"Are you sure this is the fastest way, Tazuna-san?" Sakura asked, her voice a calculated attempt to fill the tense silence that clung to them like the morning humidity. "It seems a bit… unkept."
Tazuna, walking with Kakashi at the front, snorted without turning around.
"It's the shortest. And the cheapest. I'm not paying my ninjas to enjoy the scenery. I'm paying them to get me home. Can we pick up the pace?"
Kakashi said nothing, but his visible eye curved into a lazy smile, one that failed to hide the keen vigilance with which he watched his team. The air between them was a minefield.
Sasuke had self-exiled to the right flank, several meters away, as if the mere act of sharing the same path with them was an offense. His hands were shoved in his shorts' pockets, and every line of his body screamed with contained fury. The humiliation at the village gate, Hinata's incomprehensible and stunning victory over Kakashi, had been a direct affront to the logic of his world. The weak didn't become strong overnight. It was impossible. And that impossibility was now walking just a few feet away from him, turning his pride to ash.
Hinata moved at the rear, her steps light and silent. Her lavender eyes, normally downcast and timid, now constantly scanned the surroundings with a professional calm that irritated Sasuke to the point of madness. She wasn't the girl he remembered from the academy. She was someone else, a stranger with the face of someone he had always ignored.
In the center, trying to hold the frayed formation together, walked Naruto and Sakura.
"Don't mind him, Sakura-chan," Naruto said in a low voice. "The old man's just grumpy because he ran out of sake."
"I'm not worried about him," she replied, her gaze shifting for an instant toward Sasuke's isolated figure. "It's just… this formation feels wrong. We're too spread out. If we're attacked, our response time will be a disaster."
"Maybe that's the point," Naruto said, and for a second, his voice lost its childish tone, taking on a weight that made Sakura glance at him. "Maybe Kakashi-sensei wants to see how we react when things aren't by the book."
Taking advantage of the fact that Sasuke was far enough away and that Kakashi and Tazuna were engrossed in a discussion about the durability of different types of wood, Naruto slowed his pace, forcing the girls to do the same.
"Hey," he began, his voice now a conspiratorial whisper. "We need to talk."
Hinata turned to him, her face a mixture of attention and the usual warmth she reserved for him. Sakura crossed her arms, expectant.
Naruto addressed Hinata first, the only one who knew the true, terrifying depth of his situation.
"I'm worried, Hinata. This… feels wrong."
"I know, Naruto-kun," she replied, her voice firm. "I can feel it. The air is… still. Too still."
Sakura looked at them, frowning. The familiarity between them, the way Naruto spoke to Hinata not as the shy girl, but as a confidante, an equal in a secret she didn't share, made her feel like an outsider.
"What are you two talking about?" she asked, unable to contain her curiosity.
Naruto looked at her, and in his blue eyes, she saw a plea.
"I failed at the Hokage's office. I tried to tell the truth, but it sounded like I was crazy. Now Sasuke thinks I'm a coward and Kakashi-sensei thinks I'm on the verge of a nervous breakdown."
"You didn't fail," Hinata corrected him gently. "You gave them a warning. It's not your fault they didn't want to listen."
"But they should have!" Naruto exclaimed, his frustration bubbling up. "Sasuke… ugh, that guy drives me crazy! He's so blinded by his revenge that he can't see anything else. He doesn't see a team, just tools or hindrances. Doesn't he get that being strong doesn't mean doing it all alone? It means having strong people by your side! People you can trust!"
Sakura listened, stunned. This wasn't the Naruto she knew. The Naruto she knew would have started yelling in Sasuke's face, not analyzing his motivations with such… adult frustration.
"And you, Sakura-chan," he continued, turning to her. "You're the smartest of all of us. You have a first-rate brain. But as soon as Sasuke is around, you turn into his biggest fan and forget everything else. He almost destroyed you in training because of it!"
The words hurt, but they were the truth. And the fact that they came from Naruto, without malice, only with brutal honesty, made them even harder to ignore.
"I don't know what to do," Naruto confessed, running a hand through his hair. "I have all this knowledge, this power to help, but if I act, I change things in ways I can't predict. And if I do nothing, the people I care about get hurt. It's a trap."
Hinata placed a comforting hand on his arm. "You're not alone in this, Naruto-kun. We're with you. We're a secret team, remember?"
Sakura blinked. "Secret team?"
"It's a long story!" Naruto said hurriedly. "The point is, Sakura-chan, I need your help. I need you to trust me. I'm not asking you to believe in my 'bad feelings.' I'm asking you to trust your own intelligence."
He leaned toward her, his gaze intense.
"I have a very specific request. It's crazy, but I need you to do it. At some point on this path, you might see something weird. Something that doesn't fit."
"Like what?" Sakura asked, intrigued despite herself.
"Like… I don't know…" Naruto searched for the words. "Like a puddle. A puddle of water in the middle of a dry road where it hasn't rained in a week."
The specificity of the warning sent a chill down her spine. It wasn't a vague premonition. It was a concrete image.
"If you see something like that," Naruto continued, "don't say anything out loud. Don't alert anyone. Just use that new ability of yours, the 'Analytical Eye.' Analyze it. Look for the flaw in the logic. And then, whisper what you see to Kakashi-sensei. Treat it like a logic exercise, not a panic alert. Can you do that for me?"
Sakura stared at him. She saw the desperation in his eyes, the weight of a burden he couldn't fully share. She saw Hinata beside him, nodding with blind and absolute faith. She remembered their conversation in the park, the way he had made her feel strong, seen.
She didn't understand any of it. But for the first time, she felt she didn't need to understand everything to trust him.
"A puddle… where there shouldn't be one," she repeated, processing the strange instruction. "Okay, Naruto. If I see your illogical puddle, I'll analyze it."
"Thanks, Sakura-chan," he said, and the relief in his voice was so immense it made her feel part of something important, even if she didn't know what it was. "And you, Hinata, same as always. Keep your eyes open."
"Always, Naruto-kun."
Satisfied, Naruto picked up his pace to rejoin the main group, leaving the two girls behind for a moment.
"What was all that about?" Sakura asked Hinata in a whisper. "Why has Naruto been acting like he knows everything lately?"
Hinata looked at her, and in her lavender eyes, there was a mix of her old shyness and a new, steely loyalty.
"It's… complicated, Sakura-san. But it's real. And Naruto-kun… he just wants to protect all of us."
Kakashi watched everything from a distance. The exchange, the whispers, the new dynamic. Naruto isn't a conventional leader, he thought. He doesn't give orders. He inspires trust in the strangest ways. He's turned the most insecure student into his elite scout and the most rational one into his field analyst. And neither of them seems to realize how strange all of this is. They just accept it. What did you give them, Naruto? What am I not seeing?
They continued walking for another hour. The sun reached its zenith, casting short, hard shadows on the road. Tazuna's chatter had died out, replaced by a sweaty silence.
And then, they saw it.
In the middle of the dry, cracked dirt road, there was a puddle of water.
It wasn't large or deep, but its very existence was an affront to the logic of the weather. It shimmered under the sun, an impossible oasis in a desert of dust.
Naruto saw it and felt his blood run cold, despite the heat. There it is.
Kakashi saw it too. An imperceptible smile formed under his mask. Well, well. Amateurs. Using a concealment jutsu this obvious on a day like today. This will be a fun, and above all, safe lesson. I'll let them pass by, they'll get a false sense of security, and then…
He was about to make a comment about the heat to distract them when Sakura's voice cut him off, a sharp, precise whisper next to his ear.
"Sensei."
Kakashi glanced at her. "Yes, Sakura?"
She wasn't looking at the puddle. She was looking through it, her green eyes narrowed in fierce concentration. Naruto had given her the trigger, the key word: "puddle." And her brain, now enhanced, had done the rest.
"Naruto warned me about this," she whispered, and the sentence put Kakashi on high alert. "This is illogical. It hasn't rained in a week. The ground around it is completely dry. There's no natural reason for this puddle to be here. It's a contradiction."
She paused, processing the information her new ability was feeding her.
"And there's something else. The chakra flow in this area… it's artificial. It's faint, almost imperceptible, but it's there. Like a badly tuned instrument string. Someone is maintaining this puddle with a jutsu."
Kakashi's jaw almost dropped. His "fun lesson" had just been methodically dismantled by his student's flawless logic. The girl he had tortured with a basic genjutsu was now dissecting a Chūnin-level concealment technique as if it were a math problem.
But before he could process the magnitude of Sakura's revelation, another voice joined in, quiet but firm.
"She's right to be cautious."
It was Hinata. She had stopped a few meters from the puddle, her body perfectly still, her Byakugan active, the veins around her temples pronounced.
"There are two chakra signatures hidden inside the water," she declared, her voice holding no trace of doubt, loud enough for the whole team to hear. "Low Chūnin level. They're in a state of minimal activity, waiting to ambush."
The final blow.
Tazuna choked on his own breath. Sasuke, who had been scornfully ignoring the puddle, spun around, his face a mask of absolute disbelief. He looked at Sakura, then at Hinata, and back at the water. The superiority he had felt evaporated, replaced by a cold, bewildering reality: his teammates, the ones he considered a hindrance, had detected and analyzed a deadly threat he hadn't even bothered to consider.
Kakashi's plan, his perfect, controlled lesson, went up in smoke. The element of surprise, the cornerstone of any ambush, had been pulverized not by him, the elite jōnin, but by the incredible and sudden competence of his genin.
He looked at his four subordinates. At Sakura, who was looking at him, waiting for confirmation of her analysis. At Hinata, who held her combat stance, ready to act. At Sasuke, completely thrown and furious about it. And at Naruto, who, despite the tension, had a strange "I-told-you-so" smile on his face.
What the hell is this team?
The thought crossed his mind just as the water in the puddle exploded upward.
Realizing they had been discovered, the Demon Brothers abandoned stealth. Two imposing figures, covered in bandages and wearing scratched Mist headbands, leaped from the water, the metal gauntlets on their arms glinting menacingly.
"Looks like the Konoha brats are more than just talk!" one of them, Gōzu, growled as the spiked chain connecting them whistled through the air.
The other, Meizu, fixed his gaze on them. "Doesn't matter! Discovered kids are still dead kids!"
The chain lunged at them, a bloodthirsty steel serpent, intending to end the fight before it even began.