Chapter 676 - 676: Shikamaru's Investigation

When she returned to her office, Sakura found Shikamaru standing in front of the door, one hand poised in the air as he prepared to knock. Upon hearing her footsteps, he turned around, his eyes flicking briefly towards her chest before instantly snapping back up to meet her gaze.

"Oh good, you're already awake," Shikamaru said shortly. "Ino'll be by with hot tea in a few minutes... shall we?"

Although his eyes were as lazy as ever, Shikamaru had greatly matured over the past two years. Though he hadn't quite managed to grow a full beard like his sensei Asuma's, he had carefully cultivated a little goatee on his chin… but his maturity didn't only extend to his pilosity; he was also far more diligent than he used to be. Shikamaru had had no choice but to grow up after losing both his mentor and his father... and revenge had a way of motivating even the laziest of men.

"That flowerpot isn't exactly where it used to be… and there's a bit of grime caking the base," Shikamaru noted as Sakura showed him into her office, glancing back at her as she sat in her chair. "Sasuke's returned?"

Shikamaru knew Sasuke possessed a rare form of space-time ninjutsu that allowed him to swap places with anything in his sight. Since that flowerpot had very clearly taken a trip to the street outside, all of this had been all too easy to deduce.

Indeed, Sasuke was one of the very few shinobi permitted to venture into the outside world, for the time being. These days, one had to join the ANBU to have even a sliver of a chance of returning to the shinobi continent, since only they were fitted with fūinjutsu designed to incinerate their corpses and prevent them from spilling their guts and revealing state secrets. The hidden path that led back to the Hidden Leaf Village had to remain secret at all costs, after all… but perhaps things were about to change.

"No new information on Kakashi, before you ask," Sakura said, shaking her head. "He's gone to ground, and he doesn't seem to have any intention of showing his tail any time soon."

Shikamaru took a deep breath.

"If you would only grant me permission to form a pursuit group, we could finally bring him to justice," he said in a single breath, having very clearly practised this speech in front of the mirror. "I... we, need closure."

"Kakashi-sen— I mean, Hatake Kakashi is an extremely dangerous man," she said robotically. "I cannot justify sending any number of men out into the outside world on a wild goose chase. Hostilities may have ceased, but the war is still very much ongoing. Konoha-nin are persona non grata in most countries on the continent, so you wouldn't be able to count on getting any backup. And furthermore—"

As expected, Sakura could only repeat the same old tired excuse Shikamaru had grown used to hearing.

"Sasuke's just one man," Shikamaru insisted. "It's been two years, and he's never even come close to finding Kakashi; it's time we changed our approach."

…

If Shikamaru didn't know any better, he might have thought the Hokage had something to do with his father's murder... but he knew something she didn't, something she couldn't possibly know: a secret, encoded message his father Shikaku had concealed at the scene of his own murder.

Though Shikamaru hated revisiting that moment, he had done so hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times already. The gruesome scene was indelibly carved into his memory: his father lying dead in a pool of his own blood on the porch, his final words written on the wall in blood: two hiragana... shi, and a rather wiggly, deflated-looking nu.

In context, this could be taken to mean: I'm dying, blegh :(. Since that was a little on the nose for a dying message, Shikamaru understood this to mean that his father wanted to be avenged… but that couldn't be it, could it?

At first glance, the shōgi board nearby appeared untouched, the pieces already set up for a game... clearly, his father had been waiting for him to come home to play…. but upon closer inspection, there was something off about the board.

The first thing Shikamaru had noticed was the absence of the black king; he would end up finding it later. The second oddity was the placement of the white rook; it was in its reversed, promoted state; the white dragon king in the spot where the missing black king was supposed to be… and for some reason, also sitting right on top of the white king. The third and final clue was the white pawn; clutched tightly in his father's hand, frozen in rigor mortis, along with the missing black king piece from earlier.

Shikaku must have known from the very beginning that he was no match for Kakashi. The battle couldn't have lasted more than a few seconds, but by sacrificing his own life to leave behind clues for his son, he had somehow managed to move the pieces without Kakashi's knowledge using the Shadow Stitching Jutsu.

And here was Shikamaru's deduction:

The king was the most important piece in shōgi… and yet it was almost powerless. To Shikamaru and his family, it represented the children… the future of the Hidden Leaf Village. In shōgi, black was the first to move, so Shikamaru took this to mean that black represented his family; in theory, their allegiance was to the village first and foremost, but in practice, the Ino-Shika-Chō always helped each other and the Sarutobi clan before helping anyone else.

Thus, to Shikaku, black king = Shikamaru.

At the same time, this meant white was the enemy, or the other party, or maybe even Team 3, but there was no way to be completely sure. Moving on, the strongest piece in shogi was the promoted rook, the dragon king.

Thus, white dragon king = Hokage.

Asuma had once described himself as a pawn, a piece only meant to be sacrificed and captured by the enemy to give the other pieces a tactical advantage.

Thus, white pawn = Kakashi.

This hinted that the Hokage, Sakura, was behind the assassination, but Shikamaru couldn't believe that a woman who so hated killing and was so merciful to her enemies would have his father murdered in cold blood. He avoided jumping to conclusions and thought about the second clue… the white king hidden under the white dragon king, in the black king's starting location… his own room?

On a hunch, Shikamaru had gone to his room and turned it upside-down… and hidden under a floorboard, he finally discovered a secret medical report stating that when Sakura had been admitted to Konoha General Hospital after the battle in the Valley of the End, she had been pregnant with triplets. The document had received the hospital director's stamp of approval; that man had been one of Kakashi's first victims, if memory served.

It was then that Shikamaru finally remembered the odd request the Sixth Hokage had made of the ANBU, nine months after the war's end: to secretly scour the village in search of newborn babies and report back to her with details about each one; their looks, families, even blood samples! But, in the end, the investigation had turned up a whole lot of nothing: there were simply too many infants to count, since the end of the war had brought about a baby boom.

Most likely, white king = Sakura's three lost babies!

At the time, nobody knew whether Sakura would ever awaken from her coma, and unwilling to let her powerful bloodline's potential die out and see the village lose a future war asset, Shikaku had ordered her eggs extracted and implanted into different surrogate mothers.

Shikamaru had then personally tracked down all the names on the list.

The first was Manyū Kyōko, the second was Hyūga Natsu, both residents of the Hidden Leaf Village, but the last one was a dead end: the third, unnamed surrogate mother had gone missing shortly after the war, during transport when passing by Kisaragi Village, which had just been attacked by bandits at the time, coincidentally.

And that was when Shikamaru realised the death message his father had written on the wall wasn't actually shinu... it was shiru! His father's blood had trickled down from the top-left corner of the character, following a knot in the wooden wall's grain and making him think it was the other! Though the grammar wasn't exactly perfect, it was enough to understand the real message: find out the truth!

Kakashi and Shikaku obviously knew, but Sakura didn't know, and neither did Naruto or Sasuke.

Naruto couldn't keep a secret to save his life, and after Shikamaru himself, he was the most vocal about going out to find Kakashi-sensei. As for Sakura, she had never once tried to claim either Kyōko's or Natsu's babies... she quite obviously had no idea they were hers.

In all likelihood, Kakashi had told them nothing, choosing instead to shoulder all the blame himself in order to avenge the injustice that had been visited upon his students. Although Team 7's childhood had been stolen from them by becoming active-duty shinobi, Kakashi had at least allowed them to reach adulthood without the burden of raising children of their own.

…

"I just wish I knew why Kakashi-sensei would do such a thing," Sakura sighed. "Massacring a bunch of comrades and running off… it wasn't the only way..."

"I'm coming in!" Ino's voice suddenly rang out from behind the door. "I've got tea and snacks!"