To be a master of a thousand techniques and then be unable to hold a spoon was a special kind of hell.
For Luke Castellan, formerly Hatake Kakashi, the first three years of his second life were a slow-motion blur of sensory overload and physical imprisonment. His mind, sharp, clinical, and ancient, in a cage of soft cartilage and weak muscle. He remembered how to move through the canopy of a forest at subsonic speeds, yet his current body struggled to navigate the distance between the rug and the coffee table without toppling over.
He spent most of his time observing. It was the only thing he could do with any proficiency.
His first clear realization, once the fog of infancy began to lift, was that he was no longer in the Elemental Nations. There was no ambient hum of chakra in the air, no distant call of a shinobi patrol, no scent of charred wood and wet earth that defined Konoha. Instead, the world smelled of exhaust fumes and sterile chemicals.
When May held him up to a mirror for the first time, he saw a ghost.
The hair was right, a shock of vibrant, metallic. In his old life, that silver was the mark of the Hatake, a lineage of predators and protectors. But the eyes were wrong. They weren't the dark, obsidian depths of his father, nor was there the heavy, crimson weight of the Sharingan. These eyes were a piercing cobalt, electric and strange, as if the lightning from the storm had permanently settled behind his pupils.
A different world, he mused, his internal voice as dry as the scrolls he used to study. A different biology. And yet, the same isolation.
He looked at May, the frantic, loving woman who smelled of sandalwood and impending rain, and then at the empty space beside her.
It was a bitter, familiar pattern.
In his first life, the house had been silent, save for the sharpening of a tantō and the heavy footsteps of Sakumo Hatake. There had been a void where a mother should have been, a space he had learned to navigate with the precision of a scout. Now, the scales had simply tipped in the other direction. He had a mother whose mind seemed as fragile as spun glass, and a father who was nothing more than a golden echo, a traveler who had moved on before the first breath was even drawn.
It seems I am destined to walk with only one parent at my back, Luke thought. First no mother, and now in this second life, no father. The balance of the universe is nothing if not consistent.
The absurdity his situation crystallized the week he started grade one. Age five.
It was a mundane torture. Colorful blocks, screaming children who lacked basic discipline, and a strict schedule of naps that Luke found insulting to his advanced brain. However, it was during outdoor time that his instincts began to prickle.
For three days, she had been there.
A woman in a heavy trench coat stood by the chain-link fence of the playground. To the teachers, she was just a pedestrian waiting for a bus. To the other children, she didn't exist.
But Luke saw her. He sat by the sandbox, ignoring a boy who was trying to eat a plastic shovel, and watched the woman. Her gaze wasn't wandering; it was fixed on him. It was a heavy, sticky feeling, Killing Intent. He knew that sensation better than he knew his own mother's lullabies. It was the look of a predator assessing the calorie count of its prey.
Suspicious, Luke thought, his small hands sifting through the cold sand. She hasn't blinked in four minutes. Her posture is wrong, too stiff for a civilian, too coiled. And she smells... wrong. Like a reptile house that hasn't been cleaned.
That evening, the atmosphere in the Castellan house shifted. May was pacing the kitchen, her eyes darting to the corners of the room as if listening to whispers Luke couldn't hear. When she saw him, she didn't offer him a cookie or a toy.
She knelt, her hands trembling as she pulled something from the pocket of her apron. It was wrapped in a silk cloth.
"Luke," she whispered, her voice laced with that terrifying, fragile urgency. "Listen to me. The shadows... they're getting longer. He said you would need this. He said you're special."
She unwrapped the cloth. Inside lay a dagger.
It wasn't a toy. It was a leaf-shaped blade made of a metal Loukas didn't recognize, bronze, but it hummed with a faint, warm light that made the hairs on his arms stand up.
"It's from your father," May said, pressing the hilt into his small, chubby hand. "Keep it close, honey. Don't let the teachers see."
In this world, giving a five-year-old a lethal weapon would be considered insanity. Child endangerment. A crime.
To Luke, who had been a Chūnin at six and leading assassination squads before he hit puberty, it was the first sensible thing his mother had ever done.
Finally, he thought, gripping the hilt. The balance was slightly top-heavy for his current size, but the edge was razor-sharp. Standard issue equipment. About time.
He nodded solemnly at his mother. "I will be careful."
The next day at the playground, the woman was back.
This time, she didn't stay by the fence.
The teachers were distracted by a chaotic game of tag near the swings. Loukas was near the edge of the property, "reading" a picture book upside down while keeping his peripheral vision locked on the threat.
The gate creaked. The woman slipped inside.
As she stepped onto the mulch, the air around her seemed to shimmer, like heat rising off asphalt. To Luke's eyes, the genjutsu, or whatever illusion she was using, glitched. The trench coat didn't flap in the wind; it rippled like scales. Her legs didn't move in strides; they slithered.
She beelined for him.
"Little demigod, little Loukas" she hissed. The voice didn't match the human face she was projecting. It sounded like two rocks grinding together deep in a cave. "Your father isn't here to protect you now."
Luke stood up. He was three feet tall, wearing denim overalls and velcro sneakers. He looked adorable. He felt lethal.
Target acquired, his mind droned, cold and detached. Hostile intent confirmed. Species... unknown. Reptilian traits. Possibly a summon gone rogue?
The woman lunged. As she moved, the illusion shattered completely. The trench coat dissolved into leathery armor. Her legs split into two massive, green serpent tails. Her human face melted away to reveal a snout full of jagged, yellow teeth and a forked tongue.
A monster.
Luke didn't scream. He didn't freeze.
He reached into the deep pocket of his overalls.
The snake-woman, Dracaena, his mind whispered, though he had never heard that word, swiped at him with claws that could have shredded a car tire.
Luke dropped.
It wasn't a clumsy toddler fall. It was a calculated collapse of his center of gravity. The claws whistled over his silver hair, missing him by a millimeter.
Too slow, he critiqued. Telegraphed the strike from the shoulder.
As he ducked, he drew the bronze dagger. The metal flared with a golden light, sensing the presence of a monster.
Luke drove upward. He didn't have the strength to chop or slash effectively, so he relied on the one thing a child's body could provide: leverage. He planted his feet, locked his small elbow, and thrust the blade straight up into the soft, scaled underbelly of the creature as she passed over him.
Vital point
The blade sank in with a wet hiss.
The monster shrieked, a sound that shattered the playground's ambient noise. But before the teachers could turn, before the other children could process the nightmare standing among them, the creature convulsed.
She didn't bleed red. She didn't fall. She simply... popped.
One moment, there was a seven-foot snake monster. The next, there was a cloud of yellow, sulfurous dust raining down on Loukas's head.
Loukas stood up, coughing slightly as he waved the dust away from his face. He quickly wiped the bronze blade on his pant leg and tucked it back into his pocket, hiding it beneath his shirt.
"Luke!" a teacher screamed, running over, her eyes wide with panic. "What happened? I heard a noise! Are you okay?"
Luke looked up at her. He was covered in yellow grit. He looked like he had been rolling in a sandbox of crushed chalk.
He blinked his eyes, one cobalt, one hidden beneath his bangs. He offered her a innocent, confused shrug.
"I don't know, Miss Sally," he lied, his voice pitching up into a perfect, fearful wobble. "A lady came in, and then she... sneezed. Really hard."
As the teacher frantically began to dust him off, looking around for the mysterious woman, Luke stared at the pile of yellow dust on the ground.
Threat neutralized, he thought, feeling the reassuring weight of the dagger against his hip. But how no one else notice or see? The stealth capabilities of these creatures are concerning. I need to start conditioning this body. And do some reconnaissance.