(PROFESSOR UZUMAKI) AFTERMATH II

Leviathan was dead.

The fact took several hours to sink in, and even then, people struggled to understand what its death actually meant. For years, the Endbringers had occupied a category of their own, existing beyond the ordinary scale by which humanity measured threats. Heroes had killed monstrous capes, villains had killed heroes, and entire cities had survived attacks that should have destroyed them, while powers capable of reducing buildings to rubble or turning battlefields into wastelands had become part of everyday life. Humanity had developed weapons, defenses and procedures for dealing with dangers that would have been regarded as absurd before the age of parahumans, yet none of those things had changed what happened when an Endbringer appeared.

They came, people died, the capes on the battlefield adapted to whatever they could learn about the creature, and eventually the Endbringer withdrew. The survivors returned home, the dead were counted, the damage was assessed, and preparations began for the next attack. Winning had never been the objective in the conventional sense, since there had never been a realistic expectation that an Endbringer could be killed.

Leviathan’s death changed that.

For the first time, there was proof that an Endbringer could be killed, and that proof had a name.

Naruto Uzumaki had been an obscure figure outside Brockton Bay before the battle. Most people who knew anything about him knew him as a physical education teacher at Winslow High School, while the people who knew more tended to be students, parents, or capes who had taken an interest in the unusual exercises he taught during his classes. There had been stories about his strength and speed, along with rumors concerning the strange energy he called chakra, but none of them had been enough to make him a matter of national concern.

Then he had walked out of the ocean with Leviathan’s corpse in his hand.

The footage from the shoreline spread across the country within hours, and eventually, the world. Most of it was poor, with rain obscuring the cameras and distance reducing the battle to flashes of gold against the storm, but enough survived to establish what had happened. The enormous fox made of golden chakra had crossed the bay at a speed that most cameras could barely follow, and somewhere beyond the shoreline it had fought Leviathan with enough force to send the Endbringer hurtling across the ocean. Later, a beam of energy had risen through the clouds and torn open the storm above the battlefield.

The final footage was clearer, showing Naruto returning to the beach with the Endbringer’s body dragging behind him.

There was little room left for another explanation. The body was unmistakably Leviathan’s, and the damage it had suffered went far beyond anything that could be dismissed as temporary incapacitation. The corpse was examined, the battlefield was studied, and the same conclusion survived every attempt to find another one.

Leviathan was dead, and Naruto Uzumaki had killed him.

But while the corpse was easy enough to identify, along with the how, Naruto himself was considerably harder to explain.

The PRT had spent years developing ways to assess parahumans, and although its classifications were never perfect, they provided a useful starting point. A cape’s strength, speed, durability, range and mobility could be estimated, while previous encounters often revealed weaknesses that could be exploited if the person ever became hostile. Even powers that seemed absurd could eventually be incorporated into a plan once enough information had been gathered.

Naruto offered very little to work with.

The giant fox alone created problems for almost every existing classification. Its size could be estimated from the surviving recordings, although the estimates varied according to the distance and angle of each camera, while its speed was harder to judge because most footage showed little more than a golden blur crossing the water. The energy surrounding it had been identified as chakra, yet giving the phenomenon a name did little to explain what it was capable of doing.

What mattered was what Naruto had already accomplished with it. He had used chakra to fight Leviathan, survived the battle and produced enough force to kill an Endbringer that had endured decades of attacks from some of the strongest capes on the planet. That demonstration told the PRT more about Naruto’s potential than any conventional rating could have done, while leaving them with almost no way to determine where that potential ended.

Knowing a cape’s limits made planning possible, even when those abilities were extraordinary. Naruto had just demonstrated that his own abilities extended far enough to kill Leviathan, and nobody knew whether that was his actual limit or not.

The natural response was to gather more information, which brought his other occupation into consideration. Naruto was a teacher, and several of his students had already been learning chakra from him.

Before the battle, that fact had been little more than an interesting piece of Brockton Bay gossip. Winslow had plenty of teachers, and Naruto’s unusual approach to physical education had attracted some curiosity without giving anyone much reason to investigate him. Several students had been training with him outside normal classes, and rumors had circulated that he was teaching them how to use chakra, but those rumors had remained just that.

Leviathan’s death gave them an entirely different significance.

Naruto wasn’t keeping the power to himself; he was already teaching it to his students.

Nobody knew how difficult chakra was to learn, how long it took to develop the techniques Naruto had demonstrated, or whether his students could eventually approach his level. A student who seemed barely capable of manipulating chakra might become considerably stronger after another year of training, while someone who appeared ordinary could possess an aptitude that allowed them to progress much faster. With so little information available, even their current abilities were difficult to judge, let alone their potential.

If Naruto alone could produce the power that had killed Leviathan, then the world had acquired one extraordinarily dangerous individual. If the same abilities could be taught to other people, however, Naruto had potentially done something far more significant without anyone realizing it.

He had created a method.

That possibility mattered because the PRT was accustomed to dealing with parahumans as individuals. Their powers could resemble those of other capes, but each person still represented a separate problem with separate limitations. A dangerous cape could be studied, classified and eventually planned around.

Naruto’s students suggested that his abilities might be teachable rather than unique to him, which created a problem the PRT had never needed to consider before.

The world had already seen what stood at the far end of Naruto’s training. It had no idea how long it would take his students to get there, or whether any of them ever could. But that uncertainty was enough to complicate every attempt to decide what should be done.

The PRT’s existing protocols depended on knowing what a cape could do and, just as importantly, where those abilities ended. That information allowed teams to choose containment methods, identify suitable counters and determine how much force could safely be used. Governments maintained their own contingencies, while the Protectorate had spent years assembling teams whose members could compensate for one another’s weaknesses.

Naruto had demonstrated enough power to make ordinary containment questionable while revealing too little about himself to make a reliable countermeasure possible.

A conventional team would first have to catch him, which was already questionable after what he had demonstrated during the battle. A containment facility would have to hold someone who had fought Leviathan at close range, while any long-range attack would have to overcome durability that nobody had properly measured. Even a surprise attack depended on knowing whether Naruto could actually be caught unaware.

More exotic abilities offered possibilities, although each depended on assumptions that had never been tested. A Thinker might uncover a weakness, a Master might find a way to influence him, a Stranger might approach without being detected, and a Trump might interfere with whatever allowed Naruto to use chakra in the first place. None of those approaches came with any guarantee that they would work.

That was the difficulty. There were plenty of powers that might prove useful against Naruto, but nobody knew enough about him to say which ones would actually matter.

The same uncertainty inevitably extended to the other Endbringers.

Behemoth might possess abilities that made Naruto’s approach against Leviathan useless, while the Simurgh presented an entirely different set of problems that made any prediction about a future confrontation little more than speculation. Leviathan might have been particularly vulnerable to the techniques Naruto used, or the battle might have demonstrated a level of power that would prove equally effective against any opponent.

There was no evidence either way.

For years, governments had been able to make one assumption about the Endbringers without needing to question it: they would have to be fought again. Leviathan’s death left that assumption intact in one sense, since Behemoth and the Simurgh remained alive, but it introduced a possibility that had never needed to be considered before.

One of the creatures humanity had spent every encounter trying to survive had been killed by a single man.

If Naruto could do the same to another Endbringer, the consequences would extend far beyond the battlefield. International policy had been shaped around the existence of those creatures, with nations maintaining emergency plans, cities conducting evacuations and cape organizations training for battles whose outcomes were measured in casualties rather than victories.

Yet Naruto himself had given the world no indication that he intended to use his power for any larger purpose.

He had made no territorial claim after the battle, demanded no authority and announced no intention of replacing the Protectorate. He had not asked governments to recognize him as humanity’s protector, and he had shown no interest in using Leviathan’s death as a political opportunity.

He had simply gone to the shoreline when the Endbringer appeared, fought it, killed it and returned home.

There were established ways of dealing with most threats, whether that meant arresting a criminal, hunting a terrorist, opposing a warlord or negotiating with a political faction. Naruto offered none of those familiar points of leverage, and that made the usual question of how to contain him considerably harder to answer.

His profession made the problem stranger still.

He was going back to school.

The students at Winslow had lives outside Naruto’s classroom, and until recently those lives had mattered very little to anyone beyond Brockton Bay. Now their names were being discussed, photographs were being circulated and rumors about their training were appearing alongside attempts to determine what they could actually do. The public wanted answers, while the PRT had a more practical concern: how much had they learned?

If they were simply learning an unusual martial art, the attention surrounding them would eventually fade. If they were learning the same system of power that had allowed their teacher to defeat Leviathan, then every year they spent training represented another unknown variable.

The students themselves had done nothing to cause that attention. They had simply been among the people Naruto chose to teach, and the significance of that choice had changed overnight.

The world had seen the result of Naruto’s training, but it had no idea what his students might eventually become. Some might struggle with the basics for years, while others might possess an aptitude that allowed them to advance much faster. One might eventually approach Naruto’s current abilities, while another might never come close.

There was even the possibility that one of them could surpass him.

Nobody could say that would happen, but dismissing it would be equally careless.

That was enough to change how the students were viewed by people who had never met them.

Governments had reason to wonder whether Naruto’s teachings could eventually produce a group of powerful capes outside the established cape organizations. The Protectorate had reason to determine what the students could already do, while villains had to consider whether attacking one of them might bring Naruto into the fight. Even organizations that had no interest in Brockton Bay had reason to pay attention once it became clear that the man who had killed Leviathan was teaching his abilities to teenagers.

The concern went beyond the possibility of creating more powerful individuals.

If Naruto’s methods could be understood, they might eventually spread. That could mean more people capable of using chakra and developing techniques that existing parahuman classifications could not properly describe. It could also mean very little if Naruto’s abilities depended on circumstances that could not be reproduced.

There was no way to tell yet.

That uncertainty was becoming the defining feature of the situation.

The world knew that Naruto could kill an Endbringer. It knew that he could use chakra to produce a colossal fox and that he had survived a battle that would have killed most capes. It knew that he was teaching the same power to students at Winslow, and it knew that he had made no demands after demonstrating it.

Beyond those facts, almost everything remained open to interpretation.

That made him different from the threats governments had spent decades preparing for. The Endbringers were terrifying because their capabilities were enormous and their attacks were inevitable, but at least their patterns had become familiar. Humanity knew what happened when one appeared, knew how cities would respond, knew which capes would be called in and knew what the likely cost would be.

Naruto had disrupted that certainty simply by existing.

There was no established procedure for a man who could kill Leviathan and then return to teaching high school students. There was no standard contingency for an ability that might be passed from teacher to student, and there was no reliable calculation for what happened if the strongest person on the battlefield had no interest in taking command of it.

For the people responsible for preparing for the next Endbringer attack, that was where the problem began.