Chapter 22: Ramen Ichiraku
So Might Guy really was his neighbor — separated by nothing more than a single shared wall. What Ryū hadn't anticipated was that Guy would actually come over.
Piecing together what Guy had said, the visit was almost certainly triggered by sound. Guy had heard something, decided it didn't sit right, and came to check on him.
That was Ryū's guess, anyway — the most plausible explanation. Because, when it came down to it, Guy and the previous occupant of this body had gotten along reasonably well as neighbors. They'd apparently played in the mud together as kids, even done ninja roleplay or something. And on top of that, Guy was the rare type of shinobi who didn't have a calculating bone in his body. If anything felt off with a neighbor, he was the sort of person who would absolutely come and look — no hesitation, no second-guessing.
Which was exactly what had just happened. Ryū's palm coming down on that table had probably been audible from a street away. For someone living one wall over, it would have been impossible to miss.
He pulled his scattered thoughts back into order, smoothed the surprise from his expression, and looked at the bowl-cut boy standing in front of him.
"I had some things come up — ended up out of the house for a few days. Staying cooped up inside all the time makes you go stale."
Guy scratched the back of his head. "As long as nothing happened, that's a relief. I heard this huge crash just now and figured maybe a burglar had gotten in."
Right. So it had been the table. Ryū had known the crash was loud, but he hadn't fully appreciated just how loud — even the floor had vibrated underfoot when he'd brought his palm down. And Guy was a shinobi. Noticing a disturbance from next door came with the territory.
Ryū studied the boy standing in front of him — younger than he was by two or three years — and found it genuinely difficult to reconcile this face with what he knew about him.
This was the man who would one day be called the God of Shinobi in his own right. The man whose single kick had nearly ended the final arc of the entire Naruto story — if that kick had landed flush on Six Paths Madara's skull instead of where it did, the ending of Naruto would have been a completely different story.
Right now, Guy was fourteen or fifteen. Young. But that didn't mean weak.
Quite the opposite — at fourteen or fifteen, Might Guy's combat ability was already on par with a Jōnin. Before Kakashi had gotten his Sharingan, Guy's strength had kept pace with his. And Kakashi had made Jōnin at twelve. Guy was no less remarkable than that — not by any measure.
"If it wasn't a burglar, I'll head back then!"
Guy had already begun to turn for home when Ryū stopped him with a question that came slightly out of nowhere.
"Guy — have you heard anything recently about the Fourth Hokage's wife? About whether she might be pregnant?"
Guy blinked, mildly surprised, but he didn't read anything into it. To him, it probably just sounded like idle civilian curiosity. Minato Namikaze — the young, extraordinary Fourth Hokage — had always been the subject of fascination among Konoha's ordinary residents. There were plenty of unanswered questions surrounding him.
Guy thought for a moment, then nodded. "I think I did hear something about that — a couple of months along, maybe two or three? The Fourth's about to become a father. Hokage and father at the same time." His expression lit up. "Now that's the springtime of youth!"
The word 'youth' seemed to flip a switch in him. His thumb shot up on instinct. He flashed that enormous grin again — all teeth, total sunshine — eyebrows and haircut combining into something that, on a face that earnest, produced a deeply peculiar effect.
Ryū watched him disappear back over to his side of the wall, then quietly shut the door.
He stood there with a slightly troubled expression, muttering under his breath: "Two or three months along… Did Naruto come early? I can't remember. But if it's a full ten months, that leaves roughly seven months."
Seven months. Not short, not long.
Was he really going to just wait for the Nine-Tails incident to arrive and then spend his Points jumping to another world to ride it out? Hole up in Gensōkyō with the purple granny, or go mooch food off Whitebeard, or hide out in Kaguya-sama's enormous estate?
The problem was Points. Unless his daily sign-ins kept delivering unusually large sums, he didn't have the currency to just casually dimension-hop whenever things got dangerous.
Another Group Quest would help. But more than that, Ryū wanted to find out whether he could grow strong enough in seven months to actually face the Nine-Tails incident head-on.
The Dimensional Chat Group was his biggest advantage. He'd had it for fewer than ten days. In that time he'd acquired a Devil Fruit, used 3,000 Points to double-enhance both his constitution and his fruit proficiency, and already grown to a point that would have seemed impossible before he transmigrated. If that pace held —
Seven months from now, there was a real chance he could beat Kurama into the shape of a very confused husky.
"The next few months should be the quietest period in Konoha's history — in the entire shinobi world, honestly. Nothing major happens during this stretch. Which means I have time to develop in peace."
He glanced out at the clean street beyond the window, then at the clock on the wall.
The Naruto world's technology tree was a strange thing. No firearms, no cars — but alarm clocks existed. Apparently that was where the priorities landed.
"Half past noon already. Funny — I ate plenty on the Moby Dick before coming back, so why am I starving again? …Is this the constitution upgrade? Is this what that feels like?"
Apparently so. A side effect that was hard to call a side effect — the cost of having a body that was no longer ordinary.
He had a creeping suspicion he was about to become a big eater. In every anime and novel he'd ever read, characters with exceptional physical constitutions ate ten, twenty, sometimes thirty times what a normal person would. The One Piece world alone was practically a parade of bottomless stomachs. Was that his future now?
He could barely picture it.
Time moved at its easy pace. Out on one of Konoha's busier streets, Ryū tilted his head back to look at the sign above him.
Ramen Ichiraku.
If you'd read even a chapter of Naruto — or any Naruto fan work — you knew this place. Even years after the manga ended, the legend of the Ōtsutsuki Ichiraku persisted on the internet. Because Ramen Ichiraku had been there for the whole arc of the Hidden Leaf's history, front to back, and the owner had never once changed. The owner didn't even seem to age.
Which had, naturally, spawned an entire ecosystem of conspiracy theories. The owner was secretly an Ōtsutsuki. The owner was the Sage of Six Paths' father. The final boss of Naruto was the Ōtsutsuki Ichiraku owner, and the whole story had been his long game from the start. Every type of theory, all orbiting this single ramen stand.
Standing in front of it, an absurd thought surfaced in Ryū's mind, unbidden.
"When the Nine-Tails hits — maybe I should just stay here. Ramen Ichiraku has survived Kurama destroying half the village, Orochimaru destroying the other half, and Pain leveling what was left. It came through all of it without a scratch.
Honestly, this might be the safest spot in Konoha."