After parting ways with Kaito, the two of them fell in behind the chunin and followed him through the Academy grounds, weaving past the teaching blocks until the main building came into view.
They'd tried to talk a few times along the way. The chunin was walking too close for comfort. They gave up on words and switched to eyebrow communication.
Minato:(pointed look) — This is your fault. I'm probably fine.
Hoshino Yu:(narrowed eyes) — You absolute traitor. "All for one" means something, you know. With an attitude like that you'd desert in the first five minutes of a real war.
Minato just laughed silently and shook his head.
Inside the building, under the collective gaze of returning Academy instructors, both boys pulled their spines straight and followed the chunin down the corridor until he stopped in front of a particular door.
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.
"Lord Hokage. I've brought the two of them."
"Good. Send them in."
The door swung open.
Behind the main desk sat Hiruzen Sarutobi, Third Hokage, looking entirely too comfortable for someone who'd just had his enrollment ceremony interrupted by a screaming child.
Flanking him: two advisors and an assistant. The inner circle of Konoha's current leadership.
Hoshino Yu ran a quick mental catalogue. Koharu Utatane. Homura Mitokado. Danzō Shimura. The old guard — minus Uchiha Kagami, who'd died in service years ago, and Akimichi Torifu, who'd quietly stepped back from high office. These four were what remained. The ones who actually ran things.
None of them were elderly yet. This was their prime.
...This is a lot of firepower for two six-year-olds who disrupted an assembly.
He kept that thought off his face and stepped inside with Minato.
"Good day, Lord Hokage! Good day, my lords!"
Both boys bowed in sync.
"Ha ha~ Relax, Yu, Minato. No need to be tense." Hiruzen's expression was warm, almost grandfatherly. He gestured easily with his pipe. "Especially you, Yu. That novel of yours — The Grand Voyage — it's excellent. I've been following it myself, you know."
"...!"
He's been reading it.
"Thank you for your support, Lord Hokage!" Hoshino Yu kept his posture perfect and his expression earnest, even as his internal monologue went: called it, called it, called it — he had his eye on me before today.
After a brief moment of warmth, Hiruzen's gaze became something more measured. He glanced toward the three others, then back to Hoshino Yu.
"Yu. I'd like to ask you something straightforward." A pause. "What is your view of this village? And of the Will of Fire?"
Ah. So that's what this is.
Not about the disruption at all — or not primarily. This was an evaluation.
Hoshino Yu let himself appear to think it over. He studied the old man's expression, that patient expectation behind the weathered eyes, then answered:
"My view is simple, Lord Hokage." His voice came out calm and clear. "Loyalty to the country. Loyalty to the Leaf. Loyalty to its people."
He paused.
"I'll protect this village in my own way. But what I'm protecting..." Another beat. "...is every person inside it who's laughing, crying, fighting to stay alive. And the tomorrows that haven't arrived yet — the ones that deserve to exist."
Beside him, Minato had turned to look at him.
There was something quiet in those blue eyes. Hoshino Yu didn't look back.
"Is that your answer, Yu." Hiruzen had his hands folded under his chin, head slightly tilted. A long moment passed.
Then he smiled.
"A very good answer."
He turned to Minato with that same open expression.
"And you, Minato?"
"Lord Hokage... to me, the Leaf is an extension of home." Minato's voice was steady, sincere in the way only he could pull off without it sounding rehearsed. "I stand by everything Yu said."
After the two boys left, Hiruzen rose from his chair and moved to the window, pipe in his teeth, gaze drifting over the rooftops of his village.
A smile stayed on his face.
Those two. Six years old and already thinking like this. The words weren't memorized platitudes — he could tell the difference after four decades. The thoughts were genuinely their own.
Still children at their core. But the impression they'd left was something deeper than their age had any right to produce.
Given time and room to grow — they'll be pillars of this village.
"Hiruzen." Danzō's voice cut through the quiet like a dull blade — low, dry, with that particular flavor of patience that wasn't really patience at all. "Give those two to me. Put them through Root. I'll forge them into something this village can actually use."
"Danzō." Hiruzen didn't turn around. His voice stayed even. "Don't touch those children. Not yet. They're six. When they're older, we can revisit the conversation."
"Six is precisely when the foundation gets laid. The political situation is tightening. A few years of proper conditioning now means they're manageable later—"
"This isn't open for discussion." Hiruzen finally turned, exhaling a slow ribbon of smoke, meeting Danzō's eye with the same unruffled calm he'd worn for thirty years. "Right now, they belong in the sunlight. That's where they'll grow."
Danzō stared at him.
Then at the two advisors.
A cold exhale through his nose.
"Sentimental fool."
He turned and walked to the door. Before he opened it, he said, without looking back:
"You'll regret this, Hiruzen."
SLAM.
The silence that followed had a particular texture to it.
Koharu frowned slightly. "Hiruzen... Danzō's methods are extreme, but his instincts aren't wrong. The situation—"
"Children," Mitokado said quietly, shaking his head, "cannot be measured by how well they can be controlled."
No one answered that.
Out in the hallway, Hoshino Yu and Minato fell into step toward the classroom wing.
"That was a surprisingly deep interpretation of the Will of Fire, Yu~"
"I've got twelve more where that came from. I could have pulled a different answer out of nowhere if I needed to."
Minato laughed.
They reached the classroom. The instructor hadn't arrived yet, but the front row was already packed with early arrivals. They slid into the second row without comment.
They almost made it to their seats before it started.
"Hey. Hey. Pineapple-head."
The voice came from the side — a kid maybe half a head taller than either of them, arms crossed, wearing the specific expression of someone who'd decided to establish dominance on day one.
"You with the yellow hair. You're the one following that stuck-up little author kid around, right?"
"Do yourself a favor. Stay away from him. Otherwise you'll end up catching what he's about to get."
"The stuck-up author kid?" Hoshino Yu turned to look at Minato, biting the inside of his cheek. "And the... pineapple-head with a girly face?" His shoulders started shaking. "Okay I'm — I'm sorry, I cannot, that is — pfft — he's not wrong about the hair, Minato—"
Minato pinched the bridge of his nose and reached up to touch his own head self-consciously. "...There's really nothing I can do about it."
The comment landed, and the group surrounding the ringleader erupted.
Laughter spread through the classroom.
Hoshino Yu laughed along for a few seconds. Then he looked up at Minato's long-suffering expression, sighed once, and let the smile fall off his face.
He turned back to the ringleader.
CRACK.
The sound of a clean open-palm slap rang through the classroom and left total silence in its wake.
The ringleader dropped straight to the floor.
Hoshino Yu stood with his right hand still raised, arm at full extension, expression cold.
"Your parents forget to teach you something?" His voice was quiet. "Running your mouth at the wrong person has a way of going very badly for you."
The room stayed frozen.
He pulled his hand back. Ran it once through his dark hair, smoothing it back.
"Don't mistake easy-going for easy."
"You — you dare—!" The kid on the floor was already struggling back up, one hand pressed to his cheek, teeth bared. Eyes burning with wounded pride. "Get them!!"
Several minutes later.
The boys in the class had settled into a range of expressions that went from deeply nervous to outright terrified.
The girls had settled into something else entirely.
Three or four of the ringleader's friends were picking themselves up off the floor in various stages of dignity loss. The rest had retreated to the back wall and hadn't moved since.
"Yu-kun you're incredible—"
"...I think I prefer the blond one, actually..."
The ones with swollen faces had Hoshino Yu to thank for that. The ones who'd merely gotten flushed cheeks had caught Minato's considerably more restrained responses.
Hoshino Yu flexed his hand and shook it out quietly. The satisfaction in his eyes was not particularly concealed.
He and Minato had both been running basic chakra refinement for two years. No formal taijutsu to speak of, but they'd been sparring casually since they were four. Against a classroom full of kids who'd enrolled exactly today?
That was nothing.
His knuckles were still a little sore though. Six-year-old hands were not optimized for this.
"You think numbers meant anything? Cute."
Minato exhaled. He dusted off his sleeve with two fingers, then addressed the room in the mildest voice imaginable:
"Everyone. I'm very sorry about this. We'll be classmates starting today — it would really be better if we all got along."
Delivered gently. Landed like a verdict.
The classroom was very quiet after that.
The commotion drew their homeroom teacher.
A kid with a cheek swollen to roughly twice its normal size came sprinting down the hall, dragging behind him an instructor in a green flak vest — headband on forehead, cloth wrapping around his head, expression already tightening into the specific look of someone who'd expected a peaceful first day.
"Yuichi-sensei!! It was those two!!"
Tanaka Yuichi surveyed the scene.
He'd seen a lot of first days.
This was a new tier of first day.
We're not even past the opening ceremony.
He took a breath and turned to the two boys standing at the front of it all.
"Yu. Minato." Flat, professional. "Explain."
He already knew both their names from the enrollment files. He'd done his homework.
"Ah, sensei." Hoshino Yu tilted his head with an expression of perfect innocence. "Someone had an itchy mouth. Someone else had an itchy hand. It sort of escalated from there."
After a fuller account of events — delivered with strategic editing from both sides — Yuichi reached his conclusion, filed the relevant information, and told them to get along better going forward.
Nobody bothered Hoshino Yu or Minato for the rest of the school day.
The afternoon passed without incident.
They ate lunch together, ran laps together, sparred a little after school, and split off only when the streetlights started coming on — which was barely any split at all, given that their houses shared a wall.
Past midnight.
Hoshino Yu was under his blankets with a knife, a Devil Fruit, and the particular energy of someone about to do something that was either very smart or very stupid.
The Rumble-Rumble Fruit sat in his palm, catching the faint light through the window. Bright yellow. Strange spiral pattern. Shaped like something that had no right to exist.
'The first person to eat it gains the ability. And it tastes absolutely disgusting.'
He thought back to every panel in the manga where a character bit into a Devil Fruit for the first time. The grimaces. The gagging. The sheer determination required to keep chewing.
If Luffy — with his entire personality built around enthusiasm — had found it rough going, that said something.
Hoshino Yu stared at the fruit.
The fruit did not stare back.
No choice. Surviving this world without power isn't a plan, it's a countdown.
He picked up the knife. Peeled back a section of the rind. Cut off the smallest piece he could manage with any dignity.
Put it in his mouth.
"...Oh. Oh that is — urgh — that is genuinely—"
He clamped his hand over his mouth. Squeezed his eyes shut. Forced himself to chew. Forced himself to swallow.
Done.
Just one bite. That was all it took — one bite and the ability was locked in. He wasn't eating a single gram more of this on principle.
The numbness started at his tongue and spread fast. Then something else — a warmth, building from his core and pushing outward through his limbs like a current finding its channel.
He didn't have time to analyze it.
Static electricity crackled across his skin. Blue-white arcs leaped between his fingers, danced along his forearms, jumped across his knuckles. He watched his own hands light up like a storm cell.
The Rumble-Rumble Fruit. It's already starting.
He could feel it — the power threading through his body, rewriting something at a fundamental level. The trace amount of chakra he'd built up over two years felt suddenly alive, buzzing with new energy, charging like a battery being jumpstarted.
More and more of it flooded in.
The heat reached a peak.
His blanket touched a crackling arc of electricity.
It caught immediately.
"OH COME ON—"
He grabbed the burning blanket, shoved the fruit into his pocket, and sprinted for the bathroom.
He was in the bathroom before he'd consciously registered moving.
He blinked. Looked around. Looked back at the hallway.
That was fast. That was very, very fast.
He killed the flames in the sink, breathing a little harder than expected, and then stood very still for a moment while his body finished doing whatever it was doing.
The static faded. The heat settled. The electricity retracted back under his skin like a storm moving past.
He pulled up his Attribute Panel.
[Chakra Volume: 0.7 (Trace)]
[Five Stats — STR: 0.8 / SPD: 1.1 / CON: 1.1 / MND: 6 / SEAL: 0.7]
[Chakra Affinity: Lightning · Water · Fire · Yin · Yang]
"...Devil Fruits are terrifying."
He stared at the numbers.
In one bite, his physical stats had vaulted from the floor to average-adult baseline — and past it for Speed and Constitution. His Chakra Volume had more than doubled.
One. Bite.
He sat down on the bathroom floor, back against the wall, and tried to get used to being inside a body that had just been fundamentally upgraded in the span of five minutes.
After a moment, he pulled his focus inward and did the first thing he'd been looking forward to since the fruit hit his bloodstream.
Elemental Transformation.
His body dissolved.
Not painfully. Not dramatically. Just — gone, replaced by a continuous crackling pillar of living lightning that hovered for a second in the cramped bathroom, blue-white and humming, before he pulled himself back together.
He stood there in the tile-floored bathroom at midnight, slightly singed, looking down at his own hands, and said one word.
"Incredible."
In the Naruto world, where the primary threat was physical — ninjutsu, taijutsu, blades — being literally unable to be hit by conventional attacks was as close to broken as the system allowed. Sealing jutsu and genjutsu were different categories, different rules. But physical harm?
Done. Finished. Not applicable.
And water weakness? This wasn't the One Piece world. The rules didn't cross over. He'd tested it already — wet hands, no problem.
The other applications of the fruit's power would need time and training. He wasn't under any illusions about that. Even Luffy spent years growing into his abilities, and Luffy was Luffy. Hoshino Yu was a six-year-old with a body that was still technically developing.
Constitution needed work. He'd felt his stamina draining fast when he activated the transformation — the power was there, but the engine couldn't sustain it yet.
Build the body. Give it time. Then this world doesn't get a vote.
He flushed the remaining fruit down the toilet — it had served its purpose, and he was not subjecting himself to another bite of that flavor — then spent the next two hours walking into walls at inconsistent speeds and learning where his new velocity actually capped out.
It was an educational experience.
Mostly for the walls.
By the time he finally collapsed into bed, battered in ways that had nothing to do with enemies and everything to do with doorframes, his quest panel had updated.
[New Main Quest Received: Help the future King of the Pirates — Monkey D. Luffy — acquire his first true ship and set sail upon the open sea.]
[Quest Reward: 0.2 Free Attribute Points]
[Current Progress: 0%]
Hoshino Yu stared at the ceiling.
"...This system has a fixation."
He ticked it off on his fingers. Meet Luffy. Done. Now help him get a ship. Then what — recruit him a crew? Cook him a meal? Hold his hand on the way to the Grand Line?
"So Kaito equals Luffy for quest purposes. Which means I'm now Kaito's unofficial ship acquisition coordinator." He closed his eyes. "Wonderful. Great. Love that for me."
Though to be fair, he thought, already drifting, besides the face, Kaito really does act like him. Same energy. Same density. Same gravitational pull on everyone around him.
He mumbled something half-coherent at the ceiling and was asleep inside a minute.
He dreamed.
In the dream, Kaito had somehow gotten hold of a pen and was chasing him down three consecutive streets at full sprint, screaming about an autograph.
TO BE CONTINUED