Despair raced across Chihare’s face upon hearing that even the Hokage couldn’t master them. “Then they’ll be absolutely impossible for me to use. Oh! I know. You could just come here every day and check the flow of chakra for me!”
“That’s more than ‘just’ a request, you know,” he protested weakly. “I have stuff to do too.”
“Are you busy?” she asked. “But if you used the Teleportation Jutsu, you could be here instantly.”
“Oh. I can’t use chakra right now.” Even though he’d been keeping it a secret from everyone in the village, for some reason, the words came naturally from his mouth. Maybe the ease of talking to someone he didn’t know made him say it.
“What?!” Chihare was at a loss for words and looked at Naruto pityingly. “What is the point for you when you can’t use chakra?”
She was powerfully direct, stabbing straight into his heart.
“The biggest reason that Uzumaki Naruto became the Seventh Hokage was because of how highly valued his achievements in the Great Ninja War were, right? Meaning, basically, that the people were seeking battle power from you, and now you can’t use chakra, which seems bad. Will you continue as Hokage?”
I’m not giving up the Hokage seat to anyone!
The old Naruto would almost certainly have yelled something like that. But right now, as Hokage, he bore different burdens than he did in the past. Could he continue as Hokage when he could no longer fight—this was the thought that had been stuck in his head all this time.
“My situation’s one thing.” Naruto awkwardly changed the subject. “But if I can help with your experiments, I’ll do it. Not so much Hokage work at this time of year anyway.”
“Thank you so much!” she cried. “It’s settled then.”
They marched down the stairs and returned to the lab to get started right away and check the petri dishes. There were an incredible eight hundred of them on the shelves against one wall.
Naruto climbed the stepladder and pulled the lever on the goggles.
“Hmm.”
He moved his eyes over the chakra in the dishes one by one, but all of it was sitting quietly in the bottoms of the glass dishes. He couldn’t see any real changes.
“None of them are really moving and shaking here.”
“Well, we won’t see results that quickly,” Chihare said. “I’ve been doing this for over six months now, but I still haven’t found any chakra that’s changed.”
Six months—apparently, Byakugan training and scientific experiments were the same in that they both required repeated trial and error. But Naruto was nothing if not entirely up for a fight of perseverance and determination.
This actually only made him more determined as he looked at all the petri dishes lined up on the shelves.
Chihare’s experiment had the potential to significantly change the world. If they could change the nature of chakra at will, allowing non-ninja to use it too, he was sure their world would become more convenient and a lot more fun. For instance—
“So, like, what if you completed this plooripotent machine?” Naruto said, the stepladder between his legs as he stepped with it to one side, holding onto the shelf as he did. “Copying Kizahashi gas is fine and all, but we could use it for other things too, right? Like—”
“You’re saying you’d like to use it in the field of medical treatment. I understand that,” Chihare cut him off and continued. “If chakra could be Kizahashi gas, then it might also become skin or nails or organs like the heart. If we can understand how to transform chakra into human cells, we’ll be able to repair tissue lost in accidents or through illness. We should be able to dramatically extend healthy life expectancy.”
“Right! I don’t get all that difficult stuff,” he replied. “But when I heard you talking about chakra, my first thought was maybe we could fix Sasuke’s arm or Master Guy’s leg.”
“Sasuke? Do you mean—” Chihare started to ask if he was referring to Uchiha Sasuke.
Krrrrrnnk!
Suddenly, the ceiling split open, and wooden boards dropped down. Shelves broke, and petri dishes slid to the floor and shattered.
“What the—?!” Naruto grabbed Chihare’s arm and pulled her in front of him to protect her from the chunks of ceiling raining down on them.
A spherical multicopter with four propellers flew in through the opening in the ceiling, motor humming quietly—a drone. The machine used lift generated by the four propellers to fly. Naruto had read reports about drone research at the institute and by Katasuke, but this was the first time he’d actually seen one.
So they did it then? Naruto forgot for a moment the situation they were in and stared at it.
Perceiving Naruto’s gaze as a threat, the drone approached with a whine.
Should I shoot it down before it attacks? But I don’t know if it’s hostile or not. What if it just made a mistake and flew in here during a test? Someone would be mad at me if I smashed it …
While he wrestled with what to do, the numeral five popped up on the central sphere of the drone.
Four, three, two. The numbers dropped before his eyes. A bomb!
“Run!”
“Huh?”
Naruto flew out of the lab with Chihare in his arms. He raced up the flight of stairs, and about halfway up …
Boom!
“Yikes!”
Blowback from the explosion pushed up from the bottom of the stairs. Still clutching Chihare, he forced his way up the crumbling stairs and made it out onto the ground floor. He kicked down the door, and as they ran out onto the street, he heard the hum of a drone approaching.
“What was that?! An explosion?! Was that a drone? A real one?!” Chihare yelped, panicking, and Naruto pushed her behind him without a word.
New drones appeared one after the other. Seven of them, arranged in a fan formation with the central drone in the lead. Naruto could tell someone was clearly controlling them, but where? And more importantly, who? The incident with Aze Yanaru crossed his mind, but he had no proof that the same person was pulling the strings here.