The next day dawned with the smell of rain still clinging to the rooftops. Clouds rolled lazily above Konoha, heavy but quiet, promising a storm later. Jiraiya yawned wide enough to make his jaw crack as he trudged through the market streets toward the Academy. His body ached from the previous day's sparring, but the ache was good—it was proof that he'd stood his ground.
Villagers glanced at him as he passed. Some gave him the same dismissive look they always did, others whispered about "the boy with white hair" who had faced Tsunade and hadn't been flattened in three seconds. Jiraiya pretended not to notice, but Predator's Instinct carried every mutter to his ears like a breeze sneaking through cracks in a door.
He walked taller.
By the time he reached the Academy gates, the courtyard was alive again with chatter. Students sparred idly with wooden swords or traded stories from yesterday's duels. Tsunade was already there, arms folded, looking unimpressed with anyone who tried to talk to her. Orochimaru leaned against a post nearby, eyes half-lidded, observing. And Hayato—Hayato sat with a group of clan children, talking loudly enough to make sure Jiraiya heard every word.
"Some people just got lucky," Hayato said, smirking. "Luck runs out fast."
Jiraiya ignored him, forcing his grin wider as he walked past.
Inside, Nishikado wasted no time. "Today we test your hands. Accuracy before speed. If you can't hit the mark standing still, you won't hit it running." He clapped his palms once. "Outside!"
The training yard smelled of damp earth. Targets—circular wooden boards with red centers—were set at different distances. A crate of kunai and shuriken waited beside each lane.
"Pair up," Nishikado ordered. "Throw until I tell you to stop. Hit the target, not each other."
Jiraiya lined up, hands tingling with anticipation. His fingers closed around the cold steel of a kunai, heavier than it looked. Nishikado's voice barked again. "Form! Plant your feet. Balance! Sight with your eyes, throw with your whole body. Kunai are not darts for taverns."
Jiraiya took aim at the nearest target. Predator's Instinct whispered, showing him the subtle tremor in his wrist, the curve of his elbow. He exhaled, released. The kunai thudded into the wood—not the center, but close. He scowled.
Next throw. The blade sank a little farther out. His jaw tightened.
Then, it happened. That same hum in his blood from yesterday, the same calm voice that seemed to echo in his mind:
[Ding]Reward gained: Bullseye.Your hands never miss their mark. Every throw, every strike—guided by instinct and precision.
The world shifted again. The red center of the target glowed in his perception, brighter than the rest, as if the wood itself demanded to be struck. Jiraiya raised his hand slowly, feeling the weight of the kunai settle into perfect alignment.
He threw.
Thunk. Dead center.
Gasps rippled from the line of students. Jiraiya blinked, then grinned. He picked up another.
Thunk. Dead center again.
By the fifth, even Nishikado's eyes narrowed. The instructor crossed his arms, watching silently as Jiraiya released throw after throw, each one cutting the bullseye cleaner than the last.
"Show-off," Hayato muttered, throwing his own kunai too hard. It clattered against the outer edge of the target.
"Luck," one of the clan kids hissed.
"Luck doesn't repeat itself," Orochimaru said quietly from further down the line, his voice carrying just enough for them to hear. His own kunai landed neatly near the center—precise, but not flawless. He tilted his head, almost smiling. "He's doing something else."
Jiraiya grinned wider, planting his fists on his hips. "Guess I just like hitting things where it hurts most."
Tsunade rolled her eyes but couldn't hide the impressed look that flickered across her face before she turned away.
"Center lane," Nishikado called, voice like gravel sliding. "Jiraiya. Since you enjoy attention so much, let's see if you can keep it."
The class edged back to give him space. Three targets were set at staggered distances, one high, one low, one slightly tilted. The ground between them was uneven—packed dirt with shallow dips that swallowed careless ankles.
"Walk the line," Nishikado said. "Throw one kunai per target. No stopping. If you stop, we start over. If you slip, we start over. If you miss—"
"We start over?" Jiraiya offered, grin crooked.
"—you run laps until you forget what missing feels like," Nishikado finished, not taking the bait. "Ready."
Jiraiya rolled a kunai over his fingers and started forward. The first step sank a little; the second found a better grip. Predator's Instinct spread across his back like a cloak—soft at the edges, heavy where it needed to anchor him. He didn't look long. The center of the first target pulled at him like a tide. He released.
Thunk, dead center.
His foot hit a dip, ankle wobbling. He let the wobble happen, let it pass through instead of fighting it, and rode it into the next stride. Second target at his left, lower, tilted. He threw from a poor angle without correcting his shoulders, trusting what Bullseye told him the air would do.
Thunk.
The last target sat high and slightly farther than it looked. He didn't slow. He didn't jump. He simply breathed out and let the weight of the kunai finish the sentence his arm had started.
Thunk.
The yard made a sound like someone had punched the air out of it. Then noise returned all at once—whispers, a laugh, someone's sharp "No way."
"Again," Nishikado said. Not praise. A demand.
They ran the drill until Jiraiya's calves burned. Each pass, Nishikado shifted the targets: closer together, farther apart, angles that dared him to overthink. Jiraiya didn't. He couldn't have explained it if he tried; the line from his hand to the center lived under his skin now, and all he had to do was not step on it.
On the fifth round, Nishikado raised a hand. "Now add motion."
"What exactly have I been doing?" Jiraiya panted.
"Too comfortable," Nishikado said. He nodded to a senior student, who jogged over with a pair of padded sticks. "Kenji. Pressure him."
Kenji didn't need more instruction. He came fast, sticks a blur. Jiraiya leapt aside, felt the wind of a missed strike brush his hair, and released a kunai across his body at the low target without planting his feet.
Thunk.
Kenji pressed from the other side. Jiraiya pivoted on the ball of his foot, felt the place where balance would have fallen apart and leaned a hair past it. The second throw left his hand the moment he found the thin edge between falling and not.
Thunk.
"Eyes on your attacker," Nishikado said. "Trust your hands."
It shouldn't have worked. It did. Jiraiya kept Kenji in his peripheral, body moving on rails he couldn't see but felt. The third throw left while his head was still tracking a stick that whistled past his nose.
Thunk.
Kenji backed off, cheeks flushed, not with embarrassment but with the thrill of matching pace with a kid who shouldn't be able to keep up. "Again?" he asked, hopeful.
"Later," Nishikado said. "Class first."
They cycled everyone through. Tsunade's sets were brutal and beautiful; she adjusted faster than anyone to the uneven ground, legs doing what her hands demanded. Orochimaru's throws could have been measured with a caliper. Hayato's… were angry. He hit more often than most, but the misses looked like arguments he was having with the targets that the targets refused to lose.
"Speed to walk," Nishikado called. "Walk to jog. Jog to run. Don't try to skip."
By the time the sun clawed free of the clouds, sweat had turned the dirt to paste under their feet. Jiraiya's shirt stuck to his back. He didn't mind. The ache in his forearms had gone from sharp to warm, the way steel feels five minutes after it comes out of the water.
"Break," Nishikado said at last. "Water. Then we add shuriken. If any of you throw them like coins in a well and pray for luck, I will personally retrieve them and make you eat them."
Laughter tripped around the yard, brief and birdlike. Jiraiya dropped onto the low boundary wall and let his legs dangle. Orochimaru slid down it a pace away, opened his lunch box, and, without looking, nudged a rice ball toward Jiraiya with two fingers.
"You'll throw better with fuel," he said.
"I throw fine," Jiraiya said, but he took it. "Didn't peg you for generous."
"I'm not," Orochimaru said. "I just like good data."
Tsunade approached, canteen swinging against her thigh. She glanced at the three targets that still wore Jiraiya's kunai as clean punctuation marks. "You're getting cocky," she said.
"Or consistent," Jiraiya countered.
"Cocky," she repeated, but there was something in her eyes—a tight, evaluating focus—that made it less insult and more a way of saying don't you dare trip now. "Try it moving backward," she added. "Most people forget the world exists behind them."
"Bossy," Jiraiya said.
"Correct," Tsunade said, and took a drink.
Hayato walked past close enough that his shoulder brushed Jiraiya's. It could have been an accident. It wasn't. "Pretty throws," he said, soft. "Let's see them when it matters."
Jiraiya didn't rise. He didn't need to. "You'll see them from the wrong end," he said, equally soft.
Hayato's jaw ticked. He kept walking.
The second half of the session began with shuriken—five-point, six-point, weighted variants. Nishikado didn't demonstrate as much as he dissected: grip, wrist, release, the way fingers should kiss the metal goodbye instead of slap it away.
"Targets now have friends," he said, and assistants set small dangling bells around the circles, each bell suspended on thin wire that would tangle or sing if the throw was sloppy. "Hit the target. Don't wake the neighborhood."
Students groaned in unison. Nishikado smiled like a thundercloud thinking about rain.
Jiraiya took the first stack of shuriken and felt the difference immediately. Kunai wanted to travel point-first with weight guiding them; shuriken wanted to spin, to argue with the air.
"Wrist," Nishikado murmured near his shoulder, voice low enough that only Jiraiya heard. "Not elbow. Fingers finish."
He let the metal sit in his palm until the balance told him where center lived. Then he let it go the way you let a truth leave your mouth when there's no point keeping it anymore.
Thunk. Bell silent.
He set a rhythm—breath, release, breath, release—and found something like a song. Not loud. Not sweet. Functional. When Nishikado said, "Backstep," he did. The next pair rode the retreat and still buried themselves into the wood without waking a bell. When the teacher said, "Angle thirty degrees," he respected geometry and the way air worked when you didn't try to bully it.
Soon kids were drifting from their lanes to watch. Some were waiting to jeer a miss. Most were trying to memorize without looking like they were. Orochimaru tracked his own sets without glancing over; his clusters were terrifying in their neatness, three blades touching like a sigil. Tsunade's grouping was a fist.
"Add motion," Nishikado said again. Kenji returned, sticks ready, grin wider. "Don't hold back," Nishikado told him. "If he bleeds, we learn something."
Kenji obliged. The first stick blurred toward Jiraiya's shoulder. He turned, spine loose, let the strike slide along nothing, and sent a shuriken skimming past Kenji's ear to bury itself in a target that was never fully in his sight.
Bell stayed quiet.
Kenji darted in; Jiraiya backstepped and released two more in the same heartbeat, one high, one low, both setting themselves in wood like the target had invited them for tea. Kenji feinted left and actually came right. Jiraiya's foot nearly snagged a rut—he let it, let the stumble complete, turned the loss of balance into a sudden drop, rolled his shoulder, and threw from a stupid, ugly angle that would have made a teacher yell at him in any other class.
Thunk. Bells slept.
"Enough," Nishikado said before the little crowd could break into clapping. It wasn't that sort of yard, and he didn't want it to become one. "You three. With me." He meant Jiraiya, Tsunade, Orochimaru. "Everyone else—paired drills. If I hear a bell, I come to you."
He led them to a farther corner where the fence cast a slice of shade. There, on a stand, lay a set of odd targets: not circles, but narrow slats, some slanted, some hinged. Small steel plates hung behind them at different distances.
"Ricochet practice," Nishikado said. "You won't always have a clear line. If you can't see the solution, make one."
He tapped a slat; it wobbled, showing that a throw would have to land with enough precision to rebound at the right angle without slapping the bell strung below it. "Tsunade—power restrained. You tend to break problems that require finesse. Orochimaru—don't overthink. You tend to chase perfect at the cost of done. Jiraiya—no swagger. You tend to think winning once means the world will wait while you win again."
They stared at him. He had the decency not to smile.
"Jiraiya first," he said.
Jiraiya eyed the arrangement. One slat leaned at forty-five degrees, a steel plate two paces behind and to the right. If he hit the slat's lower third, a shuriken would skip into the plate. Hit too high and it would rise, kiss the bell, shame him in front of the shade.
He didn't count. He didn't bother with math he couldn't do that fast. He let Predator's Instinct and Bullseye tug his fingers into place and let the throw go.
The shuriken struck the slat, came off obediently, and clicked into the plate with a sound that felt like a secret handshake.
"Again," Nishikado said. "Now three bounces."
Jiraiya blinked. He traced the path with his eyes and then stopped, because this wasn't a problem for eyes. It was a problem for whatever in him had started to prefer movement over thought. He sent the next shuriken left into a narrow slant, which took it to a hinge, which knocked it toward the final plate like a polite suggestion someone decided was a command.
Click.
Tsunade let out a low whistle she tried to turn into a cough. Orochimaru's eyebrows climbed a fraction. Nishikado's face didn't change, which was how Jiraiya knew he was pleased.
They took turns. Tsunade learned to leash her force without leashing herself, and when she got it, she got it hard—three clean clicks in a row that made her grin at the targets like they'd finally admitted she was right. Orochimaru shaved the path tighter and tighter until his last throw scraped two slats so softly that the bell threads didn't even tremble.
"Good," Nishikado said. "Now combine."
"Combine what?" Jiraiya asked.
"Everything," Nishikado said. He gestured to the main yard. "Moving attacker. Uneven ground. Ricochet. Two targets you can't see."
Kenji jogged over again, rolling his shoulders like a man getting back a favorite toy. "Thought you forgot me."
"Try not to break their ribs," Nishikado said. "For now."
Kenji came in. Jiraiya slipped under a stick, put a palm on the dirt to save a slide, and threw without looking. The first shuriken kissed a slat, then another, then answered the steel plate far right with a sharp click. Kenji spun; Jiraiya rose, turned his shoulder into the next stick to steal its force, and let a kunai go at knee height. It skipped off a low slat and vanished behind a hinge—
—and thunked home.
He felt the hush before he heard it. Even the bells seemed to hold their breath.
"Again," Nishikado said, not because it wasn't enough, but because enough wasn't the point.
They drilled until shadows stretched long and the clouds finally decided to keep their morning promise. A fine rain started—soft at first, then steadier. The bells made tiny silver sounds when drops found them, and the yard smelled like earth turning its face up to drink.
"Last set," Nishikado called. "Then you go home before I remember more work."
Jiraiya's hands were raw beneath the grit, thumbs a little split where steel had welcomed and bit him back for being greedy. He didn't care. The rain slicked his hair to his head and blurred the edges of the targets, and something about that made all of it more honest. He ran the lane backward just to make Tsunade snort and Orochimaru pretend not to approve. Three throws, three centers, bells asleep.
When Nishikado dismissed them, Tsunade punched Jiraiya lightly on the arm. It hurt more than lightly. "Don't be useless tomorrow."
"I couldn't if I tried," he said, and immediately regretted how easy the line came out.
"Cocky," she said, but she was smiling as she turned away.
Orochimaru lingered. "You changed how you breathe," he said. "During throws."
Jiraiya blinked. "Did I?"
"Yes," Orochimaru said, not unkind. "You started exhaling a beat earlier. It smoothed your release. You should keep doing that. Until it stops working. Then change again."
"Is that advice?"
"It's curiosity," Orochimaru said. "But you can borrow it."
Hayato passed close in the rain, face pinched, eyes hard. He didn't speak. He didn't need to. The way he held himself said enough: I won't accept this. He kept going, his back straight against the weather that soaked everyone else equally.
The walk home tasted like iron and wet leaves. Jiraiya didn't head straight there. He cut through an alley that gave him a view of the training posts from behind the fence. The yard looked smaller from here. Work usually did, when you were finished with it. He stood with rain beading on his eyelashes and practiced with empty hands—fingers flicking, wrists guiding, shoulders loose. If anyone had seen him they might have thought he was telling a story he didn't have words for.
When he finally slipped into the carpentry shop, his grandfather looked up long enough to take in the wet hair, the scrapes, the light sitting under his skin like a lit coal.
"You didn't miss," the old man said, as if it were a weather report.
"Not much," Jiraiya said. He toed off his sandals and winced when leather scraped raw skin. "I'm getting good."
"Good is a word that doesn't last," his grandfather said. "Hungry lasts longer."
Jiraiya laughed, because it was true and because it kept him from doing the other thing—bragging. "I'm hungry," he admitted.
"Then you'll last," the old man said, and nodded toward a covered bowl. "Eat. Then wash. Your hands look like they argued with a millstone."
He ate, and while he ate he replayed every throw, not as trophies, but as lessons. Where did the breath land? Where did the ankle almost betray him? Where had he been right for the wrong reason and gotten lucky in a way that wouldn't hold against someone trying to kill him?
Predator's Instinct purred agreement with the questions. Bullseye waited quietly, sure of itself, letting him know it would be there tomorrow if he came honest.
The rain thickened. Somewhere in the village, a bell marked the hour. Jiraiya flexed his hands, winced, and smiled at the pain like it had just told him a joke he liked.
Tomorrow, he thought. Faster. Farther. No bells.
Outside, Konoha breathed. Inside, the white-haired boy mapped out a path only he could see, and dared the world to call it luck again.