Three months later...

In a distant continent…

:x:x:x:x:x:x:x:

In his long career as a shinobi, Sarutobi Hiruzen had seen a lot of things.

Most of them involved blood, pain, and mortal peril.

He had fought in the first Shinobi World War.

Became Hokage before reaching the age of twenty.

Led his village in more years than his precedessors.

And thanks to the assistance of some of the greatest and powerful jutsus known from the times of his generation, he was still alive to tell the tale.

So he should have been prepared for everything when his students finally came back from their first unsupervised mission, outside the Fire Country no less.

He felt a sense of relief when he was told by an ANBU that his former genin team had returned to the village, weeks later than expected, but still unharmed.

He couldn’t avoid to feel a little proud. After all, his students had just returned from their first mission in a foreign country, the Land of Tea, without any support from other allied forces or jounins.

That was the true testament to their potential and talent, and even better, they were just twelve years old.

But nothing could prepare the Sandaime for what they carried inside his office in submitting their mission report. Such a thing had never been rarely seen in the office of a Kage, and probably never in the hands of a twelve year old girl.

In Tsunade’s arms, covered by a small bundle of cloth, was a sleeping baby. And a very young one, too, if he could see correctly. Probably only a few months old.

He was slightly baffled by this. Even if he was confident that there was an explanation, it was really something he had never encountered before.

His deep thinking was interrupted by a soft cough from Jiraiya. And the Hokage realized that he had been silent for several minutes out of shock.

“Welcome back,” he said, hiding his embarrassment. “Report.”

“Our mission in the Land of Tea was successful and under the expected time, Sarutobi-sensei,” Orochimaru said, coming closer to the desk and pulling out a scroll out of his backpack.

He accepted the scroll, but instead of opening it, he stared idly at his students, silently demanding an explanation.

“We apologize for our tardiness,” his pale student added hastily.

“You were supposed to arrive two weeks ago. I was worried at the point of sending a search party after you. What happened?” he asked, sparing a glance to the sleeping infant.

“The day before our departure, a violent storm hit the western coast of the Land of Tea,” Tsunade answered. “It was very strong, and it lasted for days. Even for a shinobi jounin, travelling in that climate would have been dangerous. Especially on the foreign country that we still aren’t familiar with. So we decided to wait until the storm was over.”

Sarutobi nodded.

True, rumors of the massive storms coming from the ocean had reached even Konoha, but not one of those had mentioned how much damage they could cause.

“There was water everywhere!” Jiraiya complained as he folded his arms behind his head. “A real flood! And we had to save everyone! That’ll show them what an awesome shinobi the Great Jiraiya is!”

There was quite a bit of pride in his loudest student's voice.

“We helped because we were paid to, Jiraiya,” Orochimaru sneered. “After we checked into an inn, the word had spread around and the local lord summoned us. He offered a substantial sum in exchange for our services in helping his people.”

The boy rummaged a while into his rucksack and took out two items; a scroll and a large pouch.

“Here’s the contract that we arranged with him, and the money we were paid.”

“I would’ve helped even if that guy didn’t ask us to,” Jiraiya pouted.

Sarutobi wanted to approve of his white-haired student’s altruism, but he decided to refrain. After all, the contract signed on the field would give an advantage in the region to Konoha, giving the village a better reputation and as such, more potential clients in the future.

And the unexpected money was good, too.

But he was reminded of the other matter at hand when the baby woke up and started crying. He had to ask the inevitable.

“And what about him? Or is it a ‘her’?” he asked, smirking a little in seeing not only Tsunade, but also Jiraiya trying to calm down the screaming little bundle of joy.

With little success. The Hokage noted how Orochimaru’s left eyebrow had developed a small tick. Their trip back home must have been… interesting.

“It’s a boy, sensei,” Tsunade clarified, as she slowly lulled the baby.

“When we finally resumed our journey,” Orochimaru started explaining, “We decided to pass by the coast. The whole region had been devastated by tidal waves. We navigated through it with ease. But days later, we spotted the ruins of a village on the coast. We would have just carried on, but…”

“But Jiraiya started running towards the ruined village, screaming that he saw something,” Tsunade muttered, after having finally been able to stop the child’s cries.

“Well, there was something! That’s why I wanted to check!” Jiraiya whined loudly.

“You could have just told us that first, before rushing in there! What if it was a trap?!” Tsunade yelled.

They all flinched when a loud wail erupted from the baby. All Sarutobi could do was sigh in frustration.

“There! Look! You made him cry again!” Jiraiya pointed out.

“It was your loud whining that made him uncomfortable, idiot!” Tsunade accused, throwing a jab at Jiraiya’s head.

The crying only grew louder.

“Oh right! Why did this not enter my mind first?!” Jiraiya suddenly clapped his hands as if he got a good idea.

Orochimaru frowned and could already predict that it would be something stupid.

“Let’s put him under a genjutsu!” Jiraiya said. “Something that will make him sleep.”

Aaand… he was right. Orochimaru restrained himself from sighing and just closed his eyes instead. Even their teacher, Sarutobi pinched his forehead after hearing that.

“You can’t use a genjutsu against someone this young, idiot! It could harm him!” Tsunade hissed, trying to calm the baby once again.

“And I did not endure his and your wails all the way back to the village just to see such stupid thing happening,” Orochimaru said, frowning to his white-haired teammate.

“I presume,” the Hokage said, interrupting his students’ antics, “that the ‘interesting thing’ Jiraiya saw was the baby?”

“No, sensei. It was a shipwreck,” the white-haired boy stated matter-of-factly, like it was perfectly normal.

“Oh, well, of course,” Sarutobi indulged. After all, the boy was still a twelve years old. “Would you tell me about this… ship?”

“It was huge! And it didn’t look like any other ship I saw before! And, and―”

“The ship had obviously been slammed against the shoreline by the storm,” Orochimaru interrupted. “It seemed to had been washed away by the stormy waves and ran aground on the ruins of the village’s dock.”

“Hey! I was gonna tell him that!”

“Jiraiya, don’t yell!” Tsunade hushed him, whispering. “I finally managed to calm him down!”

“As Jiraiya had mentioned,” Orochimaru continued, ignoring his two yelling teammates, “the ship had a design unlike anything we ever saw before. It was neither similar nor even carrying a single trace to any nation's navy that I know of. And…”

After trailing off, the pale boy seemed to hesitate. Sarutobi was surprised to see this from him.

Orochimaru hesitating when giving a mission report? This is completely unheard of!

“Sensei… it was… it was made of a wood that I failed to identify,” his student admitted finally, looking ashamed for his ignorance.

Now, that was really unusual. Orochimaru was a proud student at knowing almost everything as a prodigy and a top academic. Even at such a young age, he was already referred or even involved in some top secret discussions on the village. And it wasn’t an overstatement that he must have memorized every recorded species of wood on this continent.

“Really now? Could you please describe the design of this ship?” he asked.

“It was long! Really long!” Jiraiya started, enthusiastically. “And there was a wooden animal at the… What’s it called? Ah yes! A Prow! There was this wooden horse at the prow of the ship!”

“It was a wooden snake, idiot,” Orochimaru said, rolling his eyes.

“Nooo,” the other boy denied. “You’re saying that just because you’re obsessed with those things.”

“The ship had a single mast, sensei,” Tsunade interrupted, before her teammates started a brawl in the middle of the Hokage’s office. “And the sail probably had to be really big. But the storm had damaged it. There were also some shields along its sides, really big, round shields.”

“Yeah, they were awesome!” Jiraiya said, pumping his fist in the air. “They were taller than me!”

“Also, the entire ship was clearly heavily damaged by the storm before its collision with the dock,” Orochimaru added then handed another scroll. “I tried to draw the possible, undamaged state of the ship.”

Sarutobi remained silent for a few seconds after seeing the well drawn and different views of the ship, frowning because of his confusion. This truly doesn’t seem like any kind of ship he’d seen, or even heard of.

Had it not been for the baby, he would have already lit up his pipe.

“So, you just saw this unusual ship? What happened after that?”

“We ran after Jiraiya and found him just looking at the shipwreck with wide eyes, standing right there in the open,” Tsunade said, giving a poignant glance at her teammate, who was now massaging his head.

No doubt Tsunade had clobbered the boy when they had reached him. That would have been typical.

“As they started to argue, we heard a soft and weak wailing cry from above the ship,” Orochimaru said. He launched a brief look at the baby.

“I see,” Sarutobi said. He had already figured out that much. “And what happened after that?”

“I jumped on the ship!” Jiraiya proclaimed cockily.

Of course he did. Always so brash and impulsive...

“Even though we told him not to,” Tsunade muttered.

“Hey, there was nobody around!”

“It could have been a trap,” Orochimaru pointed out.

“But it wasn’t!”

“We could have all died, had that be the case,” the pale boy replied.

“But we didn’t!” Jiraiya insisted, defending his case no matter what.

“And what was on that ship?” Sarutobi asked, giving his students a disapproving frown to stop the bickering. “Besides your new… responsibility, of course.”

“Our what?!” the children cried in unison.

“Kidding, kidding,” he said with a mirthful tone. Children these days would believe everything. “But now stop bickering and tell me what you found on that ship.”

Jiraiya and Tsunade exchanged glances. Apparently they didn’t know how to explain what they had seen.

“Bodies, sensei,” Orochimaru said. Sarutobi had to trust him that, to be so blunt. “The ship’s bridge was littered with dead bodies.”

“Mmh, I see,” he muttered. He really wished he could smoke a little. “I suppose they died because of the storm?”

“No, sensei,” Tsunade replied. “There were… significant signs of combat. Most of the bodies showed multiple lacerations, and there were various weapons laying around.”

“There was blood everywhere!” Jiraiya said dramatically.

“Most of them?” Hiruzen asked, ignoring the boy’s outburst.

“There were signs of jutsu being used, too!” Jiraiya proclaimed.

After hearing that, it now changed everything. Were the other villages or countries secretly planning something?

His eyes narrowed.

“Were there any shinobi among the dead?”

“No, sensei. We didn’t find any Shinobi equipment, not even a kunai or hitai-ate,” Orochimaru replied promptly. His student reached for another scroll inside his backpack. “We have stored the items of interest we’ve found on the ship here. I thought you would have wanted to examine them, as they’re quite… unusual.”

Sarutobi accepted that scroll, too. Sparing a single glance at his students whose faces were full of expectation, he opened it.

The stored contents cluttered in a cacophony of metal all over his desk. Swords shaped unlike any katana he had ever seen had composed the majority of the metallic mess that was covering his precious paperwork. There were also axes, maces, and other offensive tools scattered among the blades.

He reached for one of the weapons, and unsheathed it, examining the double-edged blade that departed from the vaguely cross-like guard. The metal showed some sign of rust, probably due to having been left uncared on the sea for days. The hilt’s leather felt rough under his hands, and the weapon, even if heavy, looked well balanced.

“Sensei, look at this one! The steel is really hard!” Tsunade said enthusiastically, indicating one that was almost on the end of the pile.

“Steel tends to be hard, Tsunade-chan,” he said as he felt the blade’s edge with his finger.

“Senseeeiii! I mean that its steel is harder! And it doesn’t even rust!”

Frowning in confusion, the Hokage put the exotic-looking sword in place, deciding to examine this ‘harder steel’ her student was talking about.

Shuffling around the various metal objects, he noted that among them there were also small jewels, pieces of armour, books and other mundane items, and under the whole mass, one of those round shields the kids had told him about. It was made of wood, with a metal border, and it looked really thick. A strangely painted animal was sported on it.

On the top of the shield, was laying the strangest sword he had ever seen, besides the Raijin no Ken that used to belong to the Nidaime Hokage.

The sword didn’t have a scabbard, so he could see the exposed blade. The weapon was a beautiful black color, like a sliver of midnight.

The blade, the guard, and the hilt seemed to have been forged from a single metal piece. If he had thought that the other sword was exotic, this one looked utterly alien.

He grasped the sword and slowly lifted it, surprised by how heavy it was. The metal was cold, and looking at it from a closer distance, he realized that it was not steel. It was a metal unknown to him.

He had never seen anything like this before, indeed.

So where did the ship came from?

And the child, of course too. There was also the matter of the child.

Speaking of which...

“Where did you find him?” he asked, carefully lowering the weapon on the rest of the pile.

“We didn’t find him immediately, it took us a few minutes,” Jiraiya started, with a sad tone. “He was bound in a blanket, besides the body of a woman. We think… that she was the baby’s mother.”

“They had the same hair,” Tsunade confirmed. “And she was embracing him, when she died.”

“There were a dozen of bodies around her, too,” Jiraiya continued. “She probably had killed all of them, using only a sword—”

“Which sword was that?” the Hokage asked. He had a strange forebonding feeling.

“That cool black one, sensei. Oh, and she had used at least a fire jutsu.”

Sarutobi eyes widened, and his gazed posed on the child.

Was the little boy, a spawn of a shinobi? But if his students hadn’t find any identification symbol or equipment… maybe the woman was a missing-nin that had decided to not show her status using a scratched hitai-ate?

But she couldn’t have been one of the attackers, otherwise why would she have taken her baby with her, one that seemed almost a newborn?

Which village or country did she come from, to find herself on a ship of unknown origin that crashed on the western coast of the Land of Tea? Who had attacked them? It couldn’t be a hunter-nin’s doing, because the body of the woman hadn’t been destroyed to preserve her village’s secrets.

Pirates, maybe? Pirates with a missing-nin among their midst, that attacked the ship before, or even during the storm?

“Sensei?” his students said, trying to gain his attention.

Blinking his eyes, Sarutobi realized that he had doze off again, lost in his thoughts. He glanced at his students, and saw that another scroll was offered to him, this time by Tsunade.

“We have stored the remains of his mother too, sensei,” said the girl, gesturing with her head towards the baby. “We thought that our medics could have examined her, to see if they could understand something about her.”

Sarutobi knew that Tsunade was referring to the potential secrets that the body could hide within it. He nodded grimly. An autopsy would have probably revealed something about the origins of their mysterious woman.

“How long do you think the ship’s crew died?” he asked.

“Difficult to say,” she said, biting her lips. “It was pretty cold, so that may have slowed down the decaying process of the bodies and the state of the wreck, but I would say… at least two days. No more than three, when we found the baby.”

“Thank you Tsunade, now let’s focus again on the child… how was he when did you find him?”

“He… he was on the brink of death,” she said. “He had spent spent all that time in the cold, without food. I immediately started an emergency treatment, but to save him I almost suffered from chakra exhaustion.”

“Once the child was no longer in danger of death, we had to stop her,” Orochimaru clarified, causing Tsunade to be a little embarrassed.

“And she fell asleep soon,” Jiraiya added, adding more reasons to Tsunade’s chagrin. “The baby, too.”

“And what happened next?” Sarutobi asked.

“We… disposed of the other bodies,” the white-haired boy said sadly.

“Only because you were so damn stubborn about it,” Orochimaru said, crossing his arms.

“Hey, snake bastard! We couldn’t leave them to the animals!”

“Yes, we could. We lost time with that stupid task,” the pale boy replied.

“But Tsunade was unconscious, we would have lost time anyway!” Jiraiya insisted.

“Hey!” the girl protested, offended by that remark.

“How did you dispose of them?” Sarutobi asked, wondering how his two pupils had managed such a grim duty.

To his surprise, the two boys, instead of answering immediately, looked at each other’s eyes, hesitating.

“We burned them with the ship,” they said in unison.

Sarutobi remained silent for a moment, before finally nodded approvignly. Destroying the remains had probably eliminated all the evidence of its presence, and probably left Konoha as the only Hidden Village that knew of its existence.

That way, only Konoha would have gained from this strange encounter.

“After a few hours once Tsunade was able to travel, we departed immediately for Konoha,” Orochimaru continued.

“Which I think was a bad idea,” Jiraiya murmured. “We could have found a place to leave the baby, further inland. Instead, we had to take him all the way back to the Fire Country.”

“I was the team leader, Jiraiya. It was not your decision to make. We’ve already talked about this.”

“And what decision would this be?” Sarutobi asked, smothering another argument between the boys before it could start.

Jiraiya looked away, apparently disapproving Orochimaru’s call.

“The baby is obviously an orphan with no ties that we know of, sensei. Searching and finding a family that would adopt him would have taken time. And since the region had just been flooded—”

“The research for such a family would have probably been unsuccessful, yes,” he interrupted. “But why take him here to Konoha, Orochimaru? You could have just found a family or an orphanage… even a temple, here in Fire Country.”

“Because Konoha needs more shinobi, sensei,” the boy answered.

Ahh yes… as expected of him.

Sarutobi nodded, understanding what his student meant. It was not exactly an orthodox recruiting method, but it had already happened in the past.

And the mother of the baby had been obviously some kind of shinobi, even if her origins were unknown. They probably would never know.

And if the boy had inherited some talent from her mother…

“So be it,” he proclaimed. “The child will be placed under the care of our orphanage, and when he will be old enough, he will enter the Academy. It will be then, that we will see if your decision was a good one, Orochimaru.”

“Thanks, sensei,” his student said, bowing slightly.

Jiraiya, instead, pouted.

“Now, what is his name?” he asked, smiling.

There was a long silence, as his students looked at each other’s eyes, their expressions a mix of embarrassment and realization.

“We… we didn’t think of giving him one, sensei,” Tsunade admitted with embarrassment.

“What? You’ve travelled with him for days. Surely you should have given a name to him? After all, you had to call him something when you spoke about him, right?” he asked, hiding his puzzlement.

“We called him ‘baby’... Wasn’t that enough?” Jiraiya asked, honestly confused.

For being so talented shinobi, his students were so clueless about some things. Once again, he had to remind himself that they were only twelve years old.

“Give him to me, Tsunade,” he said, sighing softly as he spread his arms towards her.

The girl came closer to him, passing around the desk, and Sarutobi accepted the infant with a sense of caring that seemed completely out of place with an experienced killer sitting besides a pile of sharp weapons.

The baby didn’t protest as he was gently lulled by the Sandaime’s arms.

Jiraiya tried to suppress a snicker, and failed miserably.

“Something on your mind, Jiraiya?” the older man asked, caressing the child’s spiky blond hair.

“No, sensei,” his student replied quickly. “Sorry sensei.”

“Good. Now, let’s see…” he said, examining the child’s features. “He was taken to us by the storm that hit the coast of the continent, mmh… waves and winds.”

“He was taken here by us, sensei,” Jiraiya muttered. That earned him a slap on the head, courtesy of Tsunade.

“And you said that you found him in the ruins of a dock, right?” Sarutobi asked, without reprimanding the girl’s action.

“Yeah! You could say that the ship managed to dock, no matter what!” the white-haired boy laughed, amused by his own terrible joke.

Nobody else was laughing. Tsunade gave him another slap, and Jiraiya stopped laughing.

“I’ve got it,” Sarutobi announced, grinning. “You will be known as Namikaze Minato.”

“That’s a dumb name, sensei,” Jiraiya whined. Tsunade slapped him one more time. Orochimaru only sighed.

The baby, now named as Namikaze Minato, giggled in the Sandaime Hokage’s arms.