Since all the village gates were unimaginably heavy, one was always open, but it was incredibly hard to leave the western exit despite that. Ignoring the chunin in the booth, two more stood guard outside it and over half a dozen more were patrolling the gate from above.

The only other gate with more defence was the merchant’s gate on the east—and for obvious reasons all to do with money.

We passed without any trouble and about fifteen minutes into our journey, I was suddenly hit with the realisation that I’d left the village for the first time. When I looked back, the village and its massive structures looked smaller than ever and only became smaller as we travelled further and further away.

I was expecting the day’s journey to be somewhat eventful—in the anime, there was always something happening before a mission ever started, whether that was random passers-by asking for help with something fairly innocuous or running into bandits. In reality, we spent hours alternating between tree-hopping and walking before.

We only started looking for somewhere to rest when the sun had started to set, dying the horizon. The landscape had changed to mostly flatland an hour ago, but luckily, we’d discovered a safe enough cave to camp out in. I pulled out the night’s dinner: instant ramen. It wasn’t the most nutritious thing to eat, but after a day of mindless travelling, no one was in the mood to cook anything.

Choji had thought of a question while we slurped over the various flavours of instant ramen I’d packed into my bag.

“What if the bandits have a sensor?” he asked. “What are we meant to do then? Hiding you or Naruto from them is impossible.”

“Hey, give me a little more credit than that. I didn’t become a jonin by winning the raffle,” said Asuma, flicking a spark from his cigarette into the dying campfire. We edged closer to take in more of its warmth. “It’ll take Naruto a while to learn to mask his chakra because he has so much of it, but that doesn’t mean we’re completely screwed. Goro Tanimoto, the Jagged Blades’ leader, was once a chunin from the Hidden Waterfall, so there’s a bingo book entry for him, and he’s no sensory ninja.”

“So?” Choji stopped going through his second pot of ramen to speak. “Isn’t that still a problem? There are two other genin with him.”

“Yes, but not as big as if Goro Tanimoto was the sensor because he’d be able to monitor the entire village fairly easily. Seeing that they’re bandits, I doubt they even have a sensor, but I’m not ruling out the possibility either. We’re going to book an inn as far away from their base of operations as possible and make sure Naruto doesn’t go beyond that side of the village.”

“That might work,” said Hinata, looking thoughtful. “Even if they do have a sensor, I doubt their range is that extensive.”

Asuma grinned and patted my shoulder. “And when we attack, Naruto and I will fake any potential sensors out by flaring our chakra. This little guy has more than triple my chakra reserves, so it’ll be more than enough.”

His words drew a question out of me this time. I forced down the rest of my ramen in a rush and cleared my throat to grab his attention. “This whole deal with chakra reserves doesn’t make sense to me. In the Academy, we learned that you’ve got to mould the chakra required for jutsu, so how come people talk about chakra reserves as if they’re a resource to draw from?”

He scanned our faces carefully and set down his empty pot between his crossed legs. “Do you guys want the simple answer or the long answer?”

Hinata smiled. “The long answer—it’ll blow their minds.”

I smiled at her enthusiasm—she always enjoyed chakra theory, which I supposed made sense when she could see it. It didn’t surprise me that she was so gung-ho about everything chakra-related when her entire bloodline centred around seeing it.

“Chakra reserves don’t exist—at least, not in the way that you think.” He beckoned us closer, and we inched around the fire. “Since you guys want to get into chakra theory before bed, I’m making you all participate in my explanation. What’s chakra made up of?”

Choji’s hand shot up. “Physical and mental energy, sensei!”

“Precisely.” Asuma returned his enthusiasm. “Now, physical energy can be improved by training your body and mental energy can be improved through life experience. That doesn’t mean everyone with high levels of physical and mental energy has trained super hard or is some wrinkly windbag on their deathbed.”

He waved his hand in my general direction.

“Some people just win the genetic lottery—take Naruto, for example. His unique situation also means that his chakra will continue to grow even after he leaves puberty thanks to the Nine-Tails. I say this because I want to make it clear that you two—Choji and Hinata—shouldn’t use him to measure your growth in terms of chakra.”

They nodded eagerly.

“Great.” He adjusted his sitting position slightly and leaned forward. “Now, you know that physical and mental energy are related to but aren’t dependent on the body—and that to create chakra you mix those two energies. When you get tired after using a lot of jutsu, it’s because you’re spending the energies you use to function.”

I furrowed my brow at the implication of his words. In that case, “chakra reserves” was just a word for the potential maximum amount of chakra a person could mould—but that still left me with a few questions. How were sensors able to determine that amount? Did they even know that maximum amount, or was it just guesswork?

Asuma once again broke my wandering mind by disturbing the momentary silence. “Here’s another question for you all: is all the chakra we use consciously moulded by us?”

“It’s not,” said Hinata, instinctively raising her hand. “The body passively moulds a little bit of chakra anyway for basic bodily processes. If you completely run out of chakra, you’ll die.”

“That’s right,” Asuma replied. “But remember, physical and mental energy can be increased through training and life experience—something shinobi do and have in spades. Do you know what that means?”

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“...It means that shinobi have more passively moulded chakra than average.” My mouth fell open. “So, that’s how sensing chakra capacity works. In that case, how much passively moulded chakra do I have?”

“I’m glad you asked, Naruto,” said Asuma with a laugh. “We can find the answer to that question right now. Hinata, I want you to use your Byakugan and look at the three of us in turn. No need to look too close—you don’t need to glance at our tenketsu for this, just the general chakra flow.”

She set down her still-steaming pot of noodles and took a few steps back, levelling the Confrontation Seal a few inches in front of her face. I watched the individual veins around her eyes crawl outward like a series of writhing insects and when she opened her eyes, there was a piercing yet faraway gleam to them.

I held back my shudder at the intensity of her gaze.

“Anytime today, Hinata,” said Asuma.

She flinched like he’d snapped her out of a daydream. “O-Oh, sorry! Yes, you’re right, Asuma-sensei. Choji has the least amount of passively mixed chakra, you have a considerable amount more, and Naruto has roughly three-and-half to almost four times as much as you.”

“Woah…” Choji blinked slowly and turned to look at me. “That’s… that’s insane, Naruto.”

“Tell me about it,” I smiled wryly. “Just getting half-decent control over my chakra took me years. Ask Hinata; I’ve been doing chakra control training since I was seven. This seal is always skimming some chakra from that monster and adding it to my reserves, so I’ll never be able to stop training my chakra control.”

“I do not envy you there,” said Asuma.

Smiling, I just shrugged at his words—it was a small sacrifice to make in return for more chakra.

“I knew you had a lot of chakra when we were younger, but I chalked it down to talent,” said Hinata. “Knowing the reason behind it puts a lot of things into perspective.”

Her smile was bright enough for me to look away but I at least returned it before staring into the dwindling campfire.

“There ends my lecture on chakra theory for today!” Asuma clapped his hands. “Off to sleep, you three.”

“And not you?” I murmured. “Bet you’re going out for a smoke.”

“Mhm,” Hinata and Choji said in unison.

“Look at that, you know me so well.” Asuma grinned and ruffled all of our heads in turn. “You’re right, but only partly—I’m also going to lay a few rabbit traps. You guys don’t want to have instant ramen for breakfast, do you?”

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” I yawned out.

Hinata made a noise in the back of her throat. “Speak for yourself!”

“All food’s good food,” said Choji, nodding to himself as if he’d said something profound. “I know that I’ll enjoy whichever you choose, but for the record, I’d like some protein, Asuma-sensei.”

“Well, you know how our team works, Naruto,” said Asuma, stepping around the fire. “Majority rule wins—rabbit stew it is.”

“You do that, but I’m tapping out here,” I said as I zipped up my sleeping bag. “We have a lot walking ahead of us tomorrow.”

I positioned my feet towards the campfire, wishing my friends goodnight before closing my eyes. Choji and Hinata crawled into their respective sleeping bags with a series of rustling and I heard the crunch of Asuma’s footsteps as he left that cave.

Our first day of travelling was over and there would be a couple days like this to follow before we made it to Tenka Village. We spent the day making good distance, chatting whenever just drinking in the sights became boring. At night, we took turns whipping up a creative dinner, making sure that no one ever did it consecutively.

That way, at least some of our day was unpredictable.

After just under a week of tree-hopping, walking, and sleeping in caves and tents, we’d made it to Tenka Village an entire day earlier than I thought we would. The sun was almost underneath the horizon by the time we passed the shoddy wooden gate, but we’d arrived before nightfall.

I counted that as a success in my book because it meant sleeping in a proper bed for the first time in over a week.

The place didn’t quite match up to my expectations, but what did I know? The Hidden Leaf was a village only in name; it was practically a city. I trudged Asuma, peering at the locals passing this way and that, clad in patchwork yukatas and kimonos. I even saw a kid running around in what looked like a heavily adjusted… potato sack.

I gave him a second look and still couldn’t be sure that I saw that right. He raced off, giggling behind four other kids wearing clothes of a similar quality.

The inn we were looking for wasn’t exactly in a great part of town—we’d passed another called The Empty Plate that seemed to be the best thing out of the entire town. The three-storey pagoda-style inn towered over all the low buildings in the village except for what looked like a gathering hall in the distance—even the state of it was typical of what I’d seen of Tenka Village so far.

Unfortunately, Asuma made it clear that we weren’t signing in there thanks to my chakra reserves potentially tipping off the Jagged Blades. Seeing the state of the inn he’d decided on, I couldn’t help but lament what was otherwise a blessing for the first time in my life. Errant blades of straw littered the ground, probably from the bedding, and the receptionist was a beady-eyed man who didn’t bother to hide that he was drinking on the job.

“Excuse me,” said Asuma, spreading his arms over our shoulders. “I’d like a room for four—it doesn’t have to be amazing—just somewhere for my children and I to spend four nights.”

He looked over us dismissively. “20,000 ryo.”

Choji stiffened beside me and Asuma gave a wheezing laugh.

“Please,” he gestured to the state of our clothes and pushed us ahead of him so that man could get a good look at the dirt on our faces, “our journey has been long and we don’t have that kind of money.”

Surprisingly, I saw the gleam of pity behind the haze of drink in his eyes. “...The best I can do is 14,000 ryo for four nights. You’ve got to have that much if you’ve travelled as far as you look like you have.”

“Thank you,” I said with a smile while Hinata and Choji gave an elated laugh to sell our gratefulness.

We could have paid the amount in full, but peasant travellers having that kind of money and being willing to part with it without some haggling would’ve been suspicious, even with the innkeeper being slightly drunk.

“Oh, don’t thank me yet,” he said, taking another swig from his weathered gourd. He looked at Asuma, the pity vanishing from his eyes. “One room, yeah? No complaints on quality?”

“No complaints,” Asuma replied.

“Top floor, it’s the room at the end.”

Swiping his gourd off the table, he led us up the stairs and opened the door—revealing our lodging for the rest of the mission. The nights camping outside beat this hovel by a landslide and calling it a bedroom would be an overstatement. There was only one bed and even that was a sorry thing of aged wood and just enough straw spread thin between two questionable blankets.

He closed the door behind us before we could say anything and I took the first step towards the monstrosity, patting it with a tentative touch. “Yeah, I’m not sleeping on that. Pretty sure I saw a cockroach crawling around back there. Any takers?”

And so began the staring contest between Asuma, Choji, and Hinata to see who’d subject themselves to the bed while I rummaged through my things to set up my sleeping bag.

“Right, pick a straw off the floor from anywhere in the room. Whoever gets the shortest one has to sleep on the bed,” I heard Asuma say.

After a series of creaky footsteps, I heard them reconvene near the door.

“...Great,” Hinata muttered. She sat at the very edge of the bedframe and sighed. “This is what I get for trying to be fair and not using my Byakugan.”

I chuckled and looked up from the floor. “Face it, you deserve that bed for trying to be a fair shinobi.”

She couldn't muster a reply over Asuma and Choji’s laughter and nodded glumly.