"Ah, not quite," he says, letting his hand drop. "This was a gift from an acquaintance of mine, before he died."
"So you looted it." I deadpan.
"No, I swear," he insists. "He gave it to me of his own volition."
...
I roll my eyes. "Whatever you say, Kazu." Not like I'm going to be able to rat you out anyway- hold on. "Hey, why can I say your name now?" I blurt. Did the Genjutsu wear off? Only one way to find out. "You have a Sharingan, you wanted to look at my seal, you want world peace, and you've got a weird Doujutsu I've never seen before in your left eye." Each word rolls off my tongue as easy as any other. What the hell?
"I was wondering what you'd try to tell your village about me," Kazu says, the amusement back in full force. I glare at him. "No, it isn't what you think. You're still very much restricted by my technique. It's just that no one can hear you from inside this seal, so it doesn't matter whether or not you scream my secrets from the top of your lungs."
"Oh." I purse my lips. "I, uh, don't suppose I could convince you to dispel that?"
"Afraid not."
"You're kind of a dick, you know that, Kazu?"
"I'm sorry you feel that way." He props his chin on his hand, observing me with curiosity. "Would it make you feel better if I told you I have a gift for you?"
Uh. "What kind of gift?" I ask warily.
"Something I was planning on giving you anyway, if I'm honest. But you seem to have need of it, so all the better." Three static tomoe lock eyes with me. "What do you say?"
"It'll help me with my fight?" I venture after another hesitant pause. One part of me, the shinobi part, screams at me that I shouldn't even be entertaining the thought of accepting this unaffiliated shinobi's 'gift'. I should be hightailing it out of this seal as fast I can to alert Hatake to my company, and let him handle this. Trusting this complete stranger can't possibly end well, it exclaims.
The other part of me, the Uzumaki part, says that I need every trump I can get if I want to beat Sasuke. Let alone make chunin.
"If it comes to that," he confirms.
"Alright then," I say, throwing caution and common sense to the wind. "Let's see it."
If it's something useful, a weapon or a technique that I can use to even the playing field come the tournament, I'll give it a shot. If it's something useless, or dangerous enough to damage Sasuke for real, I'll take it and show it to the old man the next time I see him. That Genjutsu can only restrict me so much, right? It won't be able to stop me from bringing a scroll or-
Kazu leans forward and places his right hand flat against my stomach.
I jerk back, crying out in surprise. "What the hell!?" My stomach lights up with energy, the outline of my seal somehow shining through my shirt. I can feel the dying strand of chakra he'd forced into my stomach to bring out the seal, feel its warmth.
"Relax," Kazu says, shuffling forward and reaching out for my seal. "I'm giving you your gift."
I make to move back out of his reach and beyond the circle, not at all sure I want this gift anymore, but then his fingers, wreathed in flickering flames of chakra, touch my seal. My teeth click together sharply as I clench my jaw shut and scream while liquid fire erupts inside my stomach, branching out from the tips of his fingers and burrowing into my core. I feel my arms and legs seize up, rendered useless by the frothing agony in my stomach. Kazu twists his fingers, as if unlatching a lock, and darkness appears at the edge of my vision as the pain doubles.
The masked shinobi's fingers slide this way and that over my stomach, shifting and altering the symbols that have been inscribed into my skin for as long as I can remember. Seconds pass, minutes, hours, until he finally pulls his hand back and the fire seeps out of my veins.
I sit on the roof, frozen by the pain and covered in sweat despite the icy chill surrounding me, until the pain fades away, too. I regain control of my arms and wrap them tight around my stomach, panting and wondering what the hell just happened. I wait a while longer, Kazu content to give me time to recover, but the pressure in my stomach doesn't change. It sits right in the center of my seal, where I always draw my chakra from, pulsating with the beat of my heart. It doesn't quite hurt, but at the same time I can't quite force it out of my head, either.
"What did you do?" I gasp after a few minutes.
"I loosened it up," he says simply. "Look."
I unwrap my arms from around my gut and look down at the seal, still alight with chakra, and realize it's different now. All that poking and sliding hadn't been for show. He changed my seal. Cracked it open. Or close enough, at least. And that pressure-
"How is this going to help me fight?" I ask, struggling to bleed the pain from my tone. "It doesn't even feel like you loosened it. It feels tighter, if anything."
"That's not the seal."
I close my eyes. Take a shaky breath. "Then what is it?"
Kazu reaches out again and I try to flinch away, but he just clasps my shoulder. "When you go into your fight, Naruto, I want you to remember," he says, ignoring my question, "that wind is the undisputed most offensive element, and it is so for a reason. Wind isn't like the other elements. It's so much more than just a force to be applied to jutsu.
"It fights. It fights and howls and tears because it can't stand to lose. It rails against whatever is in its way, whether in triumph, or in defiance." Kazu squeezes my shoulder, his gaze intense. "It has life to it, a drive just like you and me, and it won't accept anything less than victory. If you give it a chance, no matter what you put it up against, it will take it. It's in its nature."
I don't have anything to say to that, and after a long moment of silence Kazu releases my shoulder and rises to his feet.
"Well, I think that's enough for one visit," he says lightly. "We won't be seeing each other again for a long while, so good luck on the rest of your exam. I'll be keeping an ear out for the results." With that said, the masked shinobi scuffs a foot along the tiles, and the seal surrounding us flares up for a single instant before dissolving into nothingness. "Until next time, Naruto."
"Wait."
He pauses in his jutsu, the one he used to kidnap me, and his form snaps back into solidity. "Yes?"
I look up into his single Sharingan eye, his words bouncing around in my head, my seal pulsating with the pressure of…
"How do you kill a Bijuu?" I ask. His blank, orange mask cocks to the side.
"You don't."
...
"Guys, look!" Sakura exclaims, pointing up over the line of buildings. "There it is!"
"No way," I say bluntly, staring up at the massive stone construct in disbelief. "There's no way."
"Your comrade is correct, shinobi-san," Our samurai guide says, nodding up at the stadium. "The Chunin Exams will be concluded there, in Mifune-sama's honorable colosseum." I eye the stone exterior of the thing, rising high above even the village's outer walls, as dark and imposing as can be.
"What's so honorable about it?"
"It is where we bring the samurai who have fallen into disgrace to fight for their honor," he replies easily.
Hm. "To the death?"
He nods. "Of course."
"I can't wait any longer!" Lee suddenly shouts, bouncing from foot to foot so fast his shins are little more than an orange blur. "I have to go now!" He tenses up more than he already was in preparation for a sprint to the stadium, our guide rests a hand on the hilt of one of his four blades, and then Gai slams him into the ground with a vicious punch to the head.
"IDIOT!"
"Leave them," Neji says flatly when our guide pauses to watch the two youthful shinobi bawl at one another. "They'll catch up."
"You shinobi are strange," The samurai says, shaking his long mane of shaggy brown hair and continuing onward.
"We prefer 'eccentric'," Hatake chimes in from behind his book.
...
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