Five Minutes Before Birth
Minato Namikaze opened his eyes.
And immediately understood he was already late.
Not late in the human sense. Five minutes still existed before Kushina Uzumaki gave birth, before the seal weakened, before the night the world was meant to break. But I was late compared to my own internal projections. Consciousness had locked into place a fraction of a second slower than optimal.
Acceptable variance.
Pain registered second. Chakra strain threaded through Minato's body like a system pushed to maximum throughput. Yet beneath it flowed something else, deeper and smoother. A second circulation of energy, steady and self-correcting.
The sage body was active before I commanded it.
Information exploded outward into the mind palace, not as memory but as structure. Timelines aligned. Probability clusters collapsed. This was not Minato's intuition. This was Alteran cognition mapped onto a human nervous system.
Five minutes.
Kushina screamed behind me, her chakra flaring violently as labor peaked. The seal strained. Not failing yet, but bending. I felt Kurama stir, vast and furious, pressing against the weakening structure like a tide against cracking stone.
Outside the barrier, spacetime distorted.
Someone was observing the moment with intent sharp enough to puncture causality.
Obito.
Minato would have reacted when Obito arrived.
I reacted before he did.
Flying Thunder God activated without seals, driven by predictive collapse rather than speed. I stepped into the precise location where Obito would materialize, occupying the point like a solved answer.
The masked figure phased halfway into the room.
Then stopped.
Our eyes met through the mask.
"You're late," I said calmly.
Confusion rippled through him. That alone told me everything. This was not expected. No contingencies existed for this outcome.
I placed my hand on his shoulder and embedded a recursive spatial anchor, derived from Alteran phase-lock mathematics. It settled beneath his chakra signature and linked to a containment lattice already forming elsewhere.
Then space folded.
Obito vanished without resistance, dragged into a sealed pocket that rewrote phasing rules into irrelevance.
No dramatic clash. No heroic exchange.
Just removal.
I turned back to Kushina.
Her pain dropped sharply the moment my hand touched her seal.
Not suppression.
Stabilization.
Alteran harmonic modeling overlaid Uzumaki fuinjutsu, transforming the seal from static containment into a dynamic system. It adapted in real time, reinforcing stressed nodes, redistributing chakra loss, refusing collapse.
Kushina gasped.
Her grip tightened on the bedding. Then she looked at me, breathing hard but stable.
"You changed something," she said.
"Yes," I answered.
Not an apology.
Not an explanation.
A statement.
Naruto was born moments later, screaming with perfect lungs, furious at being removed from warmth into air. His chakra flared once, then settled into an even rhythm that would have unsettled any sensor in the room.
It was too clean.
I lifted him carefully, already finalizing calculations.
Kurama surged as the seal finally broke.
The world held its breath.