[Title Drop]
The taste of bile burned his throat as his body tried to reject what his eyes had just witnessed.
Behind him, Orochimaru watched quietly.
His expression was… strange.
"I suppose you didn't expect that," Orochimaru said calmly.
Akira coughed and wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve, still breathing heavily.
Orochimaru continued speaking as if discussing something mundane.
"This territory technically falls under my command during the war."
He glanced down toward the village again.
"As one of the Sannin of Konohagakure, certain border regions in the Land of Fire were assigned to me to monitor."
Akira slowly pushed himself up, still feeling nauseous.
"You're… responsible for this area?"
Orochimaru tilted his head slightly.
His eyes shifted back toward the village where several Iwagakure shinobi were dragging prisoners across the dirt.
"Yes, but I chose not to interfere."
Akira looked at him sharply.
Orochimaru's tone remained calm.
"You see, Akira-kun… some things are more valuable if left undisturbed."
He gestured faintly toward the valley.
"The shinobi stationed here are mostly Chunin and a few Jonin-level operatives."
His golden eyes gleamed faintly.
"And I need them."
Akira frowned. "For what?"
Orochimaru's answer came without hesitation. "To produce the N-series drugs."
Orochimaru clasped his hands behind his back as he explained.
"The compounds required for those drugs are… complicated. They cannot be produced from ordinary biological material."
He looked toward Akira.
"They require organs harvested from shinobi with sufficiently developed chakra systems."
Akira's stomach twisted again.
Orochimaru continued as if discussing a medical procedure.
"At minimum, Chunin-level bodies. Higher chakra density produces significantly better results."
He glanced toward the village again.
"The soldiers occupying that settlement are perfect."
Akira stared at him.
"So you just…let them commit atrocities?"
Of course he let's them do all those things... Orochimaru was always like that.
Orochimaru gave a small shrug.
"If I eliminated them now, I would lose dozens of valuable specimens."
His voice remained clinical.
"But if I wait, eventually they will become materials."
The screams from the valley drifted faintly into the forest again.
Orochimaru's gaze returned to Akira.
He smiled slightly.
Akira's POV
The smell of vomit still lingered in my mouth.
My stomach slowly settled, but the images refused to disappear. Every time I blinked, I saw them again—the villagers tied to posts, the cages, the bodies thrown aside like broken tools.
I wiped my mouth and forced myself to breathe slowly.
What the hell…
This wasn't supposed... No something like this was never in Naruto.
My thoughts raced.
In the original Naruto, war was brutal, yes. Villages fought, shinobi died, tragedies happened. But it was always… distant. Clean, almost.
You heard about battles.
You saw flashbacks.
Maybe a ruined village here or there.
But this?
This was something else entirely.
This was what war actually looked like.
Slow.
Cruel.
Pointless suffering inflicted on people who had nothing to do with the conflict.
My eyes drifted back toward the valley.
The screams had grown quieter, but they were still there.
A knot formed in my chest.
Something felt wrong.
Not morally wrong—I already knew the world was brutal.
No.
Something else.
My mind started running through memories of the series I had watched in my previous life.
The wars, The shinobi villages, The politics.
None of this had ever been shown.
Not like this.
I frowned slightly.
Was it simply because the anime never showed the darker side of war?
Or…
A colder thought formed in the back of my mind.
What if the problem wasn't the anime?
What if the problem was my assumption?
I had believed from the start that this world followed the story of Naruto.
That events would unfold roughly the same way, aside from the intervation of The past batch 1 and batch 2 reincarnators, but the changes they made didn't really affect the story directly, as The Red village was destroyed, all the past reincarnators were dead.
That the characters I knew would behave more or less like they did in the show.
But what if that belief itself was flawed?
My eyes slowly widened.
Maybe…
Just maybe…
This wasn't the sanitized story I remembered.
Maybe this wasn't the anime version of the Naruto world at all.
Maybe this was what the Naruto world would actually look like if it were real.
A real world where shinobi were soldiers.
Where villages were military states.
Where human beings behaved exactly the same way they always had throughout history.
Cruel.Selfish.Violent.
Just like the world I came from.
My gaze drifted toward Orochimaru, who still stood calmly at the cliff edge as if nothing below bothered him in the slightest.
If that's true then,...
This is not The Naruto world from the anime, but rather...
A Different World