The water balloon wobbled.
It didn't expand. It didn't strain. It just jiggled like a fat, lazy jelly, mocking him in the afternoon sun.
"Pop," Naruto gritted out, his fingers digging into the red rubber. "Pop, you stupid piece of junk. Pop!"
He shoved more chakra into it. The water inside churned sluggishly, like soup being stirred with a spoon, but the rubber skin held firm.
"You're talking to it again," Jiraiya observed.
The Toad Sage was lying on a thick tree branch above, one leg dangling freely. He was reading Make-Out Paradise with one hand and eating a blue popsicle with the other. He looked infuriatingly relaxed.
"It's not listening!" Naruto yelled, throwing the balloon on the ground. It bounced harmlessly in the dirt. "This is impossible! There's no way to pop it just by spinning the water! It's too thick!"
Jiraiya sighed, marking his page with a finger.
"It's not thick, you're just unfocused. You're trying to spin the whole ocean at once. You need to create a vortex. Turbulence."
"I am making a vortex!" Naruto argued, snatching the dusty balloon back up. "I'm spinning it so hard my hand hurts!"
Jiraiya hopped down, landing with a heavy thud. He towered over Naruto, his shadow long and imposing.
"Naruto," he said, his voice dropping the joking tone. "Do you know how long it took the Fourth Hokage to invent this jutsu?"
Naruto blinked, wiping sweat from his forehead. "I dunno. A month?"
"Three years," Jiraiya said.
The world seemed to stop. The sounds of the forest—the wind, the birds, the distant drums of the festival—faded into a dull buzz.
"Three... years?" Naruto whispered.
"Three years to perfect the shape," Jiraiya confirmed. "Another six months to master the nature transformation he wanted to add to it—which he never actually finished before he died."
He put a heavy hand on Naruto's shoulder.
"You've been at this for two days. Don't expect miracles, kid. Genius isn't about doing it fast. It's about doing it until it works."
He walked away, heading back toward the stream where Anko was shouting something about hydrostatic pressure.
"Keep practicing. I'm going to check on the girls."
Naruto stood there, staring at the balloon in his hand.
Three years.
The words echoed in his head, bouncing around like the Zomeki drums.
Three years.
If it took three years, Sasuke would be gone. Orochimaru would have him. Or Itachi would come back.
Naruto closed his eyes. He saw the hospital room. He saw Sasuke staring at the ceiling, his eyes empty, his wrist broken. He saw the way the nurses whispered when they walked past the door.
I don't have three years, Naruto thought, panic rising in his throat like bile. I don't have three months. I have now.
If he wasn't strong enough now, then Sasuke was going to die. Just like the Old Man.
"Dammit!"
Naruto kicked a tree root. He slumped down, putting his head in his hands. The balloon sat on the ground next to him, red and shiny and unbreakable.
"Meow."
Naruto looked up.
A stray cat—a scruffy calico with half an ear missing—had wandered into the clearing. It was sniffing the water balloon.
"Shoo," Naruto muttered. "That's not a toy. That's a legacy. Or whatever."
The cat ignored him. It batted the balloon with a paw.
The balloon wobbled. The water inside sloshed left.
The cat batted it again with the other paw. The water sloshed right.
Then, the cat pounced. It grabbed the balloon with both paws, batting it back and forth rapidly, creating a chaotic, jiggling rhythm. The water inside wasn't just spinning one way anymore; it was crashing into itself, bouncing off the rubber walls in a dozen different directions at once.
Left. Right. Up. Down.
The balloon distorted. It bulged.
POP.
Water sprayed over the cat. The cat hissed, shook itself dry, and bolted into the bushes.
Naruto sat frozen.
He stared at the wet spot on the ground and the shreds of red rubber.
"It didn't spin it one way," Naruto whispered. "It hit it from everywhere."
He scrambled up, grabbing a fresh balloon from the crate Jiraiya had stolen.
He held it in his right hand. He started the rotation. Spin.
But then, he brought his left hand up. He didn't just hold the balloon; he used his left hand to push against the flow, to create friction, to make the water inside crash against itself.
Don't just flow, he thought. Fight.
He gritted his teeth. He poured chakra into the rotation, churning it, making it wild, making it chaotic.
The balloon expanded. It bulged against his fingers.
"Break!" Naruto screamed.
POP.
Water exploded. It drenched his face, his shirt, his hands.
Naruto stood there, dripping wet, chest heaving.
He looked at his empty hand.
"I did it," he breathed.
He looked toward the stream where Jiraiya was.
"Hey, Pervy Sage!" Naruto yelled, his voice cracking with exhaustion and triumph. "Three years?! Watch me! I'll master this thing in three days!"
"Deeper!" Anko shouted. "You're skimming the surface! I want to see the current!"
I stood in the river, the water rushing around my waist. My glasses were wet. My hair was plastered to my forehead.
"I'm looking!" I gasped.
I was trying to hold a sphere of water in the air—not a simple arc this time, but a contained ball, mimicking what Naruto was doing on land. But water didn't want to be a ball. It wanted to be a puddle.
"Don't look with your eyes," Anko instructed from the bank. "Look with your chakra. Feel the lattice. Water bonds to itself. Find the bond."
The lattice.
I closed my eyes.
I reached out with that strange, silvery sense that lived in the back of my head. I felt the water. Cool. Heavy. Connecting.
But I needed to see the structure.
I pushed the chakra to my optic nerves. I tried to focus, to zoom in, to see the veins of the world the way I sometimes saw the veins in a leaf.
Show me, I commanded my own eyes.
For a split second, the darkness behind my eyelids turned white.
It wasn't a clear image. It was static. A blinding, high-frequency snow that roared in my ears. I felt a pressure build behind my eyes—a sharp, stabbing spike that felt like someone was driving a senbon into my skull.
"Ah!"
I grabbed my head, stumbling. The sphere of water collapsed, splashing back into the river.
The world tilted. Nausea rolled over me.
"Sylvie?" Anko's voice was sharp.
I opened my eyes. The world was blurry, swimming in a haze of pain. My glasses felt too tight. My skin felt too tight.
It felt like I was trying to look through a keyhole that had been welded shut.
"I'm fine," I lied, clutching my forehead. "Just... brain freeze."
Anko waded out to me. She grabbed my chin, tilting my head up. She stared into my eyes, searching for something.
"Your pupils are dilated," she said quietly. "And your chakra just flared. It felt... weird. Cold."
She let me go, but her gaze lingered.
"Don't push the sensory input," she warned. "If your hardware can't handle the software, you're going to burn out your nerves. Stick to the feeling. Forget the sight."
I nodded, the headache throbbing a steady rhythm against my temples.
Hardware, I thought. Is that what this is? My eyes aren't right for what my brain is trying to do?
I looked down at the rushing water.
For a second, just before the pain hit, I could have sworn the river didn't look like water.
It looked like a million silver threads, tangled together, waiting for someone to pick up the loose ends.
The sun went down, but the noise didn't stop.
The Zomeki rhythm from Tanzaku Town drifted over the hills, a relentless heartbeat that underscored the exhaustion settling into my bones.
DOOM-DOOM. DOOM-DOOM.
Naruto was lying on the grass, nearly passed out. He was soaked, shivering slightly, surrounded by the corpses of a dozen popped red balloons.
I sat by the edge of the stream, nursing the lingering ache behind my eyes.
"It's too wild," Naruto mumbled, staring at the stars. "The water just goes everywhere. It doesn't wanna be a ball."
"Yeah," I said softly, dipping my hand into the current. "It hates being told what to do."
"I just gotta spin it harder!" Naruto said, clenching a fist at the sky. "Force it! If I spin it fast enough, it has to listen!"
I looked at the water rushing over my fingers.
Force. That was Naruto's way. That was the Uzumaki way. Overwhelm the system until it breaks.
But I wasn't an Uzumaki. And according to Anko, I wasn't fire or wind. I was this.
"I don't think I can force it, Naruto," I said.
I closed my eyes. I didn't try to see the threads this time. I didn't try to look with eyes that weren't ready.
I just felt the weight. The gravity.
I pushed my chakra out—not as a hammer, but as a blanket. I asked the water to stop. I didn't command it; I stilled it.
Quiet, I thought. Be a mirror.
"I think I just have to... convince it to stop."
For a split second, the physics of the stream broke.
A three-foot section of the rushing water in front of me went perfectly flat.
It didn't freeze into ice. It just... stopped moving. It became a sheet of liquid glass, dead silent, while the rest of the river roared and rushed around it. It was eerie. Unnatural. A hole of absolute silence in a noisy world.
Naruto sat up on his elbows. "Whoa. How are you doing that?"
The headache spiked. My concentration slipped.
SPLASH.
The water rebelled, rippling violently and splashing me in the face.
I sighed, wiping the river off my glasses.
"Convincing it is hard," I muttered.
Naruto chuckled, flopping back down.
From the town, the wind carried the chant of the dancers, faint but clear.
"Odoru ahou ni miru ahou; onaji ahou nara odoranya son-son!"
"We're definitely the dancing fools," Naruto yawned.
"Yeah," I agreed, looking at the dark, moving water. "But at least we're dancing."