The world had teeth, and it was currently trying to devour Kazuki Uchiha whole.
He didn't remember dying—not really. There were fragments, crystalline shards of memory that cut when he tried to grasp them too tightly: the glow of a computer screen in a darkened room, the familiar characters of shinobi he'd loved from behind the safety of fiction, and then... nothing. A void. And then, impossibly, unfathomably, breath. The first gasp of air in lungs that were new yet somehow his, in a world that smelled of smoke and iron and fear.
Seven years had passed since that inexplicable rebirth, and Kazuki had learned that the Naruto universe was not kind to those who knew its secrets. Knowing the plot meant nothing when you were born into the meat grinder of the Third Great Ninja War, into a clan compound where children learned to throw kunai before they learned to write, where the word "peace" was spoken like a prayer to deaf gods.
The Uchiha compound in this era was different from what he remembered from the anime—darker, harder, edged with a desperation that came from being simultaneously revered and reviled. The village needed their Sharingan, needed their fire and their fury on the battlefield, but they didn't trust them. Not really. Kazuki could see it in the way the ANBU watched the compound's perimeter, in the careful distance Hokage Sarutobi Hiruzen maintained in his few visits, in the way his clansmen's eyes burned with something more than pride—with defiance, with resentment, with the bitter knowledge that they bled for a village that would never fully accept them.
Kazuki himself was an oddity even among oddities. The son of Uchiha Takeshi, a jōnin who had died three months ago on the border of the Land of Grass, and Uchiha Himari, a woman whose grief had transformed her into something silent and hollow. He had two older brothers—Renjiro, age fourteen, already a chūnin with two tomoe in each eye, and Daichi, age ten, a prodigy being fast-tracked through the Academy. Then there was Kazuki, seven years old, too young for the Academy by normal standards but not by wartime standards, trapped in a child's body with an adult's memories and a growing horror at what those memories meant.
Because he knew what was coming. The Kyūbi attack. The massacre. The cycle of hatred that would consume nearly everyone he was beginning to care about.
But today, those future tragedies were distant specters. Today's nightmare was immediate and personal.
"Again!" barked Uchiha Toshiro, his father's cousin and now, by some cruel twist of obligation, Kazuki's primary instructor. The man was a wall of scar tissue and barely contained violence, a tokubestu jōnin who had survived more battles than he could count and seemed determined to forge Kazuki in the same brutal fires that had tempered him.
Kazuki's hands were bleeding. The rough twine wrapped around the kunai handle had worn through the bandages and into flesh during the last two hundred throws. His arms trembled with exhaustion, muscles screaming in protest. He was seven. His body wasn't meant for this, wasn't developed enough for the training regime Toshiro insisted upon.
But the world didn't care about what was fair.
With movements that had become mechanical through endless repetition, Kazuki retrieved another kunai from the pouch, feeling the weight settle into his palm. Twenty meters away, the training post was already studded with blades, a metal porcupine that represented hours of work. His vision swam slightly—dehydration, exhaustion, maybe both.
This is insane, he thought, not for the first time. This is child abuse.
But he also understood it. The war was going badly. Konoha was fighting on multiple fronts—against Iwa, against Kumo, skirmishes with Kiri. They needed soldiers, and they needed them young, because the older ones kept dying. Renjiro had already been on three missions. Renjiro, who should have been worried about his first crush or academy exams, had killed his first enemy shinobi at thirteen and come home with blood on his hands and something dead in his eyes.
Kazuki threw the kunai. It struck true, embedding itself next to the others with a solid thunk.
"Pathetic," Toshiro growled. "Your form is sloppy. Your hands are shaking. On the battlefield, that shake means death—yours, or worse, your comrades'. Again. Another hundred."
Something inside Kazuki cracked.
Maybe it was the exhaustion. Maybe it was the accumulated stress of seven years living in a world that was supposed to be fiction, watching it be so much worse than any manga or anime had conveyed. Maybe it was the memory of his mother's hollow eyes that morning, staring at the photograph of his father without seeing it. Maybe it was knowing that Renjiro was scheduled to deploy again in two days, and the odds of him coming back kept getting worse.
"I said again, Kazuki!" Toshiro's hand cracked across the back of his head, not hard enough to injure but hard enough to sting, hard enough to ignite something hot and furious in Kazuki's chest.
"I heard you!" The words erupted from him before he could stop them, seven years of frustration and fear and anger pouring out. "I've been throwing kunai for six hours! I'm seven years old! I'm doing everything you—"
Toshiro moved like lightning, his hand clamping around Kazuki's throat and lifting him off the ground. Kazuki's words cut off in a strangled gasp, his hands instinctively clawing at the iron grip cutting off his air.
"You think the enemy will care how old you are?" Toshiro's voice was deadly quiet, his face centimeters from Kazuki's. "You think Iwa shinobi will see a child and show mercy? I've seen what they do to Uchiha children they capture. I've seen the bodies returned to us. Death would be a kindness."
Black spots danced across Kazuki's vision. His lungs burned. But worse than the physical pain was the helplessness, the knowledge that he was utterly at this man's mercy, that his adult mind meant nothing when trapped in a child's weak body.
I'm going to die, he thought with strange clarity. Reborn into Naruto just to be strangled by my own instructor in a training yard.
Toshiro's Sharingan flared to life, three tomoe spinning in each eye, and Kazuki saw something in those crimson depths that was worse than anger—pity, and pain, and a desperate kind of fear.
"I push you because I want you to live," Toshiro said, and his voice had gone hoarse. "Your father asked me to protect you before he died. I can't protect you on the battlefield. All I can do is make you strong enough to protect yourself. So when I say again, you say 'yes, sensei' and you do it again."
He released Kazuki, who collapsed to the ground, gasping and coughing. Tears streamed down his face—partly from the choking, partly from everything else. He wanted to scream, to rage, to curse this world and the cruel arithmetic of war that turned childhood into boot camp.
But he didn't. Because Toshiro was right. Because in a few years, when the war was over, an even greater nightmare would come for the Uchiha. And if Kazuki wanted any chance of surviving, of maybe changing things, of perhaps saving even a few people from the massacre he knew was coming, he needed to be strong.
So he pushed himself to his feet on shaking legs, retrieved another kunai with bleeding hands, and whispered, "Yes, sensei."
Toshiro nodded, his Sharingan fading back to black. "Again."
Kazuki threw. And threw. And threw.
Three months later, the Academy accepted him early. It wasn't special treatment—dozens of children as young as six were being fast-tracked into the program. The village needed shinobi, and it needed them yesterday.
The Academy building was smaller than Kazuki had imagined from the anime, more utilitarian. This wasn't the relatively peaceful era of Naruto's generation, where training could be gradual and comprehensive. This was streamlined, brutal efficiency: taijutsu, weapons training, basic ninjutsu, survival skills, and an abbreviated version of shinobi history that was more propaganda than education.
Kazuki's class consisted of twenty-three children aged six to nine. He recognized a few clan names—an Aburame girl named Shiori, an Akimichi boy called Chomaru, a Hyūga branch family member named Takuma. But most were civilian-born, children whose parents had seen the Academy as their only path to stability and status, or who had lost parents to the war and had nowhere else to go.
Their instructor was Akiyama Riku, a chūnin who had lost his right arm at the elbow in a mission gone wrong and been reassigned to teaching. He was young, maybe twenty-two, and there was a bitterness in him that he tried to hide but that bled through in unguarded moments.
"You are here to become weapons," he told them on the first day, his remaining hand resting on a desk scarred with kunai marks. "That's not metaphor. That's not inspiration. That's literal fact. The village will sharpen you, and the village will use you, and some of you will break. This is the reality of shinobi life in wartime. If you can't accept that, leave now."
No one left. Where would they go?
The training was hard, but after months with Toshiro, Kazuki found it almost manageable. He wasn't the strongest—that was Chomaru, who had his clan's natural bulk even at eight years old. He wasn't the fastest—a civilian-born girl named Natsumi moved like quicksilver. But he was consistent, methodical, driven by the knowledge of what was coming and the desperate need to be ready.
The weeks blurred together. Taijutsu drills until his body was one giant bruise. Kunai and shuriken practice until his hands developed calluses thick as leather. Basic academy jutsu—the Clone Technique, the Transformation Technique, the Substitution Technique—practiced until they were as natural as breathing.
Kazuki threw himself into it all with single-minded focus, trying not to think about the fact that he was preparing for war, that his classmates were being groomed as cannon fodder, that children were being murdered by geopolitics they couldn't begin to understand.
It was during a taijutsu spar three months into his Academy tenure that everything changed.
His opponent was Takuma, the Hyūga boy, who was nine and had recently activated his Byakugan. The dōjutsu gave him an overwhelming advantage—he could see Kazuki's tenketsu, predict his movements, and his Gentle Fist style was leagues beyond Kazuki's self-taught basics cobbled together from Toshiro's brutal instruction and half-remembered anime episodes.
The spar was supposed to be friendly, educational. It wasn't.
Maybe Takuma had something to prove. Maybe he'd internalized the Hyūga superiority complex young. Maybe he was just scared and angry like everyone else and needed an outlet. Whatever the reason, he wasn't holding back.
The first strike hit Kazuki in the solar plexus, and it felt like his chest was imploding. Chakra disruption—the Gentle Fist's specialty. He staggered back, gasping, and Takuma was already following up, his Byakugan-enhanced perception making him untouchable.
Another strike, this one to Kazuki's shoulder. His left arm went numb, the tenketsu sealed.
Get up, Kazuki told himself, trying to move, trying to defend, but Takuma was so much better, his technique refined by clan training that Kazuki couldn't hope to match.
A palm strike to his thigh dropped him to one knee. The watching students were silent, Akiyama-sensei was watching with clinical interest, and Takuma's expression was utterly blank, professional, the face of a shinobi doing his job.
I'm going to lose, Kazuki thought, and the humiliation of it burned worse than the pain. I have an adult's mind, I know this world, I've trained until I could barely stand, and I'm going to lose to a nine-year-old because I'm weak—
Takuma's hand thrust forward toward his chest, toward his heart's tenketsu, a strike that could cause serious damage, and time seemed to fracture.
Kazuki could see it—not the movement itself, but the intention behind it, the shift in Takuma's weight, the micro-expression that preceded the strike. He could see the trajectory, the speed, the exact point of impact, as if the future had been painted in crystalline clarity before him.
His body moved on instinct, twisting aside with a precision that shouldn't have been possible, and Takuma's strike hit empty air.
Confusion flickered across the Hyūga boy's face—just for an instant—and Kazuki's counter-strike, a clumsy punch driven by desperation more than skill, caught him in the ribs.
Takuma stumbled, his Byakugan flickering in surprise, and suddenly the spar had shifted.
Kazuki didn't understand what was happening. Everything had become strange, hyper-focused. He could see too much—the way Takuma's muscles tensed before each movement, the direction of his gaze, the subtle shifts in stance that telegraphed his intentions. It was like watching a movie at quarter-speed, like having the script before the actors spoke their lines.
He dodged the next strike, and the next, his movements becoming fluid where they'd been clumsy, efficient where they'd been wasteful. His body still ached, his sealed tenketsu still screamed in protest, but none of that mattered because he could see.
Takuma's frustration mounted. His attacks became more aggressive, less controlled, and that made them even easier to predict. Kazuki's counter-strikes were connecting now—not with enough force to do real damage, his seven-year-old body still too weak for that, but enough to score points, enough to prove he wasn't helpless.
"Enough!" Akiyama-sensei's voice cut through the haze, and reality snapped back into focus.
Kazuki staggered, suddenly dizzy, and his vision swam. The hyper-clarity was gone, replaced by the normal fog of exhaustion and pain. His lungs were burning, his body was trembling, and there was a strange ache behind his eyes that he'd never felt before.
Takuma was staring at him, his Byakugan faded, with an expression that looked almost... afraid.
"Kazuki," Akiyama-sensei said quietly, and there was something in his voice that made the classroom fall absolutely silent. "Your eyes."
"What?" Kazuki raised a hand to his face, confused, and felt something wet on his cheeks. He pulled his hand away and saw red. Blood. Thin trails of it, leaking from his eyes like crimson tears.
"Someone get him a mirror," the instructor said, and there was a quality to his voice that Kazuki couldn't identify—not quite awe, not quite fear, something in between.
Natsumi, the fast civilian girl, pressed a small hand mirror into his palm. Kazuki raised it with shaking hands and looked at his reflection.
His eyes stared back at him, but they weren't the black eyes he'd seen every morning in the wash basin. They were red. Brilliant, bloody crimson, with a single black tomoe swimming in each iris like a tadpole in a pool of scarlet.
The Sharingan.
He'd awakened the Sharingan.
At seven years old.
The classroom erupted into whispers, but Kazuki barely heard them. He was staring at his reflection, at the dōjutsu that marked him as true Uchiha, and feeling a strange disconnect. He hadn't experienced any great trauma beyond the baseline trauma of existing in a war zone. His father's death had hurt, but it had been three months before the Academy, processed as much as grief could be processed.
This shouldn't have happened. Not now. Not like this.
But as he stared into his own transformed eyes, he felt something else beneath the shock—a humming awareness, a connection to chakra that was deeper and more intuitive than before. He could feel the tenketsu Takuma had sealed beginning to open again on their own, could sense the flow of energy through his coils with unprecedented clarity.
This is wrong, some part of him whispered. This isn't how the Sharingan should feel at one tomoe. This is too much.
But he dismissed the thought, because he was seven and overwhelmed and didn't have the context to understand just how abnormal his awakening truly was.
"Class dismissed," Akiyama-sensei said, still staring at Kazuki with that indecipherable expression. "Kazuki, remain behind. The rest of you, not a word about this outside these walls until it's been properly reported. Understood?"
A chorus of "Yes, sensei" followed, and the students filed out, casting glances back at Kazuki that ranged from awe to envy to resentment.
When they were alone, Akiyama-sensei sat down heavily in his chair, suddenly looking much older than his twenty-two years.
"Do you know what you've done?" he asked quietly.
Kazuki shook his head, still clutching the mirror, still staring at the red eyes that had replaced his black ones.
"The Sharingan awakens in response to extreme emotion or trauma, usually loss. But you..." He trailed off, studying Kazuki with an intensity that was uncomfortable. "Seven is young. Very young. The youngest in recent clan history, I think. They'll call you a prodigy. They'll expect great things."
He leaned forward, his remaining hand clenching into a fist.
"They'll also push you harder than ever before. You understand that, don't you? The village needs Sharingan users on the front lines. With your father dead and your oldest brother already deployed, the clan will be watching you, grooming you. They'll want you on the battlefield as soon as possible."
Kazuki's mouth had gone dry. "How... how soon?"
Akiyama-sensei's expression was bleak. "Genin are being deployed at ten years old now. Sometimes younger, if they show exceptional promise. With the Sharingan active..." He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.
Three years. Maybe less. Kazuki had maybe three years before he'd be expected to kill or be killed.
The mirror slipped from his nerveless fingers, shattering on the floor into a dozen fractured reflections, each one showing a different angle of his crimson eyes.
Word spread through the Uchiha compound like wildfire. By the time Kazuki returned home, escorted by Akiyama-sensei personally, a small crowd had gathered outside his family's modest house. Clan members, all of them, ranging from his own age to grizzled veterans with more scars than skin.
They looked at him with a mixture of pride and hunger that made his skin crawl.
His mother met him at the door, and for the first time in months, there was something other than hollow grief in her eyes. Tears streamed down her face as she pulled him into a crushing embrace, and Kazuki could feel her trembling.
"Your father would be so proud," she whispered into his hair. "So proud, my brilliant boy."
Kazuki didn't feel brilliant. He felt terrified.
Renjiro was there too, home on a brief leave before his next deployment. His older brother's Sharingan was active, two tomoe spinning slowly as he studied Kazuki with an unreadable expression.
"Let me see," he said quietly.
Kazuki didn't know how to activate the Sharingan consciously—it had just happened during the spar. But when he focused on that humming awareness behind his eyes, felt for the connection he'd sensed before, something clicked.
The world sharpened. Colors became more vivid, details more pronounced. He could see the individual threads in Renjiro's combat vest, could count the scratches on the hitai-ate around his forehead, could perceive the minute tremor in his brother's left hand that spoke of recent injury.
Renjiro's expression shifted, and for just a moment, Kazuki saw something raw and painful in his eyes—pride, yes, but also grief, and fear, and a terrible weariness.
"One tomoe," Renjiro said, his voice carefully neutral. "At seven years old. You'll surpass me before you're ten."
It didn't sound like praise. It sounded like a lament.
The next weeks were a whirlwind. The clan elders summoned him, a terrifying experience involving ancient Uchiha who looked at him like he was simultaneously precious treasure and useful tool. They tested his Sharingan, made him perform basic exercises while they took notes and conferred in whispers.
He learned to activate and deactivate it at will, though the chakra drain was significant—maybe ten minutes of continuous use before he was completely exhausted. The elders assured him this would improve with time and training.
What they didn't comment on, what Kazuki himself didn't realize was abnormal, was how effective his single tomoe was.
The Sharingan's abilities were supposed to develop gradually. One tomoe granted enhanced perception and a basic level of chakra sight. Two tomoe improved these abilities and added the capacity to copy techniques. Three tomoe perfected these traits and granted limited precognition.
Kazuki's single tomoe was doing all of that and more.
When he watched Akiyama-sensei demonstrate a kunai technique, his Sharingan didn't just record it—he could feel the mechanics of it, understand the weight distribution and release point and the tiny spin of the wrist at the exact right moment. When he replicated it, his throws were cleaner than the instructor's, more efficient, as if his dōjutsu had analyzed the technique and optimized it.
When he sparred with classmates, he didn't just have enhanced reaction time—he could predict their movements three, four exchanges ahead, reading their body language and chakra flow like an open book.
And there were other things, stranger things, that he instinctively avoided doing in front of others because some survival instinct told him they'd attract the wrong kind of attention.
Like the way he could feel fire chakra responding to his will without hand signs, a warmth in his chest that wanted to burst forth as flame.
Like the dreams he'd started having of meteors falling from the sky, of cosmic fury at his command, dreams that felt less like fantasy and more like memory.
But he was seven, and overwhelmed, and surrounded by adults who saw only what they expected to see—a prodigy, yes, but within the normal parameters of Uchiha genius.
No one realized they were watching something unprecedented. Something that shouldn't exist.
Training intensified after the awakening. Toshiro seemed vindicated, pushing Kazuki even harder with a gleam of fierce satisfaction in his eyes. The Academy curriculum felt almost gentle by comparison, though Kazuki knew that was more a reflection on Toshiro's brutality than the Academy's mercy.
Months passed. Kazuki turned eight. The war ground on, a distant thunder that occasionally struck close to home—a clan member killed in action, a class of Academy students graduating early and deploying immediately, rumors of defeats and victories that all seemed to blur together into one long nightmare.
Renjiro came home from deployments less and less frequently, and each time he seemed more hollow, more distant, like he was becoming a ghost even while still alive.
Daichi graduated the Academy at eleven and became a genin, assigned to a team that deployed to the Land of Rain within a week. Kazuki's middle brother, who had taught him to climb trees and snuck him sweets and ruffled his hair with the unselfconscious affection of a child himself—gone, swallowed by the war machine.
Kazuki threw himself into training with redoubled desperation, because what else could he do? He was a child with an adult's knowledge trapped in a world spiraling toward atrocities, and his only option was to become strong enough to survive them.
It was during an Academy field exercise in the forests surrounding Konoha, two months after his eighth birthday, that Kazuki first killed.
The exercise was supposed to be simple: a survival drill, three days in the wilderness with minimal supplies, teams competing to reach a checkpoint while avoiding instructor-placed traps and obstacles. It was meant to prepare them for the realities of field missions, to build self-sufficiency and teamwork.
It became a massacre.
Kazuki's team consisted of himself, Natsumi the fast civilian girl, and Chomaru the Akimichi. They'd made good progress, avoiding the obvious traps, rationing their supplies efficiently. They were perhaps six hours from the checkpoint when they found the bodies.
Two Academy instructors, chūnin, both dead. One had been killed quickly—a blade through the throat. The other had clearly tried to fight, his remaining arm outstretched toward a kunai pouch he'd never reached, his torso opened by what looked like a wind technique.
The blood was still wet.
"We need to run," Natsumi whispered, her face pale. "Now. We need to—"
The kunai took her in the shoulder, spinning her around with the impact. She went down hard, gasping in shock more than pain, and Kazuki's Sharingan activated on pure instinct.
Three attackers, all wearing Iwa headbands, all at least chūnin level based on their chakra signatures. They'd infiltrated this deep into Fire Country, had likely been trying to reach the village for sabotage or intelligence gathering, and had stumbled onto the Academy exercise.
And now they were eliminating witnesses.
It happened so fast. Chomaru roared and charged, his Partial Expansion Technique making his fist swell to three times normal size, but he was eleven and barely trained and the Iwa shinobi were professionals. An earth wall blocked his strike, and then a spike of stone erupted from the ground and punched through his expanded arm.
Chomaru's scream was the worst sound Kazuki had ever heard.
The Iwa shinobi were moving toward them, weapons drawn, and Kazuki could see his death approaching with the perfect clarity his Sharingan provided. He could see the trajectory of the kunai being thrown, could predict the earth technique being molded, could perceive every detail of his own impending murder.
And something inside him refused.
He moved without thinking, his hand forming seals that he'd never been taught, his chakra surging in response to the fire affinity every Uchiha possessed. The hand signs were wrong, incomplete, but it didn't matter—his Sharingan was compensating, optimizing, filling in the gaps with instinct.
Fire erupted from his mouth in a roaring wave, far larger and hotter than any Academy student should be capable of producing. The lead Iwa shinobi's eyes widened in shock, his own seals barely forming a water defense in time, and the collision of fire and water filled the forest with scalding steam.
Kazuki didn't stop moving. His Sharingan was feeding him information faster than conscious thought—the positions of the enemies, the vectors of attack, the weaknesses in their defense. He was eight years old and terrified and his hands were forming seals for techniques he'd only seen in an anime in another life, and impossibly, they were working.
Another fireball, this one smaller but more focused, forced one attacker to dodge into a tree. Kazuki's kunai, thrown with Sharingan-perfected accuracy, caught the man in the thigh, eliciting a grunt of pain.
But he was still so weak. His chakra was already running low, his child's body burning through reserves at an unsustainable rate. The Iwa shinobi were regrouping, their initial surprise fading into professional assessment.
"Uchiha," one of them spat, and there was hatred in the word. "Should've known from the fire techniques. Kill him first, the others after."
They split up, flanking maneuvers executed with the precision of experienced soldiers, and Kazuki knew with crystalline certainty that he couldn't fight all three. Even with his Sharingan, even with his inexplicable ability to use techniques beyond his supposed skill level, he was still just a child facing adults who killed for a living.
He was going to die here. Natsumi was bleeding out. Chomaru was down. And Kazuki was going to die, reborn into this world only to be murdered in a forest before he ever had a chance to change anything.
The rage that thought ignited was incandescent.
He didn't remember forming the seals. Didn't remember consciously drawing on his chakra. There was only fury, and refusal, and the absolute conviction that these men would not take anything more from him, from his world, from the people he'd failed to protect.
His Sharingan burned, tomoe spinning so fast they blurred, and his chakra—
The sky screamed.
Later, the survivors would struggle to describe it. Some would say there was a sound like thunder, others that reality itself seemed to tear. The Iwa shinobi looked up, and their expressions transformed from professional calculation to primal terror.
A meteor, wreathed in flame and trailing smoke like a comet, was falling directly toward them.
It was impossible. It was a technique that required the Rinnegan, that belonged to legends and gods, not to eight-year-old Academy students with barely developed Sharingan.
It happened anyway.
The meteor was smaller than the legendary versions—maybe ten meters in diameter, less world-ender and more localized catastrophe—but it was real. Kazuki could feel it, connected to his chakra in a way that made no sense, as tangible as his own heartbeat.
The Iwa shinobi scattered, their survival instincts overriding mission parameters, and the meteor struck the earth with apocalyptic force.
The impact was a physical thing, a wall of pressure and heat and sound that picked Kazuki up and threw him backward like a leaf in a hurricane. Trees were uprooted, earth was pulverized, and the roar of destruction swallowed all other sound.
Kazuki hit a tree trunk hard enough to drive the air from his lungs, his vision going white with pain, and darkness swallowed him whole.
He woke to hands on his shoulders, shaking him gently. His eyes flickered open—normal black eyes now, the Sharingan deactivated, a splitting headache pulsing behind them.
Akiyama-sensei was leaning over him, his single hand pressed to Kazuki's chest, medical chakra glowing faintly green. Behind him, the forest was devastated, a crater perhaps thirty meters wide carved into the earth where the battle had taken place.
Two of the Iwa shinobi were dead, their bodies mangled by the impact and subsequent shrapnel. The third was alive but unconscious, bound in chakra-suppression restraints, being guarded by three Konoha jōnin who must have arrived as backup.
Natsumi was sitting against a tree, her shoulder bandaged, her face shock-pale but alive. Chomaru was on a stretcher, his arm splinted, also alive.
They were alive. Impossibly, miraculously alive.
"Easy," Akiyama-sensei said as Kazuki tried to sit up. "You're suffering from severe chakra exhaustion. Whatever you did..." He trailed off, glancing at the crater, and his expression was complicated—pride, yes, but also fear, and something that looked almost like grief. "You saved them. You saved your teammates."
Kazuki's mouth was dry as sand. "The... the meteor...?"
"We felt the impact from the checkpoint. Thought it was a large-scale Earth technique at first." Akiyama-sensei's remaining hand was trembling slightly. "Kazuki, how did you... where did you learn...?"
"I don't know," Kazuki whispered, and it was the truth. "I don't know. I was dying, we were all dying, and I just... I needed them to stop. I needed to protect my team. And then..."
And then the sky had fallen at his command.
One of the jōnin approached, a severe-looking woman with gray hair and scars across her cheek. Her hitai-ate marked her as ANBU, or formerly ANBU at least.
"The boy's coming with us," she said flatly. "The Hokage will want to debrief him personally."
Akiyama-sensei looked like he wanted to argue, but he just nodded tiredly. "He's eight years old, Shimura-san. Whatever happened here, he's still just a child."
The woman—Shimura, and wasn't that name familiar in the worst possible way—looked down at Kazuki with cold, assessing eyes.
"Children don't call down meteors," she said. "Children don't kill chūnin-level enemies. Whatever he is, 'just a child' stopped applying the moment he carved that crater."
She wasn't wrong, Kazuki realized with growing dread. He'd crossed a line, revealed something that couldn't be unrevealed. The concerned instructors and proud clan elders were about to be replaced by something far more dangerous—the attention of the village's leadership, of Danzō and his ROOT, of everyone who would see a young Uchiha with impossible abilities as either a weapon to be used or a threat to be eliminated.
As he was carefully lifted onto a stretcher and carried toward the village, Kazuki caught a glimpse of the crater one last time. The earth was scorched black, still smoking faintly, a scar on the landscape that would last for years.
Just like the scar he'd just carved into his own fate.
The Third Shinobi World War had nine more months to run, though no one knew it yet. In that time, the boy named Kazuki Uchiha would become something of a legend, whispered about in the camps, feared in the Bingo Books of enemy nations.
The Uchiha who could kill without hand signs.
The Uchiha whose Sharingan could predict techniques before they were fully formed.
The Uchiha who had called down heaven's fury at eight years old.
But that was later, those were stories for other chapters, other battlefields, other nightmares.
For now, Kazuki was just a terrified eight-year-old being carried toward an uncertain future, his Sharingan burned into his eyes like a brand, his chakra coils aching from channeling power that should have been impossible, his mind racing with the horrified knowledge that he'd killed two people and couldn't even properly regret it because they would have murdered his teammates.
The world had teeth, and Kazuki Uchiha had just learned to bite back.
He had the terrible feeling he was going to get very, very good at it.
Above, clouds gathered over Konoha, heavy and dark with the promise of rain, as if the sky itself was weeping for the childhood that had just ended and the weapon that had been born in its place.
The Hokage's office was exactly as Kazuki remembered it from the anime—the large desk stacked with paperwork, the wall of windows overlooking the village, the photographs of previous Hokage watching with stern, painted eyes. But seeing it in person, as a terrified eight-year-old standing before one of the most powerful shinobi alive, was entirely different from watching it on a screen.
Sarutobi Hiruzen looked older than his anime counterpart, more worn. The Third Shinobi World War was grinding him down, Kazuki could see it in the lines around his eyes, the gray in his beard, the way his shoulders slumped when he thought no one was watching.
But when he looked at Kazuki, his eyes were sharp and assessing, the calculating gaze of a leader who had sacrificed countless pawns for the greater good.
"Kazuki Uchiha," the Hokage said, his voice gentle despite everything. "Do you understand why you're here?"
Kazuki nodded mutely. His mother had tried to accompany him, but she'd been politely but firmly turned away. This was a private meeting—just him, the Hokage, and two ANBU guards whose animal masks revealed nothing.
"The instructors you saved reported that you used several techniques beyond Academy curriculum. A significant fire jutsu, advanced kunai work, and..." Hiruzen paused, steepling his fingers. "A technique that caused a meteorite impact. I'm told the crater is quite impressive."
"I didn't mean to," Kazuki said quietly, and it was true. "I was just trying to protect my teammates. The Iwa shinobi were going to kill us, and I was scared, and my Sharingan was active, and I just... I needed them to stop."
"And so you brought the sky down on them." There was no accusation in Hiruzen's tone, just statement of fact. "Kazuki, do you know what technique you used?"
Kazuki shook his head. "No, Hokage-sama. I've never seen it before. I didn't use hand signs. It just... happened."
This was the truth, carefully edited. He suspected it was related to Madara's Tengai Shinsei, the meteor summoning technique, but he had no explanation for how an eight-year-old with a single-tomoe Sharingan could possibly replicate a Rinnegan technique. So ignorance seemed like the safest play.
Hiruzen was silent for a long moment, his eyes distant.
"There are bloodline mutations sometimes," he finally said. "Spontaneous evolutions of kekkei genkai that grant unusual abilities. The Sharingan is particularly prone to such variations—we've seen Uchiha with unique Mangekyō abilities, after all. It's possible your Sharingan has developed an affinity for meteorological or spatial manipulation techniques."
It was a rationalization, Kazuki realized. A way to explain the inexplicable in terms that fit the Hokage's worldview. And Kazuki was more than happy to accept it.
"I don't really understand it, Hokage-sama," he said, and that was completely true. "I just knew we were going to die, and I couldn't let that happen."
Something shifted in Hiruzen's expression—a flash of pain, of sympathy, of something almost paternal.
"You're eight years old," he said softly. "You should be worried about academy tests and making friends, not fighting for your life against enemy jōnin. This war has stolen too much childhood already."
For a moment, Kazuki saw not the Professor, not the God of Shinobi, but a tired old man who had watched too many children die.
Then the moment passed, and the Hokage straightened, his expression becoming professional once more.
"Nevertheless, you have demonstrated capabilities that the village cannot ignore. Your Sharingan awakened at seven, you've shown proficiency with high-level fire techniques, and you've now survived a combat encounter that killed two instructors. The clan will want to accelerate your training. The war council will want to deploy you. I can forestall them for perhaps a year, maybe two if I push, but eventually..."
He didn't finish. He didn't need to.
"I understand," Kazuki said, and he did. He was too useful, too powerful, too perfect a weapon to leave idle while the village bled. His childhood was already over. Now it was just a question of how long he could maintain the pretense.
"I'm sorry," Hiruzen said, and he sounded like he meant it. "For what it's worth, I'm truly sorry. If there were another way..."
But there wasn't. The war didn't care about apologies or regrets. It just kept consuming, kept devouring, kept turning children into soldiers and soldiers into corpses.
Kazuki was dismissed shortly after, escorted home by an ANBU who vanished the moment Kazuki entered the Uchiha compound. His mother was waiting, her face tear-stained, and she pulled him into another crushing embrace.
"They told me what you did," she whispered. "They told me you saved your teammates. You killed enemy shinobi. You're so young, my baby, you're so young..."
Kazuki held her and said nothing, because what could he say? That he'd been an adult once, in another life, before being reborn into this nightmare? That he was terrified of what he was becoming, of the power that manifested without his understanding? That he could feel himself changing, hardening, becoming the kind of person who could kill and move on because the alternative was death?
Renjiro came home that night, called back from deployment for emergency family leave. He found Kazuki sitting on the roof of their house, staring at the stars, and climbed up to sit beside him.
For a long time, neither spoke.
"Does it get easier?" Kazuki finally asked. "The killing?"
Renjiro was silent for so long that Kazuki thought he wouldn't answer. Then: "No. It gets harder. But you get better at carrying it."
"I don't want to get better at carrying it."
"I know." Renjiro's hand found his shoulder, squeezed gently. "I know, little brother. But wanting doesn't change what we are. We're Uchiha. We're shinobi. We're weapons for the village, whether we like it or not."
"That's not fair."
"No," Renjiro agreed. "It's not."
They sat together in silence, two brothers shaped by a war they didn't start, carrying burdens that would have broken adults, watching the stars wheel overhead in patterns that had been ancient before humans learned to kill each other and would continue long after.
Somewhere in the distance, a night bird called out, its cry echoing across the compound like a lament.
The Third Shinobi World War continued its grinding advance toward conclusion, indifferent to the suffering it caused, uncaring of the childhoods it destroyed.
And Kazuki Uchiha, eight years old, possessed of a Sharingan that was growing more powerful and more strange with each passing day, began the transformation that would turn him into one of the most feared shinobi of his generation.
But he didn't know that yet. For now, he was just a scared child sitting on a roof with his brother, trying to hold onto his humanity for one more night.
The darkness was patient. It could wait.
It always did.