"Phew~"
He thought he heard something — wind, maybe. Uchiha Sasuke glanced back at the sky without thinking.
The summer afternoon sun beat down hard. White clouds drifted at the edges of his vision, and a stray glare made him throw up a hand to shield his eyes. The cicadas wouldn't shut up.
Probably just the wind.
Crack. He bit into a slice of watermelon. The sweetness spread through his chest, and his eyes drifted over to his mother, who was busy moving around the yard.
Knock knock knock.
Someone at the door. His mother set down whatever she was carrying and headed over. A moment later, muffled voices drifted in from the entrance.
"Oh, Shisui..."
"...Is Itachi home?"
"He left on a mission this morning. Probably won't be back for a few days..."
Sasuke tossed the watermelon rind aside and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand — then caught himself, looked around out of habit even though his father wasn't there to give him that look, and quietly pulled out his handkerchief to clean his hands and face properly. He slipped into the hallway without a sound.
The visitor was Uchiha Shisui. One of his brother's friends.
Supposedly an even bigger prodigy than Itachi.
Sasuke studied Shisui's face — that easy, warm smile.
Then Shisui suddenly turned his head, and Sasuke's heart nearly jumped out of his chest. He forced himself to stay still and offered a polite smile in return.
Shisui looked back at him with the kind of gentleness that caught him off guard.
"I'll come back another time. Sorry for the trouble." Even his voice was soft — nothing about him screamed once-in-a-generation genius. As he turned to leave, he glanced back at Sasuke and winked, mouthing a quiet see you.
If I were as strong as Itachi and him someday... Dad would look at me like that too.
The thought settled in Sasuke's chest, warm and aching at the same time.
"Haaah—" He didn't know why, but a wave of drowsiness hit him out of nowhere. He yawned, stumbled back into the living room, and sank down against the tatami. He was asleep before he knew it.
God, Sasuke, you sweet little idiot.
Elliot looked at his oblivious host and let out a long, tired sigh.
He'd thought about transmigration plenty of times back on Earth — the usual daydreams. Never expected it to actually happen, and never expected to land in Naruto of all places. Two good things at once. Should've been great.
Except he'd transmigrated as a lump of chakra.
Indra's chakra, specifically. The reincarnated kind. The same blob that stuck to Sasuke throughout the manga and eventually became the Six Paths Sage's little gift-wrapped powerup to him.
Elliot genuinely wasn't sure what category of existence he fell into. Tailed beast adjacent, maybe?
But honestly — whatever. He'd always been a little too easygoing for his own good, and getting worked up about it wasn't going to change anything.
The problem was that, unlike a tailed beast, he couldn't survive on his own. The moment he left his host, he started dissolving. He'd tested it right after transmigrating — flew out a few feet, felt himself coming apart at the seams, and shot back at light speed. He wasn't about to gamble on whether his consciousness could survive without a physical structure to anchor it.
After that he'd still take the occasional lap outside, just to stretch, then pull himself back in.
From what he'd figured out through experimentation: past two minutes outside a host, his body structure collapsed back into raw unformed chakra and couldn't hold his consciousness together. He needed Uchiha bloodline to stabilize — non-Sharingan Uchiha could host him for a few seconds at most, while Sharingan users scaled anywhere from tens of seconds to a few minutes depending on how many tomoe they'd awakened.
The Mangekyō he hadn't tested. Instinct told him the holder would notice him, and that wasn't a risk he wanted to take.
For now, only Sasuke could host him indefinitely. Made sense — there had to be something different about the person chosen as Indra's reincarnation.
Lose about half his chakra and his consciousness started going fuzzy. Come back to an Uchiha's body, wait roughly an hour, and he'd be back to full.
So for the past year-plus, Elliot had been living quietly in Konoha as a sentient lump of chakra — taking advantage of being undetectable to pick up quite a lot along the way. With a real body he'd have been unstoppable by now. Without one, none of it meant much.
But something had come up. Something that meant he couldn't afford to sit on the sidelines anymore.
The Uchiha Massacre.
The reason was simple: as long as the clan was alive, he could use their members as relay points and roam fairly freely. If most of them were dead, he'd be stuck hovering around Sasuke at all times.
And who even knew if Sasuke would survive the way he did in canon? Elliot wasn't going to put his life in the hands of a manga plotline he'd read years ago.
My fate stays in my own hands.
"The clan compound, the clanspeople's bodies, Fugaku and Mikoto, Itachi... all the pieces are ready."
He began weaving the illusion together, strand by strand — sensation, perception, environment, intent. When it was done, what he'd built was something he'd quietly named the Night of the Massacre.
"Stage set. Cast assembled. Time to have a nightmare, Sasuke."
He watched Sasuke's consciousness sink into the illusion and took hold of the signals running through the body's nervous system.
Everyone knew how genjutsu worked: invade through the five senses, then manipulate the chakra inside the target's mind to fabricate a false reality.
In practice it was mostly a support tool. Genjutsu couldn't kill directly, and any halfway-decent shinobi could break it by disrupting their own chakra flow — a trick with basically zero barrier to entry. Even genin could learn it.
Learning to cast genjutsu, on the other hand, was a whole different story. It required specific aptitude, serious study, and the kind of sharp thinking needed to weave an illusion without holes — because the moment your target spotted the inconsistency, they'd break free. Getting real mileage out of genjutsu was genuinely hard.
For a genjutsu user without a dōjutsu, one lapse in judgment and you might as well have locked yourself in your own trap.
That's why, at the higher levels, most genjutsu had basically abandoned the illusion side of things entirely. Techniques like Tree Bind Death — B-rank — or the A-rank Bringer of Darkness and Neurobind didn't try to fool anyone. Targets caught in them usually knew full well they'd been hit. The point wasn't deception; it was control — freeze the body, black out the eyes, put them to sleep.
True illusory combat had become almost exclusively an Uchiha specialty. Fights like the ones between Itachi and Sasuke, where both sides were constantly layering and countering genjutsu — that kind of exchange almost never happened outside the clan.
The reason was the Sharingan. With it, an Uchiha could construct illusions without seams. Without it, no matter how skilled you were, a sufficiently attentive opponent would find the crack. So the logic had shifted: if they're going to notice anyway, skip the illusion and go straight for the body.
Combined with how easy it was to break genjutsu in the first place, the result was that non-dōjutsu genjutsu sat in this awkward middle ground where almost nobody bothered.
But as a being made of chakra, Elliot could say without exaggeration:
Nobody did genjutsu better than him.
Everyone else had to force their way in through the senses. He just said "I'm coming in" and started working.
His relationship with chakra manipulation was the same as moving his own hand. A little practice and he could do things no human shinobi could reach in a lifetime — and when it came to genjutsu specifically, the gap between him and anyone else wasn't even worth measuring.
The only real ceiling was something like Tsukuyomi — techniques that built an entire mental dimension, a spiritual space of their own. Short of that tier, every illusion had seams somewhere. The trick was how well you hid them.
Elliot didn't have to hide anything.
He reached into the flow of Sasuke's chakra and began to conduct.