Hatake Kakashi.
That was the name of the current Hokage.
The teacher of the two who had lead the way to victory during the war, there wasn’t a single person in the Shinobi World who didn’t know his name. Shikamaru on the other hand, knowing both the man and his students personally, was far from star-struck. There were fans who adored and fawned over the three, saying they were ‘heroes of legend’ but in reality none of the three were really types to fit the term “legend”.
Kakashi, while certainly a man who got things done during a crisis, turned back to his usual role when it came to everyday life: a no-good adult who didn’t feel like doing much of anything.
The other two heroes had similar problems as well. One was an abysmal idiot. The other, abysmally stubborn. It was because the rest of the world didn’t know about the hopeless sides of those three that they were being hailed as ‘living legends’.
“What am I even doing…?”
The words left Shikamaru’s mouth without him really thinking about it.
He himself was the type of person who would never become anything close to a hero. He never wanted to be one in the first place.
If you said he wanted to be one of those ninja who practiced vigorously to improve their ninjutsu, you’d be wrong. He certainly never thought about studying medical ninjutsu and becoming a specialist in the vanguard back-up, either. If you said he wanted to be someone with a high rank in encryption or in medical surgery, you’d be wrong too.
He just…wanted everything to be average.
That was Shikamaru’s dream.
He wanted to be an average ranked ninja who’d have an average job, marry an average wife and have an average child, and then, after an average elderly prime…
Well, everything came to an end one day.
Was there any greater happiness to be found than in a life plan like that?
He didn’t think so.
On days with good weather, lying down like this and watching the sky, seeing the clouds floating past and taking your thoughts with them. On rainy days, having shougi pieces as your company would be more than enough. There would be no pressure from people’s expectations. No stress, either.
Wasn’t that a wonderful sort of life?
“Haaa…”
It was a deep sigh, issued right from the bottom of his stomach.
The bastard called “reality” was a really tough opponent.
If the thing you were fighting was a human being, then at least there’d come a day where you would win against them. Even if they were a god-like person, they had to have a weakness somewhere. The enemies in the war had been abominations, and yet all the shinobi had focused their powers together and won against them, hadn’t they?
You can win against an opponent in front of you.
However…
Reality is an opponent without substance that you can never, ever defeat.
No matter how Shikamaru kept wishing and wanting otherwise, reality callously kept sending him towards the exact sort of fate he did not want. Shikamaru, who had wished so badly to be ‘average’, was now someone the Shinobi Union couldn’t do without.
He had so much work. All the jobs taken on by each nation’s Daimyo and citizens had to be classified from A to D rank, and then each village’s characteristics had to be carefully taken into account to figure out which one was most suitable for the allotment of labour – and then there were the Chiefs of the Union, the Five Kage’s consultations. They used him for everything, to the point where he even ended up being a shougi partner for the old Tsuchikage.
“The Shinobi Union’s Shikamaru of Konoha.”