I sat in the narrow fissure, eighty feet above the village, my knees pulled tightly to my chest. The rock beneath me was cold. Below, Konoha had paper lanterns strung along commercial districts that glowed like fireflies.
I watched the civilians moving like ants through the streets. They were laughing. They were eating. They were celebrating the peace.
I squeezed my eyes shut, pressing my forehead against my kneecaps.
I didn't want to watch. The guilt that I had ignored over the last few months was threatening my composure. I had justified my inaction with reason. I thought that changing the timeline would blind me to the future, and that warning the Hokage would result in disaster for me.
It was a perfectly rational thought. But standing here, about to witness a massacre, was a different feeling.
I am a survivor, I reminded myself, my jaw clenched so tight my teeth ached. I am survivor. I am not a hero.
I opened my eyes and looked back down at the village.
It was instantaneous. The air suddenly grew impossibly heavy, as if the oxygen had been replaced by something else entirely. A suffocating heat washed over the mountain, carrying the stench of blood. My mind screamed in terror, paralyzing my body.
Then, the world shattered.
It did not appear with a cartoonish puff of smoke. In the dead center of the village, reality seemed to implode, followed by an outward shockwave.
A deafening roar tore through the valley. The decibel level of the cry shattered every glass window near it. I clamped my hands over my ears, screaming in agony as the vibrations threatened to rupture my eardrums.
In the heart of the village, towering over four-story buildings as if they were children's toys, stood a monster.
The Nine-Tails.
It was a mass of aggressive, blood-red energy, taking the shape of a demonic fox. Nine tails whipped through the air, each one thick enough to crush a city block. It was not an animal. It was a natural disaster.
The destruction was incomprehensible. With a single sweep of its claws, a dozen buildings were reduced to pulverized stone. A tail slammed into the ground, creating an earthquake that spread through the village.
Fires erupted. The red chakra radiating from the beast was so dense and volatile that it ignited flames in surrounding buildings. Within seconds, there was an expanding ocean of flames.
The screaming began.
Even from eighty feet up, the wail of hundreds of dying people rose.
From my high ground, I watched the village's shinobi forces react.
Tiny flashes of light began to strike the beast's legs and torso. The shinobi were swarming the monster. Their attacks were equivalent to throwing pebbles at a hurricane.
The beast roared again, a sweep of its tails obliterating an entire squad of ninja.
I pressed my back against the stone, my breath coming in short gasps. My entire body shook. I was terrified, yes, but beneath this terror, a realization anchored my mind.
My plan worked. If I had stayed in the orphanage, I would be dead. If I had run into the streets now, I would have been crushed by falling debris.
I was safe. The mountain was isolated. The beast focused entirely on the shinobi attacking its legs in the valley below. I just had to sit here in the dark, endure this horror, and wait for Minato to arrive and teleport the monster away.
I watched the carnage unfold, my eyes wide, tracking the movements of the beast.
Suddenly, the Nine-Tails stopped thrashing.
It stood still amidst the ruins of the central district. It slowly turned its head, with its slitted red eyes lifting away from the shinobi at its feet.
It looked up. It looked directly at the Hokage Monument.
The temperature here plummeted. The air grew so thick with malice that I physically gagged.
The beast opened its mouth.
Red and blue particles of chakra began to manifest in the air before its mouth. They swirled in a vortex, compressing and condensing with terrifying speed. The density of the energy began to warp the light around it, creating a dark sphere of destruction.
I stared at the black sphere.
My mind raced, trying to search through the memories of my past life.
The Nine-Tails attack. Minato arrives at the Hokage monument. The beast notices him. The beast fires a…
The realization struck me.
A Tailed Beast Bomb.
In the manga, the Nine-Tails didn't just rampage. It targeted the Hokage faces. It fired a Bijuudama directly at the mountain.
Panic washed over me. I had been arrogant. I had treated my foreknowledge as an infallible shield. I mapped my steps completely forgetting the specific, narrative detail that could cost me my life.
I scrambled backward, pressing myself as deep into the crack of the rock as my body would go, my fingernails scraping desperately against the stone.
"No" I whispered, my voice cracking, lost entirely in the screeching sound of the bomb. "No, no, no…"
There was nowhere to run. The cliff was a vertical drop. The fissure was a dead end.
The black sphere finished condensing. It was perfectly round, radiating a destructive energy that made the air ripple and distort.
The Nine-Tails swallowed the sphere, its throat glowing.
The Tailed Beast Bomb erased the space between the beast and the mountain.
It stripped the shadows from the crack, illuminating the rock with the brilliance of a sun. The heat vaporized the moisture in my eyes.
I squeezed my eyes shut, and waited for my atoms to be unwritten from the universe.
Flash.
The blinding light vanished.
The heat dissipated instantly, replaced by a rush of cold wind.
I didn't open my eyes. I stayed curled against the rock, paralyzed.
Three seconds passed.
A deafening explosion detonated, but it didn't come from the mountain. It came from miles away, echoing from the deep forests beyond the walls of the village. The force of the blast created a shockwave that hit the village a second later.
Slowly, I uncurled my arms and opened my eyes.
The village below was still burning, The Nine-Tails was still roaring. But the beam that had been inches away from vaporizing me was gone.
I looked up toward the top of the Hokage Monument, just out of my line of sight.
Minato. The Fourth Hokage had arrived. He had deployed the Flying Thunder God technique, catching the Bijuudama at the last second and teleporting it away.
I slumped forward, my forehead resting against the stone floor.
I couldn't stop shaking. Tears, involuntarily, spilled hot down my cheeks. I gasped for air, my lungs burning, my heart beating fast.
I had survived. But it wasn't because of what I had planned.
I had survived because a man I had decided to let die had just saved me.
My foreknowledge was flawed. My power did not matter. In the face of true monsters of this reality, I was nothing more than an insect.
I listened to the muffled sounds of Minato engaging the masked man, and the teleportation of the Nine-Tails out of the village boundaries.
The battle was moving away, taking the threat of annihilation with it, but the fires below continued to paint the city with a bloody orange.
I didn't move for hours.
When the first gray light of dawn began to creep over the horizon, illuminating the crater that used to be the central district of Konoha, I finally forced my muscles to move.
I crawled to the edge of the fissure and looked down.
The village was a graveyard. The casualty count would be astronomical. And somewhere out there in the forests, The Fourth Hokage and his wife were dead on a ritual altar, a newborn child crying beside them.
The timeline was secured.
I pulled myself up.
It was time to climb down. The shelters would be conducting emergency headcounts among the survivors.
I began the slow descent down the cliff.
My plans had to change. Surviving wasn't enough anymore. Hiding wasn't enough. The universe had just shown me what the real ceiling of power required to exist in this world was.
If I never wanted to feel that helplessness again, I couldn't just observe. I had to become a monster myself.