The war came for Kazuki Uchiha exactly fourteen months after he summoned his first meteor.
Fourteen months of accelerated training that would have killed a normal child. Fourteen months of his Sharingan active for increasingly longer periods, his chakra capacity expanding at a rate that made even the clan elders exchange uneasy glances. Fourteen months of watching his home become emptier as more Uchiha were deployed, as casualty reports filtered back, as the compound's memorial stone gained new names carved in granite and grief.
Daichi's name had been added three months ago.
His middle brother had died in the Land of Rain, ambushed by a Kiri hunter-nin squad while his team was running reconnaissance. They'd sent back his effects in a sealed scroll—his shuriken pouch, his chipped kunai, his hitai-ate with the Leaf symbol scratched but still visible. His body had been too damaged to retrieve, according to the official report, though Kazuki suspected the truth was worse than that. Kiri didn't leave Uchiha bodies intact if they could help it. The Sharingan was too valuable, even from a corpse.
His mother had stopped speaking after that. She would sit in Daichi's room for hours, holding his Academy graduation photo, her lips moving in silent conversation with a son who would never answer. Renjiro had come home for the funeral, stayed for three days, and deployed again with eyes that had gone completely dead. He had three tomoe now in each eye, the Sharingan fully matured at sixteen years old, and he moved like a ghost through the house, barely eating, barely sleeping, existing in that liminal space between alive and waiting to die.
Kazuki had thrown himself into training with desperate, manic energy, because if he stopped moving, stopped learning, stopped preparing, he would have to think about the fact that his brother was dead. That Daichi, who had taught him how to skip stones across the Naka River, who had snuck him dango from the village shops, who had smiled so brightly at his genin graduation, had been torn apart by enemy shinobi and left to rot in a foreign land.
The rage that knowledge brought was a living thing, coiled in his chest like a serpent, and his Sharingan fed on it.
His single tomoe had not evolved—he was still technically at the first stage of the dōjutsu's development. But the abilities it granted had grown exponentially more refined, more powerful, more wrong in ways that Kazuki was too young and too traumatized to fully recognize.
When Toshiro demonstrated a new taijutsu kata, Kazuki didn't just memorize it—his Sharingan deconstructed the entire style, traced its lineage back through similar movements he'd seen, identified weaknesses and inefficiencies, and reconstructed it as something better. He would perform the kata perfectly the first time, then unconsciously modify it, his body flowing through variations that Toshiro himself had never considered.
"Where did you learn that variation?" his instructor had demanded after one such session, his three-tomoe Sharingan active and studying Kazuki with unnerving intensity.
"I... I don't know," Kazuki had answered honestly. "It just felt right. Like the movement wanted to go that way."
Toshiro had stared at him for a long moment, then nodded slowly. "Your Sharingan is adapting techniques in real-time. I've heard of Uchiha with fully matured three-tomoe eyes doing something similar, but never with one tomoe. Never at your age."
But he'd said it like it was impressive, like it was proof of Kazuki's genius, not like it was impossible and wrong and defied everything the Sharingan should be capable of at this stage. So Kazuki had accepted the praise and moved on, adding it to the growing list of things his eye could do that he didn't question because everyone around him treated it as merely exceptional rather than reality-breaking.
The Academy had graduated him at nine years old, in a ceremony that was perfunctory and grim. Twelve students received their hitai-ate that day. Kazuki was the youngest. The oldest was fourteen, a civilian boy named Hiroto who had failed the graduation exam twice before and was being pushed through because the village was running out of warm bodies.
Akiyama-sensei tied Kazuki's forehead protector himself, his remaining hand steady despite the emotion in his eyes.
"You're going to do great things," he said quietly, kneeling so they were eye-level. "Terrible things too, probably. Try to remember that you're human underneath the weapon. The village will try to make you forget. Don't let them."
Kazuki had nodded, not trusting himself to speak, the metal of the hitai-ate cold against his forehead like a brand.
His genin team assignment had been waiting for him: Squad Seven, led by Jōnin Uchiha Kenshin. His teammates were Uchiha Rina, a twelve-year-old kunoichi with two tomoe and a specialization in genjutsu, and Uchiha Takeshi, a thirteen-year-old with one tomoe and an affinity for lightning techniques. An all-Uchiha squad, which was unusual but not unheard of during wartime when clan techniques needed to be leveraged efficiently.
They'd had exactly two weeks of training together before the deployment orders came.
Now, Kazuki stood in a military staging camp on the border between the Land of Fire and the Land of Grass, surrounded by the organized chaos of an army preparing for battle, and tried not to vomit from sheer terror.
The camp was a sprawl of tents and supply depots, defensive earthworks and medical stations, organized into quadrants by specialty. The Uchiha contingent occupied the eastern section, thirty-seven shinobi ranging from fresh genin like Kazuki to clan head Uchiha Fugaku himself, who commanded the detachment with cold, professional efficiency. The Hyūga had their own section to the west, their Byakugan users critical for reconnaissance. Scattered throughout were Nara, Yamanaka, Akimichi—the Ino-Shika-Cho formations that had been the backbone of Konoha's military for generations. Aburame provided insect-based surveillance. Inuzuka supplied tracking support.
And everywhere, everywhere, were the faces of children.
Genin who should have been learning C-rank escort missions were sharpening weapons with the casual efficiency of killers. Twelve-year-old chūnin were leading squads, their eyes already carrying the thousand-yard stare of shell shock. A medic-nin who looked barely fourteen was triaging wounded in a tent where the screaming never quite stopped.
This wasn't the sanitized, adventure-focused world of the anime. This was industrial-scale slaughter dressed up in the language of honor and duty.
"First deployment?" a voice asked, and Kazuki turned to find a Konoha jōnin watching him with something between pity and dark amusement. The man was maybe twenty-five, with scars crisscrossing his face and a chakra signature that felt like static electricity.
"Yes, sir," Kazuki managed.
"Advice: don't freeze. Freezing gets you killed. Freezing gets your team killed. The first time you have to choose between hesitating and surviving, choose survival. You can feel guilty about it later, assuming there is a later." The jōnin's smile was a knife-edge. "Welcome to the war, kid. Try not to die on your first day—it's embarrassing for everyone involved."
He walked away before Kazuki could respond, leaving him standing alone in a river of shinobi flowing toward their assignments.
"Kazuki!" Rina appeared at his elbow, her dark hair pulled into a practical braid, her two-tomoe Sharingan already active. She was tall for twelve, lean with the kind of whipcord strength that came from constant training. "Kenshin-sensei wants us. We're being briefed."
Kazuki followed her through the camp, weaving between supply carts and clusters of shinobi. He caught fragments of conversation—tactical discussions, casualty reports, dark humor that sounded more like coping mechanism than actual jokes.
"—three squads lost in the eastern sector, Iwa's using some kind of new earth technique that—"
"—found pieces of them scattered over a hundred meters, whatever jutsu hit them was—"
"—don't care if he's thirteen, if he can hold a kunai he can hold a position—"
Their squad leader, Uchiha Kenshin, was waiting at the Uchiha command tent. He was thirty-two, a veteran of the Second Shinobi World War who had survived long enough to be considered unkillable by reputation. His three-tomoe Sharingan was perpetually active these days, the chakra drain apparently negligible after decades of use. Scars ran down the left side of his face, disappearing beneath his flak jacket, souvenirs from a battle he never discussed.
Takeshi was already there, methodically checking his weapon pouches with the focus of someone trying very hard not to think.
"Good, everyone's here." Kenshin's voice was clipped, professional. "Our assignment: frontline combat support in Sector Seven. Iwa is pushing hard—they know the war's turning against them and they're trying to secure as much territory as possible before armistice negotiations begin. Intelligence suggests they're committing their demolition corps to the offensive. Expect heavy Earth-style techniques, explosive traps, and possible jinchūriki activity."
Kazuki's blood ran cold. "Jinchūriki?"
"The Four-Tails is confirmed active in the region. If you encounter Rōshi, you disengage immediately and signal for backup. Under no circumstances do genin engage jinchūriki directly. Understood?"
They nodded, though Kazuki suspected that "disengage" was easier said than done when facing someone who could level mountains.
Kenshin continued the briefing, outlining rally points, communication protocols, rules of engagement. It was all very organized, very professional, very much like they were discussing something other than where and how children would be expected to kill other people.
"Questions?" Kenshin asked finally.
Kazuki had a thousand questions. How do I stop myself from freezing when someone tries to kill me? What do I do when I see my teammates dying? How do I live with myself after this? How did we get here, how did we reach a point where nine-year-olds are sent to war, how is this acceptable to anyone?
But he said nothing, because the answers wouldn't change anything.
"No questions, sensei," he said quietly.
"Good." Kenshin's expression softened slightly. "I know you're scared. You should be—fear keeps you alive. But you're Uchiha, all of you. You have the Sharingan. Use it. Trust it. Trust each other. We're going to get through this."
It sounded like a promise. It felt like a lie.
They deployed at dawn.
The Land of Grass was burning.
Kazuki had known intellectually that war meant destruction, but seeing it was different. The fertile plains that should have been green were scorched black, cratered by techniques that had reshaped the landscape itself. Villages were abandoned, their populations fled or dead. The river they paralleled ran muddy with disturbed earth, and occasionally something pale and bloated would float past that Kazuki tried very hard not to look at directly.
Squad Seven moved in standard formation—Kenshin at point, Rina and Takeshi on the flanks, Kazuki at the rear because he was the youngest and least experienced. All of them had their Sharingan active, the world rendered in enhanced clarity, chakra signatures visible like colored flames in the distance.
They'd been moving for three hours when Rina's hand went up in the signal for halt.
Everyone froze. Kenshin's hand moved in quick gestures: Enemy. Multiple signatures. Prepare for combat.
Kazuki's heart was trying to escape his ribcage. His hands were slick with sweat inside his gloves. Every shadow looked like an ambush, every sound like an attack. His Sharingan spun lazily in his vision, feeding him details with crystalline precision—the way the grass bent in patterns that suggested recent passage, the faint chakra residue hanging in the air like smoke, the metallic scent that meant blood and death.
The attack came from underground.
Earth beneath their feet suddenly liquefied, trying to drag them down, and Kazuki's Sharingan saw it half a second before it happened—saw the chakra gathering beneath them, saw the technique forming, saw the future with impossible clarity—and he was already moving.
"Down!" he screamed, and his body was in motion before conscious thought, leaping backward as the ground where he'd been standing erupted in spikes of stone.
Six Iwa shinobi burst from concealment, their coordination speaking to veteran combat experience. Chūnin at minimum, possibly jōnin. And Squad Seven was three genin and one jōnin against six enemies on terrain that favored Earth techniques.
Kenshin's response was immediate and brutal. His hands blurred through seals—Snake-Dragon-Rabbit-Tiger—and fire erupted from his mouth in a massive wave that turned the ambush site into an inferno. Two of the Iwa shinobi were caught directly, their screams cutting off as the flames consumed them.
But the other four were already retaliating.
"Earth Style: Earth Flow Spears!" one of them shouted, and the ground erupted in a forest of stone spikes, forcing Squad Seven to scatter.
Kazuki found himself separated from his team, facing an Iwa chūnin who looked at his nine-year-old body and hitai-ate with something like disgust.
"Konoha's sending children now?" the man said, his hands already forming seals. "Pathetic."
The stone fist that erupted from the ground was aimed to kill, no hesitation, no mercy for his age.
Kazuki's Sharingan caught every detail of the attack—the trajectory, the speed, the chakra composition. And something in his mind clicked.
His body moved in a taijutsu pattern he'd never been taught, flowing around the strike with movements that belonged to the Strong Fist style of the Goken—but smoother, more refined, optimized by his Sharingan's analysis of every taijutsu demonstration he'd ever witnessed. His counter-strike hit the Iwa shinobi in the solar plexus with precision that shouldn't have been possible, targeting the chakra point with the instinct of a Gentle Fist user despite having no Hyūga training whatsoever.
The chūnin's eyes widened in shock as his technique faltered, his chakra disrupted, and Kazuki was already flowing into the next movement.
His hand found a kunai—when had he drawn it?—and his Sharingan guided the strike to the man's throat with surgical precision.
Blood. Hot and wet, spraying across Kazuki's hands, his chest, his face.
The Iwa shinobi collapsed, choking, dying, and Kazuki stood over him, kunai dripping crimson, and felt absolutely nothing.
No horror. No remorse. Just cold, clinical analysis from his Sharingan showing him that the threat was neutralized, showing him the next threat—another Iwa shinobi engaging Takeshi, his teammate losing badly—showing him the exact angle and force needed to intervene.
Kazuki moved.
He crossed fifteen meters in a blur, his hand forming seals on pure instinct—Tiger-Ox-Dog—no, wait, he didn't need all of them, his Sharingan was showing him the redundancies in the technique, the unnecessary steps, his hands shifted mid-sequence to a one-handed variant he'd never learned but somehow knew—
"Fire Style: Phoenix Flower Jutsu!"
Multiple fireballs erupted from his mouth, each one tracking toward the Iwa shinobi with heat-seeking precision that was supposed to be impossible for such a basic technique. The enemy ninja tried to counter with a mud wall, but Kazuki's flames curved around it, his Sharingan adjusting their trajectory in real-time, and at least three struck home.
The shinobi went down screaming, his clothes igniting, and Takeshi finished him with a lightning-enhanced kunai through the back.
"How did you—" Takeshi started, staring at Kazuki with wide eyes, but there was no time.
An earth dragon, massive and serpentine, made of condensed stone and chakra, was bearing down on Rina. She was weaving genjutsu, trying to confuse the two Iwa shinobi controlling it, but her techniques weren't strong enough, weren't fast enough.
Kazuki's Sharingan saw the dragon's construction, saw the chakra flow holding it together, saw the weak points like fault lines in glass.
His hands moved through seals—full sequence this time because the technique was more complex—and he felt his chakra surge, felt his fire affinity respond with an eagerness that was almost sentient.
"Fire Style: Great Fireball Jutsu!"
The sphere of flame that erupted from his mouth was massive, far larger than a nine-year-old should be capable of producing. It struck the earth dragon dead center, and the collision was apocalyptic—fire and earth annihilating each other, the explosion sending shockwaves that flattened grass in a twenty-meter radius.
When the smoke cleared, the earth dragon was slag and rubble, and one of the Iwa shinobi was down, caught in the blast radius. The other was staggering, disoriented, and Kenshin was there in an instant, his sword taking the man's head off with professional efficiency.
Silence fell over the battlefield, broken only by heavy breathing and the crackle of dying flames.
Four Iwa shinobi dead. Two had fled during the chaos. Squad Seven was alive, though Takeshi was bleeding from a cut across his ribs and Rina's chakra felt dangerously low.
Kenshin was staring at Kazuki with an expression that was equal parts impressed and disturbed.
"Where," he said slowly, "did you learn one-handed seals?"
Kazuki blinked, looking down at his hands like they belonged to someone else. "I... I don't know. The sequence for Phoenix Flower felt too long, and my Sharingan showed me which seals were redundant, and I just... simplified it?"
"You simplified it." Kenshin's voice was flat. "You, a fresh genin on your first combat deployment, simplified a C-rank jutsu into a one-handed variant in the middle of active combat."
When he put it that way, it did sound impossible. But Kazuki's Sharingan had made it seem so obvious, so natural, like the technique had been wanting to be streamlined and he'd just helped it along.
"The taijutsu too," Takeshi added, his voice shaking slightly with adrenaline comedown. "You were using Strong Fist combinations I've seen Might Dai perform, but you've never trained in that style. And that counter-strike to the chakra point was pure Gentle Fist targeting. How—"
"My Sharingan can copy techniques," Kazuki said, which was true as far as it went. "I must have... I saw someone use those movements before and remembered them?"
It was a weak explanation, and from the look on Kenshin's face, he knew it. But what was the alternative? Admit that his single-tomoe Sharingan was somehow deconstructing and reconstructing combat styles in real-time, adapting techniques on the fly, granting him abilities that should require years of dedicated training?
He didn't even fully understand it himself. It just felt right when he moved, like his body knew what to do and his Sharingan was simply removing the obstacles between intention and execution.
"We'll discuss this later," Kenshin said finally. "Right now, we need to move. That fight was loud—it'll attract attention. Takeshi, bandage that cut. Rina, chakra pill. Kazuki..." He paused, looking at the blood covering Kazuki's front, at the corpse of the chūnin still bleeding out from the throat wound. "You did well. Clean your kunai."
Kazuki looked down at the weapon in his hand, at the blood drying on the blade, and felt something cold settle in his stomach.
He'd killed someone. Two someones, if you counted the assist on the second one.
He should feel something, shouldn't he? Horror, guilt, something?
But there was just... numbness. And beneath that, a small, vicious satisfaction that he'd survived, that his team had survived, that the Iwa shinobi had tried to kill them and lost.
Was this what Renjiro had meant? You don't get used to the killing, you just get better at carrying it?
Kazuki cleaned his kunai on the dead man's vest, methodical and thorough, and tried not to think about the fact that it was getting easier already.
Over the next three weeks, Kazuki Uchiha killed seventeen people.
He stopped counting after that. The numbers stopped meaning anything.
Squad Seven was assigned to the frontline combat rotation, three days on, one day rest, an endless cycle of patrol and skirmish and battle. The war in this sector was a grinding, attritional nightmare—no grand battles, no decisive victories, just constant low-intensity conflict that wore everyone down to raw nerve endings and trauma responses.
And Kazuki was good at it in a way that terrified everyone who saw him fight.
His Sharingan remained at one tomoe, but its capabilities continued to expand in ways that defied conventional understanding. Every technique he witnessed, he could replicate—and improve. Every fighting style he observed, he could integrate into his own movements. His chakra control became razor-precise, allowing him to minimize waste in a way that let him fight far longer than his reserves should permit.
But it was the way he adapted that truly unsettled people.
During a skirmish with an Iwa squad that included a kenjutsu specialist, Kazuki found himself being pressed by a swordsman whose blade work was exceptional. The man's katana moved in flowing arcs, a style that emphasized circular movements and deflection over brute force—Kazuki's Sharingan identified it as a variant of the Hiten Mitsurugi-ryū he'd seen in a completely different anime in his previous life, though he didn't consciously recognize the connection.
What he did recognize was that his kunai weren't enough to counter it.
So when the Iwa swordsman overextended on a thrust, Kazuki disarmed him—a movement his Sharingan constructed from half-remembered sword techniques and pure adaptive instinct—and suddenly he was holding a katana for the first time in his life.
His Sharingan sang.
The blade felt like an extension of his will. His hands found the correct grip without conscious thought. His body shifted into a stance that was textbook perfect despite zero formal training. And when the Iwa shinobi came at him with a backup wakizashi, Kazuki flowed.
The duel lasted perhaps thirty seconds. Kazuki's blade moved in patterns he didn't know he knew, deflecting and countering with the precision of muscle memory he'd never formed. His Sharingan fed him information faster than thought—the angle of incoming strikes, the optimal parry, the exact moment to riposte—and his body simply executed.
The Iwa swordsman died confused, killed by a nine-year-old wielding his own weapon, using techniques the boy had learned by watching him for less than two minutes.
Kenshin had stared at the scene—Kazuki standing over the corpse, blood-slicked katana held in a perfect middle guard position—and his expression had been almost haunted.
"Have you ever trained with a sword?" he asked.
"No, sensei."
"Not even basic kata?"
"No, sensei."
Kenshin was silent for a long time. "Keep the blade. You've apparently mastered it already."
The sword—a well-made standard katana, nothing fancy but serviceable—became Kazuki's constant companion after that. And his Sharingan continued to learn. Every enemy swordsman he faced taught him something new. Every technique he witnessed got absorbed, analyzed, perfected, and integrated.
Within a week, Kazuki was switching between sword styles mid-combat—flowing from the defensive circles of one technique into the aggressive thrusts of another, adapting to each opponent with the versatility of a master who had studied for decades.
He was nine years old.
The other Konoha shinobi started to notice.
Whispers began circulating through the camp: Have you seen the Uchiha kid? The small one with one tomoe? He fights like he's got three tomoe minimum. He uses techniques he couldn't possibly know. He killed a tokubestu jōnin in single combat, and the man was a kenjutsu master.
The whispers turned to rumors. The rumors turned to legends.
The Ghost of the Uchiha, some called him, because he seemed to predict attacks before they came, moving through battlefields like he could see the future.
The Fire Devil, others said, because his fire techniques were disproportionately powerful and required fewer seals than they should—sometimes no seals at all, flames just erupting from his hands like he was made of fire.
The Copy Prodigy, the more analytical voices labeled him, because there was no technique he couldn't replicate, no fighting style he couldn't adopt.
Kazuki heard the nicknames and felt nothing. They were talking about someone else, surely. He was just doing what he had to do to survive, using the tools his Sharingan gave him. Everyone kept saying he was a prodigy, a genius, so if his eye could do things that seemed unusual, well, that was just what prodigy Sharingan did, right?
He didn't realize that other one-tomoe users couldn't do any of what he did. Didn't understand that he was breaking fundamental rules of how dōjutsu development worked.
He was too busy trying not to die.
The battle that would cement Kazuki's reputation came five weeks into his deployment.
Intelligence had identified a major Iwa supply depot approximately fifteen kilometers into contested territory. The depot was heavily guarded—at least twenty shinobi, mostly chūnin with several jōnin confirmed. But the supplies it held were critical to Iwa's offensive capability. Destroy it, and their push would stall for weeks.
The mission was assigned to a strike force of thirty Konoha shinobi, led by Uchiha Fugaku himself. Squad Seven was included, which meant Kazuki was about to participate in the largest military operation he'd experienced.
They moved at night, using the darkness and Sharingan-enhanced vision to avoid Iwa patrols. The landscape was treacherous—rocky terrain riddled with caves and crevasses, perfect for ambushes. Byakugan users scouted ahead, their all-seeing eyes identifying patrol patterns and trap locations.
The depot was built into a canyon, natural rock walls providing defense on three sides. Iwa had fortified the entrance with earthworks and guard towers, and Kazuki could see the glow of campfires, the silhouettes of sentries.
Fugaku's plan was straightforward: divide into three teams, simultaneous assault from multiple angles, overwhelm through speed and superior technique. The Uchiha would take point—their fire techniques would be most effective against Earth-style defenses.
"Remember," Fugaku addressed them, his Mangekyō Sharingan hidden but his three-tomoe spinning with calm authority, "we're not here to fight. We're here to destroy the supplies and extract. Speed is essential. Do not pursue fleeing enemies. Do not engage beyond mission parameters. Complete the objective and signal for withdrawal."
It was a good plan. Professional. Minimizing risk while maximizing impact.
It lasted approximately four minutes before everything went to hell.
The initial assault went perfectly. Kazuki's squad hit the eastern approach, Kenshin's fire techniques punching through the earthworks like paper. Rina's genjutsu confused the sentries long enough for Takeshi to electrocute them with lightning-enhanced shuriken. Kazuki himself moved like a ghost, his Sharingan guiding him through the chaos, his katana taking lives with clinical efficiency.
They'd reached the supply depot—massive piles of food, weapons, medical supplies, explosive tags—when the trap was sprung.
The entire canyon floor was a massive sealing array, hidden beneath dirt and camouflage, and when it activated, it pulled.
Gravity inverted, chakra went haywire, and Kazuki felt like his entire body was being crushed and stretched simultaneously. Around him, Konoha shinobi were staggering, falling, their techniques failing as the seal disrupted their chakra flow.
And from the caves in the canyon walls, more Iwa shinobi emerged. Not twenty. Not thirty.
Hundreds.
It had been a counter-ambush. Intelligence had been compromised, or fed false information, and the Konoha strike force had walked directly into a killing field.
"SCATTER!" Fugaku's voice cut through the chaos, his Sharingan blazing. "All units, execute emergency withdrawal!"
But the canyon entrance had been sealed—a massive earth wall cutting off their escape route. They were trapped, outnumbered at least five to one, and the sealing array was still active, crippling their most powerful techniques.
Kazuki watched an Aburame jōnin get swarmed by Iwa shinobi, saw the man disappear beneath a wave of kunai and earth techniques. Watched a Hyūga girl—maybe fourteen—take a spear through the chest, her Byakugan fading as the light left her eyes.
His team was pinned down behind an overturned supply cart. Kenshin was bleeding from a dozen wounds, still fighting, his fire techniques keeping enemies at bay but weakening with each use. Rina's genjutsu was failing—the sheer number of opponents made it impossible to affect them all. Takeshi was down, unconscious, a kunai lodged in his shoulder.
They were going to die here. The entire strike force was going to be slaughtered.
And something inside Kazuki broke.
Not broke like trauma—broke like a dam bursting, like chains snapping, like something that had been barely contained suddenly unleashed.
His Sharingan burned, tomoe spinning so fast it was a solid ring of black in his crimson iris, and his chakra erupted outward in a wave that made the air shimmer.
"Kazuki, what are you—" Kenshin started, but Kazuki was already moving.
His hands formed seals—Tiger-Horse-Monkey-Ram-Boar-Snake-Tiger—no, that wasn't right, he needed more power, needed something bigger, his Sharingan was showing him variations, showing him how to compress the technique, how to overcharge it—
"Fire Style: Majestic Destroyer Flame!"
The technique that erupted from Kazuki's mouth was an A-rank jutsu that should have been completely beyond his capabilities. A massive torrent of fire, wider than a house, hot enough to turn sand to glass, roaring forward with the fury of a natural disaster.
It annihilated the Iwa front line.
Shinobi who couldn't get out of the way fast enough simply ceased to exist, vaporized by heat that exceeded what human bodies could withstand. Earth-style defenses melted. The supply depot behind the enemy lines ignited, explosive tags cooking off in a chain reaction that turned the canyon into a vision of hell.
The sealing array on the ground cracked and shattered under the thermal stress, its delicate chakra patterns disrupted.
And Kazuki wasn't done.
His hands moved through different seals—one-handed now because he didn't have time for full sequences—and lightning crackled around his free hand. Chidori? No, not quite, he didn't know that technique, but his Sharingan had seen Takeshi use lightning enhancement and it was extrapolating, adapting, creating—
He thrust his lightning-wreathed hand forward and a bolt of electricity arced out, forking into multiple targets, dropping half a dozen Iwa chūnin in convulsing heaps.
An Iwa jōnin, older and scarred, formed seals for what looked like a high-level earth technique, and Kazuki's Sharingan copied it mid-formation, his hands blurring through the sequence before the man could finish.
"Earth Style: Stone Dragon Jutsu!"
The dragon that erupted from the ground at Kazuki's command was malformed, unstable, but it was there—an earth technique performed by an Uchiha with fire affinity, impossible but happening because his Sharingan said it could.
The Iwa jōnin stared in horror as his own technique turned on him, the stone dragon's jaws crushing him before the construct collapsed into rubble.
Kazuki was dimly aware that people were screaming—Iwa shinobi screaming in terror, Konoha shinobi screaming in shock—but it was distant, irrelevant. His Sharingan was feeding him targets, and his body was moving, and techniques were flowing from him like water.
Kenjutsu forms he'd absorbed from a dozen different opponents, flowing from one style to another without pause. His katana was everywhere, moving faster than most eyes could track, and where it passed, Iwa shinobi fell.
Fire techniques without hand seals, flames simply manifesting at his will and consuming everything they touched.
Taijutsu combinations that belonged to three different schools, stitched together in real-time into something that was uniquely his.
He was nine years old and he was ending people with the efficiency of a natural disaster, and some distant part of his mind was screaming that this was wrong, that he was losing himself, that the person doing these things wasn't human anymore.
But he couldn't stop. His friends were dying. His comrades were dying. And he was the only thing standing between them and annihilation.
An Iwa captain, recognizing the threat, charged directly at Kazuki with a massive earth-encased fist. Kazuki's Sharingan tracked the movement, predicted the attack pattern, and his body responded with a taijutsu counter that looked like something from the Eight Gates formation—explosive power channeled through precise chakra control to deliver a strike that hit like a bomb.
The captain's earth armor shattered. The man flew backward fifteen feet and didn't get up.
Another jōnin tried to trap Kazuki in earth, the ground liquefying beneath his feet, and Kazuki simply jumped—not a normal jump, but a chakra-enhanced leap that took him thirty feet straight up, and while airborne his hands formed seals and another Great Fireball descended like divine judgment.
He was untouchable. He was unstoppable.
He was terrifying.
The Iwa forces began to retreat, their numerical advantage meaningless against whatever this was. Some tried to mount coordinated attacks, only to have their techniques copied and turned against them. Others simply fled, survival instinct overriding military discipline.
Kazuki landed in the center of the canyon, his Sharingan sweeping the battlefield, cataloging threats and neutralizing them with mechanical precision.
A kunai thrown from hiding—deflected with his katana before conscious thought registered the attack.
A genjutsu attempt from an Iwa specialist—seen by his Sharingan, unraveled and reversed, the enemy nin collapsing as his own technique consumed him.
Three chūnin trying a coordinated earth technique—interrupted by a fire technique that required only three seals, single-handed, and the conflagration that resulted left only char.
Somewhere in the chaos, Fugaku's voice was shouting orders, rallying the Konoha forces, taking advantage of the opening Kazuki had created. The Uchiha clan head was cutting through enemy ranks with Mangekyō-enhanced techniques, and other Konoha shinobi were following his lead, turning the tide.
But all eyes kept drifting back to Kazuki. To the nine-year-old standing in a circle of corpses, his single-tomoe Sharingan blazing like a forge, his katana dripping blood, his entire body haloed in residual chakra that made the air shimmer.
The battle ended not with Iwa's defeat but with their complete rout. The survivors fled into the hills, abandoning the canyon, abandoning their supplies, abandoning everything in their desperation to escape the thing wearing the shape of a child.
When silence finally fell, broken only by the groans of the wounded and the crackle of fires still burning, Kazuki deactivated his Sharingan and promptly collapsed.
His chakra was completely exhausted. His body was trembling with overuse. Blood was leaking from his eyes—not just the normal stress bleeding but actual damage from channeling power his system wasn't ready to handle.
Kenshin caught him before he hit the ground, his sensei's face pale with shock.
"What..." Kenshin's voice was hoarse. "What are you?"
Kazuki tried to answer, but darkness was already pulling him under. The last thing he saw before unconsciousness claimed him was Fugaku's face, the clan head staring at him with an expression that was equal parts awe and horror.
When Kazuki woke, three days later, in a medical tent back at the main camp, his legend had already grown beyond anything he could have imagined.
The Demon Prodigy, they called him now. The One-Tomoe Calamity. The Fire Devil of Konoha.
He'd killed an estimated forty Iwa shinobi. Forty. In a single battle. At nine years old. With a Sharingan that was supposedly at its most basic level of development.
He'd used techniques from multiple disciplines that he'd never formally trained in. He'd copied enemy jutsu mid-combat and turned them against their users. He'd displayed power that rivaled some jōnin despite being a fresh genin.
And perhaps most terrifying to those who witnessed it: he'd seemed almost bored while doing it, his expression blank and mechanical as he dismantled lives with the efficiency of a machine.
The Konoha forces whispered about him in tones usually reserved for jinchūriki or legendary shinobi.
The Iwa forces put him in their Bingo Book with a flee-on-sight order.
And Kazuki himself lay in a medical cot, staring at the tent ceiling, and tried to process the fact that he'd killed forty people and couldn't even remember half of their faces.
He was nine years old.
He'd been at war for five weeks.
And everyone around him was looking at him like he was either their salvation or their doom.
Kazuki closed his eyes and tried not to think about the fact that they might be right on both counts.
Outside the medical tent, the war continued its grinding advance toward conclusion, indifferent to the monster it had created, uncaring that it had taken a child and forged him into something that would haunt battlefields for years to come.
The legend of Kazuki Uchiha had begun.
And the worst part was, he was only just getting started.