"Shisui the Body Flicker… he really is the Uchiha's sharpest blade."
From the rooftop, Kuroha let out a low hum of appreciation.His double pupils tracked every fragment of Shisui's technique—the mix of real clones, illusory projections, and instantaneous shifts.
Not teleportation.Not magic.Just genius-level manipulation of movement and perception.
Broken down, the technique was simple.Executed, it was terrifying.
If the range ever extended several kilometers or more…Shisui would be nearly impossible to pin down.A one-man equivalent of Pain's wide-area pressure.
Even with limits, the technique was absurdly strong.
Back at the training ground, the last phantom flickered out.Only Shisui remained, standing over a winded Itachi.
"You fought well," Shisui said, tone even. "But right now, you lack a technique that belongs to you alone. Every ninja who reaches the top has one."
He wasn't belittling Itachi.He was showing him the shape of the path ahead.
"A technique of my own…" Itachi murmured, eyes lowered.
"All it takes is mastery," Shisui continued. "Look at the Fourth Hokage. He refined the Flying Thunder God into something only he could use. One jutsu, perfected, took him all the way to the Hokage's chair."
"I… don't know what mine should be," Itachi admitted, still sitting where he'd fallen. "Everything I know, everyone knows."
He sounded less frustrated than lost.
Since childhood, the clan had praised him as a prodigy.But facing Shisui shattered that image.The Body Flicker technique looked completely unbreakable.
He had even tried slipping a genjutsu into the brief exchanges using his two-tomoe Sharingan—Shisui dispelled it instantly, barely acknowledging it.
Shisui crouched beside him.
"You don't need to rush. Our clan has its own lineage of power. One day, you'll awaken another form of the Sharingan."
He paused.
"The Mangekyō."
Itachi's breath caught.
"With it comes a technique unique to each eye," Shisui said, lowering his voice. "Abilities strong enough to shift the course of battles. Of lives. Of history."
His gaze softened.
"These eyes of ours… hold endless possibilities."
Itachi stared at his own reflection in the Sharingan's dim red glow.Resolve slowly sharpened inside him.
He would surpass Shisui.He would open new eyes.He would reach whatever power lay ahead.
Shisui stood, offered him a hand, and pulled him upright.
"Work hard. I'll be waiting for you up ahead."
With that, he flickered away into the falling dusk.
Leaving Itachi standing alone.
But he didn't go home.
He trained.
Through sunset.Through moonrise.Through the cooling wind of night.
Kuroha, still on the rooftop, sighed through his nose.
"So he finally snapped. Must be something Shisui said."
Itachi had always been diligent.But this was different—obsessive, almost frantic.
Kuroha plucked the last chicken leg from his dinner box and chomped down thoughtfully.
"Itachi… you better make different choices this time," he whispered, voice cooling. "Don't drown yourself in that 'Will of Fire' nonsense."
A thread of killing intent slipped from him, thin but real.
He didn't hate the village.Not particularly.
But Itachi?He couldn't abide what Itachi had done in his previous life—the blind obedience, the slaughter, the twisted idea of "peace."
As an outsider watching the anime, Kuroha could understand the narrative.Placed inside the clan, living among the people Itachi later butchered—he wanted to spit.
Just because the village leadership feared a coup…the solution was extermination?Including civilians?Children?
Peace-loving Uchiha who never even trained to fight.Kids who worshipped Itachi.
All cut down in the dark.
Ridiculous.
Even worse were the excuses that followed:
"If Itachi didn't kill them, the village would have."
Kuroha scoffed.
"That's not how power works in a village of clans."
Konoha was full of influential families.A massacre of an entire founding clan would shake every one of them.Even talking about it would trigger political backlash.
"And calling the Third Hokage the 'strongest ninja in history'?"Kuroha rolled his eyes."Do the Senju and Uchiha founders not exist anymore?"
The Sarutobi clan had woven itself carefully through every layer of Konoha—ANBU, training divisions, administration.Their numbers weren't as exaggerated as rumor claimed,but their influence was real.
And their hands were far from clean.
Yet Itachi and Shisui, the clan's two most loyal sons, believed wholeheartedly in the version of the world Sarutobi Hiruzen fed them.
"They swallowed every word," Kuroha muttered. "And look where it led."
He watched Itachi continue his lonely drills under the moonlight, a stubborn silhouette swinging against the dark.
"So… which path will you walk this time?"
He didn't know.
But he was determined to change the ending—by force or by escape, whichever came first.