Fire Country's border was unlike anything I'd ever seen.
Konoha had its walls, and up until today they'd been the largest manmade structures that I could fathom. They towered above even the tallest of Fire Country's signature trees, nearly topping the unnatural forestry in Training Ground 44. Made of densely packed stone and artfully carved gates, of which four had been stationed at each cardinal point in the village, they were a testament to the strength of Konoha's founding clans. The first time I'd seen them, I'd forgotten to breathe.
But the border between Fire and Wind was something else entirely.
Fire country's wall loomed up to the heavens, taller than Konoha's by half, and twice as thick. It stretched from horizon to horizon and seemed to physically cut the forests of Fire off from the deserts of Wind, holding back all the richest of the former's flora from the latter's desolate plains. I couldn't see any gates, but something told me even if I had that they wouldn't have looked nearly as inviting as those in Konoha. The border wall's aura was entirely different from Konoha's. Not grand, but intimidating. Not warm, but cold. I could see shinobi patrolling it, top and bottom, and their grimness was clear to see in spite of the distance between us.
It burned itself into my mind the moment I saw it, but I couldn't say I was happier for the experience. "They don't look like they want people coming and going," I said, breaking the hushed silence that the wall had evoked.
"Not at all," Jiraiya-sensei agreed. "Crossing this border is a major offense without the proper permissions, and even then Fire doesn't recommend it. The road to any sort of civilization in Wind from its border is harsh, and odds are the locals won't be all that happy to see you when you get there."
"Oh," Kushina said quietly. She'd been the one to suggest Wind, eager to pay their signature beach coasts a visit. I'd gone along with it, not minding one way or another, and Mikoto had been so shaken up by the whole thing that she'd agreed on reflex. "Maybe we should go somewhere else?"
"Bah. You'll run into that no matter where you go. We didn't make many friends in the war, you know." Jiraiya-sensei patted her head. "It'll be fine. You three just follow my lead and you'll be charming foreign ladies in no time." Kushina swatted his hand aside.
"Sensei," Mikoto said, peering up at the shinobi atop the wall with a frown on her lips. "How are we going to be crossing the border, exactly? I can't see any gates. This... doesn't look like a crossing point."
Jiraiya-sensei nodded along. "Definitely not. The nearest checkpoint is a six hour sprint to the north. This particular zone has no traffic at all except for the poor saps on patrol duty, and there are only a fraction of the contingent you'd usually find. They call this part of the wall no man's land."
Kushina bit. "Why do they call it that?"
"Because the wall on Wind's side of the border is barren in this zone. They built it along with the rest of the wall and haven't staffed it since. Not even a skeleton force."
"That's crazy," Mikoto protested. "Why would they leave themselves open like that? That's begging for someone to come in uninvited."
"Doesn't make much sense, does it?" Jiraiya-sensei said cheerfully. "Good for us, though!"
Ah. So that's where this was going.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Kushina asked. "We're not sneaking in, right? You got us the 'proper permissions', right?" Jiraiya-sensei grinned. What color Mikoto had drained from her face. "Right?"
"From the east!" Jiraiya-sensei cried, biting down on his thumb and letting the blood fly. The resulting tear heralded the smallest toad I'd seen him summon yet, sitting a hair above his shin. It warbled a happy greeting. "To the west, and all the sands beyond! Jiraiya of the Legendary Three always has the proper permissions. Any fair lady would be happy to give them- no, overjoyed! Whether it be Wind, Earth, Water, or Lightning, Konoha's most gallant shinobi is always welcome!"
He clamped a hand on the back of Kushina's neck. "As my students, you'll enjoy the same privileges. Behold! A shinobi's proper permissions." He snapped his finger, and the little toad at his feet opened its mouth obligingly. Then he adjusted his grip on Kushina's neck, grabbed a fistful of her pale yellow kunoichi dress, and tossed her headfirst into the toad's mouth.
Kushina shouted, twisting and curling in an attempt to avoid squishing the tiny amphibian-
The toad's mouth yawned open wider, impossibly wide, and I felt something twist inside of it. A phantom rush, like wind surging past me into the vacuum beyond its mouth. Not breaking time and space, exactly, but stretching them. Warping them beyond recognition.
Kushina went in shrieking and she didn't stop. The little toad swallowed her whole.
"Kushina!" Mikoto cried, horrified. She rushed forward, reaching out-
Jiraiya-sensei tripped her, and she went tumbling into the toad's mouth.
There was a beat of silence.
"Do I have to throw you in too?"
"No."
Another beat. The summoned creature warbled invitingly.
"Why don't you go first, sensei-"
"Get in the toad, Minato."
I got in the toad.
It was bigger on the inside, obviously. I went in feet-first, sliding down a long and fleshy slide for a good half a minute. As I went, the phantom sound of Kushina's shrieks grew louder and louder. They peaked at a level just below "ear-splitting" as I touched down on what I assumed was the toad's tongue, squinting through the darkness. The walls of its mouth glowed, but the light provided was slight and tinged a dark flesh color.
I dimly saw Kushina, screaming bloody murder and thrashing around a few feet away. I took a cautious step forward, wondering if I should try to snap her out of it or wait for her to scream herself back to her senses.
I bumped into a lump of shivering Uchiha, and Mikoto let out a little shriek of her own. I caught her arm before she could flinch away, speaking as reassuringly as I could.
"Hey, hey, it's alright," I said. Mikoto went stock still.
"... Minato?" she whispered.
"Yeah-" I grunted, staggering as she wrapped herself around my legs. "Look, we're fine, this is just-"
"Who's ready to invade a hostile country!?" Jiraiya-sensei crowed, slamming into the toad's tongue beside me. The inside of its mouth rocked, almost knocking me off my feet again and throwing Kushina a good three shrieking feet into the air. The summon warbled indignantly, the sound of it titanic and echoing. Mikoto buried her face between my legs.
Thanks, sensei.
The desert burned.
There was no other way to describe it. It had been a hot day on the fringes of Fire Country, where the trees and their shade thinned, but this was something else entirely. The sand flowed like shimmering golden lava, pouring into my sandals and sizzling on my feet. The sun beat down relentlessly, hammer blows of heat that struck me the moment I crawled out of Jiraiya-sensei's toad.
The air itself shimmered and warped in the heat, distorting the horizon near and far. I felt delirious. I felt like time and space were bleeding.
I could see the moon. It was midday.
"Sensei." The word was nearly lost in the searing wind, whipping it behind me along with the tail of my scarf. A gift from Jiraiya, along with the two Kushina and Mikoto were sporting. Wrapped around our faces, though they made it no easier to breathe.
"Yes?" Jiraiya-sensei asked, distracted. He scribbled something in his notebook.
Jiraiya-sensei wore no scarf. He hadn't taken a single draw from his canteen since we'd entered Wind Country some eternity ago. He wasn't even sweating. When I wondered about it hard enough, really focused, I could almost feel a pleasant shifting of chakra on the surface of his bare skin. It was too vague to say, though.
"How are you walking like that?"
It was another thing I'd noticed. Where Kushina, Mikoto and I slogged through the molten sands one painful step at a time, Jirayia-sensei paced atop the dunes like they were solid stone. I'd been trying to mimic him for hours, using every chakra trick I'd learned in the Academy, but nothing worked. My teammates had been trying as well, with as much success. The surface was too volatile to tread. So how?
"Hm?" He looked up from his notepad, studying the three of us. He didn't squint. Somehow, every grain of sand in the air just... missed him. "It's one of the more advanced chakra exercises, unless you're from Suna. You'd have to know tree walking, and it really wouldn't be easy unless you knew water walking too."
"We already know those," Kushina said, her voice thin and rasping, but no less indignant for it.
Jiraiya-sensei blinked. "Really?"
We all nodded.
"Then that makes this easy!" He grinned, shooting us a thumbs up. "Combine the two."
"... How?"
"Tree walk, but water walk too."
Kushina jerked to a stop, misty grey eyes utterly flat. "What."
"You know," he said, waving a hand. "Put 'em together."
"You just said that!" Kushina yelled, voice cracking halfway through 'said' and ending in a violent coughing fit.
"Okay, okay," he said soothingly. "Here, let's say you're the tree walking exercise. And we'll say Mikoto is water walking. Make sense?" Kushina nodded warily. "Right. So what you have to do is-"
Jiraiya-sensei nudged the two girls forward, sending them stumbling into each other. They immediately latched onto one another, staggering in search of footing.
He beamed. "Just like that!"
"You're the worst!" Kushina yell-coughed, pulling back - careful not to knock Mikoto off balance again - and stalking clumsily towards our sensei. "We're not all super legends like you, 'ttebane! You need to teach us things! We can't just figure everything out on our own-"
"Ah," I murmured, balancing carefully atop the dune.
"W-what?" It was difficult to tell with the scarf covering most of her face, but I imagined Kushina looked pretty surprised.
"There you go!" Jiraiya-sensei slapped me on the back, throwing me forward a step.
I grit my teeth, driving my chakra into the sand through the soles of my feet. I saturated a wide, thin sheet with it, clung to that sheet, and balanced it upon the dune. I wobbled once. The dune stilled.
"You see?" Jiraiya-sensei said, gesturing at me. "Minato's got it. All it took was a little quick thinking."
"How?" Mikoto asking, leaning down and peering at my feet. "Why... isn't the sand moving?"
It was something I'd noticed a few hours ago while watching Jiraiya-sensei walk. Whenever his feet touched the dune, a patch of sand under and around his sandals froze. The minute shifting that was always at work on the desert's surface would just stop, only to resume as soon as he lifted his foot. I hadn't made the connection until he brought up the two chakra exercises.
"The sand is too unstable to water walk," I explained, lifting my right foot and allowing the desert flow to resume in its wake. "Pumping a constant stream of chakra into a dune upsets the structure and you sink. You can't tree walk, either, because the patch of sand you stick to your feet will just sink with you."
"So you freeze the sand," Mikoto said quietly. "And keep it on top of the dune with water walking?"
"I... think so." It was difficult to put into words. It wasn't a one to one combination of the two exercises. It was something more fluid. A feeling.
"Why doesn't that collapse the dune?" Kushina asked, watching me place my foot back on the dune with intense focus.
"Because the sand he freezes is wider around than his feet are," Mikoto said with growing confidence. "It's distributing his weight!"
"Sure." Whatever worked.
"You'd be surprised how much you can do with a little mixing and matching," Jiraiya-sensei said cheerfully.
"So then," Kushina muttered, lifting a foot from the sand and placing it carefully on the surface. "Distribute your chakra..."
I felt a soft pulse of chakra, not unlike the sensation I was getting from Jiraiya-sensei's feet, dig into the sand beneath Kushina. She tensed, lifting herself up on one foot. I felt her chakra spike, freezing a section of the desert and then burrowing deeper, suspending her on the top layer. She wobbled dangerously, touching down lightly with her other foot-
And something lurched beneath my feet.
The roots of my chakra had brushed something, something I couldn't quite picture for some curious reason, and it moved. For a moment I thought the sky was shaking in its frame, but no, that was just the desert. The dune beneath my feet roiled, shifting and collapsing inward as whatever had been holding it up moved out from underneath it. The grasping strands of my chakra stuck to the... the...
Half-formed impressions relayed from my chakra sprang to my mind. Enormous slithering things and throats full of hundreds upon hundreds of shifting teeth. Titanic. It was titanic, and it was awake, and it was hungry-
Jiraiya-sensei's chakra shrunk, folding in upon itself countless times, layering until it screamed to the senses, and then it boomed. A monstrous croak rocked the dune out from under me, breaking my chakra's tenuous hold on the titan below and sending me sprawling. With my chakra's last phantom impression I felt it recoil, turn away, and flee.
The desert flowed on.
"-ou o-ay?!" Mikoto shouted. She sounded far away, or maybe she was too close. I felt odd. Like my ears were ringing, but for my chakra instead. Reeling away just like the titan.
"Guys! What happened!?" Guys? I shifted the sand aside, ignoring the burn of it getting into my clothes, and cast around for Kushina.
She was sprawled out a few feet away, half submerged in sand just like me. I could see the whites of her eyes. They matched her skin.
"Sensei," I rasped. He laughed, grabbing me by the back of my tracksuit with one hand and hauling up Kushina by her yellow dress with the other.
"Careful now. Gotta learn how to fit more than one thing at a time in those little prodigy heads of yours. It's a whole new world out here," he said, winking.
"I think I know why they don't send anyone to this side of the border," Kushina whispered.
The rest of the day passed in shaken silence. I waited a full hour before I tried sand walking again.
"Sensei, how are we going to do missions?"
It was Mikoto who finally asked.
Jiraiya-sensei raised an eyebrow, kicking back in his tent. We'd set them all up as night fell and the desert transitioned from a hot burn to a cold one, along with a modest fire fed by whatever plant life we could find amongst the dunes. It was still mercilessly cold, but it felt good to have.
"Do you need to do missions?" Jiraiya-sensei asked.
She didn't take a moment to think. "Yes."
"Why?" he asked, honestly curious.
"Missions help the village's economy," she said immediately. "A ninja's mission record reflects their skill. Their successes and failures determine their value."
Jiraiya-sensei nodded thoughtfully. "So?"
"We can't be good ninja if we don't do missions," Kushina said. He waved his hand in a so-so gesture. "Fine. No one will believe we're good ninja if we don't do missions."
"Possible," he agreed. "But why does it matter?"
"Sensei, please," Mikoto said softly. "I can't accomplish my dream if no one respects me."
"Ah," he mused. "Well, that's different."
He pulled his notepad from a pocket in his flack jacket, flipping through it and muttering faintly to himself. We all leaned forward one inch at a time, and jumped back when he snapped it shut. He nodded once, and smiled winningly.
"We'll do missions, then!"
I blinked. Mikoto and Kushina shared a look.
"So... we're not going on an adventure?" Kushina ventured.
"The opposite." He leaned forward himself, speaking in hushed, secretive tones. "You see, Uzumaki-chan, the great Jiraiya is always on an adventure."
"Even on missions?" I asked.
"Especially on missions!" He threw his arms out, gesticulating with feeling. "You kids have been operating on the false assumption that being a ninja and living a life are two separate things. You think becoming a great ninja is all about clocking in and clocking out until the Hokage decides you've done enough to qualify for respect.
"And you know what, it isn't your fault that you think that way. That's what the Academy taught you, that's what the people you know have said, and from your perspective that's what the greats did. I won't lie and tell you I didn't have to put the hours in, because I did, but!" He jabbed a finger at us, eyes alight. "I didn't put them in because it was my job, or because I needed them to achieve some greater goal.
"I did it because I love being a shinobi. And that's the difference, here. Some people never make it past genin, let alone chunin, because they don't care enough. Because at the end of the day you can't just plug in so many hours of training and get so much skill back. You have to feel this stuff." His gaze flickered to me, and he grinned.
"A great ninja is a passionate ninja. And you know what a mission is to a passionate ninja?"
"An adventure," I finished.
"Exactly right." He clapped me on the shoulder, beaming at all three of us. "So! If you three want to be respected ninja, legends even, start with what makes your blood boil. Do what feels right and stop worrying about what other people think of your abilities, and you'll be happy. One way or another."
"Right!" Kushina shouted, jumping to her feet. "All about passion, 'ttebane! I'll show you and everyone else that Uzumaki fuuinjutsu is just as good as everyone else's!" That said, she turned tail and sprinted off to her own tent and the supplies therein.
"Wait, that's not-!" Jiraiya-sensei stopped himself, shaking his head ruefully. "Walked right into that one, didn't I?"
"What feels right," Mikoto murmured, pensive. Her lips twisted, caught between a smile and a frown. She shook her head. "I guess there's no denying it." She decided on a smile, bowing to Jiraiya-sensei and dashing off to her own backpack and supplies.
A beat. Jiraiya-sensei raised an eyebrow. "What about you, kiddo?"
I shrugged. "I want to go fast."
He shoved me over. I laughed, using the sand walk to roll overtop the grains and come to my feet.
"Go run laps then, brat," he said, grinning. "Or see if you can find passion somewhere a little more worthwhile, eh?" He waggled his eyebrows, tilting his head towards my teammates. I rolled my eyes.
Passions and adventures. Where did I start?