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After the pages about Rock Lee and his unquenchable fire, the pages that followed seemed quiet.
The Hokage's office. An ordinary visit. A conversation between an old teacher and a student weighed down by guilt.
No one in the art shops was prepared for what those quiet pages held.
[— Manga Scene —]
The Hokage's office in Konoha.
On the wooden wall behind the desk hung framed portraits of the village's leaders: the First… the Second… the Third…
And a fourth.
"Hokage-sama."
Anko entered, the emotional scars of her latest encounter still visible in her eyes.
"I'm sorry… I…"
"You regret returning alive from the Forest of Death?"
The old man interrupted her calmly without lifting his head from his paperwork.
"…"
"You and Orochimaru have nothing to do with one another anymore."
"It is irrelevant."
Then the Third Hokage leaned back and spoke in the voice of a man laying the naked truth on the table:
"There is no ninja in Konoha capable of matching him now…"
"Even I… cannot."
Anko raised her head and spoke without thinking.
"If the Fourth Hokage were alive…"
"Don't say that…"
"He died saving this village… thirteen years ago."
The scene slowly rose toward the wall…
Toward the fourth frame.
A young man in the prime of his life. Wild blond hair, with two front locks falling along either side of his face. Eyes at once sharp and calm, staring ahead with the unwavering composure of someone who could see farther than everyone else. The collar of a white robe rested upon his shoulders, and around his neck hung the Hokage's traditional necklace.
A face that filled the entire page.
"He is no longer here…"
The old Hokage finally said.
"We must do something with our own strength."
"Yes…"
Anko slowly rose.
"I'm going outside for some fresh air."
"Don't blame yourself."
[— End Scene —]
For one moment, not a single sound came from the Konoha hall.
Then, slowly, as though the entire hall were a single body turning around…
Hundreds of eyes shifted toward the quiet corner.
Toward the blond boy sitting there, his volume open in his hands to the very same page.
Because the face that filled the page—the wild blond hair with its two front locks, the sharp yet calm eyes, and that unwavering gaze that saw farther than everyone else—
Was not unfamiliar to the hall.
It was a face that had sat among them on every release day since the first chapter.
Only ten years older.
…
At the front of the hall, Hiruzen Sarutobi stared at the page, his forgotten pipe growing cold between his fingers.
The Third Hokage did not need even a second of doubt.
The eye that had spent decades reading faces recognized the resemblance at once: the portrait hanging on the wall of his future office… and the boy sitting in the corner of the hall… two sides of the same coin, separated only by ten years and a gaze that had grown heavier.
'Namikaze Minato.'
'Jiraiya's student.'
'The boy my student has never stopped talking about since the day he placed him on his team… "This boy is different, Hiruzen-sensei," he once told me, half joking, though it had not truly been a joke. "I'm not training a genin. I'm training the man who will take your hat one day."'
'I laughed that day.'
Hiruzen closed his eyes for a moment.
'And it seems the fool was right.'
'The Fourth Hokage… is you, Minato.'
It should have been a moment of pure satisfaction. The village had found his successor, the hat would pass to the worthiest head, and his student's uncanny instinct for spotting precious metal had been confirmed on paper.
But Hiruzen had also read the other sentence.
He died saving this village.
'Died…'
The old man opened his eyes again and looked across the hall at the thirteen-year-old boy, lost in the image of himself.
'The boy who politely raises his hand in the hall… who reserves his seat at first light… whose face turns red when a red-haired girl sits beside him…'
'Will wear the hat as a young man…'
'…and die as a young man.'
'And I…'
The thought stopped at the cruelest truth, the one the old man understood from the presence of his own counterpart on those pages—alive and back in the office:
'…will live to bury him, then wear the hat once more after him.'
'What a twisted order…'
'The hat is supposed to move forward, young man. Not backward, returning to the head of an old man who should have gone into the earth before you.'
…
Several seats away, Shimura Danzo stared at the same page, his face rigid.
'Namikaze Minato…'
'A boy without a clan. Without an illustrious name. Without a kekkei genkai.'
'A gifted orphan Jiraiya picked up from the Academy… who will reach the hat that…'
The thought stopped.
Danzo did not finish it, even in the privacy of his own mind, just as he had refused to finish that particular thought for forty years.
'…Very well. The village has chosen. And it will choose.'
The man slowly turned the page, then turned it back and stared at the blond face once more.
'But one thing must be acknowledged.'
'He died saving the village.'
'In an age when Kage sell their villages to snakes in exchange for promises… Jiraiya's pampered boy died standing, paying for Konoha's walls with his life.'
'Whatever he did that night, thirteen years before their time…'
'…he died as a Hokage should.'
And from Shimura Danzo, that was the highest honor any human being could receive.
…
At the front of the hall, beside the Hokage, Uzumaki Mito was not looking at the portrait at all.
She had seen enough of it in the first few seconds.
Her eyes moved slowly—with the calm of a woman who had lived for a century and learned never to rush the truth—between three points in the hall.
The blond boy in the quiet corner.
The red-haired girl beside him.
And the cover of the volume resting in her lap, where a blond boy with markings on his cheeks stood.
'The Fourth Hokage designed the boy's seal to give him the key…'
'"This is the work of a man who trusted that infant blindly"… That is what I said that day.'
'And now the man behind the seal has a face. Minato's face.'
'And Naruto…'
'The boy who bears Minato's face… and my clan's name…'
Mito closed her eyes.
Of everyone in the hall, she might have been the only one for whom the thread had reached its very end in that moment. But the old lady, who had carried this world's heaviest secrets for decades, knew how to carry one more.
'Not today.'
'Some truths, children… must wait for the pages to ripen before they can be told.'
She opened her eyes and resumed reading with an expression that revealed nothing.
…
As for the two advisers, they exchanged a single silent look.
'The boy in the corner.'
Homura thought.
'The successor beside whom we will one day sit, one on his right and one on his left… then walk in his funeral procession… then return the hat to Hiruzen.'
'Twenty years of the future, and we are still in our seats while the hats pass over us like the seasons.'
'What a damned job.'
Koharu's thought was simpler and heavier:
'Only a short while ago, I told him: That is the man we chose that day, and we were not wrong.'
'It seems we will choose again… and once again, we will not be wrong…'
'…and this time, being right will cost us a young man in the prime of his life.'
…
In the quiet corner, the entire world had disappeared.
Minato did not hear the murmur of the hall, did not feel the hundreds of eyes upon him, and did not even notice Kushina's hand, which had been frozen halfway across her page for a full minute.
The boy was lost in the portrait.
In his own face ten years later. In the eyes that saw farther. In the collar of the white robe. In the frame hanging on the office wall between the First, the Second, and the Third.
'The Fourth Hokage…'
'The man who sealed the Nine-Tails inside Naruto to protect him… who designed the restraint so that it could become a key… whom Lady Mito said had placed blind faith in an infant…'
'The man whose way of thinking felt strangely familiar…'
'…because it was mine.'
"Minato."
'He died saving the village. Thirteen years ago in their time. And he left the blond boy alone in an empty neighborhood, buying expired milk and clinging to the first hand extended toward him…'
"Minato!"
The boy finally raised his head.
Kushina was staring at him with violet eyes stretched as wide as they could go. The volume trembled slightly between her hands, while her face wavered between pallor and crimson in a losing battle.
"You…"
She slowly raised a finger and pointed at the page, then at him, then back at the page.
"Minato… you're the Fourth Hokage!?"
And because Kushina's voice had never understood the meaning of a whisper, the entire hall heard the question.
The entire hall fell silent, waiting for the answer.
Minato looked at the page one last time.
Then he calmly closed the volume around one finger, turned to Kushina, and smiled that small, quiet smile so unlike the smiles of thirteen-year-olds.
"I don't know."
"You don't know?! That's your face! That's your hair! Even the way he stands—"
"The portrait resembles me. That is true."
The boy spoke calmly.
"But the future in these pages is not a promise, Kushina… it is a possibility. We have seen many things in this manga that we may prevent, and others that we may change."
Then he looked at the closed volume in his hands and added more softly:
"But if that man truly is me…"
"…there is one thing about him I do not want to change."
"What?"
Minato raised his eyes. For one moment, those seated near him glimpsed in their blue depths the shadow of the same resolve shown in the portrait.
"That when the time came to pay the price… he did not hesitate."
"The hat, the titles, the portrait on the wall… they are all details. But to stand between your village and disaster when no one else can…"
The boy smiled his small smile once more.
"…that alone is the one thing worth resembling me in."
Kushina stared at him for a long moment.
Then she suddenly turned her face away and muttered something unintelligible in which the word "idiot" mingled with another word no one could say for certain was "amazing." She buried herself in her volume until it nearly touched her nose.
Her ears, however, remained exactly the color of her hair until the reading ended.
…
Throughout the hall, all the delayed reactions erupted at once.
"Namikaze! The prodigy! I knew it! I always said that boy would become someone great!"
"You never said anything. Be quiet!"
In his seat, Jiraiya stared at the page with an expression no one could quite decipher.
'My student…'
'The boy I train every morning to throw kunai… the one I once described to Hiruzen-sensei, half joking: I'm not training a genin. I'm training the man who will take your hat…'
'He truly will become the Fourth Hokage.'
The man should have leaped over the seats, shouting, "I am the Hokage's teacher! My instincts are never wrong!" as he would have done a month earlier.
But the Jiraiya who had read Volume Ten, sat with Orochimaru at night, and learned to read between the pages… remained seated, his eyes moving between the portrait and his student in the corner.
'And he will die young… saving the village.'
'While I live on in those pages as a white-haired old man who peeps at bathhouses.'
The man closed his eyes for a moment.
'…We'll see.'
'The future in which I bury my student…'
'…has not been printed yet.'
Beside him, Tsunade placed a hand on her old companion's shoulder without saying a word.
…
In his seat beside his father, young Kakashi read the portrait page in silence.
He did not tug on anyone's sleeve, point with his finger, or ask the questions six-year-olds usually asked.
The masked child, who had graduated from the Academy years ahead of his peers and worn a forehead protector while barely tall enough to reach a doorknob, read the scene as a genin would read a mission report.
"Father."
"Yes?"
"Minato-san will become the Fourth Hokage… then die on a mission to protect the village."
It was not a question. It was a summary.
"It appears so."
Sakumo answered calmly, watching his young son's face from the corner of his eye.
Kakashi fell silent for a moment, his eyes above the mask fixed on the blond face that filled the page.
"…He completed his mission to the very end."
The child finally said it in the tone of someone delivering a final assessment.
"The village survived. That is the measure. A shinobi who completes his mission has not lost… even if he dies."
The answer was correct. Perfect. Taken verbatim from the rulebook.
And that was precisely why Sakumo felt something tighten painfully in his chest.
The father placed a hand on his young son's head and spoke quietly.
"He completed his mission. That is true."
"But look closely at the page, Kakashi. The Third Hokage did not say, 'He completed his mission.'"
"He said, 'He died saving this village'… and then he could not bring himself to look at the portrait."
Kakashi raised his eyes toward his father, not fully understanding.
"When you are a little older…"
Sakumo smiled behind the hand ruffling his son's silver hair.
"…you will understand the difference between those two sentences."
'He died saving the village…'
'To give your life as the price for those behind you… there is no medal greater than that, and no curse heavier.'
'I hope, young man… that our time will be kinder to you than theirs was.'
…
Elsewhere in the hall, a man was crying.
Loudly. With torrents of tears. Without the slightest attempt to hide them.
"What spirit!! What a man!!"
Maito Dai, dressed in green, wrung out a completely soaked handkerchief while his young son Gai stood atop the seat beside him—a second violation of the shop's rules in a single chapter—with clenched fists and blazing eyes.
"He died protecting everyone!! This… this…"
"This is the springtime of youth in its most sublime form, Gai!!"
The father declared, tears streaming down his smiling face.
"To set your entire life ablaze in a single moment for the sake of those you love!! Men like him never truly die, my son… they become a fire kindled in the hearts of those who come after them!!"
"A fire in their hearts!!"
Young Gai repeated, striking his chest with his fist.
Around the father and son, those seated nearby retreated by one or two seats as a precaution against the passionate embrace that was surely coming.
But this time, no one laughed at them.
For the weeping man in green, in his loud and tear-soaked way, was the only person in the hall who had said aloud what everyone else felt in silence.
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Upcoming chapter titles (spoilers):
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Chapter 211: And Every Single Person in This Village!
Chapter 212: The Hidden Sand Village Appears in the Manga!
Chapter 213: Face to Face with the Kyūbi!
Chapter 214: A Summoning Beyond All Expectations!
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