Kaito's death was sudden and without dignity. Screeching tires, a flash of headlights, and then impact. His ribs cracked, his chest caved, and the air was ripped from his lungs. Darkness swallowed him before he even had the chance to scream. No pain. No thought. Just silence.
When he opened his eyes again, the first thing he tasted was ash. His chest burned with every breath. He lay sprawled across torn earth, his limbs trembling, weak and foreign. His hands were small, his arms thin, childlike.
He pushed himself upright, vision spinning, and froze. The land around him was a graveyard. Bodies littered the ground, men in battered armor, their blood soaking into the dirt. Spears jutted from the soil, kunai glinted faintly where they had fallen, and trees bore scars from fire and steel. A battle had raged here and ended in slaughter.
Panic clawed at him. None of this made sense. He had been alive, then dead, and now this. His chest should have been crushed, but when he pressed a hand to his ribs, all he felt was the frantic beat of a new heart.
A sound broke through the haze. Footsteps. Heavy. Deliberate.
Figures emerged from the treeline. Warriors in armor, weapons still at the ready though the battle was over. They moved in disciplined formation, their presence radiating danger. On their backs was a crest, red and white, shaped like a fan.
One of them stepped forward, his gaze sharp, his eyes almost glowing with an unnatural clarity.
"You survived?" the man asked. His tone was flat, not unkind, but not hopeful either. The voice of someone who had seen too many children die to be surprised.
Kaito swallowed, his throat dry. "I… I think so. My name is… Kaito."
The man studied him in silence, then gave a curt nod. "Take him. We'll bring him back. The Senju must have overlooked him."
Two warriors moved to his sides, lifting him with ease. His body was too weak to resist, his mind too clouded to protest.
But as they carried him, his eyes fell again on the crest, the fan. Something inside him froze. He knew it. Not from here, not from this life, but from the pages of a story he had devoured long ago.
Uchiha.
The name burned in his mind. If the Uchiha were real, then so was the battlefield, the blood, the endless war. He had been reborn into another world and not just any world. The world of shinobi. The Warring States.
His breath quickened. This era was chaos. The clans bled each other dry, their children raised as soldiers, their leaders clinging to the dream of unity. Somewhere out there, Madara Uchiha and Hashirama Senju walked the earth, men whose names would shape the future itself.
And now, so did he.
A child, swept into history's current.
Kaito's fists clenched despite their trembling. Fear gnawed at him, but beneath it simmered something else. Excitement. Determination. This world was no longer fiction. It was his reality. And survival would demand more than knowledge of the story. It would demand strength.
The Uchiha warriors carried him deeper into the forest, their voices low as they spoke of enemies, treaties, and the faint hope that war might finally end.
Kaito turned his head once, looking back at the battlefield, at the corpses abandoned to the dirt. His new life had begun in the shadow of death.
And in the world of shinobi, death was never far away.