The Red Shark - Chapter 0011

Chapter 11 — The Office Conversation

I woke before dawn. After a month of early mornings, my body no longer needed anyone to wake it. The boys’ dormitory, where I’d been sleeping for a few weeks now, was dark and cold and still smelled faintly of last night’s fish and sake. Rokuta was snoring in his corner. Nobody else stirred.

I dressed without a sound. My training tunic was still stiff from drying by the fire, and my muscles ached in all the usual places. I ignored them. That morning I had somewhere else to be.

The corridors were empty. The party’s lanterns had burned down to almost nothing, and the stone floor was cold through my sandals. Father’s office was at the end of the main corridor. I had only ever seen it through a half-open door. The door itself was heavy wood banded with iron.

I knocked. Nothing. I knocked again, harder, and the wood swallowed the sound. After a moment’s hesitation, I pushed. The door swung inward on hinges that barely creaked.

The room was bigger than I’d expected, and it was full of weapons. Kunai of every length hung on the walls, some curved for throwing, some straight for close work. There were shuriken with serrated edges and swords in their sheaths, slim ones for speed and broad ones for weight. Shelves sagged under scrolls labeled in Father’s square handwriting: Water Style Jutsu, Clan History, Enemy Information. The air smelled of oiled steel and old paper, and under that, of blood that had never quite been cleaned off. In the middle of the room stood a big black desk buried in maps, with an inkwell and a brush that was still wet.

On the wall behind the desk hung the Kubikiribōchō.

I’d seen it on Father’s back plenty of times, but always moving and never this close. Hanging still, it was taller than I was. The blade was one broad slab of steel with a round hole near the tip, big enough to fit a man’s head through, which was more or less the point. Its leather grip had gone dark with use. There were chips along the edge.

I knew this sword. In the story I remembered from my old life, it belonged to Zabuza Momochi, and it repaired itself with iron drawn from the blood of whatever it cut. If that was true, those chips would be gone after Father’s next real fight. Here it hung on my father’s wall, and I had no idea what that meant for the rest of the story I thought I knew. The part of me that had spent five years building robots wanted to know how a blade could rebuild its own metal, and wanted it badly. I took a step closer. My hand was halfway to the grip before I noticed and pulled it back.

There was more. Battered armor stood on racks along one wall, plates in an old samurai style, a few with brown stains in the dents. In the far corner was something I took at first for a dressmaker’s dummy, jointed wood under tattered cloth. Up close, it was a puppet. The joints were too intricate for a dummy, and dark metal plates were set into the wood at the shoulders and knees. A thin seam ran down its chest, the kind a hidden compartment leaves. The puppeteers of Sunagakure fought with things like this. I reached for the seam.

“Stop.”

The voice came from the shadows by the window. I froze with my hand in the air. Father stepped into the lamplight. He had been there the whole time.

“Don’t touch that. It may still carry its owner’s poison.”

I backed away two steps. “Where did you get it?”

He walked around the desk and sat down, and the chair complained under his weight. “On a mission. One of the most important I’ve done for the Mizukage. I kept that one as a souvenir. The rest went to the village researchers, who are trying to work out how it was built.” He laced his fingers together. “So far they’ve gotten nowhere. What do you want, Arashi?”

I stood up straight and looked him in the eye. “Your permission to start learning jutsu. I want to put my chakra to real use.”

For a while the only sound was the sea, somewhere below the window. Then he opened a drawer, took out a scroll sealed with red wax and held it out to me without a word.

I broke the seal and unrolled it. Diagrams of chakra flow. Instructions for adhesion: climbing trees, walking up walls, holding fast to any surface with the soles of the feet. Notes on balance and control, and a long list of the ways people usually failed. Questions started piling up before I’d finished the first column. How did the flow scale with body weight? What happened if too much chakra went into the feet?

I opened my mouth.

“No,” Father said. “No questions. You learn it from that scroll and nothing else. That’s the test.” He leaned back. “Master it, and I’ll teach you jutsu. Long before you set foot in the Academy.”

I rolled the scroll closed and bowed low. “I will.”

The door shut softly behind me. In my head I was already going over the first diagram again.

*

Isamu leaned back until the chair creaked and allowed himself a small smile, though there wasn’t much faith in it.

“So young,” he said to the empty room, “and so impatient. Let’s see how long that lasts.”

Tree walking was genin work. He had watched new genin fall off trunks for weeks before they got it right, and a four-year-old had no business even trying. He doubted the boy would manage it. If he did, it would take months.

Still, Arashi had taken the scroll without once asking how hard it would be. Isamu remembered being that kind of child.