The Undesired Second Chance

Chapter 25: Near, Far

Minato didn't really know much about the life his friend had led before Konoha, and he thought that perhaps he might learn some more if he took a few steps back to look things over from a distance.

In a manner of speaking, anyway.

There wasn't any real planning that led him to the fairly peaceful streets of Chotto, since it was just sheer chance that the route back home from his mission headed straight through the small village where his friend had lived temporarily. Just a few weeks, but he had apparently made a mark.

"Good afternoon, Brandt-san. I didn't know—" When he turned around, the elderly woman gave a small start. "Oh dear... my apologies, Shinobi-san. I mistook you for somebody else."

"It's perfectly alright." He chuckled. "I didn't know Axel and I look so similar from behind."

Now she was surprised for a different reason. "You know Brandt-san?" A pause, then she nodded to herself. "Well, I suppose that's not so odd— you both live in the same village now, after all. Tell me, is he doing alright?"

They traded a few more pleasantries, she shared some news of her grandson that she asked him to pass on for her, then they went their separate ways.

She was the third person to mistake him for Axel; it was like people saw his blond hair first, and just didn't process any other details until later. A tendency that made quite a bit of sense, he realized with surprise. After all, blond hair wasn't particularly common outside of the shinobi villages.

Which made him once more wonder just where Axel had come from.

The town was called Mun-shen, according to Jiraiya-sensei, though Axel gave the the word a tighter twist in the middle so it sounded slightly different. A lot of his friend's strange words were like that, with a sort of contrary inflection or emphasis that was different from anything else he'd ever heard.

Mun-shen. München.

Well, whichever way it was pronounced, trying to find information on that place had led nowhere. It was as if it simply didn't exist at all.

Then again, it may just be too small to find easily—goodness knows there are countless tiny villages scattered through every country, it's impossible to know them all. And if such a small town had been wiped out in a shinobi skirmish, then it may just be another overlooked casualty of the war.

But neither of those explanations added up quite right in his mind.

For one thing, Axel seemed used to most of the amenities his store came with: the stove, lights, heater, and so on never gave him pause save figuring out the controls. He just seemed to accept them as normal, so Minato would have expected his home town to be fairly large or wealthy. Luxuries like electricity and running water were usually only found in the capital, the hidden villages, or the rare wealthy mercantile city—not places that could simply vanish from a map.

Chotto itself was something of an exception to the rule. It may be small, but it was near the center of the Land of Fire and close enough to trade easily with Konoha, both facts that came with a host of benefits.

"Oh!" A surprised voice, right in front of him. "Are you Namikaze-san?"

He blinked, registering the teen—just a few years younger than himself, really—who had just walked out from a grocery store with bags of food and an expression like he recognized him. Maybe.

"Sorry, I mean, my dad was telling me about you 'cause you're friends with Axel-nii so he, uh..." His sentence petered off, embarrassed and not sure where it had been heading.

Still, the rambling had cleared things up. "Would you happen to be Kichirou-kun?"

"Yeah!" The boy shifted his bags around to free up a hand, then offered it to shake. "It's good to meet you!"