The morning sun had barely crested the jagged peaks surrounding Konohagakure when Naruto Uzumaki decided, as he often did, that today would be the day everything changed.
He stood at the edge of Training Ground Seven, his orange jumpsuit almost glowing in the early light, his blond hair sticking up in every direction it could manage. His hands were tucked behind his head, and he was staring up at the sky with that particular expression he wore when he was thinking hard but trying to look like he wasn’t thinking at all.
“You’re late,” said Sakura Haruno from her seat on a nearby log. She had a book open in her lap, but she hadn’t turned a page in twenty minutes. Waiting for Naruto had a way of making time slow down to a crawl.
“I’m exactly on time,” Naruto said. “Kakashi-sensei isn’t even here yet.”
“Kakashi-sensei is always late. That doesn’t mean you should be.”
“I wasn’t late! I was strategically delayed.” He grinned at her. She rolled her eyes. This was their natural rhythm, as reliable as sunrise.
Sasuke was leaning against a tree a short distance away, arms crossed, eyes closed. He had arrived first, as he always did, and had spent the intervening time meditating or brooding or doing whatever it was Sasuke did when he stood very still and looked like a statue carved from pure irritability. He didn’t acknowledge Naruto’s arrival, but the slight twitch at the corner of his mouth suggested he had heard the exchange.
Training Ground Seven was a wide clearing surrounded by dense forest, split through the middle by a shallow river that caught the sunlight and scattered it into shifting patterns across the grass. Three wooden posts stood in a rough triangle near the center, worn smooth from years of use. It was an ordinary place, familiar and unremarkable, the kind of place where nothing unusual ever happened.
That was about to change.
Kakashi arrived forty-five minutes late, which was early for him. He had his little orange book open as he strolled into the clearing, and he glanced up from it just long enough to register the presence of his three students before dropping his gaze back to the page.
“Ah,” he said. “You’re all here.”
“We’ve been here for almost an hour,” Sakura said.
“Have you? How dedicated.” He closed the book and tucked it into his vest. “Today we’re focusing on chakra control refinement. Specifically, I want each of you to practice maintaining a sustained chakra output while under physical stress. The goal is to keep your reserves stable even when your body is working hard.”
“That sounds boring,” Naruto said immediately.
“Most things that make you stronger sound boring at first,” Kakashi said. “That’s how you know they’re important.”
Naruto opened his mouth to argue, then closed it. He had a counterargument ready — he always had a counterargument ready — but something stopped him. A sensation. Faint, at first. Like a vibration in the air, too low to hear but just present enough to feel in the back of his teeth.
He looked around.
The clearing looked the same as always. The river murmured. The trees swayed in a light breeze. Sasuke was watching Kakashi with focused attention. Sakura was already beginning to concentrate her chakra, her expression shifting into the careful, precise look she wore when she was doing technical work.
Nothing was wrong.
And yet.
“Hey,” Naruto said. “Does anyone else feel that?”
“Feel what?” Sakura asked without looking up.
“That… buzzing. Kind of. Like when you stand too close to an electrical line.”
Kakashi looked at him with his one visible eye, the other hidden behind his headband. His expression was unreadable, as it usually was. “I don’t feel anything unusual. Focus on the exercise, Naruto.”
Naruto tried. He really did. He stood at his post and pressed his palms flat against the wood and pushed his chakra outward, feeling it flow from his core through his arms and into the surface of the post. It was a simple exercise. He had done it hundreds of times. But the buzzing feeling kept pulling at his attention, like a hook in the back of his mind, tugging him toward the eastern edge of the treeline.
After ten minutes, he gave up trying to ignore it.
“I’ll be right back,” he said.
“Naruto—” Sakura started.
But he was already moving, jogging toward the trees with his hands in his pockets and his curiosity leading him forward like a compass needle finding north.
The forest east of Training Ground Seven was thick and old, the kind of forest that had been growing for so long that the trees had started to lean toward each other overhead, forming a canopy so dense that the light came through in thin, dusty shafts. Naruto moved through it easily, years of training having made navigation through dense terrain as natural as breathing.
The buzzing grew stronger with every step. It wasn’t unpleasant, exactly, but it had an urgency to it that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. The Nine-Tails stirred faintly in the back of his mind — not alarmed, but alert. Curious, even. And if the Fox was curious, Naruto figured that was worth paying attention to.
He pushed through a dense stand of bamboo and stopped.
There was a clearing here, small and hidden, that he had never noticed before despite training in this area for years. It might have been created recently. Or it might have always been there and simply never mattered until now.
In the center of the clearing, hovering about three feet off the ground, was a rift.
There was no better word for it. It was a tear in the air itself, roughly oval in shape, its edges crackling with energy that shifted between green and white. Through it, Naruto could see something — another place, blurred and indistinct, like trying to read through frosted glass. There was color there, and movement, and light unlike anything he had ever seen in the Land of Fire.
And falling through it, tumbling end over end with a yelp that was cut off mid-syllable, was a device.
It hit the ground at Naruto’s feet with a dull thud and bounced once.
Then the rift snapped shut with a sound like a thunderclap, leaving behind nothing but a faint smell of ozone and the soft ringing of disturbed air.
Naruto stood very still for a long moment. Then he looked down.
The device was roughly the size of his fist. It was circular at its center, with a raised dial and a large green button on top. Strange symbols were etched into its surface — not any script he recognized, not even the complex seals he had studied in his ninja training. The symbols seemed to shift slightly when he wasn’t looking directly at them, catching the light in ways that didn’t quite correspond to where the light was actually coming from.
Two bands extended from the circular core, clearly designed to wrap around a wrist.
It looked like a watch. A very alien, very strange watch.
Naruto crouched down and picked it up. It was lighter than it looked and warm to the touch, as if it had been sitting in sunlight, except there was no sunlight here in the dense forest. The green button pulsed faintly with a rhythm that was almost like a heartbeat.
“Huh,” Naruto said. “What are you?”
The device answered this question by snapping itself around his wrist.
He yelped and jumped backward, shaking his arm, but the bands had locked into place with a precision that suggested they had been specifically designed for exactly this wrist on exactly this arm. Not painfully tight. Not uncomfortable. Just… there. Settled. Like it belonged.
The green button pulsed again, stronger now.
Then the faceplate lit up, and a holographic display bloomed upward from the dial — alien symbols scrolling past faster than he could follow, accompanied by a rapid chirping sound that rose and fell in complex patterns. Data, he realized. It was reading him. He could feel it — a gentle scan that moved from his wrist up through his arm and then, somehow, deeper. Not just his body. His chakra. The Fox’s chakra. All of it, being catalogued and understood in the span of about four seconds.
Then the display stabilized.
The symbols on the faceplate rearranged themselves into a pattern that seemed to pulse with readiness. The device was online. It had decided, apparently without asking his opinion, that he was its new owner.
“I probably should not have touched that,” Naruto said.
He stood in the forest for a while, examining the device from every angle he could manage without being able to remove it from his wrist. He tried the quick-release seals he had learned for removing equipment in the field. He tried pulling at the bands with his other hand. He tried channeling chakra into it to push it off. None of it worked. The device sat on his wrist with the serene immovability of something that had never considered the possibility of being removed.
The green button was still pulsing.
Naruto was not, by nature or by training, someone who left buttons unpushed. He had been told, at various points in his life, that this was a personality flaw. He preferred to think of it as a virtue.
He pushed the button.
The faceplate lit up again, but differently this time. Instead of scrolling data, it displayed a series of silhouettes — alien shapes, each one distinct, each one cycling past in a slow rotation. Some were humanoid. Some were very much not. One appeared to be made entirely of fire. Another looked like a walking diamond. One was a small grey figure with enormous green eyes and an oversized head that somehow radiated an impression of vast intelligence.
“It’s showing me options,” Naruto murmured. He reached out and touched the dial experimentally. It rotated under his finger with a satisfying click, and the silhouette on the display changed to the next one in the sequence. A large, four-armed figure. Huge. Built like a wall that had decided to start working out.
“Okay,” Naruto said.
He had survived worse decisions than this. He had eaten Sakura’s cooking three times and survived. He had challenged Sasuke to contests of strength at least forty times and survived, if not always with his dignity intact. He had argued with the Hokage. He had talked back to Jiraiya. He had charged into battle against opponents that made experienced jonin go pale, driven by nothing but stubbornness and the deep certainty that things would work out.
He pushed the button down.
The world went white.
It was not painful. That was the first thing he registered, in the part of his brain that remained functional while the rest of it was busy being overwhelmed. There was no pain. Just — transformation. His body expanding, changing, reshaping itself with a speed and completeness that made even his most intense Nine-Tails chakra surges feel mild by comparison. He felt himself growing — four feet, five feet, six feet, taller still — felt new arms extending from his shoulders, felt his hands becoming enormous, four-fingered, built for impact. His clothes were gone, replaced by something that covered his new form without him needing to think about it.
Then it was over. The white faded.
Naruto looked at his hands. All four of them.
He was approximately twelve feet tall. He was built like a mountain. His skin was a deep red-orange. His four arms were each roughly the size of a normal person’s torso, and his hands were large enough that he could probably palm a small building. He could feel the strength in this form like a physical weight — not oppressive, but present, enormous, a reservoir of physical power that dwarfed anything he had experienced before.
“Whoa,” he said. His voice came out deeper than normal. He turned his hands over and back, examining them with the wide-eyed wonder he always brought to new experiences. “Whoa. This is—”
A branch cracked behind him.
He spun around. Three training dummies that had been set up at the edge of the clearing by some other team went flying. He hadn’t even touched them. The displacement of air from his spin was enough.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Bigger than I thought. Okay.”
“NARUTO!”
Kakashi’s voice, sharp with urgency, cut through the trees. Naruto could hear running footsteps — all three of his teammates, converging on his position, drawn by either the sound of the dummies being scattered or some combination of instinct and alarm.
Sakura hit the treeline first and skidded to a stop so suddenly that she nearly fell over. Her eyes went from the ground to mid-height to above her head before she found his face, and then she stood there with her mouth open and no sound coming out.
Sasuke emerged from the trees two seconds later, took one look at Naruto, and reached for a kunai. This was Sasuke’s standard first response to unusual situations, and Naruto had always found it more reassuring than alarming.
Kakashi appeared last, moving with the unhurried precision that meant he was either completely calm or completely focused, and probably both. He looked at Naruto for a long moment. His visible eye gave nothing away.
“Naruto,” he said.
“Hey, Kakashi-sensei,” Naruto said.
“You’re very large.”
“Yeah.”
“And you appear to have four arms.”
“Also yeah.”
A pause. The river murmured in the distance. A bird called once and then went silent, as if it too had decided to wait and see how this played out.
“Would you like to explain,” Kakashi said, “what happened?”
Naruto looked down at his massive hands and then back up at his teacher. He had learned, over years of being Naruto Uzumaki, that the best approach to explaining unusual situations was directness. People respected directness. Also, he had found that the more complicated an explanation you gave for something strange, the more questions you got, and the more questions you got, the longer it took before you could get back to figuring out what the strange thing actually did.
“I found a device in the forest,” he said. “It attached itself to my wrist. I pushed the button. This happened.”
Another pause.
“Show me the device,” Kakashi said.
Naruto looked at his wrist. On his current arm — one of the upper two — the Omnitrix was still there, resized to fit his new form as naturally as if it had always been this size. The faceplate was still glowing green, but differently now. A softer pulse. A countdown, he somehow understood. The transformation had a time limit.
Before he could say anything, the device beeped twice.
The white light returned.
And when it faded, Naruto was standing in his normal form, in his normal orange jumpsuit, at his normal height, with a strange alien device on his wrist and three people staring at him.
Sakura made a sound that was somewhere between relief and completely renewed alarm.
Sasuke had not put the kunai away.
Kakashi walked forward, slowly, and crouched down to examine the device on Naruto’s wrist. He studied it for a long moment — the symbols, the dial, the pulsing green button. His expression remained neutral, but Naruto could see the minute tension in his jaw that meant he was thinking very hard and very fast.
“Where exactly did you find this?” Kakashi asked.
“Eastern edge of the training ground. There was a rift — like a hole in the air, with energy around the edges. This fell out of it, and then the rift closed.”
“A dimensional rift,” Kakashi said, not as a question.
“Is that what it was?”
Kakashi stood up. He looked at the device for another moment, then at Naruto’s face. Whatever he saw there — the mix of excitement and uncertainty and that characteristic Naruto stubbornness that meant he was already attached to whatever new thing had entered his life — seemed to settle something in his assessment.
“This is going to require a report to the Hokage,” he said. “And possibly a consultation with some people who understand sealing and dimensional theory better than I do.” He paused. “Don’t push the button again until we know what we’re dealing with.”
“Right,” Naruto said.
A beat.
“I mean it, Naruto.”
“I heard you.”
“I want to see your hands where I can see them at all times.”
“That’s a little extreme—”
“Both hands. Visible. Now.”
Naruto put his hands up in a gesture of exaggerated surrender, which made Sakura laugh despite herself, which made Sasuke look away to hide the fact that he almost smiled, which made the morning feel, for a moment, completely normal.
But the device on Naruto’s wrist pulsed steadily, patient and full of potential, waiting for the next time he would push the button.
And Naruto, because he was Naruto, was already thinking about it.
The walk back to the village was quiet in the way that walks back from unexpected events always were — each person processing in their own way, the silence companionable and thoughtful rather than tense. Naruto kept looking at the device. He couldn’t help it. The holographic silhouettes had disappeared when he returned to his normal form, but he could feel the device’s presence on his wrist with a clarity that went beyond the physical. It was aware, somehow. Not conscious — not the way the Nine-Tails was conscious, with its ancient grudges and its enormous sleeping intelligence. But aware. Present. Like a tool that knew it was being held.
“What did it feel like?” Sakura asked, falling into step beside him.
He considered the question seriously. “Like chakra,” he said finally. “But different. Wider. Like chakra that goes in directions I don’t have words for yet.”
She nodded slowly, processing this. “The transformation — were you still yourself inside it?”
“Yeah. Completely. I knew who I was the whole time. I just had four arms and was the size of a house.” He paused. “It was actually kind of incredible.”
“I imagine,” she said dryly. Then, quieter: “Be careful with it.”
He looked at her. Her expression was serious in the way it got when she meant something deeply and didn’t want to make a big production of it.
“I will,” he said.
Sasuke moved up on his other side, hands in his pockets, eyes forward. He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “The transformation was stable?”
“Yeah. No side effects. Came back clean.”
Sasuke nodded once, which for him was practically an enthusiastic endorsement. Naruto translated it as: I noticed and it seems interesting and I’m not going to admit that out loud.
“We’ll figure out what it is,” Naruto said, to both of them, to the device, to himself. “And then we’ll figure out what to do with it.”
He looked ahead at the gates of Konoha, the village he loved and had sworn to protect, growing larger as they approached. The Hokage Monument loomed above the rooftops, his father’s face among the carved stone reliefs, watching over everything.
The device pulsed once against his wrist. Green and warm, like something waking up.
Naruto grinned at it.
The adventure, as adventures tended to do around Naruto Uzumaki, was just beginning.
The Hokage’s office smelled like old paper, pipe tobacco, and the particular kind of authority that accumulates in a room where important decisions have been made for generations. Scrolls lined every wall. The Hokage Monument was visible through the wide window, the stone faces of the village’s greatest leaders looking out over the rooftops with expressions of permanent calm.
Lady Tsunade sat behind her desk and looked at the device on Naruto’s wrist with the expression of someone who had seen many strange things in a long life and had learned to evaluate them quickly and without unnecessary drama.
She had been Hokage long enough that her first instinct upon seeing something unprecedented was not panic but assessment. What is it. Where did it come from. What does it do. Is it a threat. Can it be useful. In what order do those questions need to be answered.
“You found it in the forest,” she said.
“Fell out of a dimensional rift,” Naruto confirmed. He was standing in front of her desk with his hands visible, as Kakashi had instructed, the device gleaming on his left wrist. “The rift closed right after.”
“And it bonded to you on contact.”
“Faster than I could stop it. Not that I tried very hard,” he admitted.
Tsunade looked at Kakashi, who was standing to one side with his hands clasped behind his back and his expression carefully neutral. “Your assessment?”
“Unknown origin. Unknown function beyond what Naruto demonstrated — a physical transformation of significant scale. The device appears to have scanned him during the bonding process, which suggests some form of intelligence, or at least sophisticated programming.” He paused. “It’s also worth noting that the Fox didn’t react negatively. The Nine-Tails has a strong instinct for hostile chakra and didn’t stir beyond mild curiosity.”
Tsunade absorbed this. She leaned forward and looked at the device more closely without touching it. “Shizune,” she said.
Her assistant appeared in the doorway immediately, as she always did, clipboard in hand and expression attentive. “Yes, Lady Tsunade?”
“Get me Jiraiya on the communication scroll. And send word to the Sealing Research Division — I want their senior analyst here by this afternoon.”
“Right away.”
Tsunade sat back in her chair and looked at Naruto. The look was complicated in the way her looks at him often were — fond and exasperated and measuring all at once, the expression of someone watching a force of nature and trying to decide whether to redirect it or just get out of its way.
“You pushed the button,” she said.
“I did.”
“After picking up an unknown object of unknown origin that had just fallen out of a dimensional rift.”
“When you say it like that—”
“I’m saying it exactly like that.” But there was no real heat in it. She had stopped expecting Naruto to exercise conventional caution approximately two years into knowing him. “Alright. Until we understand what this thing is, you’re on restricted duty. No solo missions. Training only, and supervised. If it activates again—”
“When it activates again,” Naruto corrected.
A pause. “When it activates again,” she conceded, “you report immediately. Understood?”
“Understood.”
She dismissed them. As Naruto turned to leave, she called after him, and her voice had lost its official edge, become something quieter. “Be careful with it, Naruto.”
It was the second time someone had said that to him today. He turned back and gave her his best grin, the full-wattage one that he saved for moments when he wanted people to feel reassured even when they weren’t entirely sure they should be.
“When am I not careful?” he said.
The look she gave him in response was so eloquent it didn’t need words.
Three days passed.
Three days of supervised training, of Shizune appearing at intervals to take readings with various chakra-sensing instruments, of visits from a serious-faced man from the Sealing Research Division who examined the device with magnifying lenses and made many notes and ultimately admitted he had never seen anything like it and couldn’t offer a useful opinion on its origins. Three days of Naruto sitting on his hands, metaphorically speaking, while the device on his wrist pulsed with patient, contained energy and the holographic silhouettes cycled through their slow rotation whenever he accidentally brushed the dial.
He learned things during those three days. That there were at least ten distinct silhouettes on the dial’s rotation, each representing something different. That the device seemed to respond to his emotional state — pulsing faster when he was excited or agitated, slower when he was calm. That the Fox found the whole situation genuinely interesting, which was notable because the Nine-Tails found almost nothing interesting that didn’t involve either large amounts of chakra or the opportunity to be unpleasant.
It smells like other worlds, the Fox had offered, on the second night, when Naruto was lying awake staring at the ceiling of his apartment with the device glowing faintly on his wrist. Many other worlds. Whatever built this thing traveled very far to build it.
“Can you tell if it’s dangerous?”
Everything is dangerous. The question is whether it is dangerous to us or to others. So far, a pause that managed to convey grudging assessment, it appears to be the former, not the latter.
“You mean it’s on our side?”
I mean it has decided we are its person. Whether that is the same as being on our side depends on circumstances I cannot yet evaluate.
This was, Naruto reflected, about as reassuring as the Fox ever got.
On the fourth day, everything changed.
Morning training had been going well, which in Team Seven’s experience was usually a sign that something was about to go sideways. Kakashi had set them a straightforward exercise — chakra control under physical stress, the same drill as the day of the rift — and all three of them had settled into it with the focused efficiency that came from years of working together.
Sasuke was excelling, as he always did at technical exercises. His chakra output was a model of precision — steady, controlled, not a particle wasted. He moved through the forms Kakashi had outlined with the fluid economy of someone who had internalized the mechanics so thoroughly that the effort had become invisible.
Sakura was close behind him, her medical training giving her an edge in the fine control aspects that offset Sasuke’s natural aptitude for the power aspects. She was concentrating hard, her brow slightly furrowed, adjusting her output in real time with the careful attention she brought to anything she decided to master.
Naruto was doing fine. Genuinely fine, not “fine for Naruto” fine. The exercise suited his style less than it suited his teammates, but he had put in the hours and it showed. His chakra output was less elegant than Sasuke’s and less precise than Sakura’s, but it was consistent and strong, and Kakashi had nodded once in acknowledgment, which was practically a standing ovation.
Then Sasuke said something.
In retrospect, none of them could agree on exactly what he said. Sakura remembered it as a comment about Naruto’s form being sloppy. Kakashi’s version was that Sasuke had made a remark about raw power being a poor substitute for technique. Naruto’s version was that Sasuke had been incredibly condescending for no reason at all, which was basically just a description of their general dynamic and didn’t narrow things down much.
What everyone agreed on was that Naruto had responded with a challenge.
“Fine,” he said, squaring up with the particular posture that meant he had committed to a course of action and no earthly force was going to redirect him. “You want to talk about who’s better? Let’s actually find out. One on one. Right now.”
Sasuke looked at him with the expression he wore when something Naruto said aligned, reluctantly, with something he wanted anyway. “Fine.”
“Fine.”
Kakashi looked between them. He had a policy about letting his students work things out physically when the alternative was letting tension build until it exploded in a less controlled context. He had implemented this policy after the incident at the hospital, which he preferred not to think about. “No lethal techniques,” he said. “And nobody goes home in pieces.”
“Obviously,” Sasuke said.
“Obviously,” Naruto agreed.
They faced each other across ten meters of open ground. The river caught the light. The trees were still.
And then they moved.
It started the way their sparring always started — fast and familiar, each of them reading the other the way you can only read someone you’ve trained with for years. Naruto was aggressive and inventive, pressing forward with combinations that kept changing direction, never letting Sasuke settle into a rhythm. Sasuke was precise and reactive, using Naruto’s momentum against him, redirecting rather than absorbing.
They were evenly matched, in the complicated way that two very different kinds of strength can be evenly matched. Naruto hit harder. Sasuke hit smarter. The result was a moving equilibrium that tilted back and forth with every exchange.
Naruto went for a shadow clone feint — one of his oldest tricks, but he’d refined it enough over the years that even Sasuke sometimes lost track of which was the original — and Sasuke countered with a chakra-enhanced grab that caught the real Naruto by the collar and spun him into the ground with enough force to leave a crater.
Naruto came up out of the crater immediately, spitting dirt, and charged.
Sasuke sidestepped. His foot connected with Naruto’s ankle. Naruto went down again.
“Sloppy,” Sasuke said, not unkindly by his standards.
“I’m not done,” Naruto said, from the ground.
He pushed himself upright. And as he did, his hand caught the edge of the Omnitrix’s dial.
The device lit up instantly, the faceplate blazing green, the holographic display spiraling upward in a cascade of alien symbols. Naruto felt it — the pulse of readiness, the question implicit in the device’s sudden attention.
“Oh no,” he said.
“What—” Sakura started.
The faceplate locked onto one of the silhouettes. Naruto recognized it — the large, four-armed figure, the same one as before. But he hadn’t chosen it. His elbow must have hit the dial during the fall and cycled to it accidentally.
The button was pressing against his palm. He hadn’t pushed it yet. He could feel the device waiting, poised, full of potential energy.
He looked up at Sasuke, who had gone still, his eyes moving between Naruto’s face and the blazing device.
“Naruto,” Kakashi said, his voice careful. “Don’t—”
Naruto pushed the button.
The white light consumed everything.
When it faded, Fourarms stood in the clearing.
Twelve feet tall. Four arms. Built with a density that seemed to warp the space around him slightly, the way very massive objects do. The transformation had scattered dirt and small stones in all directions, and the displaced air had set the riverside reeds bowing away from the center of the clearing.
Naruto looked down at himself. At all four of himself.
“Okay,” he said. His voice was enormous in this form, resonant in a way that seemed to start in the chest and radiate outward. “So. That happened again.”
Sasuke had not moved. His hand was raised, Sharingan activated, red eyes tracking every detail of the transformation with the hungry precision of someone filing information away at maximum speed. His expression was — not afraid. Sasuke didn’t do afraid, at least not where anyone could see it. But there was something in his eyes that Naruto recognized as the face Sasuke made when something had surprised him and he was recalibrating.
Sakura had taken three steps back. She was not running — she was also not running toward him to help, which was her instinct in most situations. She was standing with her fists at her sides and her jaw set, evaluating.
Kakashi had produced a kunai from somewhere. He held it loosely, not raised, not threatening, but present. His eye was moving between Naruto and the treeline and back again, running threat assessment.
“I’m still me,” Naruto said quickly. He held up two of his four hands, the universal gesture of non-aggression, which looked somewhat different when you had twice the normal number of hands to raise. “Completely still me. I can hear myself think. I know who everyone is. I know where we are. I accidentally hit the dial when I fell.”
“Your eyes,” Sakura said. “What color are your eyes?”
He blinked. It was the right question — she was checking for the Nine-Tails’ influence, the red-orange bleeding into his irises that signaled the Fox’s chakra taking over. “I can’t see my own eyes. But I can tell you that the Fox isn’t pushing forward. This isn’t the tailed beast chakra. It’s something different.”
“Different how?” Kakashi asked.
“It’s… external. Like I’m wearing it rather than generating it from inside.” He tried to find better words. “When I use the Fox’s chakra, it comes from inside and pushes out. This is the opposite. Something outside has expanded to fit around me.”
Kakashi processed this, the kunai still loose in his hand. “Can you transform back?”
“The first time it had a time limit — I could feel it counting down. I don’t know how to trigger it manually.” He looked at the Omnitrix on his wrist. The faceplate was still glowing green. There was no countdown display visible.
“Try pressing the symbol in the center,” Kakashi said. “The circular one.”
Naruto looked at the device. On his current wrist, it was again scaled up perfectly to fit his transformed size. He found the center of the faceplate and pressed it, firmly.
The white light.
And then he was standing in his normal form, slightly winded, blinking in the ordinary morning sunlight.
Everyone exhaled.
Then Sasuke said: “Again.”
Naruto looked at him. “What?”
“Do it again.” His Sharingan was still active, spinning slowly. “I want to see the transformation sequence at full speed. I wasn’t ready the first time.”
“Sasuke—” Sakura said.
“It’s a fighting technique. An unprecedented one. We should understand it.” He looked at Naruto with that direct, unflinching Sasuke look that meant he had decided something and the rest of the world could adjust accordingly. “Can you control which form you transform into?”
Naruto looked at the dial. He turned it deliberately, watching the silhouettes cycle — the four-armed figure, then a creature of fire, then a diamond-plated form, then a small grey shape with enormous eyes, then others he didn’t have names for yet. “I can choose,” he said slowly. “As long as I’m paying attention when I dial it.”
“Then choose something different. I want to compare the sequences.”
Kakashi held up a hand. “We are not turning training into an alien transformation showcase without Lady Tsunade’s—”
“She said restricted duty and supervised training,” Naruto interrupted. His voice had taken on that quality it got when he was building toward something. “This is training. You’re supervising. Technically we’re fine.”
The look Kakashi gave him was magnificent in its combination of resignation and reluctant acknowledgment that the argument had some validity. “One more transformation,” he said. “Controlled. Deliberate. No combat.”
Naruto turned the dial. He cycled past Fourarms, past the fire creature, stopped on the diamond-plated silhouette — solid, humanoid, built like a fortress. He didn’t know what it did. He didn’t know what any of them did, really, beyond what their shape suggested. But that was what exploration was for.
“Stand back,” he said.
They stood back.
He pushed the button.
The white light.
And when it cleared, Naruto was standing in a form made entirely of interlocking crystalline diamonds, refracting the morning light into a thousand fractured colors that scattered across the grass and the trees and his teammates’ faces. He was roughly the same height as Fourarms but more compact, built for density rather than reach, each surface of his body faceted and gleaming.
He raised a hand and looked at it. The light bent through his fingers in shifting prismatic patterns.
“Incredible,” Sakura breathed, and she had moved forward now, her scientist’s instincts overriding her caution, her eyes moving rapidly over his form with the same expression she got when she encountered a medical phenomenon she hadn’t encountered before.
Sasuke was memorizing. Naruto could see it — the Sharingan cataloguing every detail, building a model, analyzing the structural principles. He would have notes on this by morning. He would have questions by morning, specific and probing ones that would push Naruto to understand the device better, not out of any desire to help Naruto specifically but because understanding things was how Sasuke was built.
Kakashi had put the kunai away. He was standing with his arms crossed, watching with his one visible eye, and his expression had shifted from wariness to something that looked, cautiously, like fascination.
The Omnitrix pulsed on Naruto’s wrist. The countdown was running — he could feel it, the gentle backward pressure of a time limit approaching. He had maybe another minute in this form.
He used the minute. He moved around the clearing, testing the form’s weight and balance, feeling how differently it distributed his mass compared to his normal body. He touched one of the wooden training posts with a diamond-plated hand and was surprised by the depth of impression it left in the wood — not a punch, just a touch, but the density behind it was enormous.
Then the device beeped.
White light.
Normal Naruto, standing in the morning sun, slightly breathless, grinning with every tooth he had.
“That,” he said, to no one in particular and everyone at once, “was the most amazing thing I have ever experienced.”
Kakashi looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked at the sky, as if appealing to something above it. Then he looked back at Naruto.
“Report to Lady Tsunade,” he said. “And this time, I want to be there when you demonstrate.”
Naruto’s grin widened. Because this — being called in to demonstrate, being taken seriously, having something worth showing — this was exactly what he had always wanted. Something new. Something that was his. Something that made people stop and look and pay attention, not because of the Fox sealed inside him, not because of his father’s legacy, but because of what he was doing with what had fallen into his hands.
The device pulsed, warm and steady, against his wrist.
He looked down at it.
“Okay,” he told it, quietly, while his teammates were talking to Kakashi and no one was listening. “I don’t know where you came from. I don’t know why you picked me. But I’m going to figure out everything you can do.” He paused. “And I’m going to be the best at it.”
The faceplate glowed, soft and green.
In the back of his mind, the Fox made a sound that might, in a creature less committed to its own dignity, have been called a laugh.
Three hours later, in the Hokage’s office, Naruto demonstrated both forms for Tsunade, Shizune, the senior analyst from the Sealing Division, and two jonin who had been summoned for a threat assessment that was rapidly becoming something more like a research meeting.
The room was not large enough for Fourarms. Two lamps were casualties of the demonstration. The senior analyst dropped his clipboard. One of the jonin took an involuntary step backward and then looked deeply embarrassed about it.
Tsunade watched all of it with her chin in her hand and the expression she wore when she was rearranging her assumptions about how the world worked.
When Naruto had returned to normal and was standing in the middle of a room that looked slightly rearranged, she was quiet for a long moment.
“Jiraiya needs to see this,” she said finally.
“He’s already on his way,” Shizune said. “He responded to the communication scroll this morning. He said, and I’m quoting directly, ‘tell the kid not to do anything interesting until I get there.'”
Naruto laughed, loud and genuine. “Too late,” he said.
Tsunade looked at him, and this time the expression was something he didn’t see on her face very often — not the exasperation, not the Hokage’s assessment, not even the complicated fondness. Just something quieter. Proud, maybe. Interested. The look of someone watching a story unfold and genuinely wanting to know how it ends.
“Too late,” she agreed.
The Rustbucket smelled like old motor oil, instant noodles, and the particular atmosphere of a vehicle that had traveled too many miles across too many kinds of terrain to ever be fully clean again. It was, in Gwen Tennyson’s considered opinion, one of the most comforting smells in the world, because it meant she was somewhere interesting and something was about to happen.
She was sitting at the small fold-out table near the back, her laptop open, a book of advanced dimensional theory propped against her water bottle, and a half-eaten granola bar sitting forgotten at her elbow. The screen showed a tracking display — a modified version of Ben’s Omnitrix locator that she had rebuilt from the ground up because the original version had the navigational sophistication of a compass someone had dropped down a flight of stairs.
The signal was strong.
That was the thing that had started all of this, four days ago — the Omnitrix sending a distress ping to Ben’s watch, a signal type they had never seen before, a code that Grandpa Max had gone very quiet upon seeing and then immediately begun packing the Rustbucket for a long trip. When she had asked him what it meant, he had said: dimensional incursion, uncontrolled transfer event, possibly automatic bonding sequence triggered.
“Which means what in plain language?” Ben had asked.
“It means the Omnitrix went somewhere it wasn’t supposed to go,” Max had said, “and it found someone.”
That had been four days of driving toward a signal that kept moving — not randomly, but with the purposeful movement of someone going about their life, which suggested that whoever had the Omnitrix was mobile and active rather than confused and stationary. The signal had also, Gwen had noted with interest, been doing things. Spikes of alien DNA activation, clear as signatures on her tracking display. Two distinct species. Fourarms and Diamondhead.
Whoever had found the Omnitrix was using it.
“We’re close,” she called to the front of the Rustbucket.
Grandpa Max leaned slightly from the driver’s seat. He was a large, square-shouldered man with silver hair and the kind of face that had been shaped by decades of seeing extraordinary things and responding to them with practical calm. “How close?”
“Maybe twenty minutes. The signal’s stationary right now.” She studied the display. “Has been for about three hours. I think they’re in a building.”
“They’re having a meeting about it,” Ben said, from where he was sprawled across the back bench, tossing a small ball at the ceiling and catching it with the mechanical rhythm of someone profoundly bored. He was twelve, lean and brown-haired, wearing his usual cargo shorts and green jacket. His own Omnitrix — the original, to which Gwen’s locator was paired — was on his left wrist, its faceplate dark. “If I found an alien device and grew four arms, I’d have a meeting about it too.”
“You’d have a meeting,” Gwen said, “after you’d already transformed about six more times and knocked something expensive over.”
“Probably,” he agreed, without embarrassment.
She turned back to her display. The signal was definitely the Omnitrix — the DNA signature was unmistakable, the same frequency she had been tracking for years now. But there was something else in the readings, layered underneath the device’s standard output, something she couldn’t quite categorize. An energy source woven into the user’s own biological signature. Something organic and powerful and very, very old.
She made a note of it and kept it to herself until she understood it better.
The anomaly happened twelve minutes later.
The Rustbucket hit what felt like a speed bump — except they were on a flat dirt road with no speed bumps — and the windows flashed white for half a second, and then everything looked subtly different. The light had changed quality. The trees on either side of the road were different species than they had been a moment ago. The road beneath them had shifted from cracked asphalt to packed earth.
Grandpa Max brought the Rustbucket to a stop. He was not alarmed — he had the face of someone who had filed this experience under “unusual but manageable” while it was still happening. “Dimensional threshold,” he said.
“We crossed over?” Gwen said.
“Seems like it. The signal was strong enough to pull us through when we got close enough.” He looked out the windshield at the changed forest. “Different world. Related to the one we came from — same physical laws, similar biosphere — but distinct.”
Ben sat up on the bench, the ball forgotten. His eyes were bright with the particular alertness he got when something genuinely interesting had entered his vicinity. “So we’re in another dimension.”
“Another world,” Max corrected gently. “Dimension is a loose term. Think of it as—”
“Another world, got it, cool.” Ben was already at the window, looking out at the changed forest with unconcealed excitement. “The signal’s closer now, right? We didn’t lose it when we crossed?”
“It’s stronger,” Gwen confirmed, checking her display. The signal had jumped in intensity — proximity, she guessed, the locator responding to being in the same dimensional layer as its target. “Maybe ten minutes at walking pace. There’s something large ahead — a settlement, possibly a town or village.”
“Population?”
She switched to the broader scan. “Significant. Thousands of people. High energy signatures throughout — not alien, but concentrated. Like—” She paused, because the readings were genuinely strange. “Like everyone in that settlement is generating personal energy of some kind. Not electromagnetic. Not radiological. Something I don’t have a classification for.”
Max had gone quiet again, looking at the readings over her shoulder with the expression he wore when he was connecting something to a body of knowledge he hadn’t expected to need. “Not something I’ve encountered directly,” he said slowly, “but there are Plumber records. Some worlds develop internal energy systems — biological in origin, cultivated through training, passed through genetic lines.” He paused. “This place’s people generate their own power. Internally.”
Gwen looked at him. “Like the energy signature I’m reading layered under the Omnitrix’s output. In whoever has the device.”
Max nodded. “Exactly like that.”
Ben had been listening. His face had shifted from excited to thoughtful, which was a gear change he was increasingly capable of. “So whoever found it isn’t just a regular person. They’re someone who already has abilities of their own.”
“And the Omnitrix bonded to them anyway,” Gwen said. “Which means it found the bond viable. Compatible.” She turned back to the display, her mind running ahead. “That’s going to make this more complicated than just asking for it back.”
They left the Rustbucket concealed off the road, behind a stand of trees thick enough to hide a vehicle its size from casual observation. Max locked it with the security system he’d installed after the third time someone had tried to steal it, which was also the third time someone had been very surprised by what happened when they tried.
The three of them moved toward the settlement on foot. Max took the lead with the easy competence of someone who had done fieldwork across dozens of worlds and terrain types. Ben walked with his hands in his pockets and his head moving constantly, cataloguing everything. Gwen had her laptop in her bag, her locator running, and her attention divided between the display and the surrounding environment with the multitasking efficiency that her family found equal parts impressive and slightly unsettling.
The forest gave way to a road, and the road led them to a gate.
It was a significant gate. Stone and timber, built for permanence, flanked by two figures in dark clothing who stood with the stillness of trained professionals. Not soldiers, exactly — Gwen had seen enough of those to know the difference — but guardians. People whose job was to watch and assess and respond.
Both of them were watching the three travelers approach with the focused attention of people who had immediately registered them as unfamiliar.
“Here we go,” Ben murmured.
Max stepped forward, relaxed, non-threatening, hands visible. He had a talent for approaching unfamiliar situations in a way that invited curiosity rather than alarm. “Good morning,” he said pleasantly. “We’re travelers. We’ve come a long way and we’re hoping to speak with whoever leads this community.”
The two guards looked at each other. Then back at the travelers. Their eyes moved over all three of them with professional efficiency — noting the unusual clothing, the device on Ben’s wrist, the bag on Gwen’s shoulder, the general impression of people who had come from somewhere very different.
“Where are you from?” the taller one asked.
“Far away,” Max said. “Farther than you might expect. We’re not here to cause trouble. We’re here looking for something that belongs to us — something that crossed over into your world accidentally.”
Another exchange of looks between the guards. The shorter one said something quietly to the other, too low to hear. Then the taller one said: “Wait here,” and disappeared inside the gate.
They waited. A bird called from somewhere in the forest. Ben rocked back and forth on his heels. Gwen checked her display — the signal was definitely inside the gate, somewhere to the north and elevated, which probably meant a significant building.
“Nervous?” she asked Ben quietly.
“A little,” he admitted, which was the most honest thing he’d said all morning. “What if they won’t give it back?”
“We don’t know that they won’t.”
“What if the person using it is really attached to it?”
“Ben.” She gave him the look. “We’ll talk to them. We’ll explain. We’ll figure it out.” A pause. “We’re not taking it by force from someone who might be a perfectly reasonable person who just found something that fell on them.”
He chewed on this. “And if they’re not reasonable?”
“Then we’ll deal with that when we get there.”
The taller guard returned, accompanied by a silver-haired man with one eye visible and an orange book tucked into his vest who walked with the particular economy of someone very capable of violence who had decided not to be violent right now. He looked at the three of them with the one visible eye, covering all the relevant details in a single sweep.
“I’m Kakashi,” he said. “I’ll take you to the Hokage.”
The village was remarkable.
Gwen catalogued it as they walked — the architecture, the density of population, the way the people they passed moved with a trained physical ease that spoke to the kind of conditioning achieved through years of dedicated practice. The energy signatures she’d noted from outside were even clearer here, individual and distinct, varying in intensity from person to person. Children had faint traces. Adults had more. The ones who looked like guards or active practitioners had signatures that blazed on her locator like small suns.
Ben was trying not to openly stare and not entirely succeeding. She gave him a subtle elbow.
“Stop,” she said quietly.
“I’m just looking.”
“You look like a tourist at a zoo.”
“I am basically a tourist at a zoo. A really incredible zoo where everyone can do amazing things and—” He stopped, because she had given him the other look, the one that meant I will tell Grandpa Max about the thing with the smoothie maker if you do not compose yourself right now. He composed himself.
Kakashi led them to a building near the center of the village — large, official-looking, with the Hokage Monument visible behind it, carved faces in the stone that looked out over the rooftops. He brought them up two flights of stairs and knocked at a door.
“Enter,” said a voice from inside.
The woman behind the desk was not what Gwen had been expecting, though she wasn’t sure what she had been expecting. She was striking — blonde hair, strong features, the kind of presence that filled a room without effort, the posture of someone who had been making hard decisions for long enough that authority had become structural rather than performed. Her energy signature was one of the strongest Gwen had read — dense and complex, with layers that spoke to years of cultivation.
Beside her stood a boy.
He was maybe twelve or thirteen. Blond hair, blue eyes, an orange jumpsuit that was aggressively visible, with whisker-like marks on his cheeks that Gwen’s first instinct filed as some kind of cosmetic until her second instinct noted they were too symmetrical and too structured for that. His energy signature was extraordinary — the Omnitrix’s output clear on her display, and beneath it, woven through his own biological signature, something ancient and vast and currently sleeping.
He was looking at them with curiosity so transparent it was almost charming.
The device on his wrist was unmistakably hers. Ben’s. The Omnitrix.
Ben saw it at the same moment she did. She felt him go still at her side.
“Sit down, please,” said the woman — the Hokage, Gwen assumed — gesturing to the chairs arranged in front of her desk. “I’m told you’ve come a long way and that you’re looking for something.” Her eyes moved to Ben’s wrist, the original Omnitrix faceplate dark and inactive. Then to the device on Naruto’s wrist, identical in design, currently glowing its familiar green.
“Yes,” Max said, sitting with the calm of someone accustomed to difficult negotiations. “My name is Max Tennyson. These are my grandchildren, Ben and Gwen. We crossed over from another world following a tracking signal.” He nodded toward Naruto’s wrist. “That device belongs to my grandson Ben. It crossed over accidentally through a dimensional rift, and we’ve come to retrieve it.”
The Hokage absorbed this without visible reaction. Then she looked at Naruto.
Naruto was looking at Ben.
Ben was looking back at him.
There was a moment that Gwen recognized from her experience as the moment when two people who are fundamentally similar recognize that fact in each other before they’ve exchanged a word. The same age, roughly. The same kind of energy — not calm, not settled, but present and burning and pointed forward like an arrow that has been drawn and is waiting for a target. The same slightly reckless brightness in the eyes.
“It’s yours?” Naruto said to Ben.
“Yeah,” Ben said.
“And you can use it? Like I can?”
Ben raised his wrist and activated the faceplate, letting the holographic silhouettes cycle through their rotation. “Been using it for two years.”
Naruto watched the silhouettes with the fixed attention of someone doing rapid calculations. “How many forms do you have?”
“A lot. More than ten.”
“I’ve only found ten on mine.”
“Mine’s got way more.” Ben paused. “It gets unlocked as you go.”
Naruto looked at his own device. At the cycling silhouettes. Then back at Ben. “I don’t want to give it back.”
The room went very quiet.
The Hokage had not moved. Kakashi, who had remained by the door, was watching the exchange with the invisible-tension expression of someone professionally prepared for things to escalate.
Gwen decided that this was the moment to be the person in the room who prevented escalation.
“Can I ask you something?” she said, directing it at Naruto.
He looked at her. She had the impression of being assessed very quickly — she was used to that, she was twelve and people underestimated her routinely, and she had learned to meet it with the kind of direct steadiness that usually recalibrated their expectations. “Sure,” he said.
“Do you know what it does? All of it? The full range of functions, the maintenance protocols, the risk parameters if the power core is overloaded?”
A pause. “No,” he admitted.
“Do you know what happens if you use it too many times in rapid succession without the correct cooldown intervals?”
Another pause. “No.”
“Do you know which of the alien forms have environmental dependencies that make them dangerous in specific conditions?”
He was looking at her differently now. Not annoyed — more like he was updating his assessment. “No,” he said, for the third time.
“I do,” Gwen said. “I’ve been studying it for two years. I know its manual. I know its limitations. I know the things that can go wrong with it and what to do when they do.” She paused, keeping her voice even. “I’m not here to take something away from you. I’m here because someone who can actually help you use it safely has arrived.”
Silence.
The Hokage was watching Gwen with an expression that was distinctly approving. Kakashi’s invisible-tension had relaxed by a degree. Max was keeping his face neutral in the way he did when he thought things were going in the right direction and didn’t want to interrupt the momentum.
Naruto was quiet for a long moment. Then he said: “You know how to work it.”
“Yes.”
“And you’d actually explain it to me. Not just take it back.”
“I’d rather you understand it than not understand it. Regardless of who ends up with it.” She meant it. It was a true thing, and she was aware that it landed as true, because people generally could tell.
Naruto looked at Ben. Ben shrugged, which was his version of a complex diplomatic gesture. “She’s not wrong,” he said. “She knows it better than I do in a lot of ways.”
The Omnitrix on Naruto’s wrist pulsed once. Green and steady.
Naruto looked at it. He looked at Gwen. He looked at Ben.
“Okay,” he said. “But I want to know everything.”
“That’s exactly what I’m hoping for,” Gwen said.
They spent four hours in the Hokage’s office that afternoon.
Gwen spread her notes across the desk and went through the Omnitrix’s core functions with the methodical thoroughness she brought to anything she had studied deeply. The cooldown periods. The time limits on sustained transformation. The warning signals — the way the faceplate shifted from green to yellow to red as the power reserves decreased. The recharge cycle. The DNA lock that prevented certain forms from being accessed in specific environmental conditions.
Naruto absorbed everything with an attention that Gwen found genuinely impressive. He asked good questions — specific and probing, not the questions of someone performing interest but of someone actually building a working model in their head. He had been sitting forward in his chair for the first hour and barely moved.
Ben had started out watching with folded arms and the expression of someone who wasn’t sure how to feel about watching someone else use his technology, but by the second hour he had migrated to sitting next to Naruto and contributing his own operational knowledge — practical experience that complemented Gwen’s theoretical grounding, the difference between someone who had read all the safety guidelines and someone who had also crashed the car.
“Fourarms,” Ben said, pulling up the silhouette on his own faceplate. “Strongest form for raw physical power. But the size is a problem in enclosed spaces. I’ve taken out two ceilings.”
“I scattered an entire forest clearing,” Naruto said.
“Yeah, that tracks.” Ben rotated to the next form. “Diamondhead — the crystal one. That’s actually one of my favorites. Almost indestructible in that form, and you can project crystal shards as projectiles. The only weakness is sound-based attacks.”
Naruto’s eyes lit up. “You can use it to attack? Not just as armor?”
“Totally. You can grow crystal formations outward, change their shape—”
“Show me.”
Gwen watched them talk with the particular feeling she got in the presence of something developing that was going to be significant. They were natural together in a way that had nothing to do with similarity and everything to do with complementarity — Ben’s operational boldness and Naruto’s instinctive intensity meeting in the middle around a shared subject that they were both, clearly, completely captivated by.
Max had been talking to the Hokage and Kakashi in a lower register across the room — a different conversation, older and more measured, the conversation of experienced people building a picture of each other’s worlds. She caught fragments of it. Plumber organization. Dimensional monitoring. Your village’s history. The Hokage was asking precise questions and Max was answering them with the practiced transparency of someone who had decided to be trusted.
By the fourth hour, the light through the window had shifted to the amber of late afternoon.
Gwen rolled up her notes. She felt tired in the satisfied way she got after a long stretch of concentrated useful work. She looked at Naruto — he was looking at his device with the expression of someone who had just been handed a map of a country they had already been exploring, and was discovering that the territory matched the map in ways that made everything click into place.
“Thank you,” he said, without looking up. Then he did look up. “Seriously.”
“There’s a lot more,” she said. “This was the basics.”
“I know.” He looked at the device. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“The Fox—” he started, then stopped. He seemed to be deciding how much to say. “I have something inside me. I was born with it. It’s powerful and it’s complicated and it’s mine, but it’s also — not entirely mine. It has its own thoughts. It doesn’t always agree with me.”
She waited.
“When I transform,” he said slowly, “I can feel them both. The device and the Fox. And they don’t fight each other. They just — exist together. Like two things that have decided to share space.” He looked at her. “Is that supposed to happen?”
Gwen thought about this seriously. “The Omnitrix has a compatibility scan built into the bonding sequence,” she said. “Before it bonds to someone, it checks whether their biological and energy signatures are compatible with the transformation process. If they weren’t compatible, it wouldn’t have bonded.” She paused. “The fact that it bonded to you — with whatever you’re carrying internally — means it found you compatible. Both of you.”
Naruto was quiet for a moment. Then he smiled — the full one, the one that she would come to know as the one he saved for things that actually mattered. “Both of us,” he said. “Yeah.”
Across the room, Ben had been listening with half an ear. He caught Gwen’s eye over Naruto’s head and she could read the question in his face: So what do we do now?
She gave the smallest shrug. The most honest answer.
We figure it out.
They were given rooms in what appeared to be a guest facility connected to the Hokage’s administrative building — clean, spare, and comfortable in a way that spoke to practical hospitality rather than luxury. Max took the room at the end. Ben took the one nearest the window. Gwen took the middle room, spread her notes on the desk, and spent an hour updating them with everything she had learned.
Then she sat back and thought.
The situation was more complicated than a simple retrieval. She had known that before they arrived, but she knew it more specifically now. The Omnitrix had bonded to Naruto with a completeness that simple removal would compromise — not just physically, but in terms of the compatibility matrix it had built with his internal energy source. Forcing a removal at this stage could be damaging to both the device and its current user.
More than that: she wasn’t sure forcing removal was the right thing to do. The Omnitrix had chosen him. It had scanned him and decided on him and locked itself to his wrist, and in the hours she had spent with him, she had come to understand why. He was, in the specific way the device seemed to respond to, exactly the kind of person it was built for. Not because he was the strongest or the most skilled, but because of the quality of his attention — the way he listened and processed and committed, the way he took responsibility for what he carried.
She wrote in her notes: Retrieval may not be the objective. Understanding may be.
Then she went to find Ben.
He was on the roof of the guest building, sitting on the edge with his legs hanging over and his Omnitrix arm resting on his knee, looking out at the village lights coming on as the evening deepened. She sat next to him.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
He was quiet for a moment. “I’m thinking that he’s not going to give it back,” he said. “And I’m thinking that maybe that’s okay.”
She looked at him. Ben was not, historically, someone who readily reached conclusions like maybe that’s okay about things that were his. He had grown a lot in two years. She didn’t say this, because he knew it and didn’t need it pointed out.
“There’s two of them,” he said. “Two Omnitrixes. The manual says the Omnitrix was built as one-of-a-kind, but clearly Azmuth had more than one. Or made more than one for a reason.”
“Or one of them crossed dimensions accidentally and found a new purpose.”
“Yeah.” He turned the faceplate on his own device over, watching the dark surface. “He’s going to be incredible with it. You can already tell.”
“He has good instincts,” she agreed.
“He has great instincts. And that thing inside him—” He paused. “I couldn’t feel it, obviously. But you could read it on the display?”
“An energy source of significant scale. Old. Powerful. And for now, dormant — but aware.” She paused. “When those two things work together, the scale of what he could do is—” She searched for the right word. “Significant.”
“Dangerous?”
“Powerful. Whether it’s dangerous depends on him.” She looked out at the village. “And I think it probably depends on us, too. Whether we help him understand it or just take it and leave.”
Ben considered this for a while, swinging his feet over the edge.
“Okay,” he said finally. “So we stay for a while.”
“For a while.”
“And we actually help him.”
“Yes.”
He nodded once, with the decisiveness he was developing, the quality that was going to make him formidable in about three more years. “Okay.” He stood up, stretching his arms above his head. “I want a rematch with him tomorrow, by the way.”
“A rematch implies you won the first match.”
“I’m going to win the second one.”
“You haven’t even had the first one yet.”
“I’m going to win all of them,” he said, with perfect confidence, and dropped back through the roof access door, leaving Gwen sitting alone on the roof with the night air and the village lights and her notes and the strange, specific feeling of being exactly where she was supposed to be.
Below her, somewhere in the guest building, she could hear Naruto laughing at something Max had said.
She looked at the stars — different constellations, different world — and thought: this is going to be interesting.
Above the rooftops, the Hokage Monument watched over everything, patient and permanent.
And somewhere in the village, the Omnitrix pulsed on its new owner’s wrist, green and steady, waiting for morning.
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