"Uwah—!"
Naruto hacked out a mouthful of dirt, eyes streaming. "What was that for, Hinata?!"
"Hmph."
Hinata confirmed the smoke had risen thick enough to blot the entire clearing from view—and from any crystal ball. She moved fast. Camera out of her pouch, scroll unrolled under her foot, shutter clicking down column after column of text. Her hands never wavered. Only Sasuke and Naruto, on the other side of the dust, could dimly make out what she was doing. In under twenty seconds she had every page. Camera back in the pouch.
She stood, dusted off her knee, and regarded the two soot-streaked faces peering at her through the settling haze.
"The two of you had better start explaining," she said, in her best impression of someone who had not just photographed a prohibited forbidden scroll. "What were you thinking, taking the Scroll of Seals? Do you want to get hauled in by the ANBU?"
Sasuke's expression cycled through comprehension, reluctant appreciation, and resigned cooperation. He had no idea who Hinata was performing for—but she was performing, and arguing with it now would be counterproductive. He stayed quiet and waited to see where this went.
"What—Hinata, you were looking at it too!" Naruto pointed this out immediately and without any awareness of what he was actually doing. "Besides, I just learned an incredible jutsu from it! This time I'm definitely not going to lose to you again!"
"You really are something else, Naruto." Hinata's tone carried a rare sincerity. "Honestly, I feel like hitting someone right now—but since you've improved my mood considerably, I'll let it go for now." A beat. "Now—who put you up to this?"
In the Third Hokage's office, Hiruzen Sarutobi watched the pale-eyed girl through the crystal ball, his eyes narrowed. The smoke screen she'd raised had lasted approximately thirty seconds—thirty seconds during which the crystal ball's far-sight had been entirely useless. The Byakugan's penetrating vision was something a crystal ball simply could not replicate.
He had not seen what she'd done.
"Sly little white cat," he murmured. The move had been clean and fast. He hadn't observed it. But not observing something and knowing something occurred were different problems—and Hiruzen's instincts, honed across three wars and four decades at the village's helm, told him clearly that something had occurred.
His lips twitched.
She was unruly, she was sharp-tongued, and her methods would give any reasonable jōnin nightmares. But the way she ran those two boys, the situational awareness, the complete absence of panic under pressure—she complemented where Naruto was reckless and where Sasuke was rigid, better than he had expected. He was in no rush to decide anything just yet.
He settled back and watched.
"Mizuki-sensei told me," Naruto said, entirely unconcerned. "He said I always fail the Clone Technique because of a natural deficiency, and that if I studied the Hokage notes in the Scroll of Seals I could get better. There's no way I'm getting held back when Sasuke and—"
"I'll be direct." Hinata cut him off. "The Scroll of Seals is one of the most important artifacts in the entire village. It contains high-powered jutsu and techniques every generation of Hokage decided were too volatile to distribute freely. Anyone who touches it faces a prison sentence at minimum. You understand that, right?"
She looked at Naruto.
Naruto looked back at her with the expression of someone who very sincerely had not understood that, and had not considered the possibility until this moment.
Hinata looked at Sasuke.
"There wasn't a single guard," Sasuke said flatly. "No traps, no watchmen, nothing. From where I stood, it appeared to be a perfectly ordinary shrine with a scroll inside that nobody had bothered to lock up. That's not stealing—that's finding."
The verbal footwork was sharp. Hinata granted him that with a small nod. Nothing guarded, nothing labeled—the legal argument had a spine.
"Good. You passed." Hinata dropped the scroll flat and sat down. "Now let's see what's in here."
"Huh?! What—you're going to read it too?! Don't I still need to—there was this jutsu I almost had—"
Naruto had barely gotten the words out before Hinata was already dividing the scroll and handing him back his section. After all, in terms of pure suitability, the Multiple Shadow Clone Jutsu really was the technique best matched to Naruto—that much she could concede.
Naruto flopped down immediately, pulled his half back over, and resumed staring at the Multiple Shadow Clone Jutsu entry with renewed determination. After a moment's paralysis, Sasuke moved—quietly, a little awkwardly—and settled on Naruto's other side to work through the Chidori entry again. Hinata, with her own section spread out, began reading in earnest.
The clearing fell into the kind of silence that happens when three people are actually concentrating on something.
A strange warmth to it—like a study session that had assembled itself by accident in the middle of the night, in a forest, with a stolen Scroll of Seals.
Because she knew exactly how the story played out from here, Hinata wasn't worried in the slightest. What held her attention was the scroll itself—a document that had appeared in full for exactly one chapter across the entire run of the source material, yet whose importance to the world of Naruto was impossible to overstate.
After all, it was the Scroll of Seals that had given Naruto the single most important jutsu he would ever possess: the Multiple Shadow Clone Jutsu.
Without that technique, Naruto would barely be Naruto at all. Every stage of his growth was built on it—early on it let him win fights through sheer attrition and volume; in the middle arc it was the foundation for Rasengan refinement; later it let him master chakra nature transformation at a speed no one else could match; and in the end his Tailed Beast forms and shadow clone variants were all extensions of the same core technique. It was his signature, his identity, the tag attached to his name the same way Zangetsu was Ichigo's or the Gum-Gum Fruit was Luffy's.
So Hinata was genuinely curious: somewhere in this scroll, was there a technique that could become her own?
She worked through her section with a practitioner's eye, cataloguing as she went.
Taijutsu-class: the Eight Gates. Its advantage was exactly what it sounded like—a rapid, overwhelming amplification of every physical faculty. Its disadvantage was equally obvious: it was the equivalent of squeezing the body beyond all design tolerances. The more you used it, the more it destroyed you from the inside out. Not her style.
Summoning-class: Impure World Reincarnation (Edo Tensei). Arguably the most fearsome forbidden jutsu on the scroll. But the activation conditions were severe—corpse material, a living sacrifice—and the failure scenarios were catastrophic. A summoned soul powerful enough to overwhelm its vessel could break free entirely. Not a first choice. Not even close.
Sealing-class: Dead Demon Consuming Seal. Mutual destruction upon use. Hard pass.
Genjutsu-class: Bringer-of-Darkness Technique. Broad-range vision denial—brutal against anyone without a specialized dōjutsu. Even the Hidden Mist's signature technique worked on the same principle: strip sight, nullify the opponent's ability to fight back. She genuinely liked this one.
The problem was elemental compatibility. Everything she was currently building ran on fire—lit from her palms, channeled through the gauntlets, sustained at close range. Fire was its own light source. Using a darkness technique and a fire technique in the same fight would be actively self-defeating. She noted it with real reluctance and moved on.
And then she stopped.
Spirit-class: Soul Body Switch Technique.
The name was structurally similar to the Yamanaka Clan's Mind Body Switch Technique, and the surface concept—seizing control of another person's body—had a superficial resemblance too. But where the Yamanaka's technique temporarily displaced a consciousness without harming either soul involved, the Soul Body Switch Technique had no such restraint.
The method: the practitioner weaponized their own soul and drove it directly into the target's body. Once inside, the practitioner's soul and the target's soul engaged in direct combat. The loser was not merely suppressed—they were annihilated. Their consciousness was erased, their accumulated knowledge absorbed wholesale into the victor.
The limitation: the practitioner's original body was tethered. A soul deployed as a weapon could not fully vacate its vessel. If the original body died during the attempt, the soul died with it.
The result: a near-death condition attached to every use. A desperation technique, a last resort in a fight already lost. Comparable to the Dead Demon Consuming Seal in that regard—you activated it when you had nothing left to lose.
And even when it worked—the original body couldn't be abandoned, and the seized body couldn't be maintained indefinitely. Use the original body and the seized one sits useless. Use the seized body and there's no way to control the original. That was the technique's inherent awkwardness: two bodies, neither fully operable at the same time.
Functionally useless for anyone planning to walk out of a battle alive. For anyone with one soul.
Hinata's brow smoothed.
What if the practitioner had two?
Naruto's chakra reserves were, by every measurable standard, absurd—so enormous that Multiple Shadow Clone Jutsu, which was lethal to most users precisely because it divided total chakra reserves, became viable for him simply because his total was vast enough to divide. The jutsu hadn't changed. The user had.
Just like Zangetsu to Ichigo. Just like the Gum-Gum Fruit to Luffy. The jutsu found its true wielder, and the match changed everything.
She had two souls occupying one body. Her transmigrated awareness, and the lingering echo of the original Hinata—the one who surfaced in unguarded moments of sleep, who reached out for her family, who was still, technically, present.
Two souls. One body. A technique that weaponized one soul as a projectile while requiring the original body to remain tethered and alive.
The original soul—Hinata's—could remain in the body as an anchor, keeping it alive and functional. Her soul—the transmigrated one—could be deployed as the weapon. The body would stay intact. The original soul would keep the tether unbroken. And her consciousness would be free.
A slow smile.
"...Well," she said under her breath. "I suppose it's you, then."