Chapter 27: The First Test
A month passed in the deep woods. The rhythm of training hardened into something more serious. The easy laughter around the fire grew less frequent, replaced by longer silences filled with the sound of Naruto's controlled breathing as he held a water-walking stance for an hour, or the sharp thwack of a kunai hitting a distant tree knot.
Jiraiya was pushing him. Hard. The gentle slope of early teaching had given way to a steep climb. Lessons were no longer about feeling the water, but about surviving the current.
One morning, as Naruto finished running a brutal series of sprints up a sloping gully, Jiraiya didn't offer the usual dry comment or correction. He just stood with his arms crossed, looking at the boy. Naruto's dark yukata was damp with sweat, his long hair clinging to his neck. He met the look, waiting.
"You've learned the pieces," Jiraiya said finally. His voice was quiet, stripped of its usual storytelling warmth. "Balance. Control. A bit of redirection. You can move, you can feel chakra, you can think three steps ahead of a thrown rock." He paused, his dark eyes serious. "But putting the pieces together when it matters… that's a different thing. The woods are safe. Konoha isn't."
Naruto understood. This was the pivot. The theory was over.
"Tomorrow," Jiraiya said, the word leaving no room for argument. "You get a test. My test. Not in this clearing. Somewhere that doesn't care if you fall."
That night, the air in the camp felt different. The forest sounds seemed louder, the dark between the trees deeper. Naruto sat by the fire, methodically working the sandalwood comb through his hair. The ritual usually calmed him, ordering his thoughts. Tonight, his mind wouldn't settle.
What would the test be? A fight? An escape? A puzzle? The not-knowing was a hollow space he kept trying to fill with plans, but without the rules, he couldn't make any.
{The teacher wonders if his student has learned to swim, or merely memorized the motions of the water,} Kurama mused, a distant rumble in the stillness. {He will throw you into the deep end to find out.}
'I know how to swim,' Naruto thought back. But the old fear, the Aiden-fear of a body failing, of water filling lungs, was a ghost in his memory. This body wouldn't fail. He had made sure of that.
{It is not your body he doubts,} the Fox replied, and there was no mockery in it, just a cold certainty. {It is your heart. What will it choose when the rules are gone?}
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Jiraiya woke him before dawn. They moved through the sleeping forest in silence, the only sound the crunch of their steps on frost-stiffened leaves. They climbed, leaving the familiar stream and the training clearing behind, heading up into the raw bones of the mountain.
After an hour of steep ascent, Jiraiya stopped. They stood on the lip of the north ridge, a brutal, wind-scoured slash of rock. Below them, the world fell away into a sea of mist, hiding the valley floor. The wind here was a constant, hungry presence, whipping Naruto's hair around his face and tugging at his clothes with cold fingers. Ahead, a narrow, crumbling ledge skirted the cliff face, leading to a single, ancient pine that grew sideways from the stone, its roots clawing into the rock like desperate hands.
Jiraiya turned to him. He wasn't the teacher now. He was something harder. "The test is simple," he said, his voice flat against the wind's moan. "Reach the tree." He pointed to the pine, maybe fifty feet away along the treacherous ledge. "I will try to stop you. Use anything you've learned. Anything you can think of. There are no rules, except one."
He locked eyes with Naruto, and his gaze was like stone. "Do not fall."
Naruto looked at the path. The ledge was a joke. In places, it was no wider than his hand. The rock looked rotten, seamed with cracks. One wrong step, one gust of wind at the wrong moment, and that would be it. The mist below wouldn't catch him. It would just hide the end.
This wasn't a test of skill. It was a test of nerve. Of what he was made of when the ground itself was his enemy.
He took a slow, cold breath. The Aiden-part of him, the part that remembered a body that betrayed him, screamed a silent warning. But this body was different. This body was strong. He had made it strong. He pushed the old fear down, deep into the dark where it belonged, and took his first step onto the ledge.
The wind hit him like a wall, trying to pluck him off the mountain. He poured chakra into his feet, sticking to the stone with a grip that would have shattered bone in his past life. He began to shuffle sideways, his back pressed to the cold cliff, his eyes fixed on the next few inches of rock.
He'd gone ten feet when Jiraiya moved.
The sage didn't come onto the ledge. He just formed a single, quick seal and touched the cliff face.
The stone under Naruto's left foot didn't just slip. It flowed, turning to loose gravel and sand. Earth Release: Rock Avalanche. A minor jutsu, perfectly aimed.
Naruto's foot shot out into empty air. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drum in the wind's roar. He dropped, his right foot his only anchor. He swung out over the drop, the world tilting sickeningly. For a second, he was just a boy hanging over nothing.
Then his training kicked in. Not thought, but feel. His chakra flared, his right foot clamping onto the rock like a vice. He hauled himself back up, muscles trembling, his breath coming in sharp gasps. The cold fear was there, a metallic taste in his mouth, but beneath it was a hotter, sharper feeling: anger.
He glared at Jiraiya, who watched, impassive.
Naruto moved again, faster now, less careful. He had to get off this exposed section. Jiraiya flicked his wrist. Three blunt training kunai sliced through the air, not aimed at him, but at the rock face directly ahead. They thudded into the stone, their handles forming a barrier he'd have to climb over, slow and awkward.
He didn't slow down. As he reached the first kunai, he didn't climb. He jumped, chakra flaring at his feet, and ran up the vertical cliff face two steps, passing over the obstacle before dropping back to the ledge beyond it. It was risky, a waste of chakra, but it was fast. It was unexpected.
He saw Jiraiya's eyebrow twitch, just once. A flicker of surprise.
He was halfway to the tree when Jiraiya stopped using jutsu. The man simply appeared on the ledge in front of him, a solid, unmovable wall blocking the narrow path. The wind tore at them both.
"Getting here is one thing," Jiraiya said, his voice calm. "Getting through is another."
Naruto stopped. He couldn't go around. He couldn't knock Jiraiya off the mountain. The logic was cold and perfect: he had to make him move.
He remembered the gully, the stones. Redirection. Join the force.
He didn't charge. He stepped forward, into Jiraiya's space, and placed his palm flat against the man's chest. He didn't push. He pushed his will instead. He focused all his chakra, the cool, flowing blue of his own and the hot, stubborn red of the Fox's, into a single, clear command. Not an attack. A suggestion, backed by everything he had.
Move.
For a long second, nothing happened. Jiraiya was a mountain. Naruto's arm shook with the strain, the chakra in his pathways burning.
Then, he shifted his weight. He stopped trying to shove the mountain. Instead, he leaned into it, using the man's own solidity as a pivot. He poured the red chakra into the motion, not as rage, but as unyielding leverage. He wasn't fighting the force. He was trying to convince it to take a single step.
Jiraiya's left foot slid back on the grit of the ledge. Just an inch. A tiny crack in the wall.
It was enough. Naruto flowed forward like water through a break in a dam, slipping past Jiraiya so close he could smell the old leather and pipe smoke on his clothes. He broke into a sprint for the final stretch, the ancient pine so close he could see the texture of its bark.
He didn't see the last trap.
Jiraiya, now behind him, stamped his foot on the ledge.
With a sound like a cracking bone, the last five feet of rock leading to the tree split clean from the cliff and vanished into the mist.
Naruto skidded to a stop at the raw, new edge. The tree was right there. It was five feet away across a gap of screaming wind and nothing.
He stood there, the void at his toes. His mind, so quick with plans, went blank. Jump? The wind would swat him aside. Climb? The rock face was sheer, crumbling.
He felt it then. A familiar, hateful itch at the edge of his awareness. A chakra scan, clinical and cold, brushing over him from the treeline high above. Root. They'd found them. They were watching. Taking notes on the asset in its field test.
A hot, clean fury cut through his fear. This was his. His test. His moment of truth. They didn't get to have it. They didn't get to watch him fail or succeed and file it away in some scroll.
The anger focused him. It burned away the last of the Aiden-fear.
He didn't look at the gap. He didn't look at the tree. He turned his back on both and faced Jiraiya across the broken ledge.
Then he ran. Not at the gap. Away from it. Three long strides back along the ledge.
He planted his foot and spun, not jumping, but launching himself straight off the cliff into the open air.
Chakra exploded at his feet with a sound like tearing canvas. He didn't fall. He ran. Up. Two steps, three, four on the empty wind itself, climbing an invisible staircase above the deadly gap. The wind howled, trying to rip him apart. His control wavered, the volatile chakra inside him surging in protest at the madness of it.
For one heartbeat, he hung in the sky, higher than the ancient pine, the world spread out below him in a dizzying panorama of rock and mist. Then he dropped, straight down, landing in a crouch on the thick, sideways trunk of the pine tree.
He was on it. He had reached it.
But he hadn't taken the path. He'd refused the puzzle he was given and made his own answer.
The wind screamed. The cold scan from above winked out, cut off in shock.
Naruto stood up on the trunk, the abyss beneath him. He wasn't breathing hard. He was perfectly still. He looked back at Jiraiya across the broken ledge.
The sage's face was pale. All the sternness, the teacher's mask, was gone. In its place was pure, unvarnished shock. He stared at Naruto as if seeing him for the very first time. As if he'd just watched a child walk on air and rewrite a law of the world.
A long, silent moment stretched between them, filled only by the voice of the mountain.
Finally, Jiraiya closed his eyes. He let out a long, slow breath that misted in the cold air. When he opened them, he gave a single, deep nod.
The test was over.
As Naruto looked from Jiraiya's stunned face to the empty sky where the Root spy had been, he knew a different test had just begun. He had shown a piece of what he was, of what he could be. And now, the hidden eyes of the world had seen it too.
And the world, as he knew from his other life, always had an answer for things it couldn't control.
*******A/N*********
First milestone achieved. 100 Power Stones have been reached
thank you! :)