A year after the massacre, Kenji tried to kill his son with exercise. At least, that was how Daiki described it.
"Twenty laps around the compound," Kenji said, standing in the backyard with his arms crossed while the morning sun barely cleared the trees. "Then fifty push-ups. After that, the kata set. Twice."
"Dad. I'm eight."
"I'm aware."
Kenji didn't budge. Daiki groaned and started running.
The taijutsu regimen had been a point of contention for months. He couldn't understand why his father, a man who fought almost exclusively with puppets and jutsu, was so insistent on building a physical foundation. The Yamanaka clan wasn't known for their taijutsu. They were known for getting inside your head. Why did he need to run laps when his future involved sitting still and hijacking someone's brain?
He had asked exactly that question two weeks ago.
Kenji met him with a look that made it clear the answer existed and that it mattered, but he had no intention of revealing it yet.
"Because I said so," was what he had actually said, which was the most annoying possible response.
Daiki ran his laps, then dropped into his push-ups. After that, he moved through the kata twice. His form deteriorated with each repetition as exhaustion set in. By the end, he collapsed face-down in the grass, breathing as if he had just outrun a bear.
"Your second set was sloppy," Kenji observed from his chair.
"My second set was performed by a corpse. Because you killed me."
"So dramatic."
"I learned it from Mom."
The corner of Kenji's mouth twitched. That was as close to a laugh as he usually got before noon.
Honoka appeared at the back door with two glasses of water and a look that suggested she had heard every word. She handed one glass to Daiki, who accepted it like a man dying of thirst in a desert, and set the other on the table next to Kenji.
"Stop torturing him," she said.
"I'm building his foundation."
"You're building a grudge is what you're doing." She turned to Daiki. "Wash up and eat. Fūinjutsu practice after breakfast."
Daiki perked up immediately. If there was one part of his training schedule he enjoyed, it was the sessions with his mother. She had been teaching him Uzumaki clan sealing techniques for the past several months, starting with basic storage seals and working up to simple barrier formulas. The work was precise and exacting, requiring a steady hand and focused chakra control.
"Can we do the four-point barrier today?" he asked, already halfway to the door.
"If you finish the matrix exercises first."
"Deal!"
He disappeared inside. Honoka sat down in the chair Daiki had vacated and looked at Kenji.
"He's not wrong about the taijutsu, you know. He doesn't understand why you're pushing it so hard."
"He doesn't need to understand yet."
"He would train harder if he did."
Kenji took a sip of water and considered that. She had a point. Daiki wasn't the type to resist instruction, he was diligent by nature, even when he complained. But there was a difference between going through the motions and training with purpose, and purpose required understanding.
The reason was simple. A Yamanaka's greatest vulnerability was their physical body.
The Mind Body Switch Technique left the user's body completely defenseless. If an enemy reached you while your consciousness was inside another mind, you would die without resistance. Puppet masters faced a similar weakness from a different angle, as their focus was divided between controlling their puppet and defending their own body. In both cases, survival depended on time. The margin between life and death was measured in seconds, and in how quickly an enemy could close the distance.
Physical conditioning was the insurance policy. If your jutsu failed, if your puppet broke, or if your technique was disrupted, what you had left was your body and whatever it could do. A Yamanaka who couldn't run, dodge, or take a hit was a dead Yamanaka.
But explaining threat assessment to an eight-year-old over breakfast felt like overkill.
"I'll tell him eventually," Kenji said.
Honoka gave him the look that said she disagreed but wasn't going to push it. She had learned to pick her battles over the years, and this one wasn't worth the energy.
---
After breakfast, the atmosphere in the household began to change.
Kenji's training was built on structure and repetition. He ordered Daiki to run laps, hold stances, and repeat each movement until it became instinct. There was discipline in his methods, but little warmth. He taught the same way he had learned.
Honoka, however, approached teaching differently.
She prepared the fūinjutsu workspace at the kitchen table, laying out blank sealing paper, ink, and brushes. Each item was placed in its proper position. The paper rested on the left, the ink sat in the center, and the reference scrolls lay neatly on the right.
When everything was ready, she sat across from Daiki.
"Matrix exercises first," she said, settling across from Daiki. "Show me last week's four-element convergence pattern."
Daiki dipped his brush into the ink and began to draw. The convergence pattern was a foundational exercise. Four elemental symbols were positioned at the cardinal points around a central anchor, each connected by precise lines that required consistent spacing.
His strokes were steady. Honoka watched his hand, not the pattern itself, evaluating his control.
"Your north-east connector is drifting," she said after a minute. "See how the line thins right at the bend? That's where you're losing focus. Your brush hand is fine, but your chakra flow is wavering at the transition point."
Daiki paused and examined the flaw she indicated. She was right. The curve was fractionally thinner.
"Try it again. This time, don't think about the brush. Think about the chakra. The brush follows the chakra, not the other way around."
He redrew the connector. It was better. Not flawless, but far more consistent.
"Again."
By the fourth attempt, the line was clean. Honoka nodded.
"Now finish the pattern."
She sat with him for an hour, guiding him through progressively more complex matrix exercises. Her teaching style was patient. She had let him struggle with a concept for a while, give him room to figure it out himself, then step in with a correction when he was about to cement a bad habit.
The four-point barrier exercise came last. It was more advanced than the drills he had practiced before. Instead of simply drawing a seal pattern, he needed to infuse each of the four points with a precise amount of chakra, then activate them in sequence to form a protective barrier above the paper. The barrier would last only a few seconds and could not stop anything stronger than a stiff breeze, but it was his first true seal activation.
He completed the four points, checked his spacing one more time, and pushed chakra into the pattern.
The paper glowed faintly. A translucent shimmer formed in the air above it. The barrier held for four seconds before flickering and dissolving.
"I did it!" Daiki's face split into a grin. "Mom, did you see that?"
"I saw it," she replied with a soft smile. "Nice work."
"Can I do it again?"
"Tomorrow. You've used enough chakra for one session."
He deflated slightly but didn't argue. Honoka was strict about chakra limits, especially at his age. Overtraining chakra pathways in a developing body could cause long-term damage, something she had explained to him early and often.
"Four seconds is the baseline," she said, rolling up the sealing paper. "Next week, we aim for six. The week after that, eight. The goal by the end of the month is a sustained barrier for fifteen seconds. Don't rush it."
"Fifteen? That'll take forever."
"Good things do."
---
On a Tuesday afternoon at the Academy, Iruka stood at the board, explaining a lesson on chakra theory. Half the class stared at him with unfocused eyes, while the other half struggled to stay awake.
Shikamaru had already lost that struggle. His head rested on his desk as he slept openly.
Nearby, Chōji ate chips beneath his desk. He seemed convinced that no one noticed.
Daiki sat in the middle section with Karin, paying attention because his mother had drilled into him that theory was the foundation of practice. Karin took notes with the intensity of someone preparing for a war. Her handwriting was small and impossibly neat.
Three rows back, Naruto was fidgeting. He had been fidgeting since the lesson started. His right knee bounced. His fingers tapped. At one point he started making shadow puppets on the wall using the light from the window, until Iruka noticed and gave him a look that could've wilted flowers.
Sasuke sat at the end of Naruto's row, chin propped on his hand, listening without taking notes. He didn't need to. He had the kind of memory that absorbed information on first exposure and filed it away for permanent access.
When Iruka finally released them for practical training, the classroom emptied like someone had pulled a drain plug.
The training field behind the Academy was where the real learning happened, at least in the students' opinion. Today's exercise was chakra application, tree climbing without hands, using only chakra focused through the soles of their feet.
Iruka demonstrated first, walking up the trunk of a large oak. He stopped halfway, turned around so he was facing the class while standing perpendicular to the ground, and explained the technique.
"The key is consistency. Too much chakra and you'll push yourself away from the surface. Too little and you'll slide. You want a steady, even flow, like a stream, not a waterfall. Everyone pick a tree and start practicing. Don't go higher than three meters until I've checked your form."
The class dispersed immediately.
Daiki placed his foot against the bark, adjusted his chakra flow, and walked up. Three meters. Four. Five. He stopped at six, standing sideways on the trunk, and looked down at the training ground.
He could feel the pull of gravity and the constant micro-adjustments his chakra was making to maintain adhesion. But it was manageable, the way a balancing act becomes manageable once your body learns the rhythm.
Karin reached the three-meter mark on her second attempt. She grinned up at Daiki from her tree.
"Show-off!" she called.
"It's not showing off if you're just doing the exercise."
"It is when you make it look easy!"
Naruto, two trees over, was having a different experience entirely. He made it about a meter and a half up the trunk before his foot blasted a chunk of bark off the tree and sent him tumbling backward. He landed on his back with a thud that made several nearby students wince.
"Ow," he muttered.
He climbed to his feet and tried again, choosing a different tree this time. The result was no better. The bark cracked under his foot, and he slid back down, leaving a long trail of scuffed wood behind him.
The problem was obvious to anyone familiar with chakra control. Naruto possessed enormous reserves, far greater than any other student present, thanks to both his lineage and the sealed entity within him. However, raw volume and precise control were entirely different matters. His chakra output fluctuated wildly. He pushed too much, then overcorrected, then failed to push enough. The tree suffered the consequences of that instability.
"Dammit!" Naruto kicked the base of his tree, which accomplished nothing except hurting his foot.
Sasuke, naturally, had walked up his tree on the first attempt. He stood at the four-meter mark, watching Naruto's struggles.
"You're overloading," he said from his perch.
"I know that!"
"Then stop doing it."
"Wow, thanks! Super helpful!"
Iruka appeared beside Naruto. He knelt down and spoke quietly, adjusting Naruto's stance and explaining the sensation he should be aiming for. Naruto listened, nodded, and tried again. This time he made it to two meters before slipping.
After class, the four of them walked together toward the village center. It had become a habit. Daiki, Naruto, Karin, and Sasuke naturally fell into step at the end of each school day. Sometimes they headed straight home. Other times, they stopped at one of the food stalls along the main road.
Today, they chose dango.
"I hate tree climbing," Naruto announced through a mouthful of sweet dango. "My trees are going to be bald by the end of the week."
"Your chakra control just needs work," Karin said. "It's not something you're bad at for the rest of your life. It's something you haven't figured out yet."
"Easy for you to say. You've got sensor stuff. Daiki's got his dad's genes. Sasuke's got Sasuke things. What do I have?"
"More chakra than the rest of us combined," Daiki said. "That's not nothing."
"Fat lot of good it does me if I can't control it."
"So learn to control it."
"I'm trying!"
"Try harder."
Naruto threw a dango skewer at Daiki, who caught it without looking. Karin rolled her eyes. Sasuke ate his dango in silence, but the corner of his mouth twitched.
---
On a Saturday afternoon, Mikoto came to the Yamanaka household for tea.
The visit had been Honoka's idea. Mikoto had hesitated before accepting.
Honoka had pressed gently.
And so they sat together in the garden.
Honoka and Mikoto shared tea and small cakes at a low table, while Daiki practiced throwing shuriken at a wooden target ten meters away. On the porch steps, Sasuke held a book open in his hands, though his attention drifted often. His eyes followed Daiki's movements far more than the words on the page.
"He's gotten better," Mikoto observed, watching Daiki land four out of five in the inner ring.
"Kenji works with him on weekends," Honoka said. "Accuracy drills in the morning, chakra exercises in the afternoon. I handle fūinjutsu in between."
"Between the two of you, that boy's schedule is tighter than most genin."
"Don't let him hear you say that. He already thinks we're trying to kill him."
Mikoto smiled.
"Sasuke's been pushing himself hard too," she said after a moment. "He asked me to teach him the Great Fireball Technique."
"Isn't that advanced for his age?"
"It's a rite of passage in the Uchiha clan. Traditionally, a child performs it in front of the clan head to demonstrate readiness." She paused. "The clan head has not yet been decided. But Sasuke wanted to learn it anyway."
Honoka poured more tea.
In the yard, Daiki threw his last shuriken, missed the inner ring by a finger's width, and made a sound of frustration that startled a bird out of the nearest tree.
"Hey, Sasuke!" Daiki called over his shoulder. "You want to try? I bet I can still beat you."
Sasuke looked up from his book. "You missed."
"I missed once out of five."
"So you lost twenty percent of your accuracy."
"That's not... that's... okay, that's technically true. But come throw some and let's see your percentage."
Sasuke closed his book, stood up, and walked over to the target post. He picked up five shuriken from the basket, weighed them briefly in his hand, and threw all five in rapid succession.
All five hit the inner ring, and one landed exactly at the center.
Daiki stared at the target, then at Sasuke, then back at the target.
"I hate you."
"You asked."
Karin would've hit Naruto for a comment like that. But Daiki just laughed. "Okay, that was clean. Show me how you're doing the release. My follow-through keeps pulling left."
Sasuke hesitated for a moment, then stepped forward. He reached out and adjusted Daiki's grip on the shuriken.
"You're holding it too far forward. Move your fingers back. And your wrist is snapping too early. Let the rotation build before you release."
Daiki threw. This time, the shuriken hit dead center.
"See?" Sasuke said.
"Why didn't you tell me that before?"
"You didn't ask before."
From the garden, Mikoto and Honoka watched the exchange. Mikoto's expression was complicated.
"He's different around Daiki," she said quietly.
"Kids need friends," Honoka said simply.
"They do."
---
That evening, after Mikoto and Sasuke had gone home, Kenji arrived back from a meeting at the Hokage's office. He hung up his flak jacket, kissed Honoka on the cheek, and sat down at the kitchen table where Daiki was finishing homework.
"How was your day?" Honoka asked.
"Long."
His gaze shifted to Daiki's homework. It was a written assignment on chakra pathway theory. He studied the diagram briefly.
"That diagram is wrong."
"No, it's not!"
"The tenketsu point you labeled as number fourteen is number sixteen. Fourteen is two centimeters lower."
Daiki looked down at his diagram, then back at his textbook. After a moment, he groaned. "Are you serious? How do you even know that from across the room?"
"I built a puppet with a full tenketsu mapping system. Knowing where each point is located was literally my job for six months."
Daiki erased the label and corrected it, muttering something unflattering about fathers with unreasonable knowledge bases.
After Daiki went to bed, Kenji and Honoka moved to the living room and sat together in the quiet.
"Mikoto was here today," Honoka said eventually.
"How is she?"
"She's managing. Sasuke is doing well at the Academy, and that helps. She mentioned that he wants to learn the Great Fireball Technique."
Kenji nodded. "He asked her about it last month, too. She told me during the parent-teacher meeting."
"She seemed happy today. Or close to it. Watching the boys practice together, it was nice for her. I could tell."
Kenji was quiet for a moment, turning something over in his head.
"She deserves some 'nice.' After everything, she deserves a lot more than that, but nice is a start."
---
The following week, Kenji cleared an afternoon and told Daiki to meet him in the workshop after school.
Daiki arrived still smelling of dirt, sweat, and the faint scent of burned wood. He stepped into the workshop and stopped.
Kenji's workshop was always interesting. Puppet components hung from the walls and ceiling. Workbenches were covered with tools, and sealing arrays. But today, something new occupied the central table.
It was a small puppet, no more than forty centimeters tall. Its form was roughly humanoid, constructed from light wood with simple joints at the shoulders, elbows, and knees. It lacked decoration or weapons. There were no hidden mechanisms or elaborate features. It was nothing more than a clean, functional frame fitted with a basic control harness.
"What's that?" Daiki asked, even though some part of him already knew.
"This is your first training puppet." Kenji picked it up and held it out. "It is a basic model with no combat capability. Its only purpose is to teach you how to control something that is not your own body."
Daiki accepted it carefully. It was lighter than he had expected, and the joints moved smoothly when he tested them with his fingers.
"You have been practicing chakra strings with me for three weeks," Kenji said. "Today, we move to the next step. Attach a string to the puppet's right arm and make it wave."
"Just wave?"
"Yes. Once you master that, we will add more."
Daiki set the puppet on the table, extended his hand, and concentrated. A thin line of chakra materialized from his fingertip and reached toward the puppet's right arm.
Connection was the easy part. His father had drilled single-string attachment for weeks, and he could form and maintain a stable chakra string for several minutes without strain. The hard part was what came next.
He pushed chakra through the string, trying to flex the puppet's elbow joint. The arm twitched, jerked sideways, and the puppet toppled off the table.
"Too much force," Kenji said. "You're yanking. A chakra string isn't a rope. It's an extension of your nervous system. When you move your own arm, you do not pull it. You send a signal, and the muscles respond. This works the same way."
Daiki picked up the puppet and set it back on the table. He focused and tried again.
This time, the arm lifted.
The movement was uneven and unsteady, like a marionette controlled by trembling hands, but it rose. The puppet's wooden hand reached shoulder height, wavered briefly, and fell back down.
"Not bad. Again."
On the fourth attempt, the arm rose smoothly and held its position. It moved from side to side in something that could loosely be called a wave. The motion lacked grace, more like the puppet was brushing away an invisible insect, but it was controlled.
"Again."
By the eighth attempt, the wave looked natural. The arm lifted smoothly, moved with clear control, and returned cleanly to its resting position.
"Now the left arm."
Daiki blinked. "Already?"
"You've got two hands. The puppet has two arms. You might as well learn to use both."
Adding the second string was where it got difficult. Two simultaneous chakra connections meant splitting his focus, maintaining two separate flows of energy while coordinating their movements independently. It was like trying to pat his head and rub his stomach at the same time, except the head and stomach were made of wood and connected to his brain by invisible strings of pure energy.
The puppet waved its right arm. The left arm shot straight up and froze.
"Ugh."
"Don't force the left. Let the right continue on its own rhythm while you focus on establishing the left."
"That's like saying 'just breathe normally while also thinking about breathing.' It doesn't work!"
"It does. It just takes practice."
Twenty minutes later, both arms were waving. The timing was still off, the movements were choppy, and the puppet looked less like it was greeting someone and more like it was having a seizure. But both arms were moving under Daiki's control, and that was the milestone.
Kenji watched his son's face closely. He saw the furrow of concentration, the flicker of frustration when something failed, and the satisfaction when it worked. He knew that expression. He had worn it himself years earlier, in a workshop much like this one.
"That's enough for today."
"Already? I was just getting it!"
"You were just getting tired," Kenji replied calmly. "There's a difference. Your chakra strings are becoming unstable because your reserves are running low, not because your technique is wrong. We'll continue in two days."
Daiki retracted the chakra strings and sagged in his chair. He looked at the training puppet sitting motionless on the table and felt a surge of something he couldn't quite name.
"Dad?"
Kenji looked up. "Yeah?"
"Can you teach me more? I want to learn how to use one of these like you do."
Kenji studied him carefully before answering.
"Using a puppet in a real situation isn't just about moving the joints. It's about thinking in two places at once. Your body is here. The puppet is there. You need to be aware of both, protect both, and make them work together. That takes years of practice, and it starts with exercises exactly like this one."
Daiki nodded. "I know. But I still want to learn."
"Then we continue. Same schedule. Two sessions a week, along with your regular training."
"And the taijutsu?" Daiki asked cautiously.
"And the taijutsu."
Daiki groaned, but he was smiling. "Fine. But if those morning runs kill me, you have to tell Mom it was your fault."
Kenji smiled.
"Deal."
---
Later that night, Honoka found Kenji in the workshop, cleaning the training puppet's joints with a small brush.
"He loved it," she said from the doorway.
"He has talent."
"Like his father."
Kenji set down the brush. "His chakra control is better than mine was at his age. His string formation is cleaner. And he's patient with the work."
"But?"
He looked at her. "No buts."
"There's always a but with you."
He almost smiled. "He's eight. He's got years before any of this becomes real. For now, it's just training."
Honoka leaned against the doorframe and folded her arms. "That's not a but. That's a 'not yet.' Which is basically a but wearing a disguise."
"Fine. It worries me. Not his ability, his enthusiasm. He's all in. And I know where 'all in' leads in this profession."
"It leads to where you are. And where you are isn't so bad."
"I've been lucky."
"You've been good."
She pushed off the doorframe and headed toward the kitchen. "Come eat dinner. Daiki's already on his second helping and if you don't hurry there won't be anything left."
Kenji put down the brush, took one last look at the small puppet sitting on his workbench, and followed her out.