"What are we going to report?" Chihiro asks.

"To the Hokage, everything. Some of it's likely to be declared at least a bit classified, like the jinchuuriki, the Tailed Beast, and the Akatsuki. The conversation with the jinchuuriki especially should be relayed directly and only to the Hokage."

"Understood. Shall we proceed?"

He nods.

Their trip back home through the Land of Fire is also uneventful.

Thank fuck.

And Tsunade can have her report. As exhaustively as she feels like it.

Which is very, very exhaustively.

She's rubbing at her temples by the time the jinchuuriki shows up in the narrative, and has her eyes closed as of the turtle. She accepts the scroll with a scowl.

"Well. Great. I'll see what Mei wants. You're all dismissed, and I'll be adding a diplomatic mission onto your records and pay."

Sugira nods, bows to the normal depth, and heads out.

The scroll contains standard Kage-to-Kage greetings and opens with an apology for the belligerence and insularity of Hidden Mist in recent times. It explains there has been a change of leadership, and the village is looking to move forward into a new era of international cooperation. It also says there will be a general amnesty for any shinobi who left the Mist during its time of troubles due to disagreements with the leadership, and asks that the Hokage pass such news along to any interested parties she may be aware of. Finally, it warns that elements of Akatsuki have been implicated in the initial disruption to Hidden Mist and warns the Hokage not to trust the mercenary group.

Well.

Seems like there's diplomacy to be started, then.

She starts drafting a response. (Thanking Mei for the information, of course, returning sentiments about international cooperation, offering the information on Zabuza and his apprentice's grave sites...). Zabuza's sword is worth more to Mist than it is to the Leaf; Tsunade has no problem handing it over, either in exchange for concessions or as a symbolic gesture of cooperation, depending on how far Mist feels like going with their 'new era.' (She doesn't say this outright, but it shouldn't be too hard to feel out - and of course she'll need to get Sasuke's team's observations on Mist laid out formally to be handed off to any diplomatic teams...).

She also sets into motion more gentle probes after Akatsuki - likely Jiraiya's wheelhouse, there - and makes a worried note in her own mind of Danzo's apparent involvement with the group, their apparent targeting of the Nine Tails...

This is going to be a long next few weeks.

And not just for the Hokage. Sasuke also has his classes beginning.

His first crop of students includes representatives from the Nara and the Aburame, a handful of jounin including Yuhi Kurenai and Sarutobi Asuma, and a few masked ANBU.

He runs some numbers to figure out how much time he can afford to spend on teaching himself to make magic items - specifically, he wants one that'll let him sleep fewer hours every night. It'll take a while, though, especially given everything else, and that he's never actually made magical items before. He practices until the duration on his spells is longer - enough to add a minute onto the ones measured that way. He continues his work on the Fly spell, mostly, in between working on his healing spells.

For classes - he's very grateful for his stint as a professor, now. Makes recycling lesson plans a lot easier.

He's in the room ahead of any of his students - as thoroughly hidden as he can be, by the time it'd be reasonable for some to appear. Silent, invisible, and chakra-masked. (This is both a test for himself - he's unsure how well these stack up against the elite - and a demonstration for his students.)

No one seems to notice him as they come in.

(Kakashi not being part of this group, everyone is on time.)

He's leaning against the blackboard when he drops the spells all at once, exactly at the start time.

All the ninja here are too high-ranked to flinch, of course, though the Nara does visibly reach for weapons before relaxing.

He launches right into the lesson like nothing happened - summarizing his magic, what it does, the broad theory of how it works. Spells have levels, which indicate rough difficulty to memorize - a level is measured by how many symbols (two hundred and fifty per level) the instructions take to write out. Short spells, that take less than a few lines, are cantrips, or zeroth level. The spells he used to conceal himself were all second level - three spells, each when cast requires no further effort to maintain, but they have a duration measured in minutes. Casting a spell requires memorizing its instructions, and for leveled spells this erases the instructions from your mind. Which does, in fact, mean you need to re-memorize every non-cantrip you want to cast each day.

He describes the schools of magic, and describes one or more example types of spell for each (Conjuration is the main unintuitive one, as it also includes healing and teleportation), and then gives examples for spell effects typical of each level, and how modifying a spell would change its level.

That summary is over fairly quickly - the first step in actually learning to use all this is the cantrip Read Magic. It enables reading the instructions in the first place. Read Magic is fairly simple, as spells go - only thirty symbols of what looks like gibberish, each different from the others. He breaks down these symbols; this cantrip, since you can't cheat by casting it on yourself before you know it, is one of the ones that you absolutely need to understand at an atomic level to use.

And the lessons - because he's sometimes had individual students but never an entire class memorize this in one go - roll on, requiring levels of memorization that'd be brutal for any non-advanced class. He mostly focuses on introducing and explaining symbols or, once people start actually getting Read Magic, entire cantrips, leaving the actual work of repetition and memorization for the students to do in their own time.

He also, on Tsunade's orders, starts those who get Read Magic on how to cast from scrolls, cautioning them that until they can naturally channel the arcana involved in any given spell level, there'll be a risk of the spell failing - and if it fails, a risk of a scroll mishap.

He builds up a stockpile of useful scrolls for Tsunade to dole out as she sees fit. He experiments with making magic items (failing time and again). He works on his spells - one to open locks even at a distance, flight (he finds somewhere appropriately secluded to practice, then takes his team flying when they're available, both for recreation and to get them used to the spell), and bashes his head repeatedly against a spell to remove curses like, hopefully, his cursed seal -

- Managing it near the end of the period Tsunade had wanted him village-bound.

And that, of course, is where things go wrong.