Naruto: Tango with Death

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"Tyranny?"

The two seemed doubtful of my answer, so I offered some additional explanation.

"Tyranny is about forcing absolute power onto others. The form of power doesn't have to be political though."

Jashin titled his head, before saying, "It seems rather obvious to me what you must do to perfect your Authority."

Yami titled his head, unaware of what was happening in the Land of Fire, so I said, "A Tyrant is someone who grabbed power illegitimately and uses it to oppress those below them. This is what I recently did."

I believe that everything I have done since I arrived in Sendai was the right things to do, and feel righteous in what I did. However, I also can't deny that I have been acting like a Tyrant. Actually, I had been doing so for a good portion of my life, although in simpler ways.

But doesn't everyone impose their power onto others? What is there to differentiate between Tyranny and rightful rule? What even is a righteous rule? Are everyone rulers?

For some reason, I found a lot of inspiration as I thought of the subject, and it was only because Jashin and Yami talked to me that I stopped my thinking.

After some more explanations from the two Sages, Jashin returned within my mind, while I returned to my world.

As I arrived back in my garden, I saw that everything was as dead as it was when I left. However, there was one of my servants kneeling among the dead flowers, looking like he was about to replace them.

As I appeared, he turned around, and he looked at me with some panic as he hurriedly explained, "Lady Shogun, I-I don't know what happened here! I swear I didn't…"

I shook my head, and said, "It's fine, you can take your leave. I'll take care of this."

He looked visibly relieved as he got back up, bowed, and left toward the inside of the mansion. I did not immediately tend to my garden, and instead checked on whether I had missed anything.

Fortunately, I wasn't gone for long, and so nothing major had happened. As such, I was able to get right back into my routine, and once into a routine, time passes quickly.

994 was a busy year for me. At the very beginning of the year, I killed the Mizukage, before ascending to the position of Shogun.

And for the rest of the year, I was head deep into my work, which was to save the country from itself, while investigating the rebels.

Actually, when I first arrived, my goal had only been to find the rebels and deal with them, but it was only when I reached the top that I finally got a view of the whole picture, and understood that the rebels and the war were actually not the country's biggest problems.

And now that slightly more than a year has passed since I came into office, and I had turned 12 for a few months now, I can say that I am pretty proud of what I did.

Sendai had turned from a rotten, ill stricken city into the grand capital of the Land of Fire, a place every inhabitant of the country could take pride in.

In the past, people fled from Sendai to live in the countryside, while we have had a huge influx of people in the last couple of months.

The nobles had virtually deserted the city, with the exception of the Daimyo's family, and they didn't have anywhere to come back to since I had already destroyed their large mansions, building habitations instead.

As a result, just last week, the population had gone from slightly under three hundred thousand people to five hundred thousand people. Moreover, unlike before, not only are they well fed, but they also have access to healthcare for basically free.

There was no such thing as job scarcity either as a lot of things had to be done. Be it construction, with the prison that was still under construction or the many houses I had made, or administration, as a city couldn't be run by one small office, no one could say there wasn't a job.

Crime rate had also drastically lowered following the punishments I carried out. Before, soldiers never went into the third ring, and so it had become a place of chaos and infamy. But now that the population was pretty much evenly spread across the city, every inch of it was patrolled by the army, and any criminal saw themselves get punished according to their crime.

I was also in the process of building a police force for this city, I couldn't keep using the army for this, but that was a project only for now.

The city went through other changes, but those were the major ones anyway. And while I mainly focused on the city itself, I also investigated the rebellion. Fortunately, my main lead was with the nobles, so I managed to fit my investigation into the my schedule.

Since all the nobles had left the capital, I went to see them within their domain. This resulted in a great purge as I treated the nobles like anyone else. If while I investigated for the rebels, I found incriminating evidence on them, I would have them arrested, and seize everything they had.

That allowed my influence to grow outside of Sendai, and thus set aside any worries I could have about the nobles counterattacking.

Pretty much every noble I arrested threatened me the same way, to use their connections to ruin the country, and if every noble did this right when I arrived, I would have been troubled, but since I had basically been plundering every noble, I had more resources than any of them.

I had also turned some of those domains into fields of all kind, which would allow the country to become self sufficient without any support from either merchants, nobles or other countries.

All in all, Sendai had truly risen, and the rest of the country was quickly following. For now, the only thing I lacked was a good army, and that brings me to my next point.

Because of how bad the situation was, I had to take drastic measures, and doing so had created many enemies for myself. Most of them were the nobles, who all had some influence in the army.

And so while nothing had officially happened, a major part of the army had distanced itself from Sendai. All I had for now was the few ones loyal to me, those who fought under me against Kiri.

However, there were only slightly less than four hundred of them, and they were struggling to take care of the city itself, not to mention the entire country.

But I found that better than having the army so close, because I found through my investigations that quite a few of them had joined the rebellion.

From what my investigations showed me, the rebellion was mainly made of members of the army who wanted to make a coup, was financed by the nobles, and used to get everything going their way with Madam Shijimi.

That's right, the Daimyo's wife herself was involved in the rebellion. However, I was sure she wasn't the mastermind behind it, she was far too stupid, and only took orders, so I decided to let her be for now, since I had essentially trapped her within the capital.

I was now actively working on finding who exactly was this mysterious leader of the rebellion, who even managed to get the support of the Akatsuki, and was skilful enough to evade my investigation for a whole year now.

As for the Daimyo's Family, I had different plans for all of them. The Daimyo had already lost a lot of reputation with the arrival of the Council, and it was even worse now as he barely served to make for a figurehead.

He spent his days within his palace, idling around as I took care of the country, his wife on his side. Speaking of her, she had tried to overthrow my influence, mainly using the Twelve Guardians, but that only resulted in me dismissing them.

They weren't pleased with this, and it saddened me to do this to Chiriku, the Fire Monk, whom I considered as a friend, but I couldn't take the risk of them working for the rebellion and striking from within.