—You know, my whole 'Nami is clingy because she's unusually innocent for thirteen' theory might actually be overthinking things. In my case she might just be acting this way for the free food. That's a pretty universal draw regardless of who you are.

Well, doesn't bother me any. It lets me show off my burgeoning cooking skills. One of the few things no one else in our family can beat me in.

When it comes to the Postwar children of the Konoha 11 shinobi, I think every one of us—myself included—has some sort of trait or irony in our personality that sets us apart from our more famous parents. After all, kids very rarely grow up to be just like their parents or how everyone expects them to. There are other factors involved; like differences in living standards, the culture of the changing times they get brought up in, what kind of friends they hang out with, recessive genes…

Uzumaki Hanami, however, is the exception. She is 100% a carbon-copy of our Dad. She is every bit as cheerful, annoying, mischievous, loud, motivating, stupid, and unpredictable as he is. Her innate chakra affinity is even Wind nature.

…Oh yeah, and she wants to be the next Hokage, too.

I kinda feel bad for Mom. Hanami's the only other girl in the family, and she didn't inherit a thing from her besides the meaning behind her name. Think I might have used up all of Mom's genes by the time she was having Kid #3 here.

—We arrive in the family kitchen. It's a lot cozier than the big kitchen downstairs that's used for state functions.

Walking over to a granite countertop; I set down the Hokage headpiece, the froggy wallet that Nami got me for my birthday to match with hers, and the book Aburame Shinoko lent me earlier today.

While I started rummaging around in the pantry and fridge, I heard Nami pick up the copy of A Whirlpool of Lightning that I set down.

"Hey, what's up with this?" Nami asks about the hardback that she just picked up without asking. "One of those books that Shino-chan reads all the time?"

My sister and Shino-chan were about the same size and similar types of screwy and immature, so they got along pretty well despite being two years apart.

"Huh? Yeah, it is. She asked me to read it and tell her what I thought about it tomorrow. You don't know anything about it, do you?"

I guess Nami technically counts as a teenage girl…she might be able to tell me something that could come in handy. Like I said before, I'd like to do the typical guy thing and cheat my notes off of someone else so I can pretend to care instead of actually putting forth the effort.

"Eheheh, I don't read weird books like that." She grins to herself mischievously.

…I don't think you read much at all.

Was worth a try anyway. I'll just stick with my original plan of mooching some bullet points off one of the kunoichi in the hospital.

—I wipe down the counter and lay some of the ingredients out. Think I'll do a simple shouyu ramen. Not exactly the best display of culinary skill, but there's something to be said about mastering the basics.

After washing my hands, I start prepping some of the non-refrigerables. Scallions need to be bisected and then washed pretty thoroughly before you slice them up, a lot of dust and dirt can gather in between the layers, and that dash of green onion that's supposed to go on top will ruin the broth if it still has any dirt on it. Dried kombu, on the other hand, is best to just lightly wipe down with a cloth. The white powdery stuff on the surface of it is good for you and helps contribute to the taste.

—It's right when I start filling a stainless steel pot with cold water that Nami patters up to me, her stomach grumbling.

"Mina-niiiiiii." She says, her eyes bolded black lines that slanted up towards the space between her eyebrows. "Is it ready yet? I wanna eat already."

"It's been like five minutes." I smiled slightly and shoo'd her away. "Go spin some kunai around or something."

After taking care of that minor nuisance, I made some incisions on the edge of the kombu and set it at the bottom of my pot, setting the heat on the gas stove high enough for the water inside to come to a boil. I love that feeling when you're leaning over a pot of water that's starting to boil, and then the steam hits you and opens up your nose. A lot of people draw their face back or stand tall around boiling water because they have an inbuilt fear of scalding their face, but I do the opposite.

Mom says it might be because my chakra affinity is water. I can't really use Water Release or any of the other Elemental Ninjutsu these days because of my 'defect', but goddamn do I love cooking. It's like a form of meditation.

—I take the kombu out of the water right when the first bubbles start to float to the surface, right when a bit of that transparent dark green's bled into it. I'll go ahead and let the water come to a full boil, then take it off and let it simmer down before I mix in the bonito flakes and chicken stock. The fish flavor doesn't get absorbed correctly if you don't take your time.

"Mina-niiiiiiiii." Nami patters up and starts nagging me again. She looks really tired, like the lack of urgency in my role of amateur ramen cook is making her magically lose all of that boundless energy of hers.

…Think she's gonna keep doing this unless I find a way to keep her occupied.

"You seem kinda bored. Wanna play a game with me while we wait?" I ask.

"Yeah!" She shouts in the affirmative, jumping up and suddenly regaining that spirit of hers.

I evil-smile like mom does when she lures us into doing our chores. "Then it sounds like you have enough energy to help me out. Here, wash your hands and grab a knife."

Nami recoils. "You'd risk letting your precious little sister handle something sharp and scary that she could cut her finger off with?!" She acts scared, trying to get out of her share of the work.

"That's a pretty lame excuse when I've seen you throw plenty of kunai blindfolded and mid-backflip while training with Nii-san." I grinned and called her bluff. "Don't worry, I'll give you something easy. Cut the stems off these mushrooms for me. When you're finished you can dice up the extra green onion that we're going to pile on top."

I pull out a brown paper bag of day-old shiitake mushrooms from the fridge. I rub my fingers across the tops, feeling the mushroom heads for firmness. The trick to telling if a shiitake is good or not is to feel for how spongy it is. Too much moisture and it needs to be thrown out. You can also eyeball it by flipping them over and checking how exposed the gills are underneath the caps. The tighter seal around the stem, the better they are for cooking.

I put a select few on the countertop and demonstrate by using a santoku knife to cut the first one—

"Here, like this." When cutting stuff up I usually like to keep finger on the blade itself for added precision, but for her sake I'll use a full five finger grip around the handle so she doesn't try to copy me and end up cutting herself when she inevitably puts too much strength into it. "Put the caps on a plate, bag up the stems and put them in the freezer."

"Eh? What are we doing with the stems, can't we just throw them away?" Nami asks.

"Shiitake stems are highly fibrous and make for a good supplementary ingredient in broths. I'll throw them in next time we're making a real broth and not just twenty minute shouyu ramen."

"But…we're not going to have tonkotsu ramen?" She attacked me with her little sister beam again.

"My tonkotsu broth takes eight hours at bare minimum to make, preferably a whole day so it can soak up all of the flavor out of the bones." I deflected her invisible beam and smiled. "You wanna wait 'til tomorrow night to eat?"

The bottom of Nami's eyes watered. "Wa…shouyu ramen is fine."

…She really is childish for her age. Well, so is Dad, and he's forty-something. Guess it's not that weird.

As far as the ramen goes, I can't miraculously make tonkotsu broth in under an hour, but I can make a decent bowl that's better than your average bachelor's gut-wrecking instant noodles. I won't go as far as handmaking noodle dough or boiling any bones, but I'm making the dashi from scratch and I'm adding in a bit more than the lazy menma+onion+egg+nori combo. In fact, I'll skip the menma and do my signature scallion double-up instead.

"Hey, Mina-nii?" Nami speaks up while cutting up some green onion for me.

"Yeah?" I responded while prepping three more spots on the stovetop. One tall pan for soft boiling eggs, and then one saucepan for cooking up my oil—ginger+scallion with a dash of animal lard (healthier and better tasting than vegetable oil in my opinion, as long as it's not overused). And one tall pot that I'm going to thaw my frozen-fresh noodles out in towards the end.

"Do we have to put the shouyu in shouyu ramen? Isn't it bad for you?" Nami asks me something ridiculous.

"…Uh, yeah. We do." I glare at her for a sec and then round my eyes back to normal. "It's literally in the name. Who said that it's bad for you?"

"Jouji says that soy makes guys weaker and look girly and grow tits."

…Not sure if she'd be brave enough to repeat the 'grow tits' part if Mom weren't in another village right now…eh, she's old enough to find her own voice as far as I'm concerned, I'm not going to bust her over it.

"I wouldn't take anything that musclehead says to heart if I were you." I mix up the tare that we're having a discussion about. Six tablespoons of dark soy sauce, two teaspoons of fine-grained salt, three drops of sweet rice wine, and a liberal pinch of brown sugar (white or sugarless also works, but brown sugar's king for tangy flavors). "'Sides, what's wrong if you end up looking a little more girly? Everyone always says you act more like a boy than I do."

Case in point, I was the one making dinner right now while she was the one complaining about it taking too long, all while I countered her with smiles and snarky passive aggression. I'm an apron and a gender away from being a housewife.

"But what if it makes my body weaker and I stop making as much chakra?! I don't wanna become a bad ninja just because I ate some stupid soy sauce!" She squeezes her thumbs into her fists and waves her arms in the air pretty crazy-like.

I don't think a little bit of something that millions of people eat everyday would have the kind of long term effect that she's imagining, but I can respect the effort to make dietary improvements by worrying about the small details. Too many people commit to changing their eating habits and then never accomplish anything thanks to their tendency to give themselves generous exceptions and handwaving away the small pieces that make up the big picture. Think I'll give an at least semi-responsible answer instead of just outright dismissing her.

"Hm, fair enough." I take the onion-garlic-lard combo off the saucepan to strain, and throw on some pre-braised pork belly slices that I had in the fridge. "Well, in Akimichi Jouji's defense, there is evidence that consumption of soy products often has xenoestrogenic properties."

I garnish the chashu that I'm reheating with a red seasoning, and open up that textbook I have jammed inside my head. As part of my work at the Hospital and of my training; I've done a number of peer reviews and editing passes for Mom's research papers in the medical field. One of the ones she published recently was about nutritional effects on the endocrine system, I think I might be able to pull some knowledge from there—

"Soybeans contain a high concentration of isoflavones, a category of phytoestrogens that closely resemble human estrogen. The studies aren't conclusive, but there have been cases of women that drink large quantities soymilk who report irregularities in their menstru—"

I bite my tongue. I'm pretty matter-of-factly about all stuff physiological thanks to my line of work, but probably not normal to bring that up when we're about to eat.

"—Sorry. 'Monthly habits'. There's less evidence on what it does to men and for both genders in terms of muscular health and overall physical fitness, but assuming isoflavones mimic estrogen elsewhere, it would be a severe effector in terms of the metabolism and binding of bioavailable testosterone—leading to symptoms of muscular atrophy, irregular sleep, low sex drive, general fatigue…also, the phytic acid present in soybeans prevents the absorption of minerals like Iron, Magnesium, Zinc; all of which are also critical for hormonal health. There's also potential effects on the thyroid from particular glycoproteins, and Monosodium Glutamate that…hm?"

I take a break from my monologue when I notice Nami's being unusually quiet. When I glance over to my side; I see that she's collapsed flat to the ground, frothy saliva leaking out the corner of her mouth, her brain short-circuiting.

"…EH?! Ha-Hanami?!" My eyes became a pair of filled-in white circles.

"M-Mina-nii…please, stop…" Nami whimpers pathetically, an unfortunate victim of having been bored to death. "I can't take anymore, my head, it hurrrrrrrrttts…ahhhhhh, I can see the light..."

"Don't die on me, Nami!" I shout, my instincts suddenly kicking in. "I'll die too if Mom finds out I killed my sister! Resurrection, resurrection, Shousen Jutsu!"

I pushed glowing green hands against Nami's limp body, trying to nudge her back to life.

She smiles sadly like she's slowly fading away and about to become nothing more than a memory whose face gets transparently superimposed in the sky. "Bye, Mina-nii, I love you…tell Mom and Dad I love them too…almost as much as I love Aunt Ayame and her Ichiraku house special of handpulled ramen with miso broth and extra chashu…ah, Ramen-chan…"

"There's ramen right here, dammit!" I keep trying to shake her back to life. "And at least two-thirds of it is gonna go bad and get thrown out if you're not here to eat it!"

"Ah!" Nami's upper half shoots up, that red cloak of hair coming alive and stretching out in in every direction like rays of the sun. "That's blasphemy! I don't want to leave behind such a cold world where bad stuff like that can happen! I can't let it end here, I have to come back—!" She sits up, reviving herself with sheer willpower.

…Maybe the Mystic Palms on my part wasn't really necessary, there…

—I grab Nami's hand and help her up once we're finished playing around. She says something to me on the way up:

"Really, though, Mina-nii—you're really amazing. You're smart and can say all this complicated stuff right off the top of your head."

"Eh—" I shrugged my shoulders, "not really. People like Mom who write all this stuff down that the rank-and-file guys like me have to read. Or people like Shikamaru-sensei who can figure stuff out without even trying. Those are the smart ones. I just pay too much attention to boring stuff that exciting people don't have the time to memorize—"

Anyone can memorize something in a book if they have enough free time. I'm knowledgeable precisely because I'm boring. There's no way I'd ever be a main character of a story. That's for people like Dad who actually do things instead of just talking to themselves inside their head about them.

Who would read something like this? No ninja fights, just cooking, people talking to each other, and long-winded nerd essays about nothing happening. Weird people, that's who. Anyone normal would've either stopped reading a while ago or skipped past all of this so they can get to the cool parts.

"—besides, you forgetting I'm a medic-nin?" I remind her of the obvious. "Concern for people's health and what they eat goes hand-in-hand. I don't see why it'd be unusual for me to have a strong opinion about what people put in their bodies."

As healers, waiting for people to get hurt and patching them up after the fact is definitely what we're most known for, but it pays to be proactive too. In peacetime, the Konohagakure Hospital tends to bustle more with scheduled checkups than pressing emergencies. You need the mindset to be able to deal with both, if you're ever going to be any good at modern-day medical ninjutsu.

"…But, um, Mina-nii—I still don't get it. Is soy stuff good for you or bad for you?"

Nami must really care about getting stronger for her to be bringing this up again. Normally her short-term memory only lasts long enough for the butterfly to start flying in front of her eyes.

I guess the vast majority of the population really wouldn't care about all of this nutritional stuff I've talked about and the science behind it. And biochemistry is an emerging field in the Postwar Shinobi World, all of my ramblings here are really more my personal opinion than medical fact.

Mom's told me before that you can never oversimplify things enough for patients, and that you should wait until they have specific questions before going into details. Otherwise, you risk hitting them with an information overload and preventing them from digesting any of the information at all. Nami's healthier than I am and not a patient in any way, but the same process should apply here.

"Well," I continue on from that long-winded lesson from earlier. "Point I was trying to get to is that soy products can be dangerous to your physical fitness, but it also depends on what kind of product. Many of the staples in our diets, like natto and miso paste, are made with a fermentation process that removes most of the harmful anti-nutrients. In the case of soy sauce, it really depends on the manufacturing process. Traditionally, everyone in the Shinobi World ate fermented soy sauce that took months to make, but a lot of it today is produced industrially by acid washing to cut costs. You know, the cheapest stuff in grocery stores, the kind in those little plastic bottles with no labels?"

"Oh, I've seen those before!" Nami bounces in place a little like there are springs in her feet, finally understanding something I've said. "That's that stuff that tastes super salty. I don't really like it."

Think tying it back to foods that she can see with her eyes helped make it more relatable.

"Mhm. Doesn't have the same aroma." I mix some fresh-frozen noodles into a tall pot of boiling water. "Also, the factories' aluminum vats add the risk of heavy metals getting mixed in during the production. It's better for you and better-tasting to just buy the fermented kind. That's the kind that our ancestors have been eating for over a thousand years."

I'm pretty sure all six of the Hokage consistently ate meals that were cooked with the classic combination of dashi-mirin-shouyu, and I don't think any of them got to the top by having a weak punch…

…Granted, I don't know how much your health and diet can really matter, once you're a demigod that throws around giant energy blasts that determine the fate of the world and do severe ecological damage to our forests. But for those of us who are still actual ninja and not just overpowered freaks of nature, the simple rules of paying attention to your health and watching out for others' still applies.

"In short—you're fine." I go on. "Soy sauce only has a fiftieth of a milligram of phytoestrogen per tablespoon. If you're really worried about soy screwing you up, just avoid soy milk and tofu. And if you wanna be extra safe, stay away from stuff with soybean oil while you're at it. Its omega-6 to omega-3 ratio can cause some joint pain and inflammation throughout the body."

Of course, this is really just all extrapolation based off of my own personal diet and finite medical knowledge. Everyone's body is different, and I can't just make a blanket statement about all of them. A vegetarian or someone elsewise on a plant-based diet might eat something like tofu and find that the potential effects to their hormones are offset by the benefits of having an abundant source of protein with a complete amino acid profile. Additionally, I wouldn't say limited amounts of unfermented soy is any worse than, say, an occasional candy bar.

There are no medical professionals out there that are going to advocate an absolute best lifestyle, or one single change in your diet that will change everything (at least, not any with their heads screwed on correctly). Certain medical conditions like diabetes and heart disease might call for a sterner hand; but for the most part we just give answers and advice based off the patient's own questions and preconceptions, and try to guide them into making their own decisions based off of what they already know. Might not necessarily lead to everyone eating the 'optimal diet'—whatever that is—but if we can put to rest some of the stress someone might be getting over choosing the right thing every time, and get them to be just a little bit more self-involved in making healthier choices in their life—then chances are they're probably going to end up feeling better than they did before.

—The noodles finish boiling. Time to put it all together.

Two bowls—tare and grilled scallion on the bottom, then pour just enough broth so there's that firmer mesh of noodles up top to contrast with the softer underside. It's a personal preference for me.

The noodles go straight from the boiling water into each bowl. Doesn't matter too much if you set them off to the side before adding them into the soup, but I think they're more pliable and really soak in the flavor better this way.

Toppings time. This is really where you really earn your points in decoration and aesthetics.

Shiitake first so they can soften up a little.

Two floating egg halves with the jellied yolk pointing up (an extra egg for Nami's bowl).

Two sidelong pieces of nori—seaweed sheet—nestled right next to the eggs for color contrast.

Five slices of Chashu tightly stacked—the red-seasoned sides pointing up. The salty side needs to stay intact so you can bite into it and then wash it down with the warm contrast of the soup.

Finally, the green onion. I already put grilled scallion in the broth, but any good bowl of ramen needs that mound of uncooked scallion on top of the soup and noodles. There's really two ways to go about this. Either you can do it binary style and put a mound of green onion slices in the soup next to the mass of noodles, or you can put it on top of the noodles 'the snow on top of the mountain' style. You could also just sprinkle it anywhere if you're the uncreative type. For me, it's like putting a pickle on the edge of a hamburger instead of dead-center. You need some imagination, you know, some surprise.

—I skim a bit of the broth and give it a chef's taste. The first impression on the tongue is tangy and spicy, but thanks to the scallion oil, the spiciness gets tempered as soon as the broth spreads through the mouth, leaving a richer aftertaste and more of a tingle than a sting on the gums and tongue. Ramen chefs around the world debate usefulness of oil in ramen and whether or not it's cheating. Purists like to say that extra oil masks the originality in each ramen chef's broth and doesn't let the other flavors stand out on their own. Me? I have a simple saying—if you're afraid of fats, you're afraid of good food.

If you want an even more controversial opinion that would make any professional ramen chef hate me, though, try this—I always double up or even triple up on onions. You can never have enough onions. Sometimes I'll even caramelize some yellow onion and mix it in with the broth. Heresy, I know. Occasionally, I get someone who doesn't like onion and asks if I can make it without. Naturally, I respect their wishes because I am a considerate little butterfly and I would never do anything to offend someone or upset their tastes. Just kidding. I just keep cooking for them and slowly ramp up the onion content in their food so they gradually build up a tolerance, all while Talk no Jutsu-ing about why onions are so great and how they're good for you, until eventually their onion tolerance flips into outright onion love and I've successfully brainwashed them to accept my beliefs—forever shackling them to my supreme evil will. Mwahahaha…

…Shit, I might be hanging around that crazy bug girl a little too much.

Well, point is I love cooking. Granted, I'm nowhere near as good as the good folk at Ichiraku are at making ramen, and even then this is just me using a bunch of store-bought ingredients. I didn't give myself time to marinate the eggs, or make a true broth, or make fresh noodle dough and stretch it out into noodles—but even as a busy person you can still make something that's about 70% as good using packaged ingredients and shortcuts. It's not an excuse to eat terribly just because you can't eat perfectly.

"—Itadakimasu!" Nami claps her hands together when I set both bowls down at the table.

"Yeah, yeah, itadaku—" I murmur, twirling some noodles around in my chopsticks. The soup drips from the noodles like the drops from icicles at sunrise, that homely brown broth beguiling just the slightest hint of sweetness—

I take a bite. Mmmph. I love it when I'm amazing.

—Nami finishes her first bowl in short fashion and goes back for seconds, a quizzical look on her face when she comes back to the table, having been in too much of a hungered craze to notice what she's noticed now. She speaks up about it—

"Where's the naruto?" She asks. I don't think she's the only one asking that question.

"…Uh, Dad's in Amegakure. For the next day or two, remember?"

"Not Dad, the white fishy stuff with the pink swirls. That naruto!"

"Oh, narutomaki." I clarify for her. By 'naruto', she means narutomaki, the white fishcake with the pink swirls in the middle. It's not uncommon at all to put naruto on shouyu ramen, but personally I think it goes better with miso or pork based broths. "I got some from the grocery store yesterday. Second shelf down in the fridge, go cut some up for yourself."

"'Kay."

She does just that. Except, she runs into the smallest problem possible—

"Um, Mina-nii, where's the knife?"

"I threw it in the sink. Think all my spares are in there too." I pointed at the sink with my chin. There was a stack of dirty dishes protruding out the top, a monument to our temporary freedom from our parents. "Just grab a knife out of there and clean it off. Should be good."

Nami looks up for a second when I tell her that, and then looks at me so she can ask me something really stupid—

"Can you clean it for me?"

"You serious?" I stop sucking up the noodles into my mouth mid-slurp, my brain having permanently lost some of its function via diffusion of my sister's sheer stupidity. I have to talk back to her out of the side of my mouth while ramen noodles dangle loosely against my chin. "You put the soap on the metal part. Run water over it. Done. Five, maybe ten seconds. Easiest thing in the world."

"But then I'd be grabbing something out of the sink, which means my hands would be dirty, which means I'd have to wash my hands too, which means it would take even longer for me to eat my—" Nami says a bunch of things in the time it would take her to just do it.

"Literally the simplest two tasks in the world." I turn in my seat to face away from her and contently slurp up my noodles. "You gonna tell me you need me to breathe for you too? I thought you were supposed to be Konoha's #1 hyperactive ninja. Do some activity."

Who the hell asks something like that? 'Oh, can you get up and do this simplest most trivial task for me because I don't wanna put in the extra effort?' The kind of people who are way too comfortable being themselves around you and not afraid at all of looking selfish—siblings, that's who.

—Our ramen-addicted heroine is currently stirring around in place right now, trying to think of a way to get around doing the easiest thing in the world. It's taking her about five times as much time as it would to just grab a knife from the sink and deal with the thirty second inconvenience.

I'm pretending not to care right now, but I'm still watching her out of the corner of my eye.

—A light bulb goes off over her head like she's got some genius idea. She unzips the pouch with all of her ninja tools inside, and then turns it upside down over the counter. My ears are filled with the clangs of a bunch of kunai and shuriken hitting the granite.

That's the wrong activity.

I sigh, and get up. I have a serious amount of work to do before I can release this one into the wild as a functioning member of society. Not quite as much work as I have before I can release our dear Shino-chan, but that one's probably a lost cause anyway.

"Hey, don't do that, I just wiped down the counter…"

"But Mina-nii, I can skip all of this if I—"

"Yeah, I know what you're trying to do. All of your ninja tools are really dirty because you overuse them on target practice and never wash them. See—?" I picked up one of her kunai, covered in caked-out mud. How the hell did she even manage this, was she using it to dig…she some sort of weird part-human-part-fox? "These have at least five types of bacteria we haven't discovered yet in our laboratories. You'll seriously get sick if you use one of those to cut up some narutomaki and let them soak in your bowl."

"But I think I still got one that's clean. Where is it, where'd I put it…?" She starts patting herself down, trying to find a kunai that she hid on herself.

I don't get why she's so randomly stubborn about the stupidest things. Must be some more of Dad pouring out from her genes.

"Ah, here it is!" She pulls out the kunai she's looking for. It's…

…Oh…that kunai.

Lub-Dub. Lub-Dub. Lub-Dub.

Oh, sorry. That was the sound of my heart beating. I'm in danger.

The particular ninja tool she just pulled out isn't any regular kunai. It's one of the ones that the Fourth Hokage famously used, the ones with the three pronged blades and the tag wrapped around the handle that lets users of Hiraishin no Jutsu teleport instantly to your location. Dad gave each of us one so he could teleport to us at any time.

Lub-Dub. Lub-Dub. Lub-Lub-Dub.

That third heartbeat had a bit of a stutter. Happens all the time.

"Alright!" Nami lines up the middle blade of the kunai with the tube of fish cake, and is just about the cut into it when—

"WAIT, NONONONONONONONONONONO." I snap out of my internal narration of the events unfolding in front of me, my fight-or-flight instinct kicking out all the smartassery out of my head and replacing it with the frantic desire for survival. "Nami—whatever you do, don't use that kunai! I might die if you do!"

"Eh?" Nami looks at me puzzled, seriously not understanding the logical order of events that's going to happen if she uses a Hiraishin kunai right here and now.

The way this particular type of kunai work is by alerting the closest Hiraishin-user with a matching seal whenever they get used. There are two users of the Flying Thunder God Technique alive right now, and Dad is in Amegakure. That would mean the closest user would be—

"You'll summon Shinachiku!"

"Shinachiku…?" Nami looks up at the ceiling like I just said a foreign word. "Oh, you mean like menma?! I like those on ramen too!"

"I'M NOT TALKING ABOUT THE RAMEN TOPPING YOU IDI—"

Nami cuts me off as she slices into it, the handle of the three-pronged kunai glowing as its seal is activated—

And in that instant—

A yellow flash appears.

There's no gust of wind, nor is there a single piece of overturned furniture or a loose thing fluttering in the air from the momentum, even though he just traveled here at the speed of light—a flawless execution of space-time ninjutsu.

He lands a little bit past where Nami stabbed in the kunai, a palm planted firmly on the counter, all five fingers spread out.

—I felt my legs tremble. This was what I was afraid of—

A black haori waving in the air behind him, with the same pattern as the ones worn by the Hokage—white flames at the hem.

Blond of hair, green of eyes.

They say there's a certain talent that appears in this village only once every generation. Our father and Uchiha Sasuke fulfilled this role in the generation before us. In the generation before them, it was Namikaze Minato—the man I'm named after. Before him it was the Sannin, then the Third Hokage before them, and then the First Hokage and Uchiha Madara at the village's founding.

Working the other way, there was one person that represented that talent for our generation. One single outlier that defied all of the weakening expectations of this generation that has never known anything but peace, the one young shinobi that represented everything we once were—

The strongest shinobi to have been born since the end of Fourth Shinobi World War—

"Yo," Uzumaki Shinachiku said, like he was no big deal. "What's up?"