The Third placed a sealing scroll on the desk and pushed it in front of Naruto.
"This... is the Flying Thunder God your father left behind."
The old man hemmed and hawed for a long while before squeezing out the rest through clenched teeth.
"There were reasons we had to hide your identity."
He forced a heartbroken expression onto his face, his words seeming to drip from the tips of his beard.
"The title Yellow Flash of Konoha was an unremovable thorn in the side of every other shinobi village. During the Third Shinobi World War, there were too many shinobi killed by him to count."
"Once you expose yourself, the people hunting you could line up all the way from the Land of Fire to the Land of Lightning. What if..."
Smack!
Naruto slapped the table, splashing a few drops of tea.
"Stop, stop. Quit preaching at me."
He frowned impatiently and dug at his ear.
"I, Naruto, won't rip you off—five million ryo. You pay up, I keep quiet, and we're done. I can let the fact that I'm the Fourth Hokage's son rot in my stomach."
"F-Five million ryo?"
Hiruzen Sarutobi's eyes nearly popped out of their sockets, his tongue tying itself into a knot.
The minimum starting reward for an S-rank mission was only one million ryo. By that calculation, five million was merely the equivalent of five ordinary S-rank missions.
The Sannin, for instance, were all emotionless mission machines, each with more than a hundred S-rank missions on record.
At first glance, five million ryo did not seem like an astronomical sum.
Unfortunately, that was not how the books worked.
Most of a mission's reward went to the shinobi carrying it out. The Hokage could only skim a small cut, and still had to support