In the morning at the Hamura Estate
After waking up and freshening up, Naruto walked out to the training ground. Ryu and Toshiro were already there, locked in a fierce physical endurance competition.
At the east end of the compound, Akihiro was doing his regular [Earth-sensing] training, barefoot on the grass and waiting for Kohinata. Ryu sensed him and Kaori coming a moment before the gate clicked open. They stepped through, offered a brief greeting to Ryu, and headed straight for their training partners to continue the advanced Yang Chanka control training they had started yesterday.
Ryu and Toshiro slowed down and walked up to Naruto.
"You're doing running again," Naruto said.
"Morning," Ryu said, jogging past him with Toshiro to start the next lap.
Naruto turned. "Hey—"
"Come run with us."
"I don't want to run again." His voice pitched upward, hovering near a whine. "Everyone is always doing jutsu stuff, and I keep running and running. It's boring and exhausting."
Ryu stopped. Toshiro halted a pace beside him.
Ruy turned around and looked at Naruto properly and thought, "Maybe it's time."
"Fine," Ryu said. "Finish your laps. After that, real training begins."
Naruto blinked. "Really? But can we skip running?"
"Physical conditioning is a daily task… It doesn't stop because you start other kinds of training." He paused. "So … finish your laps, then we train properly."
Toshiro offered an encouraging nod and said, "Give it up… he himself never skips physical training… in a few days, you will also be accustomed to it… see you soon."
Toshiro followed Kohinata to join his training team.
Ryu fell into a jog at Naruto's pace—slower than his own rhythm—but that was the point. Running alone was a punishment, but running with someone was training.
They ran. Naruto pumped his short arms with an exaggerated effort and looked up at Ryu every thirty seconds or so, as though checking if he was still there.
After Naruto finished his laps and his breathing had settled from desperate to merely annoyed, Ryu sat down across from him on the grass.
"Chakra… do you know what it is?" Ryu said.
Naruto straightened. "Right. I know about chakra."
"Tell me what you know," Ryu asked.
Naruto opened his mouth. A pause followed. "It's... the stuff. The ninja stuff. That you use for jutsu."
"Technically accurate," Ryu said. "As accurate as vegetables are good food... do you agree?"
Naruto scrunched his nose in immediate disgust. "Vegetables are terrible!"
Ryu replied, "So is your explanation, even though it is true."
Ryu spent a moment thinking about how to approach this. He had explained chakra theory to academy students, to medical apprentices, and to adults with years of basic training who still had foundational misconceptions baked in so deep that correcting them took weeks. Explaining chakra theory to a four-year-old who viewed ramen as a personality trait presented a distinct challenge.
"You know that warm feeling when you eat something hot — when you feel it go from your throat down to your stomach?"
"Like ramen?"
"Yes. Like ramen." Ryu kept going before Naruto could elaborate on this at any further length. "Your body moves that warmth outward. Through your stomach. Chakra works the same way. It lives inside you, quiet, until you move it on purpose. Most people never learn to do that. Ninjas do."
Naruto nodded, which could have meant anything.
"Chakra comes from two places," Ryu said. "Physical energy—the kind you build by running, training, and doing push-ups… And spiritual energy is built through experience, spiritual growth, and meditation.
"What's spiritual energy?"
"Your focus. Your will. The part of you that decides to do something and actually means it."
Naruto chewed on this for a moment. "So if I run more, I get more chakra?"
"You get more of the physical half," Ryu said. "But control still has to be built. Every jutsu—even the simplest ones—requires you to move that chakra on command to where you want, in the amount you want and in the form you want." Ryu paused. "That is chakra control. Before anything interesting happens, we build that first. as without it, all the higher-level training is useless."
Naruto's eyes sharpened. "Is this again the boring stuff?"
"Yes," Ryu replied instantly, not lying about it.
"No." Naruto crossed his arms. "I've watched Big Sister Kaia and Brother Akihiro do the sitting-still-and-breathing thing. They just sit there for hours doing nothing. It looks boring."
"They are doing something even if it looks boring," Ryu said. "They are moving their chakra."
Ryu stood up and walked to the nearest tree and stepped onto the vertical surface of the trunk without using hands or tools. He walked six paces up, turned, walked back down, and landed on the grass.
Naruto had not moved. His mouth was wide open.
Naruto asked, "How did you do that?"
"That is a chakra control exercise in itself," Ryu added. "That is the basic stuff that comes after the boring stuff."
Silence.
Naruto stared at the tree. Then at Ryu. Then at the tree again. His arms had uncrossed at some point without him noticing.
He could have shown Naruto the [Rasengan]. That would have properly ended the conversation. But that jutsu was meant to be given by Jiraiya. That man's lineage has or will shape three generations of this family. Ryu was not going to be the hand that broke that line.
"I want to learn that," Naruto said.
"You will. Once you have the ability to control your chakra, you will be ready to learn this." Ryu sat back down. "So finish the boring stuff first?"
Naruto sat down so fast he nearly pitched forward onto his knees. "I'll finish this soon," he said. "And then I go straight to learning to walk on a tree like that."
Ryu walked Naruto through the mechanics, which were simplified to their core. Focus inward. Find the warmth. Move it — not push, not force, but guide.
Naruto tried.
He squeezed his eyes shut, pressed his fists against his knees, and vibrated slightly with effort. Ryu watched and detected nothing from him. He tried again. And again. After the fifth attempt, Naruto breathed out and looked at his own hands like they had personally failed him.
"I can't feel anything," Naruto said.
"I'm not surprised," Ryu said. "You've never actually felt your own chakra move before, have you?"
"Yes, I have!"
"No, you haven't. And because it's your first time trying to actually find it, it will take time. Or I have to guide you and make you feel chakra."
Naruto looked back at his hands, less betrayed now, more focused.
Ryu thought, "A simple chakra control exercise will not mess up the original timeline. Naruto was too stupid to use the advantage of proper control without explicit guidance—just as he wouldn't realise the memory-transfer advantage of shadow clones for years. This version of him just wanted to climb a tree."
Ryu sighed. "I'll help."
He moved around behind Naruto and placed one hand flat against his back, between the shoulder blades.
Ryu let his own chakra move first — slow, controlled, and clean circulation. Ryu had done this before for other kids in his house, so he was confident.
Ryu synchronised his chakra and pushed it gently into Naruto's chakra pathways.
"Feel that," Ryu said. "That warmth is moving. That is what it feels like from the inside: moving chakra is always different from still chakra, and it feels warmer."
Naruto's back straightened slightly. He had gone still in the particular way of someone who had stopped performing concentration and actually begun concentrating.
Ryu felt the pathways begin to respond. It was partial and uncontrolled, but there was a faint, tentative resonance of a system recognising the signal being sent to it. Their chakra synced at the margin, his guiding Naruto's toward motion, and it was working. He was starting to feel the boy's chakra actually move.
"Not bad at all."
Then something changed.
It was not gradual. There was no preamble and no slow gathering. It arrived the way pressure arrives before a cracked seal fails — at the threshold, and then past it in the same instant.
A second presence pushed upward from somewhere deep inside the small body in front of him, and it was dense and enormous and very, very cold.
It was not Naruto's chakra.
The hairs on Ryu's arm rose. His palm was still flat against Naruto's back. He did not pull it away, but every medical instinct he had informed him simultaneously that he had just sent a signal to something he had not intended to contact.
"Shit…" Ryu said.
Ryu had already calculated the probability of this happening, but it was so low Ryu dismissed it. Ryu was sure that Minato must have safeguards in place to prevent young Naruto from wandering into the cage of the beast inside him or causing a ripple in the Eight Trigrams Seal.
Ryu thought, "I did not see that coming… What have I done…"
The ANBU operatives from two different teams shared a perimeter. One team belonged to the Hokage's permanent rotation for Ryu; the other was the protective detail assigned to Naruto. Today, both were present because their mission objectives were in the same place.
They had watched the morning unfold without expectation. The older child guided the small blond boy's training attempts with patience. Nothing was alarming … Then the foreign chakra arrived suddenly.
It was dense and dark, an evil pressure that neither team had felt before. The ANBU stationed there were merely to monitor; they possessed no suppression seals and no protocols to handle the weight of a tailed beast's chakra pressing upward through a containment seal.
Both teams of ANBU operatives froze in paralysing fear.
The terrifying sensation rippled across the entire estate. Heads turned sharply. Inside the main house, Dan stopped dead in his tracks.
Near the training grounds, Kohinata and Kaori went entirely still, their faces paling as they recognised exactly what that monstrous pressure meant. Beside them, Akihiro—whose sensory perception was far sharper than the other children's—frowned and tilted his head, simply wondering what this sudden, heavy feeling was.
Below, on the training ground, the Ryu had gone quiet. His hand was flat against Naruto's back, and for a moment neither of them moved.
The words he said moments ago were not loud.
In the silence over the training ground, they heard it clearly. These are the words that are spoken when something has gone wrong— "Ohh Shit".
A/N:
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