The first thing I noticed was the mask.
Rough fabric pressed against my lips, dry and suffocating. For a long, hazy moment, I thought I had dozed off at my desk again — another wasted night, another all-nighter gone wrong. My mind reached for the familiar: a cracked phone screen, the bluish glare of a monitor, the hum of a dying fan.
But when my vision cleared, I wasn't staring at plastic or glass.
I was staring at a ceiling scarred with kunai marks.
"No… impossible."
The words slipped from my mouth, unbidden. And then it hit me — a flood of memories that weren't mine but buried themselves in my head as though they had always been there.
A boy with silver hair kneeling before his father's cooling body.A mask, white and blank, soaked with blood under moonlight.A teammate crushed under stone, screaming.Another impaled by his own lightning blade.A sensei who smiled like the sun as the world fell into darkness.
I gasped and clutched at my face. My hand met fabric — the rough tug of a mask. My other hand brushed through thick, spiky hair, pale as snow, falling over a metal plate carved with a leaf.
Kakashi Hatake.
I had transmigrated into Kakashi Hatake's body.
For a long while, I could only sit there on the edge of the bed, breathing hard, the weight of two lifetimes crushing me. My old self — a tired man who read Naruto fanfiction until dawn, dreaming of "what ifs." And now this: a shinobi already legendary, already broken, already carrying enough ghosts to drown a village.
But unlike the Kakashi of canon, I had something he never did.
Foreknowledge.And the determination not to waste it.
"Team 7," I muttered, testing my voice. Hoarse, but steady.In one month, they would meet their new sensei.
A crooked smile tugged under my mask."Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura… don't worry. I'll beat your asses properly."
The thought made my stomach tighten. Because I knew how it went in canon. Kakashi had been a decent teacher, but careless. Passive. Lazy. Too wounded to guide them properly. That negligence led to betrayal, war, and oceans of blood.
Not this time.
I reached for a storage scroll on the shelf. My fingers trembled as I unsealed it, revealing a parchment lined with impossibly precise seals. I knew the handwriting instantly — even before the memories surged.
The Fourth Hokage's notes.Minato Namikaze.
My sensei.
He had entrusted them to Kakashi years ago, but Kakashi had never dared to attempt them. His chakra reserves had been too shallow, his will too fractured, his body too fragile. Hiraishin was beyond him.
But I was not the same Kakashi.
My fingers brushed the inked formula, tracing the spiraling kanji, and something inside me twisted between reverence and hunger. An almost manic laugh bubbled in my throat.
"Minato-sensei… you won't be disappointed. I'll carry your torch properly this time."
The night stretched on. I sat cross-legged, forcing my chakra into steady rhythm, experimenting with suppression seals to throttle the Sharingan's endless drain. A simple concept in theory. Brutal in practice. Shadow clones surrounded me, each one burning themselves out testing variations of seals and collapsing in bursts of memory.
I would not sleep. Sleep was a luxury. Survival was a necessity.
When dawn finally broke, I stood atop the Hokage Monument, the village sprawling below in a sea of rooftops and mist. My mask tugged against a grin that felt sharp enough to draw blood.
This world wouldn't run like canon.The wolf would hunt fate itself.