Chapter 96.4- One Thousand Hands

I turned the hard mud into soft sludge near instantly and then attached my chakra to it as the mud exploded outwards in every which way. I could feel my capacity drastically drop with the jutsu I’d just cast, but it proved to be worth it as I saw all three of my students slumped to the floor. Well, two of them were. Kushina was struggling to move. Gyuki’s chakra was giving her the strength to move even with the extremely heavy mud sticking to her. Well, that was not matter. I flashed forward and tapped her in the forehead, amplifying the weight she was under to the point that even four tails of the eight tails chakra was not enough for her to break out of my jutsu.

I smiled, looking at the three of them. They had been able to force me to use sage mode. There weren’t many trios of Jounin that could manage the same. Well, Kushina’s tailed beast state and my desire to show her that even with that power, she was not at the pinnacle of the ninja world had played more of a role in my decision to tap into nature energy than anything else. But it was still significant.

—

It took Kushina a few hours to return to consciousness after having Gyuki’s chakra leave her body once she was unable to break through the heavyweight jutsu. And he hadn’t been able to push any more chakra into her system with the present limit set at four tails. A limit I was reconsidering as I watched her devour bowl after bowl of Nishiyoka’s ramen. His store had been one of the few to have survived Chiyo’s insane attack so it had expectedly gained a notable boost in popularity since then as more shinobi had frequented it when the options had been extremely limited, and even now that the options were not so limited, a sizable portion had been converted into lifetime customers.

Personally, Kushina had brought me here the first time, and when I got to meet Nishiyoka’s young nephew Ichiraku who was his apprentice in the ramen business, I had decided to stay. How many people could say they had the chance to get front row seats to the birth of one of the most notable locations in the universe they had run to to escape theirs as a child.

And as I took another bite of the tasty ramen, I disproved another Naruto theory I’d been tempted into believing in another life— that Ichiraku’s ramen was quite ordinary and Naruto’s obsessession with the place had been borne out of them treating him like an actual human. That was just untrue. It was the food of the gods, as Kushina had proclaimed many a time.

“Another” She practically yelled out, slamming her bowl in the table before adding to the ever building stack in front of her.

“Do you think old man Nishiyoka is regretting challenging her already?” I heard Mikoto whisper to my third student who was going through his second bowl at a much more measured pace.

“Scary enough, I think he’s having just as much fun as she is” Minato said, and he was right. The Ramen chef was bustling through his kitchen like a one man storm as he moved through the motions of preparing another bowl of Kushina’s favourite— pork ramen. Teuchi Ichiraku spooned out a bowl and placed it in front of my waiting student.

“Ittadakimasu” She barely managed to get the words out of her mouth before pouring more and more ramen into it.

“This is going to cause a scarcity of something…for sure” I said, looking at Nishiyoka’s rapidly depleting stores of ingredients.

Teuchi noticed me looking and stepped closer before whispering. “I fear even running out of ingredients might not make him stop at this point. I’ve never seen him like this.” He said.

I shook my head before shrugging and turning to my own ramen. Much like Mikoto, I was only having a single bowl and making the decision to savor it rather than storm through it despite how delicious it was— Kagame would kill me if she found out I’d fucked up my diet by gorging on ramen, and I strongly doubted the deliciousness of the ramen in questions going to be an acceptable excuse.