The Red Shark - Chapter 0009

Chapter 9 — The Month of Growth

My father left five days after the pond, before dawn, the way he did everything. The only sign he’d gone was a folded sheet of paper in Kazuo’s hand when we came out to the field.

Kazuo had been my father’s chūnin since before I was born. He was a pure-blooded Hoshigaki, which surprised me the first time I heard it, because he was thin in a way none of us were: narrow shoulders, long wrists, a face made of angles and old scars. His hair was cut close and already gray at the temples, though he couldn’t have been much past thirty. His voice was quiet and dry, and it reached the far wall of the field without any effort.

“Train as if the enemy is right behind you,” he told us that first morning, “because one day he will be.”

He read my father’s sheet aloud once, tucked it into his vest, and from then on every day followed it.

The brothers who went to the Academy trained with us at first light, ran off to class, and came back in the afternoon for the pond. Those of us too young for the Academy belonged to Kazuo from dawn until dark. Daigo joined in whenever he wasn’t out on a mission, always at the front, so we had a model for every movement.

At the end of the first week, my bedding was moved out of the little room next to my mother’s and into the boys’ dormitory, between Haruto and the wall. Nobody made a speech about it. That was how the clan said I belonged to the field now. My mother brought my blankets over herself and wouldn’t let anyone else touch them.

Kata came first every morning. Early on, my punches were weak and my sweeps wobbled, because I still hadn’t recovered from those two days with my father. Kazuo stood over me with his hands clasped behind his back and corrected every repetition. “Lower, Arashi. Hit the liver, not the air.” “Your weight’s on your heels. Stand like that in a real fight and you’ll be on your back before you know it.”

Halfway through the second week, I could keep pace with Kenta. Haruto took longer to catch, and I passed him sometime in the third week without either of us noticing the day. By the end of the month I was faster than Toma and Kenta, and my strikes landed harder than Haruto’s, though all three had been training at least a year longer than me.

I liked being ahead. I didn’t like not knowing why.

So I went looking for the reason. The soreness had a pattern. It was always worst in whatever I’d used most, and it always faded faster than it should have. One night in the dormitory, with Haruto snoring on one side of me and the wall on the other, I ran chakra only through my left arm, slowly, as I’d once held leaves and pebbles in place, and left the right one alone. In the morning, my right arm was stiff from shoulder to wrist. The left felt like I had never used it.

Two nights later, I did it the other way around and got the opposite result.

That explained at least part of it. Chakra did more than power jutsu. Even a trickle of it moving through the body fed the muscles, sped up the repairs, and brought back whatever I’d damaged during the day a little stronger by morning. For two years I had kept that current running, at night at first and later through almost every waking hour, believing all I was doing was practicing control. Two years of that, on top of my father’s blood and whatever my mother carried in hers. The longer I thought about it, the surer I was that what she carried was Uzumaki.

My brothers had the Hoshigaki half. They didn’t have the other half, and none of them had spent their nights secretly feeding themselves chakra.

It showed most in the conditioning. At first I did push-ups on my knees, five or six before my arms folded, with Kazuo above me saying, “The enemy doesn’t care that you’re tired.” About ten days in, he told me to get off my knees. I managed twenty full ones that day, palms flat in the mud, and went to bed with my chest aching. On the last day of the month I did fifty without stopping, and Kazuo, who never praised anyone, made me do them again in front of the others so they could see what straight arms looked like.

Every afternoon ended at the pond. The water grew colder as the month went on, and putting my hand in got harder each day. The ball that had covered my palm at the start was the size of my fist by the middle of the month. In the last week it was as big as my head, and I could hold it for as long as Kazuo let me stand there, provided nobody made me laugh.

Rokuta had gotten his up to the size of an orange, which he was very proud of, and he kept bringing it over to show me. Haruto and Toma found their chakra with Daigo’s help before the month was half over and joined us at the pond, where they mostly made splashes. Kenta could keep an egg steady now. And at least once a day I pictured my father standing in that water with eight tons of it balanced on his palm and three fish swimming around inside, and measured everything I did against that.

The babies came in the middle of all this, while my father was away. Miyu’s son came first, a few days after my father left. Akemi’s daughter followed about ten days later, so quietly that half the dormitory slept through it. Nagi’s boy arrived last, in the final week, and nobody slept through that. Kenji, Yumi and Taro. For days afterward the corridors smelled of birthing herbs and milk, and the mothers took turns sleeping.

Training didn’t stop for any of it. Kazuo let us have a second bowl of rice the morning after each birth, which was as close as he ever came to celebrating anything.

On the last evening of the month, after Kazuo dismissed us, I stayed on the field and went through the kata alone while it got dark. I wanted to feel the difference without anyone watching. My punches came out clean now, with a small snap at the end that I could hear. My sweeps went where I sent them. Strength was part of it. The bigger change was that the gap between deciding to move and moving had nearly closed.

For a week I’d been thinking about what I would say when my father came back. Push-ups and kata I could go on doing by myself for as long as I liked. Jutsu was a different matter. For that, I needed him.

When I finally went in, my hands were too cold to feel, and I had the first sentence ready.