The screen flickered with the half-second stutter that an old GPU made whenever something finally finished loading.
Ryshaw had learned to stop worrying about it months ago. He leaned back in his chair, the worn leather groaning under him, as he stretched both arms up until his shoulders popped satisfyingly.
The familiar hum of the desktop tower filled the otherwise quiet room. His desk lamp threw a warm yellow circle across empty energy drink cans and a half-eaten bag of chips he'd meant to throw away two days ago.
The title of the game he was just about to play appearing on the barely functional screen.
NARUTO: SHINOBI ORIGINS
"Alright," Ryshaw muttered to himself, sitting forward. "Let's see if this thing is actually good."
He'd downloaded it on a whim two nights ago after scrolling past a short clip on one of the gaming forums he barely used anymore. It had no big fangame studio behind it . His expectations weren't even that high. No polished trailer, just a single post from some anonymous dev account with a download link and three words typed underneath it: The best naruto fan-made game. It's free and real.
He'd almost ignored it. But the zealous belief that it was the best fangame ever grabbed his attention. Usually, he almost always ignored things like that.
The game description buried in the comments said the game started in the Warring States Era — long before the hidden villages, before the Five Great Nations and any of the familiar names and faces.
A time when clans weren't political allies or careful neighbours but armed factions that burned each other's homes for land, water, and survival.
That alone had sold him.
Every Naruto fangame Ryshaw had ever touched was usually the same. Naruto and the OC would beats Sasuke. They would never face any challenges and always win.
Saving the world via the power of friendship and ramen. He didn't hate it. That type of story had a certain level of charm. But once you played something one to many times, the feeling would become stale.
This was different.
A time before Hokage's existed. With no massive villages or rules. Just the grim nature of war and battle.
The loading bar hit one hundred percent and dissolved into the character creation menu, and Ryshaw immediately leaned forward so far his elbows hit the desk.
"Oh, not too bad."
A full character model rotated slowly at the center of the screen — neutral posture, no features yet, like an uncarved block waiting for a sculptor. The customization menu down the left side was longer than he expected.
CREATE YOUR SHINOBI
Name · Clan · Appearance · Bloodline · Attributes
He cracked his knuckles.
The name field was first and the easiest. He didn't need to agonize over it.
Ryshaw.
Simple, it was his name. He had never understood why others spent hours of their time trying to pick a name for their OC. Especially when playing a fangame.
Surely, you want to be just yourself but immersed.
Appearance next, he pulled the sliders with the dispassion of someone who had done this a hundred times in a hundred different games. Black hair, long and falling to the waist. This was default for the mysterious character look, he had to be different in a way. His face was sharp-featured without being dramatic matching his lean athletic build. One wit no exaggerated muscles. Shinobi weren't supposed to look like sculptures.
Then came the clan selection, and the list was exactly what he expected.
Uchiha, Senju, Hyuga, Aburame, Nara, Inuzuka and more. Every name that carried weight in the lore, every bloodline worth coveting — all of them locked behind a small padlock icon that glowed a polite, firm red.
He snorted. "Yeah, right. Like they'd let you start as an Uchiha."
He scrolled past all of them. Past the famous names, the minor clans he half-recognised, all the way to the bottom, where a single option sat apart from the rest, formatted slightly differently, like it had been added as an afterthought by a dev who couldn't help themselves.
[ CUSTOM CLAN — CREATE YOUR OWN BLOODLINE ]
Ryshaw stopped scrolling.
"Okay…" He sat back slightly, head tilting. "That's actually cool."
He selected it. A new submenu bloomed open — detailed in a way that fan-made games usually weren't. Four broad categories for bloodline type: Vision, Chakra, Body, or Elemental. Each one branched into its own sub-options, carrying their own costs and tradeoffs.
Ryshaw tapped his chin for a moment, genuinely thinking it through.
Vision-type dōjutsu had a reputation in fiction for being the most versatile early-game ability. Perception checks. Combat analysis. Reading the battlefield before it moved. None of the raw destructive power of an elemental affinity, but information in a war was worth a lot.
He selected Vision.
The system prompted him to name it, and he paused only briefly before typing.
Petragon Eye.
A completely original dojustu. Something that didn't map neatly onto anything else in the lore.
For its starting abilities, he picked carefully — Chakra Perception, Flow Analysis, and Combat Prediction at its lowest tier. No copying techniques. Essentially a toned-down cousin of the Sharingan that operated on different principles: instead of recording and replicating, it read and predicted.
Attributes came next. He distributed them thoughtfully, fighting the usual temptation to dump everything into strength. In the Warring States Era, he wasn't going to outmuscle a Senju. That was a losing game before it started. Chakra control and intelligence took the lion's share, speed came a close second. And only then did he chose outright strength.
"Think before you swing," he muttered. "That's the whole strategy."
Finally it was time for the background selection. He looked at his provided options.
Mercenary Clan — better starting gear, combat-focused stats, pre-existing faction ties.
Village Civilian — lower threat level, minor social advantages, no combat history.
Minor Clan Survivor — modest resources, some combat instincts, fleeting NPC recognition.
And then, at the bottom:
[ ORPHAN ]
The description for orphan mentioned no resources, allies or safety net. Ryshaw clicked it without hesitation. If this was going to mean anything, it needed to be from something earned. What better way to start of a Naruto game than as an orphan.
The screen assembled his choices into a summary panel.
CHARACTER CREATION COMPLETE
Name: Ryshaw Risha
Clan: Custom — Risha Clan (Founder)
Bloodline: Petragon Eye
At the bottom of the screen, one button pulsed faintly.
[ CREATE CHARACTER ]
Ryshaw grinned and clicked it. The screen flashed a glistening white, illuminating not only the screen but the room. Then everything went black.
—
Cold.
That was the first thing. Not a sensation he was used to. His apartment ran warm, almost stuffy. But the air that filled his lungs now was sharp and damp and carried the smell of wet earth and something older. Mold, maybe. Old wood. Something that had never quite dried all the way.
His eyes opened.
A wooden ceiling stared back. Rough-hewn planks with visible gaps between them. Morning light crept through the cracks in long, thin stripes.
He sat up slowly.
The room was small. Barely enough space for the thin mattress he was lying on and a narrow strip of floor beside it. The walls were unfinished planks with onne window, its paper screen half-torn, letting in a pale rectangle of grey morning. A cracked clay water bowl sat in the corner beside a pair of worn sandals that were definitely not his.
"...What."
He said it flatly. Not panicked. Just deeply, profoundly confused in the way that happened when your brain hadn't fully caught up to the size of a problem yet.
Then the memories hit him, like a dam breaking. Images and feelings and scraps of knowledge crashed through him all at once — a childhood that wasn't his, faces that belonged to no one in his life, and the bone-deep, instinctive knowledge of a world he'd only ever experienced through a screen.
The memories started at a small and tired village, battered and at its edges. Where war was on the horizon always, not as a distant concept but as smoke in the air on bad days.
Slowly it shifted to an attack, months ago on a nearby village that resulted in scattered families and many deaths. Very few managed to survive the attack, those that did migrating to nearby towns.
Finally it ended at the orphanage. The current place that he could call home, if home were a good way to describe it.
Ryshaw sat there with his head in both hands and waited for the pain behind his eyes to pass. When it did, he looked down at himself properly for the first time.
His hands were small.
Not child-small, somewhere in the early-to-mid teens, he estimated. But the skin was rough and the knuckles were calloused in ways no teenager sitting at a desk would ever earn. These were hands that knew work. That had been used hard.
"You've got to be kidding me," he said quietly.
The door creaked.
A small face peered around the frame. That of a boy, maybe eight years old, with messy brown hair and eyes that were too old for his age in the way that only children who had seen genuinely bad things ever got. He looked at Ryshaw the way people looked at something they were half-afraid to believe in.
"Big brother Ryshaw…" His voice was small and careful. "You're awake."
Ryshaw opened his mouth, then closed it.
Big brother?
The door pushed open wider and more children filed in behind the first one. They moved in that quiet, practiced way as if creating any noise would cause problems. One after another they appeared, until there were nearly ten of them arranged in the small room, looking at him with the same mixture of relief and barely-held-together hope.
They were all thin.
Dramatically, visibly starving, to the point you could tell their bodies had been running on not quite enough for a long time. Their clothes were patched and re-patched, different fabrics stitched together into something that technically served its purpose.
A little girl at the front reached out and tugged twice on his sleeve.
"…I'm hungry," she said.