Chapter 314: It's Mitarashi "Sweet Potato" Now!
None of this seemed particularly strange, honestly. Ryū's existence wasn't any kind of closely guarded secret among Konoha's leadership, so it made sense Orochimaru hadn't treated it as one either, and had no real reason to hide it from Anko.
Facing Anko's utterly disbelieving expression, Ryū simply replied, "If there isn't a second person in Konoha named Ryū, then whoever your teacher mentioned has to be me."
Once she had that confirmation, Anko couldn't help but swallow hard.
She'd heard Orochimaru mention the name "Ryū" several times before—and, notably, that this "Ryū" possessed a body Orochimaru desperately coveted, the kind of powerful physique he'd always dreamed of obtaining.
But each time he'd brought it up, Anko had clearly seen genuine wariness and apprehension flicker across Orochimaru's face.
Which meant that even Orochimaru—one of the legendary Three Sannin—didn't dare casually provoke whoever this "Ryū" actually was.
So in Anko's mind, the name "Ryū" had essentially become shorthand for "someone terrifyingly powerful." Powerful enough that even a Sannin like Orochimaru wouldn't dare cross him casually—and there couldn't be many people in all of Konoha who fit that description.
Honestly, Anko had initially assumed the "Ryū" Orochimaru spoke of was probably some middle-aged or older figure, similar to the Third Hokage—surely someone that powerful couldn't possibly be young!
But the reality in front of her completely upended that assumption. This wasn't the older figure she'd pictured at all—if anything, he looked like...
A teenager?
Or maybe a young adult?
He looked, at most, just a few years older than herself. Four or five years, maybe?
Unbelievable!
He clearly couldn't be older than twenty, and yet someone this young had somehow made a man like Orochimaru genuinely wary. That felt utterly implausible, almost impossible to process.
Managing, with some effort, to swallow down her shock, Anko pressed her lips together and said, with genuine deference, "Please forgive my rudeness just now, Ryū-senpai."
She had no real sense of exactly how powerful Ryū actually was, but if a man who'd defected from Konoha like Orochimaru held this much wariness toward him, that alone meant he had to be at least a dozen times stronger than herself.
And given that he looked to be only a few years older than her, calling him "senpai" felt entirely appropriate.
"You weren't rude at all, really—maybe just a bit on guard, that's all. Isn't it perfectly normal for a girl to stay a little wary around a stranger?"
Ryū didn't think much of Anko's supposed "rudeness" at all—in his eyes, it was nothing worth dwelling on.
It was basically the equivalent of some strange man suddenly revealing a girl's private secrets to her out of nowhere—if she felt zero wariness in a situation like that, that would be the strange part.
If not strange, then she'd have to be one of those hopelessly airheaded characters you sometimes saw in anime—the extra-clueless type. Like a certain sky-blue-haired goddess, maybe?
...No, wait, that particular character wasn't airheaded at all—she was just straight-up dim-witted.
Marginally sharper than a certain monkey-loving "monkey god," at least. Compared to that particular "monkey god," the sky-blue-haired airhead goddess actually came off looking fairly clever by comparison.
Shaking off the stray thoughts, Ryū went back to working through the grilled meatballs in his bowl. Anko, to him, was really just a minor diversion in his evening—nothing more.
Sure, he'd crossed paths with Orochimaru a handful of times, but he'd never had much real contact with that gender-swapping snake princess beyond that.
So even with Anko being Orochimaru's student, Ryū wasn't about to do anything particularly meaningful here—there was simply no real reason to.
Watching Anko happily working through her own mochi rice balls beside him, Ryū suddenly found himself recalling the middle-aged version of Anko from Boruto.
Well—"middle-aged" wasn't quite the right word for that figure. That was less a sweet bean and more of a full-grown sweet potato at this point. A big, round sweet potato, no less!
Yeah, turned out the meatball vendor had been right—girls who eat that much sugary food really do end up putting on weight eventually.
Anko in Boruto, from what Ryū recalled, had to weigh somewhere north of 150 pounds, easy.
Sure, Ryū hadn't actually watched Boruto himself, but he'd seen screenshots someone had posted online of her appearance in it, and her figure had genuinely floored him.
Glancing over now at the slim, lithe teenager sitting beside him—genuinely one of the trimmer girls among her peers, if anything—and then picturing that future sweet-potato version of her, Ryū's mouth twitched slightly.
Such a cute girl, destined to eventually turn into a giant sweet potato—that was a genuinely hard pill to swallow, no matter how you looked at it, especially for someone who cared about looks as much as he did.
Ninety-nine percent of people in this world were, at the end of the day, appearance-conscious—judging based on looks, whether they admitted it or not—and Ryū fell squarely within that ninety-nine percent himself.
So he couldn't help but offer a bit of well-meaning advice. "You should probably ease off the sweets, you know? Aren't you worried about putting on weight down the line—ending up at, what, 150, maybe even 200 pounds someday?"
Anko blinked, swallowing the bite of meatball in her mouth, the distinctive sweetness of the grilling honey lingering pleasantly on her tongue.
She shrugged it off with an easy grin. "Senpai, I'm a shinobi too, you know! I'm only in my early teens this year, sure, but I'm already a Chūnin. Regular shinobi training more than burns off whatever sugar I eat."
Ryū's eyelid twitched slightly, and he asked, mildly curious, "What if you actually did put on weight someday, though?"
She thought it over for a moment, then answered cheerfully, "Hmm...guess I'd just diet it off? A solid year of real effort, and I'd probably get back to how I look now, no problem."
Anko, meanwhile, found herself a little puzzled internally—why exactly did this Ryū-senpai keep fixating so much on whether or not she'd gain weight someday?
Wait...wait a second!
Hold up!
There's no way—could this senpai possibly...have taken an interest in her?
Back at the Academy, Anko had honestly been one of the better-looking girls in her year, with no shortage of admirers she'd turned down one after another.
She didn't usually think much about her own looks day-to-day, but every so often, catching her reflection, she did feel a small private flicker of pride about it.
Which meant this senpai, roughly her own age, and undeniably good-looking himself—could he possibly, genuinely, have taken a liking to her?!
Sure...sure, he was handsome and all, but wasn't this moving awfully fast?
Could he be one of those types who just doesn't take things seriously? Like, some kind of player?
Anko suddenly felt a small flicker of nervousness creeping in.
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