had, but the strain on her heart upon losing so many comrades in front of her eyes was something that she carried to this day.

But following this, 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, especially since the Fourth Great Ninja War had called united units.

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.

Many of those people seemed to really praise Tsukiko for her constantly defending people but Tsukiko's thoughts were far from what these people had to say.

Even one death was a death – even one unavoidable sacrifice was far too many, far too much.

In the Great War, Tsukiko had lost many familiar faces, and even one of her close friends – Hyuga Neji. Tsukiko could not consider Neji to be a number, not one in a hundred, a thousand or even ten thousand. Her friend's death itself was everything.

And the same could be said for any one of the people lost in the war. Tsukiko felt the death of a single person could never be explained away in a simple word like 'sacrifice'.

Because of that, Tsukiko could never allow another war to break out when she could do something to avoid it. Which was why she was acting to carefully about the relations between Konoha and other nations, and constantly stressing upon peaceful negotiations.

"So, just how many of the missing drifted into the Land of Silence exactly?" Kakashi muttered, interrupting Tsukiko's train of thoughts, pulling her back to reality.

This was something that Tsukiko had first raised alarm about, given that she got to visit plenty of nations and villages due to her work and she noticed the scarcity of Ninjas wherever she went. She was well 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.

This had been confirmed to Tsukiko when she and Shikamaru visited the Allied Shinobi headquarters on the behalf of Konohagakure. All work requests came through the alliance headquarters, allowing them 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.