The rubber ball was pure evil.
The water balloon had been tricky, sure. It wiggled. It fought back. But at least you could feel the water moving inside. You could feel the churn.
The rubber ball was just... dead weight.
"Dammit!"
Naruto slammed his right hand against the tree trunk. The rubber ball, caught between his palm and the bark, didn't pop. It just squished, hissed, and then bounced back to its original shape the second he pulled his hand away.
There was no water inside to spin. No momentum to borrow. He had to create the turbulence from nothing, using raw chakra density to force the air inside to act like a solid.
"You're drilling," Jiraiya said.
He was sitting on a rock nearby, whittling a piece of wood.
"I'm trying to pop it!" Naruto yelled, wiping sweat from his forehead. His hand was red and throbbing. "I'm putting everything I have into it!"
"Power isn't the problem," Jiraiya said, blowing sawdust off his carving. "You have too much power. That's why you're just punching holes in the rubber instead of bursting it. Look."
He tossed the whittled stick at Naruto. Naruto caught it.
"If you stab a balloon, it pops because the skin is thin," Jiraiya explained. "Rubber is thick. If you stab it with chakra, you just get a leak. You need to expand it from the center outward. Uniform pressure."
Jiraiya stood up. He walked over, grabbed Naruto's hand, and pulled a marker from his pocket.
"Here."
He drew a black spiral in the center of Naruto's palm.
"Focus your chakra on the ink," Jiraiya said. "Don't let it wander. The rotation has to start here and push out."
Naruto stared at the black swirl.
"A doodle?" Naruto asked skeptically. "That's your sage advice?"
"It's a focal point," Jiraiya said, bonking him on the head. "Use it."
Naruto gritted his teeth. He grabbed the ball again.
Focus on the ink.
He channeled the chakra. He felt the burn. The familiar, hot rasp of his own energy grinding against his coils.
Spin.
The ball vibrated. It got hot in his hand. He could smell the rubber heating up, the smell of burning tires filling the clearing.
But it didn't pop.
It just shook, violently, burning his skin, refusing to break.
"GAH!"
Naruto threw the ball down.
"It's not working!" he shouted. "It hurts! It burns!"
"It's supposed to hurt," Jiraiya said calmly. "You're condensing enough energy to grind stone in the palm of your hand. If it didn't hurt, you wouldn't be doing it right."
Naruto looked at his hand. The skin was angry and red. The black ink was smudged.
Three years.
The thought came back, unbidden. The Fourth Hokage took three years.
Naruto didn't have three years. He had... however long it took for Itachi to decide to come back. However long it took for Orochimaru to find a new body.
"I don't care if it hurts," Naruto whispered.
He picked up the ball. It was still warm from the friction.
He didn't focus on the ink this time. He focused on the pain. The burn was real. The burn was something he could use.
"I'm not gonna drill it," Naruto muttered, his eyes narrowing, the blue of his irises darkening just a fraction. "I'm gonna rip it apart from the inside."
He grabbed the ball with both hands.
He didn't follow the instructions. He didn't use finesse. He poured chakra into it until the air around his hands shimmered with heat haze.
If I can't be precise, he thought, I'll just be too much to handle.
"Congratulations," Anko said, clapping slowly. "You can now splash water with intent. You are officially as dangerous as a very aggressive garden hose."
I stood on the riverbank, wringing out my sleeves. I was exhausted, cold, and my head was pounding with the familiar dull ache of chakra overuse.
"I broke a tree branch earlier," I defended weakly.
"You broke a twig," Anko corrected. "With a C-rank jutsu that took you four seconds to charge. In a real fight, you'd be dead three times before the water even left your mouth."
She hopped down from her perch, landing silently in the grass.
"You're not a striker, Sylvie," she said. Her voice wasn't mocking this time. It was clinical. "You don't have the reserves for mass destruction, and you don't have the bloodlust for close-range assassination. You hesitate."
I looked down. "I..."
"Don't apologize," Anko snapped. "It's a fact. You flinch before the kill. That's fine. We build around it."
She walked to the edge of the water.
"If you can't kill them," Anko said, "you make it easy for someone else to do it. Or you make it impossible for them to kill you."
She pointed at the river.
"Spiders don't chase flies, Pinkie. They build a web. And then they wait."
She turned to me, her expression serious.
"I'm going to teach you a signature move. Something I've been toying with but don't have the patience for. It requires too much stillness. I hate stillness."
"What is it?" I asked.
"Area denial," Anko said. "The technique is called Suiton: Seisui Kekkai. Stillwater Domain."
She gestured to the rushing water.
"Water moves because gravity tells it to. Wind pushes it. Earth channels it. This jutsu tells the water to ignore all of that. It tells the water to stop."
She looked at me.
"Don't make a wave. Make a dead zone. A space where the water is so heavy, so viscous, that nothing moves through it without your permission."
I looked at the river.
Make it stop.
It sounded like a barrier technique. A seal applied to a fluid.
"Okay," I said. "How?"
"Viscosity manipulation," Anko said. "Saturate the water with your chakra until it feels like syrup. Connect the molecules. Lock them."
I stepped into the shallows.
The current pushed against my ankles, eager and restless.
I closed my eyes.
I didn't try to lift it this time. I didn't try to arc it.
I reached out with my sensory awareness. The water felt... silver. Cool. Loud.
Quiet, I told it.
I pushed my chakra out, not as a spike, but as a heavy, settling blanket. I anchored it to the riverbed. I imagined the space around me filling with lead.
Heavy. Slow. Still.
For a moment, nothing happened. The river fought me. It wanted to run.
Then, I felt a shift.
A hum started in the back of my skull—that low, melodic drone that felt like it was coming from the moon. The chakra in my gut responded, turning cold and dense.
The water around my legs stopped rushing.
It didn't freeze. It just... thickened. The ripples smoothed out instantly, turning the surface into a flawless, unnaturally flat mirror.
"Hold it," Anko commanded.
She picked up a heavy stone from the bank and tossed it at me.
It hit the water two feet away.
Thwump.
There was no splash.
The rock didn't sink immediately. It hit the surface like it had landed on gelatin, paused for a split second, and then slowly, sluggishly sank into the depths.
"Good," Anko said.
She stepped into the circle.
Her foot hit the water. She frowned. She tried to lift her leg, but the water clung to her boot, dragging at her movement. It wasn't sticky; it was just... heavy.
"It dampens impact," Anko observed, moving her leg through the water in slow motion. "It eats kinetic energy. If an enemy steps in this, their speed is cut in half. If they try to use a high-velocity Suiton against you inside this zone, it fizzles."
She looked at me.
"If they can't move," Anko grinned, "I can kill them."
I looked at the flat, silent circle of water around me.
It felt heavy in my mind, a constant drain on my concentration. But it also felt... right.
I wasn't attacking. I wasn't hurting anyone.
I was just telling the world to calm down.
"If they can't move," I whispered, "I can stop them."
Anko snorted. "Semantics. Kill, stop, whatever. As long as you win."
She stepped out of the circle, shaking the heavy water off her boot.
"Keep practicing. Expand the range. Right now it's a puddle. I want a pond."
I held the technique. My head throbbed, but I didn't let go.
I looked upstream.
Naruto was there, by the tree line.
He wasn't practicing anymore. He was attacking the rubber ball. He was screaming at it, his face red, his chakra flaring in jagged, chaotic spikes. I could see the smoke rising from his palm. I could see the way his whole body vibrated with a desperate, self-destructive need to be stronger, faster, better.
He was hurting himself.
He was going to burn his hands raw before he popped that ball.
Anko was right. I couldn't be the hammer. I couldn't match that destructive output.
But I didn't need to.
I watched Naruto stumble, catching himself on the tree, wheezing.
He's all thrust, I thought. All engine, no brakes.
I looked down at the unnatural stillness of the water around my legs.
If he was the storm, I didn't need to be the wind.
I needed to be the anchor.
"Stillwater," I murmured, testing the name on my tongue.
It fit.
I closed my eyes, letting the silver hum in my head grow louder, and pushed the circle out another inch.