The silence stretched until Tsunade finally broke it, her voice low, almost uncertain.”…Your parents… were they Takeshi and Miyako Senju?”

She didn’t even know why she asked.

The words slipped out before she could stop them.

Maybe it was because of the sharp ache in her chest, or the way his tone had cut into her.

Maybe because, deep down, she already knew.

The moment he mentioned the Great Elder as his grandfather, the name Takeshi had burned to the surface of her mind.

She had only needed confirmation.

Ryusei looked at her, then gave a small nod. “Yes.”

He said it simply, but his expression carried a trace of something more, surprise, as if he hadn’t expected her to believe him this easily, without lashing out, tearing into his words, or demanding proof.

That look unsettled her even more.

She stared at him, heard his answer, and then something inside her slipped sideways.

Her eyes stayed on his face, but she was no longer seeing him.

Her thoughts spiraled back, memories long buried, yet never gone.

Ryusei watched her spiral, but he didn’t interrupt.

He knew this was the key moment in “reawakening” her.

Better to let the storm unfold.

Instead, he turned inward, recalling what little he knew of her and his father.

Which, truthfully, wasn’t much.

His father’s notes had been bitter, dismissive.

Words about Tsunade being foolish, not worth his time, someone Ryusei shouldn’t approach in the future.

But Ryusei wasn’t so naïve.

He knew resentment rarely came from nowhere.

Behind it, there had to be something more.

And it wasn’t hard to imagine.

He already had the story mapped out in his head.

After all, his father and Tsunade were of the same generation.

Tsunade, the “Senju Princess,” Hashirama’s pampered granddaughter.

And Takeshi Senju, son of the Great Elder’s line, the second strongest family in the clan.

They had to have crossed paths from a young age.

His father’s personality, from the fragments Ryusei pieced together, was clear enough.

Prideful, domineering, indifferent on the surface.

The type who would never flatter Tsunade blindly like the others.

A “bad boy” with his own sense of superiority.

Tall, dark, and handsome. Just like Ryusei.

It was almost too easy to see how sparks might have flown.

A proud girl like Tsunade, headstrong and temperamental, caught sight of someone who didn’t bend to her.

And him, seeing the granddaughter of Hashirama, bright, volatile, and not like other women.

Something could have started there.

But Ryusei was the only one in the world now who could understand how that spark had died out.

From childhood, they were destined for different tracks.

Tsunade, raised in Hashirama’s ideology, fed the “Will of Fire” by her grandfather, Tobirama, and later Hiruzen.

She had gone through the Academy, graduated, gone on missions, and become bound to her teammates Jiraiya and Orochimaru, all while drifting further from the clan compound.

Takeshi was the opposite. He stayed.

He never joined the Academy, never bent to Hiruzen’s system.

He followed the hardliner path, immersed in clan politics, rooted in the Great Elder’s pride.

Two lines set in motion, each step carrying them further apart.

And Tsunade herself, non-womanlike, full of pride, anger, never the type to yield easily.

If you didn’t know how to deal with her, misunderstandings were guaranteed.

Ryusei could already picture it.

Every time Takeshi tried to pull her closer to their faction, she brushed him off, colder each time, convinced his ideals were “foolish” against the strength of the Will of Fire.

He must have grown sharper, more bitter, while she grew more dismissive.

Arguments, shouting matches, no one willing to apologize.

Until one day, perhaps even physical clashes, and then silence.

That was how it must have ended.

But the way Tsunade had reacted just now…

Ryusei knew the shadow of his father still lingered over her.

Subtle, but there. She hadn’t erased him completely.

More likely, Ryusei thought, it had been a misunderstanding born of their unbridgeable positions.

They lacked the third-person perspective he had now.

They never saw how their pride mirrored each other.

There was potential there.

Maybe even a spark that could have grown into something else, had it not been drowned in politics.

Takeshi had blamed her for abandoning the clan, for being led astray by her teachers and comrades.

Tsunade had blamed him for refusing to integrate, for making life harder on her and those she followed.

In the end, Takeshi had been right rationally.

But women weren’t rational, Ryusei thought dryly.

You couldn’t win Tsunade with logic, not someone like her.

 His father’s mistake had been thinking words and arguments could sway her.

He should have forced through, decisive, taken her along by sheer presence.

Then maybe… things could have turned out differently between the two of them at least.

Still, Ryusei wasn’t foolish enough to believe Tsunade alone could have prevented the Senju’s downfall, even if she had sided with them.

She was only one woman, a broken reed against a tide.

They had stood on opposite sides: Konoha versus the Senju.

Only when one side was proven wrong could the gap be bridged.

For Tsunade, that proof came too late.

And for Takeshi, it cost everything.

Perhaps she realized this now.

Ryusei thought he saw it, her eyes reddening faintly, whether from memory or from pain, he couldn’t tell.

Or maybe he imagined it.

Either way, the knot between them still hung heavy in the air.

Eventually, Ryusei reasoned, his father must have grown weary and wounded by her constant rejection and unyielding pride.

In the end, he likely surrendered to pressure from his own faction, accepted the political match arranged with his mother, Miyako, and fulfilled his duty to produce an heir and consolidate the faction, as urged by the Great Elder.

And with that, their story was buried before it even began.

He had given up on Tsunade completely, in every sense of the word.

Miyako had been strangely the complete opposite of Tsunade, gentle, virtuous, steady, supportive, and obedient to her husband.

Tsunade, on the other hand, was fiery, argumentative, quick to anger, addicted to gambling and drink, and lazy when she could afford to be.

Ryusei couldn’t help but feel a flicker of amusement at how, even after marrying Miyako and being thrown into the war, his father’s notes still carried subtle, subconscious hints that he hadn’t completely erased Tsunade from his thoughts.

And Ryusei understood why, let’s just take Tsunade’s looks out of the equation.

Just as women most often fell for the so-called “bad boys,” some men were inevitably drawn to “bad women.”

The kind who were volatile, untamed, and dangerous in their allure. That was Tsunade.

Sometimes, that made her even more irresistible than the gentle, obedient type.

All of this also explained why his father had never passed on any of his discoveries to her during the war, even while being hunted.

By then, he had probably “crossed her off” completely.

He doubted she would trust him, and at that time, Tsunade wasn’t yet the legend she would become.

The proofs he had were only partial, at best fifty-fifty, and regarding Nawaki, even less, just some conjectures.

He likely couldn’t stomach the thought of being humiliated and rejected again.

Maybe he had even questioned whether Tsunade could offer any real support at all, even if she did believe him.

More likely, she would have been a liability.

And yet, Ryusei suspected that somewhere deep inside, his father had imagined what would happen if she ever did learn the truth.

With her nature, her pride, and her stubborn heart, she might not have borne it.

She might have shattered completely and gone seeking death herself.

However, Ryusei carried none of those hesitations.

Where his father had withdrawn, Ryusei felt only opportunity.

He already knew the kind of scar Nawaki’s death had carved into her.

And he planned to use it.

Nawaki’s matter would be his opening, the lever to pry past her walls and sink into her heart.

Not now, not too soon, timing was everything.

Where his father had seen only danger in shattering her world, Ryusei saw the perfect chance. For once, it broke, she wouldn’t seek death.

Not if he was there. She would have nowhere else to turn but him.

‘Unlike you, Father,’ he thought darkly, his gaze steady on Tsunade as she stood lost in her spiraling memories, ‘I won’t stop halfway.’

In fact, Ryusei suspected this was the real reason Tsunade had never grown as close to Dan Katō in this world as she had in the original story before his death. And how did he know?

Because Shizune wasn’t permanently taken under her wing here when she went outside.

There were no such rumors. Shizune still attended the Academy regularly, as Ryusei knew, and at most, Tsunade only supported her financially and guided her in medical arts when she returned to the hospital.

That was the extent of it. At best, there were whispers of Tsunade being closest to her as a personal disciple, nothing more.

That alone suggested her bond with Dan wasn’t nearly as deep here.

Ryusei reasoned it was because he existed in this world, so logically, his father had existed too, shaping things differently.

Maybe Takeshi had been at the right place, at the right time, to form Tsunade’s earliest attachment.

The thought left Ryusei quietly relieved.

It would have been far harder to break into Tsunade’s heart if she had truly loved Dan with the same strength as in the original timeline.

And Ryusei disliked being anyone’s “second” if he could help it.

But not that it would have stopped him from trying.

In truth, Ryusei knew much of this was a story he had stitched together in his own mind, guesswork built on fragments and notes.

And if the relationship between Tsunade and his father hadn’t been even deeper through things he couldn’t know, then there was no way it could have still blocked Dan Katō like that, especially considering his father had already been married for years by that point.

But Ryusei had no power to go back in time and judge those things for himself.

The other butterfly effect Ryusei noticed was that Tsunade wasn’t nearly as broken now as she had been in the original story after Dan Katō’s death.

Back then, she had been so traumatized that she couldn’t even look at blood without freezing, due to witnessing his gruesome death due to blood loss.

But here, she was still able to see blood regularly and heal the wounded; otherwise, she wouldn’t have been deployed as one of the medical pillars of this war.

People speculated her fighting ability had dropped, but Ryusei knew the real reason.

Her willpower, her spiritual energy, had dimmed.

He had seen firsthand how crucial that was since transmigrating into this world.

Without the drive to push forward, the chakra itself weakened, no matter the body’s potential.

That explained why she had seemed so vulnerable against even Kabuto at one point, yet later, after Naruto had talked her back into believing, she showed feats strong enough to hold her own against Madara, ranking her among the strongest of the Five Kage.

It was simple. The deaths of Nawaki, Dan, and, in this timeline, perhaps even his father, had carved into her belief system until there was little left to stand on.

That was why she could still heal but not fight at full strength.

Hiruzen and Orochimaru must have known it, which was why they stationed her here in the first place, to keep her as a medical asset, not a combat one.

Ryusei, however, wasn’t worried.

He had just witnessed her spirit flare up again in the face of Root.

That flame wasn’t gone; it only needed fuel. Purpose.

That, he could give her. More than one. He smirked inwardly.

‘Jiraiya, sorry, old man… this brat’s going to beat you in this race, even with a late start. Father, sorry to you as well… but at least take comfort in knowing it’ll be me who completes your tragic romance that never was.’

In truth, Ryusei didn’t think her history with his father was the kind of scar that could never heal.

It was more a deep disappointment, a failure that closed her off for a while, stopping her from opening to anyone else in the short term.

After all, she had known his father nearly her whole life up until that point, and there might have been entanglements Ryusei wasn’t even aware of.

Dan Katō had simply appeared at the wrong time.

Still, Ryusei admitted, if Dan had lived longer, he probably had the right approach for her.

Patient, steady, and persistent, he would have broken through eventually.

That was exactly why Ryusei felt there was space for him now, despite the difference in their ages.

With the right tactics, the opening was there.

Many years had passed since those old tragedies of hers, and the wounds, though never gone, had changed.

‘The last Senju, the only student, the new Nawaki, the new Takeshi, and then… Who knows…’

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep