Chapter 15: The First Wave

I woke up sore all over.

The Kirigakure cold had gotten into the room overnight, the way it nearly always did, through the cracks around the window and the gap under the door. My feet were freezing, and the edges of the blanket had gone damp by morning. Through the window, the day was still just a gray slightly paler than everything else. I lay there for a few seconds without moving, taking stock of the damage. My ankles still remembered the week on the tree, and my calves were stiff. A bruise on my hip throbbed at its own pace, left over from some fall that had hurt less at the time than it did now.

A normal person in my place would have broken a long time ago. I was sure of that. Things worked differently with me. The blood in my veins made me tougher, in a way my body felt before my head could understand it: the bruises from two days earlier were already turning yellow at the edges, and last week’s scrapes had faded into pale lines on my gray-blue skin. On any other kid, they would have needed a week to get that far. It hurt all the same, and I could take it.

I kicked the blanket off and got up in one go, before my body had time to negotiate.

Haruto and Toma were still dead asleep. Sometime during the night, Haruto had taken over half of Toma’s futon, and now he was snoring with his mouth open, one arm flung across his brother, who slept curled up with his knees almost at his chin and showed no sign of having noticed the invasion. On the other side of the room, Daiki was already up, folding his blanket with care, matching corner to corner before folding it again. He saw me get up and gave me a short nod. I nodded back. At that hour, everyone saw to his own preparations, and nobody wasted words.

The night before, my father had given us a short order, in his usual way: in the morning, we would go to one of the little-used courtyards on the estate. He didn’t explain anything else, and nobody had the nerve to ask. I knew which courtyard he meant. It sat at the back of the property, away from the wings where the mothers and the little ones moved around, and hardly anyone went there; few people in the house had any technique to practice in a place like that yet. It was where Daigo and Rokuta trained their ninjutsu.

There was only one reason to take us there. Ever since the day I asked my father to teach me jutsu, I had been waiting for an order like that, and I’d spent a good part of the night staring at the ceiling, trying to guess which technique it would be.

In my other life, I’d thought jutsu was a matter of memorizing the right hand seals and shouting the technique’s name with conviction. A week hanging off that tree had cured me of the idea. Every step up that trunk had been paid for in falls and sore ankles, and that was only chakra control, the part the cartoons never bother to show. I kept trying to picture what would come once the chakra had to leave my body and turn into something else.

I put on my training tunic. The fabric was rough and thick, cheap stuff, the kind the mothers bought in bulk because it cost little and survived a lot of washing. It did the job for me. Clothes had to be tough and cheap, because none of them lasted long on me: between the training and how fast I’d been growing, I went through tunics at a rate that would have discouraged any seamstress. The hem of this one already hung above my ankles, and not that long ago it had dragged on the floor.

The cloth scraped over my bruises as it slid past my shoulders and ribs, and my skin started itching right where the scabs were closing. My hand actually came up. I let it drop. Scratching would open everything up again, and I’d be trading days of healing for a minute of relief. I tied the sash at my waist and left the room.

The corridor stones were so cold that I walked on the outer edges of my feet, touching the floor as little as possible, which my ankles, still holding a grudge against the tree, did not appreciate at all. The night lanterns had gone out hours ago. What little light there was came in through the high windows, and the mist came in with it, leaving a damp film on the walls.

Behind the doors, the compound was starting to wake. A mother was telling someone for the third time to get up, each time a little quieter, which every child in the house knew was worse than shouting. Farther down the wing, one of the pups decided it was hungry and wanted everyone to know. Soon the crying changed places, the way it does when someone picks a baby up and starts walking with it, and it faded until it disappeared behind another door. From the kitchen came the scrape of an iron pot being dragged and the crackle of the first firewood catching.

I put on my sandals by the outer doors. From there you could already smell the sea, salt and seaweed, carried in by the same fog that swallowed the grounds a few steps past the threshold.

The training field was one big mud pit. Last night’s drizzle had turned the earth gray and soft, full of shallow puddles reflecting a sky with no color at all, and the mud grabbed the sole of my sandal with every step and only let go with a wet pop.

My father stood in the middle of the field with his arms crossed. Even in that fog he was easy to find, since nothing in the compound was anywhere near his size; Daigo, the tallest of his children, barely reached past his belt. His long, wild black hair was soaked through and clung to his broad shoulders, and the scar that cut across his left eye looked deeper in that light. The long handle of the Kubikiribōchō rose over his shoulder. The blade ran down his back, and I knew without looking that the round hole near its tip was there, wide enough for a head to pass through.

In front of him, Hanae’s three sons were running through their kata. Some of the mothers called them the fire trio, and the name had stuck.

Daigo set the pace without ever seeming to hurry. His strikes came out clean and right on time, with no wasted motion; when his foot pivoted, it turned exactly as far as it needed to and stopped there. Rokuta threw every punch so hard the air whistled, and he finished each sequence half a beat ahead of the others, red in the face, breathing through his mouth and already looking like he wanted to start the next one. Nao, at the end of the line, stopped twice to fix the angle of his back foot before letting himself fall into his older brother’s rhythm. The three of them breathed out white clouds, and the mud splashed up to their knees with every change of stance.

I watched for a little while before getting closer. It was a habit of mine, watching the three of them from the outside, unhurried, the way you’d study a lesson. From a distance, I learned more from Nao than from the other two, because with him I could see the mistake and the correction inside the same sequence. With Daigo, who got everything right the first time, all I saw was the result.

My father followed the three of them without moving anything but his eyes. I had noticed before that when he watched someone train, his gaze went to their feet first.

He turned his head as I came closer. His black eyes settled on me, then moved to Nao and stayed there for a moment. He spoke without raising his voice:

“Daigo. Rokuta. With me.”

The kata stopped at once. Rokuta still threw half a punch at nothing before he noticed the others had stopped, and Daigo straightened up and wiped his forehead with his forearm. My name and Nao’s he didn’t say, and he didn’t need to. The look had been enough. We followed.

My father walked ahead without looking back. He had a slight limp in his left leg, something you only noticed after walking behind him for a while, because each of that man’s steps covered so much ground that the hitch got lost inside the stride. Nao and I took two steps for every one of his, sometimes three, and the slap of our sandals in the mud sounded hurried next to his, steady and even. We went around the back of the kitchen, past the clothesline where yesterday’s tunics were still hanging and dripping, and out through a wooden gate I had only ever seen closed.

On the other side was the place I’d pictured, set apart from the rest of the house. It was a plain courtyard of packed earth, closed off on one side by a low stone wall and open on the other to a pond of dark water, where the mist lay low and still. Nothing there was without a purpose. There was a row of wooden posts driven into the ground, all of them splintered at roughly the same height, a rack of staffs, an overturned bucket, and, in one corner, a pile of big stones worn smooth from taking hits. Everything was orderly and bare of decoration, almost like a small military post.

My father stopped in the middle of the courtyard and turned around. The four of us came up and stopped in front of him, roughly in a line: Daigo at one end, Rokuta beside him, then Nao, then me. He looked at us in silence for a few seconds. Then he let out a short sigh through his nose and spoke calmly:

“You four are the most promising of all my children. Your chakra control is far beyond your age.” He paused. “You’ve earned what I’m about to give you.”

He turned his face toward Nao and me.

“Your two older brothers already know this technique and understand how it works. For you, it’s the first step toward becoming real shinobi.”

He let that settle, and only then called out, without taking his eyes off us:

“Daigo. Execute. Suiton: Mizudeppō.”

Daigo gave a quick nod and took a few steps forward. He stopped facing a log planted upright in the earth, about ten paces away, near the edge of the pond. It was the target, though calling it a target was generous. There was hardly any bark left; the wood was split from top to bottom and full of gouges, and the top leaned to one side, crooked from all the water it had already taken.

His hands began to move. I tried to keep up and memorize the sequence. I managed to follow the first few seals; from the seventh on, his hands moved faster than my eyes could tell one shape from the next, and I just counted. By my count, he stopped at fifteen.

Finally, he tilted his head back a little and drew in a breath. It was a long one, more air than I’d have thought a boy’s chest could hold, and I watched his torso swell under the tunic and hold there, perfectly still, for an instant.

When he opened his mouth, the water came out all at once. It was a thick, straight jet, with a pressure I had only seen in my previous life, from a fire hose, the kind that takes two men to hold. Daigo was holding it on his own, with his mouth, and his feet didn’t give an inch. The fog split along the jet in a narrow corridor. The water crossed the distance and hit the log dead on: what was left of the bark came off in strips, the wood cracked loudly and split, and the whole log was torn out of the ground and thrown backward, landing with a dull thud in the mud a couple of feet from the pond.

The spray reached us. I felt cold drops on my face and smelled wet wood and churned-up earth. The jet went on for a few more seconds, sweeping over the hole where the log had stood and cutting a furrow in the mud, until Daigo closed his mouth and the water stopped. He ran his sleeve across his mouth to dry the last drops and returned to his stance, breathing a little deeper than usual. The corridor in the mist took a long time to close.

Rokuta was grinning with every one of his serrated teeth on show, prouder than Daigo himself. Nao was staring at the empty hole in the ground. I was doing math in my head. Fifteen seals, one breath, a few seconds of jet: how much chakra went into that? And where had all that water come from? Deep in my belly, my own chakra stirred, impatient to try.

“Very good,” my father said. “I see you haven’t stopped training the basics.”

“You’re the one who taught me that if I stop training and refining the basics, I’ll get rusty and start making mistakes,” Daigo answered. “I don’t intend to disappoint you, Father.”

A small smile crossed my father’s face, tugging at the corner of his mouth on the scarred side, and was gone almost at once.

He turned back to us.

“This is the first jutsu I’m going to teach you.” He crossed his arms. “The other clans teach their children the family techniques and abilities from a very young age. There are kids in this village who learn their clan’s secrets before they learn to read. Our clan is new, and unfortunately I don’t have the resources they do.”

He paused briefly.

“But I’m not empty-handed. Besides being a jōnin, I’m one of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen of the Mist, and that has given me a lot that few people have.”

I thought of the shelves in his office, loaded with scrolls labeled in that firm handwriting of his, and the weapons hanging all over the walls. “A lot” was a modest way of putting it.

“You’re in a privileged position,” he went on. “Very different from many of the children who’ll enter the Academy alongside you.”

He pointed at me and Nao.

“Those children aren’t as lucky. They enter the Academy, learn the basics, and get put into service. If we’re lucky over the next few years and there’s no war, maybe they’ll make it to adulthood, when a shinobi’s body can finally use all the strength it has. The problem is if a war breaks out. Then every one of those genin will have to go to the front. Every one.”

His voice stayed low and grew heavier.

“That, my sons, can wipe out entire generations of shinobi. Before the villages existed, it was normal. Children went to war at your age and didn’t come back.”

I knew he wasn’t exaggerating. In my other life, I had followed this world’s wars late at night, chapter after chapter, and the children who died in them were characters. Standing in the mud of that courtyard, it was another matter: the children he meant would be my age, and Nao’s. I glanced sideways at my brother. Nao had the same face as always, but his hands had closed into fists. Daigo was already a genin. If a war broke out the next day, he would be among the first from our house to leave.

“Even if I can’t give you the resources of an old clan,” my father said, “I can give you much more than the Academy will. I can make you ready for anything. And maybe one day you’ll reach my level.”

He spoke slowly and never once raised his voice, and still it carried across the courtyard, deep enough that it seemed to bounce off the pond before coming back. Nobody moved. Not even Rokuta, who couldn’t keep still even in his sleep. I caught myself wanting him to keep going. My father didn’t usually explain things: he gave orders, and we figured out the why later, if we ever did. Hearing the why from his own mouth was rare, and I didn’t want to miss a word.

“Back to the jutsu.” He lowered his eyes to Nao and me. “The Mizudeppō may not have much offensive power. But that depends on several factors. Can you tell me which?”

Rokuta opened his mouth. Before any sound came out, my father’s hand came down on the back of his head, unhurried, his eyes never leaving the two of us, in a dry smack that made Rokuta shut his mouth and hunch his shoulders. The question was for Nao and me, and after that nobody had any doubt about it. Rokuta rubbed the back of his head and stared at the ground, muttering something that never quite became words.

Nao answered first, cold as ever, without taking his eyes off our father:

“In its basic form, it lacks offensive power. But a ninja who trained this jutsu until he mastered it like no one else could give it other properties.”

My father nodded.

“Correct. Anything else?”

This time it was my turn. I thought of my own reserves first, and the answer came from there.

“It depends on who’s using it. A ninja with stronger chakra and bigger reserves can make the jet more powerful. And keep it going longer.”

“Correct,” he repeated, with another nod. “Among other things. A ninja’s creativity, for one. At first glance, it’s just water coming out under pressure. But you have to use your heads and squeeze everything you can out of what you have. Remember this: a ninja is more than the chakra he carries. The mind has to keep up with the body. Being strong and having big reserves is worth nothing if you don’t know how to get the best out of them. Do you understand?”

We nodded, and that was the moment I started seeing my father differently.

I knew he was a jōnin. I knew he was one of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen of the Mist. Even so, somewhere in the back of my mind, I had always filed him away as a brute. His size and the sword helped build that picture, and so did his heavy hand. Part of it came from my other life: the Mist swordsmen I knew from back then had stayed in my memory, nearly all of them, as killers hauling oversized swords. I felt ashamed of having thought that about him. Nobody becomes a jōnin just by hitting things. And once again, without having to say it, my father was teaching me not to trust what my eyes showed me. The picture they took in could come out distorted, and sometimes it was a lie.

“I’m teaching you this jutsu because besides being an offensive skill, it has other uses,” my father continued. “It can be a source of water when you need one, for example. I’ve been on missions in the desert, even in a few skirmishes out there. In the desert there’s no drinking water, and no water stored anywhere. How do you think I got water for so long, with nowhere to get it from?”

“With the jutsu,” Nao answered.

“You’re right, but not exactly.” My father raised his right hand, palm up. “Can I transform my chakra and make water? I can.”

At first, nothing happened that I could see. Chakra is invisible to the naked eye; you can only see it when a large amount is condensed in a single spot. That was what he did. Little by little, the air just above his palm began to shimmer, like the air over a campfire, and the patch of mist behind his hand bent out of shape. A drop fell from it. Then another. And then, like a small tap being turned slowly, the water began to run in a steady thread and fall on exactly the same spot on the ground, with an almost stubborn precision, until it formed a shallow, round puddle between his feet.

He didn’t form a single seal; his hands never even came together. His face was shut tight in concentration, his brow furrowed, his breathing slower and deeper than before, and I saw a bead of sweat run down his temple, mixed with the damp from the fog.

“This, my sons, is called chakra manipulation,” he said, without taking his eyes off his palm. “In the scrolls, you’ll find it called nature transformation. I control my chakra and make water out of it. It’s a very advanced technique, and it’s not for you to learn now. That’s for the future. And make no mistake: maybe a very distant future. It took me ten years to perfect my command of the elements and of chakra.”

Ten years. I had spent one week on a tree and thought that was a lot.

Then he looked up from his hand and at the four of us, one at a time.

“And I didn’t have your talent when I was younger.”

Nobody answered. My father almost never gave praise, and when he did, it came like that, in passing, in the middle of something else, as if the words had slipped out. Rokuta turned red again, this time without having thrown a single punch. Daigo lowered his eyes. I tucked those words away, together with the smile from earlier.

He closed his hand, and the thread of water stopped. He shook it twice in the air, the last drops flew off, and his palm was dry.

“This first jutsu I’m teaching you is easy to learn, and on top of that it’ll open up resources for you,” he said. “We’re in Kirigakure. Most of you will probably have an affinity for water, and that will be useful. But there’s something you need to understand. Water, fire, and lightning are different from the other elements, each in its own way. Earth and wind you’ll find in abundance around you, anywhere. Put your foot down, there’s earth. Take a breath, there’s wind. Water, fire, and lightning don’t work like that.”

He tipped his chin toward the pond.

“Water you’ll find sometimes. Near a lake, a river, the sea, you’ll have plenty. When it’s raining, too. Or in a mist like this one.”

The four of us looked around. Beyond the courtyard, the white mist spread in every direction, so thick we couldn’t even see the sky. The pond had become a dark smudge in the middle of all that white, and the posts on the far side were nothing but shadows.

“You can draw water from that,” my father said. “The problem, my sons, is when you’re nowhere near any of it. Then you’ll have to make the water yourselves. A lot of water. And that’s expensive: it takes a lot of chakra to produce. Understood?”

I thought of him in the desert, pulling water out of his own chakra day after day, with no pond or mist anywhere near, and of how much that must have cost him. We nodded again.

“Good. We start practicing now.”