Chapter 16: The Lightning Country Incident
The hot springs of Yugakure had provided a welcome respite from weeks of travel, but even the soothing mineral waters couldn't wash away the unease that had been building in my chest. Something was wrong in Lightning Country—not the atmospheric disturbances I'd dealt with months ago, but something far more personal and disturbing.
The first reports had reached me through casual conversation with other travelers at the springs. Talk of a "demon Uchiha" terrorizing remote villages near the border, wielding fire jutsu with unprecedented ferocity. Initially, I'd dismissed the stories as typical roadside gossip—tales that grew in the telling, fears projected onto any dark-haired stranger with unusual abilities.
But the details were too specific, too consistent across multiple sources. Witnesses described the distinctive tomoe pattern of the Sharingan, the particular way Uchiha fire techniques scorched the earth in spiraling patterns, even the arrogant bearing that had once been my own trademark in battle. Someone was using my clan's techniques, my bloodline's gifts, to spread terror through the countryside.
It's impossible, I told myself as I studied the crude map another traveler had sketched, marking the locations of reported attacks. I'm the last. Itachi made sure of that.
But even as I tried to rationalize the reports away, a cold certainty was settling in my stomach. Orochimaru had possessed samples of Uchiha blood—my blood, taken during the years I'd spent under his tutelage. If his surviving followers had access to that genetic material, if they'd developed techniques for replicating bloodline abilities...
The implications made my hands shake as I packed my supplies and prepared to leave the peaceful spa town behind. Someone was wearing my face, metaphorically if not literally, and using it to commit atrocities that would be attributed to the Uchiha name. Every village burned, every innocent killed, every act of terrorism would add weight to the legend of my clan's inherent evil.
Unless I stop them.
The journey to Lightning Country's border region took three days of hard travel through mountain passes that grew increasingly treacherous with altitude. The terrain was harsh, unforgiving—the kind of place where civilization thinned to scattered settlements and lawlessness flourished in the spaces between.
I found the first attacked village at sunset on the fourth day, and the sight stopped me cold.
The destruction was thorough, methodical, and unmistakably the work of someone intimately familiar with Uchiha combat techniques. Buildings hadn't just been burned—they'd been systematically incinerated using the spiraling flame patterns that were a signature of advanced fire jutsu. The earth itself bore the characteristic scorch marks that only came from chakra-enhanced flames reaching temperatures far beyond normal combustion.
But it was the survivors' testimony that truly chilled me.
"He looked just like you," an elderly woman said, her eyes wide with residual terror as she studied my face. "Same hair, same build, same cold expression. But his eyes..." She shuddered. "His eyes were wrong. The Sharingan was there, but it felt corrupted somehow. Twisted."
"What did he want?" I asked, though I dreaded the answer.
"Nothing," she said, her voice hollow with remembered horror. "He didn't demand tribute or territory or surrender. He just... destroyed things. Set fires and watched them burn. Like he enjoyed the suffering."
Other survivors confirmed the details with minor variations. The attacker had used advanced Uchiha techniques with casual expertise, but there was something fundamentally wrong with his presence. Multiple witnesses described feeling an unnatural wrongness when looking at his Sharingan, as if the technique itself had been somehow corrupted or incomplete.
"How long ago?" I asked.
"Two days," the woman replied. "He said he was looking for someone. Said he wouldn't stop burning villages until his 'brother' came to face him."
My blood turned to ice. Brother. The word carried implications that reached far beyond simple genetics. Whoever this impostor was, he knew enough about my history to understand that claiming kinship would guarantee my attention.
"Did he leave any other message?"
"He said to tell you that blood remembers," another survivor volunteered. "That the Uchiha legacy couldn't be escaped or redeemed. That you'd understand when you saw what he'd become."
Blood remembers. The phrase echoed in my mind as I left the ruined village behind and continued following the trail of destruction. It sounded like something Orochimaru would say—the kind of pseudo-philosophical pronouncement he'd used to justify his experiments and manipulations.