The wind at the top of the Monument hadn't changed. It still smelled like baked stone and river mist and street smoke from grilling skewers below. But everything else had.
Naruto stood where the cliff turned the village into a toy map and let Jiraiya's words roll back through him like waves that refused to break: We leave. Very soon. We train until you can choose your own battlefield.
Good. Perfect. Exactly what he needed.
…And not nearly enough for what he knew was coming.
He shoved his hands into his pockets and started down the stairs, hopping the last five with a thrum in his legs that felt like borrowed lightning. His body wasn't the wreck it had been a day ago. Kurama's chakra had scoured it clean, knitting bone and vasculature until even the nurses stopped arguing with physics and wrote "Uzumaki anomaly" in the margins.
Four tails, the fox had said, voice reluctantly closer than it used to be. That is your ceiling for now. Past that, you melt. Past that, I stop caring.
Brusque. Practical. Not a promise of friendship, but not nothing.
"I'll take it," Naruto murmured to no one, and the wind carried the words away.
He cut through alleys he knew by heart, past the fence he'd fallen from the year he learned to run the rooftops, past the laundry lines that sometimes became obstacle courses because nobody could tell a future Hokage not to use the world like a training field. He palmed open his apartment door and the hinges yelped the same hello they always did.
Inside was… tiny. And his. A sink that thunked twice when the tap turned, a kettle with a wobbly lid, a crooked picture thumb-tacked over a crack in the plaster—him and Team 7 before everything made sense and then broke, their grins reckless and easy. The narrow futon, the little stack of ramen cups, the single window that looked onto a sliver of sky.
He clicked the kettle anyway out of habit and didn't bother with the instant noodles. Instead he stood at the window and laid out the board in his head.
Akatsuki. He knew faces and names the village still called rumors. He knew the order some of them would move, the way trouble rolled downhill from shadows you didn't dare name. He knew that "Madara" could be a person and a mask and a lie wrapped around a plan that turned people into parts. He knew—dangerously—what "Ten-Tails" meant when you said it like a destination.
And he knew there were ways to cut lines through inevitability.
Sage Mode. Natural energy, a stillness that was power without taking. The promise of not borrowing more of Kurama than his body could survive. He could feel the edges of it like a pressure change sometimes when he sat quiet enough. Like the world wanted to rest with him and he'd always been too loud to notice.
He'd ask for it. Not push. Just… ask. Jiraiya would hear the logic in it. He'd have to.
As for what else to tell the old toad—
Naruto's reflection in the window lifted an eyebrow at him. "You can't just say, 'Hey, I watched you all like a TV show once.'" He pulled a face. "Yeah, that'll go over great."
He would keep the impossible as instinct, not confession. He would call prophecy a feeling. He would pretend the patterns he knew by heart were just good guesses backed by a stubborn brain and better chakra control. And if Jiraiya looked at him like he knew more anyway… Naruto could manage that when it came.
For now he needed proof. Not words.
A technique you could show someone was better than any promise. A technique was a bridge you could run across together.
He grabbed his jacket and slid back into the street.
⸻
Training Ground Three — Dusk
The Triple Logs leaned like old veterans along the water's edge, their faces gouged by a thousand kunai and a hundred vows. Grass hissed when the wind combed through. The pond mirrored a bleeding orange sky that promised night but didn't deliver yet. Perfect.
Naruto scratched a line in the dirt with his sandal and set an imaginary chalkboard in his head.
Rasengan.
His pulse kicked faster. He knew it from the other side of life—late nights, old episodes, a technique that felt like thunder made small enough to hold. The first time he'd seen it for real—even broken and borrowed during that fight—he understood why Jiraiya had called it a creator's art. Not just power, but shape. Not just force, but control.
He hadn't learned it the long way yet. Not the water balloon step or the rubber ball or the clone as a second pair of hands. But wishes had rewired what "learning" meant for him. Perfect comprehension wasn't magic; it didn't put skills where work belonged. It just cut the waste between intention and result. It handed you a clear schematic and then dared you to build it with your own hands.
Naruto formed a clone with a breath and a flick. It saluted with his face.
"Alright," he told himself and himself, "no shortcuts. Just… cleaner lines."
The clone shut its eyes. Naruto did the same. Between them hung not a memory of a television screen but a diagram in motion: chakra drawn up from the core, fed along channels like rivers to a point in the palm, layered in three operations—rotation, compression, containment. Equal forces in conflict until balance birthed a piercing stillness at the center.
"Left to right," the clone muttered, "and counterspin over the top to counter drift."
"Don't overpack the shell too early," Naruto answered. "You get that corkscrew collapse."
They opened their hands at once.
Chakra pooled, translucent and blue. It wanted to scatter like school of fish. Naruto narrowed his palm's intent—here, not there; faster, not wider—and the pool began to stir.
"Wind helps," the clone warned.
"We don't have wind," Naruto said.
"We are wind," the clone shot back, and flipped the current.
The air in his palm rolled. The world seemed to inhale with it. Centripetal motion—he could feel the word, taste the math under it without the numbers—bit into the mass. It bulged. It tried to break. He set a second current opposed to the first, and the friction smoothed sudden.
A sphere no bigger than an apple buzzed, very nearly there.
It blew out in a harmless pop that stung his skin. He shook his hand, grinning. "That was closer than third-try should be."
"Third?" the clone said. "You mean first. The first two were… rehearsals."
Naruto set another phantom chalk mark. "Fine. Fourth try."
They drilled. He could feel the hours condense, not rush. Clones flickered and took his place the second fatigue crept in; when they dispelled, the lessons flowed back—tiny adjustments, micro-muscle memory, inner-voice cues like don't fight the wobble; absorb, redirect. Sweat ran down Naruto's neck, then evaporated as the heat of effort turned into a calm that felt almost like the edge of the Sage stillness he'd only half-glimpsed before.
By the time the sun slid behind the trees and left the pond wearing a lavender bruise, a perfect orb spun above his palm.
Blue, bright, solid. Contained noise.
"Oi," he whispered—half prayer, half laugh. "Look at you."
He didn't need a second hand.
He didn't need a clone feeding spin.
One palm. One intention. One breath.
Naruto stepped to the battered log the training ground loved best—the one who always volunteered to get destroyed—and pressed the Rasengan forward.
Wood didn't shatter so much as give up. The orb's skin shrieked against it without sound, pulling fibers into chaos and releasing them as nothing. When Naruto pulled his hand back, a crater twice as wide as his palm cored the log, edges polished as if by a mad carpenter with limitless patience.
The clone whistled low. "That's… decent."
Naruto's grin split his face until it hurt. "One-handed," he breathed, giddy. "I did it one-handed."
"Again," the clone said.
"Again."
He did it again. Then again. Then made three clones and had them do it while he watched—adjusting angles, tightening their shells, learning his own technique like a teacher picking on himself until each orb sang a note his bones could hear. The notes lined up, a chord. He laughed out loud at the absurd thrill of it. This was what a second chance felt like: not cheat codes, but a rigged playground where the bars were closer together and you were taller.
He dispelled two clones and kept one. The last watched him with a look he recognized. The what if look.
"What if…" the clone said slowly, "we add just a little of his chakra to the skin?"
Naruto's fingers flexed. The thought had been orbiting the edge of his skull since the orb first took. Not a cloak. Not a berserk flood. Just a film. A ring. An agreement made visible.
He flicked his gaze inward.
Four tails is a cliff, Kurama had said. Do not wander near it.
"I'm not," Naruto said, quiet. "I just want a thread."
Silence answered him—heavy, weighing his idea without bending to it.
He didn't push. He cupped a fresh Rasengan and set it spinning slow. Then he coaxed his chakra to the edges of the orb's shell until it thinned like glass. Only then—with patience that surprised even him—did he peel open the door to the other heat in his belly.
Red seeped out like dawn from under a blackout curtain.
Not much. Barely enough to color the outer film. It slid across the sphere's skin and the chakra's blue light turned rich—orange copper where the two lights overlapped, deeper where the red pooled in seams. The orb hummed. The hair on his arms stood up like grass on a storm plain and his teeth tingled with it.
"Hold it," the clone said. "Don't let it wet the core."
"I know," Naruto murmured through clenched teeth, steadying the balance between rotations with a third microcurrent—a counterwhorl that existed to say no further to Kurama's fire.
A second ring began to separate—an outer halo that spun fractionally out of phase with the core sphere. The halo thinned, then fattened, then leveled as he found the frequency where both layers sang the same vibration without tearing each other apart.
The clone's eyes were wide. "It's… a ring."
Naruto's grip tightened to keep the ring anchored to the orb. "Rasengan… plus a ring." He snorted at himself even as the name wriggled into place. "Rasen—ringu."
The name felt ridiculous and exactly right.
Kurama stirred. The deep-red pressure coiled and uncoiled once, measuring the structure Naruto had built.
When he spoke, the fox's voice wasn't distant. It pressed through Naruto's bones. Clumsy, Kurama rumbled. But you are less foolish than usual.
Naruto bit back a laugh and didn't dare shift his hand. "…You're watching."
You made enough noise even a blind beast would hear, Kurama said, snappish and—under it—curious. Your shell is thin. The ring will shear off if your hand trembles. If you must play creator, brat, set an outer counterrotation to shunt stray heat.
Naruto obeyed before he could think about pride. A third whisper-thin skin spun outside the halo, not touching it, just there to catch hiccups and bleed them off. The orb's hum smoothed into a tone that wanted to be a bell.
Better.
"…Thanks," Naruto said, soft as you could say anything around a live wire.
Do not mistake this for approval, Kurama said quickly. This is hazard mitigation. If you rupture that toy against your own body out of clumsiness, I will not drag your soul back a second time.
"Understood," Naruto said, smiling despite himself. Tsundere, he did not say aloud.
The ring brightened. The air around his hand warmed, but not like a fire; more like speed itself made temperature. The copper-orange edge looked almost… wet. It shivered and left a faint afterimage on his retinas each time it passed a notch in the orb's rotation. A halo wrapped around a star.
"Test," the clone said, voice reverent and scared to be reverent.
Naruto turned toward the boulder that lived far enough from the pond that nobody would yell if it died. He put the ringed sphere against the rock with the same gentleness you used for the first touch to a fox kit. Then he pushed.
The world turned into a thin white line.
Pressure vanished and then came back as a whump he felt in his ribs before he heard it. The ring detached a fraction and rode the leading edge of the Rasengan like a blur, a cutting boundary that wanted to be a circle and almost was. The boulder didn't explode; it folded. A neat, absurd bite slid out of it as if some god had taken a cookie-cutter to granite. The carved-out ring rolled once, fell to gravel, and then the rest of the energy unspooled in a ripple that rippled again, concentric grooves tearing outward across the ground until grass lay flattened in perfect circles around a crater you could sit in like a bath.
Silence. The kind that had a ringing to it anyway.
The clone said, very politely, "What."
Naruto stared at his hand. His palm buzzed. He could taste copper. A hairline nick on his thumb stung where the outer film had kissed skin, and he filed the feedback away carefully like a craftsman learning which chisel bites and which only threatens.
"Rasenringu," he said again, dazed and delighted. And then—because he was him—"Heh."
Do not grin like that, Kurama grumbled, but there was a thread of pride in the gravel.
Leaves rattled. A bird, insulted and late to protest, flapped into a new tree with opinions. The pond sighed itself back into ripples.
And then another sound threaded the quiet—a soft thup, thup of sandals on light branchfalls, a weight that barely dented bark. Naruto turned and knew the rhythm before he saw the silhouette: tall, mane of white hair fanning, red cloak catching what little light the sky had left.
Jiraiya landed on the grass with almost no noise at all. He stood between two of the concentric grooves, glanced at the boulder, then at Naruto's hand, then at the perfect circle carved like a halo into stone.
"Ah," he said with a straight face that had to be working to stay straight. "So that is what they're teaching at the Academy now."
Naruto coughed. "Advanced after-school program."
The remaining clone aggressively failed to look innocent and dispelled with a puff of smoke that drifted toward the pond like a cloud that didn't want to be involved.
Jiraiya looked down at the ring in the rock again. Then he stepped up to the crater and scuffed one boot through the flattened grass ridge as if checking the grain on a plank. Finally he folded his arms, side-eyeing Naruto the way only a mentor who had seen too much could. "Alright, brat. Tell me how much of that was you and how much was the fox."
"Mostly me," Naruto said—and let the pride show because he didn't want to hide it. "I mean, the shell is mine. The shape. The ring's skin borrowed some of his chakra. A thin film. I kept it outside the core."
Jiraiya's gaze lifted and narrowed just a hair at the word film. He nodded once. "And your hand?"
"Fine." Naruto flexed. "It nipped me when I shook. That one's on me."
Jiraiya's mouth did a little sideways thing that might have been annoyance and might have been impressed annoyance. "We'll put a bandage on your genius in the morning."
Naruto hesitated. He hadn't planned to say this part while his heart still hadn't remembered its usual rhythm, but maybe that was better. Honesty liked fresh air.
"…I made an agreement with him," he said, looking Jiraiya in the eye. "Kurama."
Jiraiya did a fair job of pretending the name didn't jolt him. "You two are on a first-name basis now?"
"He's still a jerk," Naruto said quickly. "But we see each other a little better. He gave me a limit. Four tails. Past that, I'm dead or not me. I believe him. And he… helped. Just now." He lifted his hand, palm up, like proof. "He told me how to keep the ring from shearing."
Jiraiya watched him in the kind of silence that decided things. The sort that could hold disapproval or trust with the same weight.
At last he exhaled. "You're twelve."
"So is my mortality," Naruto said brightly, then winced. "That was… not the argument I meant to make."
"Good." Jiraiya gestured at the carved stone. "Make the other argument."
"I need control," Naruto said, words coming easier now that he didn't have to make them bigger than the truth. "If I'm going to have to use his power, then I want to use a precise amount, not drown in it. My body can take more than it used to—it just can—but that isn't a plan. That's a margin. I don't want margins. I want a toolkit."
Jiraiya's eyes did that barely visible smile thing again. "And you think your… Rasenringu"—he pronounced it very carefully so as not to admit the name tasted better than it should—"is step one?"
"Step one-and-a-half," Naruto said. He swallowed. "Step two is Sage Mode."
Jiraiya absolutely stopped moving. The evening's chorus of insects filled the gap as if to draw a circle around the statement so everyone could look at it.
"Big ask," he said eventually, neutral.
"I know," Naruto said. He kept his voice simple. He kept it in the room. "But it's the only thing I know of that makes me stronger without leaning harder on Kurama. It's control and stamina and a way to feel battles without having to see every punch. I think… I think I can do it. I can sit still longer than I used to." He offered a lopsided grin that admitted this was the weak link in the pitch. "A little longer."
"Where did you hear about Sage Mode?" Jiraiya asked, too mild.
Naruto met his eyes and didn't blink. "I heard rumors. I felt something when I got quiet. Like… there's a shape in the air and I've been too loud to notice it. Like a frog on a rock could hear it, if I asked the right way." He shrugged. "I want to learn to ask."
Something eased a notch in Jiraiya's shoulders—not acceptance, exactly, but the permission to consider. "The Great Elder is stingy with his teachings."
"The Great Elder?"
"Keep up," Jiraiya said, almost playful again. Then, more serious, "It's not a promise. It's a maybe. Maybe after you prove to me you can hold still long enough to listen to a heartbeat without trying to punch it."
Naruto nodded once, strong enough to count. "Deal."
They stood without talking for a time, both watching the circles in the grass fade back toward normal and the boulder refuse to un-bite. The sky finished deciding to be night and lit itself with first stars. Fireflies wrote their brief kanji over the pond and forgot what they'd written as soon as their tails dimmed.
"Two days," Jiraiya said finally, voice quiet, as if speaking too loud might spook the plan. "We leave at dawn. Bring nothing you can't carry at a dead sprint. Say your goodbyes to anyone you'd be angry at yourself for not seeing."
Naruto's thoughts flashed: a soft-eyed girl who had kissed his cheek like it was an oath and fled; a teacher who smiled with one eye because the other had seen too much; a Hokage who drank sake like medicine because sometimes it was; a monument with four faces that looked down and one day would look up at him.
He lifted his chin. "I will."
Jiraiya glanced at the crater one more time and couldn't quite help the corner of his mouth from going crooked. "And brat?"
"Yeah?"
"Don't name your techniques when you're high on your own brilliance."
Naruto coughed into his fist. "Too late."
"Hn." Jiraiya turned away like a man who had decided to be done for the night and then paused, not turning back. His voice traveled over his shoulder like something he wanted Naruto to hear without having to watch him hear it. "You're allowed to be proud of yourself."
The admission landed warm where fear usually tried to live. Naruto didn't answer right away because answering felt like it would cheapen it. He just let the warmth soak.
Jiraiya hopped into the trees without fanfare, branches nodding in his wake, cloak red then gone. The training ground exhaled, as if holding its breath had been the tax for genius.
Naruto stood in the concentric grooves until the grass began to bounce back upright around his ankles. He opened his palm. No light. No hum. Just skin and a faint nick and residual heat that felt like a handshake he hadn't realized he needed.
You lived, Kurama said, blunt.
"Don't sound so surprised," Naruto murmured, smiling toward the boulder's impossible circle. "We're going to make a habit of that."
A derisive snort rolled through him. Do not.
"Then we'll call it a tradition."
No response, but his chest felt… less empty. As if the cage in the deep place had one fewer shadow than it did yesterday.
He breathed in the wet grass smell, the cool surface of the pond on the air, the faint oil tang of old shuriken buried and forgotten by the logs. He looked up at the first scatter of stars and counted the ones he could carry with him in memory when the road got lonely.
"Two days," he told the night. "Then no more waiting."