One Thousand Hands (OC- Senju SI)

Pre-Chapter A/N: I think we're at the point where it is officially no longer cool to say Happy New Year! Either way, I hope you're all still keeping up with your new year's resolutions. I'm just getting started on mine (still). Here we go with the fourth chapter of 2025. Lovely to have you all here, and I hope you enjoy this one. If you do, feel free to head over to patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) and read the next two chapters- I update there on a daily basis so there's always something for you to read. It's also a new year, so this is probably the best time to buy an annual membership on my page, if you're the kind of person that would do well with one. Have fun. 

"Well, thanks for ending a good fight just when it was getting good" I said as I stepped out of the crater that had been caused by the explosive tags that Piandao had left behind in making his escape. 

"Piandao the Weasel? That absolute fraud? What could have been a good fight about that?" Uzume asked with a scoff. Part of me wanted to know where the strange accusation had come from, but I did not have the opportunity to wonder as to the going-ons of Uzume's mind. 

"Look around you. That's what he and I did, and we didn't even get to ramp up fully." I said, reaching up to my shoulder to pat away some soot that had settled on my person after I'd stopped rotating. 

"Well, that's beside the point. We've all done our bits, and Uraume and Shiba told us you came over here to hold off an S-rank so we decided to come get you. You'd struggle to find the hideout without a guide so we decided to help with that as well" Izuku said, stepping between his cousin and me before we could really get going. 

She grunted, and I nodded at him before agreeing to follow along. 

We ran along the floor for a few miles before we reached the first trees that had not been devastated by my large scale ninjutsu and began hopping along. All the while I kept my byakugan active to make sure that no one was following or tracking us as we travelled. Even with that, Izuku still doubled back every few miles to eliminate whatever traces we left behind. Things like footprints, broken twigs or weakened branches as well as scent. Konoha had the best trackers and sensors in the world with our unique combination of Hyuga, Aburame, Inuzuka, and Yamanaka, but we weren't the only ones with trackers. In a regular mission, the chances of running across someone like that from. Foreign village was slim, as they didn't boast our numbers, but here, it was almost guaranteed. 

We were here to wage guerrilla warfare with the Suna advance. A head on confrontation would be suicide. I was powerful, but even two extra jounin on Piandao's side would be enough to ensure I never managed to make it out of the fight alive. The same would be the case for any of the others — one jounin in a confrontation was possible, but dozens of them falling upon us at the same time was one way to die. When we had covered what felt like half the land of rivers, Izuku made a sign to signal us to follow and then dropped out of the foliage. 

I did the same, and then we began to walk on foot until we came across a tree. It was just a tree, oak like the rest of this small forest, and unmarred. There was nothing to mark it as special, and with my byakugan- I could not see anything special about it. Still, Izuku shoved his hand straight into the tree and hit a lever of some sort that made the ground around us disappear. As neither Uzume nor Izuku were alarmed, I did not panic as I fell down into a room. It was a large underground cavern with sleeping bags arrayed around a light source, some form of luminescent crystal that I could recognise from the Hyuga compound. 

Shika and the others were standing around a stone table, upon which someone had spread a large map of the Land of Rivers. 

"We've come bearing gifts" Izuku said with a flourish, waving towards me. Shika looked up and spared me a smile before looking back to the map. Everyone else left the table to come say hi- even Shiba, to my great supply. 

 — 

"Byakugan blocking seals?" I asked Uraume as we finally ran through the pleasantries and returned to the planning circle. 

"You have no idea what you'd run into here" She said, but said little else. I narrowed my eyes at her, but said nothing else. If she wanted to keep secrets, then that was her right. The same way it was mine to find out what those secrets were. 

"Uraume says you plugged up the source of the water for the land of rivers" Shika began. I nodded. That was the story we were going with, after I swore both Uraume and Shiba to secrecy on what exactly we had found. I trusted all my comrades, but Suna nin had interrogation techniques that boggled the mind. It was better to reduce the risk of it getting out that I had in my possession a source of infinite water. It wasn't a stretch to say that the very face of this war could change if that revelation made it out. 

"We did." I replied, saying nothing more. 

"And you didn't bother poisoning it?" She asked. 

"Shiba's insects have left a nasty enough surprise for anyone with a chakra network who dares to drink the water" 

"What kind of surprise?"

"Tiny, nearly microscopic bugs that eat chakra to grow. At rest, they're the size of dust mites. When consumed by someone with as much chakra as a Jounin, they could grow to the size of dogs" I said with a shrug. The rest of the circle suddenly seemed to turn a little bit green at the thought. I couldn't judge them, that sounded like a terrible way to go. 

"Well, the sounds sufficiently morbid. Now we have to move on to the next stage of the plan." Shika said. 

"They know about our presence here" Inukuro cut in with a glance at both myself and Shika.

"They were always bound to. We have to move on with the plan."

"The plan, the plan, the plan. I'm tired of talking and planning. Give me something to hunt" His teeth were sharp. 

Instead of answering him, Shika's gaze snapped to Shiba, "You're enabling him again" 

"He made a good enough argument. How could I refuse?" The Aburame replied, not deigning to provide any details to let the rest of us in on whatever was going on.

"Well, he's your problem now"

"Don't talk about me like I'm not here" He seemed a step away from snarling at Shika. His canine partner by his side had begun to growl with warning. Instead of looking worried at the possible threat to hr safety, Shika just seemed to be irritated. 

"Go kill an Iwa patrol or whatever. There should be a few of them circling trying to look for us. Kill the ones farthest away from our location. Shiba, Uraume, go babysit him" 

"Oi" Before he could turn to Shika to say whatever was on his mind, Shiba was pushing him out from behind. In no time, they had crossed the threshold and began climbing their way out of the hideout. 

"What the hell was that?"

"I'm surprised you don't know. Guess you're too busy killing Kage and being an all-round S-rank badass to keep up with what the rest of us get up to." Shika was pulling at her hair now. Neither Choni nor Inoken were willing to meet my gaze as I tried to question them. 

"The mutt is an addict" It was Uzume who spoke, and all eyes snapped top her. 

"Uzume" Izuku hissed, trying to hush her.

"What? What do you mean?" I asked, no one else seemed to want to say anything. 

"Can someone just explain what is going on before I run insane?" 

"You know how every team has some sort of combination jutsu right?" 

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"Uraume's psycho of a sensei wanted to see if the Aburame insects could produce pheromones that would interact with Inukuro's Inuzuka biology. He succeeded. One of Shiba's insects can secret a hormone that accelerates Testosterone production and increases the potential of his muscles to take in Chakra and be enhanced. He gets much stronger, but a lot more aggressive and confrontational." 

"Of fucking course Danzo would be involved" I whispered to myself at her words. 

"That kind of power…drawbacks or not, it's addictive as all hell." 

I nodded at her words, it explained the sudden shift in his demeanor between the last time I'd seen him and just now. But then that brought the question of why Shiba had given him the bugs if they already knew the effects. Something about the question must have shown on my face because Shika simply muttered, 'later' to me while we began planning in earnest. 

After the first attack, we had a more comprehensive view of Suna's situation. "My time in their camp gave us a lot to work with. For one, they didn't split up their forces like we feared and are instead progressing as one big block of shinobi. They're also logging around supplies and securing their lines of retreat. They don't expect to take Kawa no kuni without being contested and don't want us to attack while they are consolidating a hold so its clear their plan is to bait us into an attack, defeat us, and then take the Land of Rivers."

"By us, you mean the main army right?" Kizuru clarified, and received a sharp nod for his efforts. 

"Well, that's nothing to worry about. This is one of the situations we planned around, isn't it?" Izuku looked from Shika to me as he spoke. 

"Yeah, we did but some other things I noticed mean that we can accelerate things massively."

"Well, spit it out then" another voice said, two guesses as to who it was. 

"I was getting there, Uchiha-san. The army is much smaller than expected. Only about seven hundred shinobi. With no water, and the effects of Shiba's interference, we won't be surprised to see that number drop rapidly. If we can prevent any messages being sent to Suna about the situation and prevent any reinforcements from being delivered, I predict that we can dispatch of this entire force in about two months".

"That's a lot of time" I said to Shika

"To take on a force over 50 times our number? It's barely anything".

"So what do you want us to do?"

"Well, first things first, I say we write back to Hokage-sama with the present situation and inform him that we are, at present, suited and equipped to deal with Suna's advance. Instead of scrambling to send us reinforcements, resources should instead be focused on the other fronts." 

I looked at Shika like I was just seeing her for the first time, and I could see that a lot of people were. I was one of the few that were privy to the fact that she'd been drafted into anbu, but to see the way it had changed her thought process as just something else. 

"Alright then. I vote in favour."

XXXXX

"Northeast, seven miles" Uraume said, and I sharpened my byakugan's vision to a pin point to spot the messenger hawk that was making its way towards Suna and shot it down with a single breath. 

"Your aim is something else, Cousin" She said and I nodded with a smile. 

"And everyone hated the bow when I first got it" 

"Well, it has managed to prove useful so far in this campaign" She acknowledged but said little else. 

This was our fifth day here. I ached to be doing something more exciting, but I understood just how important our presence here was. We were responsible for ensuring that no messages left or came to the Suna outpost. We'd shot about two hawks inbound, and this was the third outbound hawk we were taking down. We made sure to allow the outbound hawks fly a fair bit away before shooting them down, but the lack of communication from their village was clearly telling them something was wrong. Why else would they have sent this hawk flying by past midnight?

"They have to have noticed something wrong by now" Uraume said, unknowingly echoing my very thoughts on the matter. 

"How long do you think it will be until they send out human envoys instead of hawks? How long even until their village sends someone out to check what's going on?" I asked.

"Hopefully not for a while. Nara-san's plans work best when we are left to implement without interruption."

"You know you can call her Shika just like everyone else, right?"

"That would not be proper." 

"She's your cousin as well, I pointed out" 

"In a more distant manner than you are, Cousin" Her lips were poking upwards in a bare smile that told me she knew what she was doing. 

X- 

A week since we had been sent out here, and there was no doubt that Suna had wisened up to what was going on now. Uraume still kept an eye on their movements and found that they had begun to panic in small ways. The officer in charge, a no-name Jounin had already held close to a dozen meetings with his best agents so far. We also got a front row seat to the effect of Shiba's bugs in one. Sadly, the tainted water had not made it as far as we'd expected in terms of what it had been able to achieve. 

Only about a dozen shinobi had died before their medical shinobi had been able to trace the water as the source. The sight of giant bugs ripping themselves out of screaming humans was not something that I was going to be forgetting anytime soon. Thereafter, their first recourse had been to begin boiling the water before using it. Sadly, they had the common sense to have a single chunin test the water before they began dispersing it among their troops. Sadly for them, then the eight-hour window that they had given hadn't been sufficient for the Chunin with his pitiful chakra reserves to show symptoms of infestation. Dozens died after they cleared the boiled water for use before they banned it entirely. Now, shinobi were forced to rely on their own stores of water which were being rationed extremely. They'd sent letters asking for more, but each of those had been intercepted. 

I was sure someone would be sent tomorrow morning but for now the camp was quiet and still so I spent my time reading instead of watching them. What was I reading, you might ask? Hashirama's notes. These weren't about the Mokuton. Those notes had been given to me in the vaguer hope that I'd manifest the Kekkei Genkai. Instead, these were about general ninjutsu and his exploration with Senjutsu. The Senjutsu part had only been discovered this evening when I finished with the first of the journals. 

_This energy, it is like nothing I have ever felt before. It is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. When I first discovered it in the Blessed Grove, it had been so bountiful and plentiful, like there was too much of it for the world itself to even contain. Now, I have meditated for hours on end and cannot find anything. Tobi insists that the water in the blessed forest must have had something mixed into it and that I merely hallucinated the energy. I know what I felt. I know it was real. Something tells me that in this energy lies the answer to questions aplenty. Questions I might never even have known to ask, and the gnawing inquiries that keep me up at night. I shall ask Madara about it the next time we meet. _

Reading that, I felt my heart skip a beat. There was no way. This was the first mention of Madara in any of the Journals. I'd thought that was strange from the onset, but now I was beginning to understand. These journals, they were his. The others had been for the clan — the treatises on ninjutsu and Mokuton were for the clan to pass down from Son to Son. These ones, they were for his own thoughts. That's why the writing style was so different. I adjusted my back against the unmoving Oak bark of the tree I leaned against and continued to read, devouring every word. 

It turned out I was right, I thought to myself as I got to the halfway point of the journal. The style was wildly divergent in the way it shifted from his thoughts on Senjutsu and feeling out and finding sage energy for the first times to his studies learning lightning release. The fact that he had only even stuck with lightning release because of how good Tobirama was with it was another bit of comedy that made the two men seem like real people in my eyes — real brothers. 

The sun was just beginning to rise when I realised that I'd actually stayed up all night reading. Uraume woke with a start and turned to me with narrowed eyes. "You were supposed to wake me up for my watch" She said with barely suppressed annoyance. I could tell from the way her hands were squeezed closed and her eyes were narrowed right at me. 

"I lost track of time" I said with a shrug and I saw the way she pressed her lips against themselves to prevent herself from saying the first thing that came to mind. 

"You do this all the time, Shorirama Senju" She said. 

"You're exaggerating. This is the first time I've ever forgotten to wake you up for your watch." 

"No, I mean This. This thing you do where you forget where you are. We are in the Land of Rivers at war, Shorirama Senju. You cannot be pulling all-nighters because you are reading of all things" The way she used the word, 'reading', made it sound like the gravest of offenses. 

"I feel fine, Cousin" I said, getting to the root of it easily. 

"Anything less than your best and we are dead, Shorirama. We are dead." She said the words again as if there were not enough emphasis in the word dead already. 

"I got that, Cousin. I got you." I said, and she nodded before backing off. 

"And Uraume?" I called out to her as she walked away.

"Yes, Cousin?" Back to cousin, it seems. 

"There's no chance I'd let you die here. That's a promise" I said, and there was something that resonated deep within my very being as I said those words.

A/N: And so Shori makes his first MC promise. We'll see how that goes for him, shall we? As for this war arc, I feel like the pacing will be a bit of touch and go for a while. I can't imagine everything happening in a few weeks so we'll have to stretch things over time to have logical gaps take place between all the action. I'll also see about including downtime beats so it's not fight after fight after fight. As always, the following two chapters are up on patreon (https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga). If you just want to read complete chapters and not my work in real-time, then feel free to purchase this story as a collection on my patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) page so you get to read each chapter after I finish it and not neecessarily the daily updates available with a regular pa-treon membership- nice way to support this story and me while you're at it. Enjoy!