The setting sun hung low in the sky, its warm orange glow spilling through the wide corridors of the Academy. Most students had already gone home, their cheerful voices fading into distant echoes beyond the gates. Satoru, however, lingered.
After saying his goodbyes to Ayano and Ito, he found himself wandering back through the winding hallways, determined to find the library that his homeroom teacher had pointed out earlier.
The problem was that the Academy, despite its clean design and carefully maintained structure, was deceptively easy to get lost in. The corridors stretched on in neat lines, punctuated by sliding doors that all looked the same. Classrooms, training rooms, storage rooms — they blended together in a blur of pale walls, polished wood, and the faint smell of chalk dust.
Satoru paused at one such door, tilting his head. "Was it this way?" he muttered aloud, fingers sliding the door open with a soft shfft. His hopes fell immediately. Inside was nothing but an empty classroom, the rows of desks neatly arranged, chalk residue still clinging faintly to the board at the front.
Clicking his tongue, he shut the door again. 'I didn't think my lack of sense of direction would follow me into my second life,' he thought wryly. On Earth, getting lost had been one of his lesser flaws; here in Konoha, it seemed to persist with embarrassing stubbornness. At first, he had been content to wander; maybe it was even better this way, avoiding instructors who might question why a lone boy was wandering after hours. But after several minutes of circling the same corridors, the novelty wore thin. Each hallway looked like the last, and every door mocked him with the wrong destination.
The minutes stretched into what felt like hours. A dull frustration crept in, building into a desperate hope. 'At this point, I wouldn't even mind running into a teacher. Just someone who could break me out of this loop.'
He turned another corner, and this time something caught his attention. A faint noise; muffled but distinct.
"Clang… thud…" followed by the sound of laboured breathing. Someone was exerting themselves. Satoru stilled, his curiosity piqued. The noises repeated, sharper this time, carrying the crisp metallic ring of steel clashing.
His head tilted. 'Grunts and the clang of metal? In the Academy? At this hour?' His lips curved into a small smile. "Someone's training," he whispered to himself, already following the sound.
The corridor led him toward the rear of the building. Soon, the hallway opened into an outdoor training ground that had been shown briefly during the tour earlier that day. He recognised it now — the dirt floor worn from countless drills, wooden dummies lined against the wall, and a row of targets standing proudly under the fading light of sunset.
But he barely registered any of that. His attention locked instantly on the lone figure standing at the centre of the grounds.
A boy.
His posture was low, almost crouched, both hands full of four kunai gripped tightly in each. Eight targets stood before him, arranged at various distances. But it wasn't the weapons that caught Satoru's breath.
It was the boy's eyes.
Scarlet irises gleamed in the dim light, spinning with three tomoe each. They pulsed faintly, alive with eerie brilliance.
Of course, he realised who it was. Uchiha Itachi. The prodigy. The genius who would one day be spoken of in hushed tones across the shinobi world. Here he was, no older than Satoru himself, already wielding the perfected Sharingan.
Satoru's lips pressed into a thin line. His own eyes held but a single tomoe; a fragment of the same power. He was grateful for it, the Sharingan had already changed his life, but staring at Itachi now drove home the gap between them.
'One tomoe… and I don't even know how to progress further. How do you force evolution in a dōjutsu born from trauma and emotion?'
Itachi adjusted his stance, pulling Satoru out of his spiralling thoughts. The boy's movement was so precise, so measured, that it felt less like a child shifting position and more like a veteran shinobi who had long since memorised every detail of his own body.
He wasn't standing directly in front of the line of targets. Instead, he shifted several paces to the side, lowering himself into a half-crouch, his knees slightly bent, the muscles in his forearms taut but not rigid. He angled his body at perhaps thirty degrees off-centre, the line of his shoulders perfectly aligned with the arc he intended.
Satoru frowned, leaning forward instinctively.
'At that angle? He's not going to aim straight… is he going to curve them?' His mind flickered through possibilities, every calculation he could scrape together.
Then came the throw.
Itachi's arms moved, not wildly, not with force alone, but with a fluid, practised motion. Both wrists flicked at just the right fraction of a second, and eight kunai left his hands in unison.
"Fwsshhhht!"
The blades cut through the air, hissing as they spun. Almost instantly, the calm training ground erupted into a storm of sound.
"Clang!" The first two collided mid-flight, sparks bursting as their angles shifted.
"Clink—clank—!" Three more ricocheted, glancing off the others in a dizzying ballet of steel.
"Ping!" "Tink-tink!" The last pair skipped off the spinning metal storm, their paths altered sharply.
Satoru's Sharingan-less eyes struggled to follow, his gaze darting left and right as the kunai seemed to overlap and rebound in impossible arcs. They curved, changed trajectories, wove around each other in a deadly cascade like dancers leaping across a stage, each motion perfectly timed with the next.
Sparks lit in tiny bursts whenever steel kissed steel, glowing orange in the twilight before fading into the dirt.
"Thunk!" One embedded itself in the edge of a target.
"Thud!" Another struck a bullseye cleanly.
"Crack!" A third splintered the wooden surface, lodging itself deep.
The last kunai, the one that had been nudged, deflected, and redirected more times than Satoru could count, quivered dead-centre in the farthest target, its steel vibrating with a soft metallic hum.
Satoru's breath caught in his throat. 'Perfect…'
His mind instantly scrambled to deconstruct it. He pictured the stance, the crouch that gave balance, the sideways angle that opened a wider arc of rebound trajectories. He tried to replay the exact timing of the wrist flicks, the subtle release of pressure in Itachi's fingertips. Each element had been calibrated with inhuman precision. But beyond the physical, there was something greater at work.
'The Sharingan. He predicted every angle.'
Every ricochet, every bounce, every curve through the air had been accounted for before the kunai even left his hands. To anticipate the rebound of one blade was difficult. To do it with eight, simultaneously, and orchestrate them like notes in a symphony? That required genius. That required eyes that could see the world frame by frame, slow it down, digest it, and turn impossibility into certainty.
Satoru swallowed hard. 'Could I replicate that?'
His gut gave him the answer at once. 'Not a chance. Not with a single tomoe. Not now.'
His Sharingan, while a blessing, was still in its infancy. It gave him glimpses of precision, allowed him to react faster, but what Itachi had just displayed wasn't mere reaction. It was foresight, anticipation layered upon anticipation, a cascade of predictions building on each other in an unbroken chain.
And then there was the cruellest truth: he hadn't even touched a real kunai yet. The orphanage forbade weapons beyond wooden practice.
'I can't even train my Sharingan properly without steel in my hands. Not like this. Not like him.'
A soft sound broke the silence.
"Haa…"
Itachi exhaled, just a faint sigh, almost soundless. He walked forward and, one by one, he retrieved the embedded kunai, sliding them free with smooth, practised motions.
Satoru's pulse was racing. 'Is he going to repeat it?'
His breath caught in anticipation. 'I need to see this again. I can't waste this chance.'
Almost without conscious thought, his chakra stirred.
"Shrrkk—"
His vision shifted violently. Scarlet bled across his irises, the familiar single tomoe spinning into life. The world sharpened in an instant. Colours grew vivid, edges grew sharper, and every flicker of movement etched itself into his perception. Even the dust in the air, caught in the last rays of sunset, floated more slowly, clearer.
The shift in the air was immediate.
Itachi stilled. His hand, halfway to pulling another kunai free, froze. His shoulders straightened slightly, head tilting as if catching an unfamiliar scent. Then, with the deliberate calm of a predator sensing intrusion, he turned.
His gaze swept across the training ground — and landed squarely on Satoru.
Scarlet met scarlet.
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