One hour later, under Megumi Fushiguro’s bewildered stare, Toji had cleaned every last scrap of garbage from the house.
He stretched, rolled his shoulders, and scanned the room.
Then he shook his head.
The rental was far too cramped.
He swept his arm in a grand arc, his voice booming loud enough to rattle the roof tiles right off their moorings.
“Megumi!
Starting today, we’re leaving this decaying cage behind!
We’re moving!
Somewhere full of sunlight, where you can hear birds singing, where you can practice running on your hands anytime you damn well please!”
He bent down and pinched a leftover cup of instant noodles between two fingers, lifting it like evidence at a crime scene.
His face was stricken.
“And this!
Poison that strangles youth!
From now on, our table has protein and more protein and nothing else!
I’m going to build you muscles just like mine — muscles that can punch fate itself to pieces!”
Megumi Fushiguro was getting a little dizzy from his old man’s sudden eruption of manic energy.
He instinctively shrank back a step.
The man’s scent had changed.
Not the sour reek of cheap alcohol and stale tobacco anymore.
This was sweat baked under a blazing sun, scorching, unfamiliar, and honestly a little frightening.
“Step one!” Toji stomped the floor.
The boards let out a pained groan.
“Start-up capital!
For the blazing youth of this father-son duo, your dad stashed away quite a bit of secret savings back in the day!”
He plunged headfirst into the sea of garbage and started tearing the place apart.
“Under the tatami?
Nope.
Nothing here but moldy dried cockroaches…”
“Behind the TV?
Not here either.
What the hell are these expired horse-racing tickets?”
“In the mattress!
Right — it’s gotta be in the mattress!”
Toji grabbed the mattress, which reeked of something deeply suspicious, and flipped it clean off the frame.
With a crash, what spilled out wasn’t stacks of ten-thousand-yen bills.
It was a heap of gaudy, multicolored slips of paper.
Final notices from debt collectors.
Unpaid tabs from pachinko parlors.
Warning letters from loan sharks.
Pawnshop receipts.
Every single piece of paper bore the name “Toji Fushiguro”, a ledger of his shamelessness and ruin.
The manic grin on his face slowly froze.
What were these?
Ah.
Right.
The wreckage left behind by that scumbag.
The bastard who’d pawned his wife’s keepsakes to feed a gambling habit.
Who’d lost his son’s child support money at the racetrack.
For 15 years in Konoha, he’d trained every single day past the point of breaking.
Sweat was his only currency.
He’d forgotten that money worked differently out here, that it could be bled away, squandered, owed in mountains before you even noticed.
Just then, the wooden door, kicked off its hinges earlier and barely propped back in place, creaked open a crack.
A brown-haired girl, a little older than Megumi Fushiguro, poked her head inside.
She was holding a bag of discounted bread.
Her face was cautious.
The moment her eyes found the man ransacking the apartment, that caution snapped straight into fear.
His stepdaughter.
Tsumiki Fushiguro.
She bristled instantly.
She shoved the bread behind her back, bolted past Toji, and planted herself in front of Megumi Fushiguro.
Her thin arms spread wide, shielding her little brother with everything she had.
“You…
what are you doing back here?” Tsumiki’s voice shook, but her eyes didn’t waver.
“We don’t have any money!
Not a single yen!
Don’t you dare try to take anything else from this house to go gambling!”
Her words stabbed straight into Toji’s chest.
He looked at this girl.
This small girl, throwing her tiny body in front of her brother, staring him down with wariness and hatred that no child her age should know how to carry.
He wanted to explain.
To tell them he wasn’t the same man anymore.
To drag out the soul that had been re-forged by the Will of Fire and lay it bare in front of them.
“N-no…
that’s not it, Tsumiki…” His voice came out rough and dry.
“Dad…
I just wanted to…”
“Wanted to what?
Sell us off again?”
Tsumiki’s eyes went red.
Her voice cracked.
That sentence hit the crown of Toji’s skull like a thunderbolt.
Sell them off.
Right.
The scumbag’s memories surged back up.
Before he’d taken the Star Plasma Vessel job, he really had turned that idea over in his head.
Take his son, the boy with Zenin clan blood in his veins, and sell him back to the very family Toji himself despised.
A clean transaction.
Enough money to disappear and live easy.
In his children’s hearts, he had already long been the kind of man who would actually do that.
“I…”
Toji opened his mouth.
His throat felt packed with lead.
Not a single word came out.
His towering frame, pinned under the watchful stares of two small children, looked absurd.
Clumsy and ridiculous in a way no amount of physical power could fix.
“Big sis.” Megumi Fushiguro had been quiet the whole time.
Now he spoke, his voice flat and even, like he was reading from a report.
“He can’t take any money.”
He raised his head.
Those green eyes, the same shade as Toji’s, were still as a pair of dry wells, deep and unreadable, looking straight at his father.
“Because you didn’t just lose everything we had.
You also racked up a massive debt at the black-market racetrack.
Last week, two guys showed up at the door to collect.
They didn’t look friendly.”
Reality hit like a punch heavier than Madara Uchiha’s Susanoo.
Square in the face.
No dodging it.
He’d thought: I’m back.
I have the Eight Gates.
I can be a hero.
Save my family.
Fix every mistake.
He’d forgotten that heroes have to clear their debts before the story starts.
His were already astronomical.
He looked down at his own hands.
Knuckles thick with calluses.
Fists that could crack stone, that had once battered the legendary Madara Uchiha himself, that could go toe-to-toe with the strongest jujutsu sorcerer alive.
These hands couldn’t produce a single bill to buy his kids milk.
He couldn’t hold it together anymore.
The vile memories of his past life, the Sorcerer Killer, cheap and efficient and utterly without honor, collided with the soul hammered into shape by 15 years of Konoha’s Will of Fire.
The crash was violent and total.
The oath to protect the people beside you.
The reality of abandoning a wife and children.
The passion of burning youth.
The rot of gambling it all away.
“BWAAAAA—!”
His knees buckled.
He dropped hard onto the cold floor.
The man who’d been roaring about smashing fate with the iron fist of youth was now on his hands and knees, pounding the floor over and over, each impact a dull and muffled thud.
“I’m sorry…
I’m so sorry to you both…
I’m sorry to your mother who’s gone…”
Scalding tears broke loose again, mixing with snot and dust, cutting two wretched trails down his face.
He remembered the end.
His wife’s hand in his.
Her eyes full of hope as she asked him, begged him, to take care of their two children.
He had failed her.
Completely.
Utterly.
No part of it left to argue with.
Megumi Fushiguro and Tsumiki Fushiguro had both gone still.
In everything they remembered, this man was cold.
Short-tempered.
Or simply gone.
They’d seen him drunk.
They’d seen him lose everything and take it out on the furniture.
But they had never, not once, seen him cry like this.
This raw.
This total.
“Dad…” Toji wrenched his head up.
Tears all over his face.
But in the wreckage of it, something burned.
“…will pay all of this back with the sweat of youth.
A hundred times over.
A thousand.”
The flame in his eyes didn’t flicker.
“I swear it.
I’ll earn money the right way, honestly, with my head held up.
With these two hands, I will build you a future worth living.
This is my nindo.
A father’s nindo.”
He didn’t notice.
While he was down there, wailing and beating the floor, something outside had moved.
In the shadow of a telephone pole beyond the window, a black speck shifted.
Slow and silent.
A sinister, viscous thread of cursed energy, thick with malice, was spreading through the air, creeping unseen toward this battered little rental.
The Time Vessel Association’s retaliation was coming.
Far faster than he had ever imagined.
➤ Next: The Iron Fist of Youth, For the Sake of Protecting His Children!