The afternoon sun filtered through the buildings of Konoha, painting the streets a dusty orange and lengthening the shadows of the four genin who had just left the most dangerous office in the world. Outside the Hokage Tower the noise was deafening, courtesy of an Inuzuka who seemed incapable of modulating his voice to a volume suitable for human beings.
"Jerky! Pounds of it!" Kiba shouted, raising his arms to the sky as if he had just won the national lottery, while Akamaru barked in circles around him, infected by the hysteria. "Akamaru deserves the best for this trip! We are going to cross that desert like kings, not like beggars!"
Shino adjusted his dark glasses with one finger, stopping in the middle of the street with that infuriating calm that seemed to get on Kiba's nerves on purpose.
"It is a diplomatic mission, Kiba, not a weekend picnic," he corrected him with his monotone voice. "And I remind you that desert sand has the physical property of getting into meat if you do not seal it correctly."
"You and your logic are such killjoys!" Kiba turned toward Naruto, looking for an ally in his culinary crusade. "Hey, Naruto! Tell the bug weirdo that morale is important! If we eat trash, we fight like trash!"
Naruto laughed, scratching the back of his neck with one hand while the other rested in the pocket of his black pants.
"Food is morale, Kiba, I am with you on that!" Naruto admitted with a grin. "But Shino is right about one thing, so I do not want Akamaru getting sick halfway there and us having to carry him! See you later! And Kiba, please, take a bath! I do not want Suna to think the official Konoha delegation smells like wet dog!"
"Hey! That is natural musk! We smell like virility and adventure!"
Kiba walked away grumbling and waving his hand in farewell with Akamaru barking happily at his heels, while Shino sighed deeply. The Aburame inclined his head toward Naruto and Tenten as a silent goodbye and followed his partner at a prudent distance, murmuring to himself about the energy inefficiency of arguing with an Inuzuka.
Silence fell over the street after the noisy duo's departure, so Naruto turned on his heel to find Tenten. She was there, standing next to a wooden light pole and playing nervously with the bottom hem of her pink vest. The euphoria and confidence she had shown inside Tsunade's office had evaporated completely to leave behind a shrunken posture and a gaze that avoided eye contact at all costs.
"Well," Naruto said, breaking the ice with a soft smile to try not to scare her. "That was intense, Granny is scary when she signs papers. Ready for logistics?"
Tenten let out a forced, dry laugh without looking him in the eyes.
"I guess. I have to go to the shop," she said, pointing vaguely toward the commercial district. "There is a lot to prepare if we want to leave in a week, since inventory, seals, and scrolls do not make themselves."
She started walking with quick steps as if she wanted to put distance between herself and the Tower, but Naruto fell in step beside her immediately, matching her long stride with ease.
"I'll walk with you."
Tenten stopped dead and looked at him, surprised and frowning.
"There is no need, Naruto, since I can go alone and your house is in the other direction."
"I know, but I am the Secret Advisor," he said, puffing out his chest with comic self-importance and raising a finger. "And a good advisor must ensure that his specialists arrive safely at their base of operations. Besides, it is on my way to... well, nowhere really, but I want to walk since I was locked up reading about scrolls all morning."
Tenten shook her head, but a small genuine smile, barely a shadow, appeared on her lips.
"You are weird, Uzumaki."
"I get that a lot."
As they walked together, the noise of the village reconstruction filled the air with saws cutting wood, foremen shouting, and the clash of metal against stone, but between them there was a bubble of strange stillness. Naruto watched Tenten sideways and saw how her hands, stained with gun cleaning oil and with small cuts on the knuckles, closed and opened rhythmically, showing that there was a tension in her shoulders that did not disappear.
"What is wrong?" Naruto asked suddenly, stopping at a corner.
Tenten jumped a little, as if she had been caught doing something bad.
"What? Nothing. I was just thinking about... scrolls, quantities, and weight. You know, that stuff."
"Liar," Naruto said with brutal simplicity while crossing his arms and staring at her. "You have that face."
"What face?"
"The same one Sakura makes when she thinks I do not see her and is worried about not hitting hard enough, or the one Hinata used to make before... well, before becoming incredible and kicking Neji's butt."
Tenten stopped dead because the mention of the other girls seemed to hit her physically, so she lowered her gaze to look at her dirty, calloused hands.
"They are incredible, right?" she murmured with a voice barely audible over the sound of a distant hammer hitting a roof. "Sakura... has that monstrous strength now and they say she broke the arena floor. And Hinata... defeated Neji. Neji Hyuga, the genius of the clan."
She clenched her fists tightly until her knuckles turned white.
"And I... I am the girl who throws things, that is all I do, I throw things and I miss." She looked up and there was moisture in her eyes. "When I faced Temari I could not even touch her, Naruto. My weapons were trash against her wind and she swept them away as if they were dry leaves, and now you ask me to escort you. I am going to her village."
Tenten let out a bitter laugh.
"Are you sure about this, Naruto? Kiba and Shino are strong in their own way, and Sakura and Hinata are... monsters now, in a good way. I am just... normal, so if we get attacked or if something goes wrong... I will just be in the way."
Naruto looked at her with no pity in his blue eyes, only with an absolute seriousness that he rarely showed.
"Let's go."
He gently grabbed her wrist and pulled her, speeding up the pace toward his family's armory.
"What? Naruto, wait! Where are we going? You have not listened to anything I said!"
"I heard everything, but you think you are weak because you failed once. We are going to your shop because I need to show you something."
"Show me what? There is nothing in my shop that can help me beat the wind!"
"Shut up and walk, Tenten."
They arrived at the Higurashi Armory in a few minutes where the wooden sign creaked in the afternoon wind, and Naruto opened the door without waiting. The shop was empty of customers and had walls covered in sharp steel that gleamed in the sunset light.
Naruto walked directly toward the back counter, where a storage scroll was half-open surrounded by scattered kunai and maintenance tools.
"What are you going to show me?" Tenten asked, confused, while closing the door behind her and sliding the bolt. "Are you going to buy something? Because we are already closed."
Naruto ran his hand over the paper of the scroll.
"I have been reading," Naruto said without looking up and touching the dry ink of the seals. "My mother's journal."
Tenten blinked, approaching the counter slowly.
"Really? She was a sealing master, right? You are an Uzumaki after all."
"The best," Naruto agreed, looking her in the eyes now. "And she wrote a bunch of things that gave me a headache just looking at them, like theory on vortices, dimensional containment, and chakra fixations... nerd stuff that Sakura or Shikamaru would love. But there was a note in the margin, something about the flow."
He took a standard kunai from the table and held it in his hand, weighing it and spinning it with surprising dexterity.
"She said that most people think Fūinjutsu, the sealing art, is static, that it is writing, putting in the chakra, and that is it, like closing a box. But she said that for the masters, for the Uzumaki... it is movement and breathing."
Naruto placed the kunai on the open scroll.
"You have an orderly mind, Tenten, so you know exactly how much everything weighs and where it should go. I cannot do that because my head is a mess of ramen and yelling, and I envy that."
"You envy... my ability to make lists?" Tenten snorted in disbelief, crossing her arms. "That does not win fights, Naruto."
"I envy that you know where everything goes," he corrected, becoming serious. "Look. Try to seal this kunai, but do not do it like always."
"How do you want me to do it then? Sealing is basic: you put chakra in, activate the seal, and the object goes in."
"When you put chakra into the paper," Naruto began to gesture with his hands, trying to explain a physical sensation that he was barely beginning to understand, "do not push it down as if you were squashing a bug. That is what I used to do with the Rasengan and everything exploded, so you have to... spin it."
"Spin it?" Tenten frowned, leaning closer to the scroll. "You mean chakra rotation?"
"Exactly! But not crazy rotation like my attack, but a rotation toward the center of the seal, like a whirlpool in water."
Tenten looked at the scroll. The standard Academy theory said you had to project chakra onto the object to "push" it into dimensional space, which was an action of force. Spin the chakra? Suck it in?
"It sounds... weird," she murmured. "But... I will try, just so you see that it changes nothing."
She placed her hand over the kunai, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. Normally she simply pushed her energy, hitting the seal to open it, but this time she visualized what Naruto said: a whirlpool, a small vortex in the black ink.
She made her chakra flow.
SNAP!
The kunai simply disappeared, it was instant, faster than a blink, and the paper did not even wrinkle.
Tenten opened her eyes suddenly and looked at the paper. The kanji for "edge" was there glowing faintly, but the weapon was no longer there.
"What...?" She touched the paper, stunned. "It was... I felt no resistance."
Naruto smiled.
"I knew it! You are a tool genius! It took me hours to understand the spiral concept and you do it on the first try!"
"I am not a genius, just..." Tenten looked at her hand trembling slightly with excitement while her tactical mind began to race a mile a minute. "It was much faster. Naruto, if I can do this with all my weapons... if I can seal and, more importantly, release with this speed... my fire rate would triple. I could saturate the air before Temari's wind could even form and I would not give her time to open her fan."
She looked at Naruto with eyes shining for the first time in weeks.
"How did you know that would work? Are you a sealing expert now?"
"I did not know," Naruto admitted, shrugging with total honesty. "But my mother wrote that Uzumakis do not seal with force, they seal with spirals. And you... you understand tools and know that you do not have to force them, you have to guide them. I saw how you were cleaning that kunai before, so you treated it with respect despite being frustrated."
He leaned on the counter, becoming serious again and staring at her.
"I do not need you to carry boxes, Tenten, since anyone can carry boxes. I could make a thousand clones to carry boxes and take them to Suna myself."
He pointed at her with his finger, lightly touching her forehead protector.
"I need you because you understand tools better than anyone, you understand how they work, how to care for them, and how to use them, and we are going to need the best tools to fix Suna. If we are going to build a peace, or whatever it is Granny Tsunade wants to build... I need someone who knows where every piece goes, someone who does not fail."
Tenten felt a lump in her throat.
"Naruto..."
"So," Naruto moved away from the counter and walked toward the door, stretching. "Tonight we have dinner at the Senju Fortress. We need to coordinate and I need you to meet the girls, the full team: Sakura, Hinata, and Karin. They are... intense, but you will like them."
Tenten wiped away a small tear that threatened to escape from the corner of her eye and smiled. A real and fierce smile, the smile of a weapons specialist who had just found new ammunition.
"Coordinate? You better have food, Uzumaki. Because if I am going to reorganize your mess and teach Kiba how to pack without everything smelling like dog, I am going to need a lot of energy."
"There will be ramen! Tons! And Shizune is cooking something that is not instant, I think vegetables!" Naruto grimaced.
"I will go," Tenten said firmly, putting the scroll in her pouch. "Thank you, Naruto. Really."
"Do not thank me! Thank me when we make Temari make that scared face again! I want to see how she tries to block a thousand kunai per second!"
Naruto left the shop waving his hand and shouting something about being late for dinner.
Tenten remained alone in the silence of the armory, but it no longer felt empty, but rather felt like a workshop before work. She looked at the scroll, took another kunai, and murmured:
"Spin the chakra..."
The sound of disappearing steel filled the shop, quick and sharp like a heartbeat, again and again.
SNAP.
SNAP.
SNAP.
******
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