White clouds drifted lazily, and thunder rumbled in bursts.
A blonde girl and a black-haired boy walked one before the other along Kumogakure's streets. Although the bandage-wrapped greatsword on the boy's back looked rather frightening, quite a few passersby still turned to the people beside them and sighed when they saw the scene:
This was youth!
The earth-shaking battle between Kirigakure and Konoha clearly had no effect on Araki, who had already followed Samui to the foot of her home.
Just because Samui seemed to have no surname didn't mean she was a poor civilian ninja like Araki.
That would be completely wrong!
The issue of ninja surnames was, in fact, a special system unique to Kumogakure.
Every ninja village had ninja clans. Or rather, they had all originally been established with ninja clans as their foundation and framework.
However, the ways each village treated those clans later on differed greatly.
Kirigakure took a free-range approach and had no consistent policy. Basically, ninja clans developed on their own while the village trained its civilian ninja. Neither interfered with the other, and the strong were respected.
Konoha, on the other hand, initially adopted an integrationist approach.
The First Hokage had directly dissolved the Senju Clan, giving Konoha a large number of highly gifted civilian resources. Perhaps he had hoped that the other major ninja clans would follow suit, truly breaking down the barriers between clans and speaking only of the village, not of families.
Unfortunately, Konoha's second- and third-largest clans had not answered that call. That alone was understandable. After all, the Sharingan and Byakugan were Kekkei Genkai that required clan inheritance. If those clans dissolved, the lowered bloodline awakening rate would also affect Konoha's strength.
But even the most direct inheritors of the Will of Fire—the disciples of the Second