The white overcoat caught the wind the moment Ryu left the ground.
He did not take the road. Ninja moved across the rooftops as a matter of course, and Ryu was no exception — except he did not physically leap the gaps the way others did. He stepped off the roof of the Hamura compound and fell for half a heartbeat before his foot came down on nothing and held.
The air went solid under his sole.
It was not flight. Flight was what every wind user dreamed of and none of them achieved, Dan had told him once.
[Skywalk] was not a flight. It was a push. A slow release of wind chakra was followed by a brutal, instantaneous one; the two were stacked so that the explosion bloomed just a centimetre under the sole of his foot and launched him forward without ever truly leaving, needing the footing to step on.
He kicked off again. Another step on air. Then another.
Below him the city unfolded in neat tiles of timber and tile, and Ryu let himself enjoy the line of his own movement — coat snapping, diamonds on his hands throwing light back at the morning. He had too many wind users around him to keep a trick like this to himself.
Dan and Kohinata and half the kids; he had built [Skywalk] with them in mind: a jutsu that did not require a sealing formula stitched into the sole of your sandal, the way his older Fuinjutsu technique, [ReflexGuard Trampoline], had. Not everyone carried Fuinjutsu the way he did. This was plain ninjutsu, optimised to the highest level, and any wind nature could learn it.
He landed on the next roof and let the momentum roll through him, already calculating the next leap toward the Hokage tower.
Dan Hamura kept pace on the next roof over, wind chakra quiet in his boots, and watched his grandson treat gravity like a suggestion.
"How are you doing it?" Dan called as Ryu landed on a roof after a few jumps in the air.
Ryu glanced back, mid-stride. "Once you have grasped the concept, it is just a quick release of wind chakra with excellent control."
"It has more to it than just the release," Dan said. "Any wind user can push out a single burst – but holding it for long or doing it in succession without any hand seals or without wasting chakra is another thing... This is crazy."
Kohinata landed beside. He was wind-natured too and had caught interest in this new jutsu. He said, "People have always tried to use wind to fly. It has never worked. Real flying ninjas are a pain to deal with. The Sand has the most wind users in the world and not one flying ninja. Only the Stone's elite ever managed a flight jutsu."
"Flying is the dream of every ninja with a wind nature," Dan said.
"Any ninja," Kaori corrected from behind them, her secretary's tone untouched by the altitude.
Dan grunted. "Right. I can hold an altitude for a second, but the chakra drain and prep time make it useless in the active battle. It is not a practical jutsu, just managing a fall."
"You are not wrong," Ryu said, and kicked off again, the air booting him forward. "But I am not really flying."
"Even so, you are jumping on air very effortlessly," Dan pointed out, "and from the look of it, your chakra spend is inside the practice limit. That makes it a practical jutsu."
Ryu made another jump, just to be difficult, and landed facing them. "I am just pushing air to generate thrust. I can teach you two — your main nature is wind, so it would be perfect for you both."
"You said it is pushing," Kohinata said, "but that is an oversimplification. Wind users can soften a fall. They cannot do… this. There must be some unique logic behind it."
"True," Ryu said. "I optimised the push using chakra control and the right technique. Chakra control you are already practising and techniques you will soon get."
Both Dan and Kohinata gave him a look.
Ryu said, "You two, it will become natural after a few months of practice."
Kaori, feeling left out because of lack of wind nature, said, "It must be good to have an affinity for all the natural elements. I wish I had more nature affinity. The girls at the academy must be jealous of you."
Ryu slid her a flat look. "Don't pout like that. This is not an ideal situation for a normal ninja."
Dan shook his head. "Even if he carries all five natures, that's nothing special without the effort behind it," he said, and turned to Kaori. "Could you have mastered them all if you, Kaori, had every chakra nature at your disposal?"
Kaori gave a small, wry smile. "I got your point. I could not even master what I have right now — so if I had all of them, I'd just be wasting them."
"It is called the jack-of-all-trades paradox," Ryu said.
Kaori frowned. "Jack of What?"
"Jack of all trades," Kohinata said. "And master of none. Get it?"
Kaori snorted. "Tell that to the boss." She nodded at Ryu's back.
Dan's mouth twitched. "He is not normal — don't go comparing yourself to him."
They fell into silence after that, the four of them crossing the roofs in a line, and then Kohinata said, "I prided myself on precision release — second only to the Hyuga. You just proved to me I have too much to improve."
"Don't worry," Ryu said without turning. "You will get there. After you finish your current assignment."
---
Saya Uchiha looked up because Fumi Suzuki stopped walking.
"You hear that?" Fumi said.
It was not a sound so much as a pressure – a soft, wrong thump in the air above the street, like something solid being kicked that was not there. Saya tilted her head back. Shikanoboru and Takeshi followed her gaze.
High overhead, Ryu Hamura was crossing the rooftops in sharp zig-zag bounds, each one a step on air laid down by wind-release ninjutsu.
"What—" Takeshi started and Ryu jumped again.
Saya's breath caught. Her Uchiha eyes were not the awakened Sharingan, not yet; they were simply keen, trained to a sharpness of detail that missed little, and they fixed on the point where his foot had met empty air and found something to push against. For a heartbeat she only watched. Shikanoboru also watched it with his sharp mind.
"He's making the air solid, somehow," he said, almost to himself. "No—he's pushing off it. Like it's solid for a single instant. It must be a wind jutsu."
"Amazing," Saya breathed, awed, though her gaze kept sliding back to the space his foot had touched — the air that had, for an instant, been solid. She tracked the white coat, the red flames stitched across the shoulders, and the sunglasses. And then, because none of them could help it, they all looked at the rest of him – the chain, the pendant, the rings.
"Is he wearing jewellery?" Fumi asked, genuinely uncertain whether that was the right word for it.
"I think so," Shikanoboru said.
They watched him cross another gap, effortlessly, the white coat snapping behind him.
"I want to know where he's going," Saya said. "He seems to be in a hurry. Let's see where he's headed dressed like that."
They started following him.
And then the Hokage tower rose in front of them, and Ryu dropped to the street in front of it, coat settling. Everyone else landed just behind him – Dan, Kohinata, and Kaori.
Ryu said, "Let's get this over with."
Ryu did not wait. He walked into the building and others followed him to the conference hall.
Two ANBU at the threshold moved to intercept Kaori and Kohinata since they are not part of this meeting. Hiruzen's voice reached them before the standoff could form.
"Let them through."
The ANBU stepped back.
Inside, Hiruzen Sarutobi was already waiting for them outside the conference hall, and the first thing out of him was, "What the hell are you wearing?"
Ryu smiled. "Do I look good, or do I look good?"
"You look ridiculous."
Ryu tilted his head, letting the diamonds catch the lamplight.
Hiruzen asked, "Are those real?"
Ryu did not answer immediately but he smiled and let his smile answer.
Hiruzen was sweating now, and not from the heat – he was calculating, with the precision of a man who had read too many ledgers, exactly how much liquid wealth Ryu was carrying on his person at this moment. The chain alone was four to five hundred million Ryo. The rings had pushed the total well past a billion. And the First's pendant on top of it was not money at all. It was a statement.
"Shall we go on in?" Ryu asked, with a glance toward the chamber doors.
"Yes, I hope whatever you had planned is ready!" Hiruzen said.
The Hokage went first. Dan followed. Everyone else came after.
As Hiruzen and others entered the council chamber, all eyes were on the boy Ryu. They stared, dumbfounded, surprise plain on their faces.
Like Hiruzen, they began to sweat. They were all top-level operatives who had, at some point, dealt in diamonds so they knew at a glance that those were real.
The point landed without a word: Ryu Hamura was filthy rich and could burn money just to make people uncomfortable by wearing his wealth; the Fuinjutsu the Hamura clan sold was charity from this viewpoint. And under the diamonds, faint as a held breath, the air around Ryu sat a fraction heavier than the rest of the chamber – his chakra was weighing down the space he stood in without his meaning to, though no one in the room had the sense yet to name it.
The clan ninjas — the ones who came from great houses — swallowed hard. The civilian-born ninja swallowed hardest of all; they were the poorest of the bunch, granted their seats only because, after the First Great Ninja War, their numbers had swollen past the old clans and they had demanded a place at the table — given to them before any friction could start, a concession rather than a gift, and in average quality of ninja or wealth, they were frankly boring next to the great or minor clans. Hamura had been a shadow of a mighty name to most of them. They had not anticipated that the fallen clan's pockets were this deep.
And Ryu, reading the room with the calm of someone who had built it to be read, said, loud enough to carry, "Wow, so many big shots in one room. And of course… the ninjas of civilian backgrounds."
The remark landed like a slap at the far end of the table.
Then Ryu's eyes found Hiashi Hyuga near the head of the chamber, and his smile sharpened. "Oh — and Lord Hiashi, I have come up with a better machine than before. Now I can capture three-dimensional images, store them, zoom in and much more. You will see my new medical imaging technology in the coming days."
Hiashi's jaw tightened — the last Hamura machine had already cut the Hyuga out of the hospital's diagnostic ward; this one dug the knife deeper.
He let his gaze drag from Hiashi to the seats nearest the Hokage – Danzo, Homura, and Koharu were sitting together as always. Ryu smirked at them.
"Why the long face? It is as if someone has died. Did I say something wrong? Please forgive me. A child like me — I have no idea how to speak in such a setting."
It was not an apology. Every word had weight behind it, placed on purpose. The names he had spoken, the people he had looked at — Danzo, Homura, Koharu, Hiashi, and the civilian representatives who had voted against him the last time — were not random.
The chamber was sharp enough to piece it together within seconds—Ryu had clearly worked out who among them had voted against him the last time.
For a heartbeat, someone thought Hiruzen must have fed him the list; they discarded the idea just as fast. It was not the Hokage's way.
And across the chamber, every one of them felt it — the cold, shared understanding that no one in this room wanted an enemy with pockets that deep, or a man whose influence they could not go against. And Ryu had indirectly told them he remembers those who stab him.
The civilian representatives who had the least amount of influence understood the arithmetic far quicker than others: Ryu Hamura was not a man you could cross without making him an enemy.
A/N:
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