—————
The fist came from the left.
Kim didn't see it. Not with his eyes — his eyes were tracking the ANBU instructor's right hand, which was executing a feint so clean it would have fooled anyone watching from the outside. The strike from the left was hidden behind a body rotation, launched from a blind angle, accelerating through a trajectory designed to terminate at Kim's temple with the kind of force that said this is still training but I will not apologize if you bleed.
Kim slipped it.
Not dodged — slipped. His head moved three inches to the right, the fist passing close enough to disturb his hair, and his body was already rotating into the counter before his conscious mind had finished processing what had happened. He felt the instructor's weight shift onto the front foot, felt the momentary compression in the man's core as he committed to the follow-up, felt the chakra in the striking arm pulse in the particular pattern that meant elbow, rising, aimed at the chin—
Kim stepped inside the elbow, redirected it with his forearm, and put his palm against the instructor's sternum.
Contact. Clean. Kill-position if he'd been carrying intent.
They separated. The instructor straightened, rolled the shoulder Kim had deflected, and regarded him through the porcelain mask with a stillness that had become familiar over the past two months.
Kim stood in the center of the training room, breathing evenly, and thought: How did I do that?
Not the technique — the technique was sound, a close-quarters counter he'd drilled hundreds of times. The knowing. The part where he'd felt the left hook coming before it existed as a physical event. The part where his body had responded to information that his eyes hadn't provided.
Something is different today.
He'd noticed it during warm-ups. Small things. The way the instructor's sandals scraped the stone floor — Kim had heard the rhythm and known, without looking, that the man had favored his right ankle this morning. Stiffness. Old injury, probably. The kind that didn't impair performance but changed the micro-geometry of movement in ways that were invisible to normal observation.
Then, during the first drill sequence, Kim had caught something else. Not sound, not sight. A pattern — the instructor's chakra flowing through coils and pathways in a route Kim could almost map. Not clearly. Not the way a Hyuga would see it, with crystalline precision and three-hundred-sixty-degree coverage. More like… looking at a river through fog. You couldn't see the water, but you could see where the fog was thinnest, and from that you could infer the current.
And the smell.
Kim had entered the training room and known — known, without reason or evidence — that the instructor had eaten rice and pickled plum for breakfast. That he'd used a specific soap. That he'd sharpened a blade within the last hour, the faint mineral tang of whetstone oil clinging to his fingers beneath the gloves.
That's not normal sensory acuity. That's not training. That's something else.
He stood very still. The two original trainees watched from the wall — still blank, still silent, two months of shared space having produced exactly zero moments of human connection. Kim had stopped trying. Whatever Root had done to them was deeper than conversation could reach.
"Again," the instructor said.
They went again. And again. And each time, Kim felt it more clearly — the ghost-sense, the phantom perception, the ability to read his opponent's body through channels that had no name in the Academy curriculum.
After the session, the instructor dismissed the trainees. Kim lingered, pretending to adjust his sandal wrappings while his mind worked.
He walked home through the evening streets and didn't see any of them.
—————
His room. Door closed. Mina and Karen in the living room — he could hear Karen running Mina through the kata, the younger girl's footsteps light and uneven, Karen's corrections sharp and increasingly less terrible.
Kim sat on his bed, cross-legged, and closed his eyes.
Okay. Think.
He reached inward. The synchronization jutsu had become so integrated into his daily practice that activating it was like breathing — he didn't need to think about it, didn't need the hand signs anymore for short sessions, could hold a passive resonance almost indefinitely. His chakra hummed at frequencies shaped by two months of contact with dozens of signatures: Academy students, a chunin instructor, an ANBU operative, and the deep, strange well of Naruto's sealed burden.
But today the hum was different. There were… textures in it that hadn't been there before.
He focused on the ghost-sense. The thing that had let him feel the instructor's movements before they happened. He traced it inward, following the sensation to its source in his own chakra network, and found—
There.
A pattern. Faint, woven into his coils like a thread of different-colored silk in a rope. It wasn't his. The frequency was familiar — dense, tightly wound, vibrating with a particular intensity that he'd been marinating in for two months during every Academy session.
Sasuke's.
Not the Sharingan — Kim didn't have red eyes and spinning tomoe, and he was fairly certain his mirror would have mentioned it. But the precursor. The enhanced perception that the Uchiha bloodline was built on — the ability to read movement, to predict trajectory, to process combat information at speeds that normal eyes couldn't match. The Sharingan was the full expression. What Kim had was… a trace. An echo. His synchronization hadn't copied the bloodline; it had adapted to it. His own chakra had spent months resonating with Sasuke's signature and had incorporated the faintest ghost of its perceptual enhancement into his native system.
Kim's hands went still on his knees.
And the chakra sensing. The ability to feel the instructor's coils, his pathway routing…
He searched for that thread. Found it. Different frequency — softer, more diffuse, a gentle pressure rather than a sharp edge.
Hinata.
The Hyuga bloodline. The Byakugan's fundamental capability — chakra perception, the ability to see the flow of energy through living systems. Again, not the full expression. Kim couldn't see through walls or identify tenketsu points at range. But he had spent two months within five meters of Hinata Hyuga for six hours a day, and his synchronization had done what it always did: listened, resonated, and adapted.
Trace-level Byakugan perception. Trace-level Sharingan combat reading.
From sitting in a classroom.
Kim opened his eyes.
He stared at the wall of his bedroom — the crack in the plaster, the hook where his jacket hung, the window where the evening light was turning from gold to amber — and let the implications cascade through his mind like dominoes falling in a pattern he hadn't built but was only now seeing clearly.
It's not just experience. It's not just chakra efficiency.
My synchronization adapts to bloodline traits.
Fragments. Echoes. Trace-level expressions of inherited capabilities that took clans generations to develop.
And nobody knows.
His heartbeat was very loud in the quiet room.
In a world built on bloodlines — where the Hyuga own perception and the Uchiha own combat reading and the Nara own shadow manipulation and each clan guards its inheritance like a dragon guards gold — I have a jutsu that lets me borrow from all of them. Not steal. Not copy. Absorb. Integrate. Make it mine.
If anyone finds out—
He stopped that thought. Killed it. Buried it in the part of his mind where the worst scenarios lived, the locked room where he kept the dreams of wars and gods and a world on fire.
Nobody finds out. Ever. This is the kind of secret that gets you vivisected on a laboratory table by people who want to understand how it works.
This is the kind of secret that gets your family killed to ensure compliance.
Kim's fist tightened on his knee. The scar on his cheek pulled tight.
Nobody. Finds. Out.
He breathed. In through the nose, out through the mouth. The way his ANBU instructor had taught him — clinical, controlled, the breathing of a person who treated panic as a technical problem with a technical solution.
Okay. What else?
He did the assessment. Honest, unflinching, the way he always did it.
Combat capability: he could take his ANBU instructor in bursts. Not sustained — the man had years of field experience and muscle memory that Kim's borrowed perceptions couldn't fully compensate for. But in short engagements, his reaction time and combat reading were approaching a level that made the instructor adjust. He'd seen it today — the subtle shift in the man's approach, the increase in speed and complexity, the professional recalibration of someone who had realized that the student was closing the gap.
Comparative benchmark: two Irukas. He could handle two chunin-level opponents simultaneously, with margin. The thought was strange — Iruka, who had been his teacher, whose warm chakra had been one of the first signatures Kim had learned to read, was now a unit of measurement. A yardstick he'd outgrown.
Sorry, sensei. You deserved better than being a benchmark.
Bloodline traces: Uchiha perception and Hyuga sensing, both at fragment levels. Enough to provide tactical advantage. Not enough to qualify as actual bloodline activation. The question was whether continued exposure would deepen the integration, and if so, whether there was a ceiling.
And what about Shino's insects? Kiba's enhanced senses? Shikamaru's shadow affinity?
He hadn't noticed traces from them. Not yet. Maybe the exposure time was insufficient. Maybe some bloodlines were more compatible with synchronization than others. Maybe—
Stop. You're an eleven-year-old sitting on a bed in a two-bedroom apartment. You're not going to solve the unified theory of bloodline adaptation tonight.
Go make dinner.
He went to make dinner.
—————
The spar the next morning was clean. Kim had spent the night processing, not sleeping — three chapters of Icha Icha hadn't helped, and neither had the stars on the balcony — and had arrived at the Root facility with the particular calm that came from having already survived the worst of a revelation and deciding to treat the rest as engineering.
His instructor came at him hard. Harder than yesterday. The combat reading — Sasuke's ghost, Kim thought, and almost laughed — fed him data in real time: weight distribution, chakra pulse patterns, the micro-tells that preceded each technique. The chakra sensing — Hinata's whisper — gave him a dim awareness of energy flow, enough to anticipate jutsu formation before the hand signs completed.
He fought well. Not perfectly — the instructor was still better in sustained exchanges, still had reflexes honed by years of field operations that Kim's two-month training couldn't match. But well. Well enough that when they separated after the final exchange, the instructor stood motionless for three full seconds.
In two months, Kim had learned to read the silences behind the mask. This one said: assessment complete.
"Kim."
First time the instructor had used his name. Not "trainee." Not the clipped, impersonal address of a handler managing an asset. His name.
"Yes."
"You're ready."
The words hung in the training room's cool air. The two original trainees watched from the wall. Kim felt his heartbeat — steady, controlled, the metronome in his skull counting seconds out of habit.
The instructor reached into his vest and produced a form. Standard issue — Kim recognized the bureaucratic formatting of Konoha's administrative apparatus, the kind of document that reduced human beings to categories and checkboxes. Name, rank, classification, operational assessment.
One field was highlighted: Specialty.
The instructor held the form out. Kim took it. Read through the fields with the systematic attention of someone who understood that paperwork was just another kind of weapon.
Name: filled in. Rank: trainee (provisional). Classification: pending. Operational assessment: a series of numerical scores that Kim noted with detached satisfaction were higher than he'd expected but lower than he'd feared. The sweet spot. The band between "promising" and "exceptional" where safety lived.
Specialty: blank.
Kim looked at it. Looked at the instructor. The porcelain mask gave nothing back.
What am I good at?
The obvious answer: synchronization. The jutsu that had taken him from above-average Academy student to chunin-plus in two months. The secret edge. The loophole.
Write that and you hand Danzo the keys to your life.
The strategic answer: combat. Infiltration. The skills the Root training had built. Write something operational, something useful, something that justified continued investment without revealing anything worth dissecting.
Safe. Boring. Exactly what they expect.
Kim held the pen over the blank field. Thought about Sasuke's footwork correction. About Naruto's self-developed stance. About Karen's reversed kata and Mina's marker-stained fingers and a classroom full of students who had improved by thirty percent because an eleven-year-old had impersonated their teacher for one day and told them the truth about their weaknesses.
He wrote: Good at teaching.
The instructor read it. The mask tilted — not much, just a degree, the porcelain equivalent of a raised eyebrow.
Kim met the empty eye slots with a calm he didn't entirely feel.
It's true. It's useful. It's not the whole truth, but nobody in this building deals in whole truths. And a teacher is a tool Danzo can use without breaking — you don't sharpen a whetstone, you use it to sharpen other things.
Let him think I'm a whetstone. It's safer than being a blade.
The instructor filed the form without comment. Kim left.
—————
Ichiraku Ramen was, in Kim's professional assessment, the single greatest argument against the concept of cold food in the entirety of the elemental nations.
The broth was hot. The noodles were hot. The steam rising from the bowl carried the scent of pork bone and soy and something Teuchi kept secret that Kim suspected was just an unreasonable amount of love for his craft. You could not eat Ichiraku ramen cold. It was structurally impossible. The dish existed in defiance of lukewarm temperatures and everything they represented.
Kim loved it.
Not as much as Naruto, who was on his fourth bowl and showed no signs of biological limitation. But genuinely, sincerely, in the way you loved things that were simple and good and exactly what they claimed to be.
"So then Iruka-sensei says—" Naruto paused to inhale noodles with a technique that could only be described as aggressive — "he says, 'Naruto, your written scores are the lowest in the class,' and I'm like, yeah, but have you seen my practical scores? And he's like—"
"Let me guess. 'Practical scores don't excuse failing the written exam.'"
"How did you—"
"Because that's what every teacher says. It's in the handbook." Kim picked a slice of chashu from his bowl and ate it with the deliberate appreciation of a man who understood that good pork was not to be rushed. "He's not wrong, though."
"I know he's not wrong. I just—" Naruto stabbed his chopsticks into the broth with more force than noodle retrieval required. "I can't sit still that long. My brain doesn't do that. I read the same paragraph four times and I still don't know what it said. But you put me in a fight and I can read the other guy's whole body in like two seconds."
Yes. You can. That's because you're not stupid — you're kinetic. You process through movement, not text. The Academy's curriculum is designed for one learning style and you're operating on a completely different architecture.
Also, you have the chakra reserves of a small country, which helps.
Kim set down his chopsticks. "You ever think about the clone jutsu?"
Naruto's face darkened. The shift was instant — sunshine to stormcloud — and Kim recognized the wound beneath it. The clone technique was Naruto's nemesis. The one jutsu he couldn't perform, the gap in his capabilities that the Academy grading system was designed to punish.
"I can't do it," Naruto said. Flat. Final. The voice of a boy who had tried a hundred times and failed a hundred times and had decided that the hundred-and-first was not worth the pain.
"You can't do the basic clone." Kim kept his voice even. Casual. The tone of someone making an observation, not delivering a verdict. "You know why?"
"Because I suck."
"Because the basic clone uses a tiny amount of chakra, precisely controlled. That's the requirement. Tiny and precise." Kim pointed at Naruto with a chopstick. "You have more chakra than anyone in our class. Possibly more than anyone in the Academy's history. Asking you to use a tiny amount of chakra is like asking a river to produce a single drop of water. The tool doesn't fit the user."
Naruto was staring at him. The stormcloud expression had shifted — not to sunshine, but to something more cautious. The look of someone who had been hurt by hope before and was deciding whether to risk it again.
"There are other clone techniques," Kim said. "Advanced ones. Ones designed for people with large reserves. They use more chakra, not less. Which means—"
"They'd work for me?" The cautious look cracked. Underneath it: hunger. Raw, desperate, barely contained.
"They'd work perfectly for you. Your weakness is the Academy's weakness — they only teach one version. But there are versions out there that would turn your biggest limitation into your biggest advantage."
Kim went back to his ramen. Let the words settle. He could feel Naruto vibrating beside him — not physically, though that too, but in his chakra. The boy's reserves were surging, responding to emotion the way they always did, a tidal force governed by feeling rather than discipline.
Shadow Clone Jutsu. It's out there somewhere. A forbidden technique in a scroll that Naruto is going to steal in about… I don't know. Weeks? Months? The timeline is foggy.
I can't give him the technique. I don't know it. And even if I did, handing a forbidden jutsu to an Academy student is the kind of decision that ends careers.
But I can plant the seed. I can make sure that when the moment comes — when he's standing in front of that scroll, deciding whether to learn the one technique that could change everything — he knows it's not a long shot. It's a lock.
"Kim."
"Yeah?"
"You always know stuff." Naruto's voice was quiet. For Naruto, quiet was practically a whisper. "Like, stuff that nobody else knows. Or stuff that everybody knows but nobody says. How do you do that?"
Kim looked at his ramen. The broth reflected the lantern light — warm, amber, alive.
"I pay attention," he said. "And I read a lot."
"The weird books?"
"All the books, Naruto."
They ate. The evening settled around them like a blanket — the sounds of the village winding down, Teuchi humming behind the counter, the smell of broth and the warmth of a place that, for a few minutes, asked nothing of either of them except to be present and hungry and young.
—————
Tenten's family shop was called the Iron Maiden.
Kim had always appreciated the name. It sat on the commercial road between the Academy district and the residential blocks — a narrow-fronted building with a deep interior, every wall hung with steel. Kunai, shuriken, tantō, naginata, kusarigama. Weapons for every discipline, every range, every philosophy of violence. The air smelled like oil and metal and the particular ozone-tang of freshly ground edges.
He pushed through the curtain and the bell chimed and his heart did something his synchronization jutsu couldn't fix.
Tenten was behind the counter.
She was sorting inventory — a crate of kunai, standard issue, checking each one for balance and edge before placing it in the display rack. Her hands moved with the economical precision of someone who had been handling weapons since before she could write her name. Brown hair in twin buns. Brown eyes focused on the steel. A smudge of oil on her left cheek that she hadn't noticed or didn't care about.
Kim's chakra sensing — Hinata's whisper — registered her signature before his eyes finished processing her face. Warm. Steady. The particular frequency that his subconscious had catalogued six months ago and filed under familiar and safe and her.
There it is. The thing. The inconvenient, strategically useless, stubbornly persistent thing.
"Customer or loiterer?" Tenten said without looking up.
"Can't I be both?"
She glanced up. Recognition, then the particular expression she reserved for him — part amusement, part wariness, the face of a girl who had learned that Kim's visits to the shop involved equal parts commerce and commentary.
"Kim. Back already? You bought kunai last week."
"I go through them fast." He walked to the counter, adopting the unhurried pace of a man browsing, which he was not. He knew exactly what he wanted. He always did when he came here. The weapons were secondary. "Training's been intense."
"Must be." She held up a kunai, sighting along the edge. "You've been coming in twice a month for the past three months. Either you're training hard or you're terrible at keeping track of your equipment."
"Third option: I like the atmosphere."
"The atmosphere smells like weapon oil."
"Exactly." Kim leaned on the counter. Not too close — he'd learned, through painful trial and error, that Tenten's personal space was defended with the same vigilance she applied to her weapon racks. Close enough to talk. Far enough to not get stabbed. "You ever notice how weapon oil smells like potential? Every blade in here is a decision that hasn't been made yet. Pure possibility."
Tenten stared at him. Then she laughed.
It was the laugh. The laugh. The one he'd heard once at the training ground and had been chasing ever since — bright, surprised, genuine. The sound of someone who hadn't expected to find something funny and was delighted to be wrong.
Kim's heart did the thing again. He ignored it with the practiced discipline of a boy who had spent the last two months training with a secret military organization and still couldn't keep his composure around a girl with an oil smudge on her cheek.
"You're weird," Tenten said. But she was smiling.
"I prefer 'unconventional.'"
"I prefer 'weird.'" She set down the kunai and crossed her arms on the counter, mirroring his lean. "So what do you actually need? And don't say 'atmosphere.'"
"Replacement set. Eight kunai, standard weight. And—" He hesitated, which was unusual for him and therefore noticeable. Tenten's eyes sharpened. "Do you carry anything in wire-guided? I've been working on mid-range technique and my current setup is…"
"Garbage?"
"I was going to say 'suboptimal.'"
"I have wire-guided." She turned to the back wall, scanning the inventory. "How long do you need the wire? Ten meter? Fifteen?"
"Fifteen. High-tension if you have it."
"I have high-tension in twelve and twenty. Nothing at fifteen." She pulled a spool from the shelf, tested the tension between her fingers with the absent expertise of someone who measured wire the way other people measured cooking ingredients. "The twelve might work if you double-loop the anchor point. Depends on your technique."
"Show me?"
She glanced at him. Assessed. Decided.
"Come here."
She demonstrated the double-loop anchor with quick, practiced movements — fingers threading wire through the kunai's ring, looping it twice, cinching it with a twist that locked the connection without adding bulk. Her hands were close to his. She smelled like weapon oil and clean cotton and something faintly herbal that might have been her soap or might have been his imagination working overtime.
"See? The second loop distributes the tension across a wider contact surface. Less chance of the wire cutting through the ring under load." She looked up. Their faces were approximately ten inches apart. "Got it?"
"Got it," Kim said, and his voice was steady, which he considered a significant personal achievement.
Her chakra. Right there. Five meters? Less. Much less. Inches.
The synchronization is — stop. STOP. Do not synchronize with your crush in the middle of her family's shop. That is a line you do not cross. There are ethical boundaries that exist for reasons and this is one of them.
He bought the kunai and the wire. She wrapped them with the efficiency of someone who had done this ten thousand times, and when she handed him the package their fingers brushed and Kim's entire synchronization network hiccupped like a engine hitting a speed bump.
"Same time next month?" Tenten said. Still smiling. The oil smudge was still on her cheek.
"Maybe sooner. Training's picking up."
"Then I'll stock the fifteen-meter wire."
"You don't have to—"
"I know." She shrugged. "But you'll want it. And I'd rather have it ready than watch you try to make the twelve work and come back complaining."
She's stocking inventory for me. She's anticipating my needs based on observed purchasing patterns.
That's either excellent customer service or—
It's excellent customer service. Don't read into it. You're eleven. She's twelve. You're a customer. She's a shopkeeper. The transaction is commercial.
The oil smudge is still on her cheek and I want to—
LEAVE THE SHOP, KIM.
He left the shop.
The evening air hit him like cold water — no, not cold, never cold, like cool water — and he stood on the commercial road with a package of weapons under his arm and a heartbeat that was doing things his ANBU instructor would have classified as a security vulnerability.
You are a chunin-level ninja with trace bloodline adaptations and a secret jutsu and a position in the most dangerous covert organization in the village.
And you are completely, irreversibly, catastrophically* gone for a girl who sells kunai.*
He adjusted the package under his arm. Straightened the scar on his cheek by tugging his jaw. Walked home.
…She stocked the wire for me, though.
—————
Home. Dinner. The routine — Karen's kata (the reversed version was solid now, and her forward version had improved as a result), Mina's drawings (tonight: "a house,"), hot food, clean kitchen, quiet apartment.
They ate together at the low table, the three of them forming a triangle that Kim tried not to think about in geometric terms and failed. Karen sat straight-backed, eating with precision. Mina sat cross-legged, eating with enthusiasm. Kim sat between them and felt the warmth of their chakra signatures — familiar, loved, his — and let the synchronization rest. No jutsu. No resonance. Just family.
"Kim," Karen said.
"Mm."
"When's Mom's next day off?"
Kim did the mental math. His mother's shift schedule was a pattern he'd memorized the way he memorized jutsu sequences — by necessity. "Thursday. Why?"
Karen moved rice around her bowl. The gesture was casual. The question was not. "We should go somewhere. All of us. Together. Like a…" She struggled with the word, or maybe with the vulnerability of wanting it. "A trip."
Mina looked up from her drawing. "Trip?"
"Like going to the river," Karen said. "But further. Like a real trip."
Kim watched Karen's face. The careful neutrality, the way she held her chopsticks a little too tightly. She was nine years old and adopted and fierce and she wanted, with a desperation she would never admit, to do a normal family thing. To go somewhere with the people she'd chosen — or who had chosen her — and come back and have a memory that was hers.
When was the last time we went somewhere? Not the Academy, not the market, not the training yard. Somewhere that was just… for us?
He couldn't remember.
"The hot springs," Kim said. "The public ones on the east side. They have a family bath and a garden and Mina can draw the koi fish."
"FISH!" Mina slammed both palms on the table with the force of a six-year-old who had just heard the best word in the language.
Karen's chopsticks loosened. Not much. Enough.
"Okay," she said. "Thursday."
"Thursday," Kim confirmed. "I'll tell Mom."
He cleared the dishes. Washed them. Listened to Karen teach Mina the fourth kata — the one with the spinning heel kick that Mina kept turning into a pirouette, which was wrong but delightful — and planned Thursday in his head. Hot springs. Family. Koi fish. His mother's rare day off, spent not sleeping or recovering but being here, with them, in the warm water and the garden light.
This is what the strength is for. All of it. The synchronization, the Root training, the bloodline traces, the endless calculating — it's for THIS. For Thursday. For Karen wanting a trip and Mina wanting fish and Mom needing a day where nobody's hurt and nothing's broken.
He dried the last plate. Put it away. Leaned against the kitchen counter and pressed his thumb into his palm.
I need new clothes.
The thought arrived with mundane urgency. He'd been growing — the past two months of intensive training had accelerated something biological, some combination of physical stress and chakra development that was pushing his body through growth spurts that his wardrobe couldn't accommodate. His training shirt had a tear across the left shoulder from the last Sasuke-Naruto combination fight. His pants were an inch too short. His jacket — the one his mother had bought him at the start of the Academy year — no longer closed across the chest.
And I need a new book. I finished the last Icha Icha three days ago and the withdrawal is becoming a tactical concern.
Priorities: clothes, book, hot springs Thursday, don't get recruited into a fascist paramilitary organization.
Standard week.
—————
The next afternoon, Kim arrived at the Root facility and found it different.
Not the building — the building was the same featureless void it always was, the same stone corridors and diffuse lighting and air that tasted like secrecy and floor polish. The difference was inside the training room.
Nine of them.
Nine trainees, standing in a loose formation that was trying to be a line and mostly succeeding. They ranged in age from roughly ten to maybe thirteen — hard to tell with Root operatives, whose physical development was optimized for function rather than normality. They wore the standard dark training gear. No masks. Their faces had the careful blankness of people who had been trained to suppress expression but hadn't been doing it long enough for the suppression to become total. Kim could see the cracks — a twitch of curiosity here, a flicker of apprehension there, the small human tells that Root's conditioning hadn't yet finished grinding away.
Chunin level. All of them.
His synchronization sense confirmed it before he'd finished the visual assessment. Nine signatures, each burning at the steady, controlled frequency of operatives who had been trained past Academy standards and into genuine combat capability. Not elite — not ANBU-level, not close — but solid. Professional. Dangerous in the way that competent people were always dangerous.
His instructor stood at the back of the room. Mask on. Arms crossed. The posture of a man who had completed his task and was now observing the result.
"These are your students," the instructor said.
Kim looked at the nine trainees. The nine trainees looked at Kim. The silence was the particular kind that occurred when people were reassessing their assumptions in real time.
"From today," the instructor continued, "you are responsible for their tactical development. Hand-to-hand fundamentals, technique refinement, weakness identification and correction." A pause that might have been significant. "Your assessment indicated a specialty in instruction. This is your opportunity to demonstrate it."
Kim stood very still.
Inside, behind the mask he didn't need porcelain for, something was happening. A warmth. A pressure in his chest that had nothing to do with chakra and everything to do with the absurd, wonderful, dangerous position he'd just been placed in.
Nine chunin-level trainees. In a room. Within five meters. For hours. Every day.
Nine signatures for my synchronization to resonate with.
Nine sources of combat experience, technique, and — if any of them have even trace bloodline heritage — nine potential threads to weave into my own network.
Danzo, you paranoid, scheming, morally bankrupt old man.
You just gave me exactly what I needed.
He kept his face still. Professional. The face of someone receiving an assignment, not a gift.
But beneath the surface — deep, where Root's observation couldn't reach and Danzo's philosophy couldn't touch — Kim was laughing.
Not cruelly. Not with malice. With the particular joy of a boy who had spent months searching for a loophole in the architecture of power and kept finding them in places where nobody thought to look.
Good at teaching. I wrote "good at teaching" and they gave me a classroom.
A classroom full of chunin.
Danzo's eye for talent is not bad at all.
He stepped forward. Faced the nine trainees. Let his gaze move across each face — reading the chakra, feeling the frequencies, mapping the landscape of nine individual systems that were about to become his orchestra.
"My name is not important," he said. "I'm going to teach you how to fight. But first—"
He looked at the one on the far left — the youngest, the one whose suppressed expression had cracked just enough to show curiosity.
"—I need to know where you're broken."
Nine faces stared back at him.
Kim smiled.
Let's begin.