Chapter 42 : "Boys, Blasts, and Brain Cells—Not All Make It Out Alive"
(As seen through the eyes of very concerned girlfriends, amused mentors, and Kakashi being Kakashi)
Okay, real talk?
There are good ideas.
There are bad ideas.
And then there's "let me go practice planet-cracker level jutsu alone in the middle of the ocean because it's Tuesday and my feelings are complicated."
Yeah. That last one? Very me.
I launched into the sky, riding wind like some kind of hyperactive leaf on an invisible breeze. Sage Mode's sensory perks kicked in and everything got crisp. Like the world suddenly upgraded to HD. I could hear the distant crashing of waves, smell the salt in the air, and feel every damn gust of wind brushing past my cheeks. Cool, right?
What was cooler? My chakra control.
Ever since Kurama had stopped playing tug-of-war with my insides, it was like my whole system had become… smoother. Easier to shape. Most people spend three years training and their chakra goes up like crazy. Mine? Eh. Twenty percent, maybe. Tops. But here's the thing: my chakra was still stupidly overpowered. A tail-less tailed beast, as Kakashi-sensei once called me. Yeah. Kinda catchy.
And today, I was about to prove it. Again.
Because nothing says emotional processing like launching massive explosions into the sky.
I found a little spot in the open sea, far from any islands. I'm not talking "oh this'll give a light splash" distance. I'm talking "a Bijuu Bomb here won't cause the entire archipelago to apply for insurance" distance.
First step? Safety measures.
I surrounded myself in a giant wind barrier. Not your average windy day stuff. We're talking mini-hurricane wrapped in chakra precision. Because if this thing detonated mid-mission, I really didn't want to be the guy who accidentally invented "ocean vaporization."
Then came the real deal.
The Tailed Beast Bomb.
Kurama once explained how it worked. Technically.
"It's simple," he growled in my head. "Mix eight parts black chakra—yang—and two parts white chakra—yin. Balance that junk perfectly. Shape it into a ball. Then go boom."
Yeah. Simple, he said.
Except you had to balance the chakra inside your mouth like a human blender while your teeth tried not to rattle from the pressure. And it had to be perfect—otherwise, kaboom too early or kaboom too weak.
But I had it down.
Golden chakra cloaked me, not Kurama's red, but my own glowing energy—warm, confident, full of yang. The tails that formed were flickers of raw intent. From my palm, I shaped a swirling, compressed sphere of chakra inside a glowing maw of energy that looked suspiciously like Kurama's jaws. Then…
FOOM!
Launched.
The Tailed Beast Ball tore into the sky like a comet on a mission to bully the atmosphere. Glowing. Humming. Deadly.
Of course, I had a clone waiting up there. He saw it coming and freaked out appropriately.
"Oh crap—oh crap—OH CRAP!"
Classic me.
Still, Clone-Me got to work, forming a massive chakra avatar and conjuring a shield. Good form. Solid stance. 10/10 bravery.
BOOOOOOOM!
Zero points for survivability.
The clone was vaporized in a flash of light so bright I'm pretty sure the sun gave me a jealous glare.
I winced. "Okay... still need work on the whole 'blocking a mini-nuke' thing."
But I wasn't done. Nope.
Time to get fancy.
I figured—hey, if a Rasengan rotates to increase its power, what happens if I spin this?
So I did. Spun that sucker.
Spinning Bijuu Bomb = double the compression = triple the power = ten clones completely incinerated even faster than the first.
Oops.
Note to self: this is why we don't test Rasengan physics on WMDs.
Finally, I tried the next evolution—beam mode.
Less explodey, more focused. Like a surgical nuke.
Way harder to shape, though. Keeping the chakra from just going BOOM and instead turning it into a focused ZAAAP was like trying to hold lava with bare hands while doing math.
I messed it up five times. Nearly bit my own tongue on the sixth.
Still, progress.
I stood on the ocean, panting, surrounded by little glowing craters of steam in the water. My hands were burnt, my clones were gone, and my head was buzzing louder than a thousand ramen pots boiling.
But I was grinning.
Because explosions make sense.
Explosions don't kiss you unexpectedly or write poems in your journal.
Explosions are honest.
I'll take that any day.
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The next day dawned bright, humid, and boring.
The kind of boring that seeps into your bones after you've explored every inch of jungle, ocean, hidden cave, and even that suspiciously crab-infested beach someone swore had buried treasure. (It didn't. Just more crabs. One bit Gai-sensei. He congratulated it on its youthful spirit.)
So what did a bunch of hyperpowered ninja warriors do when they were bored?
They played games.
Really, really stupid, really dangerous games.
"Kiba, you're in the cannon seat!" Naruto declared with that classic grin that usually preceded a disaster.
Kiba, never one to back down from chaos, fist-pumped like he'd just been handed the keys to a fireworks factory. "Finally! I get to fire the ship's chakra cannons. Let's gooo!"
"Wait," said Shino, adjusting his shades. "This is a training exercise, correct?"
"Of course," said Gaara, deadpan. "It's training. With consequences."
"Like vaporization," Naruto added helpfully.
"YOSH!" Gai and Lee shouted in unison, already glowing with green determination.
The rules were simple:
Kiba would fire the chakra cannons one at a time.
Naruto, Gaara, Lee, Gai, Shino, and Asuma had to either dodge or block.
Whoever got hit… well, hopefully didn't get erased from existence.
First one to get tagged 3 times had to make dinner for everyone.
(Assuming they were still alive to cook.)
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The ship—an experimental chakra war cruiser —hovered silently above the cloud line. It looked like a mechanical bird crossed with a Tailed Beast, pulsing with power. Charged daily by Naruto, Gaara, and the others, it had a chakra signature so immense that even Kurama once grumbled, "That thing's trying to compete with me, huh?"
From the ground, no one could even see it. But to anyone with the right sensory ability, it blazed in the sky like a second sun.
Kiba, tail wagging like a feral dog off-leash, was at the controls.
The others?
Already flying through the clouds.
Naruto zipped forward, wind swirling around his body like a cloak. With Sage Mode and fine chakra manipulation, he danced on air like it was water.
Gaara hovered with his sand beneath him like a living platform, calm and unbothered, eyes focused and calculating.
Lee and Gai? They weren't flying on anything. They were literally running on air. The sheer absurdity of it made Naruto snort the first time he saw it.
"YOUTH MAKES GRAVITY OPTIONAL!" Gai roared as he leapt from cloud to cloud, muscles gleaming, green jumpsuit a blur.
Asuma flew using his wind-enhanced chakra cloak, controlling the currents beneath his feet, moving with smooth and deadly precision.
And Shino? Oh, Shino was a problem. His insects had evolved—his chakra bugs formed a solid exoskeleton around him while his wasps and flying centipedes created rotating wings and a buzzing propulsion system that made him look like some kind of dark, armored insect-god. Cool. Creepy. Terrifying.
Then it began.
BOOOOOM!
A chakra cannon fired, the energy beam tearing across the sky like a golden spear of judgment.
"MOVE!" Naruto shouted, as they all scattered.
The first blast grazed Lee's sleeve, disintegrating it.
"HOHO! THIS IS THE FLAME OF YOUTH!" Lee whooped, spinning in midair.
Gaara calmly summoned a massive sand dome to intercept the next blast. It exploded against his defense with a shockwave so massive, it flattened a nearby cloud.
Naruto zipped around the beams, wind forming slicing trails behind him. He was loving it—this was exactly his kind of chaotic insanity.
Shino let his insects absorb one smaller cannon blast. The bugs flared with chakra, overfed and humming with power. "Absorption successful," he said, calm as ever.
Kiba's voice echoed from the ship's speakers. "You guys suck at dodging! Time to double fire!"
BOOM-BOOM!
Twin blasts streaked toward Asuma and Gai. Gai dodged with a flash-step that left a trail of steam behind him. Asuma formed twin wind blades and sliced the beam midair—splitting it into harmless shards of raw chakra.
Naruto whooped. "This is insane—I love it!"
A clone popped up beside him. "I hate it."
"Shut up and dodge!" Naruto shouted as the next barrage came.
And so it continued: a ballet of death, chakra, and airborne taijutsu.
It was, in every possible way, the most dangerous game of dodgeball ever conceived.
But for shinobi like them?
It was fun.
And even better?
They were getting stronger. Faster. Sharper.
After all, nothing trains reflexes like narrowly avoiding an attack that can vaporize an island.
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It was a lovely day on the island—by which we mean the kind of "lovely" where the sky was being shredded by high-powered chakra cannons, grown men were flying like superhero pigeons on invisible trampolines, and a certain Inuzuka was gleefully yelling "Incoming!" every three minutes from a warship that could casually erase countries.
Cue the girls.
Down below (and safely outside the aerial blast zone), the female half of the shinobi crew had taken up the most sacred of wartime positions: spectators with snacks.
Kurenai lounged on a flat rock with her arms crossed, one amused brow raised as her boyfriend, Asuma, nearly got his soul cooked by a spiraling chakra beam.
"Trying to impress me again?" she said out loud, not that Asuma could hear her over the boom that just flipped his whole trajectory like a frisbee. "Cute."
Beside her, Sakura sat with her arms around her knees, sipping coconut juice like it was movie night. "Naruto's definitely doing this to run away from us."
Hinata blinked her Byakugan back to normal, sighing softly. "He's still trying to perfect the beam version of the Tailed Beast Bomb."
"He's trying to dodge us," Ino muttered, tossing popcorn into her mouth. "We drop one little love confession combo and suddenly he's launching island-busters into the stratosphere."
"Three confessions," Sakura reminded her. "And I said he gets three girlfriends for the price of one."
Hinata turned pink. Ino just laughed.
"Look, if that's his way of flirting, I'm not against it," Ino said, pointing as Naruto wind-dashed around a beam that actually bent the clouds. "Just means we gotta up our game."
A little to the side, Viola—yes, that Viola, the one with calm eyes and a glare that could freeze lava—tilted her head as another skybeam vanished in midair, like someone had snatched it from reality.
"Why aren't you up there, Kakashi?" she asked without looking at him.
Kakashi, leaning casually against a tree like some romantic manga villain, lifted one shoulder. "Oh, but I am participating."
His Mangekyō Sharingan flared to life in a swirl of hypnotic red and black. Just as another chakra beam screamed toward Gaara, it abruptly twisted and vanished into the swirling void of Kamui.
"See?" he said, eye smiling. "I'm playing defense."
Viola raised an eyebrow. "You're vaporizing beams from a warship the size of a mountain."
Kakashi gave a thoughtful nod. "Obito would be proud. Or he'd call me a show-off. Either way, I win."
He wasn't ashamed of his eye anymore. Not after all he'd been through. If anything, he was determined to honor it—to make Obito's gift shine with the brilliance of a comrade's sacrifice, not the weight of guilt.
Viola gave a small smile, rare and warm. "...Good."
Up in the sky, Naruto—glowing golden like someone dipped sunshine in a blender—was laughing as he dodged another blast.
This is better than a date... Well, less confusing anyway.
A clone got disintegrated beside him.
"Totally better," he muttered, and spun through the air.
Back on the ground, Sakura casually elbowed Ino. "Hey. What if we 'accidentally' wrote love notes and slipped them into his training logs again?"
Hinata coughed into her drink, face beet red.
Ino grinned.
"Oh, he'd definitely nuke the moon next."
And so the game continued: boys being insane, girls being terrifyingly supportive, and Kakashi casually yeeting reality.
Just another Tuesday for Team Naruto.