Chapter 169: Jiraiya!
"Change up the food today. Ramen every meal is getting old. Also need to pick up some plaster — that crack in the wall has been sitting there for over a month."
Ryū stepped out into the street, muttering to himself.
Minato's payment had been exactly what he'd promised: a substantial sum in Fire Country currency, plus an assortment of ninja tools. The tools were probably worth a fair amount, but without chakra they were decorative objects as far as Ryū was concerned. He'd left them in a corner. He'd sell them off whenever he got around to it. No sentimental value, no collectible appeal, no reason to keep them.
Konoha's main street was still quiet, but less quiet than it had been. A few people moved between the buildings — enough to constitute foot traffic, which was an improvement. A month ago, coming back from the Nine-Tails crisis, he'd walked the same streets for hours without passing a single person. The village was healing. Slowly, but it was happening.
Three days of continuous dying and reviving had left Ryū in a specific kind of fatigue. His body was at full capacity — the Arena didn't carry over physical damage — but his mind had been running at combat tension for over eighty hours with no pause. He wanted several days of nothing. The good kind of nothing: cooking, cleaning, sitting, existing without anyone trying to remove his head.
Clack. Clack. Clack.
Wooden sandals on stone paving. The rhythm was unhurried, the gait that of someone who owned the ground they walked on.
Then a voice, grumbling at moderate volume:
"Only gone a little while to do some research, and this is what I come back to. Damn it all… if I'd been here even a few days earlier, the losses wouldn't have spread this far."
"No sign of Orochimaru over at the administration building. And Tsunade — who knows if that crazy woman has even heard yet, let alone whether she'll bother coming back."
"Half the village reduced to rubble and of course — of course — my place is gone too. Unacceptable! Why did that damn Nine-Tails specifically have to hit my house? I should never have bought property in that district."
"I'm pretty sure Orochimaru's place is around here somewhere… might as well impose for a while. He can actually cook, now that I think about it. Good timing, really — I'm hungry."
Ryū's ears tracked the monologue automatically.
The voice. The cadence. The specific way the speaker referred to Orochimaru by name and Tsunade as a "crazy woman" without lowering his voice. The mention of going out to "do research" — a word that covered a very specific range of activities.
He knew who this was before he'd turned around.
He turned around.
Thirty-five to thirty-eight, he estimated. White hair that needed its own structural engineering. Red marks below the eyes. Wooden sandals that produced a percussive clack with every step, in a village full of people who wore sandals for reasons Ryū had never been able to determine. Was it a chakra efficiency thing? Did toe exposure improve technique? He'd thought about this before and reached no conclusions.
He had a brief mental tangent about how the most dangerous people in the One Piece world wore flip-flops, which made him feel slightly better about the general sandal situation, and then he reminded himself he was supposed to be watching the person in front of him.
The person in front of him — Jiraiya, one of Konoha's legendary Sannin — had stopped in front of a small villa and was looking at it with the expression of someone who had just discovered their prospective free meal was not home.
"Looks like Orochimaru's out…"
Ryū turned to leave.
Something landed on his left shoulder — or tried to. His body had already shifted before the thought completed. A hand, grimy from travel, closed on empty air. Jiraiya stumbled, caught himself, and avoided hitting the ground through the reflexes of someone who had survived considerably worse than missing a shoulder.
He straightened up and looked at Ryū with unconcealed surprise.
"Hey now! Quick reactions, kid — you sensed me coming from behind? Ha ha ha! I was just going to ask directions, that's all."
Ryū looked at him.
"Do I look like someone who would believe that?"
Jiraiya blinked.
"Directions," Ryū repeated. "You. One of the three legendary Sannin of Konoha. Grew up in this village. Currently standing in a district you clearly know well enough to navigate to Orochimaru's front door." He glanced to the side. "There are three people within twenty metres of us. You walked past all of them to come ask me."
The pause that followed was the pause of a man deciding how to play a hand that had just been turned face-up.
"…I see."
"The Fourth Hokage's technique is supposedly pretty good disguise work," Ryū continued, walking. "Now I'm wondering where he picked up the habit."
He left that observation floating in the air and kept moving.
Jiraiya stood on the street and watched the young man's back until it disappeared around a corner.
Then, gradually, his expression settled into something different from the performance he'd been running. He straightened. The comedic fumbling drained out of his posture, replaced by something quieter and more considered.
Ryū, he thought. The one who fought the Nine-Tails.
He'd heard it from Minato in broad strokes. A civilian. No chakra. No shinobi training on record. Had engaged the Nine-Tails directly and walked away without a scratch — not a minor injury, not an exhaustion collapse, nothing — while the beast operated at full lucid capacity.
When Minato had first described it, Jiraiya had nodded along and quietly assumed some degree of exaggeration. Minato was not prone to exaggeration, but the alternative required accepting a set of facts that didn't fit into any framework he had.
The kid had sensed him approaching from behind. Silent approach, no chakra signature — the kind of entry that slipped past ordinary jōnin without registering. The kid hadn't even looked tense about it. He'd just moved, and then he'd dissected Jiraiya's cover story without apparent effort, and then he'd walked away.
Young, Jiraiya noted. Very young. Might not even be eighteen.
He thought about the first Hokage — the stories Hiruzen had told, which Jiraiya had grown up hearing. How Hashirama had stood in front of the Nine-Tails and simply exceeded it.
A parallel that was either deeply meaningful or deeply coincidental. He hadn't decided which yet.
Orochimaru apparently made contact too. I wonder what he made of it.
Jiraiya smiled to himself — the specific, slightly unsavoury smile of someone who has decided to follow a person who has not invited them to do so.
He started walking in the direction Ryū had gone.
He can hardly throw me out. Probably.
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