Chapter 3: No Chakra, No Problem
On his third day in the village Kakashi decided to test him.
He didn't call it a test. He said "come with me" in that flat voice that meant he had already decided something and was just waiting for Denji to catch up.
They went to a training ground at the edge of the village. Empty except for the wooden posts and the trees and a crow sitting on the fence that may or may not have been watching them specifically.
Kakashi stopped in the middle of the field.
"Show me what you can do," he said.
Denji looked around. "What do you want me to do it to?"
Kakashi pointed at one of the wooden posts.
Denji looked at it. Then at Kakashi. "Just hit it?"
"However you want."
Denji walked up to the post and punched it.
The post cracked down the middle. Not broke — cracked. A clean split from the point of impact about halfway down.
He stepped back.
Kakashi was writing something in a small notebook.
"That was without transforming," Denji said.
Kakashi looked up. "There's a transforming."
"Yeah."
"Show me."
Denji pulled the cord.
The sound always did something to people the first time.
Not the transformation itself — the sound. The engine catching, that deep mechanical roar that didn't belong in a forest or a village or anywhere that had birds and wind and normal things.
Kakashi took one step back.
Just one. Then he stopped himself.
Denji appreciated that. Most people took more.
He stood there for a second with the chainsaw running where his head should be, let Kakashi look at it, then detransformed. Regular Denji again. Messy hair. Jacket. Slightly bored expression.
Kakashi wrote more things in his notebook.
"Does it hurt?" he asked.
"No."
"How long can you hold it?"
"As long as I need to."
"And the regeneration. How fast."
Denji held up his hand and bit down on his thumb hard enough to draw blood. The cut closed in about four seconds. He showed Kakashi his thumb.
Kakashi stopped writing.
He looked at the thumb for a long moment.
Then he wrote something else, slowly, like he was choosing the words carefully even though it was just a notebook.
"Alright," he said. "Come here. I want to try something."
The something turned out to be genjutsu.
Denji didn't know that word yet. Kakashi just said "look at me" and did something with his eye — the covered one, which he uncovered for the first time, red with a strange black pattern spinning in it.
Denji looked.
Nothing happened.
Kakashi frowned. Very slightly. The kind of frown that meant something had not worked the way it was supposed to.
"What were you trying to do?" Denji asked.
"Something that should have worked."
"It didn't."
"I noticed." Kakashi covered his eye again. Wrote something. "You don't have chakra. Our techniques need a chakra network to latch onto. You don't have one so they have nothing to grab."
"Is that good or bad?"
"For you? Good. It means a whole category of things that would stop most people won't work on you." He closed the notebook. "It also means you can't use any of our techniques yourself."
Denji shrugged. "I have my own thing."
"Yes," Kakashi said. He looked at the cracked post. "You do."
They walked back through the village after.
Kakashi had his book out again. He read while walking, which Denji thought was either very impressive or very dangerous depending on the street.
"You're not going to tell me I'm some kind of secret weapon," Denji said.
Kakashi turned a page. "No."
"Most people in my situation would get told that. Join our side, you're powerful, we have a use for you."
"Would that work on you?"
Denji thought about it. "No."
"Then why would I say it."
Denji didn't answer.
They passed the Ichiraku stall. It was too early for the lunch crowd and Teuchi was wiping down the counter. He saw Denji and raised a hand. Denji raised one back.
"You made a friend," Kakashi said, not looking up from his book.
"He refills the bowl without asking."
"That's his policy."
"Good policy."
They kept walking. A dog ran across the street in front of them. Kakashi stepped around it without breaking stride. Denji watched it go.
"So what am I then," Denji said. "If not a weapon."
Kakashi was quiet for a moment.
"A variable," he said.
"What does that mean."
"It means I don't know what you'll do yet. And neither do you, probably." He turned another page. "Variables aren't bad. They're just things you account for."
Denji looked at the side of his face.
"You say weird things," Denji said.
"I've been told."
The problem started at the gate.
Not a big problem. Small. The kind of small problem that feels manageable right up until it isn't.
A merchant cart had lost a wheel coming through the east gate and tipped over, and the street was blocked, and about thirty people were standing around it doing the thing people do where everyone has a different idea about how to fix it and nobody is actually fixing it.
Denji and Kakashi came around the corner into the middle of it.
The merchant was a large man with a red face who was blaming the gate guards. The gate guards were blaming the road. A woman with a chicken in a basket was blaming the merchant. The chicken had an opinion too.
Kakashi looked at it all.
Then he looked at his book like he was considering just reading through it.
Denji walked up to the cart, got both hands under the axle, and lifted.
The cart came up. Not slowly — just up, clean, like it weighed nothing.
The crowd went quiet.
The merchant stared at him.
"Wheel," Denji said.
Someone handed him the wheel. He held the cart up with one hand, fixed the wheel back onto the axle with the other, and set it down.
He stepped back.
Thirty people were looking at him.
He looked back at them.
"Okay," he said.
He walked back to Kakashi.
Kakashi had put his book away at some point. He was looking at Denji with that expression he had — the one that was impossible to read past the mask but you could tell something was happening behind it.
"You could have just told someone to put a rock under it first," Kakashi said.
"This was faster."
"It was." A pause. "You just lifted a fully loaded merchant cart one-handed."
"Yeah."
"In front of thirty people."
Denji looked back. The crowd was still staring. Some of them had started talking to each other in low voices. The merchant was staring at his cart like it had done something to him personally.
"Is that a problem," Denji said.
Kakashi sighed. Just slightly. "By tomorrow everyone in this village will have a story about the strange man at the east gate."
"Sorry."
"Don't be. It was faster." He started walking again. "Just be ready for people to look at you."
"I'm used to people looking at me."
Kakashi glanced at him sideways. "I imagine you are."
That evening a kid found him.
Denji was sitting by the canal again — it had become a habit already, three days in, which said something about how quickly he settled into things when the things were quiet and had fish in them.
The kid was the yellow-haired one from the training ground. Naruto. Up close he was louder than he looked, which was already pretty loud.
He sat down next to Denji without asking and said "you're the guy who lifted the cart."
"Yeah."
"That was so cool."
Denji looked at him. He was maybe twelve. Big blue eyes. Marks on his cheeks like whiskers. The kind of energy that made you tired just watching it but not in a bad way.
"You're a shinobi?" Denji asked.
"Trainee. Gonna be the best one though." He said it the way people say things they have decided are facts. "I'm Naruto. Uzumaki Naruto. I'm gonna be Hokage someday."
"Cool."
"What's your name?"
"Denji."
"Where are you from?"
"Far away."
Naruto thought about that for about one second. "Cool. What's that cord in your chest?"
"Starts a chainsaw."
Naruto's eyes went wide. "A CHAINSAW?"
"Yeah."
"Can I see?"
"No."
"Why not."
"Because the last time I showed someone it scared them."
Naruto puffed up. "I don't get scared."
Denji looked at him. The kid looked back, completely serious, completely certain about himself in the way only twelve-year-olds and people with nothing to lose can manage.
Denji pulled the cord.
The chainsaw sound tore through the quiet canal street. Naruto fell backwards off the canal wall and landed in a bush.
Denji detransformed.
He looked down at the bush.
Naruto climbed out of it. Leaves in his hair. Eyes huge. Face somewhere between terrified and the most excited he had ever been.
"THAT WAS AWESOME," he yelled.
A window above them opened. An older woman leaned out with a face like thunder. "QUIET DOWN THERE."
"Sorry!" Naruto yelled, not quietly.
Denji covered his eyes with one hand.
Naruto stayed for another hour.
He talked the whole time. About training, about his team, about ramen — they agreed on ramen, which Naruto treated like a personal victory — about the Hokage faces on the mountain, about a teacher named Iruka who had bought him ramen once and how that was one of the best days he'd had.
Denji mostly listened.
At some point the talking slowed and they just sat by the canal in the dark watching the water.
"You seem kind of sad," Naruto said. Not mean. Just honest.
"I'm fine," Denji said.
"Okay." A pause. "I get like that sometimes too. Sad but fine."
Denji looked at the water.
"Yeah," he said. "Like that."
Naruto nodded like that made sense. Then he stood up and stretched and said he had early training and left, loud all the way down the street until he turned a corner and the sound faded.
Denji sat by the canal alone.
The fish were still moving around down there. Somewhere to be, as always.
He stayed until it got cold.
Then he went back to his room and slept, and he didn't dream about anything at all.
Three hundred kilometers away, in a dark place that had no name, a white face split down the middle and smiled.
Interesting, said one side.
Very, said the other.