While the little group at Ryo's place was happily savoring their graduation night, elsewhere…
Hokage's Office.
Moonlight outside was so white it hurt, cold as a sheet in a morgue.
Inside, a human sauna crossed with a secondhand-smoke gas chamber.
The stench of smoke, sweat, and the mildewed rot of old paperwork mixed into something cloying enough to make a man drunk.
Under the dingy lamp, files were stacked into swaying towers, ready at any moment to deliver the Hokage a "buried alive" ending.
The Third Hokage, Sarutobi Hiruzen, the "ninja hero" of Konoha, had no "hero" in him now.
He was slumped in his oversized chair like his bones had been pulled out. The ravines in his old face were carved deep with dread and resentment.
His brows were cinched so tight they had knotted.
A pipe hung at the corner of his mouth. The ember had long since died, leaving only a smear of stale tar.
His fingers tapped the wooden armrest, tok, tok, tok, monotonous and edgy, a death knell in a room too quiet.
"Team assignments… damn these graduation team assignments…" he forced the words through his teeth, each one chewed to pulp and spat out, hot with temper.
A dull thump.
His palm smacked a scroll hard enough to make the desk jump.
The name on the header blurred from the impact, Uzumaki Kushina.
"Uzumaki Kushina," Hiruzen growled around the cold pipe, a volcano muffled under his voice. "Which squad do I stuff her in? Which thick-skulled Jōnin wants this burning potato?"
There was no one else in the office. Even his personal ANBU had been pressed back into the shadows by the heavy pressure in the room.
He didn't need to mind his image. A "ninja hero's" pent-up frustration spilled out in very civilized words.
Nine-Tails jinchūriki, original sin stamped on the birth record.
A responsibility, and a live explosive.
One hiccup on a mission and the team leader will be blown sky-high on the spot.
But isolate her, treat her differently?
That sort of long-accumulating loneliness and resentment, the kind that could corrode diamond, would rot her out.
Hiruzen dragged on his pipe. Only the cold taste of tar hit his tongue, sending him hacking, face turning red.
No one wanted to take this one, but someone had to.
Vines of hassle ran rampant through his head, knotting his temples into a pounding ache.
And at the root of that throb was another name, Ryo.
At the thought, his tapping hand jerked. The pipe nearly slipped from his teeth.
The blank, near-empty look of that boy at the training ground slammed into his mind with a palpitation of pressure.
The next instant, the one scene he least wanted to recall crashed back, the chasm torn through the earth, bottomless. The slash, crimson as lava, condensed to substance. And all he did was flick a scabbard.
That instant of destruction, that pure, unreasonable crushing, was carved into Hiruzen's memory at bedrock depth.
"Combat power comparable to a Kage," he muttered. The knuckles of his pipe hand blanched and creaked.
A twelve-year-old Kage?
That was a monster walking on two legs.
The problem was that this guy was like a block.
Ryo didn't need any "squad support." He was a one-man, self-propelled disaster.
"Hah…" Smoke puffed out. Hiruzen remembered that toe-curling fiasco on Hokage Rock.
He had nearly sung the lines like a chant.
Result?
Ryo never even lifted a lid.
That stare said plainly, Are you trying to teach me how to live?
The brat was a block of ice.
No sense of belonging. No bonds.
The only exception, the Uzumaki hellion, Kushina, equally lawless. She alone could chip a crack into that glacier.
And everyone else, in Ryo's eyes?
Just obstacles while alive. Wasted space after they are dead.
"Bonds… we need to pile on the damn bonds," Hiruzen bit down on the pipe stem. It was a wonder the thing didn't snap.
With someone like Ryo, extinction-grade potential and a perverse temperament, you can't just sit back.
You need something to tie him down.
Tie him tight.
Uzumaki Kushina was a steel cable looped around one of that primordial beast's legs.
Not enough. Nowhere near enough.
The more cables, the better. The thicker, the better. A thousand threads to mire the beast in a warm bog.
"Sigh… say what you will, Jiraiya's the easy one. Obedient. Likes smut like I do. His pupil, Namikaze Minato, the obedient type too. Good heir to the Will of Fire. A proper disciple. A proper grand-disciple." The comparison soured his mood further.
Kushina and Ryo?
They were the ceiling of the problem-child world.