The screen above the world flickered once, twice, then steadied into the gold of a setting sun bleeding across a river canyon.
[Ranking Announcement — Position #3]
[Namikaze Minato — Konohagakure — The Yellow Flash]
Konoha did not cheer.
Konoha screamed.
In the Hokage Tower, Sarutobi Hiruzen set down his pipe so carefully that the ash did not even tremble in the bowl. His old hands folded on the desk. His shoulders, for the first time in three days of these broadcasts, eased a fraction of an inch.
"Third," he murmured. "Third in the world."
Behind him, Koharu exhaled like a woman who had been holding her breath since the Second War. "He earned it."
Out on the rooftops, Jiraiya was already laughing, head thrown back, white hair catching the wind. "THAT'S MY STUDENT. THAT'S MY DAMN STUDENT. WRITE THAT DOWN, WHOEVER'S WRITING THINGS DOWN."
Tsunade, two roofs over, downed her sake in one swallow. "Brat better not let it go to his head. He's already too pretty."
And in a small apartment near the Academy, a six-year-old boy with silver hair and a mask he wasn't supposed to be wearing yet sat very still on the floor, knees pulled to his chest, one visible eye fixed on the sky.
Hatake Kakashi did not blink.
He did not breathe.
He just watched the screen show his sensei's face, and his small fingers tightened around the hem of his sleeve until the fabric creased.
Sensei, he thought. They're going to show it. They're going to show that day.
The footage opened.
Not on Minato. On a bridge.
A long wooden bridge over a gorge so deep the river at the bottom looked like a thread of silver. Mist curled around the supports. The sky above was the bruised purple of a storm that hadn't decided yet whether to break.
[Third Shinobi World War — Kannabi Bridge — Final Day]
The view shifted. A camp on the Iwa side. Dozens of tents. Supply lines stretching back into the rocks. Stone-faced jōnin moving in disciplined patterns. A banner, red and gray, snapping in the wind.
Then a flicker of yellow at the edge of the frame.
Iwagakure did not see it.
Iwagakure would never see it.
In the group chat, the reactions started before the screen even cut to Minato's face.
[GROUP CHAT — WORLD RANKINGS LIVE]
Ōnoki (Tsuchikage): Turn it off.
Ōnoki (Tsuchikage): I am ordering you, on behalf of Iwagakure, to TURN IT OFF.
A (Raikage): Lmao no
A (Raikage): Sit down old man and watch the lightshow
Mei Terumī: Oh this is going to be GOOD
Mei Terumī: I've heard the stories. Never seen the footage. Pop the corn, ladies.
Rasa (Kazekage): Iwa lost a thousand men in one afternoon, correct?
A (Raikage): Allegedly
A (Raikage): Going by what's about to play I'd say UN-allegedly
Ōnoki (Tsuchikage): I will personally crush every server hosting this broadcast
System: [Servers exist outside conventional space. Please enjoy the program.]
Ōnoki (Tsuchikage): I HATE this thing
The footage moved.
Minato dropped from a tree branch onto the stone path leading to the bridge, and the wind moved with him. Blue flak jacket. White coat trailing. Three-pronged kunai in each hand, the seal-paper at the hilts catching the dying light.
His hair was the color of fresh wheat. His eyes were the blue of glacier ice. He looked, in that frozen first second, like something a temple had carved and forgotten to bring inside.
Then he moved.
A flash of yellow.
Not a man running. Not a shunshin. A flash — the kind of light you see and then realize, half a second later, that something has already happened.
Three Iwa jōnin stood at the mouth of the bridge.
Three Iwa jōnin fell, in three different directions, before the closest of them had finished turning his head.
Minato was already past them.
[GROUP CHAT — WORLD RANKINGS LIVE]
A (Raikage): OKAY
A (Raikage): OKAY I see why he's number three
Mei Terumī: That wasn't a fight. That was a SENTENCE he finished.
Rasa (Kazekage): He didn't even look at them.
Ōnoki (Tsuchikage): Those were three of my best mid-tier jōnin
Ōnoki (Tsuchikage): WERE
A (Raikage): Past tense really hits different huh
The footage did not slow.
Minato hit the bridge at a dead run, and the camp on the far side finally saw him. Horns blew. Iwa shinobi poured out of tents, hands already in seals, earth jutsu rumbling under their feet.
He threw a single kunai.
Just one. A flick of the wrist, almost lazy, the three-pronged blade spinning end over end into the heart of the camp.
It landed in the dirt next to a supply tent.
Then he was there.
Then he was twenty meters to the left.
Then he was thirty meters back, kunai in a man's throat.
Then he was at the supply tent again, and a second kunai was already leaving his hand toward the command tent, and the first kunai was being plucked out of the dirt and thrown a third time and —
The Iwa camp dissolved.
Not metaphorically. Literally. Bodies fell in patterns that made no sense to the eye, because the eye was always looking at where Minato had been, never where he was. A captain raised a hand to give an order and the hand was empty before the order finished. A genjutsu specialist began a seal and the seal was interrupted by a kunai through the wrist. A water-user opened his mouth to spit a jutsu and Minato was inside his guard, hand on his chest, gone, and the man folded down like wet paper.
The footage counted.
A small white number in the corner of the screen.
It started at zero.
It did not stop climbing for a long time.
In Konoha, on the floor of his small apartment, Kakashi pressed his forehead to his knees.
He remembered this day from the other side. He remembered the rain that came after. He remembered a cave, and a boulder, and a red eye being given to him by hands that were already going cold.
He remembered Minato arriving too late for one thing and exactly on time for everything else.
The footage had not gotten to that part yet.
It would.
He breathed in, slow, the way Rin had taught him to breathe when his chest got tight. He breathed out, slow.
Watch, he told himself. You owe him that much. Watch.
The number in the corner of the screen ticked past three hundred.
In the Iwa command tent at the back of the camp, the war-table map of the canyon was untouched. The generals around it had not had time to look up.
Minato walked between them.
One hand. One kunai. The flash of yellow inside the tent canvas like a lightning storm stuffed into a closet.
The tent stood.
The men inside it did not.
He stepped out the other side, and the bridge behind him was already wired with seal tags the camera had not seen him plant.
He made one hand sign.
The bridge came apart in a wave of paper-thin detonations, each one no louder than a hand clap, the wood unstitching itself plank by plank into the gorge below. The supports buckled. The whole span sagged, groaned, and dropped into the mist like a body lowered into a grave.
Iwa's supply line to the front, gone.
Iwa's command structure for the southern campaign, gone.
Iwa's morale, the footage would later show, gone for the rest of the war.
The screen held on Minato standing at the edge of the broken bridge, white coat moving in the updraft from the gorge, hair lifted off his forehead, three-pronged kunai held loose at his side. His face was not triumphant. It was tired. The kind of tired that has nothing to do with the body.
The number in the corner read one thousand and seventy-two.
[GROUP CHAT — WORLD RANKINGS LIVE]
Mei Terumī: I need a moment.
Mei Terumī: I am a grown woman and a future Kage and I need a MOMENT.
A (Raikage): That coat. That HAIR. The little tired sigh at the end. He's a war crime AND a romance novel.
Rasa (Kazekage): He killed a thousand men in eleven minutes.
A (Raikage): And he LOOKED GOOD DOING IT
Ōnoki (Tsuchikage): I am muting this channel
Ōnoki (Tsuchikage): I am muting this channel, I am drinking a very large drink, and I am going to bed
A (Raikage): Sleep tight old timer
A (Raikage): Dream of yellow
Ōnoki (Tsuchikage): I HATE YOU
In the Hokage Tower, Hiruzen finally allowed himself to smile, small and private. "Minato-kun," he said to no one in particular. "I think you have a son to come home to. Hurry up."
On the rooftop, Jiraiya was crying without making any noise about it, which was the most undignified Jiraiya had ever been in public, and Tsunade pretended not to see.
In the small apartment, Kakashi finally lifted his head. His one visible eye was wet. He scrubbed it on his sleeve, fast, the way a six-year-old does when he doesn't want to be caught.
"Sensei," he whispered. "They didn't show it. They didn't show that day."
The system, which heard everything, said nothing back. But the screen, when it cut away from Minato, lingered for one extra heartbeat on a younger figure standing at the edge of the camp in the footage — a boy with silver hair, mask askew, one hand clutching the wrist of a brown-haired girl who was very much alive.
Then the screen turned gold.
[Reward Distribution — Rank #3 — Namikaze Minato]
[Awarded: Tremor-Tremor Fruit — Paramyu Mythical Class]
[Origin: External World Fragment]
[Effect: Bearer gains the ability to generate, control, and direct vibrational force through any medium. Air. Earth. Water. Steel. Bone. Sufficient mastery permits the localized destruction of structures, terrain, and atmospheric pressure on a continental scale.]
[Note: Combined with Hiraishin, the bearer may now arrive anywhere on the planet and end it.]
The fruit appeared in Minato's hand mid-step on a road back to Konoha, two days out from the village, with Jiraiya nowhere in sight and the war winding down into rumors and ash. He stopped walking. He looked at the dark, knobbled thing in his palm. He looked up at the sky, which was empty and pale and offered no explanations.
He looked back down at the fruit.
"…I'm going to regret eating this, aren't I."
He bit it anyway.
The taste, the histories would later record, was the worst thing he had ever put in his mouth, and he had eaten Jiraiya's cooking for fifteen years.
The ground under his feet hummed once, deep, like a struck bell.
He kept walking.
[GROUP CHAT — WORLD RANKINGS LIVE]
A (Raikage): Did the planet just shiver
Mei Terumī: I felt that in my MOLARS
Rasa (Kazekage): What did you DO to him.
System: [Reward distributed. Ranking will continue.]
A (Raikage): Brb gonna go hug my brother and tell him I love him in case the Yellow Flash decides to redecorate the continent
Mei Terumī: Smart.
[Next: Rank #2.]
[The Sealing Card has been silent for two hundred and thirty-seven chapters.]
[The Sealing Card is about to speak.]
The screen darkened.
In a small apartment in Konoha, Hatake Kakashi finally let himself lie down on the floor, one arm thrown over his eyes, and slept for the first time in three nights.
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