The afternoon sun beat down on Training Ground 6, baking the dirt into a fine, choking dust.
Twelve-year-old Minato Namikaze stood ten meters away from a wooden log. He was vibrating with the intensity of a theoretical physicist on the verge of a breakthrough. In his hand, he held a standard kunai. Taped to the handle with an excessive amount of adhesive was a scrap of paper that read: Marking Formula Attempt #42.
The tape crinkled loudly—crackle-crackle—as he smoothed it down, his thumb leaving a sweaty smudge on the paper.
Behind him, his teammates sat in the shade of a tree, looking exhausted.
Dekai—a broad-shouldered boy with dark skin and short blond hair—was lying on his back, staring at the clouds. His dark kimono with yellow trim was dusted with dirt.
Habaki Uchiha sat with his knees pulled to his chest. He was thin, with black hair pinned up in a messy bun, streaks of blue ink catching the light. He tugged at the high collar of his loose purple-blue turtleneck, hiding his mouth, his black eyes watching Minato with a mixture of confusion and pity. The red cloth of his forehead protector stood out against his pale skin.
"Sensei," Minato announced, adjusting his glasses (which he didn't wear, but he made the motion anyway). "Observe. I have calculated the spatial displacement required to bypass the friction of air resistance entirely."
He adjusted his imaginary glasses again, squinting against the glare of the sun reflecting off the metal kunai.
Jiraiya didn't look up from his little orange book. "Uh-huh. Go ahead, kid."
Minato narrowed his eyes. He visualized the vector. He visualized the space-time curvature.
"Hah!"
He threw the kunai.
It sailed through the air. Thunk. It hit the log.
A puff of sawdust exploded from the impact—poof—drifting lazily in the stagnant air.
Minato immediately dropped into a sprinter's stance. He took a deep breath, channeling chakra into his legs until they hummed.
"SUPER-INSTANTANEOUS-REACTION-SPEED-GO!"
ZOOM.
Minato sprinted. He moved so fast he kicked up a cloud of dust that made Habaki cough into his collar.
The dry cough sounded muffled and scratchy—hack-hack—through the layers of purple fabric.
Minato blurred across the ten meters, grabbed the kunai from the log, and spun around, striking a pose with his hand extended.
"Teleportation..." Minato wheezed, chest heaving. "...Complete."
Jiraiya lowered his book. He looked at Minato. He looked at the trail of footprints in the dirt.
"Minato," Jiraiya sighed. "You just ran over there."
"No, Sensei," Minato corrected, wiping sweat from his brow. "I moved at a velocity that approached the threshold of perception. To the untrained eye, it appeared as running. Effectively, I warped space by ignoring the concept of 'stopping'."
"You're sweating," Dekai pointed out from the ground.
"That is..." Minato panted, his legs shaking. "...Thermal exhaust... from the dimensional friction."
Habaki blinked slowly. He pulled his collar up higher. "You look like you're going to throw up."
"Nausea is the price of progress," Minato declared, trying to stop the world from spinning.
The Academy hallway was crowded with students rushing home.
Kushina Uzumaki was not rushing. She was trudging.
She was carrying a bag of rice that weighed approximately as much as a small boulder.
The coarse jute of the bag rubbed raw against her shoulder—scritch-scritch—with every heavy step.
The matron at the orphanage had asked her to pick it up, and Kushina, wanting to prove her strength, had refused a cart.
Now, she regretted it.
"Stupid rice," she grumbled, her red hair falling into her face. "Stupid gravity."
She spotted a tuft of spiky blond hair ahead.
"Hey!" Kushina called out. "Minato! A little help?"
Minato didn't turn around. He was walking down the center of the hallway, but his face was buried in a scroll. He drifted to the left, bumped his shoulder against the wall, corrected his course, and kept walking without looking up.
His sandals scuffed rhythmically on the linoleum—squeak... squeak... squeak—ignoring the flow of traffic entirely.
He was muttering.
"If the axis of the seal is rotated 45 degrees, the chakra drainage drops by 12%... but the stability compromises the user's nausea threshold..."
He tapped his pen against his teeth—click-click-click—in a frantic staccato beat.
Kushina's eyebrow twitched. She marched up to him and kicked him in the shin.
"MINATO!"
Minato jumped, nearly dropping the scroll. He looked around wildly before focusing on her.
"Ah! Kushina-san," Minato beamed, completely unbothered by the assault. "Did you know that spirals are the most efficient method of chakra channeling? It's fascinating. If I could apply a spiral rotation to a sphere of pure chakra..."
"I am carrying fifty pounds of rice," Kushina hissed, hefting the bag.
Minato looked at the bag. His eyes unfocused.
"Rice," he murmured. "Grains. Granular physics. Interesting. The way they settle creates a non-Newtonian density. If you applied a wind nature to the rice, you could theoretically reduce the mass by creating an air cushion between the kernels..."
The bag shifted, the rice inside making a heavy, shifting sound like sand pouring through an hourglass—shhh-shhh.
Kushina stared at him. He wasn't ignoring her to be mean. He was ignoring her because he was mentally rewriting the laws of physics to solve a grocery problem.
"Ugh!" Kushina shouted, shifting the bag to her other hip. "You are so unreliable! Get your head out of the clouds, 'Professor'!"
She stormed past him.
"Wait!" Minato called after her, pulling a pen out of his pocket. "I need to calculate the drag coefficient of the bag!"
"I hate you!" Kushina yelled back.
"Fascinating," Minato whispered, writing on his hand. "Anger increases vocal velocity."
The alleyway was a dead end.
Team Jiraiya stood in a semi-circle, blocking the exit. In the center, sitting on top of a dumpster, was the target.
Tora. The Demon Cat of the Fire Daimyō's wife.
Tora lashed its tail, the tip twitching with a predatory rhythm that matched the pulsing vein in Minato's temple.
The cat hissed, arching its back.
"Okay," Dekai whispered, cracking his knuckles. "I'll go left. Habaki, you go right. We just grab it."
"Wait," Minato hissed, putting an arm out to stop them. "I have a strategy."
Jiraiya groaned, rubbing his temples. "Kid, it's a cat. Just net it."
"Brute force is inefficient, Sensei," Minato said seriously.
He reached into his pouch and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. It looked like a football play drawn by a madman on a caffeine bender. There were arrows, circles, and equations scribbled in the margins.
The paper rustled aggressively in his grip—crinkle—as he thrust it under their noses, smelling faintly of graphite and desperation.
"We will execute the Spiralling-Flash-Super-Round-Dance-Howl-Formation-Stage-Two," Minato whispered, pointing at the diagram.
Habaki peered at the paper over his collar. "That... just looks like us running in a circle."
"It is a pincer movement based on the golden ratio!" Minato insisted. "The name is essential for morale! It creates a psychological profile of dominance over the feline mind!"
"Minato," Jiraiya warned. "The cat is licking its butt. It doesn't care about your psychological profile."
"Trust me," Minato said. He adjusted his stance. "On my mark. Three... two... ONE!"
Minato lunged. He didn't just jump; he did a superfluous spin in mid-air, attempting to flank the cat from a 45-degree angle while shouting, "HOWL FORMATION GO!"
Tora watched him coming. The cat waited until the last second, then casually swiped its paw.
SCRATCH.
"GAH!"
Minato crashed into the trash cans. The cat bounded over his head, used Habaki's face as a stepping stone, and vanished over the wall.
The trash cans toppled with a deafening, metallic CLANG-CRASH, sending a cloud of flies buzzing into the air.
Minato sat up. Three bright red scratch marks ran down his cheek. He was covered in banana peels.
"I see," Minato muttered, pulling a banana peel off his shoulder.
It peeled away with a wet shhh-luck sound, leaving a sticky residue on his shirt.
"The wind drag coefficient on the net was miscalculated. The rotational velocity was too low."
He looked at Jiraiya, his blue eyes intense and completely serious.
"I need to rename the technique," Minato decided. "How about The Flying-Raijin-Cat-Snare-Zero-Version?"
Jiraiya looked at the sky.
"I'm going to get a drink," the Sannin muttered. "You kids catch the damn cat."