Kushina's words slammed into Konoha like a tidal wave. The villagers who had once glared at Naruto with hatred suddenly felt panic crawl up their spines. Before, Kushina's fury had been aimed almost entirely at Hiruzen Sarutobi, and they had still clung to the illusion that perhaps they could escape her wrath. Now that illusion was gone.
Inside the eerie silence hanging over the Hidden Leaf, even breathing felt difficult. Minato Namikaze finally spoke, his voice hesitant. "Kushina... you..."
He sounded as if he wanted to say more, and yet the words never fully came. In the next instant, Kushina's voice was cut off again by the system. Even so, everyone still heard enough. "Get lost! You think you can tell me what to do? Go be Hokage and protect these idiots!"
Down in the arena, Naruto stood there in a daze, blue eyes wide and unfocused. He still couldn't understand why his mother kept telling him to remember those people's faces. Why would she want that? Why was everyone looking at him like this?
Genma Shiranui, still on the field as the proctor, twitched at the corner of his eye. He said nothing. As one of the Fourth Hokage's former guards, he had no right to say anything. Dereliction of duty from subordinates was still dereliction of duty.
He looked at Naruto's back and, for a brief, disorienting moment, saw Minato's shadow in it. The resemblance flashed across his mind and overlapped so perfectly that Genma's throat tightened. "Always bring a girl..." he muttered under his breath, though no one knew what he meant.
Lying where he'd fallen, Neji Hyuga curled his lips into a faint smile. Looking at the little Naruto inside the black-bordered screen, he felt something close to anticipation. "Good," he murmured. "I just wonder whether that incident will appear too. If that black-screen Naruto heard what I said, what would he do to me?"
He found himself almost eager to know the answer.
The black-bordered screen continued to move.
"Kill the fox demon!"
An elderly woman snatched an egg from her basket and hurled it. Naruto in the black screen was already wary. He dipped his head sharply, and the egg missed, exploding on the ground beside him with a wet splatter that painted his sandals in streaks of yolk.
He frowned. Anger surged up from somewhere deep inside him, hot and immediate. Why were they doing this to him? What had he done wrong? He didn't even know what a fox demon was. It wasn't him. It had never been him.
And yet, just as that anger began to boil over, an abrupt coolness washed through his mind. It came without warning, like icy water being poured over a flame. A strange emotion rose inside him, smoothing down his fury, pressing it flat, making him want to forgive the people hurting him.
The thought disgusted him. "Forgive them no matter what they do?" his inner voice echoed from the black screen. "Impossible. Absolutely impossible. Why would I think that?"
The entire arena fell silent.
Everyone had heard it. Not Naruto's spoken voice, but the thoughts of the Naruto inside the black-bordered world. Those thoughts were clear, sharp, and full of resistance. They did not match the foolish, smiling boy standing in the arena at all.
Neji's pupils contracted at once. He abruptly turned to stare at Naruto beside him. The more he thought about it, the more frightening the implication became. From this angle, the Naruto they knew was not merely an idiot or a loser. Something had clearly been done to him.
In the Pure Land, Madara Uchiha narrowed his eyes as he watched. He knew far too much about reincarnation, bloodlines, and fate to dismiss what he was seeing. Whether it was the stone tablet of the Uchiha or Black Zetsu's manipulation, all of it pointed toward one conclusion. That brat might very well be this generation's Ashura.
A fusion of Uzumaki and Senju blood. It made sense. It even explained why the Naruto on the gold screen had always felt subtly wrong to him. Madara understood it almost instantly, but he had no intention of sharing that understanding with anyone else.
On the black-bordered screen, the scene pressed onward.
Another egg flew. This time it struck dead-on.
The shell burst against Naruto's forehead with a crack. Sticky yolk ran down his face, mixing with the sting of broken shell and the throbbing ache that followed. His deep blue eyes watered immediately, though this time the tears weren't only from pain. Most of them came from fury—fury at the villagers, and fury at the inexplicable softness that kept trying to smother that anger from within.
"Get away from me! Don't touch me!" his thoughts roared.
Then the first instigator shouted again, his voice full of savage delight. "Kill that shameless fox demon!" The crowd surged, and in an instant the old woman's basket was emptied. Eggs rained down in a relentless barrage, splattering against Naruto's clothes, hair, and face.
Slap. Splatter. Crack.
The sounds came one after another. In only a few moments, the child was drenched in yolk and reeking of raw egg. His head pounded too hard for him to think straight. Worse, even though he could clearly see the paths of the incoming eggs, his body couldn't keep up. His thoughts were faster than his limbs. That helpless mismatch made him shake with frustration.
He slammed a fist against his own head, as if trying to beat clarity into himself. Then he lifted his face and stared through tear-blurred vision at every single villager who had thrown something at him. He memorized them, one by one. Their eyes. Their mouths. Their hatred. All of it carved itself into his mind.
But then that strange chakra came again.
It drifted through him like a warm tide carrying a false kindness with it. It soothed him, dulled his edge, and began to blur those faces in his memory. The fury he had been clutching so fiercely started slipping away against his will.
"Go away... get away from me!" his mind screamed.
In the arena, Naruto scratched the back of his head uneasily. "What's going on?" he muttered. "Did I really act like that back then?"
"That wasn't you," Neji said flatly.
He exhaled hard, suppressing the sudden urge to roll his eyes so forcefully that it hurt. He had no need to say more than that. The answer was obvious. The Naruto on the black screen was another version of him, and that version was fighting something the Naruto in the arena didn't even understand existed.
"What do you mean?" Naruto asked instinctively.
Neji looked at him for a long moment. "Think about what you just heard. That black-screen Naruto's thoughts—did they sound like the way you remember feeling?"
At almost the same time, Tobirama Senju spoke in the chat room. He had also noticed the discrepancy. "Naruto, do you remember that time? Were you like this black-screen Naruto then?"
Naruto frowned, trying to remember. "I sort of do, Second Hokage... but it's blurry. I can remember some things, but not clearly. It's like... like I know it happened, but I can't quite grab it."
The moment those words fell, Kushina's voice rang out again. This time it was not muted.
"You have to remember!" she shouted. "Naruto, promise Mom you won't forget their faces! If you think you'll forget, write them down right now. I'll write them down too!"
Her voice trembled, not with uncertainty, but with burning, maternal rage. Before Minato could say anything, Kushina spoke over the very thought of him. "Shut up! Minato, I don't want to hear that from you again—"
The rest was censored once more.
Inside the belly of the Shinigami, Minato's soul sat motionless. A bitter smile appeared on his face. Before death, there had always been too many burdens on his shoulders—village, duty, sacrifice, balance. After death, many of those weights had fallen away, and what remained was regret.
He regretted plenty now. Perhaps that was why he had no words left that Kushina would accept. Perhaps that was why he could only sit there in silence while someone else's voice rose instead.
The Sage of Six Paths, who had quietly been watching all of this unfold in the Pure Land, seemed almost amused by the chaos. "Kushina is still on the verge of exploding," he said. "I know that girl's temper better than you do. Stay calm for now. Besides... if possible, I would actually like to fuse with another version of myself. Who can say what the future holds?"
Minato gave no answer. The risk was too high. But the thought itself was revealing. Otherwise, how could the man once called the Little Sun ever have won the acknowledgment of the Yin Half of the Nine-Tails?
Back in the arena, the unease only deepened.
The villagers of Konoha who had once cursed Naruto were now terrified in a way they had never been before. The black-bordered screen was no longer just exposing the cruelty of the crowd. It was revealing something even more dangerous: Naruto had not originally been the harmless fool they remembered. Somewhere along the way, that anger, vigilance, and instinct for survival had been worn down, blurred, or deliberately softened.
That possibility made the air feel colder than steel.
Kushina wanted him to remember. Neji wanted to see what kind of person he might have become. Tobirama was trying to pry apart truth from manipulation. Madara was seeing reincarnation in motion. Even Genma, silent at the edge of the field, was starting to understand that the smiling blond idiot everyone thought they knew might only be the shell left behind after something precious had been tampered with.
And Naruto himself stood in the center of it all, bewildered and defenseless, listening to people tell him there had once been another version of him hidden beneath his own skin.
The black-bordered screen still had not finished.
If anything, it had only just begun to peel back the first layer.