The walk to the Hyuga compound was a study in social dynamics Naruto hadn't yet found a textbook for. The glares, usually a uniform wave of hostility directed solely at him, now split into a more complex spectrum. There was still the ingrained fear and anger aimed his way, but now it was mixed with looks of sheer confusion, blatant curiosity, and—directed at Hinata—something that felt like disapproval.
He observed it all, filing the data away. Hypothesis: Association with a clan heir, even a seemingly marginalized one, alters social perception. The reaction is not multiplicative but additive, combining the negative perception of me with the… what is the perception of her? Pity? Disappointment? Need more data.
Hinata, for her part, walked a careful half-step behind him, her eyes fixed on the cobblestones. The tomatoes were held to her chest like a shield. Every hissed whisper from a passerby made her shoulders tense, but she didn't fall back. She matched his pace.
"You don't have to," she whispered, her voice so soft it was nearly swallowed by the street noise. "I can… I can manage."
Naruto blinked, pulled from his analysis. "The probability of another spill is still high. Your center of gravity is off. You're leaning forward to protect the produce, which compromises your balance. It's an inefficient posture."
He said it not as a criticism, but as a simple statement of fact, the same way he'd note that the sky was blue. Hinata stared at him, her pale eyes wide. No one had ever… diagnosed her clumsiness before.
"Oh," was all she could manage.
They reached the imposing, traditional gates of the Hyuga compound. Two stern-faced men in traditional robes, their eyes activated and veins bulging, stood guard. Their gaze swept over Naruto, and their expressions tightened from neutral vigilance to cold disdain. Then their eyes fell on Hinata behind him, and the disdain flickered into something colder, flintier.
Naruto's own mind, ever-calculating, didn't register the emotion, only the threat assessment. Two guards. Chakra reservoirs significantly above average. Visual prowess suggests enhanced perception. Potential high-level threat. Conclusion: Withdraw.
"Your destination," Naruto stated, coming to a halt. He gave a short, sharp nod that was more a termination of a mission parameter than a friendly goodbye. "Optimal load-bearing strategy would be to redistribute weight evenly between both arms before proceeding."
He turned to leave.
"N-Naruto-kun!"
He stopped and looked back. Hinata was trembling slightly, but she met his gaze for a fleeting second. "Th-thank you."
A new variable. Gratitude. It was illogical. He had merely corrected an inefficient system. The thanks were unnecessary. Yet, the strange warmth from earlier returned to his chest. It was… a positive data point.
"The thanks are not logically required, but they are accepted," he replied, the formal words feeling awkward but correct. He offered that small, genuine smile again. "See you at the academy."
He turned and walked away, his mind already shifting gears to his postponed lunch and the clock that needed recalibrating. He didn't see Hinata stand at the gate for a full minute after he'd disappeared from view, her face flushed, her heart doing a strange, fluttering rhythm that had nothing to do with tripping.
The afternoon sun was a hammer on the cracked clay of the academy training grounds. Most students had long since fled the heat, but for Naruto, the emptiness was a feature, not a bug. Isolation meant no distractions, no observers, and maximum efficiency.
His body was a symphony of controlled motion. He wasn't just running laps; he was conducting an experiment.
Lap 23. Adjust breathing pattern. Inhale for four steps, hold for two, exhale for four. Oxygen intake is insufficient. Muscles are burning.
Lap 24. Modify stride length. Increase by five centimeters. Test impact on speed versus stamina depletion.
Lap 25. Analyze impact shock. The uneven terrain on the south end causes lateral ankle strain. Compensate with a 10-degree inward tilt on the left foot upon landing.
Swep poured down his temples, his orange jumpsuit dark with perspiration. His lungs burned, and his legs screamed in protest. This was the part his 50x learning rate couldn't eliminate: the raw, physical agony of pushing a body to its limits. But his mind reveled in it. Every ache was a data point, every gasp for air a variable in the grand equation of self-improvement.
He could see the techniques in his head—the flawless forms of the jounin he'd watched, the effortless speed of the ANBU who flickered across the rooftops at night. He could deconstruct their movements into a series of kinetic equations. The application was just a matter of repainting his own body's canvas, stroke by painful stroke.
As he ran, he saw them. A flash of pink and a darker blur under a tree at the edge of the field. Sakura and Sasuke. Sakura was chattering, waving her hands animatedly. Sasuke was ignoring her, doing slow, precise stretches, his face a mask of brooding concentration.
Naruto's analytical mind processed them as he passed.
Uchiha Sasuke. Academy top-ranked student. Natural aptitude high. Chakra control: precise. Motivation: appears driven by a negative feedback loop—anger, loss. Inefficient. Wasted energy.
Haruno Sakura. Academic scores: top tier. Physical prowess: low. Social motivation: heavily invested in Uchiha Sasuke. Illogical. Focus on a uncooperative variable hinders her own growth potential.
He felt no jealousy, no childish anger. They were simply factors in the environment. Sasuke's natural talent was a benchmark, a public data set against which he could measure his own progress. Sakura's intellect was a resource he might, under the right conditions, collaborate with. Her fixation on Sasuke, however, made that collaboration currently unlikely.
He completed his fiftieth lap, his body screaming for cessation. He allowed himself to stop, hands on his knees, drawing in huge, ragged gulps of air. The burn was exquisite. It meant growth.
From under the tree, Sasuke's dark eyes followed him. There was a new flicker in them, something that wasn't outright dismissal. It was the look of a predator noticing another predator in its territory. This wasn't the loud, foolish rival who challenged him to idiotic contests. This was someone running with a silent, terrifying intensity he recognized. It mirrored his own.
Sakura, noticing Sasuke's gaze, followed it and scowled. "Ugh, what is he doing? Trying to show off? As if all that running will make up for being dead last."
Sasuke didn't answer. He just watched as Naruto, recovered now, moved into a series of complex cool-down stretches, each movement precise, economical, and perfectly balanced.
The sun began to dip below the Hokage Monument, casting long shadows across the village. Naruto sat on his threadbare apartment floor, the dismantled clock spread out before him like a mechanical corpse. A single, tiny pendulum was the heart of the problem. Its swing was off by 0.2 seconds per hour. Unacceptable.
His focus was absolute, a laser beam of concentration. The world outside—the distant sounds of the market, the smell of cooking food from other apartments—faded into meaningless static. There was only the problem and the solution.
This was the flip side of his curse. The hyper-focused intensity that could feel like mania. When he locked onto a problem, whether it was a sealing matrix, a physical technique, or a faulty clock, everything else ceased to exist. Time distorted. Hunger, thirst, fatigue—they were all irrelevant variables to be ignored until the equation was solved.
He adjusted the weight on the pendulum arm by a microscopic degree, his hands unnervingly steady. He reassembled the casing, his fingers moving with a swift, sure grace that would make a master watchmaker weep. He set the time.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
Perfect. A flawless, rhythmic beat. A perfect, measurable constant in his chaotic world. A smile of pure, unadulterated satisfaction spread across his face. It was a small victory. A tiny, ordered system in a universe of chaos.
But the satisfaction was short-lived. As the focus faded, the static of the world rushed back in. The emptiness of the apartment. The silence that was no longer profound and peaceful like the void before his rebirth, but lonely and hollow.
He looked at the perfect clock. It told him exactly what time it was. It couldn't tell him what he was, or why he was here, or why the village looked at him with such hate.
The warmth he'd felt with Hinata was a ghost in his chest. A single, anomalous data point in a life of negative results. He couldn't quantify it, couldn't deconstruct it into a formula. It just was.
He picked up a book on basic chakra theory, his mind already hungry for the next problem to solve, the next thing to learn. The 50x multiplier whirred to life, ready to consume the information.
But for the first time, as he immersed himself in the diagrams of energy pathways and tenketsu points, a part of him wondered if there were some equations that couldn't be solved with logic alone.
The thought was uncomfortable. Illogical. He dismissed it and turned the page.