(Era: The Warring States Period. Location: Uchiha Clan Eastern Outpost)
The first thing I became aware of was the cold. It was a deep, pervasive cold that seeped through the thin, dark fabric of my clothes and gnawed at my bones. It wasn't the sterile chill of an over-air-conditioned office. This was wet, earthy, and smelled of pine, damp soil, and the distant, acrid tang of woodsmoke. I was on my knees, my palms pressed into mud that oozed between my fingers, gritty and cold.
Data point: Temperature approximately 3° Celsius. Humidity high. Location: unknown forest, pre-dawn.
My head throbbed, a solid, pounding ache behind my eyes that felt less like a hangover and more like a full-system crash. Memories—my memories—flickered like corrupted files. Spreadsheets fading into the static of campfires. The soft glow of a dual-monitor setup dissolving into the hard, glittering light of stars through bare branches. A retirement party with polite applause, swallowed by the guttural shouts of men.
A man was standing over me. He was wrapped in shades of grey and blue, armour made of lacquered plates and tough fabric strapped tight to a lean frame. His face was all sharp angles and grim lines, eyes dark and assessing. But it was the crest on his shoulder that my brain, despite its malfunction, latched onto and processed. A white fan, red background.
The Uchiha symbol. A fiction. A cartoon. A dataset I had never personally analysed but whose basic parameters were, absurdly, part of my former world's cultural cache.
"Get up, Akira," the man said, his voice a low rasp. "The Sentō patrol won't wait for your daydreams."
Akira. Designation accepted. Subject: Myself. Context: Assigned.
I pushed myself up, muscles I didn't remember owning protesting with a raw, fiery stiffness. My body was wrong. Younger, tighter, coiled with a latent tension that was entirely alien. As I stood, I took a silent inventory. Height: reduced. Reach: altered. A fundamental recalibration of my physical schema was required. I focused on the immediate environment to stave off the rising wave of disorientation—a classic data-analyst technique. Anchor in the observable.
The camp was a clump of misery nestled in a rocky hollow. A few low tents, a smouldering fire pit, the shadows of four other figures moving with a quiet, predatory efficiency. They all bore the fan. The air thrummed with a silence that was heavier than mere quiet. It was watchful. Parabolic.
"Your watch was uneventful?" the man, my apparent superior, asked. His name, I recalled from the fragmented boot sequence of this new reality, was Hikaru. No family name given. Just Hikaru. He was a chūnin of the Uchiha, and I was ostensibly his junior, a recent survivor of a skirmish that had left the previous 'Akira' vacant.
"No visual contacts," I replied, mimicking the terse cadence of his speech. My voice was younger too. "Auditory range clear beyond standard nocturnal fauna." I'd heard foxes, the rustle of something larger in the brush—a boar, perhaps. The data was logged.
Hikaru's eyes narrowed a fraction. A microexpression: not quite suspicion, but a recalculation of his own. The old Akira, I gathered, had not been one for precise reports. "Good. Eat. We move with first light. The Senju have been sniffing around the river crossings."
The meal was a cold, glutinous ball of rice and a strip of dried, salty meat that tasted of smoke and leather. As I forced it down, I observed. The others avoided my gaze, but not with malice. With a kind of weary indifference. One, a woman with a scar bisecting her eyebrow, sharpened a kunai with methodical, rhythmic scrapes. Another, a boy who looked barely sixteen, checked and rechecked a coil of wire, his fingers trembling slightly. Not with fear, I diagnosed, but with exhausted adrenaline depletion.
This was not a story. This was a system. A brutal, operational system where the key metrics were survival, territory, and attrition rates. I was a node within it, with unknown parameters and faulty legacy data.
We broke camp as the sky shifted from black to a deep, bruised grey. The movement was fluid, a practised dispersal. Hikaru took point. I was placed at the rear, a position I intuitively understood was both protective and observational—they could keep an eye on the questionable asset.
We travelled not on the ground, but through the canopy. It was not flying. It was a series of controlled, devastating falls. A leap, channelling force through the legs, a focus of energy—chakra, the word surfaced—to the soles of the feet, a push against a branch, and propulsion. The first attempt was a near-catastrophe. I misjudged the vectors, the conservation of momentum, and slammed shoulder-first into a trunk, bark scraping through my shirt. The impact drove the air from my lungs in a pained grunt.
Hikaru didn't stop. The woman, Naoko, glanced back, her scarred eyebrow twitching upwards. No mockery. Just a flat assessment: liability.
Adapt. Recalibrate.
The next jump, I focused. Not on the mythos of chakra, but on the physics. I visualised the launch point, the arc, the landing zone as points on a graph. The energy expenditure needed to overcome gravity and achieve x distance. My body knew the motions, a form of muscle memory buried in this new hardware. I let it run, but I overlaid my own analytical framework. The second leap was smoother. The third, almost synchronous with the rhythm of the team.
By the time full dawn washed the forest in pale gold and long, sharp shadows, I was not graceful, but I was functional. The ache in my shoulder was a constant data stream: feedback on poor form.
We halted at the edge of a clearing where a fast-moving stream cut through the rock. The sound was a loud, rushing white noise. Hikaru raised a clenched fist. The system translated: halt. danger.
He pointed across the water. Two figures stood there, clad in deep green and brown, their long hair tied back. Senju. The opposition. The other major variable in this bloody equation.
There was no speech, no grand challenge. One of the Senju, a broad-shouldered man with a topknot, made a series of hand seals—his fingers blurring in a pattern that my eyes tried and failed to track. The air over the stream thickened, shimmered, and coalesced into a volley of water needles, sharp as scalpels, hurtling towards us with a sound like tearing silk.
"Scatter!" Hikaru barked.
Instinct—Akira's instinct—took over. I threw myself sideways behind a thick cedar. The needles shredded the space I'd occupied, peppering the tree trunk with wet thunks, embedding deep into the wood. Splinters peppered my cheek. Not pain, yet. A notification: surface breach.
Naoko was already returning fire, kunai flying from her hands in deadly arcs. The boy, Takeshi, was weaving his wire between trees, fingers a frantic blur. This was it. The combat subroutine.
Hikaru engaged the topknot Senju directly, their clash a explosion of taijutsu—a brutal, efficient martial art where every block was a potential bone-breaker, every strike aimed at vital clusters of nerves and arteries. I watched, crouched, my heart a frantic drum against my ribs. I could see the patterns. The Senju favoured a strong, rooted stance, power generated from the hips. Hikaru was fluid, evasive, using the Senju's momentum against him. It was a violent algorithm, predictable after three exchanges.
But prediction was useless if I couldn't act.
The second Senju, a thinner man with a cruel smile, broke from the treeline, sprinting not towards Hikaru, but towards Takeshi, who was vulnerable, focused on his wire trap. The Senju's hand glowed with a churning ball of air—Fūton: Renkūdan?—the nomenclature was missing, but the threat vector was clear: high-velocity compressive force.
My body moved before my analysis was complete. A dump of adrenaline overrode careful calculation. I pushed off the cedar, not with the graceful chakra-assisted leap of before, but with a desperate, scrambling sprint. I had no jutsu. No grand technique. Only position and timing.
I intercepted his path not as a fighter, but as an obstacle. He saw me late, his eyes widening a fraction—a microexpression of surprise, then annoyance. He altered his strike, the glowing ball of air lashing out in a wide, scything arc meant to bisect me at the waist.
There was no time to dodge fully. I twisted, presenting my side. The technique grazed me.
The world dissolved into a symphony of pure, white-noise agony. It wasn't a cut. It was like being slammed by a truck made of razors and compressed wind. My ribs screamed. The fabric on my right side vaporized, and the skin beneath felt flayed, seared by friction and cold simultaneously. The force lifted me off my feet and threw me into the stream.
The shock of the icy water was a second, brutal system shock. It short-circuited the pain for a crucial half-second. I surfaced, gasping, the water around me stained pink. My vision swam. But across the stream, I saw it. Takeshi had completed his trap. The wire snapped taut across the thin Senju's ankles as he pursued, sending him crashing down. Naoko's kunai found his throat a moment later with a wet, terminal chunk.
The topknot Senju, seeing his partner fall, disengaged with a furious snarl, unleashing a torrent of water that forced Hikaru back, and vanished into the forest.
Silence rushed back in, broken only by the stream and my own ragged, shuddering breaths. The pain returned, a deep, throbbing burn that painted the edges of my vision with static. I clutched my side, fingers coming away slick and red. Not a lethal hit. A grazing blow. A warning shot I'd been too slow to fully avoid.
Naoko waded into the stream, her expression unreadable. She gripped my arm, her fingers like iron, and hauled me to the bank. "Idiot," she muttered, but her hands were already moving, pulling a disinfectant pouch and a bandage from her pouch. The alcohol she poured on the wound was a new, exquisite fire, and I couldn't stop a sharp, hissing inhale through clenched teeth.
"He was going for Takeshi," I managed to say, the words grating.
"I know," she said, not looking at me, her focus on the bandage. Her hands were swift, precise. "Still an idiot. You have a katana. Use it next time, or a kunai. Don't just throw your body." She finished, tying the bandage tight. "But… your timing was adequate."
Adequate. A passing grade.
Hikaru approached, his armour scratched but otherwise unmarked. He looked from the dead Senju to me, his dark eyes lingering on my bandaged side. "You disrupted his focus. Allowed the trap to work." He paused. "Your eyes were active."
I blinked. "My eyes?"
"The Sharingan," Takeshi said softly, crouching nearby, his earlier trembles gone, replaced by a hollow look. "You awakened it. In the fight. I saw them. A single tomoe in each."
I had felt nothing beyond panic and pain. But now, thinking back, the world had sharpened in that moment of interception. The Senju's movements, the flow of the air around his technique, the precise trajectory of the lethal arc—they had all seemed to slow, to break down into component parts. I had seen the data of his attack, not the spectacle.
I had no mirror. But I focused inward, on the memory of that clarity. A faint, familiar heat pulsed behind my eyes. When I looked at Hikaru's face, I saw more than his grim expression. I saw the minute tension in the jaw muscle, the slight flare of his nostrils as he assessed my injury, the almost imperceptible shift in his weight from one foot to the other. It was a flood of raw, granular data on his physical state and intentions.
The Sharingan. A biological data-processing unit. A pattern-recognition engine built into my optic nerves.
Hikaru nodded, a single, slow dip of his chin. "Good. The wound is your first lesson. Seeing the blow does not mean you can evade it. Not yet. Your body must learn to read the data your eyes provide." He turned. "We move. This place is compromised."
As we left, the body of the Senju cooling by the stream, I walked, each step sending a jolt of pain through my side. It was a constant, brutal feedback loop. But beneath the pain, a cold, analytical fire was kindling.
This world operated on rules—chakra, taijutsu, ninjutsu. Rules were systems. Systems could be analysed, deconstructed, and exploited. My body was a new, flawed instrument. My eyes were a sensor array. The pain was a diagnostic tool.
I was no hero. I was a retired data analyst in a kill-or-be-killed algorithm.
And I had just begun to collect my first real-time data set.