Naruto lay flat on his back atop the Stray Demon's corpse and stared at the sky through the hole in the ceiling.
His mind was somewhere high above him, running on a cocktail of adrenaline, stimulants, and exhaustion. It took a moment for the rest of his senses to catch up.
The smell of the corpse was horrible.
Like rotting meat left out in the sun too long in a lather of sulfur and ash. It was the kind of smell that had him gagging every time he inhaled as the pain from his broken arm and internal injuries began to simmer.
"I need to get healed."
Naruto held up the empty Estus Flask, tilting it hopefully. Well, I do not have a bonfire to refill this thing, he thought, frustration bubbling. But before he could dwell on it, a heavy thud echoed through the room.
"Oh, come on! Can't this place just give me a break?"
The figure stepped forward, and even in his half dazed state, Naruto could not help but think, Whoa, that's some badass armor.
The intruder was clad in jet black armor. Twin horn like protrusions jutted from the helmet, and layered plates covered the figure from head to toe.
[ Name: Black Knight ][ HP: 1393 / 1393 ]
Naruto blinked as the Black Knight moved with blinding speed toward him.
A smoke bomb hit the ground with a crack and smoke swallowed everything.
The Black Knight's sword cleaved through the smoke cloud and the Stray Demon's corpse in one uninterrupted arc, splitting the massive body in half. The shockwave cleared the smoke around them.
"Nope!" Naruto said it with a pop, already at the ladder.
Jumping up, the boy found himself in a long, shadowed corridor. One end was sealed off by an empty jail cell, while the other had collapsed into rubble. From the layout, he guessed that twin halls of prison cells must have circled the chamber on each side.
A metallic clanging snapped him out of his thoughts.
The knight was climbing the ladder.
"Oh hell no!" Naruto said, pushing the ladder and sending the knight back down to the floor below. He almost wanted to laugh and mock the knight, but he was in too much danger to act like his typical self.
Something glowing glimpsed in the darkness of the cell caught his eye.
Maybe that's something.
He ran toward it, only to find a doll.
It was a small bronze puppet that had long since turned green with age. Naruto turned it over in his hands, half expecting it to spring to life or whisper directions to a secret passage or do literally anything useful.
It did nothing.
What does this thing even do.
The faint glow he had seen from across the cell was gone now, or maybe it had never been there and he was hallucinating it.
Still. Something about it feels important.
BOOM.
The right wall of the corridor ceased to exist.
The Black Knight jumped through the hole it had made. Naruto had approximately one second to register the massive black knight sword in motion. The doll shimmered into his inventory as the thrust came forward aimed to split him clean in two. Naruto got his shield up, deflecting the blade to the side by a margin that he was choosing not to think about, and ran.
The Knight's Sight fired.
A spinning backhand cut came at head height from his right. He dropped low and felt the blade pass through the air where his skull had been a half second earlier, the stone wall behind him taking the hit instead, the sword biting deep into the rock.
Stuck.
Naruto slapped an explosive tag onto the knight's chest and sprinted. The explosion filled the cell behind him, shaking the corridor, dust raining from the ceiling in sheets.
He looked back.
[ Name: Black Knight ][ HP: 1300 / 1393 ]
The Black Knight walked out of the smoke with no sign of damage.
How does something take a point blank explosive tag and just keep walking.
Naruto kept running.
I can't fight this thing.
Even at full strength, with two working arms and a sword that had not been shattered, he was not confident he could put that thing down.
Iruka sensei, Naruto thought, said that a shinobi's greatest weapon was knowing when not to fight.
He had said it during a lesson on tactical withdrawal, which was the Academy's polite name for running away, and Naruto had rolled his eyes at that. Why would the Hokage run away from a strong enemy?
"I owe Iruka sensei an apology."
Naruto pulled the fuma shuriken from his inventory and hurled it at the knight. The Black Knight bisected it with a single swing without breaking stride. Naruto stopped running, turned around, and put his hands into the serpent sign as chakra became visible outside his body.
"AHHHHH!"
The knight's shield came up immediately, its whole frame dropping into a defensive posture.
Naruto stared at it.
So, it does have some form of intelligence.
"AHHHHH!" he screamed again with the full commitment of someone preparing to do an enormous and devastating jutsu.
He then jumped out of the hole in the wall.
The Black Knight seemed to register a second too late that nothing had happened and nothing was going to happen. It had just been outwitted by a screaming twelve year old. It jumped after him. And found him standing in the chamber below surrounded by thirty shadow clones, every single one of them holding a smoke bomb and grinning with his face.
"Try finding us now, big guy."
Every clone threw simultaneously.
The chamber disappeared into black.
What followed was the sound of the Black Knight finding clones with systematic efficiency. The first clone went down with a single swing that sent it popping into smoke before it had finished its attack. The second tried to stab from behind and got backhanded hard enough that it dissolved on impact. Three clones attempted a coordinated rush from three angles and were dealt with in two swings.
A clone threw a kunai directly at the knight's face.
The sword bisected it midair.
The explosive tag split with it, the seal formula dead before it could activate.
By the time the smoke thinned, every clone was gone.
The grappling hook caught the top of the chamber wall and Naruto dropped into the corridor on the other side before the last of the smoke had finished clearing. The hallway ahead of him was full of hollows who turned toward the sound of his landing with lurching attention.
Behind him, the Black Knight jumped into the corridor.
Seeing himself stuck between a rock and a hard place, Naruto kept running deeper into the hallway.
Silence filled the chamber below.
Then, from inside the demon's corpse, something moved. Naruto pulled himself out one handed, trying very hard not to vomit. "That is the second worst thing I have ever climbed into, dattebayo!"
He chose not to think about what the first was.
From somewhere far above, an explosion rattled down through the stone, distant enough to be muffled but close enough to feel in the floor.
A moment later the clone's last memory of a very short fight arrived.
Naruto allowed himself a small, exhausted smile.
Good. Let it think I am dead.
He pulled the grappling hook from his inventory, aimed for the hole in the wall, and swung up.
The black gates of the asylum waited at the end of the corridor beyond.
[ Item: Big Pilgrim's Key ][ Description: Key to the inner door of the Undead Asylum main hall. Big key belonging to a chosen Undead pilgrim. But this Chosen Undead knows not what this pilgrimage has in store. ]
"Thanks for the ominous warning," Naruto mumbled at the system, not really caring about its dramatic tone right now.
The door creaked open into a long cliff path. Moss covered everything it could reach, crawling up the broken stonework, softening the edges of old ruins that dotted the landscape on both sides.
Now what? Naruto stood there for a moment with no answer to that question. The Bell of Awakening. The land of Ancient Lords.
He did not know where either of those things were.
But first, he needed to do this.
Naruto found a patch of ground beside the asylum wall. He pulled a kunai and started to dig, one handed. The work was harder than it should have been and mattered more because of it. When the grave was deep enough he reached into his inventory and retrieved Oscar's corpse with both hands, broken arm protesting the weight which he ignored.
He laid his master down carefully.
Folded the hands the way he had seen it done in Konoha, in the funerals he had watched from a distance.
He stepped back and looked at what he had done.
It was not enough. It was never going to be enough. But it was what he had.
Naruto found a flat stone nearby and dragged it to the head of the grave. He set it in place and picked up his kunai. He was not a particularly good writer under the best of circumstances and these were not those. But he kept at it until every character was legible, until what he had put into the stone was real and could not be taken back.
Oscar of Astora.Knight. Teacher. Friend.He gave his kindness freely.That is rarer than any blade.
Naruto set the kunai down.
And sat down in front of it, crossed his legs, and started talking.
"I got him," he said. His voice came out hoarse and smaller than he meant it to. Naruto pulled at a piece of dead grass near his knee. "It was really close. You would have said my footwork was sloppy for most of it and you would have been right." He paused. "The iron ball was my idea though. I think you would have liked that part."
The wind moved across the cliff.
"I do not think I could have done it without you... I do not know if you were actually there or if it was just the drugs or whatever the Astora sword's blessing does but it felt like you were there." He pressed the back of his hand against his mouth for a moment. "So I am counting it. That was our victory. That was us against the demon."
He pulled at another piece of dead grass.
"I am going to find the Bell of Awakening," he said. "I do not know where it is. I do not know anything about this world really, you were supposed to be the one who..."
He stopped, swallowed and tried again.
"You were supposed to come with me."
His voice cracked on the last word and that was it.
A wave of grief hit him unlike anything in his entire life and Naruto's first instinct was to look for someone to tell.
There was no one.
No Iruka to show up at the wrong moment and say exactly the right thing. No old man Hokage to sit across from him with his pipe and patience. No Teuchi to put a bowl in front of him to make him feel better.
Just a twelve year old boy with a feeling he had absolutely no tools for.
He sat down hard in the dirt.
He had spent his whole life learning to outrun feelings he could not understand. Fill the space they occupied with noise and motion until they could not find him anymore. It had worked, more or less.
It was not working now.
The grief was too big, immediate and specifically shaped.
Naruto pressed his forehead to his knee and stopped trying to outrun it.
He ugly cried.
His shoulders shook. He made sounds he would have been mortified by under any other circumstances and did not care. There was no one to be composed for and nothing left to be composed with.
He cried until his throat was raw. He cried until his eyes were swollen almost shut. He cried until his body ran out of the energy grief needed to express itself and settled into a deep, bone heavy exhaustion that pressed down on him from every direction at once.
CAWWW!
Naruto jolted upright, his hand reaching for a weapon.
CAWWW!
The sound came from somewhere along the cliff edge, and curiosity did what it always did with Naruto, arriving before caution could stop it. He slowly walked toward the edge of the cliff.
The world opened up before him in every direction at once. Vast and endless mountains with peaks lost in gray mist.
This place is so beautiful and lonely at the same time.
Naruto was still thinking it when the shadow fell over him.
The crow was enormous, as dark as the night with a body the size of a carriage. Its talons were outstretched and descending toward him. It grabbed him before he finished the thought of moving.
The world lurched as the cliff edge disappeared. Everything disappeared except the wind and the talons locked around him. The mountains dropping away below at a speed that made his stomach attempt to relocate somewhere above his head.
He did not scream.
He wanted to scream.
Okay. Okay. Calm down, Naruto. This bird is going to land somewhere. Birds always land. Just conserve your chakra, get ready when it does, and do not look down, dattebayo!
He looked down.
That was a mistake.
The bird flew for three days.
Naruto ate from his inventory suspended in midair over landscapes that had no names he knew, drank water from a canteen he had to angle carefully to avoid it going straight up into his nose, and slept in shifts with his hands locked around the talons. Somewhere in those three days and the sheer relentless enormity of everything passing below him, his grief went quiet.
Not gone.
He could still feel it, sitting at the back of everything.
On the third day the crow began to approach a place that caught Naruto's breath.
A kingdom sprawling across the landscape below in a scale that made Konoha look like a small town sketch on a map. He stared at it with his mouth open and the wind pushing against his teeth.
The crow twisted its path toward a circular structure perched on a cliff.
The talons suddenly opened.
He fell.
The roll on landing was instinctive and deeply unpleasant, dirt and stone scraping against the armor as he tumbled across the ground and came to a stop on his back staring at the gray sky. He lay there for a moment. A warmth moved through him from the inside out. Broken arm. Cracked ribs. Three days of being in the sky in a giant crow's grip. The warmth seemed to heal his mind and body.
Naruto closed his eyes, letting the magic do its thing.
The Firelink Shrine was hauntingly beautiful.
Crumbling stone archways and pillars draped in moss and vines, concentric rings of stone surrounding the bonfire at its center. A dead gnarled tree stretched up toward a misty sky where pale blue light filtered through in shifting rays.
A man sat near the bonfire.
Full suit of dull chainmail. Short black hair. An expression that communicated clearly that he had seen everything the world had to offer and had arrived at the conclusion that none of it was particularly worth the effort. He did not look up when Naruto arrived. Just sat there with a hollow, broken stillness.
"Yo."
Naruto hoped for friendly. After everything, seeing an actual human being was almost comforting enough to overlook the dead expression.
"Well, what do we have here? You must be a new arrival." The man still had not looked up. "Let me guess. Fate of the Undead, right? Well, you are not the first. But there is no salvation here. You would have done better to rot in the Undead Asylum." A pause. "But too late now."
"Geez," Naruto muttered to himself. "Real ray of sunshine."
Still, he managed a crooked grin and raised a fist into the air, more tired than triumphant. "Well, the Undead Asylum has been conquered. Dattebayo."
Something shifted in the man's face. Gone before Naruto could read it, replaced by the same hollow expression. "Oh? So you defeated the Asylum Demon."
Something in his tone suggested he found this mildly amusing lie.
"Yep."
"Kekekeke."
"Laugh it up. It is the truth."
"Sure it is, boy," the man said, still chuckling to himself. "No Undead has ever managed to kill that thing. Either you die, or you escape. Those are your only two options."
Naruto bit his tongue so hard he tasted blood.
Precept the Fourth, he reminded himself. Show virtue of patience, humility, and honor through your actions.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
He took a breath.
"Whatever. Can you at least tell me where the Bell of Awakening is?"
"There are actually two Bells of Awakening. One is up above, in the Undead Church. The other is far, far below, in the ruins at the base of Blighttown. Ring them both and something happens." The crestfallen warrior gave Naruto a mocking smile. "Brilliant, right? Not much to go on. But I have a feeling that will not stop you. So off you go. It is why you came, is it not? To this accursed land of the Undead? Hah hah hah hah."
"Prick," Naruto muttered under his breath.
All he wanted, right now, was to go home. To sit at Ichiraku's with both elbows on the counter and eat ramen until Teuchi told him he had had enough, which had never once actually happened. To take a warm bubble bath. To sleep in his own bed.
Let's go back for now.
He made the decision quietly and turned back toward the crestfallen warrior.
"My name is Naruto Uzumaki."
"An Undead that actually has a name. In these parts, a name means nothing."
"Yeah, yeah, whatever."
Naruto swung into palm in a hammer motion. "I am going to call you Older Emo."
Blank stare.
Then back to the ground.
Wow, Naruto thought, genuinely impressed. This guy is even more emo than Sasuke. How did I end up talking to someone more depressing than Sasuke.
He shook his head and let his mind drift back to the actual problem.
Getting home.
The last time he had gone back to Konoha, how had that worked?
The Asylum Demon killed me. And then I woke up in Konoha.
He turned that over carefully.
Maybe that is the trick.
The thought sat in his stomach in a way he did not entirely like.
"Alexander."
Naruto nearly jumped out of his armor. "What?"
"You do not have to wait for my name," Alexander said. "It is Alexander. I have long since abandoned it alongside everything else. I am but a Crestfallen Warrior."
Part of him was relieved to finally have a name to put to the face. Another part recognized the particular sound of someone opening a door they had been keeping shut for a very long time and immediately regretting it.
"Now leave me alone."
There it was.
This is my problem with emos, Naruto thought while walking away. One second they crack open and the next they act like the whole world revolves around their misery.
He returned to the problem at hand.
Do I really have to die to go home?
He stood there with that thought for a moment longer than was comfortable.
Oscar had told him that dying stripped away memories. That each death chipped away at who you were until nothing remained but a hollow shell. But Naruto had died in Lordran and woken up in Konoha with every memory intact. Which meant either the rules worked differently for him, or something about being sent back to Konoha rather than to a bonfire was interrupting the process before it could take anything.
Or maybe I need to die a certain number of times before it starts taking effect.
He did not know.
He stood at the edge of Firelink Shrine and looked out at what lay beyond it, the dead kingdom sprawling below.
Now what do I do?
He already knew the answer.
He looked down at the drop below the cliff edge, unequipped his armor and jumped.
Defeated the Asylum Demon, Alexander thought, staring at the bonfire. What a joke.
Nobody beat that monster. You died, or you ran. Those were the options available to Undead in the Northern Asylum, and everyone who had ever passed through Firelink on their way to whatever pointless end awaited them had confirmed it one way or another.
So why could he not dismiss it?
The warrior heard running, causing him to look up. His brain, which had long since stopped being surprised by anything Lordran produced, went completely blank at the boy's suicide attempt.
Maybe going hollow really is better than the hell that waits out here. Maybe I should do it too.
But he was too much of a coward to act on it. Too much of a coward to die and too much of a coward to live properly either.
He looked back at the bonfire.
And waited.
Waited for the inevitable rush of essence reforming, the Darksign pulling another Undead back from the edge of finality and depositing them at the nearest bonfire whether they wanted it or not.
It was their curse.
Death, rebirth and another piece scraped away each time until the loop was all that remained.
Yet the boy did not respawn.
Alexander frowned as a minute passed. Then another. The flames gave no indication that it had received anything at all from the cliff below. Something uneasy stirred in his chest, which surprised him because he had assumed that particular capacity had been scraped away some time ago.
"Why is he not respawning?"
Then he felt it.
A surge of souls at the cliff edge. Larger than it should have been for a mere child. The crestfallen warrior's eyes widened at the colour of the soul drop.
Green.
Not the pale yellow of a common Undead's soul.
Alexander had heard about green soul drops once. In stories about souls from other worlds that were called to Lordran's lands. The warrior had dismissed it as the kind of thing people invented to make the darkness feel more interesting. The size of the soul drop told a different story.
The kid was telling the truth. He actually killed the Asylum Demon. And he actually is from another world.
"Wow, guess I have seen it all now."
And the brat has absolutely no idea what a soul drop is or what will happen if something else absorbs it before he comes back.
The hollow at the far cliff had already turned toward the green glow like moths to a flame.
Alexander cut it down with a single swing.
Another came from the left. A third emerged from the shadows near the broken wall and he dealt with those too. He stood his ground over the green soul drop and waited.
Great, Alexander thought, bisecting a hollow that had gotten too close to the green glow. Now I am a soul drop guardian. This is what my existence has been reduced to.
Another hollow. He cut it down.
If something absorbs that drop before the boy comes back, whatever it becomes is going to be my problem. My problem, because a stupid child did not go to the firekeeper to absorb his soul.
Alexander shoved a hollow off the ledge with his shield.
Brat. You owe me for this.
Yet as he cut down another hollow he noticed his breathing had changed.
The battlefield had always been the one place where the hollow weight behind his eyes went quiet and left only the present moment, only the next hollow, only the dance.
Alexander was here because an empowered hollow would be his problem.
That was all this was.
But as he blocked a hollow, there was a quiet gratitude sitting in his chest for a strange boy in armor who had accidentally reminded him of his humanity.
Morning had come slowly, and Hiruzen was grateful. After last night's chaos, a slow morning was more than welcome. His task was simple and enjoyable. Going through the genin registration forms and finalizing the candidates for the jonin to choose from.
A small smile crept onto his face as he reviewed the names, each one representing a future leaf of the village.
He could have let his team handle it.
They were more than capable of combing through those forms. God knew how much he relied on them to keep up with all the paperwork in Konoha. It was not that he could not do it himself, but it ate away at his time. Something he wished he had more of. Then, as he reached the final registration form, his smile was replaced by a frown.
There was no form for Naruto.
Of course. How could I forget? Naruto had not properly graduated.
At his finger tap, an Anbu operative appeared in front of his desk.
"Bring me Naruto Uzumaki," the old man ordered, watching her bow before disappearing in a whirl of leaves and reappearing ten minutes later with something he was not prepared to see.
Naruto Uzumaki wore armor.
Hiruzen had seen armor of every kind that the shinobi world produced. Yet he had never seen anything like what Naruto Uzumaki was wearing.
The helmet was a bascinet, or something that resembled one closely enough to classify it as such. A rounded skullcap with a pointed apex designed to deflect rather than absorb. A visor with narrow ventilation slits that spoke to a maker who understood that breathability in combat was not a luxury but a necessity. The cloth wrap at the neck was worn and dark, a detail that suggested the armor had seen considerable use.
He moved down.
The torso was a composite construction. At the foundation, barely visible at the edges, was a padded undergarment. Over that, chainmail hauberk by the look of it, covering the torso and extending downward in a skirt that protected the upper thighs. Over the mail, a surcoat in blue fabric, its embroidered edging faded but still legible as an indication of status.
Whoever had made this armor wanted the wearer identified.
The plate reinforcement over the torso was not a solid breastplate. That was interesting. Instead of a single cuirass, which would have been the simpler solution, there were layered steel plates over mail. Spaulders at the shoulders strapped to a leather harness that crossed the chest and back. Additional lames at the upper torso.
The arms had couters at the elbows. Vambraces along the forearms, steel bracers strapped with leather at multiple points. The gauntlets were a mismatch. The right was a worn leather glove while the left was a steel gauntlet. The legs followed the same philosophy. Plate reinforcement over mail. Poleyns at the knees. Greaves along the shins. A broad leather belt with a bunch of utility pouches and a broken sword.
Hiruzen sat back.
This style of armor did not belong to any tradition he had ever encountered. Not in the shinobi nations, not in the Land of Iron, not in any historical record he had studied or any intelligence report he had received in his decades of governance. And considering how perfectly fitted the armor was to the boy's frame, Hiruzen felt with quiet certainty that it had been made for the boy.
That observation opened upon a lot more questions than answers.
"Where did you get that armor, Naruto?"
The look on Naruto's face made Hiruzen's heart skip a beat. The look of someone who had lost someone recently and was still in the part of grief where the loss kept arriving in new ways.
"My master gave it to me, Hokage-sama."
Hokage-sama.
Hiruzen absorbed that formal address. The deliberate distance built into two words that a few days had been old man delivered with the particular irreverence of a boy who felt comfortable enough to be rude. The change said considerably more than the words themselves.
Yesterday there had been impossible jutsu and killer intent. Today there was a mysterious master.
The Third noted Naruto's body language.
The grief was recent.
How recently, he could not say with certainty, but the rawness of it suggested days rather than months.
Hiruzen looked at the armor again.
He did not know what to make of any of it.
It was as if Naruto had been living an entire different life. A life with a dead master and skills that had no framework in anything Hiruzen understood. And the boy had simply arrived back in Konoha carrying all of it in his body and saying almost nothing about any of it.
Inoichi's words echoed in his head.
Do we truly know who Naruto is, Hokage-sama? Not what he can do. Not what he has become. Who he actually is. Do we know what he does when no one is watching? Where he goes? How he spends the hours that are not accounted for?
I am beginning to think the answer is no.
Hiruzen looked at Naruto across the desk. Even if I want answers, I cannot reach for them directly. Not now. Not with this boy in this state. Every question I push for is a door I risk closing permanently.
Hiruzen tapped his finger against the desk three times. From the corner of the room, the ANBU acknowledged the signal and withdrew further into the shadows.
The silence that followed might have become awkward. It was not because the chair had begun to creak under the armor's weight.
"That armor is heavy," Hiruzen observed.
"Yeah." Naruto shifted slightly, which produced additional commentary from the chair. "I actively have to channel chakra into my muscles to move freely in it."
"That is one approach. Though I would recommend supplementing that with dedicated physical training while wearing it."
"Why? If I can just use chakra..."
"Because the armor's resistance does the work your chakra is currently compensating for." Hiruzen folded his hands. "Train in it long enough without chakra reinforcement and your baseline strength increases to accommodate the weight. Your cardiovascular endurance develops under load, which means in combat your body performs at a higher ceiling before it needs to draw on chakra reserves at all. Your joints and connective tissue adapt to the demand. Your posture corrects itself because the armor punishes poor posture immediately and without mercy." He paused. "Chakra reinforcement is a tool. The body underneath it is the foundation. A stronger foundation means the tool goes further."
Naruto stared at him for a moment.
"Ah. That's... actually a great idea. Ol—" He caught it. "Hokage-sama."
Hiruzen said nothing about the near miss.
But he felt something loosen slightly in his chest. The specific relief of a door that had been closed and bolted showing the faintest hairline crack of light underneath it. He had not earned back what he had lost with this boy. He was not naive enough to believe one conversation accomplished that. But the crack was there.
He would have to earn it.
Meanwhile Naruto was thinking about the bonfire. Specifically about the bonfire's healing properties.
If I train in this armor. And push my muscles past failure. Then I go to Lordran. Rest at the bonfire.
He thought about how much faster a body could develop if the recovery phase was measured in minutes rather than days. He thought about what that compounded over weeks, over months.
Sensei, he thought, I think I just figured out a genuine way to train my body.
Suddenly the door flew open.
Konohamaru stood in the doorway, all six years of him, brown hair spiking through the hole in that ridiculous gray helmet. The child wore a yellow shirt with a crooked Konoha symbol and a large blue scarf hanging off one shoulder.
"Incoming! On guard, ol' man!" Konohamaru shouted, brandishing a shuriken. The child then tripped over his scarf and landed face first on the floor.
The Third closed his eyes and tipped his Hokage hat. It was all he could do not to let out a tired sigh.
"I get it, it's a trap!"
Another voice came from the back.
"A-Are you alright, Honorable Grandson? And for the record, there are no traps."
Konohamaru's tutor had dark hair and ever present sunglasses. He was in the standard Konoha shinobi outfit, lacking only the flak jacket.
When did my office become a playground?
Then, to top off this circus, Konohamaru pointed an accusing finger at Naruto.
"Aha, so you tripped me! It was you! Right?!"
Naruto responded with a flick to Konohamaru's forehead. "You fell over that stupid scarf."
Konohamaru rubbed the spot on his forehead, looking like he was on the verge of tears.
"How dare you harm the honorable grandson of the Third Hokage!"
Hiruzen really disliked it when people measured someone's worth based on their bloodline. As if Konohamaru's value was solely tied to being the Third's grandson. And then there was Konohamaru's smug little smirk. It clearly said he expected Naruto to apologize.
This whole debacle made Hiruzen realize his grandson needed a lesson in humility.
"Hey, apologize to me!" Konohamaru demanded, puffing out his chest like a little rooster in front of Naruto.
"Here is my apology."
Naruto raised his fist and gave the six year old the middle finger.
Hiruzen snorted before he could stop himself. Whatever else had changed, Naruto was still Naruto.
Ebisu and Konohamaru stood with their mouths hanging open like fish in open air.
"But... but I am the honorable grandson!" Konohamaru sputtered.
"And I am the Squire of Oscar." Naruto said it with a straightness in his spine that had not been there before.
Oscar.
The name matched no regional dialect Hiruzen knew, bore no resemblance to any naming tradition across the Five Nations or their neighbors. It was simply a foreign word with no origin point he could triangulate toward. And squire meant nothing to him at all.
"Ha!" Konohamaru recovered quickly. "That sounds lame."
Naruto looked the six year old a death glare.
Konohamaru immediately relocated himself behind Ebisu's leg with considerable speed. "I-I'm sorry."
"Next time you say something stupid like that," Naruto said, with a calm that was somehow more effective than shouting would have been, "there will be consequences."
"How dare you threaten—" Ebisu began, hand moving toward his kunai pouch.
Naruto made a hand sign.
A shadow clone materialized directly behind Konohamaru. Ebisu's kunai was already moving on reflex, the blade driving toward the clone's chest.
It shattered on the armor.
Hiruzen and Naruto both noted this at the same moment with the same expression. Looks like shadow clones with that armor are more durable than regular clones.
The clone's elbow found Ebisu's ribs and sent him stumbling back into the wall.
Konohamaru was vibrating like a leaf in the wind. He looked at Hiruzen with the expression of someone searching for a lifeline in open water.
"Don't bother," the clone said pleasantly. "I have already defeated the old man."
Ebisu's gasp could have been heard from the floor below.
Hiruzen coughed.
"Ebisu. Take Konohamaru out of my office."
"But..."
The Third Hokage gave him a look.
Ebisu grabbed Konohamaru by the arm and moved toward the door. On his way out Ebisu aimed a sideways glare at Naruto, who picked his nose. Konohamaru, dragged along behind him, looked back at Naruto with an expression that was equal parts terror and absolute hero worship.
The door closed.
The clone popped.
"Didn't want your grandson to know how you lost to my sexy jutsu?"
"I do not know what you're talking about," Hiruzen said, with complete composure.
Naruto chuckled to himself. Then the amusement faded as he asked, "So why am I actually here?"
Someone knocked on the door.
"Come in."
Iruka opened the door and his eyes went wide as saucers the moment they landed on Naruto's armor. He stood in the doorway for a full two minutes doing nothing but staring.
"Iruka," Hiruzen said. "What brings you here?"
The chunin snapped back to attention while fighting a hangover through sheer professionalism.
"Yes. Hokage-sama." He straightened. "This is my letter of recommendation for Naruto Uzumaki's graduation to genin."
He read it one final time then placed it on the desk.
Hiruzen smiled.
"Well. Another reason to graduate Naruto."
"Another?" Naruto and Iruka said together.
"Last night Naruto demonstrated everything we look for in a field shinobi. Espionage by infiltrating a secure building and extracting a high value target. Successful navigation to a rendezvous point under pursuit. And the elimination of a chunin level threat." The old man paused. "If that does not qualify someone for genin, I am not certain what does."
Naruto's ears went red at the praise.
"Hokage-sama." Iruka reached up and removed his own headband. "May I?"
"You will need a replacement."
"You have one in your desk."
"That I do."
He gestured for Iruka to continue and sat back. This moment belonged to them. He was a witness, nothing more.
Iruka held the headband out. The boy looked at it, then at his Elite Knight armor.
"I'll just wear it on my arm," Naruto said, holding out his forearm.
Iruka fastened it carefully, making sure it sat properly against the armor's vambrace. Then he straightened and looked at his student.
"Naruto, I have watched you fail that exam three times. I have watched this village look at you and decide, before you ever had a chance to show them otherwise, that you were already the sum of their worst fears."
He paused.
"Last night you stole a forbidden scroll and master a jutsu that jonin struggle with. Then stand over the body of a man who tried to use you and feel nothing about it." His jaw tightened slightly. "That last part scared me, if I am being honest."
Naruto did not look away.
"But you know what scared me more?" Iruka continued. "The fact that I understood why. Because I know what this village has given you to work with. I know what you have had and what you haven't had and what you built out of the difference." He met the boy's eyes. "You are stubborn, reckless and make everything harder than it needs to be. And you have never, not once in all the years I have known you, quit."
A pause.
"You are a genin. You have earned it a hundred times over. And whatever you are becoming, Naruto, I am on your side."
Naruto looked at the headband on his arm.
"Thanks, Iruka-sensei," he said quietly as he got up to hug the chunin.
Hiruzen cleared his throat after a moment.
"Congratulations, Genin Naruto. Now I just need your graduation form."
"Here," Iruka said, producing the documents.
Hiruzen reviewed them, signed where necessary, and set them aside. Iruka stepped back and gave Naruto a thumbs up.
"Everything's in order. Now, before you leave, there is the matter of your mission reward."
Naruto and Iruka both looked perplexed.
"By technical definition, you were manipulated into an infiltration mission, successfully completed the objective under hostile conditions, and neutralized a traitor to the village in the process." Hiruzen's expression remained entirely neutral. "That will be logged as a solo mission on your record. The corresponding payment and mission points will be allocated accordingly."
Iruka's eye twitched.
"Hokage-sama, is that... strictly allowed?"
"I am the Hokage," Hiruzen said pleasantly, "so."
Iruka chose not to pursue this.
Naruto, wisely deciding not to look a gift horse in the mouth, asked, "Hey. Can I get a jutsu as a reward instead?"
Inoichi's words surfaced in Hiruzen's mind.
If the boy has undisclosed abilities, he will find ways to justify acquiring more without revealing what he already possesses. Was this that? An excuse to demonstrate something he had already learned? A test of how much they were watching?
"Any particular jutsu in mind?" Hiruzen asked, keeping his voice completely even.
"I don't know. Something that lets me run away really fast."
There were things in Lordran that could not be beaten. The Black Knight had made the lesson very clear. Speed had not saved him that day so much as creativity had. But creativity needed distance to work, and distance required getting away first.
Hence the request.
"Iruka, do you know the Body Flicker Jutsu?"
"Of course." Iruka paused as the Hokage's implication settled. "You want me to teach it to Naruto."
Hiruzen nodded.
Naruto's face showed pure excitement. He launched himself out of the chair with the full weight of the Elite Knight armor behind him.
The chair collapsed completely.
"I'll be at the training grounds, Iruka-sensei!" Naruto was already at the door, as running away was the best response to broken furniture.
"Guess he is still Naruto," Iruka said.
"And that's for the best," Hiruzen replied quietly.
"Hokage-sama, about the graduation tallies, the placement lists, the..."
"I'll have it handled." Hiruzen waved a hand. "Go and teach."
"Go and teach," the chunin instructor muttered, bowing, and leaving Hiruzen alone in the office.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
The clock on the wall marked the silence after the door closed. Hiruzen blew smoke upward in slow, unhurried ribbons.
"Report."
Inoichi appeared and placed a scroll on the desk. He had been there for the entire conversation. That was what he had his ANBU do.
Hiruzen looked at the scroll without touching it. "This is?"
"ANBU Owl's overnight report on Naruto." Inoichi folded his hands behind his back. "The boy returned to his apartment, slept, and came here this morning. The apartment was searched while he was en route. Officers found nothing unusual beyond what we already knew about."
Hiruzen drew on his pipe slowly.
The mysteries were compounding. Each answer producing two new questions. Each observation opening a door onto a corridor with no visible end.
"What is your honest assessment of Naruto?"
"The grief is real. The observation of his body language and how he spoke in relation to his master was authentic." He paused. "Whatever happened to him was real and it cost him something significant."
"And yet," Hiruzen said.
"We are looking at a boy who appears to have lived an entire chapter of his life that we have no access to and no framework for."
Hiruzen set down his pipe. "Is he hiding it deliberately?"
"That's the part I find most interesting." Inoichi moved to the chair yet chose to stand. "In my initial assessment I assumed the mask was the whole story. A child who learned to perform because performing was safer than being seen. But what we observed this morning does not fit that model cleanly." He looked at the door. "He told you about the master. He wore the armor openly. He did not deflect when you looked at it. A boy running a deliberate concealment operation does not do those things."
"So he's not hiding."
"I think he's being selective," Inoichi said carefully. "He's sharing what he's comfortable sharing and keeping the rest close, the way anyone does after losing someone." A pause. "The question is whether what he's keeping close represents a threat or simply something he isn't ready to speak about yet."
"He's not a threat," Hiruzen said. More to himself than to Inoichi.
"No, he's not a threat."
A pause.
"But we should understand what he's carrying," the Yamanaka added carefully, "before it becomes one."
The clock marked the silence.
"My recommendation remains the same. We observe. We do not push. We create conditions where cooperation with Konoha becomes something Naruto chooses rather than something imposed on him," Inoichi stated. "Pushing that boy right now, with fresh grief and fresh distance between you, would close every door we still have open."
"Find me everything that exists on the word squire," Hiruzen said quietly. "The name Oscar. And the design philosophy of that armor."
"Already assigned," Inoichi said.
Hiruzen took a drag out of his pipe.
"What about the jonin sensei?"
"I'm working on that."
Naruto stood in the open field and breathed in.
Trees stretched in every direction as far as he could see, the training ground quiet except for the wind moving through the branches overhead.
Iruka had his instructor face on.
"Body Flicker Technique," he began, settling into the cadence Naruto had heard a thousand times in a classroom and was only now learning to actually listen to. "A ninja uses chakra to temporarily vitalize the body and move at extreme speeds across short or long distances. The amount of chakra required scales with distance and elevation. The further you go or the higher you climb, the more it costs."
"Sensei, what's the difference between Body Flicker and Substitution? From the outside they look the same."
Iruka had a surprised expression that Naruto had asked something worth answering. "That's a good question actually."
"I know."
"Both techniques release chakra from the ankles," Iruka continued. "That's where the similarity ends. Substitution releases a single concentrated burst, short range, fast, and leaves a replacement object behind in your position. The log, usually. Body Flicker works differently." He paused to make sure Naruto was following. "It doesn't release all the chakra at once. It releases it in sequential waves."
"Like what?"
"Hold out your hand."
Naruto held it out.
Iruka tapped his palm once, then twice, each tap slightly harder than the last. "First wave gets you moving. Second wave builds on the momentum of the first. Third wave builds on the second. Each release of chakra from the ankles compounds with the velocity you already have rather than starting from zero." He stepped back. "That's why Body Flicker accelerates as it goes rather than moving at a fixed speed. The longer the distance, the faster you're moving by the time you arrive."
"Like ripples in a lake."
"Exactly like that. When did you start thinking in analogies?"
"I have always been the smart one, Iruka sensei."
"You failed the graduation exam three times."
"Strategically."
Iruka laughed while performing the hand signs. Half tiger and ram.
His body flickered.
Thirty feet away before Naruto's eyes had finished tracking the motion. Iruka was standing casually at the treeline like he had always been there.
"Any questions?"
"Can you fight while flickering?"
"Evasion and dodging, yes. Chunin and jonin use it the way a genin uses Substitution, to exit a bad position very quickly. Direct combat is harder," Iruka explained. "The sequential wave acceleration produces tunnel vision. Attacking from that state means committing to something you can barely see."
"So you can't fight with it."
"Most people can't," Iruka said. "But."
Naruto looked up.
"There was a shinobi who found a way to use Body Flicker directly in combat," Iruka said with a deeply respectful tone. "How exactly, I don't know. What we know is the result. He pushed the technique past every conventional ceiling and at those speeds his body left afterimages solid enough that opponents couldn't distinguish them from the real thing in the moment." He paused. "People compared him to the Fourth Hokage."
"Who is this awesome guy?"
"Shisui of the Body Flicker."
Naruto gasped.
"I met him a few times," Iruka said quietly, the warmth in his voice belonging to something specific and kept. "A good man who died too young."
Naruto went quiet as a form of respect, while an idea had been assembling itself in his mind. Body Flicker in direct combat.
Nobody knew how Shisui had solved the tunnel vision problem. But Naruto did not need to find that answer.
He already had a different one.
The Knight's Sight did not operate through his eyes. It lifted his awareness above his body entirely, indifferent to the direction he was facing or the speed he was moving.
The grin arrived before he had finished the thought.
Naruto of the Body Flicker.
He liked that considerably.