“I don’t want to compete with your kid. But, well, no hard feelings, you know, if only one of us manages to get—”
The shutters over Masuda’s door slowly began to rise, cutting Kiba off. Naruto could see what were likely the manager’s fingers in the gap above the ground, and then the shutters were all the way up. Opening time.
The earth shook as everyone in front of the shop surged inside as a single being.
“Ah?! Crap. They’re all getting in before me!” Kiba hurriedly pushed his way through the crowd, leaving his beloved dogs behind as he melted into the human tsunami.
Jeers and angry cries echoed from inside the small store, and Naruto even heard screaming as people got stepped on. It was all-out war in there. He swallowed hard and looked down at Himawari for a final check.
“What d’you think? You gonna wait here?”
Himawari looked up at him. Her expression had been anxious upon hearing about the low stock, but she was apparently not ready to give up. She shook her head from side to side.
“Woh-kay!” Naruto steeled himself as he took her hand, stepped over the sleeping Akamaru, and went after Kiba.
He proceeded past the various doodads crammed together, knocked about by the chaos of customers. Unable to take a real breath in the stuffy room, he was very likely to lose Himawari’s hand if he dropped his guard for even an instant.
“Sorry! Couldja let me through here?” He headed further into the store, carving out a path between people with his shoulders. He had no idea where the Kuraa-ma would be in the midst of all this confusion, but he guessed they would probably be near the cash register.
Several of the customers noticed Naruto and cried out.
“Lord Hokage!”
“Lord Seventh?!”
He had no time to respond, however, and merely cut through them with a knife hand instead of bowing in greeting. “Coming through… Ow! …Oh! You just hit me with an elbow! Don’t worry about it…Hm? You waited all night? What a coincidence. I was up all night, too. I was!”
For some reason, more than one person in the crowd complained to him about the chaos, and he answered each of them rather noncommittally. When he finally managed to reach the cash register, there was a sign that read “Family Day only! Limited time special!” just as he’d expected.
There it is!
He grabbed a long, slender egg, quickly bought it, and then slid away from the register area, going against the tide of people. When Naruto once again crossed the threshold to the outside world, Akamaru wagged his tail in greeting, as if to congratulate him on a job well done.
Naruto finally took a deep breath while the joy of victory coursed through his veins. “Yesssss!” He held the bag in his hand high in the air. “A ton of people in there, but we managed to get this thing!”
He exchanged a grin with Himawari, who was clinging to his back. Her hair was a mess, likely because of that vortex of chaos they’d passed through together, and beads of sweat popped up on her forehead.
Kiba came out of Masuda while Naruto was tidying Himawari’s hair, his shoulders slumped in disappointment. “Dammit… They’re sold out…” Other dejected customers followed him out and trudged away.
“You didn’t get one?” Naruto raised an eyebrow. “But you got in there before we did.”
“I didn’t know where they were.” Kiba shrugged. “And with so many people in there, my nose wasn’t any help. Dang.”
“Aah, well, you can’t use your nose to look for toys, anyway.” Naruto rolled his eyes.
“Daddy?” Himawari tugged on his sleeve. She was staring at the bag with the egg in it anxiously.
A wry smile on his face, he handed her the bag. Beaten down by a human tsunami after several all-nighters in a row, every muscle in his body was crying out in exhaustion. But it was all worth it if he got to see his daughter’s happy face.
However.
“Ah.” The look on her face as she pulled the egg from the bag was not what he’d been expecting.
Kiba peered at her hand and furrowed his brow. “Hey, um, Naruto?”
“Hm?” Naruto also dropped his gaze. And then doubted his eyes. “‘One Tail! Shukaa-ku’?” Instead of the adorable fox with its many bushy tails, there was a portly, plump tanuki with a round tail drawn on the egg. “It’s not Kuraa-ma?!”
“That’s… It’s a copycat product made in Sunagakure, y’know? You raise a One Tail instead of Nine Tails,” Kiba explained, but Naruto wasn’t listening. He hurried back into the store and ran down the aisle, an easy feat now that most of the customers had departed.
Stunned, he stared at the cash register. The sign hanging there was the “Family Day only! Limited time special!” that Naruto had seen. But below it, beside a basket that said “Smash hit! Nine Tails! Kuraa-ma!” was another basket that suggested, “How about a tanuki, too?” Two baskets. The Shukaa-ku eggs were still piled high, clearly not the most popular item of the day.
“Uh…mm,” Naruto said to the clerk at the register, turning his eyes toward the Kuraa-ma basket, which didn’t have so much as a mote of dust in it. “So I guess…you don’t have any Kuraa-ma?”
The clerk shook her head, a profoundly apologetic look on her face.
He made his way back outside on weak legs, and Himawari burst into tears. Her small shoulders shook hard, and the two ninja dogs paced anxiously around her.
“Okay, listen. Once the fad is over, it’ll be a piece of cake to get a toy like that!” Kiba nervously tried to comfort Naruto’s daughter. “Your birthday’s still a ways off, yeah? By then, you’ll be able to get one of those foxes so easy it’ll make this whole thing now a joke. Aah, for real. Absolutely!”
“Kiba.”
“And your dad’s the Hokage, yeah? That’s such a huge deal that even someone like me couldn’t be Hokage. Your dad goes and talks to someone, and any toy you want’ll be—”
“Kiba,” Naruto interrupted. “That’s enough. Believe it.”
“You say that. But you…” Kiba looked from the sobbing Himawari to Naruto and back again. His meaning was crystal clear: What’re you going to do about this kid now?