—————
The Hokage Tower's front steps were wide, sun-bleached, and designed with the particular architectural philosophy that said this building is important and you should feel small approaching it. Kim leaned against the railing at the bottom, arms crossed, watching the door.
He'd been waiting eleven minutes. He knew this because the metronome in his skull — Root's gift, the one that never stopped ticking — counted each second with the mechanical reliability of a man who had been conditioned to treat time as a tactical resource.
The door opened.
Naruto came out like a sunrise. Not walking — radiating. His entire body was a broadcasting station set to maximum output, every limb and feature transmitting a single, overwhelming signal: joy. Pure, unfiltered, the kind that didn't know how to be quiet because it had never been taught restraint.
He was holding a scroll.
Kim straightened. His synchronization sense — passive now, always passive, a window that never fully closed — caught the shift in Naruto's chakra before the boy had descended three steps. The signature was the same deep, rolling ocean it had always been, but today there was something different in the current. A new pattern. A technique freshly written into the boy's network, bright and unfamiliar, like wet ink on old paper.
There it is.
"KIM!" Naruto vaulted the remaining four steps with the aerodynamic grace of a thrown brick and landed in front of him, scroll brandished like a trophy, grin so wide it threatened to circumnavigate his skull. "KIM, LOOK — LOOK WHAT THE OLD MAN GAVE ME—"
"I can see you're holding a scroll, Naruto."
"Not just ANY scroll—" He thrust it forward. The seal was broken, the paper unrolled just enough to show the header. Kim read it with the calm expression of someone seeing information he'd already anticipated.
Multiple Shadow Clone Technique.
Kim looked at it. Looked at Naruto. Looked at the scroll again.
Sarutobi, you magnificent old man.
He'd known. Not the specifics, but the shape of it. Naruto needed this technique the way a river needed a channel. His reserves were vast, his control was rough, and the standard clone jutsu was a lock that his particular key would never fit. The Shadow Clone — the multiple Shadow Clone, the forbidden variant that split chakra into dozens of equal copies — was designed for exactly one kind of person: someone with so much power that dividing it still left each piece formidable.
Sarutobi had seen it. Maybe not the way Kim saw it — not through synchronization, not through the intimate knowledge of Naruto's signature that months of proximity had built. But through the old man's own genius, his decades of experience, his understanding that sometimes the best thing a teacher could do was hand a student the right tool and step back.
He would have found a way to give Naruto this technique regardless. The scroll incident, Mizuki's betrayal — whatever path the dreams showed, it always ended here. Naruto and the Shadow Clone. The lock and the key.
But this way is cleaner. No betrayal. No midnight chase through the forest. No trauma dressed up as a coming-of-age story.
Just an old man who saw a boy struggling and gave him what he needed.
"Naruto," Kim said. "That's incredible."
"I KNOW!" Naruto was bouncing. Literally bouncing — small, vertical oscillations that his body produced when his emotional energy exceeded his physical capacity to contain it. "He called me into his office and he was like, 'Naruto, I've been watching your progress,' and I was like, 'Yeah?' and he was like, 'Your reserves are exceptional and I believe this technique suits your capabilities,' and I was like—"
"You cried."
"I DID NOT—" Naruto's face reddened. "—okay, maybe a little. But it was a MANLY cry. A power-and-image cry."
"There's no such thing as a power-and-image cry."
"There is now. I invented it."
Kim looked at the scroll one more time. The technique header, the seal arrays, the chakra distribution diagrams. Forbidden-class. The kind of jutsu that could kill an ordinary user through chakra depletion. For Naruto, it was breakfast.
"Have you tried it yet?"
Naruto's grin shifted from triumphant to feral. "Watch."
He formed a single hand sign — cross-shaped, fingers interlocked, a configuration that Kim's composite perception read as a massive, deliberate splitting of chakra into parallel channels. The air pressure changed. Kim's synchronization lurched — Naruto's signature, already enormous, suddenly multiplied, the single bonfire becoming a forest fire becoming an inferno of identical signals that overwhelmed his passive sensing like a flashbulb in a dark room.
Twenty Narutos stood on the steps of the Hokage Tower.
Twenty identical copies, each one solid — not illusion, not shimmer, solid — with independent chakra signatures that burned at a level most chunin would envy. They grinned in unison. The effect was transcendent and slightly terrifying.
"WHAT DO YOU THINK?" twenty voices asked simultaneously.
Kim blinked. His synchronization was still recalibrating, his senses swimming in a sea of identical frequencies that his system couldn't differentiate.
"I think," Kim said slowly, "that you just became the most dangerous person in our graduating class. And that includes me."
Nineteen clones vanished in puffs of smoke. The original remained, and his expression — the one beneath the grin, the one that most people never saw — was something Kim recognized because he'd felt it himself.
Someone told me I'm strong. Someone who knows what strong means. Someone who isn't lying.
"Thanks, Kim," Naruto said. Quiet. The whisper-volume that was, for him, practically inaudible.
"Don't mention it. Now—" Kim pushed off the railing. "—ramen?"
"RAMEN!"
The volume was back. The world realigned. They walked toward Ichiraku with the easy stride of two boys who had, against every expectation and institutional design, become friends.
—————
The broth was perfect. It was always perfect. Kim had developed a theory that Teuchi's ramen existed in a culinary dimension beyond criticism — that the old man had achieved, through decades of practice and an unreasonable love for his craft, a platonic ideal of hot food that transcended individual taste and spoke directly to the human soul.
Or it's just really good ramen. One of the two.
Naruto was on his third bowl. Kim was nursing his first, savoring it, because eating slowly was a pleasure that Naruto would never understand and Kim would never stop practicing.
The silence between them was comfortable. That was new — or rather, it was the culmination of months of accumulated comfort, a friendship built in increments of shared meals and fishing trips and honest conversations on riverbanks. Naruto was many things — loud, impulsive, emotionally transparent to a degree that made Kim's strategic mind itch — but he was also, beneath all of it, good. Genuinely, stubbornly, irrationally good. The kind of good that didn't calculate the cost.
Kim envied that. More than he'd ever admit.
"Hey, Kim."
"Mm."
Naruto was staring into his broth. The chopsticks rested across the bowl, untouched — a sight so unusual that it registered in Kim's awareness like a distress signal.
"You got assigned yet?"
The question landed softly. Kim heard what was beneath it: Did you get a team? Are we on the same team? Will I see you tomorrow?
"No," Kim said.
Naruto looked up. "What do you mean, no? Everyone got assigned. Iruka read the whole list. I'm with Sasuke and Sakura — which, by the way, is either the best or worst thing that's ever happened to me and I genuinely cannot tell which—"
"I wasn't on the list."
The words sat between them. Naruto's brow furrowed — the deep, full-face furrow that meant he was processing something that didn't fit his model of how the world worked.
"But you graduated. You passed. You're—" He gestured at Kim with a chopstick, a motion that encompassed everything from his scar to his reputation to the general fact of his existence. "—you. How do you not get a team?"
"Different arrangement." Kim took a slow sip of broth. Hot. Perfect. "I've been placed in a… specialized training position. Not a standard genin assignment."
"What kind of position?"
"The kind I can't talk about."
Naruto stared at him. For three seconds, the loudest boy in Konoha was completely, absolutely silent.
Then: "Is it dangerous?"
Kim considered the question. Considered lying. Decided against it — not because lies didn't work on Naruto (they did, easily, the boy's trust was a vulnerability that better people than Kim had exploited), but because this particular friendship had been built on the deliberate choice to be honest, and Kim wasn't willing to compromise the foundation for the sake of comfort.
"Parts of it," he said.
Naruto set down his chopsticks. His expression shifted — the grin gone, the performance gone, just the raw face of a twelve-year-old boy who had grown up alone and had found, against all odds, someone who treated him like a person.
"You'll be okay, though. Right?"
"I'll be okay."
"Because if someone's messing with you — if someone's making you do stuff you don't want to—"
"Naruto."
"—I'll come find you. I mean it. I'll make a thousand shadow clones and I'll—"
"Naruto." Kim set down his own bowl. Met his friend's eyes. The synchronization sense registered Naruto's chakra flaring — not the fox, not the sealed thing, just Naruto, burning hot with the particular intensity of someone who had decided to care about you and would not be talked out of it. "I'll be okay. I promise."
I promise. The same words Dad used to say. The same words that turned out to be lies, because chunin die on missions and promises don't stop kunai.
But I'm not Dad. I'm faster than he was. Stronger. I see things he couldn't see.
I'll keep this one.
Naruto held the gaze for a long moment. Then he nodded. Picked up his chopsticks. Attacked his fourth bowl with the ferocity of someone converting worry into caloric intake.
"You better," he said around a mouthful of noodles. "Because I'm not eating ramen alone. That's sad. And I refuse to be sad."
"You could eat with your team. Sasuke and Sakura."
"Sasuke doesn't eat. He just… stands near food and judges it. And Sakura's on a diet." Naruto said the word with the horror of someone who had encountered a concept so fundamentally opposed to his worldview that it registered as heresy. "A DIET, Kim. She doesn't eat LUNCH."
"Criminal."
"RIGHT?"
They finished their ramen. Kim paid — he had the stipend now, and Naruto's financial situation was the kind of thing that made Kim's jaw tighten if he thought about it too long. An orphan on a government allowance, living alone, eating cup ramen because nobody had taught him to cook and nobody had offered.
I should teach him to cook. Add it to the list. Somewhere between "survive Root" and "talk to Tenten without malfunctioning."
They parted at the intersection — Naruto heading toward his apartment, Kim heading toward the building that didn't have a name.
"Hey, Kim."
Kim stopped. Turned.
Naruto was standing in the middle of the road, backlit by the afternoon sun, the scroll tucked under his arm. He looked — for just a moment, in that particular light — like someone who might actually save the world someday.
"Thanks for the ramen thing. And the power-and-image thing. And the…" He trailed off. Shrugged. The gesture encompassed months of advice and mockery and companionship and the particular kindness of being treated as someone worth investing in. "Everything."
"Don't mention it," Kim said.
"I'm mentioning it."
"Then stop."
"No."
Kim shook his head. Almost smiled. Turned and walked away before the moment could become something he'd have to process emotionally, because he had a Root facility to get to and thirty new trainees to assess and a tongue seal to endure, and emotional processing was a luxury that could wait until the balcony and the stars and the quiet.
Behind him, he heard Naruto's footsteps heading in the other direction. Fast, light, the stride of a boy who had just received the best gift of his life and couldn't wait to use it.
Go change the world, you idiot.
I'll keep the lights on while you do.
—————
The facility was the same. The corridor was the same. The cool air and the diffuse lighting and the void where ambient chakra should have been — all the same.
The room at the end was different.
Thirty of them.
Kim stood in the doorway and let his synchronization sense wash over the space. Thirty signatures — churning, overlapping, a dense field of combat-trained chakra that pressed against his awareness like a crowd pressing against a barrier. Chunin-level, all of them. Some stronger, some weaker, the distribution forming a bell curve that his analytical mind mapped automatically.
Thirty chunin. In a room. Within range.
Danzo, you insane, magnificent bastard.
They stood in rows. Five by six, parade-ground formation, the rigid geometry of bodies trained to occupy space efficiently. They wore the standard Root training gear — dark, functional, stripped of individuality. Their faces had the blankness he'd come to recognize, though the degree varied. Some were fresh — the conditioning still shallow, the human being visible beneath the surface like a swimmer visible beneath thin ice. Others were deeper, the blankness more complete, the ice thicker.
His ANBU instructor stood at the back. Same mask. Same posture. Same glacial calm.
And beside the instructor: a second operative. Different mask — boar, heavy-featured, unreadable. This one held something in their hands.
A seal.
Kim's stomach contracted. He controlled it. Kept walking.
"Your responsibilities are expanding," his instructor said. "Thirty trainees, three tiers, daily instruction. Operational authority over their tactical development." A pause. "This requires a formalization of your… relationship with the organization."
The boar-masked operative stepped forward. The seal was visible now — a paper tag, covered in dense calligraphy, the ink arrangement suggesting a binding matrix. Kim's Hyuga whisper read the chakra woven into it — complex, layered, a knot of suppressive energy designed to restrict specific behaviors.
The tongue seal. Cursed Seal of Loyalty. Root's leash.
Apply it to the tongue. If the bearer attempts to speak about Root's operations, the seal activates. Paralysis. Silence. The body betraying the mind.
Kim looked at it. Felt the cold weight of the decision pressing down.
If I refuse, I lose thirty chunin-level signatures. I lose the training facility. I lose the income. And I gain Danzo's suspicion, which is the kind of thing that metastasizes.
If I accept…
He reached inward. Felt his own chakra — the deep, refined reservoir that two months of ANBU-level synchronization and nine chunin-level trainees had built. Felt the bloodline traces threaded through his coils — the Uchiha ghost, the Hyuga whisper, the half-dozen other fragments that made his system something no seal designer had ever accounted for.
The seal is designed for normal operatives. Normal chakra systems. It's a lock built for standard doors.
My door isn't standard.
He ran the analysis in real time. The seal's binding matrix was sophisticated — Danzo's seal work was nothing if not thorough — but it operated on assumptions about chakra architecture that Kim's synchronization had quietly, systematically violated. His coils weren't single-frequency anymore. They were composite — a braided rope of multiple resonant signatures, each one vibrating at a slightly different rate. A seal designed to suppress a single frequency would struggle with a chord.
I can overpower it. Not today. Maybe not this week. But the math says yes. The composite architecture gives me…options. Interference patterns. The seal tries to lock one frequency and the others destabilize its matrix. Like trying to hold water by squeezing — it just flows around the pressure.
Weeks. Maybe a month. And then the seal is decoration.
But they can't know that.
Kim opened his mouth. Extended his tongue. The gesture was deliberately undignified — a calculated submission, the body language of compliance that Root expected and Danzo required.
The boar-masked operative applied the seal.
Pain. Brief, sharp, centered on the tongue and radiating outward through the jaw, the throat, the upper chest. Kim's eyes watered. His fists clenched at his sides. The seal's chakra burrowed into his coils like a parasite finding a host — latching onto the nearest frequency, anchoring itself, establishing the binding pattern that would enforce silence.
It settled. The pain faded to a dull pressure. Kim closed his mouth, swallowed, and felt the seal sitting on his tongue like a stone.
There you are. Now let's see how long you last.
He could already feel it — the faintest vibration in his chakra, the other frequencies beginning to push against the seal's anchor points. Not breaking it. Not yet. Just… testing. The way water tested the edges of a dam. Patient. Inevitable.
Weeks.
"It's done," the boar-mask said. Flat. Informational.
Kim nodded. Turned to face the thirty trainees.
My thirty trainees. My thirty sources. My thirty steps toward a power level that this organization isn't prepared for.
He put on his mask. The cat-that-wasn't-a-cat. Mina's kind of art, immortalized in porcelain.
Let's go to work.
—————
"Form pairs. Outer ring, taijutsu only. Inner ring, weapons integration. Center four, with me."
His voice behind the mask was steady. Authoritative. The voice of someone who had been doing this for two months with nine trainees and was now scaling up to thirty with the calm efficiency of a chef who had mastered a recipe and was simply increasing the batch size.
The trainees moved. Thirty bodies flowing into the assigned configuration with the trained precision that Root instilled and Kim was learning to redirect. They were good — fundamentally, mechanically good. Fast hands, clean footwork, efficient chakra usage. The machine was well-built. It just needed someone to show it how to think.
He started the session the same way he always did: observation. Two hours of paired sparring, his synchronization drinking in thirty signatures like a man who had been walking through a desert and stumbled into an oasis. The data was overwhelming — a flood of combat patterns, chakra architectures, strength distributions, and weakness maps that his enhanced perception struggled to process in parallel.
Too much. Need to chunk it. Tier the analysis.
He broke them into three groups mentally. Top tier: eight trainees whose signatures burned brightest, whose technique was sharpest, whose potential ceiling was highest. Middle tier: fourteen who were solid, reliable, the backbone of any operational unit. Bottom tier: eight who had specific deficiencies — stamina, control, physical conditioning — that were holding them back.
After the sparring period, he lined them up. Thirty faces. Thirty masks of blankness. Thirty human beings who had been told that individuality was weakness and obedience was strength and who had never — never — been told where they specifically, personally, individually needed to improve.
Kim told them.
He moved down the line. Each trainee received a specific, targeted assessment drawn from two hours of synchronization data. Not generic. Not templated. Theirs.
"Your guard drops on the retreat. Not when you're backing up — when you decide to back up. There's a half-second gap between the decision and the execution where your arms relax. Fill it."
"You're fast enough to fight at twice your current tempo. You're choosing not to because speed costs control and you've been taught that control is everything. It's not. Sometimes speed is survival. Find the balance."
"Your left hand is better than your right. I don't know who told you to lead with the right, but they were wrong. Switch your stance. It'll feel terrible for a week. After that, you'll be thirty percent more effective."
Down the line. Thirty assessments. Thirty moments where the blankness cracked — not dramatically, not the way it cracked in the movies of another world. Small fissures. A widening of the eyes. A slight shift in posture. The involuntary physical response of a human being who had been seen by someone who was paying attention.
By the time he finished, the room felt different. Not warm — Root facilities didn't do warm. But… oriented. Thirty people who had been pointing in the same direction because they'd been told to were now pointing in the same direction because they understood why.
Good at teaching. I wrote "good at teaching" and I meant it.
This is what I do. This is what I'm for.
Not a weapon. A whetstone.
He dismissed them. Removed his mask. Walked to the facility's exit.
His instructor was waiting by the door.
"Your assessments," the man said. No preamble. No warmth. "They were… unusually specific."
"I pay attention."
The mask tilted. The eye slots revealed nothing. But the silence that followed had a quality that Kim had learned to read — not approval, exactly. Root didn't do approval. But acknowledgment. The grudging recognition that the asset was performing above specification.
"Continue," the instructor said, and stepped aside.
Kim walked out into the afternoon and felt, for the first time since the seal had been placed on his tongue, something that wasn't strategic calculation or threat assessment or the constant low-grade anxiety of living inside a machine designed to grind people into tools.
He felt satisfied.
I'm twelve years old. I have thirty students. I have a tongue seal that's dissolving. I have a synchronization jutsu that turns every person near me into an unwitting teacher. I have trace bloodline abilities from half the clans in Konoha. I have five B-rank techniques waiting to be learned on my desk at home.
And I have a good job.
He laughed. Quiet, private, the sound swallowed by the empty street.
I have a genuinely good job. Danzo wants a weapon factory and I'm running a school. The man is funding his own subversion and doesn't know it.
What a life.
—————
The walk home took him through the commercial district. Late afternoon light, warm air, the transitional hour when the village shifted from work to rest. Kim moved through it with his hands in his pockets and his senses open — the passive synchronization mapping chakra signatures the way a bat's sonar mapped cave walls. Background noise. The ambient hum of a living village.
Three signatures ahead. Familiar.
Kim's stride didn't change, but his attention sharpened. The Hyuga whisper identified them before his eyes confirmed: three genin-level chakra patterns, each distinctive, each carrying the particular flavor of active-duty operatives who had been in the field.
Tenten's team.
They were walking toward him on the same street — or rather, Tenten was walking, and her teammates were occupying space in their respective styles. Rock Lee moved with the coiled energy of a spring that had been wound too tight and was vibrating with the effort of not releasing. His chakra was — unusual. Intense in the physical channels, almost absent in the spiritual ones. A taijutsu specialist's signature, pure and extreme. Hyuga Neji walked with the composed grace of someone who had been told since birth that he was superior and had enough talent to make the claim stick. His chakra was cool, precise, controlled — the Byakugan's native signature, the full expression of the perception that Kim carried as a whisper.
And Tenten. Between them. Her signature warm and steady and there, the frequency that made Kim's composite architecture hum in a way that had nothing to do with combat enhancement and everything to do with the embarrassing, inconvenient, wonderful fact that he was twelve years old and helpless.
Act normal. You are a ninja. You have fought ANBU trainees. You have a tongue seal on your—
She saw him. The recognition was instant — a slight lift of the chin, a shift in her stride, the particular micro-expression of someone encountering an acquaintance in an unexpected context.
"Kim?"
"Tenten." He stopped. Managed a smile that was, he hoped, casual rather than desperate. "Hey."
"Hey yourself." She glanced at her teammates, who had stopped as well and were regarding Kim with the evaluative attention of ninja assessing an unknown. "What are you doing on this side of the district?"
"Walking home. You?"
"Team training ran late. We're heading to the—" She paused. Gestured vaguely. "—somewhere. Lee wants dumplings. Neji wants silence. I want both."
"The eternal compromise."
She almost smiled. Almost.
Lee stepped forward. His eyebrows — which were, Kim noted with fascination, even more prominent in person than reputation suggested — drew together in an expression of earnest intensity.
"You are Kim! The Academy's strongest student! I have heard tales of your youthful prowess!" Lee's voice operated at a volume that suggested vocal cords were a challenge to be overcome rather than a tool to be managed. "I am Rock Lee! I challenge you to—"
"Lee," Tenten said.
"—a contest of taijutsu to test the FLAMES OF—"
"Lee."
Lee subsided. Fractionally.
Neji had not moved. Had not spoken. His pale eyes — Byakugan eyes, the real thing, the full expression of the bloodline that Kim carried as a fragment — were fixed on Kim with the flat, assessing gaze of someone who categorized people the way entomologists categorized insects.
"Academy student," Neji said. The words carried the particular weight of someone stating a rank the way you'd state a species classification. Lower. Lesser. Categorized.
Kim looked at him.
Don't.
Don't do this.
He's a genin. You're a genin on paper. This is not your fight. This is not your—
"Graduated, actually," Kim said. His voice was mild. Pleasant. The voice of someone making a polite correction.
Neji's expression didn't change. "Graduated. And yet not assigned to a team. Which suggests that your graduation was… nominal."
He looked into it. He heard about me and looked into my status and found the gap — graduated but unassigned — and drew the obvious conclusion. That I'm a washout. A paper ninja. Someone who passed the test but couldn't make the cut.
He's wrong. But he doesn't know that. And correcting him verbally won't change his mind because Hyuga Neji doesn't update his worldview based on words.
He updates based on evidence.
Don't.
…
You're going to do it anyway, aren't you.
"Want to find out?" Kim said.
The street went quiet. Not silent — the village continued around them, commerce and conversation and the sounds of a living place. But the space between the four of them developed a density that pushed everything else to the periphery.
Tenten closed her eyes. The expression on her face was the specific look of a girl who had watched too many of these moments escalate and knew exactly where this was going.
"Kim, don't—"
"YOSH!" Lee's coiled-spring energy released in a burst of movement — not an attack, just the physical expression of enthusiasm so intense it had to go somewhere. "A CHALLENGE! A TEST OF YOUTH! I ACCEPT ON BEHALF OF—"
"Nobody asked you, Lee," Neji said. His eyes hadn't left Kim's.
"I'm asking both of you," Kim said.
Why are you doing this.
Because Neji called me nominal and I have a tongue seal on my tongue and thirty trainees under my command and trace bloodline abilities from half the clans in Konoha and I am TIRED of being underestimated by people who inherited their power and think that makes them better.
Also because Tenten is standing right there and the monkey brain wants what the monkey brain wants.
That second reason is worse than the first one.
I know.
"Both of us," Neji repeated. "Simultaneously."
"Unless you'd prefer to take turns."
The silence stretched. Neji's pale eyes narrowed — not with anger, but with the cold precision of a Hyuga reassessing a target's threat level. Kim felt the Byakugan activate — a subtle pulse from Neji's chakra network, the dojutsu engaging, those pale irises sharpening as they shifted from normal vision to the three-hundred-sixty-degree perception that saw chakra the way normal eyes saw light.
He's scanning me. He can see my chakra network. He can see—
Kim's blood chilled. For one terrible second, he imagined what his coils looked like to a Byakugan user — the composite architecture, the braided frequencies, the trace bloodline threads woven through his system like colored silk in a rope. If Neji could read that, if he could identify the fragments—
But Neji's expression didn't shift to shock or suspicion. It shifted to confusion — brief, quickly suppressed, the micro-expression of someone who had seen something unexpected but couldn't categorize it.
He can see the density. He can see that my reserves are deeper than a genin's, that my control is finer than it should be. But the composite architecture — the multiple frequencies — that's not something the Byakugan is designed to interpret. He's seeing something unusual and filing it as "anomaly" rather than "threat."
For now.
Don't give him a second look.
"Fine," Neji said. "Lee."
Lee needed no further invitation. He was already moving — not the preliminary stance-taking of a normal fighter, but the explosive, zero-to-maximum acceleration of someone whose entire combat philosophy was built on speed and overwhelming physical pressure.
He was fast. Very fast. Faster than anyone Kim had faced outside of Root, at least in pure footspeed. The chakra in Lee's body was channeled almost entirely into his physical systems, a network optimized for one thing and one thing only: making the human body perform beyond its designed specifications.
Kim's Uchiha ghost screamed data. Left roundhouse, high, followed by spinning back kick to the midsection, transition to—
He moved.
Lee's roundhouse cut the air where Kim's head had been. The spinning back kick found empty space. Kim had shifted — not far, just enough, the minimum displacement that turned a hit into a miss. Root training. Economy of motion. Don't run when you can walk. Don't dodge when you can slip.
Lee's eyes widened. "FAST!"
"Thank you."
The second exchange was longer. Lee adjusted — he was good at adjusting, his combat instincts sharp despite his inability to use ninjutsu. He varied his angles, mixed his tempos, threw combinations that came from directions that Kim's perception had to work to track. For five seconds, seven seconds, Kim was fully engaged — slipping, redirecting, countering with strikes that Lee absorbed or evaded with the durability of a boy who had been training his body to the point of destruction and beyond.
Then Neji arrived.
The Hyuga came from the flank — silent, precise, fingers extended in the Gentle Fist's characteristic open-palm guard. His targeting was surgical: tenketsu points, chakra nodes, the pressure points that the Byakugan could identify and the Gentle Fist could seal. Each strike was designed to shut down Kim's chakra network one node at a time.
Two-front engagement. Lee for pressure, Neji for precision. Hammer and scalpel.
Kim's composite perception expanded. The Uchiha ghost tracked Lee's physical assault. The Hyuga whisper — irony, that — mapped Neji's chakra-targeted strikes. Two data streams, two threat profiles, processed simultaneously by a system that had been built for exactly this kind of multi-source analysis.
He fought them both.
Not easily. Not cleanly. Lee was too fast to ignore and Neji was too dangerous to let touch him. Kim ate a glancing blow from Lee's elbow — ribs, left side, the impact rattling through his frame — and barely avoided a Gentle Fist strike that would have sealed the tenketsu in his right shoulder.
But he fought them. And he was winning.
The Uchiha ghost fed him Lee's patterns — the boy was aggressive but rhythmic, his attacks following sequences that could be predicted once you identified the base tempo. Kim found it, locked onto it, and started positioning himself so that Lee's attacks created openings against Neji rather than against him. Using one opponent as terrain against the other.
Neji recognized it. Too late. Kim redirected a Lee combination so that the taijutsu specialist's momentum carried him into Neji's attack lane, forcing the Hyuga to abort a strike and reposition. In the gap — less than a second, the space between Neji's abort and his recovery — Kim stepped inside his guard.
Palm to sternum. Light contact. The kill-position.
Neji's Byakugan eyes widened.
Kim held it for one heartbeat. Then he stepped back, pivoted, and caught Lee's follow-up kick on his forearm — the impact hurt, genuinely hurt, Lee's physical power was no joke — and swept the boy's planted foot.
Lee went down. Rolled. Came up grinning.
Neji hadn't moved from where Kim had tagged him. His expression was doing something complicated — the Hyuga composure fighting against the dawning, unwelcome realization that he had just been touched by a recently graduated Academy student with no team assignment.
Nominal, Kim thought, and didn't say it, because saying it would be cruel and unnecessary and also because the tongue seal twinged when he experienced strong emotion and he didn't want to test its limits during a street fight.
"INCREDIBLE!" Lee was on his feet, eyes blazing, the universal indicator of a Rock Lee who had found something worth pursuing. "Your speed! Your perception! Your YOUTHFUL—"
"Lee." Tenten's voice cut through the enthusiasm like a blade through paper. She was standing where she'd been standing the entire time — arms crossed, expression cycling between exasperation and something that might, if Kim squinted, have been impressed. "Enough."
She looked at Kim. The look lasted two seconds longer than necessary.
Then she sighed. The sigh of a girl who had spent the past minute watching her teammates get outfought by a boy she sold kunai to, and who was processing multiple emotional responses simultaneously and had decided that the simplest one was annoyance.
"Go home, Kim."
"I—"
"Home." She pointed down the street. The gesture was firm, maternal, and utterly non-negotiable. "Before Lee challenges you to something else and Neji breaks something expensive. Like his pride."
Neji's jaw tightened. He said nothing. His Byakugan was still active — Kim could feel the perception pressing against him, the full-spectrum analysis of a dojutsu that was trying to understand what it had just failed to defeat.
Stop looking. You won't find what you're looking for. Not because it's hidden — because you don't know it exists.
Kim raised both hands in surrender. "Going. I'm going."
He walked past them. Past Lee, who grabbed his hand and shook it with the force of someone trying to extract a confession. Past Neji, who tracked him with those pale, unsettling eyes. Past Tenten, close enough to catch the scent of weapon oil and clean cotton and the herbal soap that he now definitely confirmed was not his imagination.
"Nice seeing you," he said to her, quiet enough that only she heard it.
"You're impossible," she said. But the corner of her mouth moved. Just slightly.
Kim walked away. His ribs ached where Lee's elbow had connected. His right arm was sore from catching the kick. His heart was doing the thing that his ANBU instructor would have classified as a tactical liability.
I just beat a Hyuga and a taijutsu prodigy in a street fight to impress a girl who sells kunai.
Power and image.
Naruto would be so proud.
—————
Home. Door. The smell of an empty kitchen and the sound of Karen's voice in the living room, running Mina through what sounded like the sixth kata.
Kim made dinner. Rice, grilled fish (hot, always hot, the fish prepared with the care of someone who considered cold protein a personal affront), steamed vegetables with the soy-ginger glaze that his mother had taught him and that he had, over the past months, made his own.
They ate together — three of them tonight, Mom on shift again, the empty fourth place at the table a familiar absence that they had learned to navigate around the way you learned to navigate around furniture in a dark room.
"Kim," Mina said through a mouthful of fish. "We should go to the hot springs again."
"We went last week."
"We should go AGAIN."
"It was nice," Karen admitted. The admission cost her something — Karen rationed her enthusiasm the way their mother rationed her energy, in careful, measured doses. But the memory was strong enough to override the rationing. "Mom laughed. Like, really laughed. In the garden. When the koi fish splashed her."
Kim remembered. His mother, standing by the koi pond in her yukata, water droplets on her face and her hair, laughing with the full-body abandon of a woman who had, for one afternoon, put down every burden she carried. The girls splashing. The warm water. The steam rising around them like a cocoon.
"We'll go again," Kim said. "Next month. We'll make it a regular thing."
"REGULAR THING," Mina announced to her fish, as if the fish needed to be informed of the family's social calendar.
After dinner, he took them through the kata. Both of them — Karen running the full sequence, Mina following three steps behind with the adorable determination of a six-year-old who had decided that ninja training was the most important thing in the world because her big brother said so.
Karen's form was sharp now. The reversed mirror-training had done what Kim intended — forced her to understand each movement from multiple angles, building the kind of deep comprehension that rote repetition alone couldn't produce. She moved through the tenth kata with a fluidity that was, genuinely, impressive for a nine-year-old.
"Good," Kim said. "Really good, Karen."
She didn't smile. But her shoulders settled — the particular relaxation of someone who had been holding tension without knowing it and had just been given permission to let go.
She needs to hear it. She needs someone to say "good" and mean it. Not "good for an adopted kid" or "good considering." Just "good."
I'll keep saying it until she believes it.
Mina's form was — well, it was Mina. The tornado princess attack made an appearance despite not being part of any recognized kata. Kim corrected the technical errors and left the creative additions intact, because Mina was six and joy was a training tool and because the tornado princess attack was, if he was being objective, not the worst improvised technique he'd ever seen.
He put them to bed. Mina first — asleep in seconds, her body surrendering to unconsciousness with the totality of a child who had no reason to fight it. Karen took longer. She lay on her futon with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling, processing the day.
"Kim?"
"Yeah?"
"You're different."
He paused in the doorway. "Different how?"
"Bigger." She turned her head to look at him. In the dim light, her eyes were serious, searching, the eyes of a child who saw more than she was supposed to. "Not just taller. Like… . Does that make sense?"
Yes. It makes sense. I've absorbed trace bloodline abilities from half the clans in Konoha and I'm running a covert training program for a shadow military organization and I'm twelve years old and I'm an elite chunin pretending to be a genin pretending to be an Academy student.
Bigger inside. Yeah.
"I'm growing up," Kim said. Simple. True. Incomplete.
Karen studied him for a moment longer. Then she nodded, rolled over, and closed her eyes.
"Don't grow up too fast," she said into her pillow.
Kim stood in the doorway and felt the words land.
Too late, kiddo.
Way too late.
He closed the door quietly. Went to the kitchen. Washed the dishes. Prepared his mother's plate — covered, warm, the note beside it: Eat while it's hot. I mean it. We're going to the hot springs again next month. Karen's idea.
The balcony. The stars. The cool air.
Kim leaned on the railing and looked at the village and felt, for the first time in a while, the full weight of everything he was carrying. The Root training. The synchronization. The bloodline traces. The tongue seal dissolving on his tongue. The thirty trainees who looked to him for direction. The Hokage's open door. Danzo's watchful absence. Naruto's trust. Tenten's almost-smile.
His sisters. His mother. The empty fourth place at the dinner table.
I'm twelve. I'm a big man now.
He said it to himself, and the words tasted like something between pride and sadness — the particular flavor of growing up faster than you're supposed to because the alternative is being too small to protect the things you love.
Big man. With a tongue seal and a secret jutsu and a crush on a girl who sent me home like a misbehaving dog.
Big man who still reads Icha Icha under the covers and can't cook as well as his mom and checks on his sisters three times before he goes to sleep.
Big man.
He laughed. Quiet. The stars didn't care.
Yeah. I'm a big man now.
He went inside. Checked on the girls. Lay on his bed. Reached under the mattress.
Chapter 12. The protagonist meets the blacksmith's daughter. She has calloused hands and smells like forge smoke and he falls for her in a single paragraph.
That's not unrealistic at all.
He read until the words blurred. Closed the book. Closed his eyes.
Somewhere in the village, Naruto was probably making shadow clones in his apartment and grinning at each one. Sasuke was probably staring at something with lethal intensity. Sarutobi was probably watching from his tower, pipe in hand, wondering about the boy who'd been a step too far from his reach.
And Kim was here. In his room. Tomorrow. Thirty trainees. Five new techniques. The seal gets weaker every day.
And maybe I'll walk past the Iron Maiden on the way home. Just to check if she stocked the fifteen-meter wire.
Just to check.
He slept.