"OH-HO-HO-HOOOO—!"
Ebisu immediately started hopping around from the intense heat, screaming like Tom getting his tail slammed in a door.
Konohamaru had indeed safely tested the output of his Fire Release: Ash Chicken Burning on shadow clones beforehand.
But he overlooked a massive biological fact.
He tested it on shadow clones.
Once a shadow clone takes too much structural damage, it simply pops and disappears into thin air.
A living human didn't have that luxury.
Besides, everyone's physical tolerance was different.
What was Konohamaru's situation?
A young, untouched body that hadn't yet experienced the friction of life.
And Ebisu? A man even more tightly wound than Kakashi, with years of intense, suppressed frustration packed inside his system!
So for the first few seconds of impact, Ebisu successfully tanked the heat through sheer willpower.
But once the fabric covering his target area incinerated completely and the sticky ash and micro-sparks began crackling directly against his bare skin, Ebisu broke.
He originally wanted to maintain his dignified image as an elite elite-tutor.
Now he was screaming and rolling around in the dirt!
Even worse, Konohamaru's Ash Chicken Burning carried a built-in adhesive effect.
The mechanics traced back to when Naruto explained the earliest version of Jiraiya's flawed Sage Mode.
When engineering a physical shortcut to enter Sage Mode, you had to calculate whether the delivery system functioned mid-combat.
Naruto's Multiple Shadow Clone method didn't suffer from this bottleneck.
It worked seamlessly in and out of active combat.
Kakashi's Purple Electricity, however, forced him to factor in tracking and adhesion if the main body cast the lightning net onto moving shadow clones.
The clones had to dodge and weave through enemy attacks. If they got popped by an opponent before the Purple Electricity stimulation reached them, the chakra used to spawn them went entirely down the drain.
Purple Electricity bypassed this through hyper-precise tracking.
When it came to Konohamaru, he also needed to ensure the Ash Chicken Burning smoke cloud would track and stick to his clones while they moved, so he engineered an aggressive adhesive property into the ash.
After the initial exhalation, the burning ash would glue itself to the nearest surface.
Just like a second ago, it glued itself to Ebisu's trousers.
And after the clothes burned away...
"Is Pervy Teacher suffering or enjoying himself?" Naruto scratched his head as he watched Ebisu thrash and wail, genuinely unable to read the room.
"H-Help..." Ebisu caught Naruto's voice and squeezed out a desperate, strangled cry.
"Huh? Something actually went wrong? Pervy Teacher, you should've spoken up sooner! How was I supposed to know if you didn't tell me?"
"Quickly... save me..."
"Summoning Jutsu!" Naruto bit his thumb and slammed his palm against the ground.
A bright yellow toad materialized in a cloud of smoke. "Go, Gamatatsu! Douse Pervy Teacher with Water Release!"
"Ribbit! I don't know Water Release, but I can spit river water. Hold on a second." Gamatatsu hopped twice, scrambled over to the riverbank, sucked a massive mouthful of water into his cheeks, and hopped back to aim at Ebisu.
"Hold it!" Kakashi lunged forward, stepping directly between Gamatatsu and the target. "You can't throw water on a thermal reaction like that! When water hits ash that hot, it flashes into superheated steam instantly. You'll just give Ebisu third-degree vapor burns!"
"Is that so?" Gamatatsu opened his mouth, letting all the river water spill uselessly onto the grass.
The toad tilted his head. He learned something educational today!
"Then what's the plan?" Naruto asked.
"Smother it. Find a dense object that doesn't burn easily and completely isolate the zone covered in ash." Kakashi scanned the riverbank for a suitable tool.
But they were in the middle of the wilderness.
There was grass, dry kindling, and more dry kindling.
What the hell were they supposed to use to smother a sticky ash fire?
"I've got it!"
Naruto turned back toward Gamatatsu.
He was half a second away from telling the toad to un-summon himself since he was useless, when he noticed several fish flopping around in the puddle Gamatatsu just puked up.
Naruto scooped up a fish and hurled it at Ebisu like a shuriken.
Smack.
The wet fish landed squarely on Ebisu's... dick.
Naruto winced, looking a little embarrassed. Apparently, his projectile accuracy still needed work!
"I get it, Naruto-niichan! Leave it to me!"
Konohamaru watched the play and instantly grasped the tactical intention. He scooped up another flopping fish and hurled it at Ebisu.
"Phew..."
Cushioned by a layer of raw river fish, Ebisu collapsed onto the grass, completely drenched in sweat.
But the crisis wasn't entirely over.
The fish merely acted as a proxy target for the crackling micro-sparks.
Once the raw fish got fully baked, charred, and crumbled apart, the sticky ash would drop straight back onto Ebisu's bare skin.
How was this Ash Chicken Burning? This was practically the inextinguishable black flames of Amaterasu!
Speaking of Amaterasu, they technically had a brute-force solution.
The ash didn't burn forever.
As long as they kept a steady rotation of fresh fish flying through the air—hurling a new one onto the zone before the old one cooked through—they could insulate Ebisu's skin.
But over time, the poor teacher would still get slow-roasted by the ambient heat radiation.
Fortunately, Konohamaru possessed incredible battlefield intelligence.
His fluid combat logic didn't rank a single tier below Shikamaru's. In a flash, he thought of a workaround using the Manipulated Shuriken Technique.
He whipped out a spool of steel wire and tied a quick knot around the tail of a fresh fish.
Once the fish landed and the sticky ash successfully transferred to its scales, Konohamaru yanked the wire hard.
The scorched fish, along with the entire clump of sticky ash glued to it, ripped clean away from Ebisu's body.
"I'm dead..."
The trauma of the fish being violently ripped away from his target area served as the final straw. Ebisu's eyes rolled back, and he lost consciousness completely.
"What a drag! Ebisu-sensei's mental fortitude was too weak, and he doesn't have a personal summon beast to share the load. Otherwise, he might've triggered Sage Mode right then and there."
Konohamaru pulled a picnic blanket from his ninja pouch and draped it over the comatose tutor.
If a civilian stumbled upon the clearing right now, they would assume Ebisu was some kind of unconscious public degenerate!
With Ebisu safely removed from the equation, Konohamaru ran the demonstration properly with a shadow clone and earned Kakashi's nod of approval.
Naruto viewed Konohamaru as his own flesh-and-blood younger brother.
Since he already taught the kid the Shadow Clone Technique and the Rasengan, he naturally didn't gatekeep the sacred toad contract either.
He bit his thumb and let Konohamaru sign his name in blood.
In the original timeline, Konohamaru ranked among the elite few shinobi to hold contracts with two entirely separate animal species simultaneously.
For the Enma monkey clan, he summoned Enra. For the Mount Myōboku toads, he summoned Gamagorō.
Strangely enough, the hyper-accelerated growth rate of the toads wasn't a biological trait shared by all summon species.
Enra was the direct son of Enma, the legendary monkey king summoned by Sarutobi Hiruzen.
The exact same Enma whose panels were frequently quoted out of context by fans joking that "the monkey used a staff to stab the Third Hokage to death!"
As Enma's literal son, even if Enra belonged to a slightly different generation than Naruto's new wave of toads, his growth chart shouldn't have been far behind.
Yet even by the Boruto era, Enra remained microscopic, looking like an infant.
Enma was roughly the same age as the Third Hokage.
Even in the most extreme biological bottleneck where Enra was conceived right after Hiruzen's death—when Enma finally retired back to his mountain to start a family—the kid should still be a teenager.
Judging by his size, Enra looked younger than Boruto.
Of course, in this timeline, Enra was already born.
It simply meant the monkey clan aged at a drastically slower rate than the giant toads.
"Yes, exactly like that. Keep the rhythm steady," Naruto directed, supervising from his rock.
Konohamaru's setup was relatively compact.
He sat cross-legged with little Enra perched on his left shoulder and the juvenile Gamagorō resting on his right.
Kakashi, on the other hand, looked like an absolute disaster.
He had all eight of his ninken ninja dogs clamped onto his arms, legs, and back!
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