…
The walk home was quieter than the training ground had been.
Murakami let the session settle in his mind as his feet found the familiar route back through the residential district.
The spar with Ren had been straightforward enough, close range, physical, the kind of exchange his staff handled well.
He could've used Taijutsu instead, stepped away from the weapon entirely and fought with his hands and feet the way the True Combat Technique was built for.
But he hadn't.
And the reason was simple enough to state without dressing it up: he didn't yet fully understand what the Skin Refining Stage was doing to his body.
He knew it was working. He could feel the difference in the density of his skin in the way his forearm had responded to the internal pressure sessions.
But understanding a change and trusting it in live combat were two different things.
Clashing head-on with bare hands against an opponent like Ren, who put real weight behind his strikes, before he knew exactly what his body could take and exert was unnecessary risk.
The staff existed for exactly that reason.
He discarded the thought and moved on.
His senses during the fight were worth more attention.
Something had been sharper than usual. Not dramatically, but present in a way he hadn't noticed before the session started.
Ren's body shifts had registered a half-beat earlier than he expected. Mio's repositioning after each throw had been easier to track even at the edge of his peripheral range.
Sakumo's tell; the slight forward lean that preceded his diagonal approach, had surfaced in the second exchange rather than the fourth or fifth where he'd have expected to find it.
'The Awakening Star.' he thought, intrigued.
The star allowed chakra flow perception to be sharpened under real combat pressure rather than by controlled observation.
He filed that away with satisfaction.
In terms of pure combat experience, the trio were a level or two above him, that much had been clear from how they moved, the ease of it, the absence of wasted motion that came from having done this enough times that the body stopped asking for permission.
They'd fought real opponents in real situations, and it showed in how they moved.
But experience wasn't the same as mastery of one's own tools.
He had the advantage there.
Which was why all three exchanges had gone the way they had.
Though he wasn't naive about what that meant. One on one, with full control over the terms of each engagement, his skill set had been sufficient.
But if all three had come at him simultaneously, Ren pressing from the front, Mio controlling range from behind, Sakumo cutting off lateral movement with his blade, the result would've looked considerably different.
He'd have been in genuine trouble.
The same applied to any face off against more than two opponents.
He was still turning that over when something else surfaced.
Hideki.
He hadn't visited since the day they'd walked him to the hospital. That should be close to a week now.
He slowed his pace, then changed direction.
There was a fruit stall two streets over that he'd passed enough times to know the stock was fresh.
He stopped there, took a moment to select some persimmons, a cluster of grapes, two pears, paid without haggling, and picked the wrapped bundle and left.
The hospital wasn't far from there.
…
The ward attendant recognized Hideki when Murakami mentioned his name and pointed him down the third corridor.
"Room seven, second door on the left."
Murakami nodded and made his way there. Upon arriving at the door, he heard two familiar voices in an argument.
"I'm telling you I'm fine—"
"You still have a hole in your chest, Hideki."
"Had. Past tense. It's basically healed—"
"The medic said another four days minimum—"
"The medic is being cautious—"
"Because caution is appropriate when someone has a hole in their chest!"
Murakami paused outside the door for a moment, then slid it open and stepped inside.
Hideki was sitting up in his hospital bed with the posture of someone who had clearly lost the argument but refused to admit it.
Sora stood at the foot of the bed with his arms folded, looking like someone who had exhausted every reasonable argument and was now repeating the strongest ones.
Both of them looked at Murakami when he entered.
A beat of silence.
"Murakami," Sora said, with the tone of someone who had just been handed reinforcements.
"Finally," Hideki said, with the tone of someone who had just been handed an audience.
Murakami set the fruit on the bedside table and looked between the two of them.
"How long has this been going on?" he asked.
"Too long," Sora said.
"Not long enough," Hideki said simultaneously.
"Hmm." Murakami hummed and narrowed his eyes at both of them. "I think I've got the gist of it."
"You do?" Hideki's eyes lit up immediately, as though he'd just been handed a way out.
Sora said nothing. He only looked at Murakami, the resigned expression on his face suggesting he already had an idea of where this was going.
"So you think I've recovered enough, right?" Hideki pressed, leaning forward slightly.
Murakami nodded.
Sora's eyes widened.
Hideki pumped his fist. "Finally, someone with some—"
"Give me twenty push-ups," Murakami said. "Without grunting."
The room went quiet.
Hideki stared at him.
"...What?"
"Twenty push-ups," Murakami repeated, pulling the chair from the corner of the room and sitting down with an unhurried patience of someone who had nowhere else to be. "No grunting. If you can do that, I'll agree you're recovered enough."
Hideki opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at Sora.
Sora had unfolded his arms and was now wearing a deeply satisfied expression at what was unfolding in front of them.
"That's—" Hideki started.
"Twenty," Murakami said.
"My shoulder—"
"I know."
"So you understand why I can't—"
"I do."
Hideki gestured broadly at the bed, the bandages, the general situation. "Then why are you asking me to do push-ups?"
"To find out if you're recovered enough," Murakami said, as though this were entirely reasonable.
Hideki looked between the two of them, found no sympathy on either face, and dropped back against his pillow.
"You're both terrible people," he announced.
"Rest well," Sora said pleasantly.
"Just a few more days," Murakami added.
"I hate this team."
"No you don't," Sora said.
Hideki opened his mouth, closed it again, and reached for one of the persimmons Murakami had left on the bedside table.
The tension broke after that.
"The food here is terrible," Hideki announced, peeling the persimmon. "I mean genuinely awful. I didn't know rice could taste like disappointment."
"Better than the ration packs on the mission," Sora said.
"Nothing is worse than those ration packs."
"The soup here is." Hideki paused, considered that seriously, and conceded with a slow nod. "...Fair."
Murakami watched him eat his fruit and said nothing.
Eventually the conversation found its way, the way conversations between shinobi always did, toward the things that actually mattered.
"Have you heard anything about Kaito-sensei?" Hideki asked, the shift in his tone marking the change in subject before the words did.
Sora's expression shifted too. "Some things."
"Like what?"
Sora glanced at Murakami briefly, then back at Hideki. "I've been asking around for a while. To some of the older genin, a chunin I know from the mission assignment board." He paused. "They call him the Lone Wolf. On the battlefield."
Hideki was quiet for a moment. "That's not necessarily bad."
"It's not," Sora agreed. "He's apparently very capable. The kind of capable that makes other Jonin step aside and let him work." He took another pause. "But he operates alone. Always has. Doesn't coordinate, doesn't take support, doesn't ask for backup."
"And?" Hideki said.
"And he takes the missions that suit that style," Sora said. "Solo infiltration, targeted elimination, deep reconnaissance. The things one person does better than a squad." He folded his arms. "Which makes you wonder what exactly he thinks he's doing with a three-man genin team."
The room was quiet for a moment.
"He's not taking us seriously," Hideki said. It wasn't quite a question.
"That's what I've gathered," Sora said. "From what you've heard too, right?"
Hideki nodded slowly. "Riku's sensei mentioned it once. Said Kaito was the kind of Jonin who took a team because the village required it, not because he wanted one." He picked at the edge of his bandage absently. "That he'd probably leave us to our own devices and show up when the mission required it."
"Which is exactly what he's been doing," Sora said.
Murakami listened to this without comment. He understood what they were feeling. It was the particular frustration of waiting for a hand that wasn't coming.
The sense that something was being withheld from them that they were owed by virtue of being someone's students.
What he didn't fully understand was the waiting itself.
He hadn't been waiting for Kaito. Hadn't been waiting for anyone. His growth had never been contingent on what a sensei chose to give him or withhold.
He'd taken it upon himself long before he'd ever been assigned to a team, and the assignment hadn't changed that calculation at all.
He understood the frustration intellectually. He simply didn't share it.
"What do you think?" Sora asked, looking at him.
Murakami considered the question honestly. "I think he has his reasons," he said. "Whether those reasons are good ones is something we won't know until we know more about him."
"That's not exactly a strong opinion," Hideki said.
"No," Murakami agreed.
Hideki looked at him for a moment. "Does it not bother you? That he's barely acknowledged us?"
Murakami thought about the right way to answer that.
"I'm not waiting on him," he said finally. It was simple and factual, without making it a judgment on either of them for feeling differently.
Hideki and Sora exchanged a brief look.
Neither of them pressed it further, and Murakami didn't elaborate.
They talked about the war after that, what fragments had reached them through rumor, the names of battles that had made it back to Konoha's walls in one form or another.
The conversation drifted and circled and doubled back on itself. It was the knock on the ward door that ended it.
A nurse stepped in. "Visiting hours are ending. He needs his medication and a bandage change."
Sora stood immediately. Murakami set down the remains of the fruit he'd been eating and rose from the chair.
"Be patient," Sora said to Hideki, picking up his vest from the back of the chair. "Recover properly. Don't argue with the medics."
"I'm not arguing with the medics," Hideki said. "I'm providing them with a second opinion."
"That's arguing with the medics."
"It's a collaborative discussion—"
"Goodbye, Hideki."
Murakami paused at the door and looked back at him.
"Twenty push-ups," he said. "Before you ask to be discharged."
Hideki stared at him.
That tone was impossible to read, Hideki thought.
Flat and unhurried, carrying the same quality it always did, which was to say the quality of a statement that might be serious or might not be and gave you nothing to determine which.
"Are you—" Hideki started.
But Murakami had already turned and stepped out, Sora one step behind him, the door sliding quietly shut between them.
Hideki sat alone in the ward, persimmon in hand, staring at the closed door.
He still didn't know.