If there was a Hidden Village of hypocrisy, it would certainly be Konohagakure no sato, better known as the Village Hidden in the Leaves. Or so it may have seemed to one young child, barely ten years old and currently being chased by an angry mob of villagers. Key words in that statement, however, being 'may have'. The child didn't acknowledge hypocrisy, hate or generally anything as really worth his energy and expenditure.

No, in the worldview of one Naruto Uzumaki, the only states of mind worth investing in were positive ones that helped take his and other peoples' minds off the troubles plaguing them.

Then again, when those positive states of mind came into contact with reality in the form of his more (admittedly) ingenious and (debatably) elaborate practical jokes, he simply could not know how it was possible that the villagers couldn't have liked his work! Repainting the Hokage Monument was a classic, sure, but it wasn't that far ahead of his usual jokes! Tossing pheromones into the Aburame and Inuzuka clans' respective feeding systems for their bugs and hounds was a hoot!

But debating any of it would get him in range of the angry mob behind him. Not good.

The orange jumpsuit-wearing child started lightly panting as he broke out onto his fourth mile of running from the mob. He could say what he wished, but all the running and hiding was really great exercise. And great on-the-go-thinking training. Surely that would be useful for a ninja! Naruto's dip, then subsequent rise in mood was unnoticed by the mob, however, as they continued to chase him.

Just another night in Konoha...

-][-

It was morning. The street was bustling, with the traffic of people moving about to their everyday stations - ninja to their commanders, shopkeepers to their counters, the few farmers and craftsmen in the village to their respective stations. The Monday brought a dull sunrise which gave a harsh welcome to the poor souls who had woken up around the 4 a.m mark to slave away at their jobs, to earn money and to pay rent and the like. Needless to say, the crowds' thoughts were jumbled to say the least, but ordered - organized even in their diversity.

And one man who could hear them all smiled wistfully, as he sipped some recaf out of his personal hip-flask. That man couldn't believe the utter happiness behind the blanket of ignorance that was weaved over this village.

Certainly, ignorance was a powerful tool to hold over a population. Where he came from, it was all but the watchword for interactions between the common citizen and the threats that assailed mankind. What he was amazed at was the easygoing air that the village had.

He took another bite of his food - a local meal named 'dango', served on a stick - and slowly chewed it down. As he had guessed, it was fresh. Locally caught and made, most likely. But what gave him pause for thought was that it was real food. His less important crew had been surviving on little more than the standard nutrient bars given to ship personnel.

He silently reiterated that to himself - it was real food. Oh, it was nothing compared to the meals his brilliant cook usually prepared, but still, credit's given where credit's due. The man put down a tip of 250 of the local currency - ryo, he heard it called - onto the table and sat back, taking the time to simply relax and take a break. He could understand the language easily, listening into thoughts being one of the benefits of being a psyker, and as such the chatter around him was very clear and made perfect sense. His eavesdropping went unnoticed in the morning rush.

"How was your mission last night?" asked one of local armed forces - ninja, he recalled - to another. Though he knew it was typical of these ninja to work in secret, and even though this village tried to keep up a 'nice-guy' image, the appalingly lax way these ninja conducted themselves was disgraceful. One of them even had said 'Oh, sorry' to a civilian he had accidentally brushed past! Horriffic. He fought down a scowl of disgust and listened in to another table with two chatting villagers.

"Yes, I know! Moritake's had a really bad brush with the brat lately." Local pranksters? Not unexpected, considering these Hidden Villages utilized child soldiers, regarded as adults they may have been.

"Oh, what did he do this time?" By the sound of things, the subject of their conversation was quite the master of evasion. He would see if he could recruit this miscreant.

"Snuck into the Soukon and rearranged all the merchandise. Service was closed for hours while they reorganized it, I heard." He internally fought down a laugh, at risk of being noticed. This rascal simply HAD to be up for recruitment!

Though no more was said by the two citizens, he continued being amused internally. Then, one of them said something, which shook the eavesdropping man to the core.

"So when are we getting together to hunt the demon again?"

Ikotashi Yaaka was discussing with her friend Tokishi Mori the subject of them taking part in the 'demon hunting' mobs that cropped up now and then to go hunt down Konoha's orange-wearing Jinchuukiri when she was interrupted. Thinking of the rudeness of this stranger, she turned with a piece of her mind ready to be said to this stranger.

Then many things became evident. One, it was not a ninja that she was being assailed by. Ninja simply didn't dress like that - a heavy coat would restrict movement slightly, and the black-painted armor she saw under it wouldn't have been useful for stealth at all.

Two, he was scary. Most killers she had seen wore their killing of others as a status symbol, to show that they weren't afraid to take lives. Now, the civilian woman - just a baker herself, was no poet to be waxing eloquence but she could have easily said that this man thrived amidst fear and death.

Three, what she could see of his face was pitted and scarred, and long since torn by a mess of things. And with eyes like blocks of steel, he began to ask her questions.

"Daemon?" He had a strong accent, she thought. But she paid no attention to the strange way she pronounced the word; rather, she answered by impulse. She felt like a small, fragile animal under the gaze of something big, and dangerous.

"Yes, sir - that is, my lord." Thankfully, he did not notice her tripping up over her own words. "The Hokage keeps the demon in this village out of goodwill. We sometimes go and attack it en masse." It didn't even occur to her that this might be a little strange. Or that she was using phrases like 'en masse'.

He turned to Mori. Briefly, Yaaka felt as if she had blended back into obscurity.

"Both of you." Then, a spark lit up in Yaaka's chest. Some rebellious feeling which demanded clarity and reason, and deductions made by the whole truth, nothing but the truth, and the explicit truth. "This... Daemon. Tell me everything. Leave nothing out."

Some time later, Yaaka and Mori sat in dazes, wondering where the mysterious stranger had left. No words passed between them, for nothing needed to be said. Mori actually had her head propped up on her elbow.

"Hey!" They heard a distant voice call out. Both turned blearily, with thousand-yard stares coming to rest on three of the Village's chuunin. Gradually, the two civilians felt their thoughts start to clear up. The lead chuunin walked closer.

"Excuse me. We heard reports that you two were accosted by a strange man in a cloak? Can you describe him to us?"

For the life of them, neither Yaaka nor Mori could adequately reply. They just gave puzzled if not dazed shakes of the head to the disgruntled military police officers, who headed off again.

-][-

The Hokage's assistant, Kutsa Kai, was finishing up so that the Hokage's secretary could take over for him in the afternoon. He wouldn't lie, she was a hellishly attractive woman. And if one added in the fact that she got more paperwork done than most in the office, paperwork not exclusively of ninja matters anyway, then it was easy to see for which reasons the Hokage had selected her. Plus, she had a fantastic rack...

The assistant was shook from his thoughts when he spotted a man walking in through the front door. Annoyed, he got up.

"Excuse me, sir, the Hokage's office is closed at this hour-" But Kai spoke no more, as the man looked at him over his high collar.

Kai was hit with a wave of forgetfulness, just as a mild soothing sensation in the back of his skull manifested itself. But he looked everywhere, and saw stars twinkling away from wherever he looked. And that man's gaze shone like the sun.

Kai slumped back down, mouth drooping open slightly as the man walked on to the stairway that led up the building and to the Hokage's office.

The same fate awaited the Chuunin ninja who openly guarded the Hokage's office as they moved to stop the cloaked man. They slumped back, in dazes against the walls. The man was polite enough to set them down in sitting positions, sometimes. To make things worse for the village leader's guards, the ANBU that made assaults on him were stopped almost disappointingly easily and quickly. With some degree of stealth, too, if any casual observer were to be blase enough to look for that sort of thing, what with noise and attack vectors and all that. The various trained ninja were busy trying and failing to intercept the transgressor were too busy forming plans to take him down to pay attention much more than they would usually, however.

It seemed like nothing could touch this man. Any and all guards, regular ranking ninja or not, never seemed to be able to land a blow on the figure's cloaked form. To make things even worse, the figure was walking openly through and up the building! Walking! With seemingly not a care in the world, non-lethally taking down whoever came at him! Simple things like sleeper holds, and knockout blows to the temple, and other such maneuvers.

The few defenders caught up in the impromptu assault would have been slightly humiliated, had they not been busy trying to take them down. No-one thought to ring the alarm, either.

Then, it was up a hall and with two more ANBU incapacitated - or rendered into a state where they wouldn't be fighting immediately, anyway - that the last line of defense fell, and in his office, the Sandaime Hokage Sarutobi Hiruzen was making ready to combat the surprise attacker.

The few lucky, privileged and honored ANBU that were in the room were up on the corners of the room, blended in to match the corners of the office. They were lucky that this day was different to the many others they had spent in boredom. They were priveleged to defend their Hokage.

But more than all, they were honored to see the Professor, the God of Shinobi in action, if this brief and sudden attack could be called that.

The man had two halves of two different hand-seals in both hand. Certainly, casting two jutsu at the same time drained chakra like nobody's business, but then again he wasn't Hokage for no reason. His brief stint in retirement hadn't addled his mind, and his personal ANBU guards, the best of the best in all of Konoha's armed forces could see from the multitudes of kunai he kept up the sleeves of the Kage robes, not to mention the arsenal of devices and jutsu scrolls and sealing scrolls he actually kept close to his chest that he was ready for a long, grueling battle. Let it never be said that the Sandaime of Konoha was an unprepared man.

And the look, the gaze in Hiruzen's eyes. The bodyguards unfortunate enough at the forward corners of the room openly shivered under the ferocity of that gaze. It was one of a dying wolf, that would give one last fight before passing away. Though there wasn't much of a frown or a scowl to speak of, the angle of the old man's head and the intensity of the glare he sent towards the door spoke volumes on its own.

The footsteps kept on coming, and as they neared the door to the office Sarutobi readied himself. The aged Hokage hadn't caught much of an image of the attacker - the best the security cameras could come up with were images of a tall man in an all-covering cloak. That surfaced an old pet-peeve of Hiruzen's; Faulty intelligence.

The attacker came to right outside the heavy doors, and tensely the Hokage readied his office to be assaulted. He was guessing they would utilize a medium-yield explosive tag - one of those would make a mess of everyone in the office, let alone the door. That, or a low-power water jutsu to knock the door down, or a Earth technique to simply cannon the door into the office, making the heavy doors a weapon in their own.

The Hokage's mind went on in hundreds of possible courses of action, and jutsu he thought long forgotten raised themselves in his head. The tension became unbearable, then-

Two knocks. Just that, two almost polite knocks on his door. Sarutobi blinked. He could safely say he wasn't expecting that. A fool would decide to actually go answer the door, so he instead flung forth a small spool of ninja wire, hooking the door handles and pulling them inward with some deal of strain.

Who came through was not who he expected. Firstly, the cameras made him look smaller than he actually was. Standing upright, the aged Hokage could probably only reach shoulder-high to the mystery man. And more reason to stare became evident when he discarded his ragged, concealing cloak.

What lay underneath was an exquisite black coat with a high collar, which was only complemented when the stranger put on a dark hat with an exceptionally wide brim. Not the typical straw hat seen around the Elemental Nations, either - this one was a finely-made one with a large cap and a golden, stylized '-][-' (though with three dashes) facing forward.

And underneath that jacket, the Hokage spotted an elaborately-crafted suit of full-body plate armour. In this day and age of ninja and light conflict, that was a rare sight. Briefly, Hiruzen wondered if the man was some sort of samurai, or a emissary from a particularly rich, eccentic or endangered nobleman of Fire, or perhaps Cloud Country. Then again, he may have been of both. The armor was thick, and of a black metal in itself, made up of moderately-sized plates that interlocked to produce a formidable-looking metal shell around the man.

The man walked inside calmly while Hiruzen was still wary of a surprise attack. And he simply stood, on the other side of the Hokage's table, unconcerned by the look Sarutobi wore. Then, it was he who broke the tense silence.

"Sarutobi Hiruzen. Sandaime Hokage of Konohagakure no Sato. Am I correct in assuming I am speaking to you?"

The Hokage nodded, wondering what this man was playing at. The armored stranger reached into his coat. Sarutobi was milliseconds away from unleashing a Katon: Twin Infernal Dragon Technique on the man by now. The tension could have cut a knife, nevermind the idiom.

But tension turned to hostile curiousity when the stranger took out a large sigil. It was carved out of what looked like gold, actually. It took shape of the same kind of sigil that was on the stranger's hat. When the stranger placed it down on the Hokage's table, it made a loud thump.

"Inquisitor Gregoriy Russ. Ordo Malleus. We need to talk."

Hello, everyone who reads this. First of all, I own neither the grim, bloody, epic darkness of Warhammer 40,000, nor do I own the Naruto multimedia series. They belong to Games Workshop and Masashi Kishimoto and/or Shounen Jump respectively. This is my rather casual foray into both series because I can do what I bloody well please, and this is a somewhat productive use of my time. To quote an excellent fellow fan-fiction author on here, 'if I owned either I wouldn't be paying rent and working in a grocery store'.

Any and all reviews are welcome; they give me an insight into your thoughts, after all.

Also, I'm tossing my Author's notes down here. Ursakar tried it with his story, and I think it works excellently.

Enjoy!