Third Person POV
The greenery was bursting with life in the large field nestled in the middle of a dense forest.
On the training ground, far from the walls of the Leaf Village, there was only a single boy who looked to be around twelve. Sitting on a stone outcropping, he ran his fingers through unruly blond hair, his blue eyes gazing up at a sky of the same pure blue. He wore a simple black jumpsuit that didn't restrict his movements, and under his sleeves were two small bracers with fūin seals. Secured to his back was a scabbard with the hilt of a tanto sticking out. This was Naruto Uzumaki.
The world around him was alive, filled with rustling leaves and the occasional sound of animals from the woods. But the peaceful moment with nature didn't last long. The boy was distracted by two figures who appeared in a swirl of leaves.
The first was a medical-nin in a white uniform, wearing a pleased expression. The second was a tall, slightly hunched man with silver hair sticking out in all directions—now inexplicably damp—wearing a jōnin uniform and a mask that hid half his face, his shinobi headband pulled down over his left eye. His single visible eye looked lazy, even slightly irritated. This was Kakashi Hatake.
In response to their arrival, the boy stood up from the rock, walked closer, and remarked:
"Not late, Hatake-san. Guess the rumors about you were wrong."
"Yep," the man confirmed grumpily, glancing sideways at the medic.
"Yes, isn't it just wonderful how everything worked out?" the medical-nin chimed in cheerfully.
He had, in fact, kicked Kakashi out of the hot springs only a few minutes ago, where the silver-haired man had decided to relax in the middle of his mission. The mission, assigned by the Hokage, was simply to conduct a training spar with some kid.
"Everything's ready here. You know where to find me if I'm needed. Good luck to you both," the medic said with another wave and vanished into the forest with the Body Flicker.
"Well then." Kakashi pulled his favorite little orange book from his pouch—Icha Icha Violence, another volume in what some even called the Great Cycle, authored by Jiraiya. He then said lazily, "Hiruzen-sama asked me to put on something resembling a fight with you. Don't hold back. You can start whenever."
He waved his hand, basically telling the kid to go ahead and try something while a very important ninja was busy with his own business.
"Hmph." The boy was clearly pissed by such disregard. "If I don't hold back, ten medical-nin won't be able to put you back together. Put away that… literature… and at least try to look a little serious."
"Hm?" Kakashi's eye lifted from the page. "What's wrong with the book? I bet you haven't even read it. And those are big words for a little squirt like you. Now, stop distracting me."
And he buried his nose back in the book.
The boy's eye twitched. He looked up at the sky, then back to the man, and sighed.
"Your rival was definitely more pleasant to talk to. Unlike you, he'd actually heard of respect."
"You know Gai?" Kakashi was interested again, tearing his eye away from his book.
"Yeah. I heard from him that you two are supposedly equals as shinobi. I'll check that for myself. Considering the rumors you've been out of the game for a while, it's hard to believe. Getting rusty, are we?"
"You talk too much." The blond's jab made Kakashi's gaze turn annoyed again. "It's all people like you can do, when you're nothing but pathetic nobodies yourselves. Am I supposed to wait here all day?"
The boy snorted.
"No. This will be over in less than ten minutes," he answered, folding his arms in a closed stance, waiting. "Now pull up your headband and, if you can, activate your Mangekyō."
Kakashi was about to retort with something even snarkier when, for him, it was as if the world stood still.
An unseen chill emanated from the boy who'd been introduced to him as Naruto Uzumaki, making Kakashi's heart clench with a fear from his past. Immediately after, a monstrously powerful chakra erupted from the blond, making the air howl and take on a dark blue hue.
Acting on pure instinct, Hatake didn't even realize he had used the Body Flicker to tear across the distance, reappearing at the edge of the training ground. He then raised his headband, and the Mangekyō pattern swirled to life in his revealed eye to immediately trap the boy in a genjutsu.
It all took much less than a second.
"Kushina-sama…" was all Kakashi managed to choke out, stunned, staring at his opponent and breathing heavily. Immediately after, he covered his dōjutsu eye with his hand. Activating the Heavenly Eye had come with great strain and pain, so Hatake decided to use only the basic Sharingan from now on.
That chakra... that power... The man knew it well.
"M-n-gh…"
Uzumaki grimaced, and then another, even more powerful pulse of chakra erupted from him with a roar, causing deep cracks to spiderweb across the ground around him.
"Just a simple paralysis. And what did that woman ever do to you?"
Hatake didn't answer. He just sharply snatched out a smoke tag and threw it at his feet, bursting out of the smokescreen to the side.
Meanwhile, the boy focused a bit more chakra into his eyes, making them glow blue, then grasped the hilt of his tanto with his right hand.
"I've only been using this for two years. Let's see what I've achieved," he said, and upon unsheathing the blade, he immediately clashed with Kakashi's kunai as the man approached from the left.
Several sounds of metal striking metal rang out, ending with a powerful blow to Kakashi's stomach that sent him flying a dozen meters away.
"Weak," Uzumaki noted, before rushing after his opponent.
They closed the distance, and the two were now fighting with two kunai on the silver-haired man's side, and a tanto plus a kunai in the blond's hands.
Despite his Sharingan, Kakashi could barely keep up with the movements of his opponent, who turned out to be much faster than him. In the course of the clash, he couldn't land a single scratch, while he himself was already covered in cuts from his opponent, who even seemed almost careless about it.
Only ten seconds had passed when a powerful punch from the fist clutching the tanto smashed into Kakashi's chest, sending him flying once again.
"No, this won't do at all," came Uzumaki's indifferent voice.
When Kakashi landed, he was about to rush forward again, but a seal spreading across his flak jacket made him pause. When he looked up, he saw a Shadow Clone literally stepping right out of Uzumaki himself. The clone simply dropped to its knees, its back to the boy, and leaned forward slightly.
"You know, back in the day they let me study one difficult but very versatile technique."
Kakashi decided to see what would happen next, not moving from his spot.
"This is its simplest application, but I think it's pretty damn genius," Uzumaki went on, raising his tanto as the clone clapped its hands together, forming a hand seal.
Based on his opponent's actions, Hatake quickly figured out what kind of technique it might be and immediately tried to rip off his vest. But it turned out the spreading seal had latched itself firmly onto his body.
An instant later, with a loud whoosh, space warped, swapping the clone and Kakashi, even their exact poses.
And immediately, the tanto's blade whistled through his neck, the sound drowned out by the thrum of the immense chakra source.
The head fell, and a fountain of blood erupted from the body, soaking the ground in front of it.
The boy casually shoved the headless body down to the ground, then turned his head toward the bushes. They rustled.
Instantly, the "corpse" dispersed into smoke, revealing it was only a clone.
Uzumaki's Shadow Clone, which had been kneeling in the distance, simply and silently dissolved into a blue haze, disappearing.
"Seen enough? I noticed it was just your clone. Come out, Kakashi."
A technique based on the Substitution Jutsu... but also similar to the Hiraishin... The thought flashed through Hatake's mind as he stepped out from the thicket, his headband still raised and his Sharingan active.
He walked slowly, which let him see the blond release the kunai from his left hand, after which it began to glow with a golden light.
Instantly, the boy aimed his hand at the emerging jōnin, and from it, a thick chain—its links more than half a meter in diameter—shot out at incredible speed. Stretching out for nearly a hundred meters, it whipped around to follow the Kakashi who had already started fleeing to the side, smashing through trees with a deafening crash along the way, and finally tore the flimsy body apart, causing another of Hatake's Shadow Clones to disperse. After that, it simply pierced through several more trees and came to a stop, buried deep in the earth.
"I said, come out. No point in using another clone. I saw you leave through the genjutsu," Uzumaki said calmly. After he spoke, the hand from which the chain had emerged flared even brighter.
Just as quickly, the chain jerked sideways into motion again. Hundreds of trees in its path were obliterated, exploding into splinters, until, after sweeping across about a forty-degree arc, it finally stopped and vanished in a flash of light.
The boy kept staring toward the now-mangled forest. And not for nothing. Soon, a completely disheveled man burst from the thicket. With one long leap, he landed ten meters in front of the boy.
Kakashi, breathing heavily, took a step forward. A bead of sweat rolled down his temple.
"That's… impressive," was all he could say.
"Thanks for the compliment. In this spar, I want to hone my weakest side—close-quarters combat without any run-up," Uzumaki replied, and without giving Hatake a chance to respond, he charged into the clash.
This time, the fight was different. The real Kakashi was faster; his experience was palpable in every move. The steel of the tanto and kunai rang out again, and now the blond had to give it his all.
He was squeezing every last drop of strength from his small body. Thanks to his unprecedented control, his limbs were driven even more by channeled chakra than any other shinobi could manage. But it still wasn't enough. Kakashi was significantly larger, and his more developed body, with its much better-honed natural affinity, could simply generate higher output. Purely due to age, the silver-haired man had to exert far less effort to be superior—at least in terms of explosive speed, which was crucial in a fight like this.
Had Uzumaki fought differently, like his former teacher Shisui—building up speed from mid-range and using the Body Flicker—he would have held the advantage in speed. But this was a different kind of battle.
Kakashi, despite being stronger, still couldn't easily snatch a win. The kid was just incredibly technical—more so than Gai, and in that regard he even surpassed the silver-haired man with his Sharingan.
The scene unfolding between them seemed unreal to Kakashi. How many hundreds of battles must Uzumaki have gone through to reach this level?
The blond himself, time and again, saw his opponent making mistakes, small as they were. A slight delay in reaction, noticeable to the blond even despite his opponent's Sharingan; balance that was just a bit less than perfect; a hand set a little wrong here, a foot there; a barely perceptible stiffness in his movements.
The boy couldn't help but feel a steadily growing irritation toward his opponent, because that rustiness meant he couldn't give an even better fight.
"Hah," Uzumaki tossed out, parrying a kunai strike. "Even without the Gates, Gai would be a serious problem for you right now. You've really let yourself go, Hatake. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Next time I spar with him, I'll make sure to tell him you're losing."
Kakashi could barely suppress his surprise and irritation that his opponent, during an incredibly hard duel, was not only not out of breath but could also talk—and openly laugh at him.
For an elite jōnin, an S-rank ninja, it was deeply humiliating.
Anger flashed in his eyes. He sped up, but his movements became slightly more predictable. This was exactly what the blond had been waiting for. Evading another attack, he simply knocked the kunai from his opponent's hand with a sharp strike, after which both fighters simultaneously leaped back, opening the distance and forming hand seals.
"Fire Style: Great Dragon Fire Jutsu!" they shouted almost in unison.
Two enormous heads of fiery dragons roared as they rushed toward each other. A brilliant flash was momentarily blinding, and the shockwave from the explosion made the earth tremble. When the light subsided, a smoking, ten-meter crater gaped in the center of the clearing.
Kakashi was breathing heavily, peering into the smoke. And in that moment, he heard a whistle. Instinctively jerking to the side, he saw a kunai with characters on its hilt slam into the ground next to him.
"Ruthlessness for the Right to Love"
And then another. And another. A true rain of hundreds of identical kunai began to fall from the sky, peppering the entire battlefield.
"It can't be…" Kakashi whispered, recognizing his sensei's fighting style. "Hiraishin…"
"You would have run out of steam soon anyway. There's no point in this type of spar anymore," the boy's voice echoed from all around. "And I decided beating you through stamina would be way too cliché."
A flash. Uzumaki appeared at the kunai next to Kakashi, without any hand seals, and immediately drove a powerful kick into his stomach.
"Don't zone out. I know you can do better! And that was just a demonstration, like with the chains. Now, show me your ninjutsu…"
The place that was once a simple field in the middle of a forest now looked like something else entirely: craters, a few patches of scorched earth, earthen spikes and walls, and broken trees that had somehow flown here from the slightly mangled forest in the distance.
Only five high-level jutsu—that's how far Hatake had been able to go.
Kakashi, battered, covered in dirt and riddled with cuts, was breathing heavily, sitting with his back against a tree at the edge of the field. A tanto was embedded up to its hilt in the wood, a centimeter from his temple.
"Thanks for the spar, Kakashi," Uzumaki said, walking up to him with a light smirk.
A monster in a child's body.
"Look. One… two… three…" He poked a finger at the three most noticeable tears in his uniform—on his arm, leg, and torso—and added, "For someone in such bad shape, that's a very good result. Hope we meet again."
He pulled out the tanto, shook it off, and sheathed it on his back. Then, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, he gave Kakashi a friendly pat on his now-filthy silver hair and, pushing off the ground, disappeared with a leap somewhere deep in the forest.
Kakashi kept breathing heavily, staring into the emptiness in front of him, his eyes wide with shock. A few seconds later, the medical-nin appeared beside him.
"You and Uzumaki-san really went at it," the medic noted approvingly, before turning his attention to the jōnin's condition. "Alright, what have we here… No broken bones, excellent, excellent. We'll fix up the cuts and bruises. You'll be running around good as new in a day, Hatake-san."
But Kakashi no longer heard him. Only one thought hammered in his mind: Sensei... what kind of monster did you leave behind?
The Hokage had told him about the child, but the jōnin, already in a bad place, had been too crushed by the deaths of the last people close to him—Minato and Kushina. After that, life had been like a mirage. In the time leading up to today, it seemed Kakashi couldn't think about anything at all.
But now, after a shock like this, maybe that would change.
_____
You can support me and read up to 20 upcoming chapters ahead of release at –> patreon.com/Welydora