Tsunade's daughter (A Naruto original fanfiction)

Chapter Seventy-One: Rebuilding the Village

Ever since the day following Pain's assault, the village had been started to be rebuilt gradually. Mostly everyone helped rebuild it, since it was everyone's village and home.

The news of Pain's assault had spread rather quickly throughout the different great nations. Suna had even offered their help to rebuild Konoha since Konoha had helped them after the respective deaths of the Sandaime Hokage and the Yondaime Kazekage without asking for anything in return. But Mai had kindly declined their offer, responding that they could manage to rebuild the village on their own.

Mai and Yamato had been using their Mokuton skills so they could rebuild homes and buildings much faster and more efficiently. But since Yamato didn't have Senju blood unlike Mai, doing this too much would wear him out much faster than her.

"Are you okay, Yamato?" she asked him once as they were still doing it.

"Yes, don't worry, Godaime-Sama, I'm fine," he said whereas he looked pretty exhausted.

"You should get some rest now. I can continue on my own, you know."

"No, no. It's alright. I can still do it."

"Don't go overuse your chakra. I don't want to have to heal you afterward," Mai said as if to warn him.

"You won't have to, Godaime-Sama. I promise I'm fine."

"Stop pretending you are, because I can see that you are not," Mai said, crossing her arms.

Yamato's facial expression immediately turned to being awkward.

"Sumanai, Godaime-Sama, I didn't mean to lie to you," he said, scratching the back of his head with one arm. "It's just that I don't want to feel useless. I want to help as much as possible."

"But you won't be useless if you just rest for a little bit. You've been helping us much more than necessary, and I really appreciate it," she said, smiling softly at him.

Yamato smiled back at her sheepishly.

"Well... It's normal... Since the village was completely destroyed, we need to rebuild it as quickly as possible."

"And you're doing a great job so far, Yamato," she assured him before winking at him, which made him blush slightly.

It had been decided that they would first and foremost focus on rebuilding people's houses and crucial buildings such as the hospital, so the medic could take care of all the wounded people in a decent place. As for the rest, like all the different kinds of shops, some villagers had been starting to rebuild them all nonetheless. And as for the Hokage Tower, Mai had deemed that it could wait and after she helped rebuilding most people's houses, she created a wooden office (like the one in the anime), not as large and huge as the Hokage Tower, but at least she would have some place to work in temporarily.

The same evening when she had finally built it, she went inside and spent some time in it. But it was rather to get lost in thought than to do real work.

She thought about her time as the Hokage, from when she had officially become so until now.

What had she achieved as the Hokage concretely?

Well actually nothing.

Apart from giving orders to different shinobi and teams and remaining sat in her office doing paperwork, she had done nothing.

Well, she had helped once fight one of the Akatsuki members to avenge Asuma's death. But Naruto and Akira had been the ones to defeat the man in the end.

But she couldn't give up now. As her father had told her, the struggle wasn't over yet, and the worst was probably yet to come. And right now was certainly not the right time to wallow.