Author’s note: Sorry for the delay in updates, everyone. I recently lost my job and am now trying to get everything back on track. If you would like to support me financially, you can now donate to me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Sophronius/overview. The story itself will continue to be free, so please don’t feel any obligation to donate if you cannot readily afford it.

Thank you for your support and/or understanding.



-o-

“What happened?” Jiraiya had asked, worry plain in his voice.

“I got into a fight with a boy at school today,” Naruto had said in reply. “He said something nasty about my friends, so I hurt him – I hurt him real bad. I had to go to the professor’s office to explain, but I was still angry about it, and so I ended up making him angry at me too.”

Hot tea had been shared between them, assurances were made to accompany promises of a better tomorrow, and finally Naruto had gone to bed with a heavy heart – for no more worrying phrase had ever been spoken than that everything would be all right.

And then the next morning he woke up, only to find a note lying on the kitchen table.

-o-

Another explosion reverberated through the forest surrounding Konoha, causing what few birds remained to take to the skies and flee in the opposite direction of where Kakashi was going. The disturbance was coming from one of the training areas set up near the Village, where there was no property to be destroyed and where civilians knew to stay well away from. There were special underground compounds where Anbu could practice jōnin-level techniques in secret, and of course the Noble clans all had their own facilities, but such a provision was deemed unnecessary for regular front-line soldiers.

As always, the rules failed to accommodate those who refused to fall within the usual boundaries.

Kakashi landed at the edge of the clearing, which was by now twice as large as it has been before. All around what had once been a peaceful forest glade lay shattered pieces of timber and smoking tree stumps, and the grass was coated in a sea of splinters. It looked as if someone had attached explosive tags to each of the trees and set them all off at once, but the size of the scorch marks did not quite match up.

Right in the middle of the devastation stood a single teenager, dressed in a standard issue black-and-green chūnin uniform. He might have looked like any other Konoha ninja, if not for that familiar mess of blond hair.

“Naruto?” Kakashi approached cautiously, not wanting to startle his student. There was an air of quiet danger that wafted from the boy which he did not like one bit. “What are you doing?”

“I was trying out a variation of the summoning technique to call forth a responsible adult.” The boy turned to regard Kakashi with a sullen expression. “Needs some work.”

Kakashi slowly let out the breath he had been holding. For a moment there he had almost thought that the Nine-tails had broken free, but it was just Naruto being Naruto as always. “That’s quite a bit of damage you did to that training ground,” he said lightly. “I wonder how you’re planning to repair it?”

Naruto rolled his eyes. “I think we can afford to lose a few trees, sensei. It’s not like they are people.” As if to drive home his point, he lobbed a kunai at one of the few training posts that remained standing, which instantly exploded and shattered into a thousand pieces on impact.

Kakashi gazed at the sight in wonder. There wasn’t any explosive tag attached to that kunai. Did he make the chakra of the cloned knife itself explosive? Naruto had done the same thing in his fight against Gaara, he remembered. But Explosion Release was supposed to be a rare bloodline that only existed in the Land of Earth, though Akatsuki was also rumoured to have acquired it. Jiraiya-sensei… just what have you been teaching my student?

Naruto was still staring resentfully at the shattered post as if he held it personally accountable for all the world’s problems. “Then again, trees might be brainless, but at least they don’t actively make things worse. So maybe we should replace all the world’s leaders with trees. What do you think, Kakashi-sensei?”

“An interesting notion,” Kakashi said dryly. “I’m sure the Temple of Fire monks would love to discuss the merits of perennial hegemony with you over a cup of tea. Me, I would need something a lot stronger.” He cocked his head at his student. “You got me worried there for a moment, Naruto. What is this about?”

“Nothing really.” He conjured a coil of rope from a scroll and attached several more kunai along one end. “The head of torture and interrogation made us fight giant chakra monsters inside a place called the Forest of Death, we took part in a giant death tournament in which I killed a fellow student… nothing out of the ordinary, really.” He swung the rope around him in wide arcs, then let go of it at the apex of its swing so that it flew at the nearest tree and coiled itself around the trunk. “You know, I used to think that learning rationality gave me some sort of advantage. That it made me stronger than people who thought themselves too good to learn how to think. But then I ended up doing the same stupid crap as everyone else, and now I gotta wonder if maybe I’m the one who was lying to himself all along.”

Naruto gave the rope a sharp pull, and when that did not work, formed a single handsign that caused all the kunai to detonate. There was a sound like a thunderclap followed by a shower of splinters as the entire midsection of the tree was blown off. The top groaned and collapsed right between Kakashi and his student, impacting the ground with a resounding crash that was almost louder than the explosion itself.

Kakashi stared at his student impassively. “I’ve never heard of anyone being this upset over a general lack of rationality,” He said mildly. “A teenager being frustrated with his own helplessness however, feeling like he’s not understood by the world or his friends… Well, that wouldn’t be the strangest thing.”

Naruto opened his mouth to bite out a retort, but seemed to think better of it. He lowered his gaze to the fallen tree that lay between them. “Maybe. I guess I would feel better if there was someone else who I could trust with all of this stuff. If I could just relax a little, knowing that even if I failed, someone else would take care of the mess I created. But I guess if Jiraiya was still in the Village, he’d tell me that the whole point of being a hero is that you never get to feel that way.”

He took out another kunai from his pouch, this one with a tag around the handle, and Kakashi realized in shock that the dagger had three prongs. Naruto threw it at one of the logs in the centre of the clearing, and when it struck the wood it vanished and left Naruto in its place. The boy was crouching on top of the tree stump, one foot still touching the place where the kunai had landed.

“Naruto,” Kakashi breathed, “You couldn’t have. That’s the Fourth’s…”

“Yeah,” Naruto said. “The same as the Fourth Hokage. Now maybe I too can kill three hundred people, become leader of the Village, and die three years later without having changed a damned thing.”

Kakashi frowned, still recovering from the earlier shock. “Is that what this is about? Naruto, the Fourth really was a hero. He was…” The greatest man I ever met. “A leader, someone who inspired a whole generation, even if he did not live long enough to see it. If he had not ended the war, back then…”

“Ended the war,” Naruto repeated hollowly. “You know, I asked Sakura how he did that, since it seemed like the kind of thing that would require a lot of smarts to pull off. I figured that if I could just copy his methods for securing peace, then maybe I could achieve the same thing one day. Do you know what she told me, Kakashi-sensei?”

Kakashi did not need to guess: He had learned the truth first-hand, even if Minato-sensei had never spoken of it. He could only imagine where Sakura had found a record that told about that fateful day, when Minato returned only to find him alongside the bodies of his friends. There had been a change then, in his sensei, as the man who he had been taking for granted assumed an expression Kakashi had never seen on him before.

“The Fourth decided to stop holding back,” Kakashi answered.

“Three hundred people,” Naruto said. “An average of one hundred Rock Ninjas per day.” He held up his fingers as if to count them all up. “I don’t have access to the official numbers, but Sakura checked the math for me once. All of Konoha can’t have more than fifty real jōnin. That’s fifty people who represent the bulk of our military potential, since even if you can throw enough genin and chūnin at them to fend them off, a team of jōnin can always just run away and come back to fight another day.” He gritted his teeth. “Fifty people to protect a nation. And for the sake of fifty people, they’d fight a war.”

Kakashi could once again hear the voice of Zabuza in his head, almost as if he were still alive and all the reports of his death were a lie. “You can’t possibly have been a jōnin for so long and still be this naïve, Kakashi. All the people in this dirt village combined are worth less than even one true ninja. Entire countries like the Land of Rain were reduced to rubble by you and your people during the Second War just because it was a convenient battleground, or did you forget?”

“Fifty people,” Naruto said again. “The Hidden Rock has more ninjas than anyone – mostly because of their abysmal recruiting standards if my textbooks are to be believed – but still. Three hundred people to stop a war… it doesn’t sound so terribly much when you put it that way, does it?”

Minato had not been able to target the heart of the enemy – could not risk teleporting right next to the Tsuchikage and his bodyguards even with his skill, but anyone less powerful than that was fair game. He had spread his teleportation seals all across Konoha, so that he could attack any encampment whenever he saw an opportunity. If the enemy sent scouts, he would kill them himself. If they sent a larger force, he would summon toads and use shadow clones to bombard the whole area with seals to wipe them out.

It was joked in Konoha that even now, Rock Ninjas would check underneath their beds for Flying Thunder God Seals before going to sleep.

“And then,” said Naruto, his voice wavering, “and then whenever he got too tired to keep fighting, he would just teleport back home to his wife. They would share a tender moment, I guess, have a nice meal, and take a quick nap. And then when he woke up, he would just get up and do it all over again.”

At the end of the third day, the Rock Ninjas had grown wise to these tactics. They gathered all of their shinobi together, set up every seal and defensive technique they could imagine, and moved on Konoha as a single densely packed unit. They had thought themselves safe. They had thought themselves smart.

On the fourth day, meteors had rained from the sky.

No one knew how the Fourth had done it. Some said he had awakened the Rinnegan, despite his total lack of Senju or Uchiha ancestry. Others said it was the single greatest sealing jutsu ever created, taught to him by his wife Uzumaki Kushina. Minato had never told anyone, declaring it a forbidden technique. And though the council had protested fiercely, they were only too happy to name him Hokage for his deed. Even Danzo had given Minato his seal of approval, which must have been what hurt him most of all.

And then three years later, he had died, taking all of his secrets to his grave.

“I never understood it,” Naruto said, “why anyone would assign ninjas to blow up a bridge, the way you were forced to. It seemed so stupid, given how the whole point of being a ninja is that you can strike at any place and without warning. I didn’t understand why our leaders didn’t just do the sensible thing and target the enemy shinobi, since that and knowledge are the only things of actual value in this world.”

Kakashi was once again back in the rower’s house, staring that stupid, obstinate, dead bridge builder in the eye. “I’m saying this was never about your bloody bridge. Do you understand? Your bridge is worth nothing, you stubborn old fool! You dragged us into your petty conflict with your lies, and now my enemies are coming to kill us all.” He shook his head, feeling suddenly tired. That had almost felt like genjutsu just now, but when he flared his chakra the world looked much the same as it had before.

Naruto’s hands had clenched into fists. “It bothered me so much, I actually went back and checked my old history books, and in between all the propaganda I finally found the one line that made sense of it all: Afterwards, this prolonged period of skirmishes came to be known as the Third Great Shinobi War.” He gritted his teeth. “Afterwards – not during! People didn’t think of it as a world war back then, because why would they? It was just business as usual, with ninjas fighting and killing each other over stupid missions, only with a slightly higher frequency than what we’re doing right now.”

Kakashi sagged against the nearest tree. Obito’s eye was aching for some reason. Perhaps it was because of all the training he had been doing to try and reach its full potential. His body had never fully adjusted to the transplant, and there were only so many medical ninjas who he could trust to check on it.

“So let me make a guess, and you can tell me how close I am, sensei: There’s a Five Kage summit, and afterwards the Daimyo’s wife’s cat suddenly dies. The Daimyo decides that this must be the Eternal Mizukage’s revenge for that insult the Hokage dealt him, and so his wife hires a team of Leaf ninjas to get back at him by abducting his pet lobster or something. Realizing that only the Hidden Rock would stoop so low as to attack an innocent lobster, the Mizukage retaliates by killing the Tsuchikage’s third grandcousin, twice removed, and makes it look like his enemies in the Sand did it. Furious, the Tsuchikage orders a team of jōnin to sneak in and clip the overly large fertility symbol known as the Sand’s Holy Tanuki Statue of its prime assets. At which point the Kazekage, who is not known for his sense of humour, orders Lady Chiyo of the Honoured Siblings to take her puppet army and massacre every single living being in Tanzaku Castle.” He glanced up sharply at Kakashi. “Does that sound about right?”

Kakashi smiled weakly. “To the best of my knowledge, the Daimyo’s wife’s cat is just as fat and healthy as ever, though rumour has it that a full team of genin was required to capture it after its last escape attempt.”

“It was just an example,” Naruto muttered. “The point is, the reason why none of the countries ever tried to destroy each other’s Villages is because as far as they were concerned that was never the goal to begin with. Why would they? Even if our enemies managed to burn Konoha to the ground, all that would leave them with is an army of vengeful ninjas scattered throughout the Land of Fire: Soldiers who fight without orders, who can cross borders undetected and who are willing to infiltrate your country over a period of years if need be, and who are never gonna pause in their quest to hunt you down because it’s all they know. No, far better to send the occasional assassin after each other’s cousins, and afterwards make up over a nice bowl of Sake and maybe some Hijiki with sardine balls on the side.”

The boy stared down from his log at the field of splinters that stretched out before him. “If anyone had really been at war with us, it would’ve been like Hidden Whirlpool: One day, my family decided to devote all their resources to sealing research, and then the next they were suddenly not there anymore.” He shook his head. “The fact is, we were never at war with the Hidden Rock until the Fourth Hokage decided otherwise. It was the most terrible thing he ever did, and everyone loved him for it.”

Kakashi regarded his number-one-most-obstinate student wearily. Not even Ibiki would arrest Naruto for talking about replacing the world’s leaders with trees, but this was serious. The boy knew too much to be seen as harmless, but had too little sense to keep his knowledge a secret. Especially after his fight with Gaara, people had taken notice of his abilities, and they would come after him before long. It was all well and good while it was Kakashi’s own Anbu team that was watching the boy, but some of the newer recruits were more zealous – more in line with Lord Danzō’s thinking. And then there were the all-seeing Hyūga, and the Yamanaka clan with their mind-reading abilities…

Minato-sensei… what am I supposed to do with him? I’m a ninja. I don’t know anything about children.

He looked into Naruto’s mind once again, trying to see if there was anything else that might alarm him. From the boy’s perspective, it would look like he still had his headband lowered, but the Sharingan could peer through even the tiny hole which he had left in the illusion wrought by the transformation technique. A more attentive person might have noticed the tiniest shimmer in the place where his left eye would be, but Naruto had never paid much attention to detail, even when there were no illusions to hide them.

“Well,” he said lightly, “sad as the general state of affairs may be, I would hold off on your world-conquering ambitions for a little while longer. It’s a little known fact that jōnin-teachers compete with the number of promotions their students manage to attain before dying, and between the three of you I’m this close to not finishing last.” He looked Naruto in the eye, focussing chakra through his Sharingan as he evoked the message ‘I gotta stop saying this sort of thing out loud’. The trick was to phrase it in such a way as to make it indistinguishable from the target’s own thoughts, so they would remember it as their own idea. The boy’s natural desire for internal consistency would take care of the rest.

Naruto glowered at him, not seeming to appreciate the humour of his last comment. “You know,” he said, “I think I’ve finally figured out why you’re always late to our team meetings, sensei.”

Kakashi raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Yeah. At first I thought you were just being lazy, but no jōnin would ever survive as long as you have by being lazy. So then I figured you must be trying to teach us a lesson somehow, and I thought I’d look at the expected result and assume that was your intended goal. I concluded that you were trying to teach us not to blindly trust authority, and to take responsibility for our own development.”

Kakashi took care not to smile. “You may very well think that, but-”

“But then I remembered to look underneath the underneath, and I thought to myself: What if all of that is just my attempt to guess what you want to hear, when you yourself might not really know why you do the things you do? So instead I asked myself which state of mind would make your actions the most likely outcome, and focussed only on what I already know.” He looked at Kakashi with uncharacteristic coldness. “So I’m gonna stick my neck out and guess that it’s not just us but that you’re late to all kinds of meetings, and that you had difficulty connecting with people long before you even had a team. And whatever bogus rationalization you came up with afterwards, whatever answer you claim to be the correct one, it’s really just an excuse to avoid having to get close to the people you care about.”

Kakashi stared at his student. In truth, he did not really know what he felt in that moment: Strong emotions had never been his suite. But he had to admit to feeling a certain indignation, resentment, even anger at his own student, and that was just no good. Still, for his own pupil to call him out on his behaviour in that way… nobody had talked to him like that since – well, that had been Obito, in point of fact.

“I see.” He smiled at Naruto, who seemed slightly unnerved by this reaction. “Say, Naruto. This is unrelated, but would you mind showing me that technique of yours one more time?”

Naruto looked at his three-pronged dagger in surprise, and then after a second’s hesitation lobbed it at the nearest tree. This time Kakashi body-flickered after it and caught it in mid-air, and he instantly untied the parchment that was wrapped around the handle. I see. A summoning scroll, just like the kind that was used in the Forest of Death, inscribed with Naruto’s own blood to mark himself as the target. The Fourth’s shadow-cloned chakra dagger dispels upon impact, releasing the chakra stored within, which then triggers the summoning and teleports him to its location.

“Ingenious,” he murmured. But far too chakra-intensive to use for anyone who isn’t Naruto, and even then it’s far inferior to the Fourth’s seal which did not disappear and could be used as often as desired.

“Hey,” Naruto protested. “You weren’t supposed to see that!”

“If you don’t want your secret techniques to be revealed you shouldn’t use them out in the open.” He tossed the dagger at the top of the tree, causing his student to appear in the branches with an indignant squawk. As he did so, Kakashi caught a glimpse of the explosive seal that had been inscribed upon the boy’s palm. “Honestly, I really must be a pretty lousy teacher if you didn’t know that already.”

Naruto grumbled at the rebuke even as he clambered down from his perch, and Kakashi could not help but smile at the sight. He felt strangely relieved that there had not been a second Minato hiding beneath his nose this entire time. It would have been pretty damned embarrassing to miss something like that.

It looks like everything is going to turn out just fine, he remembered thinking to himself.