(Sukomo Hatake's POV)
"Alright, Hatake. Third time's the charm. Or is it the thirty-third? Who's counting anymore, really?" I muttered to the empty training ground, my voice the only thing competing with the evening crickets. "This time, for sure, I will definitely be able to do it. Probably?"
It's a weird thing, finding your life's calling thanks to a coincidence. I'd been a full-fledged, card-carrying Jōnin of Konoha for a few months now—one of the youngest, a fact my father brings up at meetings until people stop making eye contact.
But for years, my career path felt less like a chosen destiny and more like a family inheritance I was dutifully lugging around.
The Hatakes have history. We were samurai, once upon a time, serving the Fire Daimyō with all our strength and under any circumstances you'd expect. Then we got caught in some political internal conflict.
I was just a baby at the time, but I've heard the stories from my old man and my uncles enough to imagine it.
They'd huddle around a fire, their voices getting all grave, reminiscing about the good ol' days of being gloriously, terrifyingly without affiliation in the middle of the Warring States Period.
A small band of them, with their fancy swords and even fancier pride, suddenly realized that against clans who could use fireballs, their sharp pieces of metal were... well, just very pointy sticks.
They weren't exactly welcomed by any of the big clans. "Oh, look, the disgraced samurai! Do they come with land? No? Just the overwhelming sense of failure? Pass."
They were panicked, desperate, and a few days away from trying to sell their katanas for lunch money.
Then, like a miracle straight out of a bad children's story, the two biggest, baddest clans in the shinobi world—the Uchiha and the Senju—decided to stop trying to murder each other and start a village, ending the Warring States that had lasted for centuries. Konoha.
And they had a sign out front that basically said, "All are welcome!"
The relief was so palpable in their stories you could almost taste it. My family found their big, beautiful, leafy umbrella right before the storm really hit. To this day, they get misty-eyed talking about it.
The loyalty runs deep. "We will die for this village!" they say. And I get it, I really do. Having seen the rest of the world on missions—a place that largely consists of mud and despair—Konoha is like heaven that one must protect no matter the cost.
But here's the problem: wanting to protect something and actually being able to do it are two very different things.
I'm good, I'm really good. But I'm not 'punch-a-tailed-beast' good like the First Hokage, the one I admire the most. I'm certainly not even as talented as his granddaughter who graduated after a year at the Academy or, heaven help me, Princess Azula herself.
My thing, my whole deal, is the family heirloom: the White Light Chakra Sabre. I got it young, a symbolic gesture from the elders after entering the Academy, and I love it.
There's nothing quite like the shiiing sound it makes when you unsheathe it. It's a beautiful and elegant weapon.
But in a real fight? Unless you're overwhelmingly faster, trying to use a sword as your main attack is a bad idea. Any decent shinobi's first thought is, 'Cool sword. Anyway,' and then they'll happily sit on a branch twenty meters away and hurl fireballs at you until you're a dobe. It's frustrating.
And then… I saw it. Demon Slayer. Princess Azula's masterpiece.
These people… they couldn't use chakra! They had no fancy bloodlines, nothing! All they had was sheer, unadulterated willpower and a breathing technique so intense I got lightheaded just watching them.
They were just… breathing really, really well… and then chopping the heads off demons that could give an average Jōnin a very, very bad day.
It was a revelation. An epiphany. A 'why-didn't-I-think-of-that-oh-right-because-I'm-not-a-genius' moment.
That's it! That's what I've been missing! It's not about the sword; it's about the idea! For two years, I've been in my backyard, trying to crack this and replicate their feat.
And I've had some success! By controlling my breathing, focusing my chakra internally, I can now pull off a move I call the "Hatake Breathing: Initial."
It basically doubles my strength and speed for a short burst. It's enough to play with an Elite Jōnin if he doesn't go all out. It's also incredibly draining and makes me need a nap for hours.
But it's not what I want. What I want is to take it further. I want to merge this breathing with my Lightning Release chakra. I want absolute speed.
I want to be a blur, a flash of white light, somehow like the Third Raikage.
Thinking about it, we use hand seals to mold and control chakra for ninjutsu, right? It's a focusing tool. But what if the focus was inside?
What if, instead of weaving signs, I could weave a specific breathing pattern that does the same thing? A Breath of Lightning Style! No seals, no warning, just pure, instantaneous speed!
If I can master that… then maybe, just maybe, I can finally cast that B-rank Lightning Release jutsu without even moving a muscle. Well, except my lungs. They'd be moving a lot.
"Raiton: Lightning Palm." I used the B-rank technique that shocks the opponent on contact but, well, I dialed the voltage waaaaay down from killing technique to massage technique.
My plan is to give every single cell in my body a friendly contact with lightning chakra. I'm basically trying to bribe my nervous system into becoming best friends with electricity.
The goal is to see if making this zap directly connect to my chakra network can create a sort of... perpetual energy mode. I will only need to control my breathing to keep it calm in normal times, but always ready to unleash B-rank ninjutsu simply by breathing harder.
Anyway, after two years of this, my body's less "ouch" and more "ahh, that's the stuff." The numbness is gone, replaced by this weird, hyper clarity.
My reactions are sharper, my brain is processing things so fast I can see individual dust motes dancing in the sunbeams, and I'm just... weirdly energetic.
I cracked my knuckles, a few stray sparks jumping between my fingers.
"Come on, Hatake. If it doesn't work this time, it'll work the next time." I wasn't sure why I was so confident. Maybe it was the lightning, or maybe it was the fact that my hair was now permanently standing on end, giving me a fantastic and very cool look. ... ... ... Ordinarily, a lone Jōnin training in his secluded home training ground doesn't exactly send ripples across the shinobi world. It's about as impactful as a single raindrop in a monsoon.
But what Azula, currently grinding her teeth in Konoha, didn't realize was that her mere presence had already set the most delicate of butterflies flapping its wings since her arrival in this world—stronger than even changing the Uchiha situation.
And that butterfly was about to orchestrate a hurricane so colossal it would leave the entire shinobi continent needing a change of pants.
Her immediate forecast, however, called for a high chance of severe annoyance with a 100% chance of a gloating Tsunade.
"And then the old man said my chakra control was 'precocious'! Pre-co-cious!" Tsunade chirped, practically vibrating with smugness.
At the grand old age of eight, she, along with Orochimaru and Jiraiya, had been promoted to Chūnin, cementing them as Konoha's youngest prodigies. She had now woven this fact into every conversation for a solid week.
Azula, who had been trying to meditate on the finer points of setting things on fire with one's mind, cracked open a single, unimpressed eye.
"Tsk. Let me offer my heartfelt congratulations. So what if you're a Chūnin? The title didn't magically grant you the ability to beat me, a 'lowly' Academy student." She delivered the verbal poke with surgical precision, and just like that, the smugness on Tsunade's face deflated like a punctured balloon.
It was true. Their spars were far more balanced now, a far cry from a few years ago when Azula could end them before Tsunade could throw her first punch.
But this wasn't due to any sudden surge in Tsunade's talent; it was simply the cruel, inevitable law of biology.
Azula had hit her prepubescent physical ceiling early, a high-performance sports car running on a child-sized engine. Tsunade was finally catching up to the model year.
In raw, unadulterated fighting power? Either of them could hand most average Chūnin their own headbands with minimal effort.
If they did nothing but accumulate mission experience for a few years, Jōnin was a foregone conclusion.
So, Tsunade's promotion was, in Azula's meticulously calculated opinion, a participation trophy. She herself was already mentally checked out of the Academy, bored out of her skull and itching for a proper challenge.
How was she supposed to awaken her precious Sharingan if her greatest adversary was a written exam on shurikenjutsu theory?
"Anyway, don't get too comfortable in your new flak jacket," Tsunade said, rolling her eyes so hard she feared they'd get stuck. "Before you even learn how to properly starch it, I'll strive to become a Jōnin. Just imagine me, your superior officer, assigning you to D-rank missions to weed the village gardens. A fitting destiny, don't you think?"
Azula didn't care, knowing full well Hiruzen would rather adopt a tailed beast than promote a nine-year-old Tsunade to Jōnin.
A new, more pragmatic thought then struck her.
"Speaking of your newfound prestige," she began, her tone deceptively casual, as if asking about the weather. "How's your progress with medical techniques coming along?"
Azula's own affinity for Yang Release was… underwhelming. She was more suited to taking things apart than putting them back together.
But her long-term plans, meticulously outlined in the secret scroll she kept hidden under a floorboard, absolutely required advanced medical knowledge.
We're talking everything from the safe injection of questionable Hashirama cells to the ethical nightmare of cloning oneself—all crucial steps on the path to achieving the Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan.
And speaking of the Mangekyō, it was almost hilarious. Here she was, strategizing about the pinnacle of ocular power when she hadn't even managed to turn her eyes a festive shade of red. Talk about putting the cart before the divine, world-altering horse.
For two and a half years, she'd tried everything to jumpstart her emotions. She'd consumed every new, original manga she could find, from the tragically romantic to the absurdly dramatic. But they were all… meh.
Fictional stories crafted by strangers who couldn't possibly understand the intricate, dark, and frankly sarcastic wiring of her psyche.
But then, a gloriously unhinged idea struck her. The goal was a profound emotional fluctuation, right? And who knows what traumatizes Azula better than Azula?
Her new plan was a masterpiece of self-inflicted psychological warfare.
Step one: Create a Shadow Clone.
Step two: Slap a custom seal on it to block the memory transfer upon its dissipation.
Step three: Order that clone to create another clone, and so on, building a chaotic assembly line of herself.
This chain of Azulas would have one mission: to collaboratively write and illustrate the most soul-crushingly depressing, personally resonant tragedy imaginable, tailored specifically to destroy her own emotional state.
She was morbidly curious. What story would a committee of herself write? Would it be a Shakespearean epic of betrayal? A heartbreaking tale of lost honor? She was literally going to outsource her own trauma.
And if that didn't work… well, she had a Plan B. A guaranteed, one-hundred-percent foolproof method to awaken the Sharingan. She shuddered to think of it.
"Don't worry, I'm doing good on this. Speaking of which, I have some new ideas for a medical jutsu I came up with, but I need to see Grandma," she said, thinking about the idea that had suddenly struck her during her last mission.
(END OF THE CHAPTER)