Yamamoto Uchiha—formerly known as Derek Thompson, a twenty-six-year-old accountant from Ohio who died after choking on a particularly ambitious bite of gas station sushi—woke up screaming.
This was reasonable.
What was less reasonable was that he continued screaming for approximately forty-five minutes, causing his new mother, Uchiha Akemi, to genuinely consider whether her newborn was possessed by some kind of demon. Her husband, Uchiha Takeshi, a man who had survived three wars and seen things that would make most people weep, stood in the corner of the room looking distinctly uncomfortable and muttering something about "maybe he'll grow out of it."
He did, eventually, grow out of it.
But not before the midwife had fled the compound, three neighbors had filed noise complaints with the Military Police (who were also Uchiha and therefore found the whole situation deeply embarrassing), and someone had actually tried to perform an exorcism.
Derek—now Yamamoto, a name he would spend the next several years absolutely butchering the pronunciation of in his own head—had not been screaming because he was a baby, though that was certainly part of it. He had been screaming because he remembered everything. The gas station. The sushi. The way the fluorescent lights had flickered overhead as he collapsed next to a display of novelty keychains. The disappointing realization that his last words had been "this tastes weird but I'm sure it's fine."
And now he was here.
Wherever "here" was.
It took him approximately three weeks to figure it out, and when he did, he started screaming again.
"UCHIHA?!" his infant brain shrieked, though what came out was more like "WAAAAAAAHHHHH."
His mother, who had just started to relax, immediately tensed up again.
"Takeshi," she said flatly, "I think our son is defective."
"All babies cry, dear."
"Not like this. This is... targeted."
She wasn't wrong. Yamamoto had, in fact, been staring directly at the Uchiha clan symbol embroidered on his father's shirt when the screaming began. He knew that symbol. Everyone who had ever watched Naruto knew that symbol. And everyone who had ever watched Naruto knew exactly what happened to people who wore that symbol.
They died.
Horribly.
In what could only be described as the worst family reunion in the history of fictional family reunions.
Yamamoto's tiny baby brain struggled to calculate his age relative to the timeline. He didn't know what year it was. He didn't know how old Itachi was. He didn't know if the massacre had already happened or if it was looming in the future like a particularly homicidal storm cloud.
What he did know was that he needed to get stronger.
Like, immediately.
Like, yesterday.
Like, he should have started training in the womb if that was even possible.
His father, apparently interpreting his son's intense staring at his own tiny fists as some kind of early developmental milestone, beamed with pride. "Look at that focus! He's going to be a prodigy, I just know it!"
"He's been clenching his fists for six hours straight," his mother said. "I think something is wrong with him."
"Nonsense! That's the Uchiha determination!"
Yamamoto was, in fact, trying to do baby push-ups. They were not going well. His arms were approximately the consistency of overcooked noodles, and his coordination could charitably be described as "non-existent." But that wasn't going to stop him. Nothing was going to stop him. He had seen the anime. He knew what was coming. And he absolutely refused to die again, especially not to some edgy thirteen-year-old with parent issues.
No offense to Itachi. The guy had his reasons. Yamamoto understood the complexities of the situation from a narrative perspective.
But he also understood, from a very personal and very survival-oriented perspective, that he did not want to be murdered.
So the grinding began.
At six months old, Yamamoto could crawl.
This was not unusual for a baby his age.
What was unusual was the intensity with which he crawled. He did laps around the house. Hundreds of them. His parents would put him down for a nap, and he would immediately flip himself over and start crawling in circles like a tiny, determined roomba.
"Should we... stop him?" his father asked, watching his infant son complete his three-hundredth lap of the living room.
"I tried," his mother said tiredly. "He bit me."
"He doesn't have teeth."
"He gummed me aggressively. It was unsettling."
Yamamoto ignored them both. He was building his cardiovascular endurance. Or something. He wasn't entirely sure how baby physiology worked, but he figured any exercise was better than no exercise. In his previous life, his idea of physical activity had been walking to the fridge during commercial breaks. That version of Derek was dead. Literally. Gas station sushi had killed him. This version—Yamamoto version, Uchiha version, hopefully-not-getting-massacred version—was going to be different.
He was going to be strong.
He was going to be fast.
He was going to be so ridiculously, absurdly, unreasonably powerful that when Itachi showed up with his Mangekyou Sharingan and his tragic backstory, he would take one look at Yamamoto and think "you know what, maybe I'll skip this house."
That was the plan, anyway.
The execution was... a work in progress.
At one year old, Yamamoto spoke his first word.
It was "training."
His mother wept.
"Why couldn't it be 'mama'?" she sobbed into her husband's shoulder. "Or 'papa'? Or literally anything normal?"
"I think it's wonderful!" his father said, completely missing the point. "Our son is dedicated to the shinobi arts! He'll bring great honor to the clan!"
Yamamoto, who was in the middle of attempting baby squats (his balance was terrible, and he kept falling over, but he refused to give up), didn't bother to correct them. Let them think he was a prodigy. Let them think he was naturally gifted. The truth was far simpler and far more pathetic: he was a former accountant with crippling anxiety about getting stabbed by a teenager, and he was coping with that anxiety through obsessive exercise.
It wasn't healthy.
But it was effective.
Probably.
He hoped.
The first time Yamamoto discovered he could use chakra, he was two years old.
He had been trying to do wall-sits—a challenging endeavor when you were thirty-two inches tall and had the muscle mass of a small potato—when he felt something shift inside him. It was warm. Tingly. Like drinking hot chocolate, but instead of going to his stomach, it spread throughout his entire body.
"Huh," he said out loud, because his vocabulary had expanded significantly since the "training" incident.
And then he accidentally stuck himself to the wall.
His mother found him three hours later, still plastered to the vertical surface like a very confused starfish, unable to figure out how to unstick himself.
"Takeshi," she said calmly. "Our two-year-old is on the wall."
"What?"
"The wall. He is on it. Vertically."
His father rushed into the room, took one look at the situation, and burst into tears of joy.
"HE'S A GENIUS!"
"He's stuck."
"A STUCK GENIUS!"
Yamamoto, for his part, had given up trying to free himself and was instead attempting to do wall-mounted crunches. If he was going to be stuck here anyway, he might as well make it productive. His mother stared at him with the hollow eyes of a woman who had long since stopped trying to understand her child. His father was already running off to tell the neighbors.
By the end of the day, half the Uchiha compound knew about the toddler who could walk on walls.
By the end of the week, Yamamoto had figured out how to unstick himself, how to stick himself to ceilings, and how to use chakra to enhance his crawling speed by approximately three hundred percent.
"He's like a little spider," one of the aunties commented, watching Yamamoto scuttle across the ceiling during a family gathering.
"We're so proud," his father said, wiping away a tear.
"I'm so tired," his mother said, drinking directly from a bottle of sake.
Yamamoto, who had discovered that ceiling-crawling was excellent core exercise, ignored them all and continued his laps.
At three years old, Yamamoto unlocked his Sharingan.
This was an accident.
It was also, in retrospect, probably inevitable given the amount of physical and emotional stress he was putting himself through on a daily basis. The Sharingan, as he vaguely remembered from the anime, was awakened through intense emotional experiences. Usually trauma. Sometimes love. Occasionally just really, really wanting something.
In Yamamoto's case, it was awakened because he accidentally walked in on one of the elder Uchiha council members taking a bath.
"AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!" the elder screamed.
"AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!" Yamamoto screamed back.
And then, somehow, they were staring at each other with matching spinning red eyes.
There was a very long, very uncomfortable silence.
"Did," the elder said slowly, "did you just awaken your Sharingan from seeing me naked?"
"I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S HAPPENING," Yamamoto shrieked, covering his eyes with his tiny hands. "I JUST WANTED TO FIND THE TRAINING GROUNDS!"
"THIS IS THE BATHHOUSE!"
"I CAN SEE THAT NOW!"
He could, in fact, see that now. In excruciating detail. The Sharingan, it turned out, had excellent resolution. Yamamoto would spend years trying to scrub that image from his memory. He would never fully succeed.
The elder, whose name was Uchiha Benjiro and who was one hundred and seven years old, would later tell this story at family gatherings with far too much enthusiasm.
"And that's how young Yamamoto awakened his eyes!" he would cackle, slapping his knee. "From seeing my wrinkly—"
"PLEASE STOP," Yamamoto would beg every single time.
He never stopped.
The thing about having a Sharingan at age three was that no one quite knew what to do with it.
On one hand, it was unprecedented. Most Uchiha didn't awaken their eyes until they were at least seven or eight, usually after experiencing some kind of battlefield trauma. Yamamoto had done it from seeing a naked old man. The circumstances were... not ideal.
On the other hand, it was still a Sharingan. Still the pride of the Uchiha clan. Still a weapon of immense power and potential. Ignoring it would be wasteful. Ignoring it might even be seen as an insult to their heritage.
The clan elders debated for approximately six hours before deciding that Yamamoto would receive accelerated training.
"Are you sure about this?" his mother asked, clutching her son protectively. "He's only three."
"He has the eyes," Elder Benjiro said, still uncomfortably amused by the whole situation. "He must learn to use them. Besides, look at him. He clearly wants to train."
Everyone turned to look at Yamamoto, who was currently doing one-armed push-ups in the corner of the meeting room. He had graduated from baby push-ups to regular push-ups to incline push-ups to decline push-ups and was now working on the one-armed variation. His form was surprisingly good for a toddler.
"See?" the elder said. "Dedication."
"That's not dedication," his mother muttered. "That's obsession."
She wasn't wrong. But no one was listening to her.
And so, at three years old, Yamamoto began his formal training.
His first teacher was a woman named Uchiha Rin.
Not to be confused with Rin Nohara, who was a completely different character from a completely different tragedy. No, this Rin was a forty-year-old jounin with a scar across her nose, a perpetually unimpressed expression, and absolutely zero patience for children.
"I don't know why they assigned me to you," she said flatly on their first day. "I've never taught anyone younger than twelve."
"I'm very mature for my age," Yamamoto said.
"You're three."
"Chronologically."
Rin stared at him for a long moment, then sighed heavily. "Fine. Let's see what you can do."
What Yamamoto could do, it turned out, was an absurd amount.
He could run a mile without stopping. Not fast, but steadily. His cardiovascular endurance, built up through two years of obsessive crawling and toddler-jogging, was frankly ridiculous for someone his size.
He could do fifty push-ups in a row. His arms, no longer noodle-like, had developed actual muscle definition. It was deeply unsettling to see on a three-year-old body.
He could walk up walls, across ceilings, and even upside-down on the underside of tree branches. His chakra control, honed through countless hours of accidental sticking and deliberate practice, was bordering on chunin-level.
And he had a two-tomoe Sharingan that he could activate at will, though he still flinched every time he did because he kept remembering Elder Benjiro.
Rin watched him demonstrate all of this with an expression that slowly shifted from boredom to confusion to something approaching horror.
"What the hell have you been doing for the past three years?" she demanded.
"Training," Yamamoto said simply.
"You're THREE."
"I'm aware."
Rin pinched the bridge of her nose. "How is this possible? When do you sleep?"
"Four hours a night."
"That's not healthy!"
Yamamoto shrugged. "Sleep is for people who aren't worried about getting massacred."
There was a very long pause.
"What?"
"Nothing," Yamamoto said quickly. "I said sleep is for people who aren't worried about... math. Massacring... math problems. I want to be good at math."
Rin clearly did not believe him, but she also clearly did not want to pursue that line of questioning. Some things were better left unexplored.
"Okay," she said slowly. "Let's just... start with the basics. Taijutsu forms."
"I already know those."
"You—what?"
"I've been watching the adults train from the rooftops for the past year. I memorized all the forms and practiced them in my room."
Rin stared at him.
Yamamoto stared back.
"Show me," she said finally.
He did.
The forms weren't perfect—he was still working with a three-year-old's body, and there were some movements that required a reach and flexibility he simply didn't have yet—but they were recognizable. More than recognizable. They were actually pretty good.
"You learned all of this from observation," Rin said flatly.
"Sharingan," Yamamoto said, pointing at his eyes. "Photographic memory. Comes in handy."
"You awakened your Sharingan two months ago."
"...I also have a very good regular memory."
Rin's eye twitched.
"I'm going to need more sake," she muttered. "So much more sake."
Training under Rin was intense.
She had apparently decided that if her student was going to be abnormal anyway, she might as well lean into it. She taught him things that no three-year-old should know. Pressure points. Grappling techniques. How to throw a kunai in a way that would actually hit the target instead of just flopping sadly onto the ground.
Yamamoto absorbed it all like a sponge.
A very paranoid, very determined sponge.
"Why are you like this?" Rin asked one day, after Yamamoto had correctly performed a chunin-level kata on his first try.
"Like what?"
"Like... this." She gestured vaguely at all of him. "You're three. You should be playing with toys. Eating dirt. Doing whatever it is normal children do."
"I don't have time for that."
"You have nothing but time! You're a toddler!"
Yamamoto considered explaining the whole "reincarnation from another world where your entire clan gets murdered by one of its own prodigies in approximately seven to nine years depending on the current timeline" thing, but decided against it. That conversation would only lead to more questions. Questions he couldn't answer without sounding insane.
"I want to be strong," he said instead.
"Why?"
"Because weak people die."
Rin's expression flickered. For a moment, she looked almost sad. Then the moment passed, and she was back to her usual unimpressed self.
"Fair enough," she said. "Let's work on your shuriken throwing. Your spiral pattern is still off."
Yamamoto nodded and retrieved his training weapons.
The grinding continued.
At four years old, Yamamoto learned his first jutsu.
It was the fireball technique.
This was, according to his father, a rite of passage for all Uchiha. The Great Fireball Jutsu was the clan's signature technique, taught to every child as proof of their heritage and potential.
"When you can perform this jutsu," his father said solemnly, "you will be recognized as a true Uchiha. It is a moment of great pride and—"
"Like this?" Yamamoto asked, and spat out a fireball the size of a small house.
There was a moment of silence.
Then the training ground caught fire.
Then the neighboring training ground caught fire.
Then someone started screaming.
"I SAID TO VISUALIZE IT FIRST!" his father shouted, frantically performing water jutsu to contain the blaze.
"I DID VISUALIZE IT!"
"THAT WAS NOT A VISUALIZATION! THAT WAS AN ACTUAL FIREBALL!"
"THEY LOOK THE SAME IN MY HEAD!"
The fire was eventually contained. No one was permanently injured, though Elder Benjiro's eyebrows had been singed off completely and he was not pleased about it.
"First my bathhouse," he grumbled, rubbing his bare brow ridge. "Now my facial hair. What will he take from me next?"
"I'm very sorry," Yamamoto said, not sounding sorry at all.
"You're a menace."
"I'm four."
"A FOUR-YEAR-OLD MENACE!"
Yamamoto's father, who was trying very hard to look stern but was clearly bursting with pride, cleared his throat. "Perhaps we should focus on control exercises before attempting any more jutsu."
"But I want to learn more fire techniques—"
"CONTROL EXERCISES."
"Fine."
The control exercises were boring.
Leaf sticking. Water walking. Ember manipulation. All of it designed to teach precision and restraint, qualities that Yamamoto had in limited supply when it came to anything involving his chakra.
The problem, he was beginning to realize, was that he had too much of the stuff.
Way too much.
His chakra reserves, built up through years of obsessive physical training and constant activation of his Sharingan, were frankly absurd. A normal four-year-old might have a pool of chakra the size of a pond. Yamamoto's was more like a small ocean. Every jutsu he attempted came out five times stronger than intended because he simply couldn't throttle back the power.
"Less chakra," Rin said, watching him blast another leaf into confetti instead of gently sticking it to his forehead.
"I'm trying!"
"Try harder."
He tried harder. The next leaf caught fire.
"How are you doing this?!" Rin demanded.
"I DON'T KNOW!"
This became a recurring theme.
Everything Yamamoto did was too much. Too strong. Too fast. Too big. He was like a firehose set to maximum pressure when what the situation called for was a gentle sprinkle. Control came slowly, painfully, and with a lot of property damage along the way.
By the time he was five, he had accidentally destroyed three training grounds, two storage sheds, and one very unfortunate vegetable garden belonging to a family that would never look at him the same way again.
"We're so sorry," his mother said, bowing repeatedly to the vegetable garden family. "Our son is... he's..."
"A monster," the patriarch said flatly.
"A work in progress," his mother corrected, though her eye was twitching.
Yamamoto, who was standing behind her and very deliberately not making eye contact with the scorched remains of what had once been a beautiful tomato plant, resolved to train harder. Not because he felt guilty about the vegetables (he did feel a little guilty about the vegetables), but because lack of control was dangerous. Lack of control meant unpredictability. And unpredictability, in a world where people could teleport behind you and stab you without warning, was a liability.
He needed to be precise.
He needed to be refined.
He needed to be the kind of warrior who could thread a needle with a kunai at fifty yards and then immediately blow up a building without any collateral damage.
It was a tall order.
But he was determined.
At five and a half years old, Yamamoto entered the Academy.
This was earlier than normal—most children didn't start until six or seven—but the clan elders had insisted. His skills were too advanced for home tutoring, they said. He needed to be around peers. He needed to learn teamwork and cooperation and all the other things that shinobi were supposed to embody.
What they actually meant was that they were tired of paying for property repairs and wanted someone else to deal with him for a few hours each day.
Yamamoto didn't mind. The Academy meant more resources. More training grounds. More opportunities to learn.
Also, possibly, more information about the timeline.
Because that was still the big question, wasn't it? When was the massacre? How much time did he have? Was it years away or months or—god forbid—weeks?
He had tried to figure it out through context clues, but it was surprisingly difficult. Everyone looked perpetually the same age in this world. His Sharingan could copy techniques but not calendar dates. And he couldn't exactly walk up to someone and ask "hey, how old is Uchiha Itachi currently, and has he expressed any interest in mass murder lately?"
That would be suspicious.
So he went to the Academy. He kept his head down. He trained with his classmates during the day and trained alone at night. He listened for rumors, for whispers, for any hint of the brewing coup that he knew was coming.
And he kept grinding.
Always grinding.
His classmates thought he was weird.
This was fair. He was weird.
While they played ninja in the schoolyard, he did squats in the corner. While they gossiped about crushes and cartoons, he practiced his shuriken throws until his fingers bled. While they went home after class to eat dinner with their families, he snuck into the advanced training grounds and worked until he collapsed.
"Why do you train so much?" one of them asked once. A girl named Uchiha Miko, who had the misfortune of sitting next to him in class.
Yamamoto considered the question.
"Because I don't want to die," he said honestly.
Miko blinked. "That's... kind of dark."
"We're training to be soldiers. Soldiers die. I'd prefer not to."
"But we're just kids."
"Kids die too."
There was a very long silence.
"You're weird," Miko said finally.
"I know."
She didn't talk to him again after that.
Yamamoto was fine with it. He didn't need friends. He needed power. He needed to be so impossibly, unreasonably strong that nothing could threaten him. Not Itachi. Not the ANBU. Not the whole damn village if it came down to it.
He would survive the massacre.
He would survive everything.
He would be the last thing standing when the dust settled, even if he had to train every waking moment for the next ten years to make it happen.
So he trained.
And trained.
And trained.
At six years old, Yamamoto's Sharingan evolved to three tomoe.
It happened during a sparring match with Rin, who had continued to train him privately even after he entered the Academy. She had landed a particularly vicious kick to his ribs—nothing that would cause permanent damage, but painful enough to knock the wind out of him—and in that moment of breathless panic, something clicked.
The world sharpened.
Colors became more vivid.
He could see Rin's chakra flowing through her body like luminescent rivers, could predict the exact trajectory of her next attack before she even finished planning it, could—
"Your eyes," Rin said, freezing mid-strike.
"What about them?"
"They're... complete."
Yamamoto didn't understand what she meant until he looked in a mirror later that night.
Three tomoe. Fully matured. The complete Sharingan, achieved at an age when most Uchiha were still struggling to activate their first tomoe.
He should have been proud.
Instead, he just felt relieved.
More power meant more safety. More safety meant less chance of dying. Less chance of dying meant—
Wait.
If he had a full Sharingan at six...
A thought occurred to him. A terrible, wonderful, probably-very-ill-advised thought.
What if he could awaken the Mangekyou?
The Mangekyou Sharingan. The legendary next stage, achieved only through the trauma of losing someone precious. The eyes that granted god-like abilities at the cost of eventual blindness. The eyes that Itachi would use to murder the entire clan.
But you didn't necessarily need trauma to get them, did you? Yamamoto's memories of the anime were fuzzy in places, but he vaguely recalled something about intense emotional experiences. Trauma was the most common trigger, but it wasn't the only one.
What if he could push himself hard enough? Train intensely enough? Force his eyes to evolve through sheer stubborn determination?
It sounded insane.
It probably was insane.
But Yamamoto had never let sanity stop him before.
His new training regimen was, by any reasonable standard, torture.
He ran until his legs gave out, then crawled. He did push-ups until his arms refused to function, then switched to crunches. He practiced his jutsu until his chakra was completely exhausted, then practiced taijutsu forms until he could barely stand.
Every night, he pushed himself to the absolute limit.
Every morning, he woke up and did it again.
His mother watched him with increasing concern. His father watched him with increasing pride. Rin watched him with something that might have been fear.
"You're going to kill yourself," she said bluntly one day, after finding him passed out in the training grounds for the third time that week.
"I'm fine."
"You're six. Your body can't handle this."
"Then I'll make it handle it."
"That's not how physiology works!"
But the thing was, it kind of was.
This world didn't operate on the same logic as his old one. Here, willpower was a tangible force. Determination could literally reshape reality. And Yamamoto was very, very determined.
His body adapted. Muscles that should have torn instead strengthened. Bones that should have cracked instead hardened. Chakra pathways that should have burned out instead expanded.
He didn't understand how it was happening.
He didn't care.
All that mattered was that he was getting stronger.
At seven years old, Yamamoto discovered that he had developed a passive healing factor.
Not on purpose. He hadn't trained for it. It had just... happened.
The discovery came after a particularly brutal training session when he sliced his palm open on a shuriken. He had cursed, wrapped the wound in a bandage, and resolved to be more careful in the future. Standard procedure.
Except when he removed the bandage two hours later, the wound was gone.
Not healed. Gone. Like it had never existed.
Yamamoto stared at his unblemished palm for a very long time.
"Huh," he said.
He tested it. Small cuts healed in minutes. Larger ones in hours. Bruises faded almost instantly. Burns disappeared overnight.
His body, pushed beyond its limits so many times, had apparently decided to upgrade itself.
Yamamoto didn't question it. He didn't have time to question it. Every moment spent thinking was a moment not spent training, and he couldn't afford to slack off.
So he incorporated the healing factor into his regimen. Now he could train harder, longer, with less recovery time. Now he could push himself to breaking points that would have hospitalized anyone else.
Now he was unstoppable.
Or at least, he was getting there.
At seven and a half years old, Yamamoto graduated from the Academy.
This was not remarkable in itself—plenty of prodigies graduated early—but the manner of his graduation was noteworthy.
The final exam had three components: a written test, a taijutsu demonstration, and a ninjutsu demonstration.
Yamamoto scored perfectly on the written test. Photographic memory combined with obsessive studying made academic challenges trivial.
For the taijutsu demonstration, he defeated his opponent—a twelve-year-old who outweighed him by thirty pounds—in six seconds flat. He had moved so fast that the proctors asked him to do it again slowly so they could confirm what had happened.
For the ninjutsu demonstration, he performed the three required jutsu (substitution, transformation, and clone) and then, because he felt like showing off, added a fireball that required three chunin working together to extinguish.
"That was unnecessary," the head proctor said, covered in soot.
"But impressive?"
"...Yes. Annoyingly impressive."
Yamamoto graduated at the top of his class.
Not that he cared about rankings. What he cared about was access to the genin training facilities, which were far more extensive than the Academy ones. More weights. More equipment. More space to practice his increasingly destructive jutsu.
More opportunities to grind.
His genin team was... fine.
His teammates were named Uchiha Shin and Uchiha Yuki. Both were older than him—nine and ten, respectively—and both seemed vaguely intimidated by the seven-year-old monster that had been assigned to their squad.
Their jounin sensei was a man named Uchiha Goro, a solid if unspectacular shinobi who had clearly drawn the short straw when it came to teaching assignments.
"I've heard about you," Goro said during their first meeting, eyeing Yamamoto warily. "You're the kid who set Elder Benjiro's eyebrows on fire."
"That was years ago."
"You're seven."
"Three years ago. That's a significant portion of my life."
Goro stared at him for a long moment, then sighed. "This is going to be difficult, isn't it?"
It was.
Yamamoto was not a good team player. He was too fast, too strong, too impatient. Every mission they took became a showcase of his abilities while Shin and Yuki struggled to keep up.
D-rank missions were completed in hours instead of days. C-rank missions that should have taken weeks were finished before the clients could blink. Yamamoto didn't even try to hold back—he attacked every objective with the same intensity he brought to his training.
"You need to let your teammates contribute," Goro said after Yamamoto solo'd their fifth consecutive mission.
"Why?"
"Because that's what teamwork means!"
"Teamwork means accomplishing objectives efficiently. I'm efficient."
"You're insufferable."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive."
Goro's eye twitched. He made a note to request a team transfer at the earliest opportunity. The request was denied. The Hokage apparently found the situation "amusing."
At eight years old, Yamamoto discovered fire release came naturally to him.
This was perhaps unsurprising, given his clan affiliation and the sheer volume of fire jutsu he had already learned. But "naturally" didn't quite capture it. What Yamamoto experienced was closer to instinct. He could shape flames with a thought, conjure heat without hand seals, manipulate the intensity and direction of his attacks with unconscious precision.
It was like breathing.
Terrifying, destructive, potentially-apocalyptic breathing.
"How are you doing that?" Rin demanded, watching him juggle basketball-sized fireballs with casual disinterest.
"Doing what?"
"That! Without seals! Without visible chakra expenditure! Without even looking at them!"
Yamamoto shrugged. "Practice?"
"You've been practicing for five years!"
"Consistent practice."
Rin threw up her hands. "I give up. I literally give up. You're not human."
"I'm definitely human."
"Humans don't do that!"
"This one does."
He wasn't trying to be difficult. He genuinely didn't understand what was so unusual about his abilities. From his perspective, he was just doing what everyone else could do—training hard and getting results. The fact that his results were exponentially better than everyone else's didn't register as strange.
He had no frame of reference.
He didn't realize that normal people couldn't train eighteen hours a day without collapsing.
He didn't realize that normal people's chakra reserves didn't quadruple every six months.
He didn't realize that normal people didn't develop passive healing factors and fire immunity and perfect chakra control all before the age of ten.
In his mind, he was just grinding. Just doing what needed to be done. Just preparing for the inevitable catastrophe that loomed in his future.
If anyone had told him that he was already strong enough to fight most jounin and win, he would have dismissed the claim as flattery. If anyone had pointed out that his fire techniques rivaled those of actual fire release specialists with decades of experience, he would have assumed they were exaggerating.
Yamamoto didn't see himself as overpowered.
He saw himself as barely adequate.
After all, he still couldn't use the Mangekyou.
That was the goal. That was the benchmark. Until he achieved those legendary eyes, he would continue to view himself as a work in progress. A trainee. A kid who hadn't yet reached his full potential.
The fact that his current potential was already ridiculous beyond measure completely escaped him.
At nine years old, Yamamoto learned something that made his blood run cold.
It happened during a routine clan meeting—the kind of boring, procedural gathering that he normally would have ignored completely. But this time, a name caught his attention.
"—Itachi's performance has been exemplary," one of the elders was saying. "He's already being considered for ANBU promotion despite his age."
Itachi.
The name hit Yamamoto like a physical blow.
Itachi was already in ANBU. Already a prodigy. Already on the path that would eventually lead to the massacre.
Which meant the timeline was further along than he had hoped.
Which meant he had less time than he thought.
Yamamoto sat through the rest of the meeting in a daze, his mind racing through calculations and contingencies. How old was Itachi now? Thirteen, probably. Maybe twelve. The massacre happened when he was thirteen, give or take—Yamamoto's memories were fuzzy on the exact timing.
That meant he had, at most, a year or two.
A year or two to get strong enough to survive.
A year or two to prepare for the worst night of the Uchiha clan's existence.
He left the meeting without speaking to anyone and went directly to the training grounds.
The next several months were a blur.
Yamamoto trained like a man possessed—which, in a sense, he was. Possessed by knowledge. Possessed by fear. Possessed by the desperate need to survive what was coming.
He learned every fire jutsu the clan library had to offer. He perfected his taijutsu to the point where he could fight blindfolded. He developed his chakra control to such a degree that he could perform most techniques with a single hand seal or none at all.
He pushed his Sharingan to its limits, copying techniques from anyone who would spar with him and a few who wouldn't. His three-tomoe eyes became so responsive that he could activate and deactivate them at will without any conscious thought.
And still, it wasn't enough.
The Mangekyou remained out of reach.
No matter how hard he pushed, no matter how much he suffered, his eyes refused to evolve. They needed trauma, and Yamamoto—despite his best efforts—couldn't manufacture genuine trauma through training alone.
He considered... extreme options.
There were ways to trigger the Mangekyou deliberately. Dark ways. Ways that involved sacrifice and loss and things he really didn't want to think about.
He rejected them all.
Not because he was a good person—he was fairly sure he wasn't, at this point—but because the cost was too high. He didn't have precious people to lose. He had kept everyone at arm's length specifically to avoid attachments. Losing someone who meant nothing to him wouldn't trigger anything.
So he did what he always did when faced with an impossible problem.
He trained harder.
At ten years old, Yamamoto accidentally created his first original jutsu.
He hadn't meant to. He had been experimenting with fire manipulation, trying to achieve even finer control over his flames, when something unexpected happened.
Instead of conjuring fire externally, he channeled it through his own body.
His veins lit up like molten rivers. His skin glowed with internal heat. For a terrifying moment, he thought he had set himself on fire from the inside out.
But it didn't hurt.
It felt... powerful.
His muscles surged with energy. His reflexes sharpened. His already-impressive speed tripled in an instant.
"What the hell," he breathed, staring at his incandescent hands.
The technique lasted about thirty seconds before burning through his chakra reserves, but in those thirty seconds, he felt invincible. Truly, genuinely invincible.
He named it Fire Release: Internal Combustion Engine (which was a terrible name, but he was ten and had no sense of poetry).
Over the next few months, he refined it. Extended its duration. Reduced its chakra cost. Developed variations that enhanced different aspects of his physiology.
By his eleventh birthday, he could maintain the technique for ten minutes straight and had created a dozen spin-off jutsu based on the same principle.
No one else could use them.
He had tried to teach Rin—the only person he trusted enough to share his creations with—but the techniques required a combination of chakra control, fire affinity, and pain tolerance that apparently only he possessed.
"You're a freak," Rin said, watching him demonstrate his latest variation (Internal Combustion Engine: Acceleration Mode, which made him so fast that he left after-images).
"Thank you."
"That wasn't a compliment."
"I'm choosing to take it as one."
At eleven years old, Yamamoto felt it.
A shift in the air. A tension in the clan. Whispers that stopped whenever he entered a room.
The coup was being planned.
He didn't know the specifics—he was too young and too unconnected to be included in the actual conspiracy—but he could sense the trajectory. The frustration with the village. The resentment toward the Hokage. The growing belief that the Uchiha were being unfairly marginalized.
And beneath it all, the ANBU operative who was definitely not spying on his own family and definitely not reporting everything back to the village leadership.
Itachi.
Yamamoto saw him occasionally, at clan gatherings and formal events. A quiet teenager with dead eyes and a gentle smile that never quite reached them. Everyone praised his talents, his dedication, his loyalty to the clan.
No one suspected what he was really planning.
Except Yamamoto.
Yamamoto suspected very, very hard.
He wanted to warn someone. To shake his parents, the elders, anyone who would listen, and scream "HE'S GOING TO KILL ALL OF YOU."
But who would believe him? He was eleven. He had no proof. And even if he did have proof, would it matter? The coup was happening regardless. The village would retaliate regardless. The only variable was how many people died in the crossfire.
So instead of warning anyone, Yamamoto trained.
He trained like the end of the world was coming.
Because for the Uchiha clan, it was.
At twelve years old, Yamamoto achieved something he had thought impossible.
It happened during a late-night training session, alone in the depths of the forest where no one would see him. He had been pushing himself harder than ever, trying to break through some invisible barrier that he could sense but not identify.
He ran until his legs shattered.
He punched trees until his hands were nothing but bone.
He channeled so much fire through his body that his skin began to melt.
And still, he kept going.
His healing factor struggled to keep up. For the first time in years, he was taking damage faster than he could repair it. The pain was indescribable. The agony was transcendent.
And in that moment—that singular moment of absolute extremity—his eyes burned.
Not with the familiar warmth of the Sharingan.
With something else.
Something more.
The world went red. Then black. Then a color that didn't exist in the normal spectrum, a shade that his human brain couldn't quite process.
When his vision cleared, everything was different.
He could see... more. Not just chakra anymore, but the fabric of reality itself. The threads that connected all things. The patterns that underlay existence.
His hands, still regenerating, were wreathed in black flames.
Amaterasu.
He had awakened the Mangekyou Sharingan.
Not through trauma.
Not through loss.
Through sheer, stubborn, absolutely insane determination.
He should have collapsed from chakra exhaustion. He should have died from the strain. He should have at least acknowledged that what he had just accomplished was supposed to be impossible.
Instead, he looked at his burning hands and thought, "Now I need to learn to control this."
And then he kept training.
The Mangekyou changed everything.
Amaterasu—the inextinguishable black fire—came naturally to him. With his left eye, he could conjure it at will, directing it with the same ease he directed regular flames.
His right eye gave him something different. Something he didn't immediately recognize from the anime. A technique he eventually named Kagami (Mirror), which allowed him to copy not just jutsu but physical abilities. Speed. Strength. Reflexes. If he could see it, he could replicate it.
And then there was Susanoo.
The first time he manifested it was accidental. He had been experimenting with his new eyes, trying to push their limits, when suddenly he was surrounded by a massive humanoid figure made of pure chakra.
It was incomplete. Just a ribcage and partial skeleton, glowing with an eerie blue light. But even incomplete, he could feel its power. Its protection. Its potential.
He trained the Susanoo just like he trained everything else.
Day after day. Night after night. Pushing it to develop further, to grow stronger, to become more complete.
By the time he was twelve and a half, he could manifest the full humanoid form. By thirteen, it was armored. By thirteen and a half, it had weapons—a massive blade wreathed in Amaterasu flames and a shield that could block almost anything.
His eyes bled constantly during these sessions. The strain of the Mangekyou was taking its toll. But his healing factor kept pace, repairing the damage almost as fast as it occurred.
He didn't go blind.
He should have gone blind.
Everyone who overused the Mangekyou went blind eventually.
But Yamamoto's ridiculous, impossible body refused to cooperate with established lore. His eyes healed. His chakra replenished. His abilities continued to grow without any apparent limit.
He didn't understand why.
He didn't care.
All that mattered was that he was strong.
Strong enough to survive.
Strong enough to face whatever was coming.
Strong enough to... probably be fine. Maybe. Hopefully.
The paranoia never went away. No matter how powerful he became, some part of him still whispered that it wasn't enough. That Itachi was the REAL prodigy. That the massacre would happen regardless of his preparations.
So he kept training.
Always training.
The grind never stopped.
On the night everything changed, Yamamoto was fourteen years old.
He had been in the middle of his usual evening routine—practicing Susanoo manifestation in a remote clearing because doing it anywhere else would destroy the surrounding buildings—when he felt it.
Killing intent.
Massive, oppressive, suffocating killing intent washing over the compound from somewhere to the east.
He activated his Sharingan—no, his Mangekyou—and turned toward the source.
Multiple chakra signatures were winking out. One by one, like candles being snuffed. Fast. Too fast to be anything other than—
"No," he breathed. "Not yet. Not now."
He had miscalculated.
He had thought he had more time.
He had thought wrong.
Yamamoto moved. Not ran—moved. Teleported, almost, using his maximum speed combined with every enhancement technique he had developed over the past fourteen years. The forest blurred around him. The wind screamed in his ears. His heart pounded with something he hadn't felt in a very long time.
Fear.
Genuine, primal, absolutely justified fear.
Because the massacre was happening.
Right now.
And he had no idea if he was ready.
Itachi Uchiha was having a very bad night.
This was, admittedly, an understatement. He was in the process of murdering his entire clan—his family, his friends, everyone he had ever known—in order to prevent a civil war that would have killed far more people. It was the right choice. The logical choice. The choice that would protect Sasuke and ensure the village's survival.
It was also, undeniably, a horrible, traumatic, soul-destroying thing to do.
But he was committed.
He had already killed dozens. The elders. The conspirators. The warriors who had taken up arms against him. He had cut through them like paper, his Mangekyou Sharingan blazing, his Amaterasu burning, his grief locked away behind walls of iron discipline.
He was almost done.
Just a few more houses. A few more families. A few more lives to end.
And then—
Something made him stop.
A chakra signature. Massive. Overwhelming. Approaching at impossible speed from somewhere to the north.
Itachi turned, his Sharingan spinning, ready for—
What the FUCK was that?
A Susanoo.
A full, complete, armored Susanoo, blazing with blue light and wreathed in black flames, was descending on the compound like the wrath of an angry god. It was easily fifty feet tall. Its blade—which was genuinely on fire with Amaterasu, how was that even possible—carved through the air like a streak of midnight.
And inside it, barely visible through the layers of chakra armor, was... a kid?
A kid he vaguely recognized.
"Wait," Itachi said out loud, momentarily forgetting that he was supposed to be an emotionless murder machine. "Isn't that the weird one who never talks to anyone?"
The Susanoo landed in front of him with an earth-shaking impact. Its massive eyes—which were also Mangekyou, what the hell—stared down at him with something approaching irritation.
"ITACHI!" the kid shouted, his voice amplified by the chakra construct. "I'VE BEEN PREPARING FOR THIS NIGHT FOR FOURTEEN YEARS! I TRAINED EVERY DAY! I PUSHED MY BODY BEYOND ALL REASONABLE LIMITS! I DEVELOPED TECHNIQUES THAT SHOULDN'T BE POSSIBLE! I AWAKENED THE MANGEKYOU THROUGH SHEER FORCE OF WILL! ALL TO SURVIVE THIS EXACT MOMENT!"
Itachi stared.
The Susanoo stared back.
"I... don't remember you being particularly notable at clan gatherings," Itachi said slowly.
"I WAS TRAINING! WHO HAS TIME FOR CLAN GATHERINGS WHEN THERE'S TRAINING TO BE DONE?"
"That's... actually fair."
"WAIT, REALLY?"
"I also prioritized training over social events. It's very relatable."
There was an awkward pause.
"So," Itachi said, his mind still struggling to process the situation, "are you here to stop me?"
Yamamoto considered the question.
On one hand, stopping the massacre was the moral thing to do.
On the other hand, he had never really connected with anyone in the clan. He had spent fourteen years keeping everyone at arm's length, focused entirely on his own survival. The only person he genuinely cared about was... himself, basically.
Also, if he was being honest, he wasn't even sure he could stop Itachi. The guy was a genius. A legend. Someone who had slaughtered the entire clan in a single night.
Although...
Looking at the situation with fresh eyes...
Itachi was staring up at his Susanoo with an expression that could only be described as "what the actual fuck." His Mangekyou was active, but he hadn't made any move to attack. He seemed... confused. Maybe even a little intimidated.
Was it possible that Yamamoto was... stronger than him?
No.
That was ridiculous.
Itachi was Itachi. The prodigy among prodigies. The shinobi that even other shinobi feared.
Yamamoto was just... Yamamoto. A paranoid reincarnator who had done nothing but train for his entire second life.
There was no way...
"Uh," Itachi said, taking an involuntary step backward as the Susanoo's Amaterasu blade drifted slightly closer to him. "Could you maybe not point that at me?"
"Oh, sorry," Yamamoto said, adjusting his stance. The blade swung to the side, accidentally cleaving through three houses in the process.
They both winced at the destruction.
"I'm still getting used to this," Yamamoto admitted.
"I can see that. How did you... how did you achieve a complete Susanoo? I've only managed the skeletal form."
"Training."
"Training?"
"Lots of training. Like, an excessive amount of training. More training than is probably healthy or sane."
Itachi was quiet for a moment.
"I've been training my whole life," he said finally. "I don't have a complete Susanoo."
"Maybe you're not training hard enough?"
"I train fifteen hours a day."
"Rookie numbers."
"I'm sorry?"
"Nothing. Look, are we fighting or not? I feel like we should resolve this one way or another."
Itachi considered his options.
On one hand, he was supposed to be killing everyone in the clan. That was the mission. That was the deal he had made with Danzo and the village leadership.
On the other hand, the person in front of him had a full Susanoo with Amaterasu-enhanced weapons and clearly wasn't going to go down without a fight. A fight that would probably destroy half the village. A fight that Itachi... wasn't entirely sure he could win.
That last realization hit him like a bucket of cold water.
He wasn't sure he could win.
Against some random kid he barely remembered.
What the HELL had been happening in this clan while he wasn't paying attention?
"Let me ask you something," Itachi said slowly. "Did you know about the coup?"
"Obviously."
"And you didn't do anything about it?"
"What was I supposed to do? I was busy training."
"You could have warned someone! Tried to prevent it!"
"That's not my job! My job is to survive! Everything else is someone else's problem!"
Itachi pinched the bridge of his nose. This was not how he had expected the night to go.
"Okay," he said. "New plan. I'm going to continue with the mission. You're going to... not interfere."
"Why would I agree to that?"
"Because if you don't, we're going to fight. And if we fight, people are going to notice. The Hokage will send reinforcements. The village will get involved. And then everyone dies anyway, but messier."
Yamamoto considered this.
It made logical sense.
Also, he really, really didn't want to fight Itachi. Despite his power, despite his training, some small part of him still remembered watching the anime, still remembered how terrifying Itachi was, still believed that prodigy-among-prodigies had tricks up his sleeve that no amount of grinding could overcome.
"Counter-offer," Yamamoto said. "You finish... whatever this is. I don't interfere. And in exchange, you don't kill me."
"I wasn't planning to kill you."
"Oh. Well. Good. Then we have a deal."
"This is the strangest negotiation I've ever been part of."
"You should get out more."
There was another awkward pause.
"So," Itachi said. "I'm just going to... go. Finish up. Try not to destroy any more buildings."
"I'll try."
Itachi turned to leave, then hesitated.
"One question," he said without looking back. "How did you awaken the Mangekyou? You haven't lost anyone precious. I would have noticed if you had."
Yamamoto shrugged, the gesture causing his Susanoo to mimic the movement on a massive scale.
"I pushed myself until my body was falling apart," he said. "I trained through pain that would kill most people. I broke every limit, shattered every barrier, exceeded every expectation. And somewhere in that crucible, my eyes evolved."
"That's not how the Mangekyou works."
"Tell that to my eyes."
Itachi was silent for a long moment.
"You're a monster," he said finally.
"I prefer 'dedicated.'"
"Monsters often do."
And then he was gone, flickering away into the night to finish his bloody work.
Yamamoto stood there for a while, watching the fires spread through the compound. He could hear screaming in the distance. Dying. The final gasps of a clan that had existed for generations.
He felt... nothing.
No grief. No anger. No satisfaction.
Just a vague sense of relief that he had survived.
That the grinding had paid off.
That all those years of training hadn't been for nothing.
"I did it," he said out loud, to no one in particular. "I survived the massacre."
Then, because he didn't know what else to do, he dismissed his Susanoo and went back to his training grounds.
There was always more work to be done.
More techniques to perfect.
More strength to accumulate.
The grind never stopped.
Even on the worst night of the Uchiha clan's existence, the grind never, ever stopped.
Three days later, Yamamoto learned that he was one of only two survivors.
The other was Sasuke.
This made sense, from a narrative perspective. Sasuke was important. Sasuke was the protagonist's rival. Sasuke was destined for great things.
Yamamoto was... not any of those things.
But he was alive.
Which meant, in his extremely biased opinion, that he had won.
The village was in an uproar. The massacre had been blamed on Itachi (accurate) acting alone (not accurate, but Yamamoto wasn't about to correct the official story). The Uchiha compound was sealed off. Investigations were launched. Condolences were offered.
Yamamoto nodded along to all of it, accepted the sympathy with as much grace as he could muster, and then went right back to training.
Because here was the thing: Itachi wasn't dead.
Itachi was out there somewhere, being a missing-nin, doing whatever missing-nin did. And someday—Yamamoto was absolutely certain of this—someday he would come back.
For Sasuke.
For revenge.
For whatever other stupid plot reasons the universe decided to throw at him.
And when that day came, Yamamoto intended to be ready.
Stronger than before.
Stronger than Itachi.
Stronger than anyone who might possibly threaten his survival.
So the grinding continued.
The training resumed.
And somewhere, in the depths of his impossibly-enhanced body, Yamamoto began to suspect that there might not be an upper limit to his power after all.
Not that it mattered.
He would keep training anyway.
Just to be safe.
Itachi, meanwhile, was having a minor existential crisis.
"What do you mean there was another survivor?" Danzo demanded.
"I mean exactly what I said. One of them manifested a complete Susanoo with Amaterasu-enhanced weaponry. I didn't feel confident engaging."
"A complete Susanoo? That's impossible. Only Madara—"
"I know what I saw."
Danzo was silent for a long moment.
"Who was this individual?"
"A child named Yamamoto. Approximately fourteen years old. No notable accomplishments or positions within the clan hierarchy. I barely remembered he existed until he dropped out of the sky in a fifty-foot chakra construct."
"And you just... let him go?"
"The alternative was fighting him. In the middle of the village. While destroying everything in a five-mile radius."
"...I see your point."
More silence.
"This is a problem," Danzo said finally.
"Yes."
"A significant problem."
"Also yes."
"He needs to be eliminated."
Itachi sighed. "You're welcome to try. I would suggest bringing... considerable backup."
Danzo frowned. "Surely one child, however gifted—"
"He's not 'gifted.' He's an anomaly. A glitch in reality. Something that shouldn't exist but does anyway."
"You're exaggerating."
"I am not. I have fought S-rank shinobi, Danzo. I have faced monsters and legends and things that would make normal men go insane. That child scared me."
The admission hung in the air, heavy and uncomfortable.
"Then we wait," Danzo said finally. "We observe. We gather intelligence."
"And if he becomes a threat?"
"Then we deal with him accordingly. With... considerably more resources than we would normally allocate."
Itachi nodded.
It was, he reflected, a reasonable plan.
He just hoped it would be enough.
Because somewhere in the back of his mind, a small voice was whispering that no amount of resources would be enough. That the kid in the Susanoo wasn't finished growing. That he would keep training, keep improving, keep pushing past limits that shouldn't be breakable.
That by the time anyone tried to "deal with him accordingly," it would already be too late.
Itachi pushed the thought away.
He had more immediate concerns.
But still, the voice lingered.
What had that kid been doing for fourteen years?
And more importantly...
What would he become next?
End of Chapter 1