The world had shrunk to the space of a few square feet on the common room floor. Every sunrise found Akira there, his small body a taut line of exertion against the cold wood. The initial six seconds of his plank had become a benchmark, a tiny island of achievement in a vast ocean of inadequacy. His mornings were a ritual of pushing his body to that limit, collapsing, and then repeating the process until the shaking in his arms became uncontrollable. The number of repetitions, not the duration, was the new metric of his progress.
He began adding to the grueling routine. Outside, the ancient oak tree at the edge of the yard became his new instrument of torture. Its lowest branch, thick and worn smooth by generations of children, was a distant goal. After several days of clumsy, failed attempts to even reach it, he finally managed to haul himself up, his fingers barely wrapping around the wood. He tried to hang. His grip, weak and untested, lasted for less than a heartbeat before he dropped back to the dirt with a jarring thud. It was another failure, another data point to be analyzed. The problem wasn't just his arms; it was the lack of cohesion, the inability of his back and shoulders to support the strain.
His relentless, silent efforts began to grate on the other children. The amusement they once found in his struggles curdled into annoyance. His refusal to cry out, his unnerving habit of getting back up after every shove, denied them the satisfaction they sought. He was a broken toy that refused to stay broken.
Koji and his followers changed their tactics. Their torment became less about random acts of cruelty and more about direct sabotage. They would wait until Akira was in the middle of a push-up, trembling with effort, before kicking his legs out from under him. They would form a circle around him in the yard, preventing him from reaching the oak tree, jeering at his quiet persistence.
"What's the point, ghost?" Koji sneered one afternoon, blocking his path. "You're trying to be a shinobi? You're too weak to even be a farmer."
Akira offered no response. His gaze drifted past Koji, analyzing the way the bigger boy stood, the distribution of his weight, the slight forward lean that preceded any aggressive movement. These encounters were no longer just endurance tests; they were anatomical studies. He couldn't match their strength, so he began dissecting it. He learned to anticipate a shove by the subtle tensing of a shoulder. He started to understand how a clumsy punch was always telegraphed by a shift of the hips. His body was a poor shield, but his mind was becoming a master of reading the storm before it broke.
His observations extended beyond the orphanage walls. Whenever he could, he would watch the shinobi who moved through the village. To the other children, they were just cool, fast blurs. To Akira, they were a complex physics problem he was desperate to solve. He ignored the flashy jutsu, the impossible leaps. He focused on the fundamentals. He watched how a ninja landed silently, bending their knees to absorb the impact. He noted how they ran, not with the lumbering gait of a civilian, but with a low center of gravity, their arms held for balance, not momentum. He would try to mimic these basic postures in his secluded corner of the yard, resulting in awkward, ungainly movements that earned him fresh waves of ridicule.
One evening, the cumulative toll of his existence pressed down on him. His entire body was a symphony of aches. A fresh bruise was darkening on his ribs from Koji, and his scraped palms from his failures at the tree branch burned. He lay in his cot, listening to the soft breathing of the other sleeping children, and felt a profound, crushing sense of futility. The path he was on was a vertical cliff face, and he was trying to scale it with bleeding fingernails. For a fleeting moment, the cold analytical part of his mind went silent, leaving only the raw despair of a five-year-old trapped in a body that was a prison.
Then, the coldness returned, sharper than before. Despair was a luxury. It was an emotion, and emotions were weaknesses to be discarded. This pain was not a punishment; it was a forge. Every bruise, every ache, every sneering laugh was a hammer blow, beating the useless fragility out of his new form. He did not need hope. He needed resolve.
The next afternoon, he went to the oak tree. Koji and his two shadows were waiting, as expected.
"Going to try and climb to the moon, ghost?" one of them taunted.
Akira ignored them. He walked to the tree, his movements measured. He reached up, his fingers finding their grip on the familiar rough bark of the trunk. As Koji stepped forward to shove him, Akira did something different. Instead of bracing for the impact, he used the boy's momentum, letting the push pivot him slightly. It wasn't a dodge, not truly, but a slight, calculated shift. Koji's shove, meant for his back, glanced off his shoulder, causing the bigger boy to stumble forward a step from his own force.
It was a tiny, insignificant moment. Koji barely registered it, recovering his balance with a frustrated growl. But for Akira, it was a revelation. In that split second, he had not been a victim. He had used his opponent's strength against him.
He ignored Koji's subsequent, harder shove that sent him to the ground. He lay there, the familiar pain a dull background noise. His mind was alight. It was a new variable, a new path of study. He didn't just have to build his body. He had to master the geometry of conflict. He pushed himself up, the dirt clinging to his cheek, and for the first time, the endless climb ahead seemed not just necessary, but possible.