Just finished a reread.
"I'll take the aberration and deal with it once and for all, you take the brat and get this back on track." The trenchcoat ninja said. He wore no headband, and beneath the coat she could see heavy metal armour.
In retrospect, this bit seems off now. We now know that Hisana isn't nearly the only transmigrant who's not with the Trenchcoats - they approached Karin, so they obviously knew about her - so this guy saying '
the aberration' and 'once and for all', as if killing Hisana would put everything back on track, seems odd.
Hisana had tried to figure out what on earth the whole graduation day battle had been about, but she was rebuffed by official sources and told to wait by the Hokage, and resolved to look into it further when she could.
@Tekomandor: Did we ever follow up on this? We now have the rank to be read in on the subject, and given these guys
keep showing up on our missions we obviously have need-to-know. Konoha Intelligence might be missing some critical facts that would let them truly understand these outsiders, i.e. the existence of canon and transmigration, but they're generally competent and they've had time to work at it. Surely they've come up with some information?
Kakashi took a great toll on the Zetsu, his speed blinding even compared to Hisana's; his arsenal of jutsu vastly more varied. The last Zetsu fell to a blow from Hisana's blade, and the battered team regrouped some distance away from the battlefield. Hisana had sealed away the cash and gold in the Caravans, as well as a few Zetsu corpses, and they were ready to leave.
"Listen up, kids. We're heading for Konoha at full speed - no breaks, no rest until we get there. If I tell you to keep moving, even if I stay behind you keep on going," Kakashi ordered, his voice still uncharacteristically firm and authoritative.
@Tekomandor: Whatever happened to the bandits from the initial attack? The
canon omake says that they were all captured and tied up before the Zetsu revieled themselves. Did they die in the fighting? Did we leave them behind, tied to trees, to die?
"Were you arrogant enough to think you could control me through my own creation? What, I wonder, possessed you to think that I would not build safeguards for this, not prepare? Are all other people merely puppets to you, to be manipulated as you wish? Surely, my student could not have failed so direly in your education as that - surely, you must have been defective before he taught you," Tobirama said, a scowl evident in his face. Orochimaru went to remove the kunai, only for Tobirama to make a seal with his left hand.
So, this didn't happen in canon. And I can't see how anything Hisana changed could have caused it, nor any differences in the lead-up to Orochi using Impure World Resurrection which might explain it. Which leaves two obvious possibilities:
- The jutsu was sabotaged in some subtle way - but that doesn't make sense; the Trenchcoats are trying to keep canon on-track.
- Tobirama added these safeguards to the jutsu while he was still alive in this world, where he did not do so in canon. Which implies canon has been butterflied for a long time.
... now that I think about it, there's another deviation in this scene: Orochi doesn't even
try to summon the Fourth Hokage
"Just watch, she'll devolve into a boy-mad bad girl right before our eyes," Karin said. Hisana tried to control her emotions. To not let anyone see her reaction. Some things were better-kept secret, she thought. Sasuke and Naruto devolved into barely concealed laughter.
Huh. I missed this the first time around, but it looks like Hisana's gay? I had vaguely wondered if she might be - there was a mention in the first chapter about, in her first life, having a secret crush on her gender-unspecified best friend.
I wonder if that's a pattern? Of the two transmigrants we actually know anything about the first life of, one's trans, the other's gay.
)
