Life didn't so much change as… tilt.
The problem primarily was that Ren was used to being busy. The month since his promotion had only sharpened what was already there. Yes, there were still long days, longer nights, ink-stained fingers and chakra reserves stretched thin. But being Vice Captain changed the shape of his work in subtle ways.
It didn't tire him as before, for one. Maybe because it involved less running around the village chasing anomalies.
There was more sitting in the Barrier Corps HQ with half a dozen seal arrays hovering in the air, colleagues hovering at the edges of his vision waiting for him to say, "No, line three and four will short each other out, change the rotation here."
He was good with seals, yes, but maybe he was too good as he now worked less time because what he did consisted in mostly supervising.
Mostly, though, he missed anonymity.
"Urahara-san, can you take a look at this?"
Ren rubbed the small tick of annoyance from his eyes before the other saw it and leaned over the spread of paper on the desk in front of him. It was midmorning, and the main operations room hummed quietly—the low buzz of chakra, scratching pens, the occasional muttered curse when an ink line went crooked.
He scanned the proposed modification to the eastern perimeter barrier, mentally overlaying it with the live array already circling Konoha. The script itself was neat. The formula, less so.
"You're trying to boost sensitivity to foreign chakra signatures in this array," he said, more statement than question.
"Y-yes," the chunin beside him answered. "Especially for non-leaf shinobi crossing at the border. If we can tune it closely enough, we could connect it to a relay and—"
"You'll burn it out," Ren said mildly. He tapped the junction symbol with his brush. "Here. You're pushing too much load through a point that's already carrying the structural balance. It'll become unstable under field conditions."
The chunin frowned. "But it works with the mock wall seals—"
"In a controlled environment, yes," Ren agreed. "With a barrier this size, with weather, wildlife, and random civilians constantly triggering it… it'll crack within a week."
He didn't bother explaining how he knew that without needing to test it. After seven years, it was second nature to let the knowledge from Truth's Gate and Urahara's meticulous logs merge with his own calculations.
He simply dipped his brush and, with a few clean strokes, rewrote the junction, adding an auxiliary loop and a decoupling rune. The change was small enough to look like a cosmetic adjustment. The function, however, rerouted the stress entirely.
"There," he said, sliding the sheet back. "Split the load. It will still do what you want, just… without exploding. When you have a complete array or if you get stuck, come to me and we can brainstorm."
The older man stared at the amended seal, then at Ren.
"…How did you see that that fast?"
Ren offered a faint shrug. "That part's similar to the test array we used in the western sector last month. You were there."
"Yes, but I didn't…" The chunin trailed off, scratched the back of his head. "…Right. I'll, uh. Rework it. Thanks, Urahara-san."
He walked away looking simultaneously grateful and vaguely spooked. Ren pretended not to notice. He turned back to his own stack of work—routine checks on the perimeter barrier, cross-referencing chakra logs with border reports, reviewing the latest data from the experimental barrier stretching into the Land of Fire's outer edges.
That barrier was still a headache.
It wasn't meant to be a wall so much as a net—an invisible lattice laced through the air and soil, tuned to twitch when someone who didn't belong crossed it. It needed to be sensitive enough to pick out foreign shinobi from merchants and refugees, but robust enough not to drown them in false positives every time a squirrel with a high chakra affinity took a wrong turn.
At least the theory was straightforward. It was the implementation that was tricky. Chakra wasn't alchemical energy; it didn't always obey the clean, balanced progression of an array. It had moods.
If he'd had access to the energy system of Amestris, he could have built a continent-spanning detection net in a week.
Instead, he had nature chakra, which was volatile.
He glanced at the far wall, where the live projection of Konoha's barrier pulsed in faint blue lines. Last year, a minor flaw had started flickering in the southern quadrant. Nothing catastrophic, just a gentle wobble in the metaphysical fabric, like a skipped stitch threatening to run. However, it had the potential to unravel everything if they didn't act quickly.
It was almost instinctual when he'd stood in front of it, palm to palm.
The memory came back with embarrassing clarity—the way his colleagues had stopped to stare as he pressed his hands together in a calm clap and sent chakra surging out along the pattern he'd already visualized in his mind, no brush or ink needed.
The correction had rippled through the barrier with a satisfying thrum. The flaw had dissolved as if it had never been there.
He'd turned back to find three other chunin blinking at him.
"…I didn't know you could do that without a circle," one had muttered, half awed, half unnerved.
Ren had just said, "It's… a tattooed seal I'm working on," and quietly resolved to use that particular trick only when absolutely necessary. Truth's little parting gift made his work easier—but the more he leaned on it, the harder it would be to pass as normal.
It was a delicate balance, but he was getting good at those.
Between barrier duties, his part-time shifts at the hospital, and the occasional low-ranked missions he still picked up for extra cash, his days were full enough that most people would have called them overloaded. Sealing ink and good quality paper weren't cheap, and while he could technically do without them for most things, buying them like any other seal-nin was part of maintaining the illusion.
He couldn't clap his hands in front of everyone and weave reality back together on a whim. Not yet.
Hopefully not ever.
He capped the ink he wasn't currently using and leaned back in his chair, rolling his shoulders until they cracked.
Even with the new responsibilities, he had to admit—life had become strange.
He walked between three worlds every day: the practical, dusty floors of Konoha's hospital; the fluid internal map of the village's barrier network; and the vast, crisp archive in his mind where Kisuke's shinigami arts and alchemical equivalencies slept, waiting for him to call them up.
He could release shikai now, if he wanted to. The sword—a cane/staff to everyone else—answered him when he called. Its name fit in his mouth like a thread pulled through cloth. He'd tested it only in controlled spaces, braided with personal seals and muffled with chakra, careful to keep its song low.
Bankai… that was another thing entirely.
That would take time. Meditation. Patience. More than he felt he had, with the Second Shinobi War looming like storm clouds along the horizon.
He'd watched Naruto once, in another life, hunched over a laptop screen with cheap snacks and too little sleep. He'd thought then that the timeline was messy—half-remembered wars, flashbacks nested inside flashbacks, events sketched more in emotion than in dates.
Living in it was worse.
This was somewhere in the hazy before. Before legendary titles, before the sannin, before everything cracked. Hiruzen was still a 'young man'. His students were strong but not yet a myth.
And the war was close enough that even the civilians could taste it in the way prices shifted and patrols multiplied.
Ren's chosen strategy was simple: make himself indispensable in places that were far from the front lines.
If he was crucial in the barrier corps, if the hospital needed his hands, if logistics ground to a halt without his sealwork, maybe—just maybe—someone up the chain would decide he was more valuable here than as another body on a battlefield.
Cowardly? Maybe.
Prudent? Definitely.
And it wasn't as if he planned to stay weak. Every spare moment was spent refining his threads, reinforcing his spiritual pathways, stretching the reach of his perception just a little further.
He wanted to walk into the storm with his eyes open.
He just wanted a little more time before that happened.
For now, he looked at the small stack of completed reports on his desk, at the notes for tomorrow's barrier recalibration. It was barely past midday, and by some miracle he was ahead.
He could go to the hospital. Pick up another shift. Or…
Ren exhaled through his nose, gathered his files, and stood.
…Or he could ask for more work here.
The thought made him grimace at himself, but he cannot help it; if he wasn't tired, he couldn't sleep. His brain always firing theories and plans.
He shook his head as he ignored his insomnia problems.
Still, the barrier didn't maintain itself. And the knowledge humming under his skin never really let him rest for long. Better to keep his hands busy than sit alone in his room and... Think.
He made his way down the corridor toward the Captain's office, nodding politely to the shinobi he passed. A few nodded back with the respectful distance that had settled around him since his promotion. Others still looked at him like he was a puzzle they hadn't finished solving yet.
He knocked on the sliding door frame.
"Come in," a rough voice called.
He slid the door open and stepped inside.
The Barrier Corps Captain was behind his desk, hunched over a scroll with his forehead creased. His hair, more grey than black now, was pulled back into a no-nonsense tail, and his flak jacket bore more ink than a seal paper. He looked up as Ren stepped in, sharp eyes flicking immediately to the files in his hands.
"Urahara," he grunted. "Report already?"
Ren set the folder on the desk, ordered and neat. "The perimeter checks are complete. Western and northern sectors are stable. The southern adjustment you approved yesterday integrated without issue. The external net is still giving too many false positives near the Fire-Taki border, but I've marked the problematic nodes."
The Captain scanned the highlighted notes and let out a low whistle. "You don't waste time, do you?"
Ren hesitated. "There wasn't as much backlog today," he said carefully. "If there's anything else that needs doing, I still have a few hours before my hospital shift."
The Captain stared at him for a beat.
Then he sighed heavily, reached for the little clay cup at the corner of his desk, and took a long sip of what Ren suspected was very strong tea.
"Young people these days," he muttered. "Don't know what to do with free time. When I was your age, if I got an afternoon off, I'd be halfway to the river with a bottle before my superior could change his mind."
Ren considered that mental image and decided not to comment.
The Captain set the cup down with a thunk and fixed him with a suspicious look.
"You're not secretly an old man in disguise, are you?"
Ren blinked. "I… don't think so?"
"Hn." The Captain rubbed at his temple, as if fighting a losing battle. "Workaholics, the lot of you. Hokage's brats, ANBU, now you. Is there a gene for it, I wonder."
Ren folded his hands behind his back, allowing the faintest quirk of his lips. "If it makes you feel better, Captain, I do occasionally sleep."
"Do you?" The man snorted. "I'll believe that when I see it."
He leaned back in his chair, eyes narrowing thoughtfully, lines deepening around his mouth. For a moment, Ren thought he was about to be sent away with a lecture about balance and rest.
Instead, the older man hummed under his breath, somewhere between resigned and relieved.
"As it happens," he said, "there is something I've been putting off."
Ren straightened a little. "Sir?"
"I've had a request sitting on my desk for a week," the Captain went on, rifling through a stack of folded papers until he found the one he wanted. "From Hokage-sama."
Ren's pulse ticked up.
"About…?" he asked carefully.
"Fuinjutsu instruction." The Captain tapped the paper. "Hokage-sama's got a couple of powerful, promising idiots—his word, not mine—who've decided they want to take seals seriously. Since half the village apparently thinks we just 'draw pretty symbols on walls all day,' I'd like to encourage this rare spark of interest before it goes out."
Ren stared, the implications slotting into place one by one.
Hokage-sama.
Powerful.
Promising.
Idiots.
He swallowed.
"…And you need someone to…?"
"Teach them," the Captain said bluntly. "Give them a proper foundation in theory and application. Make sure they don't blow up the village or themselves. That sort of thing."
Ren opened his mouth, closed it, then tried again.
"I've never taught before, sir," he said. "Most of my learning was… self-directed."
Guided by the memories of a royal guard captain and a glyph of cosmic arrogance, but that was neither here nor there.
"I'm still a genin," he added, because that seemed relevant. "Wouldn't they be better served with—"
The Captain cut him off with a short, sharp chop of his hand.
"Rank is for mission pay and bragging rights," he said. "Not for deciding who understands a field best. I recommended you for the vice captain post because you see patterns the rest of us don't. Because you can look at a mess of ink and know exactly where it will fail." He leveled a finger at Ren. "You're our best seal mind under forty."
Ren's ears felt oddly warm.
"I… appreciate the confidence," he said quietly. "But these are Hokage-sama's personal students. They're likely jōnin, at least. I doubt they'd be eager to be lectured by someone who can't even wear a chūnin vest yet."
The Captain barked a laugh.
"Oh, they'll complain," he agreed. "But Hokage-sama asked for the best we had, not the highest-ranked, and I don't plan on disappointing him. Jiraiya will be the loudest but he likes to prank others and joke around, so don't let it affect you, okay?"
Jiraiya.The name clicked into place with a faint mental jolt.
"And the other—?"
"Tsunade-hime and Orochimaru," the Captain said. "Apparently Mito-sama cannot teach Tsunade-hime. Everyone thinks it's because of Tsunade-hime's temper, but Hokage-sama said she's got a head for this sort of thing. Orochimaru would probably be the best of them; he'd always had an analytical mind. Personally, anyone volunteering to learn seals gets points in my book."
"They'll come tomorrow around this hour," the Captain continued, oblivious to the way Ren's thoughts were trying to rearrange themselves around the new information. "I told them I'd assign them an instructor."
He held Ren's gaze, tone turning serious.
"You don't have to do this," he said. "Being vice captain doesn't mean I get to throw every impossible task at you. If you want to keep your head down and just do the usual work, I'll find someone else to handle basic lessons. Might not be as good as you, but it'll be adequate."
Ren hesitated.
He could say no.
He could walk out, go to the hospital, bury himself in safe, familiar routines. He could maintain the quiet distance he'd cultivated, staying a name on reports and a presence in the barrier, not in the lives of the people who would shape the next stages of this war.
But—
If he taught them, he could influence how they understood fuinjutsu. Nudge their thinking away from reckless application, toward stability, structure, containment. Maybe, just maybe, soften the edges of whatever path Orochimaru was destined to walk.
And selfishly… part of him was curious.
He wanted to see what the future sannin looked like before the title.
He exhaled slowly.
"I'll do it," he said. "If Hokage-sama requested the best, I don't want to embarrass the Corps."
The Captain's mouth curved in a crooked smile.
"Knew you'd say that," he said, sounding equal parts smug and fond. He pushed himself up from his chair with a grunt. "I'll introduce you properly when they arrive."
Ren inclined his head, then hesitated at the door.
"Captain?"
"Hm?"
"…Do you have a syllabus I can follow? I've got a couple of hours before my shift at the hospital."
The Captain chuckled.
"Workaholic," he said. "Hokage's brats won't know what hit them."
Ren wasn't so sure about that.
.
The next day, standing in the training hall with scrolls unrolled around him and a neat array of blank practice seals laid out, he heard the door slide open behind him.
Two chakra signatures stepped through—bright and loud as laughter, sharp and coiled as a waiting snake.
Ren turned to face them.
"Oi, this the place?" a man's voice asked, lazy and booming and too casual for the solemnity of the Corps building. "Man, this reeks of ink. You sure this is gonna be fun, hime?"
"You can go if you want. No one asked you to come and we did tell you, many times, it won't be fun," a feminine voice came out, sounding more than a little annoyed.
"Fun isn't the point," another voice replied—smooth, cool, edged with something like impatience. "Hokage-sama said to learn. We're here to learn."
Ren's fingers curled briefly at his sides, then relaxed. He inclined his head, the motion precise.
"Welcome to the Barrier Corps," he said, voice steady behind the mask. "I'll be your instructor for fuinjutsu fundamentals."
Jiraiya blinked. "Are you even a chunin?"