"Yo! The whole crowd's here. Heh—Boss, I brought my student along."
The moment Jiraiya spoke his first line from the doorway, Erina and the other girls in the restaurant turned their heads away as one.
Erina even scoffed!
Their dislike of him couldn't have been plainer. The disgust his behavior had stirred up the night before clearly wasn't going to fade any time soon.
After greeting Yuto, Jiraiya's eyes drifted, of course, toward the girls, and that faintly sleazy smile crept back onto his face.
"Oh, the girls are here too. Good evening, everyone!"
Not one of them answered and the moment turned a little awkward.
Luckily, Jiraiya was used to it. The thick skin he'd built up over the years was more than enough for something this small.
His student beside him, though, couldn't take it.
The boy had spiky blond hair and a ninja forehead protector tied across his brow.
The mark stamped on it was the Konoha symbol Jiraiya had mentioned before. The most striking thing about him was the six whisker-like lines on his face, which held Yuto's attention for an extra second.
As for the boy's name, Yuto already knew it—Jiraiya had let it slip while drinking here the night before.
Uzumaki Naruto.
And right now, Naruto's face was full of anger and embarrassment.
He rounded on Jiraiya and burst out at once.
"Argh! Pervy Sage! What are you even doing?! Damn it, this is so embarrassing!"
His slightly hoarse voice carried a heap of frustration—the outburst of a teenage boy was still a loud thing.
Jiraiya, however, didn't care in the least about his student's reaction.
He spread his hands, his face full of scorn and helplessness.
"Tch. You brat! All you know how to do is make noise. And call me teacher—not Pervy Sage! Can't you show me a little respect in front of all these people? I knew I shouldn't have brought you here."
As he spoke, he brought his fist down on Naruto's head.
With a solid thwack, a bump swelled up on the spot—the kind that looked painful just to see.
"Ow!!! That hurts, damn it!!!" Naruto clutched his head and howled with grief and rage, but Jiraiya simply ignored him and walked straight to the counter, sitting down like a man ready to eat.
Behind him, Naruto followed and took the next seat, muttering curses under his breath.
Yuto watched the odd pair and couldn't help being amused.
He could see the fondness buried under all the arguing.
Beyond teacher and student, the two of them felt more like friends.
"What would you like to order?" Yuto asked with a smile.
"Bring me some snacks to go with a drink, and plenty of that mead from last night. I've been thinking about it since yesterday." Jiraiya rubbed his stomach, his face full of longing.
Beside him, Naruto showed no interest at all, the boy didn't much care for alcohol.
Yuto nodded to show he'd noted it, then asked, "And what would you like for your main meal?"
The moment he finished, the two of them answered at the same time.
"Two bowls of ramen."
"I want ramen!"
Jiraiya's steady voice and Naruto's eager one overlapped.
"You're the student—don't cut off your teacher like that!"
"Then act like a proper teacher!"
The two started bickering again, enough to make anyone wonder if the closeness from a moment ago had been an illusion.
Yuto laughed to himself.
"So two bowls in all?" he asked again.
"Right. One for me, one for this idiot. Oh—and make both large. Two extra eggs in each, and plenty of narutomaki." Jiraiya added it easily.
Beside him, Naruto crossed his arms and nodded along in silence, his face rather serious, even muttering under his breath.
"That's right, that's right. Exactly like that!"
His quiet self-talk reached Yuto's ears and earned him another glance.
Then Yuto looked at Jiraiya too, and couldn't help feeling it: these two really did get along.
Once the order was set, Yuto went to the kitchen and got started on the ramen.
While he was at it, he made two simple side dishes and had Tohru bring them out.
Before the noodles were ready, Jiraiya was already eating snacks and drinking, his rough face going a little red from the mead.
Naruto kept up a steady stream of complaints beside him, and Jiraiya paid them no mind at all.
One a student grumbling nonstop, the other a teacher laughing loudly over his cup—somehow the whole scene fit together.
In the kitchen, Yuto worked on the ramen.
He turned Jiraiya's request over in his mind and thought about what kind to make.
There were countless types of ramen, and the craft behind them couldn't be captured in those two simple words.
After a few seconds, he decided.
Japanese ramen it was!
A good bowl of Japanese ramen needed a proper broth, but Yuto hadn't made one from scratch.
Luckily, he had store-bought broth packets.
They were basically concentrated broth, made to save housewives some trouble, and Yuto found them handy enough to keep around.
The taste was good too.
A concentrate produced by modern food science couldn't match broth patiently simmered by an old master who did nothing else, of course—but against an ordinary noodle shop, it was already enough to beat plenty of them.
In fact, a lot of shops out there used this same concentrate and just adjusted the flavor themselves. It was convenient, and it saved an enormous amount of work compared to simmering broth by hand.
Yuto squeezed a packet into a pot of water.
As it came to a boil, the color inside shifted toward milky white and pale yellow. He tossed in a few stalks of bok choy and several slices of winter melon, put the lid on, and left it alone.
He turned the heat down and let it simmer for a while, so the bok choy and winter melon would give more of themselves to the broth and make it richer.
He kneaded the dough, folded it, and pulled it into strands, and with a flick of his wrist the noodles shook through the air like silver threads.
Then he started a second pot of water.
The broth was meant to be poured over the noodles at the end, not to cook them—noodles still had to be boiled in plain water.
Once they were done, he lifted them out and rinsed them in cold water before setting them aside.
That tightened the noodles and gave them a firm, springy bite. It was a contested step, though.
Some people believed the rinse washed away nutrients; others swore by the texture the cold water produced.
Ramen cooks argued over it all the time.
After taking out the noodles, Yuto cracked four eggs into the pot and, with one hand, made poached eggs.
Then he set the narutomaki in a strainer and dipped it briefly into the boiling water. He took out two ramen bowls, laid the chilled noodles inside, added two eggs to each, and scattered the softened narutomaki on top.
Then he lifted the lid off the broth.
The bok choy and winter melon had cooked until they looked half-transparent—the winter melon especially, clear as white crystal.
He fished the pieces out with chopsticks and set them into the bowls. With that, the toppings were done.
Silver-white noodles, snow-white poached eggs, pink narutomaki, clear slices of winter melon, and bok choy.
The look of it alone was enough to make a person hungry.
The last step—pour in the broth.
Yuto scooped it up with a ladle and poured two full spoonfuls into each bowl. The faint yellow broth gave the noodles one more layer of richness.
If he had to put it into words, the bowl was like a small hot spring with noodles for a theme, every topping drifting gently inside it, each one setting off the others as naturally as anything in the world.
...
When Yuto carried the ramen out, both Jiraiya and Naruto looked delighted—though Jiraiya's reaction was calmer than Naruto's.
He was the more grown-up of the two, after all.
"It looks amazing!!!" Naruto shouted.
He couldn't wait and took a sip of the soup at once, and a look of pure contentment spread across his face, as if he'd finally been reunited with something he'd missed for a very long time!
Jiraiya slurped up a mouthful of noodles, and a pleased, satisfied look settled over him too.
"I didn't expect you to be this good at ramen either, Boss. That's a real surprise." He sighed in admiration and took another bite.
"I've been on the road with Pervy Sage for ages, and this is the first time I've had ramen this good. Ahh, I could cry!" Naruto shouted, thoroughly worked up.
There were even tears at the corners of his eyes, which caught Yuto a little off guard.
The kid really did get emotional fast!
"Hey, hey—don't make it sound like I never take you anywhere good to eat!" Jiraiya grumbled around his ramen.
"But there really hasn't been any good ramen on the road." Naruto didn't slow down for a second, though it didn't stop him from talking.
"Ahh, what am I going to do with you? Why do you love ramen this much?" Jiraiya sighed.
Naruto only grinned and didn't explain.
The two of them finished off their ramen in no time, and even drained the last drop of soup at the exact same moment.
Both lifted their bowls, and the height and angle were so alike they might have been one person.
Clunk.
Naruto set his bowl down on the counter a little too hard.
Lucky for him, it didn't break.
"Thanks for the meal!" He looked at Yuto with a bright, excited grin.
Beside him, Jiraiya's brow tightened with a hint of embarrassment. "Set the bowl down more gently! Sorry about that, Boss."
Yuto waved it off. "It's fine. When someone's happy, a little excitement is only natural."
Naruto beamed at once. "See, Boss gets it! Boss is way better than Pervy Sage! Pervy Sage doesn't know what it feels like to finally eat something you've been dreaming about!" Naruto spread his hands, and the words twisted Jiraiya's brow into a knot.
"You little brat still wet behind the ears—I'm trying to teach you some manners, idiot!"
"The one calling people idiots is the real idiot! Hmph! Pervy Sage is the idiot!"
"Ha! Sounds like you're overdue for some extra training, Naruto!"
When Jiraiya clenched his fist and turned to Naruto with a kind smile, Naruto did the smart thing and followed his instincts—he shut his mouth.
Keep going, and his ass would pay for it.
That was a lesson learned the hard way.
"But about your ramen, Boss—it's really good, but it's still a step behind old man Ichiraku's!" Naruto changed the subject.
Yuto's expression didn't shift; he calmly smile..
He'd never once thought to look down on the great people of the world.
He wasn't all-powerful, so how could he be the best at everything? That was exactly why he had to keep learning.
Naruto's words didn't trouble him.
But Jiraiya was another matter.
Naruto was young and reckless; Jiraiya was far more mature, and of course he understood how rude the boy had just been.
"Hey! You don't say something like that right to a man's face! You idiot!" Jiraiya cracked Naruto on the head again, and another bump rose.
Naruto burst into tears on the spot!
For a moment, the place turned unbelievably lively.
If Yuto hadn't stopped Jiraiya, Naruto would probably have gone home with several more bumps on his head.