World Hunter (HXH Naruto Crossover)

Prologue: Missions and a Kamui Look Alike

Notes at the end of the chapter (** indicates notes)

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Even though Sasuke was pardoned of his crimes by his old sensei, he chose a life of traveling—at first searching, maybe for a part of himself he had lost in his battle for revenge.

But he was also running from relationships he had burned and relationships he had never even bothered to form in the first place.

Now he realizes it was simply the only path he could take.

He had been running for so long that he simply didn't know when the right time to return was.

There was also a part of him that hated Konoha. There would always be a part of him that blamed the village for what happened to his brother.

It was what Konoha was—rather than who its residents were.

Even with Kakashi as the Hokage and Naruto as the next-in-line, there was nothing that could keep him in the village—not after everything the village had done to him and everything he had done to the village in turn.

But that didn't mean he would stop protecting Konoha, it only meant that he didn't want to do it in the limelight.

Under the watch of the council and the politics that had caused the massacre of his clan and ruin of his brother.

It was in that respect that Sasuke had spent two years tracking down Jiraiya's old contacts and taking up the old toad sage's mantle, while also working on a project of his and Naruto's own making.

To find any remnants of the Otsutsuki Clan**.

After the battle with Kaguya, Naruto and him were wary—despite everything, despite their victory...

They were paranoid as ninja are apt to be.

Zetsu had stayed hidden for centuries—biding his time, manipulating reincarnations of Indra and Asura...

Without a single shinobi suspecting a thing.

It stood to reason shinobi more experience than them had been overlooking things—together they had been careless, even if it was in the ways nobody could ever fault them for.

So the mission was created.

If anymore members of the Ōtsutsuki clan lived, it would be a problem—maybe big enough to jeopardize the peace they had worked so hard to maintain.

Sasuke was to confirm their existence.

It was his both his primary and secondary objective. As important as it was, it couldn't retract from his job as Konoha's spymaster.

Kakashi was aware of the informal mission, and he could hardly object to it with how easily it fell into place.

Sasuke would continue to travel the elemental nations and gather intel. On the side, he would investigate any leads on the Ōtsutsuki clan's status.

The mission fell perfectly into place in his schedule, yet that was about all the mission fell into place for.

Neither him nor Naruto expected finding any members of the Goddess's clan to be easy, but they had expected to fair better than what they had now.

Perhaps, to at least have a definitive answer as to whether any members of the clan even lived.

But with absolutely nothing gained from his years blindly chasing dead ends (except for maybe a larger perspective on his own life and choices), the mission proves itself especially tedious.