"What's that supposed to mean? Kakashi—what the hell is going on?"
Sasuke's voice shot up sharply. The notion that Naruto had given up Divine Sandstorm because he was worried about hurting the people around him grated violently against the dark-haired boy's towering pride and chuunibyou sensibilities.
"Exactly what it sounds like. You've both probably heard bits and pieces before. Eleven years ago—around the time you were all born—a massively powerful Nine-Tailed Demon Fox attacked Konoha. The village's shinobi threw everything they had at stopping it, and a great many died in the process, including... my teacher. The Fourth Hokage. In the end, the Fourth sealed the Nine-Tails inside the body of a child. That was the only way to end the catastrophe."
A barely concealed thread of grief wove through Kakashi's voice. As the Fourth Hokage's own student, claiming he felt nothing about it would have been absurd. After the Fourth's sacrifice, every bond of mentorship Kakashi possessed in Konoha had been severed. Obito and Rin had died in the war; the Fourth had perished in the Nine-Tails incident. Coming on the heels of his father Sakumo Hatake's suicide, his teacher, his closest friend, and his beloved had all left the world. It was almost certainly this accumulation of loss that drove Kakashi into the ANBU Black Ops, where he spent a long stretch of time in sunless violence and shadow.
"And that child was Naruto? But... why him specifically?"
Hinata played the part of someone who knew nothing, letting the strange, urgent feeling inside her guide the question. The sensation didn't feel like it belonged to her—it was as though her heart had split in two, and from the second one came a pulse of desperate need to understand.
"People with the constitution to serve as hosts for Tailed Beasts are exceedingly rare. And unfortunately, among the newborns at the time, Naruto was the only one whose qualities were a match."
Kakashi shook his head, and his answer wasn't exactly wrong. Individuals with the right constitution to become Jinchūriki were indeed vanishingly scarce. A poor match could cause the sealing to fail outright, allowing the Tailed Beast to seize the body and resurrect itself.
But the real picture extended far beyond that simple explanation. While Minato Namikaze's bloodline remained murky, Naruto's mother—Kushina Uzumaki—had been a full-blooded member of the Uzumaki clan. That lineage carried an innate affinity for powerful sealing jutsu and a constitution descended from the Sage of Six Paths' son Ashura himself, renowned for vast chakra reserves and extraordinary regeneration speed. It was said that merely biting an Uzumaki's skin could rapidly restore one's own chakra.
More importantly, Kushina herself had been the Nine-Tails' previous Jinchūriki. That meant her bloodline was the most compatible within the entire Uzumaki clan for the role. Naruto, as her son, was practically destined to have the capacity to seal the Nine-Tails.
"...So that's why. That's the reason those people called him a monster all those years. Isn't it?"
A low, somber note entered Sasuke's voice as he apparently recalled scenes of Naruto being ostracized as a child. But the Uchiha boy shook his head and looked up at Kakashi. "Still—even if the Nine-Tails is sealed inside him, that doesn't make Naruto the fox itself. Right?"
"Exactly right. The Nine-Tails is contained by a powerful seal within Naruto's body. Naruto is Naruto, and the Nine-Tails is the Nine-Tails. The two should never be conflated... Though, of course, the overwhelming majority of ordinary people refuse to see it that way."
Kakashi sighed. It wasn't that he'd been oblivious to how terrible Naruto's situation was. But under the gag order the Third Hokage had been pressured into issuing by the council of elders, Kakashi couldn't freely approach Naruto. The best he could do was ensure the boy survived, and even that had required considerable effort.
"I see. So let me get this straight: Naruto is not only not a monster—he's actually a hero who sacrificed his own body to seal away the Nine-Tails and save Konoha. And yet, thanks to some catastrophically misguided directive, instead of receiving the honor and recognition he deserved, he spent years growing up under the hatred and rejection of the very people he'd saved. Is that about right?"
Hinata made no effort to disguise the scorn and derision in her words. This drew a slight frown from Kakashi, and the silver-haired Jōnin's tone grew serious. "Hinata, making appropriate sacrifices for the sake of the village is sometimes unavoidable, so..."
"So, based on everything I've observed, the current Konoha leadership really is incompetent. You want to know what I think? The kind of imbeciles who cling to the philosophy of sacrifice the few to save the many are nothing more than hypocritical, worthless garbage. Tell me, Kakashi—can you explain how to assign value to a human life? How exactly does one determine which lives are worth more, and which are worth less?"
Hinata's voice was level and cold, and the question left Kakashi speechless. The silver-haired Jōnin could only let out a long sigh, then close his eyes in silence.
Sasuke didn't speak either. He rose wordlessly and walked to the sliding door, clearly about to leave. Hinata gave a small shrug and stood as well. "Well then, Kakashi-sensei—thank you for the instruction. It's been... enlightening. Until next time."
"Regardless..."
Just as Hinata reached the window, Kakashi's voice came from behind her. The silver-haired Jōnin's tone was unmistakably earnest. "You are all my students. So no matter what happens, I will never abandon any of you. I can't promise anything beyond that, but... at least that much, I can guarantee."
Both Hinata and Sasuke hesitated mid-step at those words. As a teacher, this was the most sincere pledge Kakashi could offer—just as in the original work, when he'd faced down Zabuza and declared I will protect you all.
"Heh~"
A strange little smile played across Hinata's lips, and she vaulted out the window, leaving Kakashi's room behind. Regardless of anything else, Kakashi would certainly report this conversation to the Third Hokage. Which meant Hinata now had a perfectly legitimate excuse to conduct certain... experiments involving the Nine-Tails.
After all, in the original work, the Nine-Tails' power was unequivocally the apex of all Tailed Beasts. The Eight-Tails, Gyūki, had once said that a Tailed Beast's strength wasn't determined by its number of tails, but canon had definitively shown the Nine-Tails single-handedly overpowering every other Tailed Beast combined without breaking a sweat. The masked man's entire stable of Tailed Beasts had been flattened in one go—and that was before you even considered the finale, where Sasuke had used his tomoe-patterned Rinnegan to amalgamate every Tailed Beast's chakra along with Susanoo into his Indra form, and still failed to defeat Naruto, who'd had only the Nine-Tails.
Not even the full Nine-Tails, at that. Merely half its power. The other half had been ripped away by the Fourth and dragged into the Shinigami's belly. The mind boggled at what the fox's full, undiminished strength must look like.
Were it not for the fact that the Tailed Beasts' power was specifically hard-countered by the Mangekyō Sharingan, the Rinnegan, and the Uzumaki clan's sealing jutsu, subduing the Nine-Tailed Demon Fox would have been flatly beyond human capability.
Chakra of that magnitude was simply too valuable to leave untapped.
And given what Hinata had deliberately said in front of Kakashi just now, even if she privately ran some experiments on Naruto, the silver-haired Jōnin and the Third Hokage would simply assume she was standing up for the boy out of righteous indignation.
Hinata had no concrete plans for the Nine-Tails' power just yet, but satisfying the prerequisite conditions in advance was only prudent. Opportunities had a way of appearing without warning, and failing to prepare meant failing to seize them.
For the moment, though, the immediate priority was finding Naruto a Wind-Sacrifice Fist ultimate technique to replace Divine Sandstorm. If Naruto couldn't keep pace, the Sacred Fist trio would be one member short.
So... teach him the ol' Rasengan from the original work? She had the complete Scroll of Seals, after all, which naturally included a section on the Rasengan. Given Naruto's current level of chakra control, learning the technique would take no time at all.
But... how to put this?
The Rasengan was certainly powerful. The Fourth Hokage had spent years developing it based on the principles underlying the Tailed Beast Ball, and according to canon, it could even momentarily disrupt an opponent's chakra upon impact, meaning it doubled as a control technique on top of its raw damage.
The drawbacks, however, were equally significant.
As a close-range ninjutsu, the Rasengan required the user to close the distance and physically connect with the target's body to take effect. For the Fourth Hokage, this had been a non-issue—he'd been the undisputed master of the Flying Thunder God Technique. In his hands, the Rasengan was an assassination tool paired with instantaneous teleportation: appear behind the enemy from their blind spot, drive the Rasengan home, kill in a single blow.
Kakashi had clearly aimed for a similar approach, but he'd never mastered the Flying Thunder God. His workaround was to use the Sharingan to track the enemy's movements, dodge incoming attacks, then drive a Chidori thrust into the target at close range.
Translating that to Sasuke: the Sharingan would likewise serve as a targeting system, locking onto the enemy and delivering a lethal Chidori strike.
But for Naruto, this playbook was a losing proposition. He had neither the Fourth's Flying Thunder God nor Kakashi and Sasuke's Sharingan eyes. Accurately pinpointing an enemy's real body and then closing to zero range for a point-blank hit—in a shinobi world where Substitution Jutsu, Clone Technique, Body Flicker, Transformation Technique, and Cloak of Invisibility flew around like confetti—was nothing short of a pipe dream if he weren't the protagonist.
In the original story, his solution had been to burn massive quantities of chakra on swarms of Shadow Clones to confuse the enemy, or to use his own body as bait to draw the opponent in, or to simply run into idiots like Sasuke who insisted on charging straight in for a head-on clash. Only under those conditions could the Rasengan actually connect.
It wasn't until he learned Sage Mode that he developed the area-effect Rasenshuriken, finally breaking out of Rasengan's awkward melee-range limitation.
So... some useful modifications would be in order.