Chapter 48: The Ring of Fire!

Kushina woke up feeling like she'd been folded in half and stepped on.

"Everything hurts," she announced to the room. "My arms hurt. My legs hurt. My hair hurts. How does hair hurt, Mikoto? What did you do to me?"

"Training." Mikoto was already dressed, already packed, sitting by the window with the morning light behind her like she'd been awake for hours, because she had. Outside, the eaves were still dripping from a rain that had swept through sometime in the night. "Up. All of you."

Rei made a sound from his bedroll like a dying animal. Kaede sat up in silence, and then stood in silence, and only the very careful way she did both gave away that she was just as sore as the other two.

"You healed us like five times last night," Kushina groaned, dragging herself vertical. "Why am I still sore?!"

"I healed the injuries. I left the soreness on purpose." Mikoto tossed her a ration bar. "That's your body rebuilding itself stronger. If I heal that away, you lose the training. Eat. We move in twenty minutes."

"You're evil. The whole village thinks you're an angel and you're actually evil."

"There's plenty of people who think I'm evil. You'll just never meet them." Mikoto stuck out her tongue.

…

The town saw them off.

Nobody organized it. People just came out and stood along the road in the pale morning. Sōbei bowed low. Dr. Yura stood in her doorway with her arms crossed and gave Mikoto a look. Kinta leaned on his fence with his one hand raised. Tarō ran alongside them to the edge of the village with his stick sword on his shoulder, shouting that they had to bring back a tusk, the biggest tusk, he needed it for reasons.

Kushina, sore or not, walked out of that town like a hero at the front of a parade. Chin up. Chest out.

"They're all counting on us," she said, once Ishikari was behind them. "You saw that, right? The whole town. We're gonna be heroes. Actual heroes. They'll probably build a statue."

"I don’t think they have enough money for a statue." Kaede pointed out.

"If they did, it’d be an awesome statue. Of all of us!"

"I want to be doing something cool in the statue," Rei said. "Like a flip. Can they sculpt me flipping?"

"You're all going to be doing exactly what I tell you in the statue," Mikoto said. "Which brings me to the plan. Ears up, all three of you, because I'm only saying this once and then I'm going to ask each of you to repeat it back."

Something in her voice put their feet in line. The relaxing part was over. They gathered around her as they walked.

"Here's how the day goes. First we track. We find the animals, we learn the ground, and we pick the spot, not them. The spot needs to be open enough for you three to move and tight enough that the pack comes to us in a bunch instead of scattered through the trees. When we've got them where we want them, I set the trap." She held up her right hand. "It's a barrier ninjutsu. A ring of fire goes up around a space I choose. Nothing gets out. Anything that touches the wall catches fire. It burns off the ground itself, so it holds as long as I want it to hold."

"Wait." Rei's eyes had gone huge. "You're going to trap us IN a ring of fire WITH thirteen giant boars?"

"Yes."

"...That's so cool…"

"The barrier does two jobs. Nothing escapes to terrorize this valley next season. And nothing gets to run away and circle back on us from the trees. The fight stays where we can see all of it." Mikoto looked at each of them in turn. "Inside the ring, dealing with the boars is your job. I will not be stepping in."

That landed. Even Kushina blinked.

"You're not going to fight at all?" Kaede asked.

"You three are genin of the Leaf and these are animals. If you can't handle them, you might need to go back to the Academy..." She told them honestly.

Rei was vibrating. Kushina had gone starry-eyed and pumped. Even Kaede stood a little straighter.

"Good. Rei, Kaede, you're our noses. Find us those pigs."

…

Tracking, it turned out, was the fun part.

Rei pulled his hood up, and the Izuno clan's Cat Cloak slid over him like a second skin of chakra, blue-eared and blue-tailed, the Siamese form, the one that sharpened his nose until the whole valley was a map of smells. He went ahead along the field edges in a low lope, calling back everything it gave him. Kaede walked the middle with her hands in her pockets, and every so often a thin line of her worm-like shōkaichū slid out of her sleeve and into the earth, and a minute later she'd say something like "eleven chakra signatures, four hundred meters, northeast".

"Tracking is freaking hard when you don't have techniques suited for it." Kushina whined.

"Should've been born with a better nose." Rei called back.

"You wanna see how good your nose is when it's broken, Rei?!" Kushina balled her fist.

The signs got bigger as they climbed toward the treeline. A wallow the size of a small pond, churned and stinking. Trees stripped of bark in ragged belts, tusk-gouges scored through the wood beneath. Prints stamped over prints in the soft ground, most of them the size of dinner plates.

And then one that wasn't.

Rei found it at the edge of a mud slick and stopped joking mid-sentence. The print was wider than both his hands spread side by side, driven so deep into the ground that last night's rainwater had pooled in it.

"Guys, come take a look at this."

They looked at it.

"That's a big piggy." Kushina grinned.

"The stride's three times the others'," Kaede said, crouched, reading the ground without hurry. "And look at the depth. Whatever made this weighs more than all four of us together. Several times over."

"The farmers said cart-sized. The farmers weren't exaggerating. Let's keep moving." Mikoto said.

The hollow was where Kinta said it would be, a bowl of ground up in the trees where a stream cut through, sheltered from the wind, floor churned to black mud. Rei's nose and Kaede's insects agreed: the pack was in there, most of it, dozing through the daylight.

"Thirteen pigs." Kaede reported.

"Thirteen…" Mikoto scanned the ground below the hollow. "The big one?"

Kaede was quiet a moment. Then: "Not with them. Nothing in range matches that print."

"It ranges alone from what Kinta told me. It comes and goes from the pack whenever it wants. Nobody tells it what to do."

Mikoto looked down the slope, where the trees thinned into a wide, grassy shelf of open ground before the fields began, the grass still heavy and soaked from the night's rain. Room to move. One direction the pack would naturally run when flushed: downhill, toward the easy ground, bunched by the funnel of the terrain.

"There. That shelf. That's our spot. Here's how we bring them to it." She started to speak.

…

The plan was simple, which was the point.

Kaede seeded the shelf's edges with kikaichū beforehand, a thin waiting cloud in the grass. Rei circled wide above the hollow with a pouch of smoke bombs. And Kushina got the job she was born for.

"Wait. My job is to stand in the open and be loud?" Kushina said, when it was laid out.

"Your job is to be bait. You stand on the shelf, you make noise, you smell like a person, and when thirteen angry boars come downhill at you, you do not move until I tell you. Then you move." Mikoto said.

Kushina's grin could have lit the treeline. "I was born for this job."

"That's one way to put it..."

Rei's smoke went up on the far side of the hollow, acrid and hissing, and the hollow exploded. Thirteen boars came up out of the mud like the ground itself had decided to leave squealing, and they ran the only direction that was quiet and clear and downhill, which was the shelf, which was where a small red-haired girl stood alone in the open, with her hands on her hips ready to take them on by herself.

They came at her in a wedge of muscle and tusk, small-bear-sized, the ground drumming.

"NOW!" Mikoto called.

Kushina moved. A hard leap sideways, clearing the wedge's line. And Mikoto, standing at the shelf's edge, flames already burning on the five fingertips of her raised right hand, slammed her palm to the earth.

"Uchiha Flame Formation."

The ring went up in a breath. A cylinder of fire, taller than the trees, roaring out of the ground in a perfect circle two hundred paces across, the shelf and the wedge and three genin sealed inside a wall of flame. The lead boar, too committed to turn, hit the barrier at a full charge.

It came off it burning, and went thrashing and squealing through the wet grass, which hissed and smoked under it and refused to catch.

The scream and the smell taught the other twelve everything they needed to know about the wall, and just like that the wide world was gone and there was only the ring, the fire-light, three children, and thirteen giant animals with nowhere to run.

The boars turned inward.

"Take 'em down, Team Eleven!" Mikoto shouted from outside the barrier.

It was a brawl, and it was beautiful.

The wedge broke apart into a wheel of charging bodies, boars peeling off in twos and threes, and the genin met them.

Kushina took the first charge head-on because of course she did, every word of last night's lesson forgotten, and against the small ones, it worked. Feet planted, chakra sunk into her legs and arms, and when a hundred and fifty kilograms of boar hit her raised guard the boar was the one that stopped. She wrapped both arms around its tusks, wrenched with her whole body, and threw it sideways into its packmate, both animals going down in a squealing tangle. Then she was on them, fists falling like hammers, each blow landing with a crack.

"ONE!" she bellowed. "TWO! I'M WINNING!"

"It's not a competition!" Rei yelled, and then immediately, "THREE! IT'S THREE NOW AND I HAVE THREE!"

Rei fought like water poured through the herd. He'd shifted the Cat Cloak green for the fight, the stray-cat form, green-eared, claw-fingered, built for speed instead of scent, and he was never where a tusk arrived, sliding along their sides and up over backs, his chakra-hardened claws opening deep red lines across bodies and throats as he passed. A boar wheeled on him; he raked his claws through the dirt and a curtain of dust exploded into its eyes, and while it was blind Kaede's insects took it.

Because Kaede was everywhere and nowhere. She'd planted herself near the ring's center, unmoving, coat rippling, and her kikaichū moved for her, a low dark tide through the grass. Boars that charged her hit the swarm before they hit her; insects poured into eyes and ears and snouts, draining chakra, and animals that outweighed her twenty times over crashed blind and staggering into the dirt at her feet, where a single flat strike of her kunai ended it.

And they covered each other properly. When two boars came at Kushina from both sides at once she didn't have to turn, because Rei was already tearing into the second one's back. When a burning boar came off the wall in a mad blind rush at Kaede, Kushina crossed half the ring in three strides and met it with a haymaker that turned its charge into a cartwheel. When Rei nearly got clipped, Kaede's swarm walled off the follow-up charge and Kushina hauled him up by the collar without either of them saying a word about it.

The drills. The aches from last night. All of it, cashing out at once.

Boars hit the fire wall and reeled off it burning. Boars turned toward the children and found that the children were worse than the flames. The wheel of the fight turned and turned and got smaller each time, and inside twenty minutes the shelf was strewn with heavy still bodies and the three of them stood back to back to back in the middle of it grinning like lunatics.

"And that’s thirteen." Kaede said, counting the still shapes.

"WE'RE HEROES!" Rei howled at the fire-lit sky.

"Statue!" Kushina howled back. "GROUP STATUE!"

Beyond the wall of flame, Mikoto smiled, and let the barrier fall. The fire sank back into the earth like it had never been, leaving a perfect scorched circle and the cooling evening air.

Which was when the treeline moved.

They heard it before they saw it. A sound like a landslide learning to walk.

It came out of the trees at the top of the shelf. Cart-sized had been the truth. It stood taller at the shoulder than Mikoto's head, black-bristled and mud-caked, its hide a map of old scars and broken-off spear points, tusks as long as a man's forearm curving yellow. It looked at the ring of its dead pack. It looked at the three small things standing among them.

The blood smell was a bell it had come to answer.

"Barrier's coming back up," Mikoto called, flames already alight on her fingertips. "It doesn't leave alive."

"I GOT THIS ONE!"

Kushina was already running.

"Kushina!"

Behind her, Mikoto's palm hit the earth, and the fire roared back up around the shelf, the alpha and all three genin sealed inside it before Kushina had covered half the distance.

It went through Kushina's head in fragments, in the two seconds of her charge, the way these things did. Thirteen boars down, three of them hers, four if you counted assists, her blood up and singing, the whole town watching in her mind's eye, the statue, the story, Kushina Uzumaki who punched out the monster pig that a whole hunting party couldn't touch, and it was JUST a pig, a big pig sure, a really big pig, but she'd thrown one of the small ones and the small ones were the size of bears, so really this was just a bigger version of that, and-

The alpha charged.

Kinta had told Rei: four seconds, and everything he knew was gone. The survivors had told Sōbei: like a cart through a paddy. Everyone had told everyone that the big one's speed was the thing the stories couldn't make anyone believe, and Kushina had heard all of it, and none of it had made it past the singing in her blood.

It crossed the ground between them like weather. One heartbeat it was thirty meters away and turning; the next it was on her, head dropped, tusks scything up, and the world was a wall of black bristle and yellow ivory and there was no room left to dodge in.

Outside the ring, Mikoto's Sharingan had the whole charge. The angle of the head. The tusk rising for the gut. Her weight was already shifting, a breath away from a Body Flicker that would put her between them, and then she saw Kushina's arms come up and saw the chakra flood into them, thick and dark red and more than enough, and she held.

Kushina got her arms up.

Trained reflexes, strange chakra, both arms crossed and flooded with everything she had in the quarter-second she had to do it, and the tusk that would have impaled her, hit her guard instead. The impact picked her up off the earth and threw her. She went fifteen meters, hit, bounced, rolled, and came up on one knee in the scorched grass with her ears ringing and both forearms screaming and blood, her blood, running hot and red from where the tusk's point had ripped through her arm and torn a long ragged laceration up her left one.

She stared at it. Red on her sleeve. A lot of red. Redder than her hair.

The alpha wheeled at the end of its charge, unhurried, and looked at her with one eye, and Kushina Uzumaki understood. This thing didn't want to just hurt her. It wanted her dead. Super dead. It wanted to trample over her corpse.

The fire roared around them on every side. There was nowhere to run, and the alpha didn't want to run.

And into the ringing silence of Kushina's ears came Rei's voice, bright as a bell:

"Wooooow. Nice block. Really great. Hey, quick question idiot, was that your plan? Charging it alone? Was that really your great idea?"

"How embarrassing." Kaede said, sliding up on Kushina's other side, kunai out, her swarm already lifting from the grass in a dark, whirring cloud. "I could never be so foolish."

"That's a good point. I don't know anyone who could be so stupid to try and take that thing alone with their fists."

"Certainly not me."

"So are you done?" Rei's cat-eyes were on the alpha, but his grin was all for Kushina. "Like, is the hero act over? Are you ready to fight as a team now, or should we wait behind the fire while you get a tusk through the gut this time? I just want to know."

Kushina's face went through several colors and settled on a red that matched her hair exactly. She opened her mouth. She closed it. Her arm hurt, her pride hurt worse, and across the ring, through the flame-light, she made the mistake of looking at Mikoto.

Mikoto was watching her through the fire with the flattest, deadest, most eloquent expression a human face had ever produced. She didn't say a word. She didn't have to.

"FINE!" Kushina screamed, at Rei, at Kaede, at the look, at the entire world. "YEAH! FINE! WHATEVER, YOU KNOW?! TOGETHER! We'll do it TOGETHER, I KNOW WHAT I DID WRONG, OKAY!"

The alpha charged.

"Kaede!" Kushina was moving even as she yelled it, and this time not alone, this time with the two of them fanning out to either side of her. "BLIND IT!"

Rei smiled. The corners of Kaede's mouth came up, one whole millimeter.

The three of them went forward together.

It was the hardest fight of their young lives, and it lasted four minutes.

The swarm hit the alpha first, Kaede's whole reserve, a black river pouring up its snout and into its eyes, and the beast's world went dark mid-charge. It didn't stop, things that size didn't stop. Now it was blind, and a blind charge was easy to read.

Rei anticipated it. He came in fast and low off its side, inside the arc of the tusks, and his chakra-hardened claws went in behind the front leg. He opened it to the bone and was gone before the beast finished turning, and the alpha's next step buckled.

It screamed in rage.

It shook its great head and insects sprayed from it, half-blind now instead of blind, and its small eye found the nearest small thing and committed one last time, wounded and burning-mad, a final charge with all its scarred tonnage behind it, at the girl with red hair.

Kushina didn't dodge.

She planted. Both feet, chakra driven down through her legs into the scorched earth, both fists loaded with every scrap of the monstrous, bottomless, ridiculous chakra that made her what she was, and this time there was no singing in her blood and no statue in her head. There was her team on either side of her and her captain's flat stare in her spine and four seconds of pure cold focus.

"COME ON THEN!" she roared at it.

It came. And at the last possible instant, Rei's claws raked across its remaining vision from the left, and Kaede's kunai buried itself in its ear from the right, and the charge faltered, half a step, a stumble, its head dipping, and Kushina Uzumaki stepped inside the tusks and hit it.

The uppercut caught the alpha under the jaw with a sound like a temple bell being murdered. The blow stood the whole colossal animal up, up, its front legs leaving the ground, a thousand kilograms of legend hanging in the fire-light for one impossible heartbeat, and then it came down. All the way down. On its side, the earth booming, legs kicking once, twice.

Still.

The ring of fire crackled. Three genin stood over a boar the size of a cart, chests heaving.

"...Four… That one counts as at LEAST four." Kushina wheezed.

"We softened it for ya, but yeah, sure, whatever." Rei scoffed.

"IT COUNTS AS FOUR!"

“That’s our Red-Hot Habanero.” Kaede shook her head.

…

Mikoto healed them on the shelf as the sun went down.

Kushina's arm first, the tusk-tear long but straight, the green glow closing it while its owner very pointedly did not meet her captain's eyes.

"So," Mikoto said, knitting muscle.

"Don't."

"I didn't say anything."

"You're SAYING it with your FACE."

"My face is healing your arm." Mikoto smoothed the skin closed, not a scar left, and finally smiled. "Anyway, I'm just glad you learned your lesson without having consequences bigger than this."

Kushina peeked at her sideways. "...So on a scale of one to ten, how mad are you?"

"The look was the punishment. We're done."

"THANK THE SAGE, you have no idea how scary your face is, Mikoto, they should put YOU in the bingo book for that face alone."

"There's nothing scary about my face." Mikoto protested.

"That look though, you know? A second entry for that."

Rei's calf took thirty seconds. Kaede had a cracked knuckle and one burn she hadn't mentioned; she stood absolutely still through the healing and then said "thank you, Captain," with a small bow.

Then they took the tusks, both of the alpha's, each as long as a grown man's forearm, and Kushina hoisted the entire alpha carcass up over her head by herself, because her pride demanded exactly one more act of showing off and Mikoto decided she'd earned it.

They walked back down into the valley in the dark, following the lights of Ishikari.

…

The town came out of its houses for the second time that day, and this time nobody was quiet.

They heard it before they were halfway up the road, doors, voices, someone's dog losing its mind, and by the time they reached the square the whole of Ishikari was in it, lanterns swinging, and the crowd saw a red-haired girl carrying a nightmare above her head and it went up like a festival. Tarō got to them first, of course, screaming at a pitch that everyone could hear, and was presented with a tusk as long as his whole arm, and had to hold it with both hands, and declared on the spot that he was never letting go of it and would be buried with it.

Sōbei bowed so low and so long that Mikoto had to physically help him back up. "All of them," he kept saying, his voice going. "All of them? The big one too?"

"All fourteen. Your fields are yours again."

Kinta pushed through the crowd, and stood in front of the carcass for a long moment, the fire-lit mountain of it, the scarred hide, the face. His hand rose and rested on its side, and whatever passed across his own face wasn't for anyone else to name.

"Which of you got it?" he asked, rough.

"It was a team effort." Rei said.

"Hah." Kinta's grip tightened once on the bristles, then let go. "Hah. Good. Good. Good."

Dr. Yura appeared, looked all four of them over head to toe with medical suspicion, found nothing to fix, and seemed almost disappointed. "Nobody on my table," she said to Mikoto. "You kept your word, little ninja doctor."

"Not all of it yet." Mikoto looked past her, toward the doctor's house. "I made Heita a promise."

Yura followed her gaze, and for a moment the blunt woman's face did something complicated. Then she jerked her head toward her door. "Back room's yours. Take all the time you need."

…

The town would not hear of the genin going anywhere that night. There was a fire in the square, and food from a dozen kitchens, and Kushina told the story of the fight four times with the alpha getting bigger each telling, and Rei demonstrated the flip he wanted in the statue, and Kaede sat by the fire and ate quietly and let three separate grandmothers refill her bowl.

Mikoto knelt on the floor of Yura's back room and drew.

The formula took most of an hour, chakra-ink lines spiraling across the boards around the mat where Heita lay, tighter and denser near his head, four anchor marks at the corners. Yura held the lantern without being asked. Heita lay still and stared at the ceiling with his one eye, and when Mikoto took a single lock of his hair and laid it against his temple beside the empty socket, he swallowed hard.

"Last chance to say no," she told him.

"Do it."

She opened the old scar first, gently, under a numbing genjutsu so he felt nothing but pressure. Then her Sharingan turned, and she began.

It took the rest of the night.

Cell by cell, she turned his own hair into what he'd lost. The tough white wall of the eye first, a hollow sphere no bigger than a plum, built layer by layer into the socket. Then the clear jelly inside it. Then the lens, which she rebuilt three times before it came out true. And then the hardest part, the thin living sheet at the very back, the one that caught the light, so fine and so crowded with tiny working parts that she had to stop twice and simply breathe before she could go on. Last came the nerve, a thread at a time, growing back along the path through the bone toward the brain, and she fed it forward slowly, so slowly, until it met what was waiting on the other side.

Yura watched the whole thing without a word. Somewhere around the third hour she set the lantern on a hook so she could sit down, and she never took her eyes off Heita.

The formula's light faded a little before dawn.

Mikoto sealed the lids, laid a cool cloth over both his eyes, and sat back on her heels. Her own eyes ached in a way she'd never felt before.

"Keep it covered until the sun's properly up," she said. "Then take the cloth off slowly. Not all at once."

…

Heita took the cloth off in the doorway of the doctor's house with the whole square watching, though half of them were still wrapped in blankets from the night before.

He squinted. He blinked. He closed his right eye with his hand.

And then he turned his head, very slowly, toward the square, toward the fire burned down to embers and the lanterns guttering out and Tarō asleep on a bench with a boar tusk clutched to his chest, and his mouth opened.

"It's blurry," he said, hoarse. "It's all blurry, it's, I can see the lanterns. I can see Tarō."

"It'll sharpen over the next few days," Mikoto said, from where she leaned on the doorframe. "The nerve has to get used to seeing again."

Heita didn't seem to hear her. He was looking at his brother's son. He walked out into the square on shaky legs and knelt beside the bench, and he put his hand on the sleeping boy's head, and he looked at him with both eyes for a long time.

Oharu came out of her house and saw him there, and covered her mouth with both hands.

…

Kinta was harder.

He came to the doctor's house mid-morning, on his own, and stood in the doorway with his jaw working and his empty sleeve pinned at his side.

"Heita says you gave him his eye back," he said.

"I did."

"From nothing."

"From himself." Mikoto looked at the sleeve. "It's the same technique. An arm is bigger. A lot bigger. It'll take all day, maybe into tonight, and it'll hurt afterward while the new muscle learns what it's for. But it's possible." She paused. "If you want it."

Kinta stared at her. Then he laughed, a short broken sound, and had to sit down on the bench outside the door.

"Twelve years," he said to the ground. "Twelve years I hunted these hills. Then four seconds, and I couldn't hold a bow. Couldn't hold my own daughter and a lantern at the same time." He looked up at her, and his face was wet and he didn't seem to notice. "You're asking if I want it."

So the genin got another day of being celebrated by the town. And Mikoto spent all of it in Yura’s back room, building a man’s arm out of a lock of his own hair, his right arm lying beside her the whole time while her Sharingan read it bone by bone and built its mirror. Bone first, the long bones and the small ones of the hand, all twenty-seven of them. Then the vessels. Then the muscle, wrapped in layers, and the tendons that tied it all together, and the nerves threaded through it like roots finding their way through soil, and skin last of all, pale and soft as a child's.

It was full dark again when she finished. Her hands shook when she let them fall.

Kinta lay on the mat and looked at the new arm lying beside him like it belonged to someone else. Thinner than the other one. Paler. Pink at the shoulder where the new met the old.

"Try your fingers," Mikoto said.

He did. The new fingers twitched. Curled. Uncurled. Closed, slowly, slowly, into a weak and shaking fist.

Kinta broke down in tears.

…

Ishikari saw them to the road at dawn the next morning, and this time the whole town came.

Heita stood beside Oharu with a hand on Tarō's shoulder, both eyes open and squinting in the early light. Kinta stood at his fence with both hands resting on the rail, the left one thin and pale and stiff, and a girl of maybe nine pressed against his side, holding onto it like she was afraid it would vanish. When the four of them passed, he lifted it. Slowly. All the way up.

Sōbei bowed again. "When you go home," he said to Mikoto, "you tell the Hokage what Konoha did here. You tell him what the Red-Eyed Angel did. This valley won't forget it. Not in my lifetime. Not in Tarō's."

"I'll tell him," Mikoto said. "But they did the hunting." She nodded at the three genin. "I just made sure they didn’t make any mistakes."

Kushina was looking away at the sky while whistling.

Tarō made it a full kilometer before turning back, tusk over his shoulder like a priceless treasure.

…

The walk home was slow and easy. Near the last rise before Konoha, Kushina drifted up to walk beside Mikoto, and for a few paces she was quiet, which meant something was coming.

"Hey. Mikoto."

"Hm?"

"When I charged it." She was looking straight ahead. "That was dumb. I know it was dumb. I knew it was dumb while I was doing it, that's the messed up part, there's like, a me in my head going 'this is dumb' and the rest of me just, went anyway." Her jaw worked. "You put up the fire before I even reached it. You'd have pulled me out."

"Yes."

"But you didn't. You let them roast me instead. The teasing was worse than the tusk, honestly."

"If I'd pulled you out, you'd have learned that I'll always pull you out," Mikoto said. "Rei and Kaede taught you something better. That they need you next to them, not out in front."

"Rei's annoying when he's right, which is why I usually just beat him up instead." Kushina kicked a stone up the road. Then, quieter: "I'm gonna be Hokage someday, you know? For real. And a Hokage who runs off alone gets her whole village killed, so. I'm working on it, you know? I'm working on it."

Mikoto looked at her friend, and something warm settled in her chest. "I know you are," she said. "For what it's worth? The uppercut was cool. When you tell everyone else, you have my permission to say the boar was the size of a house."

Kushina's grin came back like sunrise.

"Oh, it was the size of a house! It was the size of two houses. It breathed fire, Mikoto, keep up, this is for the statue!" She exaggerated.

They crested the rise, and Konoha appeared below them, and Team Eleven came home laughing, mission complete, with a story that was already growing bigger than the boar.