Naruto: God of Shinobi

Chapter 50: See You Around, Pervy Sage

The training ground was quiet in the way mornings were always quiet before something broke them open. The pond caught the early light and held it still. No wind. No birds. Just Naruto standing at the water's edge with his hands at his sides and his face blank, and Jiraiya watching from a distance, arms crossed, a pipe forgotten between his fingers.

"Alright, kid." Jiraiya's voice carried easy across the grass. "You signed the contract. Now you gotta use it. Focus on what you learned from walking on the water. Gather the chakra you need and channel it through your summoning hand."

Naruto nodded. He bit his thumb. Smeared the blood across his palm, warm and copper-bright in the morning air. His hands came together. The seals were slow, deliberate, each one pressed into place like he was learning the shape of something new.

"Summoning Jutsu."

Smoke bloomed. Small. Thin. A tadpole flopped onto the ground between his feet, wiggled once, and was gone.

Naruto looked at the wet patch it had left in the dirt. Jiraiya laughed. A short, fond sound.

"A tadpole. First time. Not bad. Try again."

Naruto tried again. Another tadpole.

Again. Another.

Again. Another.

His jaw tightened. Four attempts, four tadpoles, four wet patches drying in the morning air. Something behind his eyes was moving, calculating, sorting through what he knew and what he was missing.

Jiraiya spoke. "Focus on the principles. Use the same chakra control from water walking. Gather the required chakra and channel it…"

"No."

Jiraiya blinked. He had not expected that.

"No?" he said.

"Without having summoned a toad before, I don't know what amount I actually need. I can't guess. I could throw chakra at this all day and get nothing but tadpoles." Naruto looked at his bloodied thumb. At the faint tremor of dried red along his palm. "So I'm not going to guess."

He closed his eyes. He breathed. He gathered his chakra, not a careful measured portion, not a fraction guided by intuition, but everything. Every last thread of it. He felt it rise, that immense churning tide of blue-white energy that sat in his gut like a second heartbeat. He gathered it until it hurt, and then he stopped and he halved it.

He opened his eyes.

"Half," he said. "I'm going to summon with half my reserves."

Jiraiya stared. "Half? Kid, that's not how…,"

"I'll pull it back if I need to."

Jiraiya opened his mouth. Closed it. He looked at the boy's face, at the absolute certainty sitting there like it had always lived behind his eyes.

"Fine," Jiraiya said. "Show me."

Naruto bit his thumb again. The blood came sharp and immediate. He smeared it across his palm, pressed his hands together, and moved through the seals with a speed that had no hesitation in it. He pulled half his reserves, that enormous half, into his summoning hand, felt it fill his arm from the shoulder down until his fingers ached with it.

He pressed his palm flat against the ground.

"Summoning Jutsu!"

The smoke came. Not a puff. Not a plume. A wall of it, white and thick and total, pouring out of the earth like something had broken underneath. It filled the training ground in seconds. Jiraiya was thrown backward off his feet. He hit the ground, rolled, scrambled upright, and looked.

Naruto was gone.

The smoke settled slow, pulling back from the edges in long drifting tendrils, and what it left behind was not the training ground anymore. The trees at the perimeter were flattened. The pond had rippled out to nothing. The earth was cratered where something had landed, and in the center of that crater sat a mountain.

No. Not a mountain. A toad.

He was the size of something that should not exist. Rusty red skin, broad and ancient, crossed by brighter markings around his eyes and lips and chest. A scar ran deep above his left eye, old and ragged, the kind of wound that had taken months to close. His tongue was pierced in a row of silver studs along both edges. He wore a wide happi vest, deep blue, with the kanji for shrimp across the back, and at his hip hung a dosu blade so large it would have taken three men to lift. A kiseru pipe was clamped between his teeth, smoke rising from the bowl in a thin gray ribbon.

Naruto was standing on his head. Hands in his pockets. Face blank.

Below him, one vast orange eye moved. It found Jiraiya at the edge of the crater, pale and openmouthed, his pipe on the ground beside him. Then the eye moved up. It found Naruto.

"A brat." The voice was deep, gravel-thick, old in a way that predated language. "A scrawny brat summoned me."

Naruto looked down at him. He did not move his hands from his pockets.

"Yeah," Naruto said. "I did."

The toad's eye narrowed. "Get off my head, brat."

"Make me."

Gamabunta had been summoned by men who trembled when they said his name. By shinobi who had lived whole lives in shadow and blood and still felt the weight of him like a sentence. He was the Chief Toad, the Boss of Mount Myoboku, and no one in his long memory had ever looked down at him from the top of his own head and told him to make them.

He moved.

His body launched, that colossal mass of muscle and shell hurling itself into the air with a crack of displaced earth that sent tremors rolling out in every direction. The trees that had survived the summoning did not survive the jump. The wind roared. Naruto felt it tear at his face, his clothes, the loose ends of his headband, and he dug his chakra in, steady and absolute, feet planted against the top of that massive skull like he had grown there.

Gamabunta landed. The ground split. Naruto did not move.

The toad ran, those vast legs hammering the earth, weaving through the forest with a speed that did not belong to something his size. Canopy tore. Branches splintered. Naruto adjusted with each shift and change of angle, his chakra flowing seamless, his center of gravity always one step ahead of the toad's. It was water walking. It was tree walking. It was everything Kakashi had taught him about presence and grip, applied now to the skull of the Boss of Mount Myoboku at full gallop.

Gamabunta rolled. His body turned in the air, the whole vast weight of him rotating sideways. Naruto moved with it. His feet found new purchase before the roll was finished.

Gamabunta stopped.

He sat in the ruined clearing, pipe still between his teeth, blade still at his hip. Smoke drifted up from the bowl. For a long moment there was nothing, just the sound of settling earth and distant water and the creak of a forest that had lost significant portions of itself in the last two minutes.

The great eye moved upward.

Gamabunta laughed. It was a rumbling sound, like boulders finding their rest.

"Not bad, brat."

Naruto looked down at him. His face was still blank. But something in his eyes was satisfied, the narrow, settled look of a man who had made a calculation and watched it prove correct.

"I held on," Naruto said.

"Yes," Gamabunta said. "You did."

Naruto's mouth curved. Just a fraction. The kind of smile that meant something had been won.

"I am Naruto Uzumaki. Last of the Uzumaki clan. Son of the Fourth Hokage." He let the silence sit for a beat. "The Namikage."

Gamabunta was quiet. The pipe smoke drifted. He looked at the boy on his head, at the blond hair and the whisker marks and the eyes that did not flinch or waver or perform for anyone.

"Namikage," Gamabunta repeated, slow. "Wave Shadow."

"I am going to rebuild my clan," Naruto said. "And surpass them all."

The Chief Toad had seen many summoners. He had walked with greatness, had felt the Fourth Hokage's chakra like a song through the earth, had known Jiraiya since the man was young and stupid and brave in ways that had not yet learned to be careful. He had seen conviction before. He knew the difference between the real thing and the performance of it.

This boy was not performing.

"I look forward to walking with you after drinking some sake," Gamabunta said. "Naruto Uzumaki."

The smile widened. Just a fraction more.

"Thank you," Naruto said.

Then his eyes rolled back. His body went limp and he fell forward, slow, like something had simply stopped holding him up, and he was unconscious before he hit the crown of Gamabunta's head. Half his reserves, the summoning, the battle of will on the back of the most powerful toad in existence. It had taken everything he had and then it had taken the rest.

Gamabunta looked across the ruined clearing at Jiraiya. Jiraiya had not moved. He was staring up with an expression that had not quite found a name yet.

"Get him off my head," Gamabunta said.

The ceiling was white. The room was white. The sheets were white and stiff and smelled of antiseptic. Naruto lay still for a moment looking up at it, taking inventory, the way he always did when he woke somewhere that was not where he had gone to sleep.

He was in a hospital bed. His headband was on the table beside him. His clothes were folded on the chair across the room. His hair was a mess, pressed flat on one side, spiked in all the wrong directions on the other.

He turned his head.

Sakura was in the chair beside his bed. Her head was resting on her folded arms on the mattress edge. She was asleep, her shoulders rising and falling in a slow rhythm, her pink hair fanned out around her face, one hand resting near his side.

He looked at her for a moment. Then he looked at the window. The sun was low, cutting orange across the room in long flat bands, the kind of light that only came in the last hour before it gave up for the day.

He reached over and touched her shoulder. She did not stir. He touched it again, firmer.

"Sakura."

She came awake in stages, the way people did when they had been asleep longer than they meant to be. Her eyes opened. She looked up at him, groggy and unfocused, and then something in her face snapped into place and she sat up fast.

"Naruto! You're awake."

Her face was flushed, her hair a mess where it had been pressed against her arms. She had been here for hours. He could see it in her.

"How long was I out?" he asked.

"Since this morning. Some old guy brought you in." She was still blinking the sleep out of her eyes. "He said you summoned some sort of giant toad and just, um. Fell off it."

"I passed out," Naruto said. "Not the same thing."

He sat up. Swung his legs over the side of the bed. Looked at his clothes on the chair.

"How goes your training?" he asked. "With Kakashi-sensei."

Sakura looked down at her hands. A small pause, the kind that came before answers people did not want to give.

"He disappeared earlier today," she said. "To train Sasuke."

"So he's not training you."

"He said he'd come back."

"But he hasn't."

She shook her head. Naruto stood. He walked across the room and started dressing, unhurried, unselfconscious. He did not look at her.

"Makes sense," he said. "Sasuke's the one who needs it most right now. The curse mark. His fight with Gaara. He's going up against something that could kill him."

Sakura said nothing. He reached for his headband.

"Naruto."

He paused. He turned.

She was standing now. She had risen from the chair while his back was turned, and she was on her feet with her face pale and her eyes bright, that particular brightness that came just before someone said something they could not take back.

"Are you going to leave the village?" she asked. "When the exams are over."

He looked at her. Something moved behind his eyes.

"Where are you going with this, Sakura?"

She walked toward him. She stopped in front of him, closer than she needed to be, close enough that he could see her hands trembling at her sides. Then she reached up and took his face in her palms and kissed him.

Her lips were soft. Warm. She pressed them against his and closed her eyes and waited.

He did not move for a moment. His eyes stayed open. He stood there with her hands on his face and her mouth on his and something in him that was not quite stillness.

Then slowly, his mouth opened. His hands found her waist. She leaned into it and deepened the kiss and he kissed her back, and when his hands slid down and he pulled her close and squeezed her butt, she made a small sound against his mouth.

They separated. A thin thread of connection broke between them.

Sakura laughed. Awkward. Nervous. The laugh of someone who had done something irrevocable and had not yet decided how to feel about it.

"I know my chest is small," she said. "But I can already feel how hard you are."

She looked down. He was. There was no pretending otherwise.

Naruto looked at her. His face was blank. His voice was low and even.

"I'm a guy, Sakura. Any contact with a girl does that. It doesn't mean what you want it to mean."

"Really?" She searched his face. "All guys?"

"Yes. But that's not the point."

He stepped back. His hands left her waist. He looked at her with that particular steadiness that was not coldness exactly, more like a window with the light behind it, showing you the shape of something without letting you in.

"I am going to rebuild the Uzumaki clan," he said. "That means finding survivors. Others who carry the name or the blood. They will be part of what I build. There will be other girls, Sakura. That is not a maybe."

He paused.

"And it is very likely that I'm going to become an enemy of the Hidden Leaf."

Her face went pale. Not the pale of shock, the pale of something that had been expected and dreaded arriving exactly on schedule.

"Even if you come with me," Naruto said, "you'd be leaving your village. Your family. Your teammates. For a man who will not belong only to you, in a future where you will be a traitor to everything you were trained to protect."

He turned back to the chair. Finished dressing. Tied his headband.

"Take your training seriously," he said. "I don't know exactly what's coming or when. But something is. Something big." He moved toward the door. "Keep that in mind."

He left without looking back.

Sakura stood in the empty room with the orange light dying across the floor, and she pressed one hand to her mouth, and she did not cry, because she had already decided, and crying was for people who were still unsure.

---

Next Time: Rebuilding the Clan - Another Uzumaki Girl