"Wait, don't you usually treat me the same way?"
"I've never felt dehumanized."
"Yellow Hedgehog, orphan, whatever-I never took any of it to heart. It all feels pretty normal."
He scratched his blond head, speaking in genuine bewilderment.
"What? Did I say something wrong?"
Amamiya Maki stopped and turned to look at him.
"It's not about whether you're wrong. What you said is bizarre."
"Translated, it means they aren't being malicious when they bully you, and I might not be well-intentioned just because I comfort you."
"Let's all hurt each other, then forgive each other, and build a beautiful, harmonious Konoha together."
Minato wasn't being hypocritical.
He genuinely didn't mind being called "Blondie" or "Little Orphan," and genuinely believed other people shouldn't mind either.
With his tolerance for stress maxed out, he had developed a serious cognitive bias: he habitually measured everyone against his own standards.
He could take all Maki's malice with a smile and still make him lunch the next day.
But just because he could didn't mean everyone else could.
He thought his own tolerance was the norm everyone should possess.
In reality, that extraordinary mental resilience was a top-tier talent as rare as Flying Thunder God.
Even now, he hadn't realized he was treating a rare gift as a social rule everyone had to follow.
Amamiya Maki covered his face with one hand.
He really had stepped on a mine he'd planted himself.
There wasn't a trace of complaint in Minato's words. He was simply offering a sincere example.
He wanted to use "I'm fine with Amamiya Maki teasing me"
to prove "There's no need to care when other people tease you."
The logic seemed airtight, but it rested on a single central premise.
The person teasing him was Amamiya Maki.
Minato himself hadn't noticed that he never got angry at Amamiya Maki's foul mouth.
It wasn't because he was magnanimous. Subconsciously, he had long since classified Amamiya Maki as one of his own.
However harsh their jabs and jokes sounded, they were another form of caring when they came from someone close.
That was fundamentally different from the classmates who maliciously called him an "orphan."
Those people offered nothing but indifference and malice. Amamiya Maki, at least, genuinely cared about him.
"So you're saying it's my fault?"
Before Amamiya Maki could gather his words again, a clear female voice tinged with hurt came from behind him.
Kushina Uzumaki stood quietly beside Amamiya Maki.
"Is that what you think too? Was..."
Was what you said that day about my hair being pretty a lie?
She didn't dare ask the rest aloud, but the way her fingertips clenched her hem told Amamiya Maki exactly what she was thinking.
Following the original story's trajectory, Kushina Uzumaki shouldn't have been like this at all.
Normally, she would have beaten the boys who mocked her red hair senseless on her very first day at school.
That was how she had earned the nickname "Red-Hot Habanero."
That proud, fiery girl dared to point at the whole class and issue threats, dared to face down older thugs surrounding her, and threw punches without hesitation.
She shouldn't have been standing timidly before others like this, humbly asking whether they were lying to her.
Where had things gone wrong?
Had Granny Mito protected her too well, or had his casual compliment that day given her too much hope of being accepted?
Once people had expectations, the disappointment when they fell through grew exponentially.
Before coming to Konoha, she had already prepared herself to be treated as a monster by everyone.
What she had never expected was to first receive a gentle affirmation, only to be cruelly abandoned by that very affirmation.
The despair of falling from heaven into an abyss was far harder to bear than always living in darkness.
"I don't like seeing you like this."
Kushina's eyes trembled violently, as though someone had thrown a bucket of ice-cold water in her face.
[Detected mental pressure inflicted by host on "Kushina Uzumaki" Pressure Points +500 Obtained: Mind's Eye of the Kagura fragments ×200]
Five hundred Pressure Points in one go.
Previously, that remark about the fate of a medical ninja had earned only eighty Pressure Points from Tsunade.
Yet this brief sentence had broken the record outright.
This wasn't a simple verbal clash. It was a psychological blow delivered with pinpoint precision.
Tsunade's distress came from thwarted ambitions, Nawaki's frustration from the original sin of his bloodline, and Kushina's collapse from seeing all her hopes dashed.
She had expected something like, "They don't understand you, but I do."
Or even a simple, "I'm here for you."
But neither came.
All she received was that cold rejection, brutally shattering both her hurt and her hopes.
He hadn't rejected her hair, but he had rejected her current posture of timid caution and meek endurance.
"No, Maki, don't say that! Maki didn't mean it..."
Minato hurried forward to smooth things over, his hands gesturing frantically in the air.
Like a dove of peace desperately trying to soothe two bristling feral cats, he was caught between them and utterly flustered.
He waved one hand at Amamiya Maki and gestured to Kushina with the other, until he no longer knew where to put either hand.
Amamiya Maki gave Minato an indifferent glance.
Everyone here had the right to intervene except you.
You little ray of sunshine with a hidden masochistic streak-you couldn't even tell good from bad when you were bullied and mocked for years, and you still dared to play peacemaker?
The students watching from the classroom doorway had already swarmed over like sharks scenting blood.
Students passing through the corridor craned their necks to watch, and the crowd kept growing.
"The Tomato Monster's here again."
"Red-haired monster. Bet your final years will be cursed."
"Holy crap, even the Great Dao's been obliterated!"
Shrill, grating taunts rose one after another, ringing throughout the classroom.
Konoha's villagers were always like this: endless internal disputes, yet utterly united whenever they bullied an outsider.
People who normally couldn't stand each other had now achieved perfect consensus.
Konoha's solidarity, its so-called Will of Fire, shone in all its glory when they bullied the weak.
A boy pushed straight out of the crowd, grabbed Kushina's red hair, and yanked it backward hard.
His nails dug into the base of her ponytail. The force jerked her head back, twisting her neck at an unnatural angle.
"Stinking tomato! Who told you to look so freakish?"
Kushina's gaze pierced the noisy crowd and fixed on Amamiya Maki's face.
Her hair was held fast, and her neck ached unbearably, but there wasn't a single tear in her eyes.
She wasn't holding back tears. Her sheer fury had already burned away all her hurt.
"Is that what you think too?"
Amamiya Maki leaned against the wall, his tone as casual as though he were describing a change in the weather.
"Do you know why they call you a tomato? It isn't because your hair looks like one. It's because they need someone to be their tomato."
"Today it's you. Yesterday it was Minato. Tomorrow it'll probably be someone else."
"The more you bow your head and put up with it, the more they think you're weak and easy to bully."
"The more you shrink back and endure it, the more they think bullying you is fun."
"So whether your hair is pretty doesn't matter at all. What matters is how long you're going to let them call you that."
Kushina fell silent for a few seconds, then abruptly raised her head to look straight at him, her eyes full of hope.
"Then tell me, what do I have to do to change their minds about me?"
She was waiting for his approval.
As long as Amamiya Maki said, "I accept you,"
she would be willing to keep enduring it.
She would endure until these people grew bored, until she could be like Minato, calmly accepting all their malice and smiling as she said they meant no harm.
She was asking him for a lifeline.
It didn't have to be anything substantial. As long as it proved his compliment in Granny Mito's courtyard that day had been genuine, that would be enough.
But Amamiya Maki refused to give it to her.
"Tomato Monster. Red-haired freak. Beggar from out of town."
He repeated those mocking names without the slightest change in tone.
"Does what other people think matter that much to you?"
He paused, his tone suddenly hardening.
"The only way to deal with Konoha scum like this is to hit hard."
A bright smile instantly bloomed on Kushina's tense, gloomy little face.
Her long-suppressed hurt and frustration had finally found an outlet.
At that moment, she no longer needed anyone's approval.
"So that's how it is..."
Kushina Uzumaki's eyes disappeared beneath her red hair.
Something strange seemed to take root and sprout in her heart...
Before she finished speaking, Minato Namikaze immediately reached out to stop her, trying to extinguish the impending conflict with his habitual pacifism.
Having survived several years of school bullying through patience and retreat, he naively assumed the same approach worked for everyone.
"There's no need for this. We're all Konoha villagers, all part of the village. We just need to get along..."
"Shut up, you blond sissy! Who ever treated me as one of them?"
"Fence-sitting hypocrites like you need a hard punch too!"
[Successfully pressured Minato Namikaze Pressure Points +100 Obtained: Spatial Perception talent fragments ×10]
Minato's half-open mouth suddenly froze, his unfinished plea forced back down his throat.
His blue eyes widened sharply, and his entire body seemed to have been put on pause.
He wasn't stunned because she'd insulted him. He had abruptly woken up.
The plea for patience he'd just made was fundamentally no different from the words of those maliciously mocking Kushina.
Both were forcing the victim to silently bear their malice.
Blind acceptance and endurance, it turned out, could hurt far more than fighting back.
The thought flashed through his mind, but it left his expression completely frozen.
Had he really been wrong?
The next second, Kushina's furious shout exploded through the classroom!
Her brilliant red hair burst outward, flying wildly like a blazing fire fully ignited.
She reached back, seized the boy pulling her hair, and executed a clean, textbook shoulder throw.
Like a weightless sack of potatoes, the boy traced a graceless arc through the air, cleared two desks, and slammed into the floor.
The dull impact sent a pencil case on a nearby desk bouncing up before dropping heavily back down.
"Just so we're clear, I hate tomatoes too!"
Kushina Uzumaki rose with her foot planted on his chest, the tips of her red hair tracing sharp arcs through the air.
"Damn outsider! You dare hit us?"
"Get her!"
"I've been itching for a fight!"
The watching Konoha students erupted and rushed Kushina in a mob.
Someone lunged at her head-on. A crisp elbow strike knocked him back, sending him crashing through the desk behind him.
Someone tried to ambush her from behind. A precise leg sweep brought him down, the back of his head striking the floor with a sharp thud.
Someone opened his mouth to taunt her with "Red-Hot Habanero," only for her fist to shut it.
Desks toppled one after another, and chalk dust burst into clouds of white.
The piercing screech of desks and chairs scraping the floor mingled with the dull thuds of fists hitting flesh and everyone's furious curses. The entire classroom shook violently.
Minato stood outside the melee, hesitated for just two seconds, then gritted his teeth and charged in.
He hadn't come to help fight. As always, he simply wanted to break it up and calm things down.
He tightly grabbed a boy who was about to smash a schoolbag into the back of Kushina's head.
The boy turned and drove an elbow hard into his chest.
Minato grunted, but still didn't let go.
A gentle people-pleaser was doomed to be bullied amid the chaos.
In the confusion, people stepped on him several times, and stray elbows repeatedly struck his side, yet he silently endured it all.
Leaning against the wall and watching the chaos, Amamiya Maki reached out, grabbed the back of Minato's collar, and forcibly hauled him out of the melee.
"Looks like Kushina's pretty popular with everyone."
Minato Namikaze looked utterly bewildered. "...?"
"What's with that look? Can't you see she's already mixing it up with the villagers of Konoha?"
"Th-this counts as mixing it up?"
"Of course. A little more mixing and they'll be pulp."
As if to prove his point, the girl once called Tomato had fully transformed into the Red-Hot Habanero.
Her fiery red hair flew wildly through the chaotic classroom, just as he had said when he first met her.
As red as a dazzling sun.
Only now, that gentle sun was exploding rampantly through the classroom, burning away every trace of malice.
Burn this body to ashes!!!
Before you continue