The last thing Tanaka Hiroshi remembered before the blinding headlights consumed his entire field of vision was the exact moment he realized he'd made a critical, catastrophically stupid error in judgment. He had been walking home from the movie theater, his mind still buzzing with excitement from watching Jujutsu Kaisen 0 for what had to be the fifteenth time (he'd lost count somewhere around viewing number seven, but who was really keeping track when Yuta Okkotsu existed in all his beautifully traumatized, overpowered glory?), when he'd decided—in his infinite wisdom—to check his phone while crossing the street.
The Truck-kun that slammed into him at sixty kilometers per hour didn't even have the decency to honk first.
This, Hiroshi thought in that strange, stretched-out microsecond before impact, is really not how I wanted to spend my Tuesday evening.
And then there was nothing but white.
Consciousness returned like a wave crashing against jagged rocks—sudden, violent, and deeply unpleasant. Hiroshi's eyes snapped open, and he immediately regretted every decision that had led to this moment, because his entire body felt like it had been shoved through a meat grinder, reconstituted, shoved through again just for fun, and then set on fire for good measure.
He was lying on his back in what appeared to be a forest, which was already concerning because the last time he checked, downtown Tokyo didn't have a lot of forests. The canopy above him was dense with unfamiliar leaves, filtering weak moonlight into scattered silver patches on the ground around him. The air smelled wrong—too clean, too fresh, lacking the familiar pollution and urban grime he'd grown accustomed to over twenty-three years of city living.
"What the actual—" he started to say, but the words died in his throat when he brought his hands up to rub his aching head and realized something was very, very wrong.
Those weren't his hands.
Well, technically they were his hands now, apparently, but they definitely hadn't been his hands five minutes ago (or however long it had been since his unfortunate encounter with Japan's most notorious isekai facilitator). These hands were younger, slimmer, with longer fingers and calluses in places he'd never had calluses before. They were the hands of someone who actually exercised, who practiced with weapons, who—
Hiroshi sat up so fast he nearly gave himself whiplash, and that's when he saw the sword lying next to him.
It was a katana, but not just any katana. Even in the dim moonlight, he recognized it instantly because he'd stared at it on his computer screen for countless hours, had it as his phone wallpaper for three months, had genuinely considered getting a replica despite the absolutely outrageous price tag. The blade was pristine, the edge catching the light with an almost supernatural gleam, and the hilt was wrapped in that distinctive pattern he knew as well as his own face—his old face, anyway.
This was the sword Yuta Okkotsu used. The one Gojo gave him. The one that—
"Oh no," Hiroshi whispered, and his voice came out wrong too. Younger. Softer. With a quality to it that suggested its owner had spent a lot of time not speaking at all. "Oh no, no, no, no, no."
He scrambled toward a nearby stream he could hear burbling in the darkness, his new body moving with a grace and coordination that his old one had never possessed. His old body had been the body of a man who considered walking to the convenience store to be adequate cardio. This body felt like a coiled spring, like a loaded weapon, like something designed specifically for violence and movement in equal measure.
The water was cold when he leaned over it, and the face that stared back at him in the rippling moonlit surface made his heart stop.
Dark hair that fell in messy layers around a face that was beautiful in an almost fragile way, like something that could break if you touched it wrong. Eyes that were just a shade too intense, holding depths that spoke of trauma and loss and something other lurking just beneath the surface. Features that he'd memorized from countless manga panels and anime frames, that he'd argued were objectively superior to any other character design in the entire Jujutsu Kaisen franchise (and he would die on that hill, had apparently literally died on that hill, except now he was somehow alive again in someone else's body).
"I'm Yuta Okkotsu," Hiroshi said to his reflection, and the words felt both absurd and absolutely, terrifyingly correct. "I'm actually Yuta Okkotsu. I got isekai'd into Yuta Okkotsu."
He sat back on his heels, staring up at the unfamiliar stars through the gaps in the canopy, and started laughing. It was the kind of laughter that bordered on hysteria, the kind that threatened to tip over into sobbing at any moment, but he couldn't help it. Of all the ways he'd imagined dying (and he'd imagined quite a few, because he was a millennial with anxiety and an active imagination), getting hit by Truck-kun and waking up as his favorite anime character had never even made the list.
"Okay," he said finally, when the laughter had subsided into hiccupping breaths. "Okay. Let's think about this logically. I'm in a forest. I'm apparently Yuta Okkotsu now. I have his sword. That means I probably have his abilities too, right? That's how these things work?"
As if in answer to his question, he felt it.
It started as a tingling at the base of his skull, a sensation like static electricity dancing across his nerve endings. Then it grew, spreading outward through his body in waves, and with it came an awareness that hadn't been there before. He could feel something now, something vast and dark and hungry lurking at the edges of his consciousness, something that was simultaneously part of him and entirely separate, something that was—
"Rika," he breathed.
The shadows around him stirred.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the darkness at the edge of the clearing began to coalesce, thickening like fog made solid, and from that impossible blackness emerged a shape that made his breath catch in his throat. She was exactly as he remembered from the movie and manga—monstrous and beautiful, terrifying and tragic, a twisted nightmare given form by love so powerful it had transcended death itself. Her body was a nightmare of too-long limbs and too-many teeth, white eyes burning in a face that still held the ghost of human features, and when she looked at him, he felt the weight of absolute, unconditional devotion pressing against his soul.
"Yuta."
Her voice was like nothing he'd ever heard before—layered, echoing, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. It was the voice of something that had shed its humanity but still remembered love, and hearing it directed at him made something clench tight in his chest.
"Hey, Rika," he said, and to his own surprise, his voice came out steady. "I guess you're real too, huh?"
"Yuta is confused," Rika observed, her massive form drifting closer. "Yuta feels different. Wrong. But still Yuta. Still mine."
Hiroshi—no, he supposed he was Yuta now, might as well get used to it—felt an inexplicable wave of affection wash over him. In his old life, Rika had been his favorite character in JJK 0, the tragic girl whose love had been so powerful it had literally cursed the object of her affection, who had become a monster to protect the boy she cherished above all else. Now she was his partner, his cursed spirit, and the sheer absurdity of that fact made him want to laugh again.
"Things are a little weird right now," he admitted. "I'm pretty sure I died and... ended up here somehow. With you. With all of this." He gestured vaguely at himself, at the sword, at the forest around them. "I'm still figuring things out."
Rika tilted her head, a surprisingly human gesture from such an inhuman form. "Yuta died? But Yuta is here. Yuta is alive. Rika would not let Yuta die. Rika will never let Yuta die."
The absolute certainty in her voice sent a shiver down his spine, and not entirely from fear. Having the Queen of Curses sworn to protect you was... well, it was something, that was for damn sure.
"Right," Yuta said slowly, standing up and brushing dirt from clothes he was only now really registering—the familiar uniform of Tokyo Jujutsu High, slightly torn and dirty as if he'd been through some kind of ordeal before waking up here. "Okay. First things first. I need to figure out where 'here' actually is."
He picked up the sword, and the moment his fingers closed around the hilt, knowledge flooded into him. It was like remembering something he'd always known but had somehow forgotten—the stances, the techniques, the way to channel cursed energy through the blade to extend its cutting power far beyond the physical edge. His body knew these things on a cellular level, muscle memory embedded so deeply it might as well have been instinct, and layered on top of that was his own encyclopedic knowledge of the Jujutsu Kaisen universe gleaned from years of obsessive fandom.
He knew how to use Reverse Cursed Technique. He knew how to copy cursed techniques after being hit by them. He knew how to unleash Rika's full power, how to draw on the seemingly infinite reservoir of cursed energy that made him a Special Grade sorcerer, how to—
Wait.
Yuta's eyes widened as a new piece of information slotted into place, something that definitely hadn't come from the original Yuta's memories.
The trees around him were wrong. Not just unfamiliar—wrong in a way that nagged at his manga-and-anime-saturated brain. The bark patterns, the leaf shapes, the way the moonlight filtered through the canopy... it was all just slightly off from what a Japanese forest should look like. And the air, that too-clean air that had bothered him from the moment he woke up, carried traces of something that his newfound senses were reluctantly identifying as chakra.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," Yuta said flatly.
He wasn't just isekai'd into Yuta Okkotsu.
He was isekai'd into Yuta Okkotsu in the Naruto universe.
As if to confirm his suspicion, a kunai came whistling out of the darkness and would have embedded itself directly between his eyes if his body hadn't moved on pure instinct, swaying aside with a grace that surprised even him. The blade passed so close he could feel the displaced air against his cheek, and then there were figures in the trees around him—five, no, seven of them—moving with the inhuman speed and precision that no ordinary human could match.
Shinobi.
They landed in a loose circle around him, cutting off any obvious escape routes, and Yuta's first clear look at them confirmed his worst suspicions. They wore the standard uniform of Konoha ninja, complete with flak jackets and forehead protectors bearing that iconic leaf symbol he'd seen in a thousand fan animations. But their faces were hard, their eyes cold, and their body language screamed threat in a way that left no room for the possibility of friendly conversation.
"Unidentified individual," one of them said—a woman with a scarred face and close-cropped hair, her voice flat and professional. "You are in Fire Country territory without authorization. Identify yourself and state your purpose."
"Enemies," Rika hissed from the shadows, her form flickering at the edge of his perception. He could feel her rage building, her protective instincts flaring. "They want to hurt Yuta. Rika won't allow it. Rika will protect Yuta."
Yuta noted with grim amusement that none of the shinobi reacted to Rika's voice. Of course they didn't. They couldn't see her. They couldn't hear her. Cursed spirits were invisible to those without cursed energy, and whatever chakra was, it clearly wasn't the same thing. To these ninja, he was just a strange kid in weird clothes standing alone in a forest—not someone with an eldritch horror of unlimited power hovering protectively behind him.
Their mistake.
"Hold on," Yuta said, raising his free hand in what he hoped was a calming gesture while his mind raced through possibilities. "Look, I'm not here to cause trouble. I don't even know how I got here, honestly. I just woke up in this forest and—"
"He's lying," another ninja cut in—a man with a bandana covering his left eye and a tanto drawn and ready. "No one just 'wakes up' this deep in Fire Country during wartime. He's a spy. Look at his clothes, that uniform—it's not from any village I recognize. New hidden village, maybe? Or one of Iwa's special operations units?"
Wartime, Yuta thought, and his blood ran cold. The Third Shinobi War. He was in the middle of the goddamn Third Shinobi War, the bloodiest conflict in the Elemental Nations' recent history, and he was wearing suspicious foreign clothes while carrying an unregistered weapon in a territory currently on high alert for enemy infiltrators.
This was going to go badly. He could see it in their eyes, in the tension in their shoulders, in the way their hands were already moving toward weapon pouches. They weren't going to listen to explanations. They weren't going to take him prisoner for questioning. In wartime, in a situation like this, standard protocol was—
The scarred woman's hands flashed through seals faster than he could track. "Kill him."
What happened next was instinct, pure and overwhelming and utterly beyond his conscious control. Cursed energy—his cursed energy, impossibly vast and dark and hungry—erupted from his body in a visible wave, the sheer pressure of it making the leaves on nearby trees curl and blacken. The ninja faltered, clearly sensing something pressing against them even if they didn't understand what it was, and in that moment of hesitation, Rika struck.
"NO ONE HURTS YUTA!"
The Queen of Curses manifested her attack through pure force—invisible to the shinobi, but absolutely devastating in its effects. The first ninja didn't even see what hit him. One moment he was standing ready for combat; the next, invisible claws tore through his chest with enough force to send his body flying backward into a tree, leaving a splatter of crimson and a confused expression frozen on his face.
To the other shinobi, it looked like their comrade had simply exploded.
"What the—" the scarred woman started, her composure cracking for the first time.
She didn't get to finish. Rika was among them now, moving like darkness given purpose, and to the shinobi it must have seemed like death itself had descended on their formation. Bodies jerked and tore apart with no visible cause. Blood fountained from wounds that appeared from nowhere. Screams cut short as throats were crushed by invisible hands.
The woman tried to substitute, tried to escape, tried to survive, but Rika was faster than any technique. Yuta watched with a strange, detached fascination as an unseen force simply squeezed, and the body that dropped to the forest floor a moment later barely looked human anymore.
"R-Retreat!" someone screamed—the man with the bandana, now missing an arm that had been torn off by something none of them could see, blood spurting from the ragged stump. "Fall back and report! We need backup, this is a—"
He didn't finish the sentence. His head twisted at an impossible angle with a wet crack, and his body stood there for a long, surreal moment before toppling over.
Three more died in the next handful of seconds. To them, it must have been like fighting a ghost, an invisible demon, something from their worst nightmares given form. Their attacks—a fireball jutsu, a volley of shuriken, desperate sword strikes—passed through empty air, hitting nothing while their comrades died around them from wounds inflicted by an enemy they couldn't see, couldn't sense, couldn't even begin to comprehend.
One brave or foolish shinobi charged directly at Yuta, apparently deciding that if he couldn't fight the invisible threat, he could at least take out what he assumed was its controller. He learned, in the last instant of his life, exactly why that was a terrible idea when Rika's claws intercepted him three feet from Yuta's position and reduced him to scattered pieces.
Then there was only one left—a young man, barely older than Yuta's new body looked, with wide terrified eyes and shaking hands and a forehead protector that was splattered with his comrades' blood. He was frozen in place, his body apparently having decided that if he didn't move, maybe the monster—the monster he couldn't even see—wouldn't notice him. The air around him was thick with the copper scent of blood and the electric terror of a man who knew he was about to die but couldn't even understand how.
"What are you?" he whispered, staring at Yuta with eyes that held the desperate hope that this was all a genjutsu, that his comrades weren't really dead, that he wasn't really about to join them. "What... what are you?"
Yuta felt a sudden, uncomfortable twist in his stomach. This was a person. A human being with a life and dreams and probably people who cared about him waiting back in Konoha. And Rika was going to kill him anyway, because that's what Rika did to people who threatened Yuta, and there was nothing—
"Last one," Rika purred, her invisible form drifting toward the trembling ninja with the casual inevitability of a shark approaching a wounded seal. "Then Yuta is safe. Then we can—"
"Wait."
The word came out of Yuta's mouth before he'd consciously decided to speak, and to his surprise, Rika actually stopped. He could feel her confusion pressing against his mind like a physical weight.
"Yuta wants to keep him? A pet? Rika doesn't understand, but if Yuta wants—"
"No, I just..." Yuta trailed off, looking at the carnage around him. Six bodies, most of them barely recognizable as human anymore, and enough blood soaking into the forest floor to feed a vampire for a year. He should be horrified. He should be traumatized. He should be curled up in a ball having a complete mental breakdown.
Instead, he felt... nothing. Or not nothing, exactly, but a strange, cold clarity that settled over his thoughts like a blanket of fresh snow. These people had tried to kill him. They hadn't given him a chance to explain, hadn't tried to take him prisoner, hadn't done any of the things you were supposed to do with unknown individuals in a civilized society. They'd just decided he was a threat and moved straight to lethal force.
In a world like this—a world at war, a world where children were trained to kill and die for their villages, a world where human life was weighed against political convenience and usually found wanting—mercy was a luxury that got people killed. His encyclopedic knowledge of the Naruto canon made that abundantly clear. How many tragedies, how many cascading failures, how many deaths had happened because someone had shown mercy to an enemy who then came back stronger and more dangerous?
Orochimaru. Obito. Madara. Hell, even Danzo in his own twisted way.
"Actually," Yuta said slowly, the cold clarity crystallizing into something sharper and more deliberate, "you know what? Never mind."
He moved.
His body flowed through the familiar stances without conscious thought, the sword coming up in a smooth arc that bisected the remaining ninja from shoulder to hip before the man could even process that Yuta had closed the distance between them. There was a wet, slithering sound as the two halves separated and fell in opposite directions, and Yuta flicked the blood from his blade with a casual motion that felt as natural as breathing.
"YUTA!" Rika's voice was exultant, delighted, and he could feel her swirling around him in massive spirals of dark energy, invisible to the world but utterly real to him. "Yuta killed! Yuta protected himself! Rika is so proud, so happy, Yuta is learning!"
"Yeah," Yuta said, looking down at his hands—at the blood spattering his knuckles, at the slight tremor he could feel starting in his fingers. "Yeah, I guess I am."
He waited for the horror to come, for the guilt and the revulsion and the crushing weight of having just killed a man with his own hands. He waited for his old self to reassert itself, to remind him that he was Tanaka Hiroshi, otaku and Jujutsu Kaisen superfan, a man who had never been in a fight in his entire life unless you counted that one argument at a convention that had almost but not quite come to blows.
It didn't come.
What came instead was a cold, pragmatic assessment of his situation: he was alone in a hostile world during a period of unprecedented violence, wearing a body that painted a target on his back, and the only reason he was still alive was because he had access to power that these people couldn't even comprehend—power they couldn't even see. He could try to play nice, try to explain himself, try to find a village that would take him in and give him a chance to live a normal life—but he already knew how that would end. Foreign powers during wartime were interrogated, experimented on, and disposed of. Even Konoha, the supposed "good guy" village, had ROOT and T&I and a hundred other mechanisms for extracting information from unwilling sources.
No. He wasn't going to become anyone's weapon or anyone's prisoner or anyone's soldier. He'd been Tanaka Hiroshi for twenty-three years, and Tanaka Hiroshi had spent his entire life following rules and fitting into systems and trying to meet everyone else's expectations.
Now he was Yuta Okkotsu, Special Grade Sorcerer, wielder of Rika the Queen of Curses, possessor of copy abilities that could steal any technique after experiencing it once. He had power that put him on a level with Kage, maybe above Kage, and he was in a world where the strong made the rules and the weak followed them or died.
He wasn't going to be weak anymore.
"Okay, Rika," Yuta said, sheathing his sword and turning away from the battlefield without looking back. "We need to figure out exactly where we are and what's going on. And then..." He paused, considering. "And then I think it's time we introduced this world to what a real curse looks like."
Rika's laughter echoed through their connection like shattering glass—audible only to him, invisible to everyone else—and somewhere in the darkness, a rabbit that had witnessed nothing but a young man talking to thin air while bodies mysteriously exploded around him decided that now would be an excellent time to relocate to a different forest, possibly a different country, ideally a different plane of existence.
The next three days were... educational.
Yuta traveled through the forest with Rika flickering in and out of his perception, a constant presence that only he could sense. She moved in patterns around him—sometimes close enough to touch, sometimes ranging out to scout ahead—and her reports came to him through their connection, a stream of information that no one else could access.
He avoided the main roads and established paths, keeping to the deep woods where he could sense approaching presences long before they could detect him. His senses had expanded dramatically since waking up in this world. He could feel cursed energy as a constant pulse within himself, and he could also detect something else—a different kind of energy signature that the inhabitants of this world carried. Chakra, he assumed. Similar enough to cursed energy that his senses could pick it up, different enough that he could tell them apart.
More importantly, he'd discovered that his Copy ability worked on chakra techniques.
The test had been accidental—a wild boar had charged him on the second day, and Rika had dealt with it before Yuta could even react. But in the process, Rika's attack had released a small burst of cursed energy, and Yuta had felt something click in the back of his mind. The same sensation he'd experienced when copying techniques in his inherited memories. His body knew this feeling, understood it intimately, and that understanding extended to the new energy system he found himself in.
He'd spent an hour practicing until he could manifest claws of pure cursed energy from his own fingertips, dark and jagged and sharp enough to score marks in solid stone.
"Yuta is growing stronger," Rika observed, her voice a whisper only he could hear. "Yuta is learning so fast. Rika is proud. Rika loves Yuta so much."
"Thanks, Rika," Yuta said absently, dismissing the claws and shaking out his hands. "I think this world runs on a different system than ours—theirs, I mean. The JJK world. But cursed energy seems to interact with chakra in interesting ways. If I can copy ninjutsu the same way I copy cursed techniques..."
He didn't finish the sentence, but the implications hung heavy in the air. The Sharingan was famous for its ability to copy jutsu, but it had limitations—you had to see the technique, understand the hand seals, have the physical ability to replicate it. Yuta's Copy ability was far more complete. It recorded not just the external form of a technique but its essential nature, the underlying structure that made it work. If that principle applied to chakra-based abilities...
The potential was staggering.
On the morning of the fourth day, Yuta crested a ridge and found himself looking down at a valley that made his stomach drop.
It was a battlefield.
Or rather, it had been a battlefield, probably within the last day or two judging by the state of the bodies. Konoha shinobi and Iwa shinobi lay scattered across the churned, scorched earth like discarded toys, their blood long since absorbed into the dirt but their equipment and bodies still relatively intact. Crows circled overhead in lazy spirals, occasionally descending to feast on the plentiful carrion below. The smell hit him a moment later—copper and rot and voided bowels, the unmistakable perfume of violent death.
"At least a hundred people," Yuta murmured, scanning the destruction with clinical detachment. "Looks like neither side won. Mutual annihilation, maybe? Or they all died from..." He trailed off as his eyes caught something in the center of the battlefield, a crater that still radiated faint heat despite the time that must have passed since its creation.
Someone had used a fire jutsu of truly massive scale. The trees around the crater's edge were reduced to charcoal, and the bodies nearest to it were literally nothing but ash and bone fragments.
"Bad death," Rika said, and there was something almost like sympathy in her voice. "Painful. Burning. Rika could make it worse, if Yuta wanted. Rika could make them scream forever, trap them in—"
"Not necessary," Yuta interrupted gently. "They're already dead. Let's just..." He paused, considering. "Actually, let's take a look around. There might be supplies we can use. Intelligence. Something that tells us more about the current situation."
He picked his way down the slope and into the valley of death, moving between the bodies with a detachment that surprised him. The smell should have been unbearable, but he'd read enough about warfare and death to have developed a certain intellectual immunity to the worst of his imagination's attempts to make him react. The reality was both better and worse than he'd expected—better because the bodies were mostly just bodies, no longer people; worse because some of them were so young, barely older than the body he now wore, with faces frozen in expressions of pain or terror or nothing at all.
He found a pack on one of the less damaged Konoha shinobi that contained ration bars, a medical kit, and—jackpot—a map of the Fire Country region. It was military issue, detailed enough to show major landmarks and hidden supply caches, and Yuta studied it for several minutes until he had a rough idea of where he was and where the main concentrations of enemy and allied forces were located.
He was about halfway between Konoha and the front lines, in a stretch of forest that both sides apparently used for supply routes and troop movements. Which explained the patrol that had found him on his first night—they'd probably been moving toward the front when they stumbled across the weird kid in the unfamiliar uniform.
Bad luck for them.
"Hey, Rika?" Yuta said, folding the map and tucking it into his own pack (liberated from another body, this one an Iwa ninja whose skull had been caved in by something heavy and fast). "What do you think about—"
He stopped talking because his senses were suddenly screaming danger, a sensation like someone had dropped ice water directly into his spinal column.
The attack came from three directions at once.
Earth erupted beneath his feet, massive stone spikes shooting upward in a deadly forest of sharpened rock. Lightning crackled through the air from his left, a technique that would have fried every nerve in his body if it had connected. And from above, plunging down at him with sword drawn and chakra flaring, came a shinobi whose speed and precision marked him as something far beyond the ordinary chuunin he'd fought before.
Jonin. At least one, probably more.
Yuta moved.
His body twisted between the stone spikes with inches to spare, the ground-shattering technique that should have impaled him instead creating a momentary barrier between him and the lightning attack. The electricity grounded itself harmlessly in the stone while Yuta was already airborne, his sword clearing its sheath in a silver arc that met the descending jonin's blade with a clash that sent shockwaves rippling through the air.
The jonin's eyes widened behind his mask—an Iwa mask, Yuta noted, stylized into the image of some kind of predatory bird—as he found himself pushed back by a kid who shouldn't have been strong enough to match a jonin's physical force. But Yuta's body wasn't just any body, and the cursed energy reinforcing his muscles made him far stronger and faster than his slight frame suggested.
"What the hell—" the jonin started to say.
Yuta didn't let him finish.
He pulsed cursed energy through his blade, extending its cutting edge by a meter of pure dark force, and the technique that had been evenly matched suddenly wasn't. The jonin jerked back to avoid being bisected, his guard breaking just long enough for Yuta to land a kick to his chest that sent him flying backward into a tree trunk hard enough to splinter the wood.
"More coming!" Rika warned, and Yuta felt her presence surge as four more chakra signatures erupted from concealment. "They want to hurt Yuta! They want to take Yuta away! RIKA WON'T ALLOW IT!"
The Queen of Curses tore into them like an invisible hurricane.
These shinobi were better than the first group—genuinely skilled, the kind of elite soldiers who survived warfare against other elite soldiers. They moved with the coordination of a well-practiced team, spreading out to engage what they thought was a single opponent while launching attacks from multiple angles. Fire jutsu. Water jutsu. Earth walls rising to block... nothing, from their perspective. Wind blades slicing through the air toward Yuta's position.
But they couldn't see Rika. They couldn't sense her. They had no idea that an invisible monster was moving among them, picking them off one by one.
The first one died without ever knowing what killed him. One moment he was weaving hand seals for a fire technique; the next, his body was torn in half by invisible claws, his upper body spinning away while his legs remained standing for a grotesque moment. His comrades screamed in confusion and terror—to them, it looked like their teammate had simply come apart, ripped in two by an unseen force.
"Genjutsu!" one of them shouted. "It has to be genjutsu! Kai! KAI!"
They tried to break free of an illusion that didn't exist. Their chakra flared as they attempted to disrupt phantom techniques, leaving them momentarily distracted—and that was all Rika needed.
Two more died in the next handful of seconds. The survivors couldn't coordinate against an enemy they couldn't perceive, couldn't defend against attacks they couldn't see coming. One of them—a woman with a stone-armor technique covering her body—actually managed to survive a glancing blow from Rika's claws, the defensive jutsu absorbing some of the impact. But it left her confused, staring at the deep gouges in her supposedly impenetrable armor with no idea what had caused them.
Yuta decided to help her understand.
He flashed forward, closing the distance before she could react, and his cursed-energy-enhanced blade punched through her weakened armor like it wasn't even there. The light left her eyes, and Yuta was already moving toward the next target.
The jonin leader had recovered from his impact with the tree and was trying to rally his remaining forces—all two of them. "Fall back! Fall back and—"
He stopped mid-sentence, his body jerking. Blood fountained from his mouth. Rika's invisible claws had punched through his back and out his chest, holding him suspended for a moment before tearing free. He collapsed in a heap, twitching once before going still.
The last two didn't even try to run. They stood back-to-back, weapons drawn, spinning in place as they tried to track an enemy that didn't exist in any sense they could perceive. One of them was crying. The other was praying, lips moving in a silent mantra to whatever gods shinobi believed in.
Neither of their deities answered.
Yuta watched with a strange, detached fascination as Rika finished them—quick, efficient, almost merciful compared to some of the deaths she'd dealt. When it was over, he stood amid the bodies, breathing hard but uninjured.
"Okay," he said, flicking blood from his sword and sheathing it with a smooth motion. "That was... that was something."
"Yuta was amazing," Rika crooned, her presence flowing around him in possessive spirals that only he could sense. "So strong. So fast. Rika loves watching Yuta fight. Rika loves watching Yuta kill. They couldn't even see me. They died without ever knowing what killed them."
There was something like satisfaction in her voice, and Yuta understood it. In a world where everyone could see you, where everyone could fight back, there was a certain vulnerability inherent in being a cursed spirit. But here, in this world of chakra and ninjutsu, Rika was genuinely invisible. A perfect predator. An unseen death that no defensive technique could block because no one even knew to defend against it.
"It's almost unfair," Yuta mused.
"Rika doesn't care about fair," Rika said simply. "Rika only cares about Yuta. If being invisible helps Rika protect Yuta, then Rika is happy to be invisible. Let them die in confusion. Let them never understand what killed them. As long as Yuta is safe."
"I love you too, Rika," Yuta said softly. And he meant it—in whatever complicated way a man in a borrowed body could love a cursed spirit that had devoted itself to his protection. It wasn't the romantic love that had created her, but it was love nonetheless. The love of partners. Of companions. Of two beings bound together against a world that wanted them dead.
He looted the bodies with the efficient detachment of someone who had already decided that squeamishness was a luxury he couldn't afford. More weapons. More supplies. A couple of technique scrolls that he couldn't read yet but might figure out eventually. And, from the jonin's pack, a set of orders that confirmed his suspicions about the current state of the war.
The Iwa forces were pressing hard against Konoha's western territories. Casualties on both sides were mounting. And—this was the interesting part—there were rumors of a "Yellow Flash" cutting through enemy lines like a force of nature, a single shinobi whose speed and lethality had turned the tide of several key battles.
Minato Namikaze. The future Fourth Hokage. Already well on his way to becoming a legend.
Yuta tucked the orders away and stood, surveying the carnage around him with something that might have been satisfaction and might have been resignation and was probably a little of both.
"I'm not going to become a ninja," he said aloud, as if stating it clearly would make it more real. "I'm not going to join a village or take orders from a Kage or fight for any nation's interests. I'm going to live my life on my own terms, and anyone who tries to make me do otherwise..."
He felt Rika's presence surge with approval, her invisible form radiating satisfaction.
"Well. They'll never even see it coming."
"Rika will make sure of that," the Queen of Curses promised. "Rika will be Yuta's shadow. Yuta's secret weapon. Yuta's invisible death. Anyone who threatens Yuta will die before they even know they're in danger. That's Rika's vow. Forever."
"That's the spirit," Yuta said, and started walking toward the nearest road.
The village of Tanzaku Quarters was, by the standards of the Elemental Nations, a relatively minor settlement—a trading hub that catered to merchants and travelers and, according to Yuta's knowledge of the source material, would eventually become famous for its casinos and its tendency to attract a certain legendary sucker with a gambling addiction.
But that was years in the future. Right now, Tanzaku Quarters was simply a place where people from all nations mingled relatively freely despite the ongoing war, where money talked louder than politics, and where a young man in unusual clothes could walk the streets without immediately being identified as a threat.
Yuta had changed out of his Jujutsu High uniform and into a nondescript travelling outfit purchased from a village he'd passed through, paying with coins he'd looted from various bodies. (The economy of a warring states period was surprisingly practical about such things.) He still carried his sword, but that was common enough among wandering ronin and mercenaries that it didn't draw undue attention.
Rika remained close, her form dispersed into invisible patterns around him that only he could sense. To everyone else, he was just a young man walking alone through the streets. No one could see the eldritch horror that drifted beside him, the white-eyed monster that watched every passerby with hungry attention, ready to tear apart anyone who moved against her beloved with no warning whatsoever.
It was, Yuta reflected, an absolutely terrifying tactical advantage.
"Sake," Yuta said to the bartender, sliding onto a stool at one of the many drinking establishments that lined the main street. "Whatever you've got that won't kill me."
The bartender—a weathered woman with hard eyes and harder hands—gave him a once-over that assessed and dismissed him in a single glance. "You're young for the drinking life, kid."
"I'm old enough to kill," Yuta said flatly. "I'm old enough to drink."
Something in his voice or his eyes must have convinced her, because she poured without further comment. The sake was strong and slightly bitter, burning its way down his throat with a warmth that did absolutely nothing to affect his cursed-energy-enhanced constitution, but the ritual of drinking was comforting in its own way.
He sat there for an hour, nursing his sake and listening to the conversations around him. War talk, mostly. Rumors about the front lines, about legendary shinobi doing legendary things, about atrocities committed by both sides that would never make it into the official histories. The ordinary people of this world—civilians, craftsmen, farmers—lived their lives in the shadow of the ninja villages, praying they wouldn't be caught in the crossfire and knowing that prayer was often all they had.
It made him angry, Yuta realized. Not the hot, immediate anger that burned itself out quickly, but a cold, simmering fury that settled into his bones like poison. These shinobi, these children trained from birth to be weapons—they slaughtered each other for the glory of their villages, for the ambitions of their Kage, for political considerations that meant nothing to the corpses left rotting in the fields. And the civilians, the innocent people who just wanted to live their lives, paid the price for conflicts they had no part in starting.
It was wrong. It was obscene. And the worst part was, he knew from the source material that it would never truly end. Even after the Third Shinobi War, even after the Fourth, even after the Akatsuki and Madara and Kaguya, there would always be another conflict, another cycle of violence, another generation of children turned into killers.
Unless someone broke the cycle.
"Dangerous thoughts," he murmured into his sake. "Dangerous, probably impossible thoughts."
But were they impossible? He was Yuta Okkotsu now, possessed of power that rivaled or exceeded the strongest in this world. With time, with training, with judicious application of his Copy ability—could he become strong enough to force peace on the Elemental Nations? Could he become such an overwhelming threat that the ninja villages had no choice but to work together against him, and in doing so, learn to work together for other things?
It was the kind of thinking that led to supervillains, he knew. The kind of thinking that had motivated Madara and Obito and Nagato in their most destructive phases. But they had all been products of this system, warped by its violence into twisted reflections of what they might have been. Yuta was an outsider, someone who could see the entire picture from above, someone who knew how all the pieces fit together and where all the pressure points were.
And he had Rika. Invisible, invincible, absolutely devoted Rika. A weapon that no one in this world could counter because no one in this world could even perceive her.
Maybe that made him more dangerous than any of them.
Or maybe it just meant he had more options.
"Yuta is thinking hard," Rika observed, her voice a whisper in his mind. "Rika can feel it. Big thoughts. Important thoughts. Tell Rika what you're planning. Rika wants to help."
"I'm thinking about the future," Yuta said quietly, low enough that no one around him would hear. "About what we could do with what we have. About what kind of person I want to be in this world."
"Yuta can be anything," Rika said with absolute certainty. "Yuta is special. Yuta is powerful. Yuta has Rika. Whatever Yuta wants to become, Rika will help. Even if Yuta wants to burn everything down. Even if Yuta wants to save everyone. Rika doesn't care which. Rika only cares that Yuta is happy."
"I don't want to burn everything down," Yuta said slowly, considering each word as he spoke it. "But I don't want to play by their rules, either. The villages, the Kage, the whole system—it's broken. It produces broken people who do broken things to other people. I'm not going to fix it by becoming part of it."
"Then what will Yuta do?"
"I'm going to stand outside it," Yuta decided. "I'm going to become so strong that no one can force me to join them, and so dangerous that no one dares to move against me. And from that position... I'll figure out the rest as I go."
It wasn't a comprehensive plan. It wasn't even a good plan, really. But it was a direction, a goal, something to work toward that wasn't just survival for its own sake. And in a world as dangerous as this one, having a purpose was worth almost as much as having power.
"Another," he said, pushing his empty cup toward the bartender. "And some information, if you're selling."
The woman raised an eyebrow. "Depends on what kind of information you're looking for."
"Current state of the war. Troop movements. Major players on all sides. Anything that someone new to this region might want to know to avoid ending up as collateral damage."
"That's the kind of information that costs," the bartender said, but there was interest in her eyes now. "You got money, kid?"
Yuta produced a small bag of coins and set it on the counter. It was more money than most civilians would see in a month, looted from a half-dozen dead shinobi who had no further use for it. The bartender's eyes widened slightly, and she made the bag disappear with a smooth motion that spoke of long practice.
"Come back tonight," she said quietly. "After the bar closes. I know people who know things. If you're serious about this..."
"I'm serious," Yuta said. "About everything."
He left the bar as the sun began to set, casting long shadows across the streets of Tanzaku Quarters. Somewhere beside him, invisible to every eye but his, Rika stirred.
"Yuta is planning something," she observed. "Something big. Rika can feel it. Rika wants to help. Tell Rika what to do, Yuta. Tell Rika how to protect you."
"I'm planning to survive," Yuta said softly. "And to make sure that when this war ends, it stays ended. Not just for a few years until the next cycle of violence, but permanently. No more child soldiers. No more massacres. No more entire families wiped out for political convenience."
He looked up at the darkening sky, at stars that were wrong and yet somehow becoming familiar.
"I'm going to break this world's addiction to violence, Rika. And if that means becoming the biggest monster any of them have ever seen..." He smiled, and it wasn't a nice smile. "Well. We've already got plenty of experience with that, don't we? And the best part is—they'll never even see you coming."
"Rika loves Yuta," the Queen of Curses said simply. "Whatever Yuta wants, Rika will make happen. Rika will be the death that no one sees. The end that no one expects. For Yuta. Always for Yuta."
"I know," Yuta said. "And I love you too, Rika. I always will."
They walked together into the gathering darkness—man and invisible monster, sorcerer and spirit, the only pair in this world who understood what they truly were. And somewhere in the Elemental Nations, the great powers of the shinobi world continued their war without any idea that something new had entered the equation.
Something they couldn't see.
Something they couldn't stop.
Something that would change everything.
The information broker arrived at midnight, slipping into the closed bar through a back entrance that Yuta had been pretending not to watch for the past hour. He was a small man, unremarkable in every way, with the kind of face that slid out of memory almost as soon as you stopped looking at it. Perfect qualities for his profession.
"You're the kid looking for war intelligence," the broker said, settling into a chair across from Yuta with the easy confidence of someone who had conducted many such meetings. "Interesting. Most people your age are either dying on the front lines or hiding from conscription. What's your game?"
"My game is staying alive," Yuta said. "Which requires knowing where the fighting is so I can avoid it."
"Bullshit." The broker's eyes sharpened. "You've got a sword and you carry yourself like you know how to use it. And there's something about you..." He trailed off, frowning. "Something my instincts don't like. You're dangerous, kid. The question is whether you're dangerous in a profitable way or the kind that gets people killed."
"He's perceptive," Rika observed from somewhere in the room—the broker had no idea she was hovering right beside him, close enough to tear his throat out in an instant. "But he can't see Rika. Can't sense Rika at all. If he threatens Yuta, he'll die before he knows he's in danger."
Easy, Yuta thought at her. Let's hear what he has to say first.
"Both," he said honestly to the broker. "I'm very dangerous, in ways that would take too long to explain. I'm also not interested in causing trouble for people who don't cause trouble for me. All I want is information, and I'm willing to pay well for accurate, timely intelligence."
The broker studied him for a long moment, then nodded slowly. "I believe you. Don't know why—you're clearly hiding something big—but I believe you. So here's what I can tell you about the current state of the war..."
What followed was a comprehensive briefing on the Third Shinobi War as it currently stood. Konoha was on the defensive on multiple fronts, their forces stretched thin against the combined pressure of Iwa and Kumo. Suna was nominally allied with the great shinobi nations against Konoha, but their participation was lukewarm at best—the Wind Daimyo had been cutting their funding for years, and they were saving their strength for whatever came after.
The Yellow Flash was every bit as deadly as the rumors suggested. Minato Namikaze had killed hundreds of Iwa shinobi in a single battle, moving so fast that none of them even saw what hit them. Iwa had standing orders to flee on sight if he was identified, which would have been humiliating if it wasn't entirely justified.
But there were other legendary figures on all sides. A, the future Fourth Raikage, was tearing through Konoha's northern forces with his lightning-enhanced speed. Onoki, the Tsuchikage himself, had taken to the battlefield personally on several occasions, his Dust Release turning entire units to particles in an instant. And in Konoha's corner, beyond Minato, there were rumors of a masked shinobi with a single Sharingan eye who could seemingly kill with a glance...
"Kakashi Hatake," Yuta murmured. "Already?"
The broker blinked. "You know the name?"
"I know a lot of names," Yuta said. "What about Kiri? Where do they stand in all this?"
"Mist is a mess," the broker said, leaning back. "The current Mizukage has been acting erratically for years—some say he's being controlled somehow, others say he's just gone mad. Either way, they're too busy with their internal bloodline purges to participate meaningfully in the external war. Which is probably a blessing for everyone else, honestly. Kiri shinobi are terrifying at the best of times."
Yuta nodded slowly, piecing together the timeline. The Three-Tails was currently sealed in Yagura, and Obito was using him as a puppet to destabilize Kiri from within. The bloodline purges were either ongoing or recently concluded, which meant Haku and Zabuza were out there somewhere, their tragic story already in motion.
So many threads. So many potential intervention points. The question was which ones to pull on and which to leave alone.
"What about neutral territories?" he asked. "Places that aren't aligned with any of the great villages?"
"A few," the broker admitted. "The Land of Iron, obviously—the samurai there don't get involved in shinobi conflicts, and everyone respects their neutrality. Some of the smaller nations are technically neutral, but they get trampled anyway whenever armies need to move through. And then there's..."
He hesitated.
"There's what?"
"There are rumors," the broker said slowly, "of a hidden location somewhere in the borderlands. A place where missing-nin gather, where people who've abandoned their villages can find... not safety, exactly, but something close to it. It moves around—some kind of barrier technique that makes it impossible to track. I've never been able to confirm if it actually exists, but..."
"But?"
"But if it does exist, it would be the perfect place for someone like you. Someone dangerous. Someone who doesn't want to be part of the shinobi system." The broker's eyes were sharp, assessing. "You're not the first ronin type I've met, kid. Most of them don't last long—either the villages track them down or they run out of luck. But you feel different. You feel like you might actually survive."
"He doesn't know the half of it," Rika said with dark amusement. "If any village sends hunters after Yuta, they'll just disappear. No bodies. No trace. No one will ever know what happened to them. Rika will make sure of that."
"I plan to do more than survive," Yuta said aloud. "I plan to thrive."
He stood, dropping another bag of coins on the table. "Same time next week. I want regular updates on the war's progress, major battles, anything that might affect travel through the region. Can you manage that?"
The broker made the coins disappear. "For this kind of money? I can manage quite a lot."
Yuta nodded and turned to leave, pausing at the door. "One more thing. If you hear about anyone or anything unusual—techniques that don't fit any known village, fighters whose abilities seem impossible—I want to know about it immediately. Double the usual rate."
"Keeping an eye out for competition?" the broker guessed.
"Something like that," Yuta said, and stepped out into the night.
Rika flowed beside him the moment he was clear of the bar, her invisible form matching his pace perfectly. "The little man was clever. Careful. He's still alive because he knows when to talk and when to run. Rika approves."
"He's useful," Yuta agreed. "And usefulness is what we need right now. Information, contacts, resources. We're going to build something, Rika. Slowly at first, but it'll grow."
"Build what?"
Yuta smiled into the darkness, feeling Rika's presence wrap around him like a protective shroud—invisible, invincible, absolutely devoted.
"A future. One where people like us don't have to choose between being weapons or being targets. One where the cycle of violence that drives this world finally, permanently ends." He paused, looking up at the unfamiliar stars. "And we're going to do it our way. Not as shinobi. Not as soldiers for any village. Just... us. You and me against the world."
"Rika likes that," the Queen of Curses said, and there was warmth in her voice despite its inhuman quality. "Yuta and Rika against the world. No one will be able to stop us. No one will even be able to see us coming. It's perfect."
"It is, isn't it?" Yuta agreed. "An invisible monster that no one in this world can perceive, protecting a sorcerer whose power they can't understand. They have no idea what's coming for them."
He started walking again, heading for the inn where he'd rented a room for the night. Behind him—beside him—everywhere and nowhere—Rika followed, a shadow that existed only in his perception, a weapon that no one else could counter because no one else knew she was there.
The shinobi world had faced many threats over its long history. Bijuu. Legendary warriors. Entire armies of enemy nations.
But it had never faced anything like this.
It had never faced an enemy it couldn't even see.
End of Chapter One