Five years.
Five long years of being Kaito, the quiet orphan, the average student at the Konoha Shinobi Academy. The boy who always just barely passed the minimum requirements, neither talented enough to stand out, nor inept enough to be expelled.
To the instructors, he was just another face. To his classmates, a quiet, somewhat solitary guy, but no trouble. The system had swallowed him whole and digested him without protest.
But beneath the mask of Kaito, Kenji hadn't missed a single day of training.
--- Nightfall, in an abandoned sewer near the river ---
Chu-chack. Chu-chack.
The rapid, metallic sound was the only echo in the damp darkness. By the flickering light of a stolen oil lamp, Kenji repeated the same movement over and over. It wasn't a jutsu. It was something more fundamental.
His right hand gripped a cheap kunai. His two-tomoe Sharingan rotated slowly, burning with a sinister red in the gloom. He didn't use it to copy, but to see.
He saw every millimeter of his own movement. The trajectory of his arm, the tension in the muscles of his forearm, the exact angle of the blade at the moment of release.
Zuum! Thunk!
The kunai flew and lodged itself in the center of a mark drawn with charcoal on the brick wall, fifteen meters away. It wasn't a spectacular shot. It was perfect. Efficient. Lethal.
"Control, not brute force," he murmured to himself, his voice now deeper, that of a pre-teen, but laced with an adult's coldness. "Every movement, a calculated expenditure of energy. Every jutsu, an investment with a return."
He deactivated his Sharingan. A slight throb of pain behind his eyes reminded him of the cost. At almost Eleven years old, he could already maintain both tomoe for nearly ten minutes. A monstrous advance for an Uchiha without formal training, achieved through obsessive repetition and a scientific understanding of chakra that no one else at the Academy possessed.
His life was a perfect duality:
By day, Kaito attended classes, practiced the Transformation Jutsu with calculated clumsiness, deliberately failing sometimes, and listened. He absorbed every theory, every rule, every weakness of the system.
By night, Kenji, in his hideout, trained to the point of collapse. He had perfected tree climbing and water walking to a highly advanced level. With extreme patience, and wearing a tanuki mask and a dark hood, he had stolen three basic scrolls: one on Bunshin no Jutsu (illusory clones), another on Henge no Jutsu (transformation), and a third containing some very elementary genjutsu concepts. He had studied them until he had memorized them and then destroyed them. He left no trace.
Last year had been especially tense. The ANBU had been buzzing around like a wasp, patrolling the borders and low-security files. Someone, perhaps Danzo, was hunting something. Or someone. Kenji knew it instantly. His "career" as a phantom thief had to be put on hold. Too risky.
But like everything in Konoha, the internal crisis passed. Bigger problems—Orochimaru's defection, the shadows of Root, the Third Hokage's weakness—absorbed the attention of the village's hawks. And the Yakuza phantom once again faded into the background.
---Now, in front of the Academy, on an ordinary sunny day---
Kenji—no, at this moment he was Kaito—was leaving the building, his school bag slung over one shoulder. His expression was the same as always: neutral, a little tired, perfectly bland. Inside, his mind was going over the details of a cheating theory exercise he could improve.
That's when the air shifted.
"Ttebayo! You have no idea what you're talking about, teme-teme!"
The voice was shrill, full of childish rage and untamed energy. Uzumaki Naruto.
The reply came, icy and sharp as a kunai's edge. "Shut up, dead-last. Your very existence is shameful enough. You don't need to open your mouth to prove your uselessness." Uchiha Sasuke.
Ah, Kenji thought, stopping in the shadow of a tree, almost merging with it. The same old spectacle.
A small circle of students had formed. Naruto, his fist clenched and his blue eyes blazing with fury, stood facing Sasuke, who glared at him with a disdain so profound it was almost palpable.
"At least I don't go around acting like some arrogant zombie just because my family died!" Naruto shouted, the word bursting out before his brain could process it.
The silence that followed was instant and heavy. The temperature seemed to drop ten degrees. The other boys held their breath.
Sasuke didn't flinch. At least, not outwardly. But Kenji, his senses honed by years of reading threats in the eyes of other gang members, saw it. The slight tremor in Sasuke's fist, the almost imperceptible hardening of his jawline. It was anger. It was pain. It was the trigger.
"What do you know about families?" Sasuke said, his voice now a venomous whisper. "A monster who doesn't even know who his parents were. A mistake the village tolerates out of pity."
Naruto let out a guttural roar and lunged forward, no technique, just pure, wounded hatred.
What happened next, for most onlookers, was a blur. Sasuke, with the innate grace of the last Uchiha, dodged the clumsy blow, grabbed Naruto's arm, and using his own momentum, sent him flying into a fence post with a resounding thud.
But Kenji saw it differently. He saw everything.
His eyes, without activating the Sharingan, registered every micro-movement: Sasuke's slight weight shift, the precise angle of his foot to maximize leverage, the way his chakra flowed, for a fraction of a second, to strengthen his grip. It wasn't a jutsu; it was pure physical skill honed by hatred and brutal training.
Efficient, Kenji analyzed, emotionlessly. But he wastes energy on that final twist; it's pure drama. A waste of 5% of his kinetic potential. If instead of throwing him, he had twisted his wrist with that same momentum… he would have broken it. He ends the fight before it even begins.
Naruto got up, bruised but still furious, while Sasuke turned away with a "Pathetic," slinking off as if he'd just stepped on something unpleasant.
The crowd dispersed, murmuring. Kenji remained in his shadow for a moment longer, watching.
Naruto, the outcast who carried a beast within and a future as a savior. To Sasuke, the last Uchiha prince, carrying an impossible vengeance and the same bloodline potential he concealed.
And to himself, Kaito, the phantom between them. The one who was neither a hero, nor an avenger, nor a sealed monster. Just an intruder with a plan.
A plan that, seeing the power gap and the emotional distraction of those two "pillars" of Konoha's future, felt more solid than ever.
They fight for the past, for recognition, for a place in the light, he thought, turning around and merging with the flow of students heading home. I just need knowledge, power. And this village, with all its dramas and its cracks, is handing it to me on a silver platter.
A barely perceptible smile touched his lips. The daily show was over. It was time for the specter to return to training. He had to refine that 5% waste of his own style. Every advantage counted.
After all, in the world of shinobi, as in the Yakuza, only the most efficient, the most ruthless, and the most patient survived in the end.