"You're not wrong, but that was already his limit. Of course he wanted to defeat Konoha, to free the village from the hardships of the desert."
"Then who's to blame for all those people who died in the village?"
Although he didn't say it outright, Hardy knew that Sasori was really asking who was to blame for his parents' deaths.
Logically, this wasn't something a mere genin should know about.
Elder Chiyo had always kept the truth about Sasori's parents' deaths from him, only telling young Sasori that his parents had gone far away and wouldn't be back for a long time.
But as he grew older, these things could no longer be hidden from the precocious Sasori.
Hardy fell silent for a while, carefully choosing his words to avoid saying anything he shouldn't. In the end, he managed to squeeze out a correct, but ultimately meaningless, answer.
"Whoever did the killing is to blame. If Konoha killed them, then blame Konoha."
"But it was the Third Kazekage who started the war. If he hadn't started the war, people wouldn't have died."
Why is this kid so stubborn!?
"No, people would still have died, and even more of them."
Sasori tilted his head.
"Because we're poor. The village isn't wealthy, and we're surrounded by vast deserts. In the entire Land of Wind, more than seventy percent of the area is desert and wasteland. Over eighty-five percent of the land is unfit for farming. Yet most of the resources and wealth are taken by the daimyo and nobles to support their extravagant lifestyles, and they even cut the village's funding for that."
"Every year, Sunagakure gets the smallest budget among the Five Great Nations. Without funding, the village can't develop, and may even regress, while other villages are progressing. In the end, our village would become a small, weak ninja village, bullied by others, and eventually destroyed. And if the village is gone, the Land of Wind would fall too."
"At that point, many people in the Land of Wind would die—ten times more than everyone you've ever met. So, to prevent that, the Third Kazekage had no choice but to lead us to fight, to seize more resources and better land, so we can feed more people."
Trying to explain the relationship between war and productivity to a kid—especially one who's received only a semi-literate ninja education—is exhausting. Hardy could only try to explain it in a way a ninja might understand.
"Then why not just take the resources back from the daimyo and nobles?"
Sasori asked again.
"Because all the daimyo and nobles in the ninja world stand together. If we openly turn against our daimyo and kill him, all the other daimyo will order their own ninja villages to attack Sunagakure. What Sunagakure would be doing is threatening the very foundation of their rule. Then we'd have to face the entire ninja world. But if we attack the Land of Fire, we only have to deal with Konoha."
Sasori fell silent, feeling he needed to sort out his thoughts.
For someone who hadn't even had two years of schooling—and what little schooling he had was about killing—this knowledge was completely different from anything he'd ever thought about.
As a ninja, he only needed to learn two things: killing and completing missions.
After a few seconds, Sasori decided to set these things aside for now and return to the main topic.
"We can talk about that later. Today, I want to spar with you. The puppet you made that can hold a person inside is pretty special—it's different from the mainstream puppets in the village. I want to see what it can do."
Hardy looked deeply into Sasori's eyes and said earnestly:
"Alright. After we fight, I hope you'll think about what I said. If there's anything you can't figure out, you can come talk to me."
To avoid being turned into a puppet in the future, Hardy felt it was necessary to guide Sasori's thinking.
At the very least, he needed to teach him a more normal way to think, so these unteachable geniuses wouldn't come up with all sorts of bizarre solutions to problems.
The two of them left the room and headed to the Puppet Corps' training ground, releasing their respective puppets.
Hardy...
Both hands shot out chakra threads to connect to the Fat Puppet, covering himself with it. He controlled it with his right hand, while a chakra thread from his left hand slipped through a gap in the Fat Puppet's glove and connected to the little boy.
Manipulating puppets with chakra threads doesn't necessarily affect the user's own body posture.
At thirty-five years old, Sasori could control hundreds of puppets simultaneously with chakra threads released from just a piece of flesh.
The key to puppet mastery lies in the control of chakra threads.
Of course, the movements and postures of the fingers and arms can enhance the manipulation of the threads, maximizing the combat effectiveness of a single puppet.
Naturally, Hardy was nowhere near Sasori's level during his peak as a puppet master. Normally, a puppeteer would only use their fingers to emit chakra threads and control puppets.
He didn't need anything that complicated either. While controlling the Fat Puppet in battle, he just needed to use the Black Secret Technique's skill of splitting his attention, using the fingers hidden under the puppet's gloves to manipulate the little boy.
In other words, five chakra threads from one hand controlled the little boy, while five from the other hand controlled the Fat Puppet, with the rest of his body coordinating as needed.
Sasori also connected his chakra threads to Kuroari and Sanshōuo, controlling Sanshōuo with one hand to protect himself, and launching an attack with Kuroari using the other.
"Black Secret Technique: Puppet Hand Dance."
It was the same move he had used during previous missions. Kuroari's six arms instantly extended—not only were they much longer than Shiroari's, but the ends and the adjacent segments were made of metal, looking like six collapsible spears.
"Black Secret Technique: Rapid Performance."
The little boy also revealed his mechanical claws and spinning saw blades, engaging Kuroari in fierce combat.
The former was clearly faster than Kuroari, but the latter had more claws and more mechanisms at its disposal.
The two were locked in a dead heat, neither gaining the upper hand, and soon the rhythm shifted—to sever the opponent's chakra threads and disrupt their control over their puppet.
Hardy raised his eyebrows, glancing at Sasori in surprise.
"Kuroari, Sanshōuo... There should be a Karasu in the future, and with Sasori's skills, he'll surely upgrade his puppets."
In the future, Kankurō used Kuroari and Karasu during the Chūnin Exams, and after becoming a jōnin in Shippuden, he added Sanshōuo to his arsenal.
The fact that Kuroari and Sanshōuo remained in use up to jōnin level meant they were upgraded to that standard, and it also showed that both puppets had excellent foundations.
At least in Hardy's estimation, Kuroari could already be classified as a B- rank puppet.
Both were using Black Secret Techniques. Although Hardy's puppet skills had improved considerably compared to before, there was still some gap between him and Sasori.