Chapter Text
This story is set in the world of Escape & Evade, a world in which the village was formed quite differently to cannon.
There are reasons for the differences from cannon in this story and many of them are contained in The World Building of Courting Culture Confusion.
The story begins right after the end of Escape, Evade, and Ensnare, and is a direct continuation of it. It also occurs concurrently with events after chapter 188 of To Tempt a Target, the love story of Hikaku, Seto, Izuna, and Tōka.
You do not need to have read To Tempt a Target to understand Zealous Zetsu Zooms towards the Zenith, not unless you are interested in the relationships within that quartet or the personal relationships they have with the rest of the founders generation, but you will need to have read Escape, Evade, and Ensnare as this story will make no sense otherwise.
If you are reading both To Tempt a Target and Zealous Zetsu Zooms towards the Zenith, then this is the chronological order of events:
Chapter 188 of To Tempt a Target
Escape, Evade, and Ensnare
Chapter 2 of Zealous Zetsu Zooms towards the Zenith
Chapter 189 of To Tempt a Target
Chapters 3 to 6 of Zealous Zetsu Zooms towards the Zenith.
Chapter 190 to the end of To Tempt a Target
Chapter 7 of Zealous Zetsu Zooms towards the Zenith
Warnings:
There will be scenes of violence typical to cannon.
There will be frank discussions of politics, including some of the more fraught decisions made by all parties.
There will be swearing and a lot of it.
There will also be original characters, and a lot of them.
Most of the Shodai Kage, apart from Hashirama, have relatively minimal appearances in cannon and the Raikage in particular is going to feature heavily in this story. As such, he is going to be portrayed in a way I feel works with his actions, which may not match up with impressions of him from cannon. In addition, Zetsu here will be quite different to the Zetsu we see in the Fourth Shinobi War. It’s less experienced with humans, and has never lived with them on a long term basis as it did with Madara, Obito, and the Akatsuki. As such, its actions and responses may not be what you’re expecting.
Finally, this story is crack. Most of the stories in this universe are tagged as ‘Crack Treated Seriously’, and you may have noticed that this story is not. Instead it is tagged as ‘Crack NOT treated seriously’, ‘Because I can’t take Zetsu seriously’.
Be warned. Those tags are accurate to my intentions.
In that vein, all the chapter titles and summaries are from the Thirty-Six Stratagems, on which I do not consider myself an expert.
Please, read with care for yourself and skip the story if any of this is not for you.