The night was deep, and moonlight fell silently like silver threads.
With Ino on his back, Inoichi Yamanaka walked along the winding path through the hills behind the village. To his surprise, aside from a brief struggle at the beginning, his daughter hadn't resisted as fiercely as he'd expected or insisted on getting down. After calling a distant goodbye to Naruto, Ino had gone quiet and stayed still on his back.
Inoichi couldn't help feeling moved. It was as if they'd returned to the days when Ino was little, when she'd clung tightly to her father.
"Dad..." A faint voice came from his back. "You shouldn't have made Naruto pay you back..."
All right, you little brat.
The tenderness on Inoichi's face vanished in an instant, along with the warmth he'd just felt.
"What kind of man lets a woman pay for his meal?" Inoichi said with a pout. Before Ino could get angry at him, he added, "Besides, I mainly said that because I wanted to see how he'd react."
"How would he react?" Ino asked curiously, temporarily forgetting the first part of what he'd said.
"To see whether that kid takes your kindness for granted." Inoichi shifted Ino higher on his back. "If that's what he thought, he'd have been at least a little surprised when I told him to pay me back. But his reaction was decent enough. He didn't show any unnecessary emotion, and his answer was firm and straightforward. That means he never thought he could accept your kindness for free. He owes you, and even if I hadn't stepped in, he probably would've found some other way to repay you."
Inoichi couldn't stand that blond kid, but he wasn't about to say something he didn't believe just to badmouth him behind his back.
"No matter what the relationship is, both sides should make an effort to keep things balanced—to give and to owe each other. Nothing is ever simply a given, and love isn't about expecting nothing in return. Accepting kindness and then returning it is the right way to maintain a bond... If that kid didn't even understand that, I'd have to bring out my Fatherly Iron Fist."
"Then..." Ino said brightly, "he's not so bad, after all."
"Hah?" Inoichi scoffed. "That's the bare minimum for being a decent person. He's nowhere near 'not so bad'!"
"Hehe~" Ino hummed and swayed her head. She didn't care what Inoichi said; she was only hearing what she wanted to hear.
After they'd walked a little farther, Inoichi suddenly spoke.
"But you need to be careful, sweetheart."
"Careful about what?"
"That blond kid."
Inoichi accidentally let his true thoughts slip. Fortunately, Ino didn't take it that way. Instead, her cheeks flushed, and she chided him, "Dad!"
Inoichi rolled his eyes, realizing she'd misunderstood. "Not careful in the way you think. I mean that kid himself is dangerous."
"Dangerous?" Ino frowned. "How?"
"It might just be my intuition... but my intuition is usually right." Inoichi's tone was calm. "Didn't you notice? Even though it was his first time meeting me, he didn't react at all to me coming at him like an angry parent ready to accuse him of something. He stayed calm the whole time we talked."
"To put it nicely, he's composed, polite, and unflappable. But to put it bluntly, I think he simply doesn't care."
"He doesn't care about me, so no matter how much I bluster, he won't react. He doesn't care about worldly possessions, so even though it was his first time stepping into a place like Mingmie Chijian, he didn't seem the least bit nervous, surprised, or intimidated..."
Inoichi's words brought something to Ino's mind. At the food shop, after her initial shock at being shoved down, Naruto had remained unusually calm throughout the confrontation and even when he fought back. And the same had been true when he'd met Kakashi-sensei that evening... She hadn't sensed any of the respect he should have shown a jōnin teacher.
Naruto had said that he'd needed to get a few things off his chest... But if she interpreted it as "not caring about Kakashi" or "not caring what might happen because of what he said," that seemed to make sense, too.
"He doesn't care about many things," Inoichi continued. "So there must be very few things he does care about. But that also means that whatever matters to him carries enormous weight."
Inoichi paused, his expression complicated. "I've met people like that before... and usually, they have a very strong... self-destructive streak."
Ino was startled by his words, but her father's tone was so serious that there was no hint he was joking.
"Because they only have room in their hearts for the few things they care about. In everyday life, they can usually follow society's rules and order. But if anything involves something they truly care about..." Inoichi lowered his voice. "They become the sort of people who have no regard for morality, order, the law, or rules. They're capable of anything. Boundaries that ordinary people would never cross might seem as natural to them as drinking water... Everything else has to make way for what they care about. You could call them madmen."
As he spoke, Inoichi couldn't help thinking of a certain clan that had once lived in the village.
As the heir to the Yamanaka Clan, whose members understood the human heart better than anyone, he naturally didn't see the Uchiha as simply good or evil, the way ordinary villagers did. He'd never believed that the Uchiha were evil by nature. In fact, in his eyes, those red-eyed Uchiha were more passionate than anyone about protecting the people they cared about... That was something Inoichi had realized during the Third Shinobi World War, when he'd fought alongside Uchiha teammates.
Once they accepted you as one of their comrades, you could trust them without reservation. Even if it meant trading their lives for yours, they wouldn't hesitate for a moment.
But obsession inevitably went hand in hand with extremity... So when ordinary people wouldn't go to extremes, the Uchiha would. Sometimes, in private, he wondered if that was the deeper reason the Uchiha Clan had been wiped out.
And yet, after all these years, he'd never expected to see a shadow of the Uchiha in the Fourth Hokage's son. Truly... fate had a cruel sense of humor.
Inoichi sighed inwardly. His voice softened with a father's concern. "So what I mean is, now that the two of you have gotten along... keep an eye on him. Pay attention. It's not just for your sake; in a way, it's for his, too."
"...Okay." Hearing the concern beneath her father's words, Ino didn't argue. But those lyrics surfaced in her mind again.
She suddenly realized that beneath Naruto's seemingly cheerful, easygoing exterior, something darker and deeper might be hidden—something even he was trying hard to suppress, unwilling to let it show.
Come to think of it, Naruto never seemed to take the initiative to form connections with anyone. Everyone who had a connection with him had been the one to reach out first. Otherwise, it was as if he'd always lived in a world of his own... and that wasn't normal.
Under the low-hanging dark-blue sky, father and daughter walked on in silence, each turning things over in their mind.
Suddenly, Inoichi stopped. A moment later, an Anbu wearing a tiger-striped mask appeared soundlessly in the moonlight.
"Lord Inoichi."
The Anbu bowed respectfully. The tenderness vanished from Inoichi's face, and his usual calm composure returned. He set Ino down and asked, "What happened?"
"Lord Hokage has summoned you urgently. He said there's important intelligence that requires your help to analyze," the Anbu replied. "Lord Shikaku is already in the office."
"Even Shikaku's been called in? Looks like something serious has happened..." Inoichi sounded surprised, though he'd already guessed what it might be.
Lately, the village's elite jōnin had been moved around frequently, and both Anbu and Root had been increasingly active. The powerful clans of Konoha had wisely kept their distance from such sensitive matters and asked no questions, but that hadn't stopped them from guessing what was going on.
In fact, at one of the regular meetings among Ino-Shika-Cho, Shikaku had already told the three clans to prepare for an emergency.
"Ino, you should head home first."
Inoichi made a Shadow Clone and had it escort Ino home, so the little cabbage wouldn't go looking for that wild boar later.
"I see Lord Inoichi takes his daughter very seriously..." The Anbu watched, a little surprised. He hadn't expected Inoichi to spend half his chakra escorting his daughter home, even within Konoha.
"Let's go." Once the Shadow Clone had disappeared into the night with Ino, Inoichi didn't linger. He and the Anbu vanished with the Body Flicker Technique.
A little while later, once the place had fallen silent again, with only the moon and night remaining, a figure slowly emerged from the heavy shadows in the distance.
"Brrring, brrring, brrring—"
A bizarre ringtone suddenly sounded from the figure's waist, ruining the ominous atmosphere he'd created.
The figure snorted and took out an object shaped like a snail. "Moria... How many times have I told you not to call me while I'm working? Do I need to kill you?"
"Hehehehe..."
"...And how many times have I told you not to laugh at me? Your laugh is disgusting, like a rag being used to scrub a toilet. I want to wring your neck right now."
"Lucci... Don't get so worked up." The voice on the other end was still flippant, though the laughter subsided. "It's just that the passage between worlds was accidentally discovered by the natives, so we can't get back for now. They can't get over here either, so no one's competing with us for the 'Gift.' What's not to like?"
"...Get to the point."
"Did you catch that person from the Yamanaka Clan?"
"No. Have you finished talking nonsense?"
"Hehehe... I think I killed someone important. What was his name? Kizashi Haruno? My mark has increased. When I return, the world's will is sure to reward me with a bigger Gift—"
Click!
Lucci hung up. He knew Moria had only called to brag.
"That's why I hate working with these freelancers..."
A cold glint flashed in Lucci's eyes.
Maybe he should find a chance to let Moria "die in a foreign land"... Then all of Moria's marks would belong to him.
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