The words—"Why don't I just show you?"—did not echo. They settled into the scorched silence of the training ground like a stone into a pond, the ripples carrying a charge of imminent revelation.
In one fluid motion, Renjiro's hand dipped to the weapons pouch at his thigh. His fingers brushed a specific storage seal, and with a soft puff of released chakra and a faint scent of ozone, his bo staff materialised in his grasp.
The polished dark wood, tipped with reinforced steel caps, caught the fading orange light of the sun and the sullen glow of the cooling craters. He didn't twirl it, didn't adopt a flashy stance. He simply levelled it, the blunt end pointing directly at Miwa's centre of mass. His Mangekyō continued its silent, crimson revolution.
"Come at me," he said, his voice calm, devoid of bravado. It was a simple instruction.
Miwa stared, her initial curiosity hardening into disbelief. "You want to spar? Now? With that in your eyes? Is this really necessary, Renjiro?" Her gaze flicked from the staff to his glowing doujutsu, searching for the trick.
"It's not a spar," he corrected, his tone even. "And the ability can't be demonstrated passively. It requires real combat intent. Yours. Directed at me." He saw the understanding dawn in her eyes, followed by a flicker of professional assessment.
A lifetime of shinobi instinct overrode her maternal reluctance. The hesitation evaporated from her posture, replaced by the lethal grace of Uchiha Miwa, veteran of two wars. She shrugged, a small, sharp motion. "Don't blame me if you get hurt."
She moved. There was no dramatic shout, no visible gathering of chakra. One moment she was standing ten feet away, the next she had closed half the distance in a blur of controlled motion, her hand a knife-edge aimed for his solar plexus. It was a probing strike, fast and clean, but holding back.
Renjiro flowed aside, his own movement economical, his staff whipping in a tight, defensive arc that cracked against her forearm, deflecting the blow. It was a competent, high-jonin level exchange.
"You're pulling the strike," he noted, his voice steady even as he pivoted on the brittle ground.
"I told you. Killing intent. Or this is pointless."
A spark of irritation—and respect—flashed in Miwa's dark eyes. Her Sharingan erupted to life, twin tomoe spinning in her pupils. The air around her seemed to sharpen. The next lunge was different. It was a symphony of lethal intent.
A kunai, drawn from her sleeve in the same motion, thrust for his throat while her other hand, fingers taut and buzzing with concentrated chakra, aimed to disrupt the chakra points around his heart.
It was a combination strike from the Uchiha's close-quarters repertoire, refined through decades of experience. Fast, ruthless, and leaving no conventional avenue for escape. To the Sharingan, his defensive options evaporated like mist before a torch.
Renjiro saw it all. Saw the kunai's path, saw the deadly glow of her chakra-enhanced fingers. His mind calculated trajectories, speeds, and angles of evasion. The answer was a cold, simple equation: Cannot evade. Cannot block both.
This was the precipice.
His already-active Mangekyō did not flare. Instead, it… stuttered. The elegant, spinning pattern of the tri-wheel wobbled in its rotation, a single, jarring hitch. The air around Renjiro didn't tear or shimmer with light. It lagged. It was a visceral wrongness, as if reality itself had skipped a frame. Sound distorted—the shush of Miwa's gi, the whistle of the kunai—stretched into a dull, elongated moan for a fraction of a second.
Then, two things happened at once.
In one seamless continuity, Renjiro's body seemed to dissolve from the point of impact, slipping past the kunai's edge with a contortion that defied bone and muscle, the staff coming up to parry the chakra-hand in a shower of blue sparks.
Simultaneously, another Renjiro existed half a step inside Miwa's guard, having bypassed her attack entirely. This one's staff was already in motion, a controlled, brutal strike aimed not to maim but to disarm, the steel cap cracking against her wrist with a sickening thud that sent the kunai spinning into the charred earth.
Both actions were real. Both were tangible. The displaced air from the dodge brushed Miwa's cheek. The sharp pain from the strike on her wrist jolted up her arm. For one impossible moment, she perceived two Renjiros, two outcomes, layered over each other like a double-exposed photograph.
Then, collapse.
The two instances snapped back into a single point with a soundless, psychic snap. Renjiro stood, whole and singular, three feet from where he'd started, his staff held low. He staggered, a hand flying to his temple as a wave of delayed, nauseating pain—the shared feedback of the strike he'd both dodged and received—crashed through his system. He breathed hard, his Mangekyō still active but spinning normally now, its light seeming dimmer.
He looked at Miwa, who stood frozen, her Sharingan wide, cradling her numb wrist. His voice was slightly ragged. "Which side did I hit you from?"
Miwa didn't answer. Her mind, a precision instrument of analysis, was reeling. Not a clone—clones dissipated, didn't have solid, damaging mass. Not a genjutsu—her Sharingan would have seen through it, and the pain in her wrist was brutally, physically real.
Not a substitution—there was no log, no debris, and the temporal overlap was impossible. This was something else. Something that violated causality.
Her thoughts came cold and rapid, a survivor's calculus. 'He existed in two positions. Both were true. He both dodged and countered in the same temporal space. The strain is on his consciousness—having to reconcile two mutually exclusive realities, two sets of sensory input and memory. That's the instability. Not chakra exhaustion, but existential feedback. If he lost focus, which 'him' would he become? Could his mind fracture under the weight of its own contradictory truth?'
The sheer, horrifying danger of the ability—to himself as much as to an enemy—crystallized in her gut. This wasn't just a new weapon. It was a pact with paradox.
Renjiro straightened, mastering the disorientation. He let his Mangekyō fade, the crimson light dying to leave his normal, dark eyes, now shadowed with fatigue.
"Bunshin no Aida," he said, the name a quiet exhale. "The Space Between Selves. It's… taxing, especially when the distance between my bodies increases. In more ways than one."
Miwa finally lowered her hand, flexing her fingers, feeling the ache. She said nothing, still processing.
"The other ability," Renjiro continued, his voice firming as he regained his composure, "is genjutsu-based. I won't demonstrate it." He met her gaze, and in his eyes, she saw a hard-won maturity that hadn't been there before.
"It's called Kōkai no Kagami. The Mirror of Regret. It doesn't create illusions. It reflects and amplifies the target's own unresolved trauma, their deepest remorse, back at them." He shook his head once, a definitive motion.
"We are Uchiha. We carry enough."
The restraint, the conscious ethical boundary, was perhaps more shocking to Miwa than the reality-bending ability. This was not the boy desperately clawing for power. This was a man defining the limits of his own curse.
He took a step closer, his expression turning probing, seeking the insight only she could give. "Analyse it, Aunt Miwa. The abilities. Their roots. The first breaks space and self. The second reflects inner torment. What does that say about the… the wound that forged this pair of eyes?"
The request, coming on the heels of the staggering demonstration, was the final straw. The cool, analytical veteran shattered. The worried, overwhelmed aunt surfaced.
"Analyse it?!" Miwa's voice snapped through the clearing, sharp and loud, scattering the last of the eerie silence. She took a step toward him, her composure utterly gone, replaced by a wave of sheer, frustrated, fearful emotion.
"You break reality in front of me, talk about mirrors of regret, and then ask for a psychological profile?!" She ran a hand through her hair, her breath coming fast.
"No. Not now. You… you need to leave. Now. I need… I need time to process what I just saw. Get out!"
=====
Bless me with your powerful Power Stones.
Your Reviews and Comments about my work are welcome
If you can, then please support me on Patreon.
Link - www.patreon.com/SideCharacter
You Can read more chapters ahead on Patreon
Latest Chapter: 731-Tense Arrivals