Chapter 13: Fame and its Complications
After leaving the academy, Shinra and Kushina didn't head straight home. They made a detour to the market district. Shinra's hunger was a physical, demanding presence he could no longer ignore.
Two hours later, as dusk began to paint the sky, two enormous, lumpy sacks appeared to be moving through the streets of Konoha on their own.
A closer look revealed two slender figures almost completely buried beneath them.
Shinra and Kushina.
The sacks on their backs, taller than they were, were stuffed to bursting with dried meat, smoked sausages, and whole cured hams. Shinra's load was particularly egregious. Not only did he carry the massive backpack, but he also gripped two enormous haunches of ham, one in each hand. Another bulging net of meat dangled from a rope around his neck. He looked less like a shinobi-in-training and more like a walking butcher shop.
"You idiot, Shinra! Why did you have to buy so much?!" Kushina hissed from under her own mountainous load, her face flushed with a mixture of exertion and acute embarrassment under the stares of passing villagers.
"Is… is that the two kids from the orphanage?" an old woman murmured, squinting at the bizarre procession.
"That's enough meat to feed a platoon for a week!"
"Shouldn't growing children eat more vegetables?"
Shinra tuned out the whispers. Vegetables? The thought was almost laughable. Did Popeye get his strength from spinach? Maybe. But in the worlds he understood, power was built on protein. The strong ate meat. Lots of it. The idea that a diet of greens built titans was, in his current view, complete nonsense. He wasn't becoming a herbivore. This was a calculated, physiological necessity.
A few hours later, Shinra's small apartment floor was transformed into a carnivore's feast. A mountain of various meats lay before him.
He dug in without ceremony, a one-man demolition crew against the edible fortress. Kushina sat across from him, her chin resting in her hands, watching the spectacle with a look of profound, uncomprehending horror. As the pile diminished at an alarming rate and Shinra's stomach remained suspiciously flat, her confusion only deepened.
"Your stomach…" she finally breathed, "is it a bottomless pit? A secret storage seal? What is happening?"
Shinra offered no explanation, merely giving her a grease-stained grin. It was, admittedly, hard to explain. After ushering a deeply perplexed Kushina out the door, he dove straight back into his training regime.
And he trained all night.
Fueled by the colossal caloric intake, his endurance was monstrous. He would push his body to absolute collapse, rest for mere minutes while his enhanced metabolism and the forging method did their work, and then rise to do it all again. By dawn, his physical conditioning had leaped forward, his raw strength now likely surpassing that of an average chunin. The efficiency of the method was terrifying.
The next morning, as golden light spilled over Konoha, Shinra awoke, washed, grabbed a leftover ham hock to gnaw on, and headed for the academy.
His walk through the village was different today. Whispers followed him like a wake.
"Look, that's the boy from the outer village… the one who beat Masaki Uchiha…"
"Really? I heard from my son… unbelievable!"
"Masaki Uchiha? That's impossible! Who could beat him besides Minato?"
Fame, it seemed, had arrived overnight. Shinra ignored the comments, speeding up his pace to reach the school.
The moment he pushed open the classroom door, the lively chatter within hit a sudden, awkward lull. Every eye in the room swiveled to fix on him.
"Whoa… he's actually really handsome!"
"Right? I never noticed before! He might be even cuter than Minato!"
"Blasphemy! My Minato is number one! Shinra can be a close second!"
The girls, who had previously looked through him, were now buzzing with appraisal.
"Tch. Outer village mutt. He just got lucky in one stupid match," a boy muttered, not meeting Shinra's eyes.
"Yeah, Masaki-san must have been off his game. No way he loses to a chakra-failure."
The boys' jealousy was a sour, transparent thing. Shinra took it all in with a detached amusement, offering a mild smile to no one in particular before heading to his seat beside Kushina.
He immediately noticed something was off. Kushina's posture was stiff, her face set in a strange, unreadable expression.
Before he could ask, a soft, melodious voice spoke from his other side.
"Good morning, Shinra-san."
He turned. His gaze met a pair of gentle, dark eyes set in a delicate, serene face. Long, glossy black hair framed features of quiet beauty. Uchiha Mikoto.
She was sitting in the empty seat next to his. Since when?
Before he could process Mikoto's unexpected presence and greeting, another cheerful "Good morning, Shinra-kun!" rang out from in front of him. Then another from the side.
It was only then Shinra took stock of his immediate surroundings.
He was surrounded.
Not by the usual empty space or jeering boys, but by a small cluster of girls from his class, all offering smiles and greetings that ranged from shy to enthusiastic.
Oh.
Oh, no.
A slow, deep sense of foreboding, mixed with a hefty dose of surreal bewilderment, settled in Shinra's gut. This… was a complication he hadn't factored into his plans for quiet, relentless improvement.
Kushina, beside him, radiated a silence that felt more dangerous than any shout.
(End of Chapter)