The force of Takeo's words was indescribable; saying that they hit with the strength of so many sledge hammers would be an understatement. And yet somehow Takeo managed to deal an even more ferocious blow at the end. It was a wound that bit deeper than any wound he had ever received in battle, and sent the most severe pain surging through his body that he had ever felt. With one sentence, Takeo had taken everything from Ryozan. His his privilege, his dignity, and, most importantly, his home were all gone now. All he had left was a sword with no one to wield it for. All he could do was hang his head in silence. 

Ryozan stood there, stunned, wondering if he was even still alive for several minutes thereafter. Perhaps this is why spirits roamed the earth; numb, purposeless, tormented. But then Ryozan lifted his head and looked up at the crimson sky. By now Takeo was long gone, and Ryozan took a single step forward. "You're wrong..." he whispered under his breath. The war was over, yet the rebels refused to acknowledge their defeat. No blood needed to be shed that day, or any day thereafter. The village was at peace, and the only thing that had changed was the face of power. It was their power that the rebels missed, nothing else. 

"You're wrong..." he said, now walking through the streets at a brisk pace, going nowhere in particular. Of course it had occurred to him that it may have been possible that if the rebels wanted him dead then he would have been. And he dismissed that possibility as hindsight and conjecture. At the time, he could not have had a valid assessment of the attackers' abilities. They may have avoided him deliberately, they may simply not have cared who they struck. Their motives were irrelevant; defense was the best tactic in that scenario. 

"You're wrong..." It was his responsibility to protect the best interests of Konoha, even if that responsibility had just been stripped away from him. If a new way is better than the old, he ought to support it; if an old way becomes corrupt and wicked, he must correct it. Idly standing by and allowing his comrades to make mistakes was not loyalty. blindly following orders was not loyalty. But surely loyalty couldn't be defined simply by what is was not. Ryozan truly believed that he was loyal to his country, but what did that mean?

He found himself standing before the carved faces of all the Hokage, every one of them an indisputably great shinobi. He wondered if Takeo would even permit him to look at them again, and then he wondered why one of the greatest leaf ninjas alive detested him so. Calmly, he took a seat, leaning his back against the cliff, and once again stared up at the crimson sky. There were no answers up there, so why did he keep searching for them? He began to grow weary of thinking of these things, the answers to all his dilemmas seeming different depending on which philosophy he tried on, and his head eventually began to sink downwards. Then, as his eyes fell upon the earth before him, something changed. The answers were not up in the clouds, in the realm of philosophy and moral ambiguity. The answer to it all was much simpler, down to earth, fundamental. It didn't matter what was right or wrong; such things could very well differ from person to person, from place to place, from age to age. The one thing that was never, that could never be in flux was loyalty. And he had just harmed those who he claimed to be loyal to. 

Philosophy. That was a weapon of the empire. The Empress could never gain support through force alone, so she laced her power with abstractions like "peace" and visions of an idealized utopia. It was all just a genjutsu... and it worked. "I was wrong..."