Morning came like a drumbeat: the academy bell echoed over the rooftops and the smell of frying oil drifted faintly from the market. Kaito woke with the practice count still ringing in his head—five sets, three draws, breathe—and for a moment the world was nothing but the pattern of his own pulse. The Way of Tidal Edge lay folded on the small chest at the room's corner, pages slightly bowed from the humidity. He touched it with a thumb before dressing, the gesture half habit, half a promise.
Seven days until the written test. Seven days to compress what the other kids had learned in months into manageable, repeatable drills. The checklist he'd made last night unspooled in his thoughts: breathing rhythm, ankle anchoring, slow-twitch repetition, chakra micro-focus. The intellect that now lived in his skull did not shout; it catalogued, indexed, and rendered hypotheses with cold efficiency. He understood the shape of the problem: body limited, chakra modest, time short. The solution was not force. It was precision.
Outside, the academy courtyard glittered with morning dew. Iruka paced the training field like a watchful crow, eyes taking in the line of students. Naruto belonged near the front as if drawn there by gravity; his voice already rose above the others, boasting about some late-night training stunt. Sakura moved through the warmups with an intense, quiet focus that made her look older than she was. Ren found him near the wooden poles and offered a stiff, hopeful smile. "Ready to practice footwork?" Ren asked.
Kaito nodded. "Let's start with three counts, then pivot to the left at the third breath. Keep your weight ninety-ten on the back foot when you anticipate a forward pull."
Ren blinked. "You sure it's ninety-ten?"
"It balances the torque for a slight feint," Kaito said simply. "Try it."
They practiced. Kaito counted aloud at first—slow, metronomic—so Ren could feel the cadence. As Ren moved, Kaito watched the micro-tells: a blink that came a fraction before a shoulder tightened, the way the trailing toe curled a hair when someone prepared to dart. He noticed because his mind could hold dozens of small hypotheses at once and test them, mentally, in the space of a single breath.
He had learned an odd trick in the last week: instead of imagining chakra as an amorphous glow, he pictured it like water moving through a stone channel. Where the channel was smooth, chakra flowed easily; where it kinked, pressure built. By mapping another person's stance to the likely 'channels' in their body, he could predict how they would try to move or compensate. It was not prophetic. It was pattern prediction—probabilistic and messy, but useful.
Iruka's voice snapped him back. "All right, everyone! Today we're practicing anticipatory defense—reading the opponent's center of gravity and intercepting a strike three moves ahead. Treat it like counting. Eyes on the core, hands relaxed, breathe."
The lot of them formed pairs. Kaito's heart made no dramatic leap; he had learned to keep feelings outside calculations when possible. But he felt a small, private jolt when Naruto bounded into a spot across the circle, grin wide and reckless like an unlatched bolt. Naruto's unpredictability was a variable that made clean predictions noisy, but it also made effective calibrations more valuable.
They started with slow drills. Opponents drew, feinted, and then moved. Kaito's method was almost surgical: watch, compress, execute. When his partner—Toma, a wiry kid known for fast hands—attempted to close the distance, Kaito felt three seconds of mental simulation bloom and resolve. He shifted weight just as Toma committed, pivoted his hip, and used only the smallest pulse of chakra to make his palm feel like a tide against Toma's wrist. The palm did not push with force; it guided, redirected a line. Toma stumbled as if redirected by a rope he hadn't noticed.
A murmur ran through the circle. Small victories, especially clever ones, were like sparks in a dry field. Naruto whooped and slapped his knee. Ren's face lit up with a smile that was almost reverent. Sakura's brow tightened in the way of someone interested in how things worked.
Kaito felt a flicker of warmth—not from achievement, but from the surprising softness of being useful. Then his mind slid away from the moment like a careful lens, filing away the small cues that had given him the advantage: a lag at Toma's right shoulder, a breathing hitch when a kid clenched his jaw, the pattern of a practiced feint. All of it stacked like books on a shelf.
The practice increased in tempo. Iruka called for open sparring—a controlled match where the goal was not to best the other but to test anticipatory reaction under stress. Kaito's pulse quickened; his head, however, stayed cool. He enumerated possibilities in a whisper: opponent's likely next five moves; best counters for each; the minimal chakra expense for a viable defensive melody.
Naruto was first. He vaulted into the circle with his usual blast of chaos: an unpredictable blend of taijutsu and reckless commitment. Everyone expected showboating. Naruto lunged, ducked, feinted—his body a storm of impulsive energy. Kaito noticed something subtle: Naruto's breath shortened whenever his arms floored a feint, and his left foot almost always rose a fraction before he committed to a lunge. That fraction was his opening.
When Naruto advanced, Kaito didn't think of counters so much as of curves. He let Naruto run into the curve, then used a small outward step and a gentle intercept of his forearm to steer Naruto's momentum into a harmless spin. Naruto yelped in surprise, then threw a grin that proclaimed the encounter a glorious prank. The crowd laughed, and for once Kaito heard warmth in the noise instead of noise alone.
Then Toma's rematch came. Toma was faster, cleaner, and angrier about the stumble. This exchange felt different—taut, like a drawn string waiting to snap. Toma's eyes were sharper; he moved with a purpose Kaito respected. The first exchange was a blur of hands and near-misses. Kaito's head spun with calculations, trying to keep three, four, five options soldered in sequence. He tested a feint; Toma answered with a shoulder surge that nearly knocked him off balance. The crowd felt the tension shift toward pressure.
Kaito made a choice he had simulated thousands of times across the past week: reduce the number of assumptions. Instead of trying to outpace Toma's speed, he would tax the kid's equilibrium. He shifted his center fractionally to the right, then pivoted into a small palm strike that made use of Toma's forward momentum—no more than a vector re-direction—and followed with a micro-step that unbalanced Toma. Toma's foot slid and the kid stumbled, recovering with a quiet curse.
The thing that rose in the middle of the circle felt odd and new: respect. The kids around them looked at him differently than before—no longer merely quiet, but oddly competent. Naruto tossed an elbow at him like comrades do. "Not bad, Mizuhara!" he crowed.
Kaito's mind ticked. Compliment recorded. Social cache adjusted. But underneath it all was a quieter note: the knowledge that all of this was only the beginning. He had the thinking; he lacked the backbone of raw power or the arrogance to make it absolute. That humility, he thought, would probably keep people around him.
Iruka watched with a face like a stone that had learned to smile in private. After the sparring, when the kids peeled off and practiced cool-down stretches, Iruka stayed behind to make notes on his clipboard. Kaito felt that look—the one teachers give students who make them both wary and glad. Iruka then called him over.
"You handled anticipatory defense well," Iruka said, voice small as a tell. He didn't praise often, and when he did it felt like currency. "You read movement without just watching—there's another level to that. You're seeing the rhythm in other people."
Kaito inclined his head. "I try to compress the imagined outcomes, Sensei. The more possibilities I can hold, the fewer surprises there are."
Iruka's gaze sharpened. "Being able to predict is a skill. Being able to change the fight while the other one is still thinking—that can be dangerous."
Kaito stared blankly. He'd heard similar warnings before—about power and responsibility—but Iruka's tone implied something more tangible, a caution folded into the compliment. "Dangerous how?" he asked, curiously.
Iruka's jaw tightened as if remembering something old and bad. "Dangerous for the one who carries it, first. If you grow used to bending outcomes before people act, you stop seeing them as people. You see them as variables. That's how good intentions choke."
Kaito's head tilted. The concept was not new—he'd read similar warnings in his Earth books about empathy and analysis—but hearing it from Iruka made it local and heavy. "I won't do that," he said, not because he thought the vow would be ironclad but because he wanted the promise recorded. Words, he knew, made intentions more real.
Iruka gave a small, humorless chuckle. "Hope not. You're the sort of mind that can keep Konoha clever if you don't let it get distant."
They both looked toward the circle where Naruto was now imitating wind attacks and making exaggerated faces. Iruka continued softer, "But be careful. A smart man who forgets the cost of a decision makes the wrong calls at precisely the wrong time."
Kaito nodded. Inside, a tiny coil tightened. Dangerous, he repeated mentally, folding the word next to images of his parents' house breaking and the sharp lightning that had stolen their lives. Power without care could be a blade. He didn't want to be a blade for himself.
Iruka's hand landed on his shoulder, a quick, human contact. "Train hard," he said simply. "Grow your muscle and your heart. One without the other is a burden."
That night, Kaito retreated to the small space he had claimed and opened the Way of Tidal Edge. He traced a line along a kata and felt his mind hum with a strange compound of gratitude and hunger. He had the machine of thought, but it needed the factory of the body to produce change. He practiced footwork until his soles ached. He practiced breath counts until they were automatic and then took them deeper, feeling the channels he had imagined become more tangible as they aligned with the muscles.
Four days later Iruka assigned them a mock-scenario: a single-opponent engagement where one student would feint an attack and the other had to read and defuse without excessive force. It would be a graded test—not written, not the chakra-control exam, but a living check of anticipatory skill. Kaito's heart thudded in a way he recognized as a human answer to pressure. He had the thinking. Now was the time to test if his muscles would translate calculation into action.
Standing opposite him was a kid two years older, a volunteer named Sora who helped with the academy's drills. Sora was wiry and lethal in his ease; he had practice etched into his shoulders. The instructor set the scenario: Sora would launch a sequence of probable attacks, and Kaito would demonstrate control, defense, and minimal escalation.
The bell sounded. Sora moved. The sequence came fast—a feint, a low sweep, a high cross. Kaito ran through mental branches quickly—more constrained now, less fanciful. He didn't try to outmuscle Sora; he slid into the channel of the sweep and used a soft redirection that made Sora's momentum carry him past. The instructor's eyebrows rose. Sora recovered and launched again, harder this time.
Kaito felt the small burn behind his shoulder where he'd tightened too soon, the little lag that told him his body hadn't yet fully learned the timing of thought. He adjusted the pacing, breathed, and waited for the exact fraction when Sora would overcommit. When it came, he used a wrist-lock that required 1/10th of the force Sora applied, and the older youth toppled. The court was silent for a heartbeat, then broke into scattered applause.
Iruka's face was unreadable, but his eyes flicked between Kaito and Sora with a studied calm. Later, as the kids collected water and bandaged elbows, Iruka approached Kaito and said in a low voice, "You have something dangerous—but not because you're cruel. Dangerous because of how much you can predict and change. People who can do that can save lives… and they can take them without meaning to."
Kaito stayed quiet for a long time after that. He thought of the lightning that had burned his old home, of the heat that had turned wood into ash, of the countless micro-decisions that had led to that single catastrophe. He understood how he could prevent similar outcomes—better evacuation signals, stricter electrical maintenance—but the thought that logic alone could not fix everything settled like a stone in his chest.
On the walk home, Naruto recited loudly, "You're going to be some big brain, right? We'll make you teach me tests." He punched Kaito lightly on the shoulder in a way that meant welcome. Ren walked between them, shoulders hunched against the dusk.
Kaito let the companionship warm him. He had the ability to line up dozens of probable futures, but tonight he preferred the simplest projection: practice tomorrow, study the chakra diagrams, teach Ren the footwork, and maybe—if he had the courage—ask Iruka a question about what it really meant to lead without becoming a machine.
That night, he dreamed not of equations but of water—clear channels carving stone with patient persistence. He woke before dawn, hands itching to start drills again.
Iruka's warning hummed under his decisions like a faint current. Dangerous. Not an accusation, but a direction. Kaito folded it into his plan, as one folds a new instruction into a familiar manual. He would keep his mind sharp and his heart tethered. He would train until the body obeyed his thoughts without making them monstrous. He would practice humility as often as he practiced footwork.
The day's final thought, as he lay back on the futon and listened to the village's breath, was small and stubborn: there are patterns to everything. Learn them. Respect them. Then act.