Chapter 33: Genius
The water balloon sat heavy and cool in Naruto's palm. It was a simple thing. A child's toy. A flimsy skin of red rubber filled with tap water.
To anyone else, it looked like a prank waiting to happen. To Naruto, it looked like a physics problem.
"Spin it," Jiraiya said. He was leaning against the porch post, arms crossed, watching with a gaze that was half-teacher, half-hawk. "Don't just agitate the water. Make it rotate. Create a typhoon inside that rubber until the pressure is too great for the skin to hold."
Naruto looked at the balloon. He knew the theory. He had watched the anime in a hospital bed, years ago, and a lifetime away. He knew the three steps: Rotation, Power, and Containment. He knew that the original Naruto had struggled for weeks with this, using both hands, fighting his own chaotic focus.
But Aiden's mind wasn't chaotic. It was a library of filed data.
He closed his eyes.
[Quest Active: Mastery of Rotation.]
[Current Status: Phase 1. Analyzing fluid dynamics...]
He didn't need the System to tell him how water moved. He needed his chakra to listen.
He pushed a pulse of energy into the balloon. The water sloshed. It wobbled, distorting the red rubber, but it didn't pop. It just felt like a bag of angry jelly.
"Too rigid," Kakashi's voice drifted from the shadows of the garden. The Copy Ninja was sitting on a large rock, reading his orange book, but his single eye was fixed on Naruto's hand. "You're trying to punch the water from the inside. You need to stir it."
Naruto ignored him. He focused on the sensation. His chakra was heavy. It was dense, weighed down by the massive reserves of the Uzumaki bloodline and the bottomless ocean of the Nine-Tails. Trying to make it spin specifically and delicately was like trying to thread a needle with a rope.
He tried again. This time, he visualized the stream in the forest. The way the water curled around rocks. Turbulence. Friction.
He sent a stream of chakra clockwise. Then, he sent a second stream counter-clockwise, grinding them against each other in the center of the balloon.
The rubber stretched. It groaned under the strain. The water inside began to hiss, a low, angry sound.
POP
It didn't explode. It just tore. A small leak sprung from the side, squirting water onto Naruto's dark yukata.
"Fail," Jiraiya said, though he didn't sound disappointed. "You pierced it. You made a needle, not a bomb. Try again."
Naruto stared at the leaking balloon. He felt a flash of irritation, hot and sharp. He knew how this worked. He knew the answer. Why couldn't his hands do what his brain commanded?
[Observation: Chakra density is too high for fine manipulation. Suggestion: Reduce output volume, increase velocity.]
He tossed the broken balloon aside and grabbed a fresh one from the bucket.
He sat on the edge of the engawa. The sun moved across the sky, marking the hours. He went through ten balloons. Then twenty. His hand grew cold and numb from the water. His chakra pathways began to ache with the repetitive strain of the rotation.
He wasn't tired. He was annoyed.
'I am not the original,' he thought, his thumb digging into the rubber skin of the twenty-first balloon. 'I don't have time to be an idiot savant. I need to be efficient.'
{You are trying to muscle it,}Kurama's voice rumbled in his head, dripping with lazy amusement. {You treat your chakra like a hammer. Water does not fear a hammer... It fears the whirlpool.}
Naruto paused. 'The whirlpool.'
He thought back to the cliff. To the bear. To the principle of redirection. He hadn't stopped the bear's force; he had taken it and spun it.
He looked at the water balloon. He stopped trying to force the water to spin. Instead, he reached out with his chakra and grabbed the water itself, latching onto the liquid molecules. He didn't push. He pulled.
He pulled the water at the bottom of the balloon up, and the water at the top down. He created a chaotic, multi-directional storm in the space of three inches.
The balloon didn't just wobble this time. It convulsed.
The rubber expanded, stretching thin, turning translucent as the water inside was forced outward by centrifugal force. Naruto grit his teeth. He felt the resistance. The water wanted to stay still. The rubber wanted to hold its shape.
'Break,' he commanded silently.
He poured more chakra in, not more volume, but faster. He spun the energy until he could feel the friction heating up the cold water.
BAM
The explosion was sudden and violent. The balloon didn't just tear; it vanished, shredded into confetti. A sphere of water hung in the air for a fraction of a second, held there by the sheer velocity of the spin, before splashing down onto the wooden boards.
Silence filled the courtyard.
Jiraiya uncrossed his arms. He looked at the wet spot on the floor, then at the sky. The sun hadn't even set yet. It was late afternoon.
"Minato took three days to figure out the rotation," Jiraiya said softly. "He had to watch a cat play with a ball of yarn to get the idea."
Naruto wiped his wet hand on his dry yukata. He felt a quiet, cold satisfaction settling in his chest. It wasn't joy. It was the feeling of a lock clicking open.
"I had better teachers," Naruto said.
Kakashi closed his book with a snap. He stood up and walked over to the porch, looking down at the small boy. The eye that usually looked bored was wide, alert.
"You didn't use two hands," Kakashi noted. "Most people need the second hand to contain the rotation until they master it. You did it with one."
"My other hand was busy," Naruto said simply, patting the pocket where he kept his comb.
[Quest Update: Mastery of Rotation. Phase 1 Complete.]
Jiraiya reached into his pouch. He didn't look happy. He looked like a man who had bought a wolf pup thinking it was a dog, and was now watching it bite through a steel chain.
He tossed something to Naruto. It bounced on the wooden floor with a heavy, dull thud.
It was a rubber ball. Solid. Thick.
"Phase two," Jiraiya said, his voice serious. "Pop that."
Naruto picked it up. It was heavy. There was no water inside to slush around. No easy fluid dynamics to exploit. This was about raw power. It was about forcing something solid to act like a liquid through sheer, overwhelming density.
"The water balloon is about rotation," Jiraiya explained, sitting down next to him. "The rubber ball is about power. You have to fill it with so much chakra, spinning so fast, that you force the rubber to expand beyond its limit. It's a hundred times harder than the water."
Naruto squeezed the ball. It was hard as a rock.
"Good," Naruto said.
He closed his eyes. He didn't wait. He didn't rest. He poured his chakra into the ball immediately.
He tried to use the same trick as the water balloon. He visualized the whirlpool. He pulled and pushed.
Nothing happened. The ball vibrated slightly, but it didn't expand. The chakra just leaked out of the rubber, dissipating into the air.
[Analysis: Density insufficient. Chakra is permeating the material rather than pressurizing it.]
He needed more. He needed to make his chakra thick enough to hit the rubber like a physical fist.
He reached deeper. He didn't just tap his own reserves. He brushed against the seal. He didn't draw on the red chakra, not yet, but he drew on the pressure of it. He used the weight of the Nine-Tails' presence to compress his own energy, packing it tighter and tighter until his hand began to glow with a faint, erratic blue light.
The rubber ball hissed. Smoke began to curl from Naruto's palm. The friction was burning the rubber.
"Easy!" Jiraiya warned, reaching out. "You'll burn your hand off, kid!"
Naruto didn't stop. He felt the pain, the heat searing his palm, but he pushed it into the 'Sensory Buffer' partition of his mind. Pain was just data.
He focused on the ball. He could feel the internal structure of the rubber weakening. He pushed harder. Spin. Faster. Harder.
The ball shook violently in his hand. It was fighting him. It was a battle of wills between a boy and a piece of rubber.
CRACK!
A sound like a gunshot rang through the garden.
Naruto gasped and dropped the ball. It hadn't popped. But there was a split in it, a jagged tear running down the side, smoking and hot.
His hand was red, blistered, and shaking.
Jiraiya stared at the split ball. He picked it up, examining the tear. It wasn't a clean pop. It was a brute-force rupture.
"You cracked it," Jiraiya whispered. "You didn't pop it with pressure. You tore it open with sheer density."
He looked at Naruto. The boy was cradling his burned hand, his face pale, sweat beading on his forehead. But his eyes... his blue eyes were burning with a terrifying, cold light.
"It didn't pop," Naruto said, his voice trembling with exhaustion. "It failed."
"You've been holding it for five minutes," Kakashi said, his voice losing all traces of laziness. "It took me a month to get a rubber ball to even wobble."
Naruto looked at his damaged hand. The System was flashing warnings about tissue damage and chakra exhaustion. He ignored them.
He looked at the split ball in Jiraiya's hand. He understood now. The Rasengan wasn't just a technique. It was a miniature Bijuu Bomb. It was shape manipulation taken to its absolute, violent limit.
He looked up at his teachers.
"Give me another one," Naruto said.
Jiraiya hesitated. "Naruto, your hand..."
"Please....Give me another one," he repeated.
Jiraiya slowly reached into his pouch and pulled out a fresh rubber ball. He handed it to the boy.
Naruto took it with his uninjured hand. He didn't start immediately. He sat there, breathing, holding the ball, analyzing the failure. He didn't need to be stronger. He needed to be denser. He needed to be sharper.
As the sun finally dipped below the horizon, plunging the garden into twilight, the two jonin watched the four-year-old boy. They didn't see a prankster. They didn't see a hero.
They saw a genius who would break his own bones to solve a puzzle.
And for the first time, Jiraiya wondered if he was teaching a savior, or if he was simply sharpening a blade that would one day cut the world in half.
*********A/N********
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