Chapter XXIX
Water was far more like Fire than Naruto had expected. Granted, sitting in the hot springs might have had something to do with that—Naruto had put his foot down over the Yamagawa River with its agile and very bitey fish, and Jiraiya had presented the hot springs as the only alternative. Naruto was new enough to the area that he couldn’t argue.
Like Fire, the hot spring water felt like it contained the spark of life, if differently shaped. It had the same sense of power freely offered, and the same edge of danger for the unwary. It had the same potential for unappeasable devastation (and for some reason chose to unleash that potential whenever Naruto was within reach). And then, unlike Fire, it had an endlessly mutable nature. Steam had completely different properties to liquid water, as he was very aware right now. So did ice, another way in which Water remained Naruto’s nemesis in spite of either side’s best intentions.
“Jiraiya! What the hell’s an old bastard like you doing in my hot spring?”
The contemptuous voice snapped Naruto right out of his meditation.
“Oh, it’s your hot spring now, is it, Seijin? And here I remember the last time you were kicked out for being drunk and disorderly. What’s the matter, memory going with age, like certain other things I won’t mention in front of the kids?”
The newcomer, Seijin, was a rotund, sallow old man with a bulbous nose down which he was now staring at Jiraiya. There was a boy next to him, probably in his early teens, tanned as if used to spending time outdoors without much on, and with the kind of musculature Naruto would never bother to acquire.
“Let’s have some introductions, why don’t we?” Seijin said. “Kaiden, this sad sack is Warty McToadface, known to the uninitiated as Jiraiya. He’s managed to convince himself he’s still a big bad hero, when in reality he’s a hack who cranks out wish-fulfilment porn where his thinly-veiled self-inserts get it on with hot women who wouldn’t spit on the real him if he was on fire.”
“Naruto, this tub of lard is Seijin, whose only ninja skill is rolling his way to victory—sorry, I mean defeat. Even the Akimichi turned him down. He drinks like a fish, smokes like a chimney, and spends half his time at the gambling table losing the money he’s swindled out of honest folk, and the other half with ladies of easy virtue, since it’s the closest he’ll ever get to having any. Or to getting any, for that matter.”
“He’s just jealous because they turn him away even when he offers twice the going rate,” Seijin confided.
Naruto was aware that there were certain kinds of manga that shops wouldn’t sell to a twelve-year-old, and he made a note to redouble his efforts to get them anyway. He felt like the implications were blocking out the sun as flocks of them soared over his head.
“Anyhow, this kid here’s Kaiden. The old daimyo’s very own grandson, entrusted to yours truly because no one else would do.”
“Bullshit,” Jiraiya said. “No daimyo would be dumb enough to introduce a ninja into the line of succession.”
“Watch your tongue, commoner!” Kaiden snapped.
Seijin snorted. “See, he’s got all the instincts. And in answer to the question you’re too dumb to ask, his grandma’s Silver-Tongued Mina herself.”
“Silver-Tongued Mina, huh?”
Both men fell silent for a second.
“What a woman…” they breathed in unison.
“Turns out one of her seduction missions was a little more successful than she’d intended,” Seijin went on. “Or at least the timing screams it—she’s not dumb enough to confirm or deny. Her son was a carpenter with no aspirations above his station, so everyone figured that would be the end of it… until little Kaiden here was born with chakra reserves off the charts. Obviously, the Daimyo can’t ever acknowledge him, but he’s at least paid for his grandson to be trained by the best of the best, A.K.A. me. Shame I’ve got a genius to work with while you picked up a random street urchin to fuss over, huh?”
Jiraiya gave a big laugh. Naruto suppressed one of his own. If the obnoxious old man and his equally obnoxious apprentice had any idea…
“Shame this random street urchin’s about to kick your genius’s ass, huh?”
“What’re you talking about, Warty?”
“Going too fast for you, Flabby?” Jiraiya sneered. “There ain’t room in this hot spring for the both of us. But it would be no competition at all if it was just me beating the snot out of you, so I thought I’d make it a little fairer and have us a proxy duel.
“You can kick Honourable Grandson’s ass for me, can’t you, kid?”
Kaiden gave Naruto a disdainful look.
Seijin smirked at Kaiden. “You prepared to lose to some back alley fleabag, boy?”
“Hell yeah!”/“Hell no!”
“Then here’s the rules,” Jiraiya said. “Over there, past the wall, is No Man’s Land. Cross it, and you’ll be right over the women’s baths. Whichever of you brings back the most data for my next novel wins. Ages, hair colours—and I mean all of them—measurements, everything. But don’t dawdle, because anyone who doesn’t get back by the time Flabby and I are done bathing is disqualified.”
“Guess Old Warty’s getting senile,” Seijin added, “because he’s forgotten one minor detail worth knowing: the reason why it’s called No Man’s Land. See, everybody knows genin try to sneak in to spy on bathing girls in the hot springs. It’s a rite of passage. That means it’s prestigious to have solid anti-peeping defences to protect your guests’ privacy. And then after the incident thirty-seven years ago—“
“May Third,” Jiraiya added helpfully, “in the afternoon.”
“After that incident, for a while the rich chose their resorts based on which ones could best guarantee their privacy. That led to an arms race, then a
proxy arms race between the ninja who’d be selling most of the security measures, and things got out of hand, and… I guess you’ll see for yourselves. Just don’t expect it to be a cakewalk.”
“Trust me,” Jiraiya said, “it will be for the kid here. You should see the ninjutsu he’s got up his sleeve.”
“Pfft.
My apprentice could run whatever gauntlet they’ve got over there without using any ninjutsu at all.”
“Oh, is that right? Well,
my apprentice could do it without using chakra altogether.”
Naruto and Kaiden exchanged anxious looks.
“My apprentice,” Seijin rebutted, “could do it without chakra use or even ninja tools.”
“Ha! Well, my apprentice—“
“Let’s get started!” Naruto yelled with fake enthusiasm before the old men decided they had to run the gauntlet with their legs tied together while singing the Academy’s elemental circle memory song.
“All right, kids, chuck your towels over and get ready on my mark.”
“What,” Naruto demanded. “Why can’t I take my bath towel?”
“Are you kidding?” Jiraiya asked in mock horror. “A towel is about the most massively useful thing a ninja on a mission can have. Who cares if you have access to chakra or ninja tools when you have a quality towel at your disposal?”
Naruto gave Jiraiya a sceptical look, but given that he didn’t actually care about covering up in front of his fellow male bathers, and he
really wanted to make Seijin eat his words…
The two boys warily followed their perverted elders’ directions, and climbed up to the edge of the partition delineating the border between safety and dangers unknown.
“On your marks!”
Naruto tensed.
“Get set!”
Both boys shoved each other violently off the edge. Chakra or no, they
were ninja.
“Go!” they heard in the distance as they picked themselves up and began to run.
-o-
“Faster, Shino,” Kumiko demanded mercilessly. “Granny Rie has better footwork than you do!”
“Grandmother passed away three years before I was born,” Shino said evenly.
“Exactly! C'mon, baby brother, get your ass in gear. You can’t let your partners do all the heavy lifting. Well, not unless you’re working with Type XIIs.” Kumiko laughed at her own joke. Shino, who had heard it three times during the last eighteen months, did not. It would be years before he was ready to bond with the notoriously mischievous Type XII-αs, never mind the more advanced breeds that could briefly raise a person in the air.
“Aie!” he yelped. A second’s misstep, and Kumiko’s Type I-αs had stung his arm. As Kumiko chortled with laughter, Shino briefly wondered what she called hers. Even when they were both very young, and unclear on the boundaries of social propriety, she had refused to say.
He had been too little to remember her bonding ceremony, of course, though she’d attended his. Like every Aburame child, he’d sat in the middle of the First Hive, lit only by a brilliant moon. Like every Aburame child, he’d been forbidden to open his eyes, told to reach out only with his inner senses and feel his own Type I-αs make his body their new home. Like every Aburame child, he had peeked anyway.
He’d seen his Type I-αs’ iridescent shells glimmer in the nocturnal light, and known without a shadow of a doubt that they were moondrops, fragments of the cool, flowing light illuminating him at that moment. That part was not like every Aburame child—some took years to learn which part of their soul their partners occupied. Like the clear moon, it had been a good omen.
It was, of course, not something spoken of casually. He knew, by now, that his father drew his names from metonymies of plants and animals. Cousin Miki, with whom he had often played before she grew too old for games, used the elements, both common and obscure, and Shino had always wondered what she would do if she ran out.
Just now, Shino was practising misdirection with his morning mist, named for the fragile haze that disappeared quickly, stealing away with it the final secrets of the night. It wasn’t something he would ever share with the world at large—he suspected that to his fellow genin, his manliness already hung by a thread—but he would tell Kumiko, if she asked. He’d trust her if he had a chance, and perhaps that touch of intimacy would go some way towards restoring the friendship they lost when she grew up. But she never asked.
“Earth to Shino! Do you want Kiba to kick your ass even harder than he did yesterday?”
“It was a draw,” Shino muttered rebelliously. “If he says otherwise, that concussion must have been worse than he believed.”
“I still don’t get why you keep using that mutt as a practice partner. Are you just that much of a masochist?”
“Kiba’s abilities are ideal for refining my own. Why? Because—”
“You can drop the shtick,” Kumiko interrupted peevishly. “We’re at home, remember?”
“You’re right,” Shino gave Kumiko a small, awkward smile. “I’m sorry.”
“Your ‘incremental image cultivation strategy’ strikes again, right? Maybe tomorrow you should try tilting your sunglasses a couple of degrees, if that’s not too bold.”
That struck a nerve. Shino promptly followed Kumiko’s so-called advice, but only so she could see his glare over them.
“By all means, beloved sister, please continue to rub salt in my wounds. Given your apparent passion for the substance, it is no wonder you have no sense of taste.”
“That!” Kumiko pointed an excited finger at him. “If you showed your friends half the deadpan you throw at me when you’re pissed off, instead of that catchphrase crap—”
“Then they would perceive me as aggressive and antisocial, and I would revert to being ‘that creepy bug kid’. I think not.”
He turned to leave. “In answer to your earlier question, I spar with Kiba because subtle strategy should overcome reckless direct confrontation every time, and yet I defeat him only six times in ten.”
“Four times,” Kumiko interjected helpfully.
“
Six times. Until I understand how he can so consistently triumph in the absence, nay, in defiance of all reason and common sense, the shinobi you so superciliously describe as ‘that mutt’ remains a wall I cannot overcome, no matter how frequently and thoroughly I obliterate him.”
He hadn’t intended to say that much. Likely he couldn’t have, to another. He glanced back, part of him hoping that the unintended candour might spark at least some small reciprocation. But of course Kumiko only looked at him thoughtfully, and offered nothing back.
Shino zipped up his high collar as he walked away.
At this time of day, Kiba would probably be grooming his family at the Inuzuka compound, but he and Akamaru always welcomed visitors. And though Shino would never admit it, there were times when it was a salve for his soul to have a human partner and would-be rival who believed subtext was a guide to sandwich-making.
-o-
No Man’s Land was ridiculously well-defended... from civilians. With Naruto’s Academy training, he could see the sunlight glinting off the steel caltrops as if it were a bonfire. The boys skipped casually over the trap, Kaiden heading for the rise running parallel to the east wall while Naruto went straight through the caltrop field, gaining valuable seconds by trusting in the trapping expertise of Uzumaki Naruto himself.
Then he heard the baying of the hounds.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” he muttered as a pack of dobermans came into view in the distance. You could train attack dogs to restrain without biting, right?
Kaiden’s lead worked against him. With both boys’ scent erased by the bathing, the dogs were forced to rely on sight—and there was only one visible target. Naruto charged ahead down the other path with a triumphant smirk.
The spikes thrusting into his feet wiped it right off his face.
In his moment of distraction, Naruto had missed the point where the shiny caltrops were replaced by nigh-invisible matte ones. With a yelp, he dove into the nearest thicket ahead of him, off the ground and thus caltrop-free, trusting in the branches to support his weight for the few seconds it would take him to plot a new path.
As the branches inflicted countless merciless scratches, he saw something that made him feel even worse. Kaiden reached the high point of the rise, the hounds nipping at his heels. Then, in a display of pure unenhanced athleticism, he
ran along the wall, placing himself out of their reach long enough to make the jump off the edge and past the pool of mud immediately below. The dogs, with no such powers, could only wade after him.
But Naruto had his own problems. His yelp had attracted a threat that made Kaiden’s ravenous predators look like puppies.
“I know you’re there,” the kunoichi called out. “I’m authorised to use deadly force against ninja, but if you surrender now, you might get off with a fine!”
Oh, good. A girl was about to see him naked and then apply violence to his more sensitive body parts. Again.
Naruto suppressed the sense of impending doom and studied the Second Coming of Sakura. Ninja wire looped several times around her waist for tying up intruders. Kunai pouch on her right thigh, edges hopefully blunted for incapacitation. Genin stance. Short and kind of cute.
She’d find him in moments. He would only get one chance.
The second she looked away, scanning the area, he leapt out of the bush, both hands out to disarm her.
She spun around, hand pulling out a blocking kunai in one admirably smooth movement.
Naruto moved past her, imitating Sasuke’s movement from their unforgettable first live combat, reaching out as he went to yank on the end of the ninja wire. The kunoichi turned into a spinning top.
After that, it was child’s play to cut off a couple of wire lengths with her alarmingly sharp kunai, bind her wrists and ankles, and keep the rest. No ninja tools? Newsflash, respected elders: ninja cheat.
By the time Naruto arrived at his destination, Kaiden was already concealed on the highest branch of a tree directly overhanging the women’s baths. Credit where it’s due, Naruto couldn’t see a better spot, so close to the targets yet perfectly concealed. Kaiden must have got top marks at the Academy.
Naruto unhurriedly cast a loop of ninja wire around the weakest part of Kaiden’s branch, then a second, then a third, making use of Sasuke’s lesson from the genjutsu (because a smart ninja didn’t need the Sharingan to steal techniques). Then, right at the moment when Kaiden’s concentration was at its peak, he pulled on the end of the wire with all his strength. Gravity generously did the rest.
The women’s reaction proceeded in three stages. First, deafening shrieks as a naked teenage boy plummeted into their midst. Second, panicked flight out of the water, exposing all the details Naruto needed for his report. Third, devastating bombardment with wooden buckets, nailing Kaiden right as the boy finished recovering from his disorientation. He retreated in the only direction he could, back towards No Man’s Land and its hounds.
His mission accomplished, Naruto waited for a few seconds while the dogs recognised their escaped prey, then took a leisurely walk back to Second Coming and slipped a kunai into her bound hands so she could eventually cut herself free.
He leaned over to her ear. “A naked boy just beat you with your own weapons and tied you up, all without using any chakra. I won’t tell if you don’t.”
She swore at him through her gag (it probably couldn’t be called a handkerchief anymore), but she didn’t look so much angry as embarrassed. His continuing lack of clothing might have had something to do with that.
-o-
“And then she says to me, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise that was just the storage scroll!’”
Jiraiya roared with laughter as Seijin mimed a disbelieving stare.
“Ooh, my turn,” Jiraiya said. “So a couple of months back, I walk into a bar in Tanzaku Gai, and there’s this gorgeous redhead—oh, there you are, Naruto. ‘bout time!”
There was no sign of Kaiden. Naruto may have been the immediate cause of the boy’s woes, but he was a gracious winner, and wished Kaiden the best of luck in making his escape before his victims drew the obvious conclusion and moved to intercept. Unlike him, Kaiden didn’t have a supernatural healing factor.
Meanwhile, a horrible suspicion began to take form in his mind.
“You two aren’t rivals at all, are you? You just wanted to trick us into taking your test!”
“That’s right,” Jiraiya said off-handedly. “There was a point to be made about complacency, and I daresay it’s been made quite well.
“I’ll still be expecting that report, though,” he added.
Must not kill Jiraiya. Not until he finished teaching him ninjutsu. Must not kill Jiraiya. Not until he finished teaching him ninjutsu. Must not kill Jiraiya. Not until he finished teaching him ninjutsu.
“You really thought Leaf’s spymaster wouldn’t recognise Uzumaki Naruto?” Seijin laughed.
“Leaf’s spymaster?” Naruto asked sceptically. If the old man was really that, it was an incredibly convincing disguise.
“He tries that line on everyone,” Jiraiya said. “Works better than you’d expect, especially on drunk girls.”
“Drunk girls? With my skills? Fish in a barrel, Warty, fish in a barrel.”
Seijin leaned in closer to Naruto, his nose even more bulbous up close. “But now… won’t part of you always wonder?”
Naruto gulped.
“All right, you two,” Jiraiya said. “How about we blow this joint and go get some grub? Your apprentice lost, Flabby, so the meal’s on you.”
“Like hell it is. You still owe me for that time your eight-hundred-and-thirty-first girlfriend…”
Naruto led the way, listening to his elders bicker good-naturedly behind him. With a little luck, they’d be too caught up in their reunion to notice that he was leading them towards the most expensive ramen joint he could find.
