Naruto: God of Shinobi

Chapter 26: Rivals Arrive

The village woke up the way it always did. Slow. Unremarkable. Merchants rolling back their shutters with the particular exhaustion of people who had done it a thousand times and would do it a thousand more. Children cutting corners through alleyways they had been told not to use. The smell of grilled fish from somewhere to the west and underneath it, barely there, the faint sweetness of street-vendor dango that had been sitting out since before the sun rose.

Naruto walked through all of it with his hands in his pockets.

He was thinking about the scroll.

Not about what it had felt like to read it. He had already filed that away, the cold shock of it, the particular silence that had followed understanding. He was thinking about it now the way you thought about a weapon you had recently acquired. What it was. What it could do. Who had wanted him to find it.

Someone had left it accessible. Someone had made sure the route in was unguarded at precisely the right moment. Someone had wanted him angry and pointed in a direction.

He was not angry. He was aware of the attempt to make him angry, which was a different thing entirely.

He thought about the Third Hokage. Old man. Kind eyes. The man who had come to his apartment once when Naruto was six and sat across from him at the low table and said nothing useful for an hour and then left. A man who had known, for twelve years, what had been done to the Uchiha. Who had sat with that knowledge the way you sat with an old injury you had learned to move around.

Not a monster. Something more complicated than a monster. A man who had decided the survival of the village outweighed the survival of a clan.

Naruto had no particular opinion about that decision. He noted it. He filed it. He kept walking.

He thought about Sasuke. About the boy who trained at dawn and ate alone and had organized his entire life around a single axis of purpose. Who had been told his brother was a rogue. A madman. A murderer without cause.

Should he tell him?

The information was a weapon. Weapons were not thrown away carelessly. They were used when the moment demanded it.

He heard footsteps behind him. Small. Quick. Familiar.

He had been hearing them for the last two blocks.

He turned the corner near the old pottery stall, stepped sideways, and waited.

Konohamaru flew past him like a projectile, arms windmilling, and very nearly took out a display of ceramic bowls before catching himself on a wooden post.

"Boss! You saw me coming!"

"You are loud," Naruto said.

"I was being stealthy!"

"You were not."

Konohamaru straightened up, adjusting his scarf with great dignity. He was followed, a moment later, by two other children who came around the corner at a considerably more cautious pace. A boy with runny eyes and glasses, and a girl with two pigtails and an expression of permanent mild anxiety.

"This," Konohamaru announced, gesturing broadly, "is my boss. The strongest genin in the village. He killed like a hundred guys in the Land of Waves."

"It was not a hundred," Naruto said.

"More or less."

"Not more. Not less either."

The two children stared at Naruto with the particular wide-eyed quality of people encountering something they had heard about but not quite believed. The girl introduced herself as Moegi. The boy said his name was Udon and then wiped his nose on his sleeve with no apparent embarrassment.

Naruto looked at them for a moment. Then he started walking again.

Konohamaru fell into step immediately. The other two hurried after him.

"Where are you going?"

"To meet my team."

"Can we come?"

"You are already coming."

Konohamaru beamed. He took this as a yes.

* * *

Sakura was there first, which was unusual. She was standing at the corner of the meeting spot with her arms folded across her chest and her gaze fixed somewhere above the rooftops, which was the expression of someone working very hard at not looking at a particular direction.

Sasuke leaned against the wall to her right, arms crossed, eyes distant. He was doing that thing he did where he appeared to be simply waiting but was in fact thinking very hard about something. The Sharingan, probably. Or his brother. He had two subjects, more or less, and both of them had the same quality of weight.

He looked up when Naruto arrived. His gaze moved briefly to the three children following behind.

Sakura looked up too. She looked at Naruto. Then she looked sharply away. A faint color rose in her face that she would have died before acknowledging.

They had not spoken directly since the rejection. Which was fine. Naruto had not intended it as cruelty. He had intended it as honesty, which occasionally produced the same result.

Konohamaru spotted Sakura and accelerated toward her with the complete fearlessness of someone too young to read a room.

"I am Konohamaru Sarutobi! The future Hokage of this village!"

Sakura blinked. She produced a smile of the type used by people who were making a genuine effort. "Nice to meet you."

Konohamaru looked at her. He looked at Naruto. He looked at her again.

"Wait. Are you the girl who has a crush on my boss?"

The silence was total.

Sakura's face went a color that had no real name. Her fist clenched. She was across the distance between them in one step and the swing she threw at Naruto was fast, committed, and driven by something with genuine velocity behind it.

Naruto stepped to the left. The fist hit air. Then the wall. Sakura made a sound that was not a word.

"The kid is annoying," Naruto said. "I had to tell him something to get him quiet."

"I am not annoying!" Konohamaru protested. "I am persistent! There is a difference!"

"There is not a meaningful one."

Sasuke watched this. His expression did not change. His eyes, however, moved to Naruto and stayed there for a moment longer than casual observation required. He was still processing the bridge. The name. The way Naruto had said it without ceremony or self-consciousness, as if it were simply a fact he had always carried.

The dead last. The orphan. The one who ate alone because no one would sit with him.

Sasuke filed it away and said nothing.

The children ran ahead.

This was, in retrospect, predictable.

Naruto heard them before he rounded the corner: the particular sound of small feet going too fast and then stopping very suddenly, and then a voice, adult and irritated and carrying the particular edge of someone who had not been inconvenienced yet but was open to becoming so.

He came around the corner and saw them.

The boy was broad and tall, older-looking than his probable age, face painted in parallel lines of purple that could have been ceremonial or could have been simple preference. He carried a wrapped bundle on his back that was large enough and oddly shaped enough to be almost anything. A weapon of some kind. Something old.

He had grabbed Konohamaru by the front of his jacket.

"Watch where you're going, brat."

Konohamaru's feet were off the ground. His companions had gone very still.

The painted boy seemed to consider the children for a moment. Then something shifted in his expression, the particular shift of someone who has decided that inconvenience is available after all.

"Actually," he said. "I changed my mind."

He dropped Konohamaru and reached for his bundle with one hand, the other swinging a kick toward the boy's ribs.

Sasuke moved.

He was simply there, between them, the kick connecting with his forearm before he redirected it and returned it to the painted boy's chest in one flowing motion. The boy flew back three meters and landed hard. He was on his feet before the dust settled, face twisted, and his hands were going for his puppet strings.

"You are dead."

"Kankuro."

The voice came from above and to the left. It was female. It was calm in the way that things are calm when they have decided not to be anything else.

The girl standing at the edge of the scene was tall, with four blonde ponytails and a massive fan across her back. She had the posture of someone who had learned, some time ago, that posture communicated things words sometimes could not. Her eyes moved across the situation the way eyes moved across a board game, identifying pieces.

Kankuro's hands paused on the strings. He did not lower them.

"Kankuro."

A different voice. Flat. Coming from a tree branch to the right, where a boy hung upside down, feet hooked over the wood, arms folded across his chest. He was young. Younger-looking than the other two. Red hair. Dark-ringed eyes that held the particular emptiness of someone who has looked for something in the world and concluded it is simply not there.

There was a gourd on his back, large and sealed, and around his feet the sand moved in small, slow eddies that had nothing to do with wind.

Kankuro's hands came down. He took a step back. The anger in his face became something else, something smaller and less comfortable.

"They started it," he said.

Gaara said nothing. He looked at Sasuke. Then his eyes moved to Naruto and stopped.

Naruto looked back.

Something passed between them in the silence. Not words. Not recognition in any ordinary sense. Something below that. Two containers. Two villages that had looked at their own children and decided they were tools. Two boys who had grown up with something massive and alive inside them, leashed or unleashed, shaped by whatever the particular nature of their village had decided to make of it.

Naruto held Gaara's gaze for three seconds. Then he looked away.

He walked past Gaara. Past Kankuro. He stopped in front of the girl.

"Naruto Uzumaki," he said. "Son of the Fourth Hokage."

The girl's eyes moved to him. They widened, fractionally, and then she recovered the way someone recovered when they had been trained for exactly this kind of moment.

"Temari," she said. "These are my brothers. Kankuro and Gaara. Children of the Fourth Kazekage."

Naruto's smile was narrow. Not warm. It was the smile of someone who had decided to deploy charm the way you deployed a specific tool for a specific purpose.

"Children of Kage," he said. "Not many of us around. How about Ichiraku Ramen. You and I. Talk about what that's like."

The silence that followed was the kind produced by something unexpected.

Sakura's mouth had opened. Sasuke had gone very still. Konohamaru was staring with the expression of someone witnessing something their existing categories could not quite accommodate.

Even Kankuro had forgotten his anger. His eyes moved between Naruto and his sister.

Temari's smile widened. Slow. Genuine in the way of someone who had been told something they had not expected and had decided, on consideration, that they were pleased by it.

"I would like that," she said.

"She can't."

Gaara was between them. He had not appeared to move. One moment the space was empty, the next he occupied it, and the sand around his feet shifted in slow circles.

"We are not here for dates," he said.

Naruto looked down at him. Gaara was shorter. Younger looking. The presence coming off him was disproportionate in the way that presence sometimes was when it had been produced by particular circumstances.

"So you listen to your little brother," Naruto said. He tilted his head slightly. "How quaint."

The air between them had a quality to it. Two jinchuriki. Two killers. The sand moved.

"By your headbands, you're Sand ninja." Sakura stepped between them. Her voice had the particular steadiness of someone who had decided to perform a function and was going to perform it regardless of what her face was doing. "The Leaf and Sand are allies. What is the purpose of your visit? Where are your entry permits?"

Kankuro laughed. It was the laugh of someone deflecting. "Flat chest. No wonder the boys in your village are looking elsewhere."

He reached into his jacket and produced a scroll. "Foreign pass permits. We are here for the Chunin Exams."

Temari glanced at her brothers. "We should go."

She turned. Kankuro fell in behind her. Gaara dropped from the branch and landed without a sound, and he did not look back, not at any of them, and the sand moved around his feet as he walked.

Naruto took three steps after them.

"Hey. Maybe we could meet during the exams?"

Temari looked back over her shoulder. Her smile had a quality to it that suggested she was enjoying something she was not going to explain.

"Certainly," she said. "If things work out."

She walked on.

* * *

Kakashi arrived twenty minutes late. He had his book open before he finished materializing out of the air, which was either a studied effect or simply habit. Probably both.

"Good morning. I was late because a beautiful woman needed my help."

No one laughed.

He lowered the book slightly and looked at his team. Sakura was still slightly red, staring at the middle distance. Sasuke was looking at Naruto. Naruto was looking at Sasuke.

Konohamaru and his companions were gone. Naruto had told them, very quietly, that it was time to leave, and they had left without argument, which was not the usual result of telling Konohamaru anything.

"Did I miss something?" Kakashi asked.

No one answered.

"Well." He produced a scroll from somewhere and held it loosely. "I have an announcement."

He explained the Chunin Exams without excessive ceremony. The written test, designed to assess intelligence under pressure and a specific kind of controlled panic. The Forest of Death, a six-day survival exercise with no medical teams on standby and a body count that varied year to year but was never zero. Preliminary fights for the candidates who made it through, with no restrictions on technique, no referees positioned to intervene quickly enough to matter in every case. The final tournament, conducted before a full audience that included dignitaries from multiple nations.

"People die," Kakashi said. He said it the way someone said something they had said before but believed required saying clearly. "In the forest. In the preliminary fights. In the finals. Occasionally in the written portion, though that is rare and usually involves a specific kind of bad luck. This is not a metaphor for challenge or adversity. It is a statement of historical fact. Genin have died in this exam in living memory. Some of them were talented. Some of them were unlucky. Some of them were both." He paused. "You do not have to enter."

Naruto spoke. "I am in."

Sasuke spoke. "I am in."

Kakashi looked at Sakura.

She was quiet for a moment. She was looking at Naruto. Then at Sasuke. Then at something slightly further away that was not either of them, something interior, something she was examining and making a decision about. She was thinking about the bridge. About crouching in the bushes with a kunai in each hand, guarding civilians, watching the boys she trained with do things she could not.

"I am in," she said.

Kakashi nodded. "Then I will register Team Seven."

They dispersed after that. Sasuke left without ceremony, already back inside his own head. Sakura said something to no one in particular and then walked in the opposite direction. Kakashi lingered, ostensibly checking something in his scroll.

Sasuke stopped at the edge of the clearing.

"How come you never mentioned it," he said.

Naruto tilted his head.

"That you are the son of the Fourth Hokage," Sasuke said. He was not looking at Naruto directly. He was looking at the wall to Naruto's left, which was his version of looking at something difficult. "You said it to those Sand genin like you say the weather. You have always known."

Sakura's head turned. Her mouth opened.

Kakashi's book lowered. Not completely. Enough.

Naruto looked at Kakashi. The single visible eye was very still. Whatever was moving behind it was moving quickly and in multiple directions at once.

"It was a secret," Naruto said. "My father had enemies. The village thought it was safer if no one knew."

A pause.

"I do not care about that anymore," he said. "I can defend myself."

He said it simply. Not as a boast. As a fact he had verified.

Sasuke said nothing. He was filing it away. He would take it apart later, alone, the way he took apart everything, looking for the angles and the implications.

Sakura was looking between them. Her expression had the quality of someone realizing, gradually, that the conversation they were standing in the middle of had layers beneath the one they could hear.

Kakashi said, "We should go. There is a lot to prepare."

His voice was even. Trained. He had said things in an even voice while more complicated things happened inside him for his entire adult life, and it did not always show, and it did not show now.

Naruto looked at him. The smile that crossed his face was brief and not warm. It was the smile of someone who had just confirmed something they already suspected.

He had wanted Kakashi to know that he knew.

He had wanted to see the eye widen. The book lower. The small involuntary evidence of a man confronting something he had kept well and kept long and was now being shown would not stay kept forever.

He had gotten it.

* * *

He walked home alone. His hands were back in his pockets. The morning had continued around him the way mornings did, indifferent to the various small and significant things that had happened inside it.

He thought about Temari. The way she had smiled when he suggested ramen. The particular quality of it, someone genuinely amused and genuinely interested, which was not a combination he encountered with unusual frequency.

He thought about Gaara. The sand. The eyes. The thing inside him that was not quite what the Nine-Tails was but was not entirely different either. Something that had been handled badly. Something that had shaped its container in a particular direction.

He thought about Kakashi's face.

Good.

He said it to himself, once, quiet, and then he stepped into the market and bought tomatoes, two cuts of pork belly, and a handful of mushrooms, because the Chunin Exams were coming and preparation required eating properly, and then he went home.

There were pieces on the board now. There were more coming.

He would be ready for all of them.

---

Next Time: Neji Hyuga – The No1 of last year.

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