Cold. Cruel.
Words are easy. Becoming them is not.
Naruto had been soft once. The old life he remembered didn't so much as kill a chicken. Now he had jumped levels he never expected, and the idea of killing someone still felt like a distant, impossible ill. How did you make your hands obey? How did you make your heart stop shuddering?
Training the body was straightforward; training the heart was a different science. You could learn a jutsu with sweat. You could not download coldness. Cold was a habit that had to be forged until it fit like armor.
It was midsummer. Konoha shimmered under the heat, trees crowding the training fields, cicadas filling the air with a relentless, shrill chorus. Where others found noise, Naruto found a tool.
He climbed a broad trunk and sat among the leaves, listening to the insects like a metronome. He felt absurd plotting cruelty, felt guilty for thinking it, felt the pulse of something more efficient than remorse: determination.
He reached out and plucked a cicada from the branch before it could flutter away. Its wingbeats were frantic in his hand. It squealed; the sound hit him like a bell.
This would be practice, he told himself. Small things first. Start with what you can.
He pinched the insect's legs between his fingers. It thrashed, desperate. Naruto breathed slow and steady. He didn't crush out of malice; he pressed until the movement slowed and then stopped. He let the husk fall.
He felt a wave of nausea, then a small, unfamiliar calm. Something inside him hardened.
If he could not bring himself to kill a person yet, he could begin here. If he could not make his hands steady in the face of life, he could train his eyes to look and not flinch. Habit mattered. Habit became instinct when the moment demanded it.
He spent the day moving between trees. One cicada at a time, then a dragonfly snatched mid-flight, then butterflies pinned long enough to watch the panic shift direction. He tried different controlled cruelties—drop a dragonfly into an ant nest and watch the frantic, futile struggle; hold a butterfly in water until the sputtering stops.
Each exercise cost him something. Each exercise dulled the sickness a little more. Each exercise reshaped the line between revulsion and indifference. He told himself: this is not pleasure. This is training. This is survival.
Cold is not born; it is learned. Repeat until the choice to flinch vanishes. If he could teach himself to watch one small life end without breaking, perhaps one day he could do what must be done without being broken in turn.
Between breaths he thought of the stakes. The Uchiha massacre still weighed in his mind. The world outside Konoha had smiled at their fall. The shadow of Madara Uchiha loomed like a mountain. Power was protection. The Nine-Tails made him a target; that made strength a necessity.
He climbed higher, found a quiet branch, and let the summer sun bake his shoulders. The training felt petty and obscene and horribly practical. The first cruel acts were toys; they were practice for a future where toys would be weapons.
At dusk he gathered his things and left the trees. He did not feel triumphant. He felt a small, terrible steadiness that followed a task completed.
Cold and cruel, he said to himself. Not for pleasure. For survival. For power. For the future he would carve with hands that no longer trembled.
Rikudō Shingon's voice chimed in his head, amused and faint, like the echo of a temple bell.
Host, your heart's training proceeds. Efficiency increases. Sentiment is a vulnerability. Shed it or be eaten by it.
Naruto allowed the system's mockery. He kept walking.