Confrontation Under the Moonlight

Teaching Naruto Uzumaki chakra control took more time than expected.

It wasn't that Naruto Uzumaki was stupid. On the contrary, the kid's ability to grasp things in actual combat was absurdly strong—after practicing tree-walking for two days, he could run more than a dozen steps across the water without falling, though he flailed his arms like a duckling that had just learned to fly. The problem was that once he learned something, he got overly excited, hounding Shinichi with questions like, "What are we learning next?" "When are you teaching me that Wind Release: Shuriken?" and "Can you teach me some super-powerful jutsu?" At least eight times a day. Before he learned the Shadow Clone Jutsu, Shinichi felt the best response was not sparring with him, but assigning him homework.

"Practice on your own tonight. I'll check tomorrow." He clapped the chalk dust from his hands by the riverbank. "Chakra control is a basic skill. There are no shortcuts for basic skills."

"Yeah, yeah." Naruto Uzumaki kicked off his shoes, ready to try walking on water again, then suddenly remembered something and turned back. "You're not going to sneak out and practice by yourself tonight, are you?"

"I'm going to sleep at night."

Naruto Uzumaki was skeptical, but he obediently returned to the village.

Late at night, around eleven thirty.

Shinichi was not asleep.

He was lying prone on a rooftop across from Naruto Uzumaki's apartment. He had been there for nearly an hour. It wasn't that he distrusted Naruto Uzumaki's self-discipline; when they had parted earlier that day, his sixth sense had started ringing—a faint warning, like hearing an alarm clock through a thick quilt.

Naruto Uzumaki's apartment was one of those cheapest single-room standalone units, wooden in construction, with stairs outside. Its front door faced a streetlamp, and several pots of dead plants sat beneath the window. The streetlamp's filament flickered on and off, while the dry branches swayed in the night breeze. Shinichi crouched on a rooftop diagonally opposite, with an abandoned drying platform behind him and the shadow of a brick wall from an abandoned chimney concealing him in front.

The moon was bright. Moonlight blanketed the entire street in silver, filling the cracks between the stone slabs with glimmers like scattered silver. It was quiet enough to hear a stray cat jump down from a trash can. Everything was normal.

Then the patrol passed by.

Shinichi did not move. The patrols protected the village, but their route was too predictable. They passed through this street, then circled around to the Ninja Academy behind it, taking roughly fifteen minutes for a round trip. During that interval, this area had no other eyes besides the streetlamps and stray cats.

Sure enough. Before the patrol's footsteps had fully faded, someone slipped over during that gap. A black figure slid in from the alley entrance, hugging the base of the wall into the shadows behind the apartment. He moved swiftly and landed without a sound. Black cloak, animal mask—the standard attire of Root. The mask bore tiger stripes. Shinichi remembered that the unlucky fellow he had tricked in the woods last time had worn a fox mask. A tiger ranked above a fox; anyone able to undertake a nighttime mission alone was at least a jonin.

Tiger Mask stopped beneath a window at the back of the apartment. He did not enter. He merely approached the wall and pressed one black-gloved hand against the wooden siding. With his head lowered, he seemed to be sensing something. A few seconds later, Tiger Mask withdrew his hand and tilted his mask slightly toward the second-floor window. Behind the curtains, a faint cluster of blue chakra pulsed. From Tiger Mask's angle, he could sense it through the curtains.

Shinichi lowered himself even further. He completely drew his chakra presence into his body, reduced his breathing to the lightest, slowest rhythm, and eased his heartbeat. Danzo's Root had indeed stopped watching him at the orphanage recently, but they clearly could not stay idle. No matter how tightly the Third Hokage guarded the Nine-Tails jinchuriki, there would always be gaps during patrol shifts. Root needed to assess the stability of the Nine-Tails seal and record the jinchuriki's periodic chakra fluctuations. Those data could only be collected at close range in the dead of night.

He wouldn't go inside. He was only here to investigate.

But Shinichi had no intention of letting him simply return. After probing Naruto Uzumaki's chakra fluctuations, Tiger Mask had casually scanned several nearby buildings as well—it was the habitual vigilance of a jonin. Shinichi could suppress his chakra completely, but he could not guarantee that the other man had no additional sensory methods. If the man arrived a few minutes earlier next time, he might catch Shinichi lying on Naruto Uzumaki's rooftop. The root of the problem was not Tiger Mask's sensory abilities, but the mission itself—as long as Root continued conducting nighttime assessments of the Nine-Tails jinchuriki, the area around Naruto Uzumaki's residence would not be safe. And this Tiger Mask was the scout assigned to this area long-term.

Tiger Mask retreated from behind the apartment and returned the way he had come. He did not take the main road, instead vaulting over a household's courtyard wall, passing through a clothes-drying yard, and slipping into a narrow alley. The alley led to the abandoned storage district in the east of the village, filled with empty warehouses.

Shinichi moved as well. Rather than follow directly, he took another parallel alley and moved in sync with Tiger Mask with a row of buildings between them. In his previous life, stealth games had taught him that his greatest strength was not frontal breakthroughs, but tailing targets. Keep your distance, use cover, anticipate the target's direction—those skills belonged to the same technical system as learning a supervisor's inspection route at an internet company and calculating exactly how long he could slack off.

They reached the abandoned storage district.

More than half of this area had been destroyed during the Nine-Tails Rampage and had never been rebuilt. Only several rows of empty sheet-metal warehouses remained, littered with rusted iron frames and rotting wooden crates. Moonlight leaked through the damaged ceilings, casting mottled rust stains across the ground like abstract paintings.

Tiger Mask stopped. He had halted in a relatively open area at the center of a warehouse. Standing straight, he tilted his mask slightly, seemingly confirming there were no pursuers before taking a scroll from his waist to record the data he had gathered tonight.

Then a gust of wind rolled the rust on the ground.

Tiger Mask immediately closed the scroll. His movements were swift, and his left hand reached for a kunai at the same time. His shadow stretched long beneath the moonlight. Within the warehouse, only the sheet metal softly shifting in the night breeze could be heard.

Shinichi crouched on a steel beam in the warehouse ceiling. Abandoned burlap sacks and broken roof tiles were piled all around him, and the smell of rust nearly made him sneeze several times. He curled himself into the smallest possible shape and watched Tiger Mask slowly sweep his gaze over the area below.

Avoid fighting if possible. That was the line Shinichi had drawn for himself. But he also knew that if Tiger Mask returned tonight with a complete set of data on the Nine-Tails' chakra fluctuations, Root could use those data to uncover the jinchuriki's patterns next time. Then the one watching Naruto Uzumaki would not be an assessment team, but Danzo himself.

He pulled a white smoke bomb from his pocket, a version made from saltpeter powder, dried grass ash, and a hemp-cord fuse. It had already been improved to its third generation. He did not throw it at Tiger Mask's head, but at a pile of empty iron barrels to Tiger Mask's left. The white smoke bomb exploded among the barrels, and the entire warehouse was instantly filled with thick smoke carrying the stench of sulfur.

Tiger Mask reacted far too quickly. Before the smoke had fully spread, he vanished from where he stood, leaving only a faint breeze brushing through the white haze. The next instant, a kunai tore through the air, grazing beneath the steel beam where Shinichi had been hiding and embedding itself in a ceiling plank. Its handle trembled with a low buzz. He had already locked onto the direction from which Shinichi had thrown the bomb through the smoke.

Shinichi did not hesitate. The instant he threw the bomb, he had already moved a distance in the opposite direction along the steel beam while drawing the kunai at his waist. The same one he had confiscated. Its owner was gone, but the patterns left on it had become familiar beneath his grip.

Tiger Mask charged through the smoke. His figure suddenly emerged from the white haze, and his hand blade, edged with sharp Wind Release chakra, slashed toward the spot where Shinichi had just crouched. The steel beam snapped with a crack. But Shinichi was not there. The real Shinichi had lowered himself and nearly slid flush against the beam to Tiger Mask's rear, swinging his kunai upward from below at the back of Tiger Mask's knee.

Tiger Mask backflipped away from the strike. His cloak flared open, revealing the standard tight-fitting Root shinobi uniform beneath and two strings of shuriken wrapped around his waist. His feet landed on the other end of the steel beam, facing Shinichi. Several meters separated them as the white smoke slowly spread between them, moonlight piercing the ruined roof in shafts through the haze.

Tiger Mask said nothing. Most Root shinobi did not speak much. But his left hand subtly adjusted its grip on the kunai—from a forward grip to a reverse one. It was preparation for a lethal fight, showing that he had already marked Shinichi as a target who had to die.

Shinichi said nothing either. As he had retreated, his left hand had instinctively brushed the corner of his eye. The other man had probably already seen his eyes, faintly glowing red in the darkness.

A faint metallic scrape sounded from a seam in the steel beam. Tiger Mask moved first. Boosted by Wind Release chakra, his speed was even faster than an ordinary Body Flicker. In nearly the blink of an eye, he closed in on Shinichi, his kunai slashing diagonally in a tricky arc. Shinichi dodged to the side. His left shoulder was cut open, but a green glow flickered over his skin—the wound healed.

They widened the distance. Tiger Mask looked at the faint glow, then at Shinichi's exposed left shoulder, which was completely uninjured. His expression could not be seen beneath the mask, but the hand holding his kunai paused for a beat. "Wood Release." He spoke for the first time that night, his voice muffled behind the mask.

Shinichi did not answer. Since the other man had seen his reddened eyes and confirmed Wood Release, he could not be allowed to return tonight. If Danzo learned that an orphan possessed both the Sharingan and Wood Release, the consequence would not be Shinichi's enrollment at the Ninja Academy being canceled. The entire orphanage would be torn apart from top to bottom. He slowly raised a hand, wiped away the blood remaining on his shoulder, and looked at the black figure across from him.

Tiger Mask at the other end of the steel beam was reassessing the situation as well—a Wind Release jonin, possessing both speed and cutting power, should have had the upper hand in an enclosed space like this. Yet this child could accurately predict his attack routes through the smoke and emerge unscathed from close combat. This was not merely talent. His battle instincts had already exceeded the normal range of a genin.

Tiger Mask removed a shuriken from his waist with his left hand and held it between his fingers, while his right foot shifted slightly back. Shinichi watched those details, tightening his grip on the kunai as well. The white smoke between them gradually dispersed, and the moonlight fell upon them in full. There was no wind. The beams of light leaking through holes in the roof made the rust gleam brightly.