The pain was a live wire embedded in my right side, humming with every step, every breath, every heartbeat. It wasn't the sharp, clean agony of a cut, but a deep, radiant burn, as if the air itself had turned to sandpaper and scrubbed me raw down to the muscle. Naoko's field dressing was tight, a constant pressure that felt like a warning hand pressed against the injury. Don't forget this.
We moved. Not as a unit anymore, but as a fragmented algorithm recalculating its path. Hikaru's silhouette, ahead and to the left, was a study in controlled tension. Every few seconds, his head would turn minutely, ears subtly cupping the forest sounds, his eyes scanning not just the trees but the spaces between them, the quality of the shadows. Naoko flanked right, her movements a silent, stalking glide that made the underbrush seem to part for her. Takeshi was a nervous pulse behind me, his breathing a rapid, shallow rhythm I could track without turning. And me? I was the flawed variable, the lag in the system, my progress a series of hissed inhalations and careful weight distributions.
The forest was a cathedral of grey and green, the morning sun slicing through in dusty, mote-filled beams. It was beautiful in a way no database could capture. The smell of pine sap and decaying leaves, the distant cry of a hawk, the way the light dappled on a spiderweb strung between two ferns—it was overwhelming, a torrent of unstructured data. My old mind, the one that lived in spreadsheets and predictive models, floundered. It sought a filter, a way to categorize.
Forget categories. Observe. Survive.
Hikaru raised a fist. We froze. My side throbbed in protest at the sudden stillness. He pointed, two fingers, towards a dip in the land ahead where a small, fast creek had carved a gully. Then he made a series of hand gestures—sharp, precise shapes in the air. Naoko and Takeshi nodded. I stared, uncomprehending. A new language. A non-verbal protocol.
Naoko caught my look. Her eyes, dark and flinty, narrowed. She mimicked Hikaru's last gesture—a tapping motion against her own thigh—then pointed at me, and then at the ground near her feet. Stay. Watch.
Understood. I was on observational duty. The liability was being parked.
Hikaru and Naoko melted into the foliage, their chakra presence—a concept I was starting to feel as a faint, atmospheric pressure—dimming to near nothing. Takeshi gave me a quick, tense look, then scrambled up a nearby cedar, his movements squirrel-quick, vanishing into the needled canopy. Silence descended, thick and heavy.
Alone, the pain and the sensory input rushed in. I leaned against a mossy boulder, the cool dampness seeping through my clothes. I focused on my breathing, trying to pattern it—in for four counts, hold for four, out for four. A stress-management technique from a lifetime ago. It was absurd here, surrounded by the visceral threat of violence, but the ritual of it grounded me.
My gaze drifted to the creek. The water was clear over stones of brown and grey, moving with a chaotic yet constant energy. I watched a leaf, caught in an eddy, spin helplessly before being ejected downstream. The pattern of the ripples, the flow rate, the way the light refracted…
Chakra. The word was a key turning in a rusty lock. It was the energy they used. It was the physics of this world. Hikaru had pushed it to his feet to walk on trees. The Senju had shaped it into cutting wind and piercing water. It was a fundamental force, like gravity or electromagnetism in my old world, but personal. Malleable.
An idea, fragile and theoretical, formed. If chakra could be shaped, it followed it had properties. Viscosity. Density. Flow. Could it be… measured? Disrupted? Not with brute force, but with precision. A scalpel, not a hammer.
A flicker of movement at the edge of the gully. Not Hikaru. Not Naoko.
A Senju scout. A young man, face pale under streaks of forest camoflage, peered over the lip of the gully. He was looking downstream, away from my position. His hand went to a pouch at his hip.
My body went rigid. The pain faded to a background hum. Every sense sharpened. The rough texture of the boulder under my palm. The taste of pine on the air. The exact distance between us—twenty-three paces, uneven terrain.
The Sharingan activated without conscious command. A faint heat bloomed behind my eyes, and the world shifted. The scout's movements didn't slow, but they became… legible. I saw the bunching of the muscle in his shoulder as he reached. I saw the micro-tremor in his drawing hand—fatigue or nerves. I saw the likely arc of his throw, the trajectory of the kunai he now held, extrapolated from the angle of his wrist and the tension in his deltoid.
Data. Pure, beautiful, lethal data.
But data was useless without action. I had no kunai of my own ready. My katana was slung across my back; drawing it would be a movement, a sound. The boulder was cover, but it was also a trap. He hadn't seen me. Yet.
The scout turned, his gaze beginning a sweep that would cross over my position.
A branch snapped in the canopy above. Takeshi, shifting his weight.
The scout's eyes jerked upwards. A microexpression of alarm, swiftly suppressed into focus.
It was the only window I'd get.
I moved. Not with a ninja's silent grace, but with the desperate, efficient economy of a man trying to minimize agony and maximize effect. I pushed off the boulder, using my left arm, keeping my injured right side tucked. Three long, stumbling strides across the mossy ground. The scout's head snapped down, his eyes widening. His hand, holding the kunai, started to come up.
My Sharingan fed me the data stream: Wrist rotation initiating. Projectile launch in 0.3 seconds. Target: center mass.
I didn't try to intercept the throw. I attacked the source.
My left hand shot out, not for the kunai, but for his wrist. My fingers, guided by the predictive paths glowing in my vision, closed over his forearm an instant before the muscles fully contracted. I didn't grip with brute strength. I pressed my thumb hard into a specific point on the inside of his wrist—the ulnar artery, flexor retinaculum—a nexus of nerves and tendons I remembered from an anatomy textbook a lifetime ago.
A shock, a misfire. His grip spasmed. The kunai tumbled from nerveless fingers, thudding point-first into the soft earth between us.
He gasped, a short, sharp sound of surprise and pain. His other hand formed a seal—Boar? Ram?—the pattern was a blur, but the intent in his eyes was clear: ninjutsu.
I had no technique to counter it. But I had the data of his first failure. His chakra was gathering, a prickling static in the air around his hands. My Sharingan saw it not as magic, but as a concentration of energy, a pressure building at a point in space.
I didn't retreat. I stepped in, inside his guard, my injured side screaming in protest. My forehead smashed into the bridge of his nose.
The crunch was sickeningly solid, a wet, grating vibration that traveled up my skull. A burst of hot blood sprayed over my face, coppery and warm. The gathering chakra aura around his hands flickered and died, his concentration shattered by sheer, primal trauma.
He staggered back, eyes streaming, hands going to his ruined face. A guttural sound of pain and rage escaped him.
I didn't finish him. The thought—kill him—was a cold, logical conclusion in my mind. Remove the variable. But the act… the mechanics of driving my own kunai into his throat… my body recoiled. The analyst observed the necessity; the man, the human who had just woken up in this nightmare, hesitated.
It cost me.
Through the tears and blood, his foot lashed out in a blind, sweeping kick. It caught my already-badly balanced legs. My feet went out from under me. I landed hard on my back, the impact driving a white-hot spike of agony through my wounded side. The world swam, greying at the edges.
He was on me, a blur of pain and fury, his hands scrabbling for my throat. The smell of his blood, his sweat, his fear, filled my nostrils. His thumbs pressed into my trachea. My vision tunneled. The beautiful, crisp data-stream of the Sharingan fragmented into panicked static.
Then a shadow fell across the sun.
There was a sound like a wet melon being dropped. The pressure on my throat vanished. The Senju scout's weight collapsed on top of me, then was hauled off.
Hikaru stood there, his katana dripping a single, fat drop of crimson onto the moss. His face was impassive. He looked from the dead scout to me, lying gasping on the ground, clutching my throat and my side.
"You read his movement," Hikaru stated, his voice flat. "You disrupted his jutsu before it formed. A good tactic." He nudged the scout's body with his foot. "But you traded a broken nose for a kill-shot. You hesitated. In this era, Akira, hesitation is a mortality statistic."
He didn't offer a hand. He watched as I struggled to sit up, each movement a fresh lesson in pain. Naoko appeared from the gully, wiping a short blade on a leaf. She glanced at the scene—the dead scout, me covered in his blood and my own filth—and her mouth tightened. Not disapproval. Calculation.
"The patrol was just him," she said to Hikaru. "A lone forward observer. The main group is likely a mile west, moving parallel to the River Fangs."
Hikaru nodded. "We circle north. Avoid engagement." His eyes returned to me. "Can you move?"
I pushed myself to my feet, my legs trembling. The world swayed, then settled. I met his gaze. "I can move."
"Then move. Your training begins tonight. You have the eyes. Now you need the body, and the will, to match them." He turned and began to lope north, setting a punishing pace.
Naoko fell in beside me for a moment as I stumbled after him. She didn't look at me. "The point on the wrist," she said quietly, her voice barely above the rustle of leaves. "That was not clan-taught."
"No," I rasped.
A slight, almost imperceptible nod. "Keep it to yourself. Unorthodox can be an asset. If you live long enough to refine it."
Then she was gone, ahead with Hikaru.
I followed, the taste of blood and failure in my mouth, the pain in my side a relentless tutor. But beneath it, a cold ember glowed. I had used the Sharingan. I had applied old-world knowledge as a weapon. It had been messy, inefficient, and nearly fatal.
But it had worked.
The forest deepened around us. The calculus of survival was brutal, but for the first time, I felt I was beginning to understand the variables. The most important one, thrumming with heat behind my eyes, was me.