“Kid, believe in yourself.
Even without ninjutsu, you can still become an amazing shinobi!”
“Now then—let’s keep pushing your limits.
If you can’t finish, how about fifty rounds of handstands?”
“…”
Chiba narrowed his eyes at Guy, who looked thoroughly delighted with himself, and sighed quietly in his heart.
He understood Guy meant well.
But.
As a transmigrator, he understood exactly where pure taijutsu topped out.
Strong.
But only so strong.
The Eight Gates were about as far as it went, weren’t they?
And even that was just an instant of brilliance—a firework, blazing and gone in a blink against the scale of the shinobi world.
Chiba had no intention of becoming a firework.
He and Rock Lee were the same age, and if he devoted himself purely to taijutsu, no matter how hard he trained, he’d end up at Lee’s level.
And what was Lee’s level?
At the deciding battle, opening the Sixth Gate had done nothing but cheer his teacher on from the sidelines.
He’d stood there, helpless, forced to watch his master go all-out alone.
Chiba was certain that in that moment, Lee had felt something close to despair.
Chiba didn’t want to live through that.
So he understood, with total clarity, that training in taijutsu alone had no future.
But he had no choice.
Two years ago, he’d been transmigrated into the world of Naruto, and afterward discovered a sphere of light sitting somewhere in his consciousness.
Then he’d discovered he was missing the talent for nature transformation, genjutsu, and everything in that vein—he couldn’t even learn the three basic Academy techniques.
Still.
After some trial and error, Chiba had found the upside to that light.
First, his chakra control was extraordinary.
Second, his talent for taijutsu ran high, and his command over his own body and muscles was just as strong.
According to his instructors, and Guy, plenty of jōnin might not even match him in that regard.
As for the third thing—
He learned things unusually fast.
He suspected all of it was connected to the mysterious sphere of light.
And over these two years, he’d noticed the sphere seemed to be growing, little by little, as he studied and researched.
So he had to come up with something.
Sorry, Sensei Guy.
“Chiba, if your talent for ninjutsu and genjutsu is this poor, are you giving up on taijutsu too?”
Guy looked at Chiba, his face full of disappointment.
The reason he’d taken an interest in Chiba and Lee, agreeing to train alongside them, was that both boys worked hard without caring what anyone else thought of them.
But.
Two years of hard training, and now, just like that, giving up?
His resolve couldn’t be that weak.
“Sensei Guy, I’m not giving up.
I’m thinking about a different path.
Lee and I just can’t manage nature transformation—but we both have chakra, and my control is strong.
There’s no reason we can’t develop techniques that don’t rely on nature transformation at all.”
Chiba rose and kept running, breathing hard as he laid out his thinking to Guy and Lee.
“No hand seals, no nature transformation—just compressed chakra.
That should still hit plenty hard.”
“But—”
“Like this.”
Chiba held out his right hand as he spoke, and a sphere of compressed chakra gathered in his palm.
It wasn’t a Rasengan.
Just chakra compressed dense enough to do damage.
Guy glanced sideways at it—then his face went slack with shock.
This was…
A Rasengan?
No.
Not yet.
Just a plain, compacted ball of chakra.
“We run past the river all the time, and these past few days I’ve been thinking—if I take compressed chakra like this and get it spinning, like a whirlpool, it should hit even harder.”
Chiba kept talking.
That was the truth of it.
Ever since transmigrating two years ago, he’d been trying to recreate the Rasengan from the manga through his own training.
To make it look plausible, he hadn’t gone straight for the “balloon method” from the source material—instead he’d worked from the same underlying principle, spending two years quietly mastering the technique on his own.
As he spoke, he began drawing chakra into a spin.
The rotating chakra churned like a small tornado inside the sphere, while the outer shell held its shape, flawless and unbroken.
Guy said nothing for several seconds.
Then: “Have you thought about adding rotation along more than one axis?”
“Huh?
Oh!
Why didn’t I think of that!”
Chiba acted as if he’d just woken from a dream and tried it immediately—but the chakra sphere scattered apart almost at once.
He wasn’t discouraged.
He got ready to try again.
Guy’s voice turned heavy.
“Kid, this technique already exists.
It’s an A-rank ninjutsu.
It’s called the Rasengan.”
“What?
It already exists?”
Chiba looked utterly stunned.
“That’s right.
What you’ve made is identical to Lord Fourth’s Rasengan.”
Guy nodded.
Lee stood off to the side, saying nothing.
From his expression, he didn’t fully grasp what had just happened, but he was clearly floored all the same.
“This…”
“Don’t worry about it.
Sometimes two people land on the same idea, the same technique—it happens.
If your talent for nature transformation and genjutsu were better, you might have grown into a truly remarkable shinobi.”
Guy sighed.
Even without a shred of talent for ninjutsu, this kid hadn’t given up—instead he’d found a way to build techniques out of pure, untyped chakra.
That kind of mind, that kind of ingenuity…
What a waste.
“It’s nothing, Sensei Guy.
The Sage of Six Paths closed one door on me, but opened a window instead.
I should be grateful for that.
And I believe that even without nature transformation, I can still become strong!”
Chiba’s voice was firm.
Only then did Lee speak up, both envious and excited.
“Even though Chiba can’t use ninjutsu either, he worked out a technique like this all on his own—that’s amazing!”
“We’ll train in taijutsu, and we’ll train in untyped ninjutsu, and combine the two together.”
Chiba went on.
“What you’re describing is called nin-taijutsu.”
Guy offered the term.
He thought it over, and a faint smile crossed his face.
“All right.
Whatever else, taijutsu is still the foundation.
Let’s keep training!”
“Yes, sir!”
The three of them returned to their grueling regimen, though each carried his own private thoughts now, and the mood that followed, however hard they trained, had gone a little quiet.
Not until dusk did the three of them finally part ways.
Chiba returned to the housing the village had assigned him, turning the day’s events over in his mind.
His plans, of course, went further than nin-taijutsu.
But as a commoner, the knowledge he could plausibly access was limited.
If he started talking about monstrous strength, natural energy, senjutsu—that wouldn’t just draw attention from above.
It would draw ANBU.
Danzō.
He might well end up sipping tea in Root’s custody before long.
Sorry, Sensei Guy.
But I really don’t have another road to take.
He was twelve this year.
Graduation was only a few months off, and in a few more years the Fourth Shinobi World War would be here.
There wasn’t much time left.
Of course, he hadn’t neglected his ninjutsu training either.
Back home, Chiba began refining his chakra, shaping and compressing it outside his body.
He could already form chakra threads and use them to manipulate objects like kunai and shuriken—but that wasn’t the effect he was after.
When his chakra ran low, he pulled out his notebook.
Not enough density.
Can’t pierce solid objects.
Need to work on refining and compressing further.
Best result so far is still the Rasengan.
Can’t fuse the Rasengan with nature transformation, but there’s still room to push it further.
He thought for a moment, then drew two lines beneath the word Rasengan.
One was labeled release speed.
The other, compression and volume.
After that came the harder problem—figuring out how to fold it properly into his own combat style, so he wouldn’t end up like early Naruto, holding a finished Rasengan and charging in like an idiot.