Chapter 253: Single for Several Thousand Years
Crazy Diamond: Hey Wolffy-bro, don't drop the "dog" from "smug normie dog" just because you're literally a dog — without the "dog" the whole thing loses its flavor.
Roar of the Evil Dragon: Explode already! Smug normie dog! — Actually, what does "normie dog" mean?
Street-Corner Illustrator: @Roar of the Evil Dragon — Tohru-nee only arrived on Earth recently, so not knowing the slang is completely understandable.
Street-Corner Illustrator: "Normie" means someone who's living large in real life. Like what Wolffy-san described — house, car, kid, wife, mutton, savings.
Crazy Diamond: The envy is causing osmotic crisis. I also want a car, a wife, and savings!
Admiral Kizaru: This old man has a house and savings, but no wife, unfortunately~
Edward Newgate: With that face of yours… unless you somehow encounter true love, old Whitebeard suspects you'll still be unmarried at sixty.
Admiral Kizaru: Hey hey hey~ I know I'm not exactly handsome, but that's a bit harsh, isn't it~? Still single at sixty — that's a dire prognosis~
Little Sakura of the Tohsaka: Yukari-nee has been single for several thousand years though!
Admiral Kizaru: Sev— several thousand… ahem. Can't touch that one. Absolutely not~
Eternally Seventeen: Hmph! Several thousand years — absolutely not! Sakura-chan, what outrageous lies has Ran been filling your head with? I am precisely seventeen years old, which means I have been single for precisely seventeen years.
Terrible Tornado: Recovered from that awkward moment so fast — classic Yukari-senpai!
Eternally Seventeen: What? What are you talking about? What awkward moment? What happened?
RawrSoFierce: Absolutely nothing happened!
RawrSoFierce: I can vouch for this!
Kaguya-sama: Correct — nothing happened whatsoever!
Kaguya-sama: Seconded!
"…"
Ryū withdrew from the Chat Group and pushed the assorted mental noise aside. His attention returned to the platform — the intermission was over, and the five remaining competitors were about to draw lots for the bracket.
The lottery used a physical drawing box. No ninjutsu of any kind was permitted to inspect the contents — pure luck, full stop. Five lots: two red, two green, one orange. Red draws against red, green draws against green; the orange holder was the lucky bye. The implication, as Minato had presumably intended it, was that shinobi needed luck alongside skill.
The draw was over in moments.
The two red-lot holders took the stage first — both from Konoha. In fact, four of the five remaining competitors were from Konoha. The one bye was the solitary outsider. Which meant the latter rounds were essentially Konoha's internal talent facing itself, the one external competitor coasting into the top four without a match.
More evidence, if any were needed, of the depth Konoha had accumulated. No other village in the field came close.
The third round moved along with clean efficiency. As the matches progressed toward the finals, the competitors hit harder and held back less — ambition had a way of clarifying restraint out of existence.
Ryū shook his head quietly.
Why this frantic drive? Did none of them understand the value of drifting through life like a model salted fish? Take Kizaru in the One Piece world — clocking in, finding a comfortable corner to read the newspaper in, skipping work entirely since joining the Chat Group. And his power was absurd: one foot connecting with somewhere between three and four Supernovas simultaneously.
Whitebeard had claimed Kizaru could handle three of the current Yonkō at once. Ryū suspected that was Whitebeard being generous — the man had been on roughly one or two group quests, with strong rewards each time, but 1v3 against three Yonkō felt like the upper ceiling of possibility. Even if technically achievable, defeating all three versus merely outlasting them were different propositions.
Though with the Points Kizaru had accumulated, who knew what qualitative changes had taken root. The man was harder to read than his lazy exterior suggested.
Ryū let his attention drift back to the stage.
Two Uchiha, one Hyuga, one unremarkable civilian background, one outside-village talent of unknown origin. He studied the ongoing exchange. No wonder Konoha's leadership watches the Uchiha so carefully — extreme ideology, susceptibility to being manipulated, and this much foundational depth in reserve. Anyone would keep their eye on that combination.
Not that Ryū had any personal feeling about the Uchiha one way or another. No grudge, no entanglement. In all his time in Konoha, he'd crossed paths with exactly two members of the clan — Shisui, twice, fewer than twenty sentences exchanged between them, less familiar than his acquaintance with Orochimaru. And Itachi once, a single "hello senpai" answered with a nod.
Somewhere in that reflection, the match wrapped up.
Uchiha Kanmoku won again.
The second pairing concluded in similarly brisk fashion — shinobi in general were glass cannons with limited reserves, and fifteen minutes of serious fighting was already above-average endurance for the genre. The revival match followed: both previous losers back on stage, one chance to claw their way into the top four.
At this pace the whole thing ends around three or four in the afternoon, not six. Final comprehensive scoring and chūnin selection afterward — that's Minato's department.
Ryū's hands continued to produce small items from somewhere without any apparent sourcing logic. A can of iced cola at one point. A bag of chips. A grilled skewer. The snacks materialized without preamble and were consumed without ceremony.
Everyone who had been watching him wore the expression of someone whose mental model of the situation had stopped cooperating.
Hiruzen eventually pushed his reading glasses up his nose — chakra extraction from living cells having left a man in his fifties looking closer to his late sixties — and still couldn't explain the snacks. Sealed scrolls? But as far as anyone knew, Ryū had no chakra and used no ninjutsu. Had the young man recently learned something? There was still no detectable chakra signature.
The mysteries surrounding this young man are truly without limit, Hiruzen thought. Which is fortunate — if he were Konoha's enemy, our current intelligence on him would give us approximately zero chance of prevailing. And if he were attached to another village…
That was a thought Hiruzen preferred not to finish.
As it stood, Ryū living in Konoha was the optimal outcome, and Hiruzen had quietly stopped fretting about whether he represented a threat. The more useful question was: what happened if he left? The uncertainty about his relationship with whichever village he moved to — particularly if that village had existing tensions with Konoha — was the genuinely alarming scenario.
Can't read him at all. The depth of composure in someone that young is simply not natural. He doesn't move like a teenager. He moves like someone who's been alive for centuries.
Hiruzen set the thought aside.
On the platform, only two competitors remained.
The final was about to begin.
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