The sun was shining over the Gosha Village, warm rays spilling across the rooftops and fields. Birds chirped. Wind brushed through the trees.
And in the middle of all that peace stood Leo, facing down a tree like it had personally insulted him.
He tilted his head, eyes narrowing. "Alright, you overgrown piece of firewood… round two."
He took a slow breath. The familiar hum started under his skin — black and red veins crawling up his arm like living code. The flesh shifted, hardened, and then shhk—! the arm blade formed, gleaming wickedly in the morning light.
Leo swung.
A sharp crack split the air. The tree shook violently, the cut biting deep— but stopping halfway. Bark splintered. Sap dripped. The tree creaked but refused to fall.
Leo stared at it for a moment. Then sighed.
"…Man. In the games, this would've been a clean one-hit animation."
He poked the half-cut trunk with his finger, frowning at the resistance. "Guess reality comes with a nerf patch."
Shaking his head, he flexed his arm, the veins retreating as the weapon dissolved back into normal skin.
'Control's there, but the output's weak. Either I'm under-leveled, or this world's physics hates fun.'
He stretched, glancing up toward the sky. "Back to grinding, I guess."
"What are you doing, Cousin?"
Leo froze mid-motion.
He turned his head slowly, spotting a small figure standing a few meters away — short black hair, turquoise eyes gleaming with curiosity, and that familiar Fuuma battle suit that looked way too serious on a five-year-old.
'Crap.'
Without missing a beat, Leo bent down and grabbed the knife from the dirt — the totally normal, definitely not alien-virus-related knife — and straightened up with the most casual smile he could manage.
[Insert image of Fuuma Tokiko]
"Oh hey, Tokiko. Just, uh… training," he said, twirling the knife lazily. "You know, sharpening my skills. Ninja stuff."
She tilted her head, eyes darting from the half-cut tree to the knife, then back at him.
"…With a kitchen knife?"
Leo blinked. "…It builds character."
Tokiko crossed her arms, unconvinced. "Mom says you're supposed to use a training sword."
He smiled, scratching the back of his neck. "Yeah, well… the sword's in the shop."
She blinked again. "We don't have a shop."
'God, kids in this world don't miss a thing,' he thought, keeping his grin up.
He crouched to her level, resting the knife on his knee. "Alright, you got me. I was testing a new… cutting technique."
Tokiko's eyes lit up instantly. "Can you teach me?"
Leo looked at the half-cut tree, then back at her excited face.
'Yeah, no way I'm explaining viral biomass manipulation to a five-year-old.'
"Tell you what," he said, giving her a grin, "once you're older and can actually lift something heavier than a kunai, I'll show you the super-secret Fuuma art of… dramatic chopping."
She gasped. "Really?"
"Promise." He raised his pinky.
She grinned, looping hers around his. "You better not forget!"
As she skipped off toward the village, Leo sighed in relief, looking at the tree again.
"Crisis averted," he muttered. Then, under his breath, "Man, being an older cousin is scarier than any virus."
Later that day, in the Fuuma household, the warm aroma of dinner filled the air.
Leo sat across from his parents at the low dining table, trying to look as normal and innocent as possible.
Across the room, Tokiko was chatting excitedly with her parents — Leo's uncle and aunt — her voice carrying a little too clearly for his liking.
"And then Leo was chopping trees with a knife!" she said proudly. "He said it was the super-secret Fuuma art of dramatic chopping!"
Leo froze mid-bite, his chopsticks hanging in the air.
Across the table, his father blinked. "...Dramatic chopping?"
Tokiko nodded rapidly. "Uh-huh! He cut a big tree! Almost all the way!"
Leo's mother chuckled softly. "Sounds like someone's been sneaking out to play samurai again."
"Yeah," his father added, shaking his head with a grin. "Boys that age always want to test their strength. I did the same thing when I was his age— nearly broke a hoe trying to split firewood."
Everyone laughed.
Except Leo, who kept a fixed smile while his soul quietly screamed inside.
'Thank god they didn't check the tree.'
He glanced down, continuing to eat as if nothing happened, muttering under his breath, "Yup, just a normal kid doing normal, non-viral chopping."
Tokiko leaned toward him and whispered proudly, "I didn't tell them about the secret technique."
Leo patted her head with a grin. "Good job, secret's safe."
As the family meal went on, he relaxed slightly, a smirk forming on his lips.
'Note to self: little cousins are adorable… but dangerous.'
The next day, the sound of clashing wood echoed through the Fuuma dojo.
Leo and Asagi faced each other again, wooden swords raised. This time, Asagi was coming in hot — faster, sharper, her strikes cutting through the air with real intent.
"Don't hold back, Leo!" she shouted, eyes gleaming with determination.
Leo smiled faintly, sidestepping another swing. "Wouldn't dream of it."
She pressed harder, frustration creeping in. Her strikes grew wilder, her footwork sloppier. For all her natural talent, she was still young — fierce heart, but not yet refined.
Leo's eyes followed every motion calmly, almost clinically. One misstep, one overreach — there it was.
He pivoted, parried her blow, and swept her leg in one smooth motion.
Asagi's eyes widened as the floor rushed up to meet her—
—but Leo caught her mid-fall, one arm slipping around her back before she hit the mat.
The training hall went still. Her face flushed red, their eyes meeting for just a heartbeat.
Leo grinned softly, helping her steady herself. 'Need to build more of a bond with my future wife, so can't let her faceplant. Not exactly the smoothest romantic gesture.'
"Careful," he said aloud, tone teasing. "If you keep charging in like that, the floor's gonna start charging rent."
She pouted, brushing dust off her sleeve. "Tch… I almost had you that time."
Leo tilted his head, smirking. "Sure you did."
She glared. "Next time, I will."
"I'll look forward to it."
As she turned away, still grumbling under her breath, Leo glanced at his hand — the one that had caught her. He smiled faintly.
'Step one: earn her trust. Step two: stop her from walking into the same tragedy twice.'
He took a deep breath, gripping his wooden sword again. 'Long road ahead, Leo. But you've got time — and an advantage the old you never did.'
Leo glanced at Asagi as she dusted herself off, her pout still firmly in place.
'I wonder how her arrogance ended in canon,' he mused. 'They never really showed that part… unless I somehow missed a spin-off.'
His eyes drifted toward the edge of the dojo, where Sakura was sitting cross-legged, trying — and failing — to stifle her laughter.
The younger Igawa sister was clutching her stomach, giggling uncontrollably. "You almost ate the floor, Onee-chan!"
Asagi shot her a glare sharp enough to cut steel. "Sakura!"
But that only made the blonde laugh harder, her small frame shaking.
Leo couldn't help the chuckle that slipped out. He leaned on his wooden sword, shaking his head. "Yup, definitely sisters. Chaos and composure — a two-for-one deal."
Asagi crossed her arms, cheeks puffed in mild embarrassment. "You could've at least let me land on my feet."
Leo shrugged. "You were about half a second away from kissing the mat. I prefer my training partners conscious."
That earned him a glare from Asagi and a fresh round of giggles from Sakura.
He smiled softly at the two of them, the memory of the darker canon versions flickering in his mind.
'If I can keep them laughing like this… maybe I'm already changing something.'
Leo watched Asagi from across the dojo as she resumed her stance, still glaring at Sakura between swings.
'If I remember right,' he thought, 'the plot of Taimanin Asagi doesn't kick off until she's about twenty-one… and she's what, six now?'
He sighed internally, resting his chin on his wooden sword.
'Yeah, I've got time. Fifteen years before the real nightmare starts. That's plenty to train, prepare… and definitely not cause one massive butterfly effect that erases everything I know about canon.'
He tilted his head slightly, watching Asagi bark orders at Sakura like a mini-sergeant.
'Though knowing my luck, I'll probably sneeze and accidentally rewrite a timeline.'
He exhaled through his nose, smirking. "Guess I better learn how to survive in a world that hates happy endings."
The forests behind Gosha Village were quiet — too quiet, except for the faint sound of retching.
Leo stumbled out from behind a tree, hand clutching his stomach, eyes wide in disbelief.
"Okay," he wheezed, "bad idea. Very bad idea."
He looked down. A small rabbit sat in front of him — alive, twitching, covered in faint traces of black biomass. It stared up at him, trembling.
"I just… tried to absorb you," Leo muttered, his voice dry with disbelief. "And instead of biomass, you came out looking like you saw God's 4K horror edition."
The rabbit bolted into the bushes, still shaking.
Leo groaned and sat down against a tree. 'Right. So, either this world doesn't follow Prototype logic… or I'm still running a beta build of this body.'
He stared at his hand as the black veins flickered and faded. 'Looks like I can't use that part yet. At least the blade works… sometimes.'
Later that afternoon, Leo was back at the dojo with Asagi and Sakura.
Sakura was sitting cross-legged, watching with a grin as Asagi tried (and failed) to land a hit on Leo.
Asagi: "Stop dodging and fight properly!"
Leo: "I am fighting properly. You're just mad your form keeps slipping."
Asagi: "It does not!"
Sakura: "It kinda does, sis."
Asagi shot her little sister a death glare.
Leo smirked but thought to himself, 'It's weird. Fighting a future heroine while she's still a brat. She's got talent… but that ego needs nerfing.'
He gently tapped Asagi's wooden sword away and caught her wrist before she overextended.
"You've got strength," he said softly, "but you're too focused on winning. Focus on movement. Flow, not force."
Asagi blinked, cheeks puffing slightly as she looked away. "...Fine. I'll try."
Sakura: "Wow, Leo's got you listening. That's a first."
Asagi: "Shut up!"
Leo chuckled, hiding his faint smile behind the wooden sword. 'Maybe this world isn't so bad. At least until the demons start showing up.'l
That night, Leo sat outside near the woods again, poking at a small campfire he'd made. The stars above Gosha Village shimmered faintly, like they were watching him think too hard for his age.
He turned his hand over, black and red lines faintly pulsing beneath his skin before fading again.
'Alright… so I tried to absorb a rabbit, and the damn thing came back alive. Traumatized, sure, but alive. Which means it didn't have what I needed.'
He leaned back, eyes glinting with thought.
'In Prototype, Alex absorbed biomass — genetic information, raw tissue energy, whatever made living things tick. But this world... this isn't New York. The physics, the magic, the biology — all off.'
He looked toward the distant mountains, where rumors said monsters roamed.
'If this world has demons, ogres, orcs, yokai, maybe that's the difference. Maybe they have what this world's equivalent of "biomass" is. Normal animals probably don't carry enough — they're just… too mundane.'
He chuckled quietly. "So, basically, I can't eat rabbits, but demon meat is fine. Great. Guess I'm the world's most morally flexible exterminator."
He looked at his hand again and smirked.
'Still… I need to be careful. If I start experimenting on something too strong too soon, I could mutate, and that's not on the list of fun childhood memories.'
A faint rustle came from the woods — Tokiko's chakra signature. She was patrolling again.
Leo quickly canceled the black glow from his arm and pretended to be dozing by the fire.
'Yeah, no one's gonna believe the six-year-old can turn his arm into a sword anyway.'
The morning air up near the mountain smelled like wet stone and pine. Leo crouched at the edge of the tree line, eyes narrowed against the sun glinting off distant cliffs. Down in the valley everyone wagged on about chores and training—here, things were simpler: predators, prey, and things that wanted to eat you if you blinked.
He flexed his right arm, feeling for that old, familiar hum. Black-red veins crawled across his skin and the blade unfurled—smaller, rougher than the game's animation, but sharp enough. He tested the edge on a scrap of bark; it left a clean gouge.
"All right," he thought, slipping into the first kind of calm that meant trouble was worth taking. "Small oni. Not a god, not a general. Something to test with minimal paperwork."
He moved like a kid playing hide-and-seek, but his breathing was deliberate and quiet. The mountain's lesser demons weren't stupid; they patrolled the gullies and den mouths, grunting in their low guttural languages and sniffing for blood. Leo crept between boulders and low scrub until he found a shallow cave half-hidden by hanging roots. The stench hit him first—sour, metallic, like old coins soaked in swamp water.
Something inside the cave stirred. A small oni—no larger than a dog but wrong in all the ways that mattered: too many teeth, eyes like coals, skin a grayish-green with a faint oily sheen. It hissed and lunged before Leo finished thinking of strategy.
He didn't waste theatrics. The blade came up, a single fluid strike aimed to cut the spine's motion. The oni whined as metal met flesh; it collapsed, twitching, a wet, ragged sound leaving its throat. Leo stepped forward and pressed the flat of his hand to the creature's flank.
The world narrowed. Sensation flooded in—not just pain or heat, but a cluttered, simple pattern: territorial scent marks, the memory of scuffles, a flash of a cave lit by a stranger's torch. The virus interface hummed, attempting read-and-write.
Leo let it take what it wanted. The oni's life bled into him like ink: a taste of feral cunning, a faint map of the mountainous paths, and the tiniest slice of the creature's reflexive aggression. He felt the edges stitch into his muscles, a cold, efficient knowledge of how that oni bit and dodged.
When he let go the oni twitched, then stilled for good.
He staggered back, the world settling like a lens finding focus. The blade collapsed into flesh; the veins beneath his skin pulsed more pronouncedly than before. A small shard of memory lingered—an image of a cave-marker pattern, a smell he could now recognize at distance.
"Okay," he said out loud, voice rough. "That's… a thing."
He wiped his hand on grass and watched as the mountain air seemed a little sharper, the bird calls arranged differently in his head. Not powerful in any flashy way—no monstrous transformation—but practical. A map in his head and a tiny boost to instinct. Enough to be useful, not enough to make him a monster yet.
"So normal animals don't work, demons do,' he said to himself, letting a grin cut across his face. 'Whoever wrote the cosmic patch notes really knew what they were doing. Or not. Either way, step one accomplished."
He packed the small oni carcass into a deep pit—no ritual, nothing pretty—just practical disposal. Then he sheathed his blade and started making his way back down the slope. He had data now: a working hypothesis, a direction for study, and—more importantly—proof that the Prototype package actually functioned in this world.
As he moved, a new consideration slid into his thoughts, quieter than the rest: "Don't tell the parents. Tokiko already told on me once; imagine the lecture if they found a used demon in the yard."
He pushed the idea away and picked up his pace. The village was still far off, and there was a lot to test—small steps, careful notes, no dramatic publicity stunts. Leo had plans, and this morning had just given him the first good one.
Leo started to walk away, his eyes flicking down to the blade that had replaced his arm. The black-red veins pulsed faintly in the light.
"So, even though I've got both James and Alex's powers, like that voice said…" He exhaled, watching the edges of the blade shimmer. "I'm definitely more like James Heller than Alex."
Leo twirled his arm slightly, watching the blade shift and dissolve back into muscle and skin, red tendrils coiling before sinking beneath the surface.
He flexed his hand, feeling the strange warmth lingering under his skin.
'Yeah… definitely more like Heller,' he thought. 'Alex was colder, methodical. Heller felt alive, angry—but his control came from emotion, not calculation.'
He raised his hand again, focusing. Black and crimson tendrils lashed outward, striking a nearby boulder. The impact cracked the rock in half before the tendrils snapped back into his arm like rubber bands.
Leo stared for a moment, blinking.
"Okay, that was—" He exhaled. "—both awesome and terrifying."
Then, after a pause, he added dryly, "Good thing nobody saw that, or they'd think I'm some kind of demonic blender."
To be continued
Hope people like this Ch and give me Power stones