Year: 35 AF (After Founding of Konoha)
Time: 17:47 - Twilight
Month: October (Aki)
Day: 19th
Area: Northern Ame/Konoha Border - Sector 7, "The Mudflats"
Age: 20 years, 4 months, 11 days
---
17:47 - The Moment Before Death
Rain fell in grey sheets, turning the earth to sludge. The air smelled of ozone, blood, and wet earth. Senju Makoto knelt in the mud, one hand pressed against the stomach of a young genin from the Aburame clan—Koharu, barely thirteen. Her insects were dead, scattered around them like black ash.
His other hand was gone. Or rather, it was still attached, but the kunai through his palm pinned it to the ground. The real problem was the second kunai—the one buried to the hilt just below his sternum. He could feel the wet, hot spread of blood inside his flak jacket. His chakra was gone, burned out holding a Water Barrier against three Iwa earth spears.
I can't…
The thought was soft, distant. Like someone else's regret.
Through the rain, he saw the Iwa-nin approaching—two of them. One was forming hand seals. Doton: Doryūsō. Stone spikes began to erupt from the ground, moving toward them.
Koharu whimpered.
Makoto's vision tunneled. The sound of the rain faded. This was it. Another average chūnin, another forgotten death in the Mudflats. He hadn't lived up to the name. Hadn't been a Hashirama, or even a match for his distant cousin Tsunade. Just… Makoto. The reliable one. The one who was fine.
[NANO SYSTEM - DORMANT]
[BIOSTASIS CRITICAL]
[SURVIVAL PROTOCOL: 'FIRST FORGING' - ENGAGED]
A warmth, not from his center, but from everywhere and nowhere—his bones, his nerves, the space behind his eyes—bloomed.
[SCANNING: 3-METER RADIUS]
[TARGETS: 2 HOSTILE. CHAKRA SIGNATURES: EARTH-NATURE DOMINANT. MUSCLE TENSION: AGGRESSIVE POSTURE. KILLING INTENT: CONFIRMED.]
[ALLIED BIOLOGICAL ENTITY: CRITICAL. INSECT-BASED SYMBIOTE FAILURE.]
[HOST BODY: CATASTROPHIC DAMAGE. PULMONARY PUNCTURE. MAJOR VESSEL SEVERANCE. CHAKRA NETWORK DEPLETION.]
[INITIATING EMERGENCY FORGING.]
The world snapped back into hyper-clarity.
The stone spike was a meter away. The Iwa-nin's hands were in the Tiger seal. Makoto didn't think. His body moved.
His pinned hand tore free from the kunai with a sickening rip of flesh he didn't feel. He shoved Koharu sideways into a water-filled crater. At the same time, his own body twisted in the exact opposite direction, the trajectory a perfect, inefficient-yet-unavoidable line NANO painted in his mind.
The earth spike grazed his side, tearing his jacket but missing vital organs by millimeters.
The Iwa-nin frowned, hands moving again. Ox, Hare, Monkey… The same jutsu. He was predictable.
[TARGET #1 - JUTSU ANALYSIS]
['EARTH-STYLE: EARTH-SPEAR']
[CHAKRA FLOW PATTERN: GROUND-ANCHOR → POINT-CONVERGENCE → KINETIC PROJECTION]
[HAND SEAL SEQUENCE: OX → HARE → MONKEY → TIGER (RELEASE)]
[WEAKNESS: 0.8-SECOND CHANNELING LAG AFTER 'MONKEY' SEAL.]
[BODY FORGING REQUIRED: MINIMAL. OPTIMIZING NERVE TO MUSCLE RESPONSE. ADJUSTING TENDON TENSION IN RIGHT ARM.]
It wasn't knowledge. It was instinct. A sudden, absolute knowing of what the enemy would do, how he did it, and the one flaw in his execution.
As the Iwa-nin's fingers formed the Monkey seal, Makoto was already moving. No chakra. Just his body, now moving with a terrifying, fluid economy. He closed the distance in two strides, his right arm—the wounded one—lashing out. His fingers, guided by an unseen calculus, didn't aim for the throat or heart. They struck the precise point on the Iwa-nin's forearm where the chakra was concentrating, just as it began to flow toward the final Tiger seal.
The flow destabilized. The man's eyes widened in confusion as his own chakra backfired with a muffled crunch, the earth around his feet buckling harmlessly.
[TECHNIQUE: 'CHAKRA DISRUPTION STRIKE' - IMPROVISED. EFFICACY: 94%.]
[TARGET #1 NEUTRALIZED.]
The second Iwa-nin shouted, drawing a tantō and charging. Pure taijutsu. A whirlwind of slashes.
[TARGET #2 ANALYSIS]
[STYLE: 'IRON ROCK' TAJJUTSU (IWA VARIANT).]
[PATTERN: HIGH OVERHEAD COMMITMENT → LOW SWEEP FOLLOW-THROUGH.]
[MICRO-MOVEMENTS: RIGHT SHOULDER TENSES 0.05 SECONDS BEFORE LUNGE.]
[PREDICTIVE PATHING: GENERATED.]
Makoto didn't block. He leaned back, letting the whistling blade pass an inch from his nose. As the man committed to his follow-through sweep, Makoto's foot—already placed exactly where NANO said it should be—hooked behind the man's ankle. Not a kick. A nudge.
Off-balance, the Iwa-nin stumbled forward. Makoto's elbow rose mechanically and connected with the base of his skull. A crisp, clean sound. The man dropped.
[TARGET #2 NEUTRALIZED.]
[COMBAT RESOLUTION TIME: 8.2 SECONDS.]
[INITIATING PRIMARY BODY FORGING: SEALING INTERNAL HEMORRHAGE. REROUTING CIRCULATORY FUNCTIONS. STIMULATING CELLULAR REGENERATION PRIORITY.]
The heat inside Makoto intensified. He could feel something shifting. The tearing agony in his chest was being… contained. Stitched from the inside by invisible threads. His breathing, which had been wet and shallow, evened out. He was still grievously wounded, but he was no longer dying.
He stumbled to the crater and hauled a drenched, shivering Koharu out.
"M-Makoto-sensei… your hand… your chest…"
"Can you walk?" His own voice sounded strange to him. Calm. Empty of the pain that should have been there.
She nodded, tears mixing with rain.
[DIRECTIVE: EXTRACT TO RALLY POINT DELTA. HOST BODY SUSTAINABILITY: 42 MINUTES AT CURRENT FORGING RATE.]
He slung her arm over his shoulder, ignoring the protest of his own body. As they began to limp east through the downpour, Makoto cast one look back at the two fallen Iwa-nin in the mud.
He had just performed a perfect chakra disruption and dismantled a taijutsu specialist with two moves, while mortally wounded. He hadn't just survived. He had learned. And he hadn't practiced a single second of it.
A cold, silent understanding settled in the newly-awakened part of his mind, separate from his own racing thoughts.
This changes everything.
18:23 - Konoha Field Triage, Rally Point Delta
The medical tent was chaos—groans, the smell of antiseptic and blood, the green glow of iryō-ninjutsu.
Tsunade, her blonde hair tied back severely, her forehead clear of the diamond that would one day mark her strength, moved from cot to cot with furious efficiency. She was yelling at a medic for a sloppy seal.
Then the flap opened. Makoto stood there, drenched and pale, supporting a small genin. The left side of his flak jacket was a dark, sodden crimson. His right hand was a mess of torn flesh.
Tsunade was at his side in an instant. Her hands glowed green as they hovered over his torso. Her eyes, sharp and discerning, narrowed.
"Punctured lung. Severed intercostal artery. Massive blood loss. Chakra exhaustion." She listed his injuries like a death sentence. "You should be dead, Makoto. How are you standing?"
"I… had to get her back," he rasped, gently passing Koharu to a waiting medic.
Tsunade's probing chakra dove deeper. She expected to find the frantic, fading flicker of a dying man. Instead, she found something… baffling. The wounds were still there, terrible and raw, but they were stable. The bleeding had been arrested not by a medical technique, but by what felt like… an insane, hyper-accelerated clotting and tissue reinforcement at a cellular level. It was crude, instinctual, and impossibly effective.
It felt like… Senju vitality. But dialed to a level she'd only ever sensed in her grandfather, Hashirama.
She looked from his chest to his eyes. They were clear. Focused. Not the eyes of a man who just cheated death.
"Your body is healing itself from the inside out," she murmured, more to herself than to him. "The legendary Senju life force… I've read about it, but to see it awaken under mortal duress…" A flicker of something—professional awe, clan pride—crossed her face. She saw a medical marvel, a late-blooming testament to her clan's legacy. She did not see the silent, analytical system already cataloging her own brilliant, efficient healing technique as she worked, downloading its principles into a sealed, inviolable sub-mind.
"It seems," Tsunade said finally, her tone shifting from shock to stern command as she began to properly seal his wounds with her own expert jutsu, "you're not just a reliable chūnin after all, cousin. You're a stubborn fool who doesn't know how to die. Get on the cot. Your war isn't over."
As Makoto lay back, letting her chakra wash over him in true healing, he stared at the canvas roof of the tent.
The rain still drummed its rhythm. The war still raged.
But Senju Makoto, the average chūnin, was gone.
In his place was something new. Something that watched the world, and learned.
[NANO SYSTEM - ACTIVE]
[HOST STABILIZED.]
[FIRST FORGING: COMPLETE.]
[AWAITING INPUT.]
End of Episode 0.