Since they'd committed to helping Tazuna, Hinata's group had naturally moved into the old man's home. The veteran bridge builder could still scrape together enough food to host guests—though it amounted to plain rice and vegetables. The household itself wasn't much different from its canon counterpart: a dark-haired beauty of a young wife and a brat named Inari.
"Well~ the C-rank escort mission is technically complete now, so what we're executing from here on out is a B-rank location-scouting assignment. Enemy shinobi attacks are within the expected parameters for this mission tier, so~ we're just staying at your place. That's all."
Kakashi stood with his arms folded, visibly resigned. Strictly speaking, shinobi weren't supposed to bend the rules out of personal sentiment. But in all honesty, he wasn't a cold-hearted man, and seeing the misery that pervaded the Land of Waves had left its mark on him.
So, conveniently enough, Hinata's team also needed to stay here for a week of location scouting, and the mission tier happened to call for guarding against hostile shinobi. Tazuna's home would serve as their free lodging. If attackers showed up, they'd deal with them as a bonus.
"Ah~ I understand. Thank you so much~ And, ahem~ these three shinobi here—please take good care of us as well."
Tazuna was overjoyed. After witnessing these three kids—whom he'd privately dismissed as brats—execute a coordinated combo that dropped Zabuza, the old man who'd lived more than half his life immediately recognized the windfall he'd stumbled into. This squad was no ordinary genin team. It was an unusually powerful genin squad.
"Hahaha~! Relax, relax~ A hundred more guys like that masked freak could show up and I'd send 'em all flying~!"
Naruto, predictably, was soaring on the high of his own boasting. Kakashi pressed a hand to his forehead and swallowed the urge to retort. Fine—given what these three had actually accomplished, the pride wasn't entirely unearned.
Zabuza had gotten himself killed by his own overconfidence, true, but that didn't change the fact that three freshly graduated genin had brought down a notorious member of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen of the Mist. That kind of achievement was worth bragging about no matter where you went.
"Big talk from the one guy who still hasn't mastered his ultimate technique."
Sitting across from Naruto, Sasuke delivered the barb with impeccable timing. Naruto's triumphant laughter choked off instantly, his face shifting to a constipated shade of purple-blue. Sasuke's jab had struck his sore spot dead center.
After Sasuke had already achieved a preliminary release of Ame no Habakiri, Hinata had also completed her own initial mastery of Orochinagi within a single week. Only Naruto remained stalled—whether from slacking or something else, his Divine Sandstorm training had yet to produce results.
At that moment, Hinata, seated nearby, opened her eyes. Under the pretext of going out to forage for food, she'd successfully met with Kakuzu and Hidan and relayed her plans for controlling the Land of Waves. Their affirmative responses meant she had nothing left to worry about on that front.
Shinobi were a profession that placed extraordinary weight on efficiency and promises. Kakuzu and Hidan were both first-rate ninja. If they said they'd encircle the entire Land of Waves with a reef-island chain within a week, then there would be absolutely no issues.
Which meant that with the off-script matters now handled, only the canonical storyline remained.
"Enough, Naruto. Starting tomorrow, you wear nothing but women's clothing. You don't take it off until you've perfected Divine Sandstorm."
Resting her chin on one hand, Hinata issued the order in a flat tone. Naruto flinched reflexively, his bravado crumbling on the spot. But after everything he'd been through, Naruto had long since realized there was no defying Hinata on commands like these—unless he wanted the punishment to get far, far worse. And so, wearing the expression of a man attending his own funeral, the teary-eyed blond nodded. "Y-Yes... I understand..."
Watching Naruto, Kakashi sighed quietly. In truth, he knew exactly why the boy's training had stalled.
The tailed-beast transformation incident hadn't only burdened Hinata's group with pressure—it had left a deep shadow in Naruto's own heart. Though everyone had tacitly chosen not to hold him accountable, Naruto himself clearly couldn't let it go.
The experience of being swallowed whole by Nine-Tails chakra, losing both memory and self—that was nothing short of terrifying.
As a result, Naruto had spent the intervening period training with extreme caution, never daring to go all out the way he used to. He was afraid the monster sealed inside him would break free again.
And that was precisely why he couldn't complete the Divine Sandstorm. A person who only dared use half his strength during training was never going to make rapid progress.
But this was the tragedy of being a Jinchūriki. The Nine-Tails was the most powerful and malevolent of all the Tailed Beasts. Its chakra was practically a distillation of hatred and negative emotion—even a trace could drag an ordinary person down the path of darkness and corruption.
If Naruto's burden had been any other Tailed Beast rather than the Nine-Tails, the seal alone would have allowed the Jinchūriki to harness at least a portion of its power. The One-Tail and Eight-Tails, for instance—their chakra didn't carry inherent malice, making them merely difficult to control rather than actively dangerous.
So even though Kakashi sympathized with Naruto, he was genuinely helpless. His abilities weren't enough to deal with something like the Nine-Tails.
Moreover, the seal would gradually weaken over time and with each activation. The more Nine-Tails chakra Naruto drew upon, the closer the beast came to breaking free—a scenario Kakashi had no desire to see. Not unless Naruto could one day truly master it.
"In any case, Sasuke will be working with me tomorrow. We need to shoot a series of seaside portrait photos for Zuorin first. The day after, we'll switch to Naruto. Everyone else is free to move about during that time."
Issuing orders in her customary fashion, Hinata naturally hadn't come to the Land of Waves on a whim. Her original mission plan had always included shooting a series of photo sets here—material for collectible figures and special photo collections. The main storyline of Fox Tales might still be on hiatus, but side content and merchandise had to keep flowing. That was the key to sustainable revenue.
"Mm. That said, although Zabuza did take a serious hit from Hinata, he's not dead. And his accomplice is no slouch either. Everyone should stay on guard when moving around."
Kakashi added the warning dutifully. A Jōnin's vitality was typically formidable, especially one like Zabuza, who'd carved his way out of mountains of corpses. Without having taken his head at the time, there was no certainty he was dead. And then there was his partner's strange ice mirrors. That was no ordinary ninjutsu. The worst-case scenario was a Kekkei Genkai.
Yes—in the shinobi world, the overwhelming majority of Kekkei Genkai could only be inherited through blood, passed down through genetics. Techniques born of a Kekkei Genkai couldn't be copied even by the Sharingan.
Hinata's Byakugan was undeniably useful, but it possessed no inherent offensive capability. Its first advantage lay in vision—x-ray vision and telescopic vision. Its second lay in chakra emission: whereas most shinobi, including Kage-level ones, could only release chakra through their hands and feet, Byakugan wielders possessed the formidable ability to emit chakra from tenketsu across their entire body. That was what enabled techniques like Eight Trigrams Palms Revolving Heaven.
But in the end, the Byakugan was a support-class Kekkei Genkai. It couldn't hold a candle to the terrifying bloodline secrets of the Mangekyō Sharingan.
So now, having brought her Byakugan to its current limit, Hinata had naturally begun considering the possibility of acquiring other Kekkei Genkai for herself.
Nothing was truly absolute. Even a power like Kekkei Genkai—which required the right genetic makeup to obtain—surely had alternative paths to acquisition. And so the most pressing question wasn't how to accomplish it, but how to get her hands on a usable Kekkei Genkai shinobi.
And the confirmed Kekkei Genkai user closest to her right now—aside from Sasuke and herself—was...
Having settled on her target and her goal, the corners of the pale-eyed girl's mouth curled upward. A sigh brimming with anticipation and malice slipped from her lips.
"Heh..."
Burns. Among all categories of injury, burns ranked among the most horrific. They left scars that were nearly impossible to erase, healed with agonizing slowness, and inflicted excruciating pain.
On the lower left side of Zabuza's back, a patch roughly the size of a straw hat had been charred completely black. A severe burn of this magnitude was unmistakably the mark left by Orochinagi.
A slender figure carefully tended to the burns on Zabuza's back, though with the surface skin entirely carbonized, the process was inevitably gruesome.
"Zabuza-san, if you need me to stop at any point, please just say the word."
The figure picked up a small brush and used badger oil from a jar to coat the burned tissue. His movements were feather-light, but against a wound this severe, even the gentlest touch brought searing agony.
"Shut up, Haku. Don't say stupid things to me."
Zabuza, lying face-down on the bed, clenched his fingers. He'd lost this one fair and square, no excuses. The three genin he'd written off as trash had displayed combat power that defied all expectations. Even if he hadn't let Sasuke's opening ambush land, those three genin plus Kakashi would still have beaten him handily.
"Then shall we decline this assignment? With all due respect, those three possess strength that I fear neither you nor I can match."
The figure's voice was remarkably soft. As he glanced up, a sliver of ambient light finally illuminated his face—a face of flawless porcelain, as though the words "beauty" and "gentleness" had been given human form.
"Hmph! Rotten luck this time, running into Kakashi and kids like that. But don't worry."
Zabuza's pupils contracted. As a battle-hardened Jōnin, he hadn't been intimidated by the destructive power Hinata's team had displayed. Instead, he analyzed their performance with cold rationality: "They did beat me, I'll give them that. But from what I saw, their combat experience and tactical execution were unmistakably those of beginners. I don't know how they managed to perform Nature Transformation at a level that should require Jōnin rank, but I could tell they weren't proficient with it."
He glanced back at the wound on his lower back. His assessment wasn't bravado. Just as he said, while Hinata's trio had brute-forced their way to Jōnin-level Nature Transformation through the Sacred Fist Gauntlets, applying that power to actual destruction remained far too crude.
Take Hinata's Orochinagi, for example. It had serious problems.
In its original form, the Orochinagi was meant to concentrate fire at close range into a focused stream—like a high-pressure flamethrower boring into the target. But the burn on Zabuza's body covered an area the size of a straw hat. Gruesome as it looked, the actual damage was essentially flesh-deep.
In other words, Hinata hadn't concentrated the Orochinagi's flames to a sufficient degree. At her current level, she could only release the technique from her entire palm, meaning the fire's emission point was as wide as her hand. With the same volume and temperature of flame spread over that area, the destructive force within that range was inevitably diluted.
By contrast, the original practitioner of this technique—the heir of the Kusanagi clan—released the Orochinagi from just his index and middle fingers. The benchmark for the Orochinagi's destructive power was precisely how few fingers the user needed to channel it: with the same amount of force, fewer fingers meant more concentrated flame and exponentially greater killing power within the target area.
"If that pale-eyed girl could release that strange fire technique with two—no, even three fingers, she probably would have burned a clean hole straight through my body on the spot."
Stating the fact in a measured tone, a glint of ferocity surfaced in Zabuza's eyes. "This is the first time in all my years that anyone has left a mark like this on me. I won't let this go."
"Then please rest well, Zabuza-san. Once you've recovered, we'll face them together."
The beautiful boy called Haku offered a gentle smile, then draped a thin towel over the wound. He was, without question, the partner who had spirited Zabuza away when the swordsman fell.
"Hmph! With your Ice Release, those brats are all yours next time."
With that, Zabuza closed his eyes and settled in to recover. This was a ninja's life.
No matter how severe the injuries, no matter how close each encounter came to death—the endless cycle of killing and conflict never stopped.