The tavern was the kind of place that survived by not asking questions.
It featured a low, sagging ceiling and tables coated in a layer of sticky oil and cold grease. The air was a suffocating cocktail of stale beer, unwashed bodies, and something that had been fried three days ago and left to fester. To Tsunade, the room felt heavy—an acoustic vacuum that didn't expect hope, only payment.
She tipped her chair back until the wood groaned under her weight and stared through the warped, bruised glass of the window.
Outside, Naruto Uzumaki was shadowboxing with his own reflection in a puddle.
Hah-shh. Hah-shh.
Punch, spin, almost-trip, recover. He was loud even when he was alone, his chakra flaring like a roaring furnace fed with bad decisions and raw optimism. To her medical eyes, he was an engine redlining without a coolant system.
Inside, Sylvie sat cross-legged on the bench. She wasn't looking at the scrap paper in front of her. Her pen moved in a sharp, percussive rhythm—skritch-skritch-skritch—drawing seal fragments with a precision that looked involuntary. Incomplete arrays. Jagged shapes that looked like mineral infections on the page.
Tsunade took a drink. The liquid burned like battery acid, exactly what she needed to dull the serrated edges of her nerves.
"Don't stare," Jiraiya muttered beside her. He was already halfway to drunk, the scent of bitter plum wine clinging to his breath. "Makes you look like you care."
"I do care," Tsunade said flatly, her voice a dry rasp. "That's why I'm staring."
She watched Sylvie. The girl blinked hard, her eyes squeezing shut. She rubbed her temple with two fingers, a microbeat of hesitation before she kept drawing. That pause mattered. It was a sign of a system under too much load.
Tsunade leaned back, boots hooked under the table. "That kid isn't seeing wrong."
She felt it then—a barometric drop in the room's pressure. Two overlapping presences brushed against her perception, faint and indistinct, leaving a shadow in her mind that felt like crawling charcoal heat.
Anko stiffened instantly. Her hand didn't move for a weapon, but the friction of her sudden alertness was palpable.
"She's seeing too much," Tsunade finished.
Silence stretched, broken only by the thud-thud-thud of Naruto hitting a post outside.
Shizune frowned, her hands clutching Tonton. "Her glasses—is it an ocular defect?"
"Not ocular," Tsunade said. "And not structural. If it were her eyes, she'd tilt her head to compensate for the focal shift. She doesn't."
Anko exhaled smoke through her nose, the scent of burnt sugar filling the booth. "Then what is it?"
Tsunade finally turned her head. She studied Sylvie properly, her gaze as sharp as a glass scalpel. "When did it start?"
Sylvie looked up, startled. Her eyes were wide behind her lenses. "Uh. Early? I think? It got worse after the Forest of Death."
"Does it hurt," Tsunade pressed, "or does it ache?"
Sylvie frowned, her fingers interlacing as if to hold her own bones together. "Ache. And... pressure. Like static inside my skull."
"Taste like copper?"
Sylvie froze. The color drained from her face, leaving her looking bruised and translucent.
"...Yeah. Like I'm sucking on a dirty penny."
Tsunade nodded once. Diagnosis complete.
"Neurological," she said, her voice dropping into a clinical register. "Chakra-induced sensory overload. She isn't lacking perception; she's drowning in it. Her wiring is too thin for the voltage she's pulling in from the environment."
Sylvie's shoulders went rigid.
"Is that fixable?" Anko asked, her voice low and dangerous.
Tsunade didn't answer. She took another swallow of the acid-liquor. Her gaze flicked back to Naruto. "And him? Obscene output. Terrible efficiency. Zero patience. He's a pressure cooker that refuses to stop ticking."
"Sounds like a winner," Jiraiya slurred, offering a lopsided grin.
"Sounds like a bomb," Tsunade corrected. She looked back at Sylvie. "And her. Abnormal perception. Frightening control potential—if she survives her own brain."
Sylvie didn't look up. Her pen scratched faster, the gritty wood pulp of the paper tearing under the force.
Later, the bottle was empty and the air in the tavern had turned to a thick, blue haze of tobacco smoke.
Jiraiya was talking too much. He didn't notice the truth serum Tsunade had slipped into his cup—the way his words were becoming unraveled and heavy.
"Orochimaru always hated limits," Jiraiya said, staring into the dregs of his drink. "Said rules were just... excuses made by people who got tired of the drag."
Sylvie's head throbbed. She looked like she was trying to calculate the tactical geometry of a world without limits, and the thought was making her nauseous.
"He used to talk about you," Jiraiya muttered. "About how you could've fixed the village if you hadn't left."
Tsunade's jaw tightened. She felt the ghost-ache of her own trauma, a biological rewiring that she'd tried to drown in a thousand bottles.
"He said if you'd stayed," Jiraiya went on, "the village would've been perfect. That scared him. He preferred the scabs and the rot."
Tsunade stood abruptly. The legs of her chair shrieked against the floorboards—screee-ack.
She tossed a handful of ryo onto the sticky table. Legacy, she thought, wasn't a gift. It was an industrial weight you had to learn how to aim before it crushed you.
"Time to go," she said. "Big day tomorrow."
Naruto burst back in from the cold, his face flushed and smelling of dry earth and sweat. "I'm ready! I think I almost got the rotation!"
Tsunade didn't answer him. She was already walking toward the door, her decisions feeling like iron weights in her gut.
One week.
Not to test their belief. To confirm if they were strong enough to survive the truth.