"Happy new year!"
"..."
"Huh? Why do you two look like this is such a hassle? It's new year's, you know? New year's?"
Standing in the small courtyard she and her husband had bought together, Kushina, dressed in splendid clothes, looked displeased at the two males before her—one grown, one small.
"How can you still be so gloomy when it's already new year's? We made it through another year, nothing major happened, and the war didn't come. Shouldn't that be something to celebrate?"
"Give me a break, Kushina..."
With dark circles under his eyes, Minato Namikaze sat on the doorstep, feeling as though his mind had gone hazy.
"Unlike the Sealing Group, which moved out long ago, our Space-Time Group can only conduct interference-free work underground. We still haven't finished writing out the spatial-temporal loop logic from our analysis of the Mutually Multiplying Explosive Tags. Our group has been pulling all-nighters for nearly four days..."
"..."
Kakashi Hatake had been forcibly dragged into this house to supposedly soak in the festive atmosphere. Without saying a word, he leaned against the doorframe and began snoring softly.
As a member of the Blut Arterie and Blut Vene development team, Kakashi Hatake might have been a child, but given the current situation in the Ninja World, the prematurely mature Kakashi had volunteered to become a key member of the breakthrough team.
Back when the Ninjutsu Research Institute was still all together, Kakashi could often be seen running about, asking all sorts of questions and coordinating with other groups. Now that ninjutsu research had grown beyond what a small institute could contain and begun expanding, Kakashi, as a core member, had still spent a considerable amount of time in that underground laboratory.
It was only after the latest generation of Blood Attire had been