Chapter 249: The Third Round
The good times in the Chat Group had a way of swallowing hours without warning. Ryū had no idea how long he'd been trading messages with that collection of unhinged group members, but when he finally pulled his awareness out, he found it was already the following morning.
7:00 AM. The third-round tournament stage was scheduled to begin at 8:30 and run until roughly 6:30 in the evening.
By comparison, a tournament arc in the One Piece world would take the better part of a month to reach a conclusion. Those people had constitutions built for endurance — take away someone like Enel, who'd never had a proper instructor, and the rest were almost universally physical close-combat specialists. Two evenly matched fighters could trade blows for an hour or two without either showing much strain. The stronger the combatants, the longer it went — ten days and nights without stopping was not theoretically impossible. Large health pools, excellent stamina, regeneration that a meal could restore by half. Human-shaped HP tanks, every one of them.
Shinobi in the Naruto world were a different animal entirely.
High-damage glass cannons, essentially — assassins who could cast spells, or mages who could go toe-to-toe. Ten days and nights of continuous combat was a fantasy. Ten minutes to half an hour was enough to drain a chakra system to empty.
Which was not to say ninjutsu wasn't extraordinary in its own right. The Substitution Technique alone was so broken in the early part of the story that the author had apparently recognized the problem and quietly shelved it by the later arcs.
Ryū brushed his teeth, washed his face, took a quick shower, and by 7:30 was walking to the Hokage Building dining hall to extract a free breakfast. He normally ate once a day — one meal sufficient for three — but he was up early for once, and failing to capitalize on that seemed wasteful. It wasn't as though it cost him anything.
The kitchen staff had long since gotten used to him. After two weeks of near-daily visits, and given his unmistakably unusual relationship with the Fourth Hokage, the sight of this particular outsider walking through the dining hall doors produced not resistance but immediate, enthusiastic greeting.
"Lord Ryū!"
"Lord Ryū!"
"Lord Ryū!"
Back and forth, the same four syllables, from every corner of the kitchen. Ryū found it faintly exhausting, but responded politely and settled into a seat.
He hadn't been sitting long when someone took the seat beside him. He glanced over.
Minato.
Same outfit as always. Which raised a question Ryū had been vaguely curious about — did the man keep an entire wardrobe of identical sets, or had he simply not washed this particular one? Given the summer heat, the latter seemed like a hygiene concern. Konoha was not a village with any shortage of water.
On the other hand, there was no detectable smell. So Ryū filed it under "probably owns many identical outfits" and moved on.
Minato's breakfast was the same standard fare as any other shinobi's — no special treatment, nothing elaborate. He turned toward Ryū with his customary warm expression.
"I genuinely wanted to thank you for coming the other day. Without your presence, I honestly might not have been able to hold certain people in check. It hasn't even been a year since I became Hokage."
Ryū stirred his congee with a spoon, watching the slow spiral of the broth.
"As you can see, I just came for the food. But since you're grateful — I'll accept that gratitude without embarrassment. In fact, if you feel like you owe me a favor, I'd be even happier than I already am."
Minato's mouth twitched.
He had genuinely, in his entire life, never encountered a person with this level of unabashed nerve.
Well — except for his teacher Jiraiya, who made a practice of peering over bathhouse walls and calling it research for his novels. That particular brand of shamelessness was its own category.
The other two Sannin, by comparison, were reasonably normal. Except that Orochimaru had gone down a very dark road, and Tsunade had developed her blood phobia. Which meant the most normal one of the three was, objectively, his gloriously shameless, relentlessly lecherous teacher.
What Ryū had just said and how he'd said it — the thickness of that face — was roughly comparable.
Minato smiled anyway. "You're right that I owe you a favor. Actually — two favors. The time before last, if you hadn't acted, Konoha might have lost half its people. My wife. My newborn child. They might not have survived."
He meant it completely. Even if Ryū's intervention had been incidental in both cases, the debt was real.
Ryū swallowed a steamed bun without chewing — Life Return made that perfectly fine — and set down his spoon.
"Given that you owe me two favors, and that we've shared a few meals at this point — let me offer you a small piece of advice. A reminder, call it."
"Don't get too attached to the question of power and position. Use whatever time you have to work on your actual strength. Because in the not-too-distant future… at your current level, protecting Konoha? Protecting the people you care about? That's not going to be possible."
Minato's pupils contracted slightly.
This wasn't an abstract comment about politics. It touched on Konoha — and on his family.
That was enough to sharpen his full attention.
"Ryū-kun… what exactly are you referring to?"
Ryū didn't answer the question.
Minato sat with the silence, turning over what had been said. He knew — understood at a bone-deep level — that someone of Ryū's caliber didn't say things like that without reason. Which meant Ryū knew something.
But if Ryū had chosen not to elaborate, pressing him was not an option. It wasn't in Minato's nature to compel anyone. And more practically —
He couldn't win a fight against him. Which was the more relevant factor.
The minutes passed. As 8:30 approached, Ryū pushed back his chair and stretched with a long, unhurried yawn.
"Right… supposed to be at the tournament stage. I am technically a judge. Standing someone up is bad form, and standing up a room full of minors carries an especially specific kind of guilt."
He took a few steps toward the door, then paused.
"Just know that what I said has no downside for you. The better Konoha develops, the more comfortable my life here gets. As for the details — even if I spelled it out, you probably wouldn't believe me."
That was true enough. The future was not the sort of thing people took on faith when described plainly to them. And explaining it properly would take time and energy Ryū was not inclined to spend. He had a carefully cultivated salted-fish reputation to maintain — one that placed him comfortably alongside Kizaru, Yukari, and Umaru in the Chat Group's all-time rankings.
His figure disappeared from the dining hall, leaving Minato alone with his thoughts.
Minato sat there for some time, turning the words over.
He couldn't make sense of them.
Eventually he let out a quiet breath. "Ryū-kun really is impossible to read… But if that's how it is, I'll take it to heart. I can't afford to let my abilities stagnate."
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