Kiyohara let the last of his momentum bleed off into stillness. The air was sharp with dust and the faint metallic tang of thrown steel. A kunai, warm from his grip, clicked softly as he slid it back into its sheath, and only then did he look down at the boy he'd just forced into the dirt.
Obito lay on his back, chest rising too fast, eyes wide with the kind of disbelief that only came when reality refused to match your confidence. The final exchange still lingered in the space between them: Obito's rush, the desperate reach for an opening, and Kiyohara's calm, almost indifferent adjustment, one step, one breath, shuriken cutting through the air at angles that turned "chance" into certainty. It wasn't brute strength that ended it. It was timing. It was control. It was the quiet cruelty of a plan that left no room for luck.
Kiyohara extended a hand.
"Looks like I won."
His voice didn't carry pride. It carried a flat truth, like a verdict that didn't need emotion to be final.
Obito had Uchiha blood. Kiyohara had something else, something that made the present feel temporary and the future feel crowded. Somewhere down the line, Obito had an urn waiting for him. Kiyohara did, too. In that sense, they both had "bright futures." Bright enough to burn to ash.
Right now, Kiyohara had won by a narrow margin. But the thought didn't comfort him. If anything, it sharpened his awareness of how thin the line was. Today's advantage didn't guarantee tomorrow's. The version of himself that waited ahead, random, unknowable, could be far stronger than the one standing here.
And if he drew a truly monstrous future… then all he had to do was fulfill that future's final wish.
He could take off.
Of course, the stronger the future, the more brutal the wish would be. Power never came without weight. It just chose different places to crush you.
Obito stared at the offered hand. Then his gaze flicked to Rin standing nearby, worry written plainly across her face. Heat surged into his cheeks so fast it was almost comical.
This was an Uchiha disgrace.
But Obito had been the dead-last for so long that losing had become familiar, something he hated, something he expected, something he'd learned to swallow without choking. He'd lost in the Chunin Exams before, too. He'd even lost to Might Guy.
In the end, after forcing his pride to sit down and behave, Obito grabbed Kiyohara's hand and let himself be pulled upright. His grip was stubborn, like he could squeeze his dignity back into place through sheer effort.
"…Damn it," he muttered, avoiding Rin's eyes. "Next time I'll definitely win."
Minato Namikaze watched the whole thing with a quiet intensity. The warmth in his expression never left, but the evaluation underneath it deepened, like he was measuring not only what Kiyohara had done, but what it meant.
"That was excellent," Minato said, voice gentle but firm. "Your tactics and shurikenjutsu were impressive. Kiyohara… your practical combat ability is far beyond an ordinary genin."
Then, almost casually, he added what had clearly been sitting in his mind.
"With your level, the Chunin Exams should be easy for you. Why haven't you taken them?"
"I've been focused on training," Kiyohara answered. "I didn't make time to test."
"I see." Minato nodded, accepting it without pressing.
But this wasn't peacetime. Promotions didn't always follow neat schedules when people were dying daily. If someone proved themselves where it mattered, there were ways to fast-track them. Otherwise, they'd have to wait for the annual exam cycle, an idea that felt almost naïve with the front lines collapsing.
"Kiyohara," Minato said, and the shift in his tone made it clear he wasn't speaking lightly, "if this mission succeeds, I'll recommend you for chunin."
As their jounin leader, Minato understood the difficulty of what he was sending them into. He also understood the guilt that came with it. This wasn't the kind of mission his students should have been carrying. But Konoha didn't have the luxury of "should" anymore.
The front line situation had become dangerously unstable. The village had reached a season where survival itself felt like a coin toss. If they could sever Iwagakure's supply line, the advantage it would create for Konoha would be enormous, enough to justify the risk.
And precisely because Iwagakure believed such a breakthrough was impossible, the mission required a team that looked ordinary. Send shinobi who were too strong, and Iwagakure's scouts would notice. They'd send reinforcements. The trap would close.
"Yes," Kiyohara said, nodding once.
He wasn't thinking about rank for pride. He was thinking about what came after.
After the Battle of Kannabi Bridge, if he became a chunin, his strength would likely jump in a way he couldn't afford to ignore. More importantly, his odds of staying alive would rise. And as long as he stayed alive, he could keep receiving help from other timelines, other versions of himself who had died in different ways at different times.
It would snowball. It had to.
Because what waited ahead wasn't theoretical. It was a list of disasters with names people would someday whisper like curses: the Kyuubi Incident, the Konoha Crush plan, Pain's assault on the village, the Otsutsuki invasions…
At those turning points, being weak wasn't a setback. It was an execution.
Not long after, Minato left first. The mission departure was set for three days later, in the afternoon. He was busy every day, too busy to linger, too busy to breathe.
Once Minato was gone, Kakashi stepped toward Kiyohara.
"You're good," Kakashi said, tone flat as a blade. "You won't affect the mission."
Since his father's death, Kakashi had reduced the world to one uncompromising principle: follow the shinobi rules. Complete the mission. A shinobi who failed a mission was trash.
With the strength Kiyohara had shown, he wouldn't drag them down. Their chances wouldn't drop because of him.
Kiyohara simply nodded. "Mm."
This was Kakashi in that warped, rigid phase, words wouldn't reach him. Experience would. One lesson, delivered hard, would do more than a hundred conversations.
Kannabi Bridge would become a turning point for Kakashi, too. But in the original course of events, it was only a small dawn before the plunge. After he killed Rin with his own hands, he'd fall into a darkness so complete he'd stop caring whether he lived at all.
To be honest… if Kakashi had been Uchiha Kakashi instead of Hatake Kakashi, he'd have awakened the Mangekyo Sharingan sooner or later, whether he wanted it or not. And with that, he could've pushed to a terrifying height, without paying the same kind of ruinous physical cost.
"Kakashi," Rin asked gently, trying to stitch the group back together, "do you want to train together?"
A shinobi couldn't afford to relax. Training wasn't ambition, it was maintenance. The moment you grew comfortable, even a small decline could turn into death during a mission.
"No," Kakashi replied, concise as always.
He planned to train alone. Recently, he'd successfully developed a particularly powerful technique, and he wanted to refine it before the mission.
Kakashi becomes a jounin the day before the mission, Kiyohara noted silently.
In truth, Kakashi's strength right now was roughly that of a newly promoted jounin, talented, but stuck in an awkward place. He hadn't fully inherited Hatake Sakumo's blade techniques, and his Lightning Release wasn't yet polished into something complete. No matter how strong Chidori ("One Thousand Birds") was, it carried a fatal flaw: without the kind of dynamic vision the Sharingan provided, it was dangerously hard to control at full speed.
That was why, in Boruto, after losing the Sharingan, Kakashi developed Shiden ("Purple Lightning"), a technique on the same level, but one that didn't require those eyes to use safely.
When things truly turned critical, Kiyohara suspected he'd still end up relying on Rogue-nin Kiyohara possessing him. Even among jounin, the gap between them could be brutal. Thirty-plus years of training and battlefield experience wasn't something Kakashi could replicate overnight.
"Kakashi's just like that," Obito said, leaning back with his hands behind his head.
He still didn't know what had really happened to Kakashi's father, how comrades had turned their backs, how that kind of betrayal could hollow a person out. To Obito, Kakashi just seemed arrogant and difficult.
"I also think it's better to do targeted training these last few days," Genma Shiranui said, bending down to pick up the senbon that had fallen earlier. He wiped them clean, then slid them back into his mouth. They hadn't dropped because of clumsiness. They'd dropped because Kiyohara's display had genuinely rattled him.
"Makes sense," Kiyohara agreed.
Three days remained. Three days in which Rogue-nin Kiyohara could still sharpen his weaknesses, tighten his instincts, and squeeze more out of him before they stepped into something that might not let them come back.
After parting from the others, Kiyohara headed home at a quick pace.
Inside, the quiet hit him like a weight. He stared at the ninjutsu scroll in his hand and felt a headache blooming almost immediately. Sometimes, even with someone explaining everything perfectly, mastery still came down to repetition. Your eyes understood, your mind understood… and your hands betrayed you. The classic curse: looks easy, until you try.
And chakra capacity wasn't something you bullied into existence. It was built slowly, day after day, like filling a lake with a cup.
Unless he could complete the second final wish immediately and fully merge with Rogue-nin Kiyohara.
Kiyohara exhaled and looked inward, as if he could glare his limitations into submission.
"Say… do you have any way to get stronger fast?"
Logically, a future version of him who'd become a rogue-nin should know plenty of shortcuts. Not "dirty tricks", just efficient methods that didn't require him to bleed years he didn't have.
"I do," Rogue-nin Kiyohara said, voice dry. "Take drugs."
So that was the answer.
If you didn't take drugs, how were you supposed to get strong?
Kiyohara couldn't help thinking of Sasuke's three years with Orochimaru, how many forbidden substances he must have swallowed during that time. Still, Orochimaru had been unusually careful with Sasuke's body. The drugs hadn't visibly ruined him. At the very least, they hadn't turned Sasuke into some grotesque experiment with a sharpened, unnatural skull.
End of Chapter