The forest was quiet except for Naruto's own wheezing.
He slammed his palms together again, fingers numb and clumsy.
"Shadow… Clone… Jutsu!"
Smoke burst around him, harsh in the moonlight.
When it cleared, there was… something on the ground in front of him. It had his hair. Sort of. Its limbs were wrong, its eyes were rolled back, and then it popped like a soap bubble and vanished.
Naruto cursed and dropped to one knee.
His arms shook. His shirt clung, damp with sweat. The giant scroll he'd stolen lay open in front of him, its inked warnings and diagrams staring back like they were mocking him.
He glared at it.
"I did it," he muttered. "Once. I know I did."
He had, too. The first time he'd tried, fueled by panic and stubbornness, there had been three clones for a second. They'd fallen over like drunks and hit each other in the face, but they'd been real. Sort of.
Since then? Nothing but half-formed messes.
Naruto clenched his fists.
"If I get this jutsu," he told the trees, "Iruka-sensei has to pass me. Mizuki-sensei said so."
The name tasted weird in his mouth. He shoved that feeling away.
He could see it so clearly in his head: Iruka putting the hitai-ate on him, saying he was finally a real ninja. Everyone else having to shut up about him being dead last.
He pushed himself back to his feet.
"One more time," he growled. "No—ten more times!"
He slammed his hands into the seal again.
"Shadow Clone Jutsu!"
By the time I realized exactly how bad things were, the whole building was buzzing.
"Uzumaki Naruto stole the Forbidden Scroll—"
"—Hokage-sama says keep civilians away from the north forest—"
"—if ANBU find him first, it's going to be—"
I stepped out of the orphanage hallway just in time for two chunin to barrel past, talking too loud and too fast.
The words "Naruto" and "Scroll" hit my brain like a cold bucket of water.
"What," I said to nobody.
They didn't slow down. One of them added, "Iruka-sensei went after him already," and that was enough.
I grabbed my sandals from beside the door and jammed them on as I ran.
The smart move would've been to stay put. Let the professionals handle it. Trust the system.
I'd seen the system here. It left Naruto alone on swings and shrugged at Mizuki's oil-slick energy and told me I wasn't "a real Konoha ninja anyway."
So: no.
The village blurred past—dark streets, shuttered stalls, the distant glow from the red tower. I cut through alleys and hopped a low fence, lungs already burning. I did not have a runner's body. I had a "sits cross-legged and paints for three hours" body.
Too bad.
The closer I got to the tree line, the clearer the hum of energy became, and the more intensely my heart raced. Dozens of signatures flared and shifted as ninja fanned out in search patterns.
Beneath all that, two points stood out to my weird sense.
One was Iruka: steady, warm, pulsing with worry.
The other was Naruto: bright and jagged and exhausted.
I followed the line between them.
Branches clawed at my sleeves as I shoved through undergrowth. My sandals slid in damp leaf litter more than once. I nearly ate dirt twice. I couldn't stop, no matter how much my legs ached to reverse direction.
"Great," I panted. "This is just like the last time I almost died in a forest. Love the symmetry for me."
Voices filtered through the trees ahead.
"…you found me… "
"…did you do all this…?"
I slowed automatically, forcing my breath quieter, and edged up behind a trunk at the edge of a small clearing.
Naruto knelt in the middle of it, scraped up and panting, a massive scroll lying open beside him. Dozens of shallow craters pocked the ground around him like bite marks.
Iruka stood a few steps away, sweat plastering his hair to his forehead, vest torn where something sharp had grazed him. He looked furious and terrified in equal measure.
"Yeah," Naruto said, grinning weakly. "I learned a jutsu from the scroll in only a couple hours. Pretty impressive, right?"
I could barely see him from my angle, but his energy felt like it was holding itself together with duct tape and spite.
Iruka opened his mouth to answer.
A sharp whistling sound cut through the air.
"Iruka, get down!"
Mizuki dropped from the trees like a knife.
Everything happened too fast and too slow at the same time.
Iruka shoved Naruto out of the way and took the hit himself, a spray of kunai burying in his back with a wet sound I felt in my teeth. Naruto hit the ground and rolled, scrambling for cover.
Mizuki landed on a branch above, a massive shuriken strapped to his back.
I slapped a palm over my mouth to stop the noise that wanted out.
"Oh, come on," I whispered.
My brain skidded. The smell of blood, the ragged drag of Iruka's breathing, the way Naruto's energy spiked with white-hot panic—
"Why, Mizuki-sensei?" Naruto shouted. His voice cracked. "What are you doing?!"
Mizuki smiled down at him, too wide, all teeth.
"Give me the scroll, Naruto," he said. "Iruka has been lying to you from the start."
My fingers dug into the tree bark.
Here it comes. Whatever dark secret the adults had been hiding.
Iruka staggered to his feet, blood soaking through his vest.
"Don't listen to him, Naruto!" he shouted. "Run!"
Mizuki laughed.
"You think he'll trust you once he knows?" he sneered. "Once he finds out what you really are?"
My stomach twisted. I wanted to scream.
"Thirteen years ago," Mizuki said, eyes locked on Naruto, voice dripping poison, "the Nine-Tailed Fox attacked this village. It killed hundreds of people—"
"Naruto, stop listening!" Iruka yelled.
"—and the Fourth Hokage couldn't kill it. So he sealed it away…" Mizuki's smile hit something ugly. "…inside a newborn baby. Inside you."
The forest went very quiet. Even the bugs seemed to shut up.
Naruto's energy didn't spike this time. It didn't flare or crackle or explode.
It dropped.
One second it was that familiar, restless blaze; the next it was gone, like the bottom had fallen out of him and everything inside had just… dumped into a void.
I'd felt him scared before, angry, lonely, humiliated. This was different. This was hollow.
He stared up at Mizuki, face ashen.
"That's why everyone hates you," Mizuki went on, relentless. "You're the fox that killed their families. You're a monster."
Iruka flinched like he'd been stabbed again.
"That's enough!" he shouted. "Naruto is not the fox!"
Words, even true ones, felt so small against the weight of that secret.
My nails bit into my palm hard enough to hurt. I needed to do something.
I'd been practicing a barrier seal. It was half-baked, a clumsy ring of ink lines meant to block simple projectiles for a few seconds. On paper, it worked. Once.
This was not paper. This was a chunin with a giant shuriken and a murderous grudge.
But his chakra was coiling to strike, and Naruto was frozen, and Iruka was bleeding out on his feet.
Any plan I made in the next five seconds was going to be bad.
"Fine," I whispered. "Stupid option it is."
I fumbled in my pouch for a folded tag, fingers slick with sweat, and pressed my back harder into the tree for cover.
The pattern on the paper was rough: a circle, a spiral, four anchoring marks. I fed a thin trickle of chakra into it, ignoring the way my hands shook.
"Please don't explode in my face," I muttered.
Out in the clearing, Mizuki hurled his shuriken. It spun toward Naruto, whistling through the air.
"MOVE!" Iruka screamed.
"Naruto!" I yelled, because subtlety had clearly already left the building.
I slapped the tag to the ground at my feet and slammed my hand over it.
"Barrier Mark!" I hissed.
The seal flared to life—too bright, too fast. A flickering dome of chakra shivered into existence around me and… about two feet of leaf litter.
The shuriken sailed majestically past, unaffected.
A shockwave of misfired chakra slammed into my chest.
I choked and dropped to my knees as the barrier collapsed on itself, static crawling over my skin like ants. For a second, my vision went white around the edges.
"Okay," I wheezed. "That… was not it."
So much for playing backup hero.
The combo flare and yelling had jerked Naruto out of his stunned freeze for a heartbeat. He flinched sideways on instinct, buying Iruka enough time to take the hit instead—the shuriken struck Iruka, sending him crashing into a tree.
My attempt at interference fizzled into nothing but a headache and singed leaves.