The Naruto squad dissolved into a pillar of white light, snapping cleanly back to their native timeline.
Minato's gaze swept across his remaining comrades before he let out a low sigh. "Everyone, the parameters of today's event are restricted strictly to the four of us. I trust no one will let a single syllable slip once we return to the village."
"Rest assured, Minato! My mouth is functionally a vault—the tightest lock in Konoha!" Nawaki guaranteed with absolute, chest-thumping conviction.
Ren glanced over at young Kakashi, asking, "Should we execute a localized memory suppression array on the kid?"
After a fraction of a heartbeat's hesitation, Minato shook his head. "No need. I possess absolute faith in Kakashi's foundational shinobi conditioning."
"Fair enough. Your squad, your command choice," Ren noted smoothly. "By the way—"
He pivoted toward the remaining crowd of evacuated citizens, his voice amplified across the perimeter. "Listen up, everyone! The sudden structural destabilization of the Dragon Vein nearly wiped Roulan off the map today! It was entirely due to the absolute heroism of Queen Sara that the localized grid was stabilized, preserving your lives! Do not forget the boundless royal grace of your sovereign!"
The displaced citizens blinked in shock, but as the logic clicked, they nodded frantically, raising their voices in a roaring chant: "Long live the Queen! Long live Queen Sara!"
Sara herself stood there looking completely dazed, but under the frantic nudging of her remaining ministers, she quickly processed the political lifeline Ren had just handed her. She remained silent, entirely at a loss for words.
Then again, Ren's squad couldn't be bothered by the internal administration of a minor queen. Ren turned his focus, his gaze settling cleanly onto Pakura.
The Suna kunoichi felt her heart jump as an intense, volatile wave of adrenaline hit her system! Are they executing an erasure protocol to silence me? At this critical juncture, looking into Ren's casual eyes, a sudden, burning question flared within her soul.
However, Ren intercepted her thoughts before she could speak.
"Pakura-chan, it would be highly optimal if you omitted the exact details of today's tactical display from your debrief to the Kazekage~" Ren said with a broad, easygoing grin. "If your military command realizes just how absurdly lopsided Konoha's raw power scaling is, it might deter them from ever launching a proper war!"
"A war... wait, what?" Pakura blinked, her analytical walls crumbling. "You aren't deploying an extraction matrix to eliminate me?"
Faced with her deeply bewildered gaze, Ren executed a smooth flip of his bangs, chuckling warmly. "To execute a fatal protocol against a girl as thoroughly adorable as you? I could never bring myself to be that heartless!"
In that exact split second, absolute realization washed over Pakura. Right... there was never any grand, profound mercy here. The man is simply a shameless, unmitigated flirt... then again, his baseline composition isn't entirely terrible...
Her gaze wavered for a fraction of a second, her psychological walls shifting, when Nawaki's boisterous voice shattered the atmosphere.
"Sensei! Before we broke orbit from the village, my Master-Sisters specifically mandated that I monitor your operational footprint to keep you from casting nets. If you continue to flirt—"
BAM!
Ren drove a flawless punch that buried Nawaki straight into the desert sand, his tone thoroughly exasperated. "You just love flapping your gums, don't you, brat?!"
The violent physical comedy instantly snapped Pakura out of her brief romantic illusion. She glared at Ren, her expression turning into a cold, mocking sneer. "Master-Sisters? Plural? It appears I have drawn the personal focus of an absolute, multi-layered scumbag~"
Seeing the beautiful target rewrite her psychological evaluation of him in real-time, Ren frantically beat up Nawaki's dense, iron-headed persona a thousand times over in his mind.
"Well... look, while it is statistically factual that I currently possess two wives, I must demand you believe me: my strategic intent toward you is completely authentic!"
"Heh~" Pakura didn't offer another syllable, turning on her heel and initiating a rapid departure vector.
As her silhouette began to blur against the shimmering horizon, Ren cupped his hands around his mouth, roaring across the canyon: "Hey! Pakura! The next time our paths cross on the international register, I am officially kidnapping you back to my estate!"
A mile away, Pakura's fluid stride hit a sudden, violent hitch. She turned a flushed, thoroughly incensed glare back toward his coordinates before snapping into a hyper-velocity Body Flicker, vanishing from the desert entirely.
Ren crossed his arms, a highly satisfied smirk spreading across his face. "She's definitely going to occupy a massive percentage of her cognitive processing thinking about me from now on!"
"Huh? How do you calculate that?" Nawaki asked, pulling his head out of the sand.
Looking down at the twenty-year-old, chronologically stagnant bachelor at his feet, Ren delivered a calculated kick to his hip. "You absolute blockhead! From this day forward, you are barred from ever joining my active deployment roster!"
"Nooo! Sensei, mercy!!"
By the time Ren's squad evacuated the sector, Queen Sara was already mobilizing her remaining citizens to mine the pristine, calcified jade fields covering the basin. It required zero foresight to calculate that Roulan's future economic growth was about to explode exponentially.
Along the return vector, Kakashi looked up at Minato, asking hesitantly, "Minato-sensei... is breaching the temporal barrier truly an achievable technical parameter?"
"It is. After all, the structural data was verified right before our eyes." Minato had been a skeptic prior to the mission, but with the empirical facts laid bare across his tactical arrays, there was no room left for doubt.
Ren interjected smoothly, "Once our foundational technological tree scales to a certain threshold, we might genuinely mass-produce a fully functional time machine."
"A time machine?" Kakashi murmured, his intellect turning the concept over.
Minato suddenly turned a sharp gaze toward Ren. "Ren, today wasn't the first instance where you've cross-referenced future travelers, was it?"
"Yeah. A few years back, I ran a diagnostic on a middle-aged iteration of Sasuke alongside your future grandson."
"...Huh?" Minato's analytical features froze in rare, absolute bewilderment. To witness a grown iteration of his son today was already an astronomical anomaly, yet Ren had intercepted his grandson years prior?!
"What?! Sensei, why the hell did you omit that data from our training sessions?!" Nawaki shrieked, jumping around.
"Because the data streams had zero relevance to your timeline, Nawaki. Furthermore, that future iteration of Sasuke didn't hold a single line of data regarding your presence in his native era. Based on my calculations, your character had likely achieved a permanent state of expiration by then!"
"EEH?!!!"
The squad remanifested inside Konoha, delivering a scrubbed debrief regarding the Dragon Vein's environmental explosion to Hiruzen Sarutobi. Though the Third Hokage remained somewhat skeptical of the parameters, Roulan was a minor, geopolitically irrelevant nation on the global register, so he didn't dedicate core cognitive assets to investigate it further.
Once Ren and Nawaki dismissed from the tower, Hiruzen logged a fresh set of classified deployments into Minato's profile.
Jiraiya, Tsunade, and Orochimaru possess zero personal ambition to secure the administrative seat of the Hokage. Hatake Sakumo has effectively transitioned to secondary tactical command. Ren Kurogane and Nawaki Senju completely lack the baseline bureaucratic temperament to run an office... At the end of the day, the only pillar left to sustain the village infrastructure is Minato! Hiruzen sighed internally, overwhelmed by logistical fatigue.
Ren slid open the main door to his estate, only to find his two beautiful wives watching him with highly calculated, razor-sharp smiles. He paused, asking with a raised eyebrow, "My lovely ladies, is there an anomaly in my appearance?"
"Oh, nothing at all. We were merely running a statistical calculation on the exact date you intend to fulfill your promise and kidnap that little Suna kunoichi back to the household~" Hikari said, her tone dripping with pure, high-frequency sarcasm as her eyes rolled toward the ceiling.
Konan stifled a warm chuckle behind her hand. "Hahaha! Hubby, you truly are an irredeemable blockhead when it comes to covering your footprint! However, given her status as an elite asset of Sunagakure, is a permanent integration into our cell a viable operational parameter?"
"You two... deployed an active surveillance matrix on my coordinates?!" Ren gasped, sheer panic hitting his systems.
Hikari pointed a finger toward his lower torso. Seeing his confused expression, Konan smoothly formed a single hand seal. The next instant, an endless swarm of pristine, paper butterflies erupted from the lining of his combat trousers.
Ren recalled a brief sensation of spatial displacement, and then—even given his immense, upgraded psychological resilience—a highly unhinged, thoroughly broken grin spread across his face.
"Ninja Art: Grand Isolation Barrier!"
In that exact microsecond, the physical structure of the Kurogane estate completely dropped off Konoha's localized dimensional register.
A few days later, when Ren finally stepped across the threshold to head into the village, Hikari waved a gentle farewell from the porch, her right hand slightly clenching into a fist...
Hiss~~ Ren winced, his internal systems registering an immediate phantom spike.
That afternoon, inside the Kurogane sitting room.
The expansive space was packed to maximum capacity with his usual circle of comrades.
"I must demand an explanation from you pack of loafers," Ren grumbled, dropping onto the tatami with deadpan, heavily fatigued eyes. "Why does the entire village infrastructure systematically migrate into my living room every single week?"
"Because your estate boasts the largest square footage in the residential sector!" Kushina laughed boisterously. "Besides, Minato and I are actively evaluating blueprint designs to construct our own permanent estate. There's a prime plot over by the Western District, but the merchant guild's asking price is completely absurd! I'm currently running a high-intensity negotiation strategy to grind down their margins!"
"The Western District? That sector is highly prosperous; the ambient aroma from the adjacent culinary street is phenomenal!" Konan smiled warmly.
"Right?! Exactly! That was the primary parameter that locked in my focus!"
"However, isn't that vector situated quite far from Lady Mito's medical perimeter?" Mikoto interjected analytically. "Furthermore, the local night market arrays in that district operate non-stop until the third watch—frequently scaling until the fifth watch. If you anchor your residence there, the ambient audio pollution at night will be incredibly severe~"
Hearing Mikoto's structural breakdown, the enthusiastic grin on Kushina's face instantly evaporated.
"If the data models scale like that, a total re-evaluation of our location vectors is mandatory!" Kushina stated with absolute gravity.
Ren turned his head toward Minato, leaning back against a structural pillar. "Minato-sensei, aren't you considering building a massive, custom-tiered compound of your own? If your liquidity reserves are facing a temporary bottleneck, I can gladly deploy an exclusive loan matrix to back your play."
Follow-up Question:
Since Ren Kurogane is introducing the concept of modern high-interest real estate financing and development into the early Konoha economy, should he focus on using his massive wealth to monopolize the prime residential districts before Minato selects a plot, or should he work with Konan to design a custom, paper-armor integrated smart-villa package to gift the future Hokage couple?