Who Could Blame Him for Being Minato's Child?

The boulder had been blasted into powder, with fine limestone dust still drifting through the air. Under the sunlight, those particles refracted mottled specks of light. The heavy smell of gunpowder smoke and ozone stubbornly forced its way into everyone's nostrils.

Jiraiya and Hinata's expressions looked like a frozen painting, terror congealed on their faces.

Karsten, standing where he was, suddenly began to flicker like a poorly connected projection. His outline blurred and turned transparent.

He lowered his head to look at his fading palm, and confusion appeared on that weathered face for the first time. He abruptly turned toward Naruto and urgently shouted in that rough Imperium tongue, "Commissar, my coordinates are drifting... I..."

Naruto's ice-blue pupils did not ripple in the slightest. He answered in the same language, his tone soothing yet unquestionable, as if reassuring a subordinate. "Do not worry. Hold your position, soldier."

"Yes!"

Karsten's gaze instantly regained a soldier's distinctive resolve, as though that command was the sole meaning of his existence. He straightened his chest and seemed about to say something more, but his entire figure had already transformed into a wisp of distorted black smoke and vanished in an instant.

Only an empty patch of grass remained, along with the lingering scent of rust in the air.

Naruto closed his eyes.

In his perception, the soul chain formed through the summoning contract, linking him to Karsten, had not been severed—it was still Dan. It had been stretched to an extreme by an incomprehensible force, twisting as it extended toward a distant end beyond any understanding of space and time.

He understood immediately.

The "Summoning Jutsu" of this world had been utterly "contaminated" by the characteristics of his otherworldly soul, the soul of an Imperium commissar. It was no longer a simple summoning technique, but had become a two-way positioning "Warp Shin Beacon."

This was a top-level strategic secret.

"Naruto!"

A furious shout exploded beside him.

Jiraiya appeared before Naruto as though tearing through the air itself. Every trace of his usual frivolity had vanished, replaced by unprecedented gravity and scrutiny.

"What exactly was that thing just now?!" His voice was low, but carried an unquestionable force of interrogation. "He isn't from this world! And what did that 'Commissar' mean?! Explain yourself!"

There was a trace of fear hidden in his tone, one that even he had failed to notice. That weapon called a Bolter, and its silent power to reduce a boulder to dust, had completely overturned his understanding of the term "ninja tool."

Facing Jiraiya's thunderous rage, Naruto opened his eyes. In his ice-blue pupils, he simulated, with perfect precision, an expression mixed with "confusion" and "analysis." He tilted his head slightly, pretending to ponder gravely.

"I cannot answer that either."

Naruto spoke slowly in an analytical tone.

"My chakra output followed the standard procedure you taught me. However, the contract itself seems to have suffered some sort of underlying logical error, randomly linking to... invalid data."

He defined this horrifying incident as a minor accident that could be understood.

"Nonsense!" Jiraiya did not believe him at all. "A technical malfunction? What about the things he said?! The way he looked at you! That look of absolute obedience wasn't fake!"

"White-haired mister..."

A faint, trembling voice came from beside them.

Although Hinata's little face had turned pale with fright, she still clenched her fists and gathered all her courage to defend Naruto. "Naruto-kun... he seemed surprised too..."

Naruto gave Hinata an imperceptible look of approval.

He then added, "According to the assessment, the threat has been eliminated, and that unit has disappeared. I recommend that this incident be archived as an 'unknown summoning anomaly' and classified as top secret pending further analysis."

His well-reasoned, airtight "official report" left Jiraiya unable to find any flaw to refute for the moment.

Jiraiya stared intently into Naruto's eyes, trying to find even the slightest crack beneath that ice-blue lake.

But he failed.

Those eyes held only unfathomable calm, along with an absolute rationality that made even his heart tremble.

A raging tempest surged within Jiraiya's heart.

He realized an extremely serious problem. If this matter were reported to the Third Hokage exactly as it had happened, then given Teacher Sarutobi's steady nature, bordering on stubbornness, Naruto—Minato's only bloodline—would likely be immediately treated as an extremely dangerous and unstable factor.

The best outcome would be confinement within the village, under twenty-four-hour surveillance, with all freedom completely stripped away.

The worst outcome... he did not dare imagine it.

Danzo from Root had even more countless rotten ideas.

No! Absolutely not!

This was the child Minato and Kushina had left behind!

At that moment, Jiraiya's sense of responsibility as a godfather, forgotten by even himself for over a decade, was thoroughly awakened. He made a decision, one that was far from easy.

He would bear this secret alone.

Jiraiya looked deeply at Naruto, forcibly suppressing all the shock and doubts in his heart. In a grave tone unlike any he had ever used before, he said, "All right. I'll believe you for now."

He paused, his gaze sweeping over the tense Hinata beside them.

"But this matter is known to heaven and earth, to you and me, and to the little girl from the Hyuga clan. There must not be a fourth person who knows, understand?!"

In that instant, his attitude completely changed. He went from being a guide trying to "reform" Naruto to a keeper of their shared secret, and... a "supervisor" who had to keep watch over Naruto at all times.

The relationship between him and Naruto entered a new stage, one more complex and more delicate than before.

"Understood." Naruto nodded in agreement.

To completely dispel Jiraiya's doubts, and also to verify his hypothesis regarding the "Warp Shin Beacon," he proactively made a suggestion.

"To verify whether the previous incident was an 'accidental malfunction,' I need to establish a control group." He looked at Jiraiya and calmly said, "I will attempt the Summoning Jutsu once more."

The proposal left Jiraiya stunned.

He looked at Naruto's expressionless face and, for a moment, could not tell whether the boy was truly forthright or whether his calculations ran so deep that even Jiraiya could not see through them.

After hesitating again and again, Jiraiya still agreed.

He also needed a "normal" comparison to conclusively define that terrifying scene as an "accident." Otherwise, he would not be sleeping tonight.

"Go ahead." Jiraiya stepped back several paces and assumed a guarded stance. "Let me see whether the toads of Mount Myoboku still recognize you as their contractor."

Naruto walked into the clearing again.

This time, he bit his finger. At the moment of forming the hand seals, he deliberately used his immense mental power to actively block the fluctuations of the "Shin Beacon" deep within his soul, the one connected to the Imperium coordinates.

He linked his chakra, purely and without a trace of impurity, to the contract on the scroll belonging to the "toads of Mount Myoboku."

"Summoning Jutsu!"

His palm slammed into the ground once more.

"Poof!"

A crisp, normal sound rang out.

A small, harmless puff of white smoke emerged from the center of the summoning array.

The smoke was thin, reaching only Naruto's knees. Compared to that world-destroying entrance from before, it was practically like a child's firework.

Jiraiya and Hinata both stared nervously at the white smoke.

As the smoke gradually dispersed, a tiny... little toad, no bigger than a palm and with a blade of grass in his mouth, appeared before them.

The little toad looked around. When he saw Jiraiya, he froze for a moment, then spoke in a childish voice while putting on an air of maturity:

"Yo, isn't that Jiraiya? What's with this? You put in all that effort, and you only managed to summon the great Gamakichi?"