Pre-Chapter A/N: Me last week: "I think at this point, we just have to accept that I will inevitably show up with two chapters a week. As for when those chapters show up, I think it's best I not make any particular promises" And the gods laughed as I said this, lmao. Hit a writing slump plus a particularly nasty case of food poisoning and got humbled massively. Back on it though, so let's go!
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The chains snapped, sending the kunai racing at me at Mach speeds. I took a breath and then reached out for one, catching it by its handle, and then contorting my body to avoid most of them before deflecting the rest with the kunai I held.
I felt the seal on the kunai as it began to activate. I looked down, noting that it was an explosive seal. Not one I'd seen before, but the core elements were there for sure. I wondered for a second whose work it was even as I deactivated the one in my hand with a flex of my chakra before I spun into the kaiten to allow all the other explosions to detonate harmlessly against the Hyuga's ultimate defense.
I stepped out of the rotation, finding all three of them assembled before me again. I twisted my chakra, snapping the genjutsu and the one she tried to layer on top of it instantly. Kushina was the only one in front of me. She moved, fingers twisting into the bird seal.
I allowed her wind bullets to hit nothing but wind as I danced through them, closing the distance between us. She tried to backpedal and avoid my punch. The punch came just shy of hitting her, stopping a few inches away. And then I opened my palm before blasting her off into the trees with a half-powered force palm. Well, that was that for her. I felt several links of wire begin to surround my position. I formed a single tiger seal, several arcs of cutting wind spreading out from my body in all directions.
The ninja wire stood no chance as Mikoto's trap fell apart. They engaged straight away next, hoping to take advantage of some of the shock a regular opponent would feel at having come so close to being trapped. It was smart.
But smart was far from enough to deal with me. I met Minato first. His kick whizzed past my head. I took his lunge to my guard, stepping back and giving him space to spin back into a kick with impressive flexibility. I yielded more space. Mikoto joined in seamlessly, Sharingan allowing her to compensate for Minato's wide and flashy movements perfectly. Where he left openings, she plugged them instantly. This was the team I had created to kill Jounin, and would one day become my answer to Kage.
Minato was pure precision. Every kick or punch was perfectly aimed to cause the perfect amount of damage, and his impeccable balance allowed him to keep them coming in a constant storm of movements. Mikoto was a perfect accompanying shadow. The Sharingan allowed her to be many things at the same time, and what the team needed of her was for her to become the perfect partner for Minato, plugging up the holes that experience had yet to fill and giving just that extra bit of lethality to his storm.
But it was incomplete without their third prong. I smiled as I sensed it. Minato precision, Mikoto partnership, and Kushina? Kushina was pure overwhelming power. She stormed through the foliage, the beginnings of Gyuki's chakra surrounding her form. Minato stepped back, grabbing hold of Mikoto and body-flickering backwards as Kushina crashed right into me.
I braced myself as I felt the caustic chakra of the tailed beast eat at my skin. I picked her up by the midsection and tossed her overhead, sending her flying into the distance. I didn't even need to turn around to see her land on all fours, grow more tails out of her back, and shoot back at me with even more power in her movements.
Of course, no matter how much power she could tap into at this stage, she was going to need even more of it to stand against a fully realized Sage and hope to win. She blitzed forward, and at the last moment, she stopped, right in front of me, hands digging into the ground before she swung the rest of her body upwards, tails stabbing right at me. I smirked as I caught all four of them, two in each hand.
"Still in there, Kushi-chan?"
She growled and her legs followed, coming for my head. Instead of retreating, I attacked faster. I lifted my foot and stamped her in the back, sending her flying backwards and releasing her tails as I did so.
"So you're definitely in there. Can you try something for me? Stay still," I said, projecting my voice. This was more about testing her control for now. If she could show control, the spar could continue. If she couldn't, I'd end it before she could bring out Gyuki in full force over a training match. While I doubted he was the sort to engage in unscrupulous destruction, I had little desire to repeat the Third Raikage's feat in the middle of my own village.
Kushina froze in her attempt to rush me again. She stopped moving, not moving a single muscle. Good.
"How does it feel?" I asked.
"Hard," she said, voice echoing with something deeper. Something more.
"Why so?"
"We want to fight," she said. I noted the pronoun use but said nothing about it. It was normal for her to feel like she and Gyuki were one with this level of mastery over the tailed beast chakra. She was probably feeling sensations she'd never felt before and taking them as signs that she had merged with the tailed beast. I'd disabuse her of that notion with time, but it was acceptable for now.
"You want to, do you? Come on then," I said, and in a flash, she was on me. I backflipped away as her tails stabbed into the ground where I'd been standing.
"All three of you," I shouted out, signalling for Mikoto and Minato to join in on the fun. If Kushina had control then she would avoid hurting them, and if things changed, well, let's just say that speed wasn't an attribute I was lacking in.
Kushina reached me first. In tailed beast mode, they weren't even comparable in speed. And this time instead of giving way to her overwhelming power, I stood my ground. I swelled in size as I pulled on that energy stored within my seal, balancing it against my own chakra with control only a Hyuga could understand and preparing to be the wall her storm would break against.
She kicked out. I blocked, raising a single hand. She pushed off, and as she did so, her tails lashed out at me. I stepped into their swing, grabbing a hold of them, and preparing to use them to maneuver her, before I was forced to let go to block a set of wind-enhanced kunai with my backhand after enhancing it with earth release.
Kushina used the chance to escape, and as I moved to pursue, the ground beneath me exploded—out from it came a certain yellow blur, Rasengan clutched in hand. I grabbed a hold of his wrist, dragging him into my space and landing a nasty, mean kick straight to his midsection. He exploded with enough force that I actually almost felt it. I stood there until the smoke cloud dispersed, revealing me untouched from what had been an actually good trap in hindsight.
Kushina roared, shooting at me like a bullet, spinning as she did so with her tails stretched in front of her, giving her a boost in penetrative power. Yeah, I wasn't keen on seeing how that would feel. The ground between us turned to mud with a twist of my chakra, and a hand rose from the ground, slapping her into the distance. The hand was peppered with a storm of kunai, each attached to an explosive tag.
I turned the hard mud into soft sludge near instantly and then attached my chakra to it as the mud exploded outwards in every which way. I could feel my capacity drastically drop with the jutsu I'd just cast, but it proved to be worth it as I saw all three of my students slumped to the floor. Well, two of them were. Kushina was struggling to move. Gyuki's chakra was giving her the strength to move even with the extremely heavy mud sticking to her. Well, that was no matter. I flashed forward and tapped her in the forehead, amplifying the weight she was under to the point that even four tails of the Eight-Tails' chakra was not enough for her to break out of my jutsu.
I smiled, looking at the three of them. They had been able to force me to use sage mode. There weren't many trios of Jounin that could manage the same. Well, Kushina's tailed beast state and my desire to show her that even with that power, she was not at the pinnacle of the ninja world had played more of a role in my decision to tap into nature energy than anything else. But it was still significant.
It took Kushina a few hours to return to consciousness after having Gyuki's chakra leave her body once she was unable to break through the heavyweight jutsu. And he hadn't been able to push any more chakra into her system with the present limit set at four tails. A limit I was reconsidering as I watched her devour bowl after bowl of Nishiyoka's ramen. His store had been one of the few to have survived Chiyo's insane attack, so it had expectedly gained a notable boost in popularity since then as more shinobi had frequented it when the options had been extremely limited. Even now that the options were not so limited, a sizable portion had been converted into lifetime customers.
Personally, Kushina had brought me here the first time, and when I got to meet Nishiyoka's young nephew Ichiraku who was his apprentice in the ramen business, I had decided to stay. How many people could say they had the chance to get front-row seats to the birth of one of the most notable locations in the universe they had run to escape theirs as a child?
And as I took another bite of the tasty ramen, I disproved another Naruto theory I'd been tempted into believing in another life—that Ichiraku's ramen was quite ordinary and Naruto's obsession with the place had been borne out of them treating him like an actual human. That was just untrue. It was the food of the gods, as Kushina had proclaimed many a time.
"Another!" She practically yelled out, slamming her bowl on the table before adding to the ever-building stack in front of her.
"Do you think old man Nishiyoka is regretting challenging her already?" I heard Mikoto whisper to my third student who was going through his second bowl at a much more measured pace.
"Scary enough, I think he's having just as much fun as she is," Minato said, and he was right. The Ramen chef was bustling through his kitchen like a one-man storm as he moved through the motions of preparing another bowl of Kushina's favourite—pork ramen. Teuchi Ichiraku spooned out a bowl and placed it in front of my waiting student.
"Itadakimasu!" She barely managed to get the words out of her mouth before pouring more and more ramen into it.
"This is going to cause a scarcity of something… for sure," I said, looking at Nishiyoka's rapidly depleting stores of ingredients.
Teuchi noticed me looking and stepped closer before whispering. "I fear even the threat of running out of ingredients might not make him stop at this point. I've never seen him like this," he said.
I shook my head before shrugging and turning to my own ramen. Much like Mikoto, I was only having a single bowl and making the decision to savor it rather than storm through it despite how delicious it was—Kagame would kill me if she found out I'd fucked up my diet by gorging on ramen, and I strongly doubted the deliciousness of the ramen in question was going to be an acceptable excuse.
In the end, the answer to the question no one had asked was twenty-three, and the competition had ended in a tie, with both ramen chef and customer loudly proclaiming they could keep going if not for the lack of ingredients. And indeed they had for a while. Nishiyoka had turned from making pork ramen to whatever flavors he had the ingredients for on hand—except Seaweed, of course. Kushina's hatred of seaweed ramen could only be matched by the love she had for all other forms of the delicious meal.
"Thank you for having us, Nishiyoka-san," I said, before looking at the stock Kushina had just run through. Teuchi was attempting to paint the scene to immortalize it for some reason. Doing some quick mental math, I tapped my hand on the table, unsealing a few dozen thousand ryo.
"Oh no, Hokage-sama. I said this one would be on the house," the chef said.
"And maybe I would have been fine with that if we ate one bowl each, but my cute little students seem to have conspired to try putting you out of business. Please accept the money, Nishiyoka-san."
"Kushina-chan is my best customer, Hokage-san. I knew how much she'd put away before I offered."
"Regardless. The money is out here and I can't put it back in my seal, and we don't have any pocket space to fit it in," I lied.
"But the seal—"
"Ignore her," I cut in, hand reaching out to slam over Kushina's massive mouth before she could say anything else.
Nishiyoka gave me a look that I met evenly as we stared off. Brave of him. I knew Jounin that wouldn't dare meet my eyes. Of course, as a civilian, he had the privilege of not quite understanding just how dangerous of a man he was speaking to.
"Fine, Hokage-sama. But next time, the treat is on me, I promise."
"Of course, Nishiyoka-san," I said, completing our usual song and dance.
"Come along, little monkeys," I said, turning to leave with Kushina still underarm and one hand over her mouth. Her attempts to scream for help were thoroughly muffled as the four of us walked down the street, heading back to my tower.
"Why did you lie?" Minato asked.
"Hmm?"
"He's been trying to treat us for weeks now, and you never let him," he clarified.
"Can you tell us why, Mikoto?" I asked.
"Because he'd probably go out of business if he did treat us," she said.
"What? No way. Nishiyoka-san has so many customers all the time," Kushina managed to bite her way out of my grip before saying.
"Sure he does. But his prices are so low that it doesn't matter. He's probably just doing only slightly better than breaking even on every bowl. So if he treats us to thirty bowls with no payment for that, his books go straight into the red," Mikoto said.
"Nishiyoka is going to go out of business?" Kushina almost screamed, turning about to launch herself back at the store.
She didn't make it two steps before I grabbed her by the head, tucking her underarm again to prevent her from running off and making too much of a nuisance.
"Think things through, Kushina. She said he'd be in the red if he treated us, but as you can tell, he didn't. I paid for our meals and then some. That money should probably go into keeping things working for a time longer."
"So he's fine?"
"I'd never let my cute little sister's favorite ramen place close down, would I?" I began rubbing her head, drawing groans from her and the rest of the group.
"So Minato, what do you think your role in this team is?" I asked, sitting across from the three of them.
"Me?"
"Yes, you. In fact, a better question would be for all of you—what do you think this team is designed to do?" I asked.
"Front-line battle," Minato answered instantly, hand on his chin.
"Oh yeah? Tell me more."
"Well, there's you first of all, Sensei. Can't imagine you being anywhere other than the front lines with how strong you are. Then there's Kushina. When she uses her tailed beast cloak, I don't think even Jounin can beat her. Then there's Mikoto-san, she has her Sharingan and can learn a bunch of stuff to make her even more dangerous, plus she's pretty good at using genjutsu in fights, and even her ninjutsu is perfect. Then me, I guess, I would be direct taijutsu and combat," he said.
"Hmm. And do the rest of you agree?" I asked.
Mikoto nodded her head almost instantly while Kushina looked far more hesitant.
"Anything in mind, Kushina?" I asked.
"We can't really fight on front lines, though," she said, not looking particularly sure of herself, but speaking regardless. I waved her on to continue.
"My tailed beast state isn't really made for fighting in the middle of large groups. And Shori-nii likes to fight alone so he can use his powerful attacks," she said.
"So what would that mean for the team?" I asked.
"I don't know."
"Well, you got closer to the answer than Minato at least, so that's something," I said, turning a blind eye to the way she stuck her tongue out at Minato.
"As a team, your strengths aren't just geared towards front-line battle. While I imagine you could slot in admirably in any battlefield, it would be a waste. When I chose all three of you—and don't get it wrong, I did choose each and every one of you for this purpose—it was with the goal of creating an assassination team," I said.
"Assassination? There's nothing subtle about any of us," Kushina barked a laugh.
"You're not for assassinating nobles or merchants. I drafted the three of you to assassinate those who stand above the rest of the ninja world. People like me who walk as gods among men. You're my godslayers," I said, leaning down towards them.
"And now that every other concern is off my table, I hope you're ready to be moulded into just that," I completed, watching as they matched my smile. Good.
A/N: Team building chapter as we witness the birth of our next Team 7. Next six up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)(same username as here and link in bio), support me there and read them early.