Naruto Shippuden: girl from whirlpools

A test of Courage

Chapter Three: A Test of Courage

At age twelve, the world was at Namikaze Minato's feet, and it was a world of lost pets, tedious escorts, and hand harvesting rice; for this was the nature of most D-class missions. Ai moaned endlessly, complaining that their talents were being wasted, and Saburou said nothing as usual. Minato, however, enjoyed every minute of it. Although he knew he was capable of taking higher class missions and knew that his sensei was wheedling away at the Hokage to allow him to accept a few C class scrolls, Minato was content with whatever was doled out. Yes, finding lost pets was a little insulting for ninja, but he liked animals and he loved hide-and-seek, so it was an afternoon of fun and games as far as he was concerned. And yes, being employed by short-staffed farmers who needed their rice crops brought in was a menial but physically demanding task requiring little skill and a spine of steel, but patience was another virtue that shinobi had to master, and he saw the days out on the majestic paddies as close to spiritual honing as he was likely to get.

Most of all he enjoyed the escort missions. The clients came in all shapes and sizes and numbers and their only request was to get safely from point A to point B. Minato liked these missions because for the first time in his life he was being allowed to travel extensively outside the village, and he had to the opportunity to learn the layout and landscape of the fire country: to the north were the mountains, to the west were the rainforests, and in the east lay the swamps while the south boasted the most fantastic beaches. But mostly he liked how long it took them away from Konoha. It was a joy to go to sleep ever night in a tent beside his sensei, eat breakfast with his teammates, and play games with them to pass the time as they travelled through the day. He was never lonely. He certainly never felt homesick.

Sometimes he thought he would be glad to get home again and see his other friends and sleep in the comfort of his own bed. But one cold silent evening around the dinner table with his father was enough to remind him that sleeping on the cold ground was a small price to pay to get away from such stifling silence.

But as small as Minato's world was at twelve, it was rapidly expanding. Genin were not normally brought into war, and if they were it was only to handle tasks on the periphery where there was no contact with the enemy. But Konoha had, for a long time, been at war with Kumo and Ame, and tensions were deepening as battles became more embittered.

Soon their team was being tasked with missions closer to the contended borders. Most of the time it was just a matter of taking messages back and forth as quickly as possible, and it wasn't nearly as easy as it sounded. One of the enemy's biggest priorities was to intercept the communication of the opposition, and sometimes messengers disappeared between the village and the border. More than once Minato had fought off much older and larger enemy nin who thought taking a scroll from him would be as easy as stealing candy from a baby. He disliked killing, and he avoided it when he could, but Jiraiya had cautioned him that mercy at the wrong time would be his greatest weakness.

By the time he was thirteen, he'd already killed eleven men.

Since he would not brag about this, Ai did it for him whenever the young teenage genin congregated around the bridge to loiter, kick stones, flirt, and trade mission stories.

"What do they look like when they die?" asked a pale blond boy called Inoichi who had a rather gruesome thirst for details.

"I hear your eyes bug out and your tongue swells up when you get killed. Is that true?"

"What did your first time feel like?"

Minato shrugged. He hadn't really thought about these questions before or the subjects. His first time had felt like nothing. The man had been alive one moment and then he'd stopped moving and breathing and he'd been dead, but Minato had felt very little; neither sadness nor relief, and not even shock. It was the seventh man he'd killed that had perturbed him, as this was the first time he'd killed a man attempting to retreat. He'd felt a little bad about that. But as for what it looked like? Sometimes their eyes bugged out. Sometimes they went purple in the face before they stopped moving. Sometimes their bowels opened and it was deeply unpleasant to watch, but other times it was almost like they had just fainted, cleanly, neatly, without ever knowing what was happening until they were gone.