This place was far from the noise of the village. The only sound was wind and sand rattling against the window frames.
Temari, Kankurō, and Gaara sat on the other side of the table, backs stiff, as though they were facing not a person, but a predator that could devour them at any moment.
"Akira," Temari asked carefully, "with your strength and position, isn't it a bit excessive for you to be leading a Chūnin Exam team?"
Akira took a sip of tea, posture lazy and unhurried. "No need to be so formal. I'm younger than all of you. Just call me by name."
That relaxed ease, as if he were the host and they were the visitors, only made Temari find him even harder to read.
"Let's stop dancing around it."
Akira set down his cup, and his gaze sharpened. "Your higher-ups think I'm here to start a war, don't they?"
Bullseye.
The moment the words landed, chakra flared inside both Gaara and Kankurō. Kankurō's fingers were already poised on his puppet controls.
Akira acted as though he hadn't noticed. He even crossed one leg over the other.
"Put those thoughts away. If this turned into a fight, the two of you together wouldn't be enough to warm me up."
"I really didn't come here to make a move against the Suna. The reason is simple. There's nothing in it for me."
"Are your elders always this paranoid?"
At that moment, Gaara's face abruptly went pale, a sheen of sweat breaking across his forehead.
Because the monster inside him was screaming.
Shukaku, the One-Tail, was trembling.
As a tailed beast, its sensitivity to chakra far surpassed that of any human. In its eyes, the smiling boy across the table was not a person at all, but an abyss of chakra so deep it had no bottom.
The pressure coming off him was unlike anything it had felt since the old Sage of Six Paths.
Even that hateful old fox Kurama did not seem to possess chakra this monstrous.
"Hey! Kid! Listen carefully!"
Shukaku's shrill voice exploded inside Gaara's head. "Do not provoke this guy! Absolutely do not!"
"He's got more chakra than I do! What kind of monster is this?!"
Gaara answered inwardly, stunned, "More than you? That's impossible. He's human. You're a tailed beast."
"Shut up! I know what I'm feeling!"
Shukaku was practically shrieking. "Even if you let me all the way out, the two of us together still wouldn't be enough!"
"When I heard he suppressed the Three-Tails, I thought it was exaggerated. Now I know it was true!"
"That body of his is like a bottomless pit. No tailed beast sealed inside him, and he still built up this much chakra? That's insane!"
It was the first time Shukaku had ever reacted this timidly.
Hearing the tailed beast's frantic warning, the killing intent Gaara had quietly gathered vanished at once, replaced by deep caution.
Temari noticed the change in her brother. At the same time, she had also heard Akira's promise. At last, some of the tension left her shoulders.
"I hope you'll keep your word."
Akira watched the three of them relax, then shook his head helplessly.
"Don't worry. I hate trouble more than anything. As long as the Suna doesn't start anything, I'm just a tourist here."
He genuinely could not understand how he had been turned into something so terrifying in everyone's minds.
Had his reputation just gotten so overblown that people instinctively assumed the worst?
The air in the teahouse seemed frozen. Even after he rose to leave, the invisible weight he had brought into the room did not vanish immediately.
Watching Akira go, all effortless composure and above the concerns of ordinary people, Kankurō noticed his teacup trembling in his hand.
Back when they had all taken the Chūnin Exams, they had at least been able to call themselves peers. How had the gap widened into something like light-years in such a short time?
Now Akira was one of Konoha's pillars, while the three of them had only just clawed their way to Chūnin and had still been proud of it.
Only after his figure disappeared completely down the street did the pressure in the teahouse ease a little.
Kankurō finally exhaled, as if he had been holding his breath the entire time. His forehead was covered in cold sweat.
"I'm not kidding. I barely dared breathe in there. His presence is even more terrifying than before. It felt like a mountain was pressing down on my head."
"It's only been a little over a year. How does someone even train like that? Did he grow up on steroids or something?"
Gaara held his teacup in both hands, his expression as still and deep as a frozen lake. But when he spoke, his calm tone made the words even more shocking.
"The amount of chakra he has is already beyond reason. It's greater than the chakra of Shukaku inside me."
"What?!"
That hit Temari and Kankurō like a lightning strike. They nearly jumped out of their seats.
Akira's chakra surpassed Shukaku's?
It sounded like the most absurd joke of the year. Shukaku was a tailed beast, one of the nine monsters standing at the top of the shinobi world's chakra hierarchy.
How could a human possibly rival that kind of natural disaster?
Gaara narrowed his eyes, the dark rings around them making his stare even heavier.
"I'm not guessing. Shukaku told me himself."
"Tailed beasts are especially sensitive to chakra on their own level. He was practically losing his mind inside me just now."
"He said the power inside Akira is bottomless. It might even exceed that old fox Nine-Tails."
At that, both Temari and Kankurō felt their throats go dry. They swallowed with difficulty, their entire view of the world cracking apart.
"Is... is that guy even human?"
"He's fourteen. Fourteen. Even if he started refining chakra in the womb, this still wouldn't make sense. The world's gone insane."
Reason told them it was impossible, but if a tailed beast like Shukaku had made the judgment, then it had to be true.
And yet the idea that a human, with nothing but his own flesh and blood, possessed enough chakra to overshadow a tailed beast... that was basically a wild tailed beast wearing human skin.
Before today, they had thought Akira was just some absurdly gifted genius. Now it was obvious that "genius" was nowhere near enough. He was a monster operating on an entirely different plane.
Even Gaara, as the host of the One-Tail, now fully grasped the gulf between them. It was not something he could ever hope to cross.
"No wonder he treated the Suna's little tricks with such complete indifference," Gaara said quietly. "In his eyes, we were never a threat."
"With strength like that, the kind that can keep a tailed beast in check... if he really wanted to move, he probably could flatten the current Sunagakure all by himself."
It sounded like giving the enemy too much credit, but it was not an unreasonable thought.
Unless someone possessed the kind of godlike power that let Madara Uchiha or Hashirama Senju reshape the landscape itself, even monsters like the Third Raikage, men who could wrestle the Eight-Tails head-on, would still die if tens of thousands of shinobi swarmed them.