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Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
The clock on the wall marked the silence after the door closed. Hiruzen blew smoke upward in slow, unhurried ribbons.
"Report."
Inoichi appeared and placed a scroll on the desk. He had been there for the entire conversation. That was what he had his ANBU do.
Hiruzen looked at the scroll without touching it. "This is?"
"ANBU Owl's overnight report on Naruto." Inoichi folded his hands behind his back. "The boy returned to his apartment, slept, and came here this morning. The apartment was searched while he was en route. Officers found nothing unusual beyond what we already knew about."
Hiruzen drew on his pipe slowly.
The mysteries were compounding. Each answer producing two new questions. Each observation opening a door onto a corridor with no visible end.
"What is your honest assessment of Naruto?"
"The grief is real. The observation of his body language and how he spoke in relation to his master was authentic." He paused. "Whatever happened to him was real and it cost him something significant."
"And yet," Hiruzen said.
"We are looking at a boy who appears to have lived an entire chapter of his life that we have no access to and no framework for."
Hiruzen set down his pipe. "Is he hiding it deliberately?"
"That's the part I find most interesting." Inoichi moved to the chair yet chose to stand. "In my initial assessment I assumed the mask was the whole story. A child who learned to perform because performing was safer than being seen. But what we observed this morning does not fit that model cleanly." He looked at the door. "He told you about the master. He wore the armor openly. He did not deflect when you looked at it. A boy running a deliberate concealment operation does not do those things."
"So he's not hiding."
"I think he's being selective," Inoichi said carefully. "He's sharing what he's comfortable sharing and keeping the rest close, the way anyone does after losing someone." A pause. "The question is whether what he's keeping close represents a threat or simply something he isn't ready to speak about yet."
"He's not a threat," Hiruzen said. More to himself than to Inoichi.
"No, he's not a threat."
A pause.
"But we should understand what he's carrying," the Yamanaka added carefully, "before it becomes one."
The clock marked the silence.
"My recommendation remains the same. We observe. We do not push. We create conditions where cooperation with Konoha becomes something Naruto chooses rather than something imposed on him," Inoichi stated. "Pushing that boy right now, with fresh grief and fresh distance between you, would close every door we still have open."
"Find me everything that exists on the word squire," Hiruzen said quietly. "The name Oscar. And the design philosophy of that armor."
"Already assigned," Inoichi said.
Hiruzen took a drag out of his pipe.
"What about the jonin sensei?"
"I'm working on that."
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Naruto stood in the open field and breathed in.
Trees stretched in every direction as far as he could see, the training ground quiet except for the wind moving through the branches overhead.
Iruka had his instructor face on.
"Body Flicker Technique," he began, settling into the cadence Naruto had heard a thousand times in a classroom and was only now learning to actually listen to. "A ninja uses chakra to temporarily vitalize the body and move at extreme speeds across short or long distances. The amount of chakra required scales with distance and elevation. The further you go or the higher you climb, the more it costs."
"Sensei, what's the difference between Body Flicker and Substitution? From the outside they look the same."
Iruka had a surprised expression that Naruto had asked something worth answering. "That's a good question actually."
"I know."
"Both techniques release chakra from the ankles," Iruka continued. "That's where the similarity ends. Substitution releases a single concentrated burst, short range, fast, and leaves a replacement object behind in your position. The log, usually. Body Flicker works differently." He paused to make sure Naruto was following. "It doesn't release all the chakra at once. It releases it in sequential waves."
"Like what?"
"Hold out your hand."
Naruto held it out.
Iruka tapped his palm once, then twice, each tap slightly harder than the last. "First wave gets you moving. Second wave builds on the momentum of the first. Third wave builds on the second. Each release of chakra from the ankles compounds with the velocity you already have rather than starting from zero." He stepped back. "That's why Body Flicker accelerates as it goes rather than moving at a fixed speed. The longer the distance, the faster you're moving by the time you arrive."
"Like ripples in a lake."
"Exactly like that. When did you start thinking in analogies?"
"I have always been the smart one, Iruka sensei."
"You failed the graduation exam three times."
"Strategically."
Iruka laughed while performing the hand signs. Half tiger and ram.
His body flickered.
Thirty feet away before Naruto's eyes had finished tracking the motion. Iruka was standing casually at the treeline like he had always been there.
"Any questions?"
"Can you fight while flickering?"
"Evasion and dodging, yes. Chunin and jonin use it the way a genin uses Substitution, to exit a bad position very quickly. Direct combat is harder," Iruka explained. "The sequential wave acceleration produces tunnel vision. Attacking from that state means committing to something you can barely see."
"So you can't fight with it."
"Most people can't," Iruka said. "But."
Naruto looked up.
"There was a shinobi who found a way to use Body Flicker directly in combat," Iruka said with a deeply respectful tone. "How exactly, I don't know. What we know is the result. He pushed the technique past every conventional ceiling and at those speeds his body left afterimages solid enough that opponents couldn't distinguish them from the real thing in the moment." He paused. "People compared him to the Fourth Hokage."
"Who is this awesome guy?"
"Shisui of the Body Flicker."
Naruto gasped.
"I met him a few times," Iruka said quietly, the warmth in his voice belonging to something specific and kept. "A good man who died too young."
Naruto went quiet as a form of respect, while an idea had been assembling itself in his mind. Body Flicker in direct combat.
Nobody knew how Shisui had solved the tunnel vision problem. But Naruto did not need to find that answer.
He already had a different one.
The Knight's Sight did not operate through his eyes. It lifted his awareness above his body entirely, indifferent to the direction he was facing or the speed he was moving.
The grin arrived before he had finished the thought.
Naruto of the Body Flicker.
He liked that considerably.