Naruto Uzumaki came back three days later.
This time without Sasuke. Without the Hokage robe. Just a faded orange shirt that looked like it had been old for a very long time, dark blue training pants, hair that hadn't been fully combed, and what appeared to be a ramen stain on his collar.
He knocked at half past five in the morning.
Boruto opened the door and looked at his father with an expression somewhere between disbelief and resignation. "Dad. Five-thirty in the morning."
"Yeah, good timing right? Air's still fresh." Naruto leaned past Boruto's shoulder to peer inside. "Is Saruto up yet?"
I was already up. I was always up before everyone else in this house — an old habit from Kenji's life that had refused to let go even after retirement. I was sitting at the dining table with a glass of milk in front of me when Naruto peered in and immediately found my eyes.
His smile bloomed perfectly.
"Hey! Saruto! Want to go for a morning run with Grandpa?"
Konoha in the early morning was something else entirely.
I had seen it through my bedroom window many times, had felt it from the backyard, but running — or more accurately, jogging — through Konoha's streets in person was a completely different experience.
The village was alive even before the sun had fully risen.
Merchants opened their stalls with voices that overlapped and carried. A few shinobi in uniform moved quickly toward the gates for morning missions. Older children ran in groups through their regular training, their breath coming out as thin wisps of vapor in the cold morning air.
Naruto ran beside me at a pace he had clearly adjusted as much as possible to match my stride.
Even so, I had to work hard to keep up.
"Control your breathing," he said without looking over, eyes straight ahead. "Don't take short shallow breaths. Breathe in deep, let it out slow. Give your body a rhythm."
I followed his instructions. Slightly better.
"Good. You pick things up fast."
"Dad taught me," I answered between breaths.
Naruto laughed softly. "Boruto taught you properly then. When I was training him, he complained for three straight days. 'Why do we have to run, can't we just use shunshin, Dad.' That kid."
I could picture a younger Boruto saying exactly that.
We ran along the village's main road, past rows of shops still mostly closed, past the small park near the academy, past the Hokage monument where the carved faces looked out from the northern cliffs. I made a point not to stare at those faces too long, knowing full well what I would feel if I did.
"Grandpa," I called.
"Hm?"
"When you first started training, what did it feel like?"
Naruto thought for a moment. His feet kept moving in the same rhythm, unbothered by the question.
"Heavy," he answered at last. "Back then I was alone. Nobody wanted to train with me, nobody wanted to teach me seriously. Iruka-sensei was the only one who gave me his time." His tone wasn't sad — more like someone remembering something from a very great distance. "But because of that, even small progress felt enormous. Because I knew exactly what it had cost."
I turned his words over as I ran.
"Saruto isn't alone," I said.
Naruto glanced over briefly. His eyes — blue and warm and full of something that couldn't quite be put into words — looked at me for one second.
"No," he said. "You're not alone."
We stopped at the edge of a small river on the eastern side of the village.
Naruto sat on a flat stone at the water's edge, legs stretched out, taking in the morning air like someone with no responsibilities in the world. I sat beside him, my breathing only just returning to normal after nearly forty minutes of running.
This five-year-old body was stronger than I had expected, but its stamina still had very real limits.
The river moved quietly before us. A few small fish drifted beneath the clear surface.
"Grandpa," I called again.
"Yeah?"
"Is Grandpa's chakra big?"
Naruto turned with a slightly amused expression. "Why do you ask?"
"Sarada told Dad once. That Grandpa Naruto's chakra is different from normal shinobi." I chose my words carefully — information that made sense for a child to have picked up from his parents' conversations. "Saruto was curious."
Naruto looked back at the river. There was a smile at the corner of his mouth, but his eyes held something deeper than simple contentment.
"Big," he answered simply. "Too big, when I was younger. Hard to control. It used to burst in the wrong direction before I learned to manage it properly."
"And now?"
"Better now." His hand moved toward the river in a casual gesture, and without any change in his expression whatsoever, chakra flowed from his palm to the surface of the water.
I felt it before I saw anything.
Not fire. Not ice. Not something visible to the naked eye — but I could feel it. A wave rolling out from Naruto like heat rising from asphalt at noon, invisible but real and felt all the way into the bones. The small fish in the river moved away toward deeper water all at once, their instincts responding to something far greater than themselves.
The wave kept spreading. One meter. Two. Five.
The surface of the river trembled very faintly, as though something was vibrating far below.
Then Naruto pulled his hand back and everything stopped.
Still again, as though nothing had happened.
"Something like that," he said casually.
I didn't speak for several seconds.
The Kenji Matsuda inside me — who had watched hundreds of episodes of Naruto, who had read every chapter of the manga, who understood intellectually exactly how vast the power of the man sitting beside him was — had still not been prepared to feel it in person.
This wasn't data. This wasn't numbers on a page.
This was real.
"Aren't you scared, Grandpa?" I asked at last.
"Scared of what?"
"A power that big. Scared of not being able to control it."
Naruto turned to look at me, and this time there was something in his eyes that was different from every expression I had caught from him since he first walked into our house.
Serious. Not a heavy or threatening kind of serious — but the seriousness of someone delivering something genuinely important.
"I used to be," he answered. "Very scared. There were times I was more afraid of myself than of any enemy I ever faced." He looked at his hand for a moment. "But you know what changed that?"
I shook my head.
"People who believed in me before I believed in myself." The corner of his mouth lifted. "Iruka-sensei. Lady Tsunade. Jiraiya-sensei. Hinata. They believed first. I caught up later."
The river kept flowing before us.
"Now it's your turn, Saruto." Naruto stood and extended his hand toward me — a large hand with old scars long since faded, a hand that had carried the weight of the entire shinobi world more than once. "We believe first. You catch up later. Deal?"
I looked at his hand.
Then I reached for it.
His hand closed around mine — firm without hurting, warm in a way that was different from the warmth of the chakra that had spread across the river earlier. This was a simpler warmth, and for that very reason stronger than any of it.
The warmth of an ordinary person.
"Deal," I said.
On the way home, Naruto walked more slowly than on the way out. We followed the same road, but the village was livelier now — the merchants' voices louder and overlapping, a few residents greeting Naruto with respect and he answering every single one without exception, treating each person like someone important.
At the intersection near the house, I stopped.
Naruto stopped beside me and looked at me with mild curiosity.
I looked at my right hand. The hand that had burned with a small fire days ago. The hand that had just been held in my grandfather's.
Deep inside my chest, very far within, something pulsed warmly twice in a row — Crimson Fang responding to something, perhaps the enormous chakra I had felt radiating from Naruto, perhaps the resolve that had started forming in the corners of this old soul of mine that had not felt resolve like this in a very long time.
"Grandpa," I said without looking away from my hand.
"Yeah?"
"Saruto will become strong."
Not a question. Not a wish.
A statement.
Naruto was quiet for a moment. Then from the corner of my eye I could see his smile — not the amused smile of someone who found it endearing because the one saying it was a five-year-old.
An equal smile. A believing smile.
"I know," he said.
Lanjut Bab 6?