At the end of every action, a result awaits. That is one of fate's most fundamental equations.
Nearly half a month flew by. Konoha's atmosphere remained as peaceful and tranquil as ever; only in places invisible to ordinary eyes could one sense the efforts people were pouring toward the future.
"Bleh~!"
Wiping the sweat from her forehead with the back of her wrist, Hinata glared at the path of glowing coals laid out before her. Just moments ago, she'd walked the entire stretch on her hands—and aside from a dusting of black ash, her palms showed none of the charred, ruined flesh from when she'd first started. In those early days, she'd been peeling layers of scorched skin and tissue off her hands every single session.
She studied her palms. A flush of angry humiliation crept over her. She could hardly believe she'd actually stuck with this absurd training regimen and completed it. It had cost her half a month of precious time, and she'd burned through virtually all the money she'd saved up.
Setting aside a small portion for charcoal costs, eighty percent of her funds had gone to medicine. The Nara clan's ingredients were excellent but far from cheap, and her insistence on a fair competition meant she'd volunteered to cover Sasuke and Naruto's medicine costs as well.
The net result: Hinata could now channel chakra to her palms and touch burning coals without injury. It wasn't just the chakra's protective effect—the skin of her originally fair, delicate palms had thickened considerably, looking less like the hands of a teenage girl and more like the calloused, work-worn hands of a middle-aged laborer.
"My whole plan is shot to hell."
Rising to her feet, Hinata's brow spiked with anger. Her right hand slammed flat against a nearby tree trunk, as though wishing it were Naruto's or Sasuke's skull.
Her original plan for this half-month had been to wrap up filming on The Fox's Tale, while simultaneously advancing her Explosive Point technique to the point where it could punch through solid rock. Instead, she'd let her temper get the better of her—leaving both Sasuke and Naruto unsupervised for two full weeks, abandoning her Explosive Point training, and all she had to show for it was the completion of this ridiculous regimen.
"If this isn't Sasuke and Naruto's protagonist aura dragging my IQ down, then I must've been kicked in the head by a donkey."
Spitting the words through gritted teeth, Hinata resolved to immediately cut off the supply of medicine to those two idiots and check whether they'd completed their respective training. If not, she'd mock and humiliate them thoroughly. If they had, she'd drag them straight back to filming. At the very least, she needed to earn back the nearly eight hundred thousand ryō she'd burned through.
But as she turned to leave, her gaze happened to sweep across the tree she'd just struck. Her feet stopped dead.
Konoha's trees were all premium timber species. This particular one was sandalwood—renowned for its hardness, the kind of wood that shuriken could barely nick. Yet there on its trunk, hard enough to serve as a wooden shield, was a clear handprint.
Without question, it was the mark Hinata had left in her moment of anger. The imprint sank roughly four millimeters into the wood, and its edges bore a faint scorched-yellow discoloration, as if they'd been kissed by flame.
"...Could it be?"
Hinata's pupils contracted. Leaving an impression this deep and crisp in sandalwood wasn't a matter of brute force alone. Sandalwood's hardness and natural elasticity combined in a way that required extremely concentrated, localized impact. If the burst of force wasn't precise enough, the wood's overall give would simply absorb it—no mark, regardless of how much raw power was applied.
In other words, Hinata's palm strike had punched clean through both the elasticity and the hardness thresholds of sandalwood. Under normal circumstances, achieving that required a heavy iron hammer, at minimum.
She turned back, set her stance, drew a sharp breath, and drove her right palm into the sandalwood trunk again. A fresh handprint appeared instantly—and because her focus was sharper this time, it sank nearly a full centimeter deep.
No doubt about it. This was the direct result of completing the Flame Slaughter Fist's initial training.
To protect her palms from being burned, her body had learned to habitually channel chakra to her hands. And because every session meant contact with scorching coals, her fire-natured chakra had instinctively surfaced—because the most effective defense against burning wasn't increasing your heat resistance but making yourself hotter than whatever was trying to burn you.
All of these gains had been carved into her flesh and blood through extreme agony, branded in by burn after burn. An organism's instinctive fear of pain had taught her body exactly how to fight fire—and granted it the power to do so.
"So that's how it works... Whatever nonsense I was spouting, the core idea was right all along: endure the pain, conquer the pain, and that's the true path to power!"
Comprehension dawned, and Hinata's head dipped. Then her body began to tremble—and a fit of uncontrollable laughter erupted: "Bwa-ha-ha-ha~~ Ah-ha-ha-ha~! This is killing me~! So this is the so-called fruit of effort?!"
The laughter cut off abruptly. A vicious gleam entered her eyes: "Now then! Time to see how those two bastards are coming along!"
————————
As a girl in the bloom of youth, Haruno Sakura was every bit the starry-eyed romantic. Like nearly every girl in her class, the object of her affections was the grade's most handsome, most aloof boy—Uchiha Sasuke.
This wasn't mere infatuation. Sasuke genuinely had qualities worth admiring at this age: strikingly good looks went without saying; top marks in every exam, across the entire grade, were a given; and his spotless school record—never once punished by a teacher—completed the picture. With grades, looks, and deportment all beyond reproach, it was little wonder so many girls were smitten.
Lately, however, the class heartthrob's reputation had taken a hit. The reason was simple: he'd started skipping class.
Not just the occasional afternoon, either—some days he didn't show up at all. His test scores remained impeccable, but truancy was serious business for students their age.
Predictably, a fair number of girls had begun distancing themselves from him. Sakura felt a twinge of satisfaction at the shrinking competition, even as she resented those fair-weather fans. Couldn't those airheaded groupies look past the surface? Didn't they stop to consider why Sasuke was skipping? He must be dealing with something too painful to talk about—and with no family left, he surely needed a caring, understanding girl by his side.
And wasn't this the perfect opportunity? If she could soothe Sasuke's wounded heart at his lowest point, he'd realize she was the girl who truly loved him—and understand she was his best match!
Needless to say, Sakura launched herself into a state of barely contained euphoria. After a night of being torn between restraint and fantasy, she emerged the next morning sporting dark circles and having thoroughly surrendered to her fangirl fantasies. She scrubbed up, fixed her appearance with care, prepared a love-filled bento from the best ingredients in the fridge, and—head full of rose-tinted scenarios—mustered her courage and set forth.
The Uchiha compound wasn't hard to find, though it occupied a relatively remote corner of the village, largely cut off from the outside world. The massacre that had wiped out the clan years ago still lingered in local memory as an unspeakable horror, and no one was eager to visit a neighborhood widely regarded as cursed.
Under normal circumstances, Sakura's pride would never have let her show up at a boy's house uninvited. But with her beloved potentially suffering in solitude, propriety could wait.
Following the village map through several intersections, Sakura caught sight of the Uchiha estate and took a deep breath. She debated whether to rehearse her approach first. Should she go soft and sweet—"Sasuke, I've been so worried about you~ So I came to check on you~"
Or peppy and encouraging—"Sasuke~! Don't worry, I'll support you no matter what~!"
"Ahh~ This is so embarrassing~!"
Pressing both hands to her burning cheeks, Sakura was just about to take her first step when a sour voice spoke up from nearby: "Oh my~ Well if it isn't Billboard Brow~!"
CRACK~! A massive cross-vein popped on Sakura's forehead. Without even looking, she knew exactly who that was. She turned and fired back without mercy: "Well, well~ Look who it is—Ino-Pig~ What, you wandered out of the mountains to work on your tan today?"
Standing a short distance away was a golden-haired, fair-skinned girl with a distinctly Western air—her classmate and arch-rival in the Sasuke sweepstakes: Yamanaka Ino!
"Hmph~! I'm not in the mood to fight with you today~ I'm here to visit poor Sasuke. One bite of my special love-filled bento and he'll bounce right back~ So take your billboard forehead and scram, you she-baboon~!"
Ino brandished her own exquisitely presented bento box, clearly operating on the same premise as Sakura. The latter snorted in disdain: "What a coincidence~ I've also made a pick-me-up bento~ Sasuke will definitely choose mine!"
"He'll definitely choose mine!"
"Mine!"
"Mine!"
"MINE!!"
BONK—foreheads collided, and the two girls locked eyes with electricity practically arcing between them. Then a cool voice cut through from behind: "Isn't that Ino and Sakura? What are you doing here?"
The sudden interruption made both girls whip around. When they registered the trademark white eyes, their jaws dropped in unison: "Hinata? What are you doing— Wait, don't tell me you're also into Sasuke?"
Watching the two love-struck idiots interrogate her in perfect sync, Hinata's mouth twitched. But a heartbeat later, a peculiar glint of amusement flickered through her gaze.
That's right~ It's about time to expand the crew. These two look like perfect candidates~
"Don't get the wrong idea~! I have zero interest in that stone-face! I'm here to collect a debt!"
Hands jammed in her pockets, Hinata dropped the fake-gentle act and donned the expression of a merciless bill collector: "That guy owes me roughly four hundred thousand ryō, and he still hasn't paid! I'm here for my money."
"F-four hundred thousand ryō?!"
Ino and Sakura were visibly staggered. Even for adults, that was a staggering sum—let alone students with no income. Their imaginations immediately spiraled into worst-case scenarios: debtors driven to suicide, forced from their homes and cast into the streets...
"Hold on! How could Hinata possibly have that kind of money to lend Sasuke? You're just a student like us!"
Shaken by a mental image of Sasuke dangling from a noose, Sakura forced herself to calm down and pointed an accusing finger at Hinata: "Did you use some underhanded trick to swindle Sasuke?!"
"Sakura~ Watch your mouth. Whatever else I may be, I'm still the eldest princess of the Hyuga clan. How could an ordinary person like you possibly understand?"
Hinata blew casually on her right fingernails. The Hyuga name truly was a convenient shield—perfect for moments like these.
"What Hyuga clan— mmph~!"
Sakura was about to retort, but Ino—face gone pale—clapped a hand over her mouth. Restraining Sakura with one arm, Ino scrambled to appease Hinata: "Um~ Hinata, please don't mind Sakura's rambling. She's just too worried about Sasuke and doesn't know much about the Hyuga clan..."
"Don't worry about it. But Sasuke probably can't pay this back anytime soon. I don't know what he spent the money on, but if he can't settle up, I'll have no choice but to report him to the Detention Bureau and have him locked up for a few days."
Hinata delivered this with perfect gravitas while carefully observing both girls' reactions. Konoha did indeed have a Detention Bureau for resolving disputes and administering punishments. An outstanding debt of four hundred thousand ryō that couldn't be repaid was absolutely grounds for incarceration and forced labor until the balance was cleared.
"Huh? But~ Hinata, he's our classmate after all. Isn't that a bit..."
Ino's social awareness clearly exceeded Sakura's. She understood the Hyuga clan's standing, and her tone had turned meek. She'd never had much contact with Hinata before, so being confronted with this debt-collector persona left her thoroughly outmatched.
"I... I have some savings I could give you. It's only about two thousand ryō, but... please don't have Sasuke locked up? I'll... find a way to help him pay it off..."
Sakura caved as well, stammering out her offer. Ino, unable to watch her rival grovel alone, steeled herself: "I... I have about three thousand ryō saved up. Hinata, can you cut us a break?"
"That's really not going to work... We may be classmates, but five thousand ryō against four hundred thousand? That's a huge gap. Besides, it's not like you two have any way to earn that kind of money, right?"
Twirling a strand of hair by her neck, Hinata let a hint of enticement slip into her voice: "How about this—if you really care about Sasuke and want to help him at all costs... I happen to have a way to earn money quickly. And if you do it, it counts as working for me~ In return, I'll promise not to hand Sasuke over to the Detention Bureau until the debt is cleared. What do you say?"
The offer radiated danger. Ino and Sakura both felt it—this classmate, once so soft in their memories, now felt like something terrifying. Whatever work Hinata was offering, it certainly wasn't going to be anything respectable.
"Alright... I... I'll do it~!"
But driven by a feeling she couldn't quite name, Sakura bit down and forced out the words. Her body was trembling, but her voice carried an unmistakable resolve.
"Sakura!"
Ino was clearly alarmed, but one look at those determined eyes made her pause. She sighed: "Then... I agree too."
"Excellent~~ With both of you, we'll clear the debt much faster~"
Hinata smiled. She was fairly confident she could now exploit these two genuine actresses to her heart's content.
"Let's go then~ We have a lot to do today."