Gato’s office sat above the harbor in the only building in Wave that had been repainted in the last decade, which told you most of what you needed to know about the man before he ever opened his mouth.
He was smaller than his reputation, the way most men who bought their menace instead of earning it tended to be — round-faced, expensively dressed in a country where expensive clothes were an insult, a cane he didn’t need resting against his desk like a prop he’d grown attached to.
He listened to the report from his lieutenant — Zabuza’s status unconfirmed, the hunter-nin gone quiet, the bridge still standing — with the specific, contained irritation of a man doing math on how much a mistake was going to cost him.
“Unconfirmed,” Gato repeated.
“No body recovered, sir. The hunter-nin took it. Standard collection procedure, but—”
“But you don’t actually know if my very expensive missing-nin is dead, or resting somewhere plotting how badly he’s going to make me regret the accounting on this contract.” Gato didn’t raise his voice.
He didn’t need to; he’d built an entire business model on other people being afraid of him without him having to try.
“Bring in the crew that was already moving. Pay them the premium rate. I want that bridge stopped whether Momochi’s in the ground or not, and if he shows up alive, I want enough bodies on that dock that it won’t matter which side he decides to be difficult on.”
Outside the window, past the repainted trim and the harbor he’d bled dry over three years of shipping tariffs and quiet extortion, Wave’s fishing fleet sat mostly idle at anchor — boats that couldn’t afford the fees he’d priced them into paying just to leave the dock, crews that had taken to selling what little they still caught at half the price it was worth rather than risk his collectors deciding the difference belonged to them instead.
It was, by any honest accounting, the single most profitable arrangement of his career, and the bridge was the only thing standing between him and keeping it that way indefinitely.
“And if he’s loyal, sir?”
Gato’s smile didn’t reach anywhere near his eyes.
“Loyalty’s a service I stopped paying for the day I realized fear was cheaper and lasted longer. He knows that. It’s why I hired him in the first place.” He waved a hand, done with the conversation, already turning back to the ledgers stacked on his desk — a man for whom a bridge full of desperate villagers and a swordsman’s life were both, in the end, just numbers that needed to balance.
“Get it handled.”
Back at the house, the team split for the day’s work — Kakashi taking Sasuke out for the Sharingan-focused drills he’d promised, Sakura buried in the field-medicine primer Kakashi had handed her with the flat instruction to have the first three chapters internalized by dinner, and Naruto assigned, without much discussion, to bridge-guard duty alongside two of Tazuna’s remaining crew.
The bridge itself was further along than Naruto had expected — a long spine of timber and stone reaching out over gray water, unfinished at the far end where the work had stalled every time Gato’s men made an appearance.
The workers moved with the same watchful economy he’d seen in the market, heads down, hands steady, the specific discipline of people who’d learned that panic got you noticed and getting noticed got you hurt.
Three of Gato’s men showed up an hour before the shift was meant to end — not the dozen the runner had promised yet, just an advance scouting trio, swaggering the particular swagger of men who’d never had to test whether the reputation they were coasting on was actually earned.
“Bridge work’s suspended,” the lead one announced, loud enough to carry, plainly enjoying the sound of his own authority.
“New terms. Talk to the boss if you’ve got complaints.”
One of the older workers, a man with forearms like rope and a face that had clearly had this argument before and lost it, straightened up anyway.
“We’ve got a contract with Tazuna. Nothing to do with your boss.”
“Everything in this country’s got something to do with my boss,” the mercenary said, and reached for the collar of the man’s shirt with the casual confidence of someone who’d never once had that gesture cost him anything.
Naruto was between them before the hand closed.
He didn’t move fast — not the speed he’d shown two days ago, nothing that would read as anything but a genin stepping between an adult and trouble — just close enough, present enough, that the mercenary’s hand stopped an inch short and reconsidered.
“He’s got a contract,” Naruto said, mild.
“You’ve got a boss who likes making noise more than he likes actually collecting on threats before the shinobi he’s afraid of shows up and asks him about it personally. I’d think about which of those is actually working for you today.” This chapter is updated first at novelping . com.
It wasn’t much.
It wasn’t meant to be — a mission-appropriate deterrent, not a fight worth escalating over three low-tier hires who’d fold the second real resistance showed up.
The mercenary looked at him for a long moment, recalculating, and then laughed it off with the particular ugliness of a man saving face instead of a decision.
“Cute,” he said.
“Enjoy the bridge while it’s still standing.” They left without pushing further, which told Naruto everything about how thin their actual authority ran without the numbers behind them yet to back it up.
The worker with the rope-forearms didn’t thank him exactly, just gave him a long look and went back to his measurements, which was, Naruto had learned by now, close enough to the same thing in a place like this.
Sasuke’s training with Kakashi ran long into the afternoon, and Naruto caught the tail end of it on his way back from the bridge — Sasuke on one knee in the dirt, breathing hard, the Sharingan open and unsteady in his eyes, a fresh bruise already purpling along his jaw.
“Again,” Kakashi said, not unkindly, but without softening it either.
“You’re not even using it at full speed,” Sasuke said, getting up anyway.
“No. I’m using it at the speed you need to actually learn something instead of just getting hit a lot with extra steps. There’s a difference between training and getting your face rearranged for free, and I’d like to keep affording the difference.” Kakashi’s visible eye flicked toward Naruto without any real surprise at being watched.
“Something to add?”
“Just admiring the bruise placement,” Naruto said.
“Very symmetrical. Almost artistic.”
Sasuke didn’t dignify that with anything but a flat look, which was, from Sasuke, most of the way to a laugh.
He reset his stance, jaw set, eyes locked forward, and went again — and Naruto watched him take the hit a third time, and a fourth, refusing every single time to ask for a slower pace than the one that was actually teaching him something.
It was a familiar kind of stubbornness.
Naruto recognized it from the inside.
He’s going to be a real problem for somebody someday, Kurama observed.
In the good way.
He already is, Naruto thought.
Just not for the somebody he thinks.
That night, once the fish was cleared and Tazuna had retreated to his usual chair with his usual bottle, the four of them stayed at the low table a while longer, mapping out what a dozen hired mercenaries actually meant for a bridge with one exposed approach and no cover past the halfway mark.
“Numbers favor them,” Kakashi said, plainly, no drama in it.
“Skill doesn’t. Most hired muscle folds the second the fight stops going the way they expected, which means the actual danger isn’t the twelve — it’s whoever Gato sends to make sure the twelve don’t run.”
“Zabuza,” Sakura said.
“Or worse,” Kakashi said.
“We plan for both.”
Naruto listened more than he talked, mapping the bridge’s geometry in his head the way he used to map terrain for real campaigns — chokepoints, sightlines, the places a fight would naturally funnel toward if nobody controlled it on purpose.
The landward end was the obvious pressure point, wide enough for a dozen men to spread out and force a numbers fight, but the far end, still unfinished, narrowed down to a single line of scaffolding and exposed beams — a place where numbers stopped mattering and footing started to.
He filed that away without saying it out loud, because most of what he was actually thinking started with information he had no clean way of explaining he already had. Read the latest chapters at g.com.
That evening, back at the house, Naruto found Inari sitting alone on the dock behind the property, the little clay fox turning over and over in his hands, watching the water the way people watch things they’ve decided not to hope about anymore.
Naruto sat down next to him without asking permission, close enough to talk, far enough not to crowd.
“You’re not going to tell me it’ll be okay,” Inari said, flat, like he was daring him to try anyway.
“No,” Naruto agreed.
“I don’t actually know that it will be. I know we’re going to try very hard to make it true, which isn’t the same promise, and I’m not going to pretend it is.”
Inari’s jaw tightened, the same defensive set Naruto had watched all week, the specific armor of a kid who’d built a whole personality out of not being disappointed twice.
Naruto let the silence sit for a while before he said the rest of it, the part he hadn’t planned on saying until the words were already most of the way out.
“I grew up without parents either,” he said.
“Not the same way — nobody I loved got killed in front of me for standing up to somebody with more power than they had. Mine just weren’t there at all, from the start, and the man who was supposed to look out for me mostly didn’t, not because he was cruel, just because he had a whole village’s worth of problems and I was easy to put at the bottom of the list.” He kept his eyes on the water while he said it, not on Inari, giving him room not to have to react to being looked at.
“I used to think being angry about it made me weak. Took me a long time — longer than it should’ve — to figure out the anger wasn’t the problem. Doing nothing with it was.”
Inari didn’t say anything for a long moment.
Then, quietly, not looking up from the fox in his hands: “Did it get better? Being angry?”
“It got useful,” Naruto said.
“That’s not the same as better. But it’s not nothing.”
Out past the pilings, the water had gone the color of tarnished metal with the last of the light, and somewhere across it, invisible from here, the bridge sat unfinished and waiting, and the mercenary boats Gato had paid for were already somewhere on their way toward it.
Naruto didn’t say any of that out loud.
There’d be time enough for Inari to find out exactly how bad it was going to get before it got better.
Tonight wasn’t that night.
They sat there a while longer, not talking, the fox turning over and over in Inari’s hands, and when Naruto finally got up to head back inside, Inari didn’t say thank you this time either.
But he pocketed the fox instead of leaving it on the dock, and that, same as before, was close enough to the same thing.
That was almost a whole conversation, Kurama observed, once Naruto was alone with his thoughts again.
He’s not ready for a whole conversation.
Nobody his age is ready for a whole conversation about grief.
You just leave the door open a crack and let them decide when to walk through it.
Wise, Kurama said, and then, a beat later, dryer: Suspiciously wise, for a man who used to solve every emotional problem by punching it until it agreed with him.
I contain multitudes, Naruto thought back, and went inside before Kurama could find a way to make that funnier at his expense.