Chapter 170: There's a Jiraiya in the Bin
Sometime later, in a Konoha restaurant that the Nine-Tails incident had left entirely unscathed, Ryū sat at a table covered in food he had no particular interest in eating, and looked at the man sitting across from him.
The restaurant was doing well. Suspiciously well — nearly full, the noise level of a place that had forgotten a disaster had happened a month ago. Not everyone in the village had the constitution for manual labour, and those who didn't were apparently dealing with their feelings by spending money in establishments like this one. Ryū had no complaints about this. The reconstruction fund was reportedly half-covered by people in exactly this tax bracket, so the arrangement made a certain kind of sense.
He had never come here before the payment from Minato. The pricing had been prohibitive. That was no longer a concern.
What was a concern was the white-haired man sitting opposite him, who had followed him from the street, sat down uninvited, and had not stopped talking since.
Ryū pointed at the several empty tables nearby.
"There are open seats everywhere. Why are you at mine."
"Those tables have people at them," Jiraiya said cheerfully. "Rough-looking types. If I sat with them I might get beaten up."
Ryū's eye twitched. "And you're not worried I'll beat you up?"
"You're close with Minato, right? Which makes you a friend. And I'm Minato's teacher — which makes me basically your teacher. You can't hit your teacher."
A pause.
"…Are you a logician?" Ryū asked.
He had never, in either of his lives, encountered reasoning structured quite like that. The relationship chain Ryū knows Minato → I taught Minato → therefore I am Ryū's teacher was missing several load-bearing logical steps. It was the kind of argument that worked only if the other person simply failed to examine it.
Ryū examined it.
He said nothing further. He picked up his chopsticks. He had decided that the optimal strategy with this person was to generate as little conversational surface area as possible and wait for him to run out of material.
This strategy failed immediately.
Jiraiya, it turned out, did not run out of material. He cycled through topics. He offered unsolicited wisdom about the dangers of relying too heavily on strength at a young age. He described, at some length, the importance of maintaining a balanced perspective. He appeared to be building toward something but kept veering off course into extended digressions about the nature of youth and power that recycled the same observations with minor variation.
"…and that's why, when a person is young, it's important to remember that strength alone can't—"
"Hey. White hair."
Jiraiya stopped.
"Say one more word," Ryū said pleasantly, "and I'll put you in a bin."
Jiraiya blinked. Then he smiled — the smile of someone who had just been handed what he was looking for. "Oh? Thinking of starting something? I should mention that despite my age I'm in excellent condition. You might not find this as easy as you're imagining." He leaned back. "But since you're challenging me — I'll accept. You can even go first. I should warn you, no one's managed to put Jiraiya of the Sannin anywhere he didn't want to be."
He said go first, Ryū noted.
He went first.
No announcement. No shift in posture. The hand came around in a single, precisely calibrated arc — a knife-hand strike to the side of the head, controlled to the exact threshold of lights out, no permanent damage. For someone at Jiraiya's level, this translated to mild concussion. Probably.
Whether that progressed to anything more serious was not, strictly speaking, Ryū's problem.
The impact registered as a wet crack. Something lukewarm began moving down from Jiraiya's hairline. His eyes lost focus in the methodical way of a system performing an orderly shutdown. Several seconds of blinking consciousness remained — enough time to appreciate what had happened, not enough to do anything about it — and then Jiraiya's eyes rolled back and he went down like a sack of flour.
The floor developed a series of hairline fractures radiating from the point of impact.
Ryū straightened, wiped his palm on a cloth, and looked down at the body.
"He specifically said to go first," he told the stunned restaurant. "I was being courteous."
He returned to his meal.
The noise level in the restaurant did not recover for quite some time.
He had known the force was calibrated correctly. What he'd used on Jiraiya was, for a shinobi of that grade, the equivalent of a firm tap. The floor cracking was a materials issue, not a force issue. He had been careful.
Still — annoying didn't quite cover it. The man had the conversational density of a summer mosquito. Persistent, sourceless, impossible to reason with. Ryū was not, by his own assessment, a short-tempered person. But there was a limit to how long anyone could sit with that kind of noise in their ear before the math stopped working out.
Jiraiya had been testing him. That much had been obvious from the street. The circuitous tavern approach had been another layer of the same probe — wear down the target's patience, provoke a reaction, observe the quality of the reaction. Reasonably clever, as methodologies went. Completely transparent if you knew what you were looking at.
The man had said go first. Ryū had taken him at his word.
He finished his food in peace.
By the time the sun was sitting low and orange over the western rooftops, a large refuse container on a Konoha street emitted a pained groan.
"Nghhh… my head… what happened…"
Rustling. Something shifting against metal walls.
"I was just in the restaurant — it was morning — how is it already evening — "
More rustling. A pause.
"Why is everything so narrow in here? And what is that smell? And what is crawling on me — is that — the shape of that — is that a cockroach?!"
A longer pause.
"There are cockroaches in that restaurant? That's a health code violation. I had food there. I put it in my mouth. What if I ate a — oh gods — "
"Why are the lights off? Why is everything pressing in from all sides? Someone turn the lights back on — "
A scrabbling sound. An experimental push. The lid of the refuse container flew off and hit the stone street with a resonant clang.
Jiraiya emerged from the bin like a man surfacing from deep water — gasping, blinking at the orange sky, hair dishevelled, a dried streak of brown-red running from his hairline to his cheekbone.
He stared upward.
"…I don't think I'm in the restaurant anymore."
Something landed on his head. Small. Hard. His hand flew to the impact point and found fresh pain radiating outward from an existing injury. He surged upright, spinning.
"What — who — you absolute — do you have any idea who I am, throwing garbage at — "
He stopped.
The person standing in front of him, a small paper wrapper in hand, was looking at the bin with an expression that suggested they were reconsidering their decision to throw anything in this direction.
"Orochimaru?" Jiraiya said.
Orochimaru looked at Jiraiya.
Orochimaru looked at the bin.
Orochimaru looked at Jiraiya again.
"…You're back," Orochimaru said carefully. "Why are you in the bin?"
"That's what I'm asking!" Jiraiya said, with considerable feeling. "I don't know why I'm in the bin! I was in a restaurant, there was a kid, and then — " He touched his forehead. Looked at his fingers. Blood, dried to a flake. "— and then apparently I was in a bin. What happened to the afternoon?"
"You have a wound on your head," Orochimaru observed.
"I can feel that, thank you—"
"Did you fight someone?"
"I don't — I don't remember fighting anyone — I remember offering to fight someone — "
Orochimaru had been on his way home. He had stopped to dispose of something. The bin had produced a person he knew. This sequence of events did not cohere into any framework he currently had available.
He considered whether he might be experiencing a genjutsu.
He concluded, reluctantly, that he was probably not.
Jiraiya was still piecing together his recent history, prodding at his injury with the careful bewilderment of someone who has woken up somewhere inconvenient and cannot determine the full causal chain. His expression cycled through confusion, indignation, and a growing suspicion that he already knew the answer and simply didn't want to accept it.
"…Orochimaru," he said slowly. "Have you met a young man — "
"Ryū."
A pause.
"Yes," Jiraiya said. "Him."
Orochimaru said nothing. His expression communicated, to anyone who knew him well, that he found this outcome entirely unsurprising and was not particularly sympathetic.
Jiraiya sat on the edge of the bin, looked at the evening sky, and reflected on the afternoon.
He had told the young man to go first.
The young man had, apparently, gone first.
He had not been fast enough to do anything about it.
He sat with this information.
"…I need to think," he announced.
"You're also sitting in refuse," Orochimaru noted.
"I'm aware of that."
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