Naruto: God of Shinobi

Chapter 49: Summoning Jutsu

Naruto stood at the edge of the water and did not move.

Jiraiya watched him from a few meters back. He had expected the boy to rush in. To step out and sink and climb back up and try again and again the way students always did, the way he had done as a boy when the Third Hokage sent him out to that same pond and told him to figure it out. Failure as the method. Repetition as the teacher.

Naruto was not moving.

His lips moved slightly. His brow was furrowed. He was thinking out loud, just barely, the words almost inaudible.

Jiraiya stepped closer to hear.

"Okay so..." Naruto's eyes were closed. "Going for raw strength isn't the idea. From what Kakashi-sensei explained, tree climbing was a constant, steady stream. Chakra to the soles of the feet. Solid surface, so the rate stayed constant. That's not the same here."

He paused. His head tilted slightly.

"Soft surface. Liquid. Back then if you pushed too much chakra you'd break through the bark and fall. The trick was enough to stick. Not enough to break. That principle's the same, but..." He exhaled through his nose. "The water's always moving. Always shifting. A steady stream won't work. It has to adapt. Constantly. You'd have to read the surface and adjust in real time."

He opened his eyes.

Jiraiya's mouth was slightly open.

"That's right," he said. "That's exactly right. You just... figured that out after a few tries."

"Yeah." Naruto shrugged. "Trying to brute-force it without understanding it first seemed like a waste of time."

Jiraiya stared at him. "Most people figure it out after failing a hundred times."

"Panic doesn't help. I learned that a while ago."

Something moved across Jiraiya's face. He looked at the boy for a moment longer than was comfortable and then looked away at the water.

"Alright," Jiraiya said. "Theory's good. Can you do the practical?"

Naruto crossed his fingers. The seal was automatic, the motion clean.

"Shadow Clone Jutsu."

Four clones appeared beside him. They looked at him. He looked at them.

"You know what to do."

The clones stepped to the edge. They performed the Tiger seal. They gathered chakra to their feet and stepped out.

The first one sank immediately, foot punching through the surface like it wasn't there, and went under with a yelp and a splash.

The second one stepped out and stood, knee-deep in water but upright, wobbling but not falling.

The original stepped out. Five inches deep. He wobbled. He held.

The fourth clone sank. Gone.

The fifth clone stepped out and simply stood. Feet flat on the surface. Steady.

Naruto stepped back to the bank. He looked at his clones. Then he released the jutsu.

The memories arrived all at once, five sets of experience landing simultaneously, and he sorted through them the way he sorted through everything now, quickly, looking for the pattern underneath the noise.

"Okay," he said. "That makes sense."

"What did you just do?" Jiraiya said.

"Used the clones to try different chakra distributions at the same time. When I released them I got all their memories. Five attempts in parallel. I can see which flow worked and which didn't."

Jiraiya was quiet for a moment. "You figured out the real use of shadow clones," he said. "Most people use 'em for combat. Distraction. The true purpose for it was always espionage. You turned it into a training method."

"It's efficient."

"Kid, that's not just efficient. That's..." Jiraiya shook his head. "Never mind. Keep going."

Naruto crossed his fingers again.

Four more clones appeared.

For two hours they worked. Clones stepped onto the water. They fell. They sank. They stood. The original watched and absorbed the memories after each release, refined the approach, spawned new clones, watched again. Each cycle was faster than the last.

After two hours all four clones were standing on the surface. So was the original.

They looked at each other.

Naruto released the jutsu. Absorbed. Nodded once.

He crossed his fingers.

Twenty-five clones appeared.

They spread across the water without instruction.

Then they attacked each other.

The sound of it was immediate and real, fists on bodies, splashes when someone hit the surface and had to claw their way back up, the grunt and impact of twenty-five people who shared a brain and knew exactly how each other moved and were trying to find the edge anyway.

They were fast. Faster than Naruto had been in the preliminary rounds. The weights had done what the weights were supposed to do, and the water was doing something else on top of that, forcing a precision in the footwork that solid ground didn't demand.

They moved like they'd been born out here.

Jiraiya watched. His arms were crossed. His face had gone somewhere that wasn't his usual expression, something quieter.

"Minato's boy," he said. Quiet. Mostly to himself. "Figured it out in one morning. What took me three days."

Naruto walked up beside him. The clones were still going on the water.

"So," Naruto said. "You gonna teach me the Summoning Jutsu or what?"

Jiraiya looked at him sideways. Something in his expression shifted. Warmer. "You certainly are Minato's son."

"Yeah, well." Naruto's voice was flat. "I am. Not that anyone bothered to mention it."

Jiraiya was quiet for a moment. "You wanna know about him. Your father."

"Nah." Naruto didn't look at him. "I won't ask. I had to find out by myself what he did. What my mother went through. I don't need you filling in gaps for me."

He paused. His eyes stayed on the water.

"This village has a secret problem. Really, the whole shinobi world does, if I'm being honest."

Jiraiya let out a long breath. It came out through his nose, slow, the sigh of a man who had been told something he already knew by someone who had no business knowing it yet.

"Well," Jiraiya said. "Isn't that something."

He looked at the boy for another moment. Then he bit his thumb.

The blood welled up dark and quick. Jiraiya smeared it across his palm and brought his hands together, the seals fast, so practiced they barely registered as separate motions.

He pressed his palm to the ground.

"Ninja Art: Summoning Jutsu."

The smoke came thick and white and immediate, filling the space in front of them from the ground up. When it cleared, a toad sat where the smoke had been.

He was enormous. The size of a small building, his body orange with blue markings scattered across the skin. Bandages wrapped around his torso and his left foreleg. A heavy necklace hung around his neck, seven large beads on a cord, and on the central bead, the largest one, was a kanji burned deep into the stone. 忠. Loyalty.

His tongue rolled out, slow and deliberate, carrying a scroll. Worn at the edges. Mostly green. Old.

He looked down at them. His eyes were the eyes of something that had been alive for a very long time.

"Jiraiya," he said. His voice came from somewhere below normal sound. "You called."

"Yeah." Jiraiya grinned. "Got a kid for you to meet."

The toad's eyes moved to Naruto. He looked at him for a long moment, the way old things looked at things they were still deciding about. Then he looked back at Jiraiya.

"Another one. You never learn."

"Just let him sign, old friend. He's worth it."

The toad grunted. His tongue unrolled the scroll across the ground. It spread wide, revealing rows of names written in blood. Some of them were old enough that the ink had faded to brown at the edges. Some were newer.

"Your summoning hand," Jiraiya said. "Write your name. Then press your fingers below it."

Naruto nodded. He turned to the water.

"Alright. That's enough."

The twenty-five clones dispersed. The memories came in all at once, twenty-five fights, twenty-five perspectives, and he absorbed them and set them aside.

He bit his thumb.

The blood was warm. He pressed it to the scroll and wrote.

Naruto Uzumaki.

He bit each finger. He pressed them below his name in a line.

The blood glowed briefly. Not for long. Just long enough to acknowledge what had been done. Then it settled into the page and was still.

Jiraiya looked at him. The grin was gone. His face was serious in the way it got when it wasn't performing anything.

"You're one of us now, kid."

Naruto looked at the scroll. At his name. At the names above it. One of them he recognized. He didn't look at it long.

He looked up at the toad instead.

"So," he said. "Do I get to summon you, or is there a smaller one I have to start with?"

The toad looked at him. Something in the ancient eyes shifted. Not warmth exactly. Something more like interest.

Next time: See You Around, Pervy Sage – Rebuilding the Clan

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