For Luke, Connecticut had turned into a Class-A Training Zone.
The suburban charm of Westport had been replaced by a tactical overlay in his mind. The manicured lawns were potential pitfall trap locations; the local parks were kill-zones with high-visibility escape routes. He had spent the last two years treating the local monster population like a buffet of experience points.
He sat on a branch of a massive maple tree, overlooking a Target parking lot, scribbling into a notebook with a clinical, detached focus.
Field Log: Specimen Analysis
Cyclops: Anatomy: Single-eye focus creates a massive 120-degree blind spot.
Special Ability: Mimicry. They can mimic any voice perfectly. I heard one try to lure me into an alley using May's voice. It was a 7/10 effort—the pitch was right, but the cadence lacked her specific brand of frantic instability.Crafting: Ridiculously skilled. I watched a juvenile Cyclops turn a dumpster and two car axles into a functioning ballista in under ten minutes.Hellhounds:
Ability: Shadow Travel. Not a true space-time jutsu like the Hiraishin, but a biological displacement. They treat shadows as a liquid medium.Counter: Fight in high-noon conditions or utilize magnesium flares to "solidify" the shadows.Laistrygonians: * Analysis: High-strength, low-intelligence. Essentially Earth-style constructs made of flesh. They smell like old gym socks."Maa, how troublesome," Luke muttered, closing the notebook. "The ecology here is fascinatingly violent, but the lack of a decent bookstore in the immediate vicinity is the real tragedy."
He dropped from the tree, landing without a sound. He had a new mission today. A high-priority S-rank objective.
He had finally wrestled his dyslexia into submission. It turned out his brain wasn't broken; it was just pre-loaded with Ancient Greek and treated English like a poorly encrypted code. Once he'd cracked the cipher, a whole new world had opened up.
A world of literature.
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The bookstore in downtown New Haven was quiet when Luke strolled in. He looked like an innocent nine-year-old with gravity-defying silver hair and electric-blue eyes, wearing a pair of cargo shorts and a t-shirt that said 'I'm a Traveler.'
He ignored the "Young Adult" section. He ignored the "History" section. He headed straight for the back corner, the "Adult Fiction and Manga" aisle.
His fingers twitched. His breath hitched.
In his old life, the Icha Icha series had been the pinnacle of human achievement.
Finding its equivalent in this world had been his secret secondary mission. He had feared this world was too civilized, too soft for the kind of high-caliber smut that had sustained him through decades of war.
He was wrong. So, so wrong.
He pulled a volume titled The Nymph's Midnight Run from the shelf. He flipped a page. His eyes widened. He flipped another.
The range. The variety. The depravity.
In his old life, Jiraiya's masterpiece had been his constant companion, a window into a world of human drama that had nothing to do with war. Here, the art was different, the themes were bolder, and the variety was staggering.
There were stories about forbidden love between satyrs and wood nymphs. There were "educational" graphic novels with anatomical details that made the Icha Icha series look like a textbook on gardening. There was even a section of Manga that utilized stylized art to depict...
He pulled a volume titled The Traveler's Tryst from another shelf. He flipped a page. His eyes widened. He flipped another. A faint, dusty pink hue touched his cheeks.
The prose was dubious, the descriptions of anatomy were questionable, and the pacing was atrocious. It was perfect. It was exactly the kind of trashy, soul-soothing smut that made the life of a child-soldier bearable. He felt a lump in his throat, tears of happiness that he could finally read the forbidden scrolls of this world.
Luke began to vibrate. A single, crystalline tear rolled down his cheek, a tear of pure, unadulterated joy.
Marvelous. Simply marvelous.
"I've found it," Luke whispered, his voice thick with emotion. "The sacred texts. This world... it has potential after all."
He began pulling books off the shelf in a feverish blur. Under the Parthenon, The Shinobi's Secret Desire, Tales of the Traveling Merchant. He stacked them in his arms until the pile reached his chin.
He ambled up to the counter, his eye-smile visible even through the stack of smut.
The cashier, a weary-looking woman in her fifties, squinted at him through her spectacles. She looked at the silver-haired angelic child. She looked at the titles.
She looked back at Luke. "Kid... aren't you a little young for 'Classical Romance'?"
Luke tilted his head, his electric-blue eyes radiating a terrifyingly sincere innocence. "Maa, I'm a very advanced reader. My mother says I have an old soul. Besides, I find the... character development... in these volumes to be quite stimulating for my vocabulary."
The cashier stared at him for a long ten seconds. She looked at the stack of twenty-dollar bills he placed on the counter, money he'd liberated from a group of drunks who had tried to mug him in an alley (they were currently rethinking their life choices in a dumpster).
"Kids these days," she muttered, her voice full of a mixture of suspicion and "I don't get paid enough for this."
She scanned the books with a series of aggressive beeps. "That'll be ninety-two dollars and sixty cents."
Luke handed over the cash, added a five-dollar bill as a tip, and gathered his prizes. "Keep the change. Your selection is truly a gift to the arts."
He strolled out of the store, his hands in his pockets, the heavy bag of books slung over his shoulder.
"Yo!" he greeted a passing police officer, eye-smiling with such genuine radiance that the officer actually paused to wave back, completely unaware that the nine-year-old was carrying enough smut to fuel a decade of lonely campfires.
Luke reached his "training ground", a secluded rooftop overlooking the Sound. He sat down, opened The Nymph's Midnight Run, and sighed.
"Alright," he murmured, the shadow of the Copy Ninja flickering in his eyes as he turned the first page. "Let's see if this world can truly compete with the Pervy Sage."
In the distance, a group of Dracaenae were slithering through the sewers, tracking his scent. Luke didn't even look up. He just reached into his pocket, felt the cold bronze of his dagger, and kept reading.
"How troublesome," he giggled. "I'll kill you guys after Chapter Three. The plot is just getting good."
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And Kakashi finds his smut again. All is right with the world.
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