Karmic Acumen
Well-known member
A/N: This one will probably lose steam the fastest of everything I’ve written, but it’s the last of my plot bunnies that I’ve been needing to unload in order to actually be able to focus on my original books. Hopefully.
I had my wife and kids cremated. Besides making sure that their bodies wouldn’t be desecrated by the various lunatics that inhabited this world, this also made it easy to bring the urns along on my annual October 10th walkabout. The attack of the Nine-Tailed Fox was the biggest tragedy in Konoha’s history, the Hokage didn’t do anything as morbid as throw a festival on its yearly observance. He left that stuff for the Rinne Festival in December. Instead, October 10 was a solemn day when people commemorated their lost loved ones in their own manner. If there was a higher number of traveling peddlers and longer open hours for the various locales, nobody was tone-deaf enough to mention it.
Being more of a skinflint with each year that passed, I ignored them all on the way to the empty lot where our family home had once stood. I could easily picture the place as it used to be, my ability to visualize had carried over from my last life. Two stories, kitchen and den downstairs, one staircase leading up to the bedrooms. Master bedroom empty. Kenzo alone in the kids’ room, looking out the window just in time to see the random wind blast that bisected him and the entire second floor in the first minute of the beast’s appearance. A load-bearing beam snapped and pulped my wife Ume. My daughter, Yui, was frozen in shock. I was half-way to her when the second wind shear came, burying her under the debris that everything had suddenly become, save for the small patch of load-bearing wall that happened to be between me and the blast. It didn’t stop the roof from caving in, but at least the wall didn’t fall on me too. I was ‘lucky’ enough to spend a day buried alive instead of dying with the others.
I reminisced about all that and more as I sat in the middle of the lot, three untouched saucers of sake between me and the urns, each with a framed picture behind them. Both my kids would be of age by now, by this world’s standards.
“Did you know, son? In another world, your name would’ve been Vali.” I was already on my fifth drink, but I didn’t even feel it. Sake had a ridiculously low alcohol content, especially for something drunk in shots. It was sweet, though, which is the only reason I didn’t stop in disgust after the first couple of sips. I was that rare and unfortunate breed of man that began to hate the taste of spirits after the first glass. Another thing that had carried over from my previous life. “My name was Miron.” I took a bite from one of the apricots my wife was named for. “No equivalent for Ume or Yui in my mother tongue though. English either. Or French. Or Latin. Pretty sure Italian and Spanish don’t have them either, though I’m admittedly spotty on those.” I considered the apricot pit in my hand and pocketed it. Maybe this would be the lucky one that sprouted.
I used to worry about being overheard or spied on. Well, not so much worry as hope. Unfortunately (or not?), despite being Big Brother central, ninja villages could be really up their own ass if you weren’t a ninja yourself. It made it a surprisingly pleasant place to live in for civilians, but a very frustrating one for a sole survivor trying to channel your self-destructive depression into something at least potentially constructive for the world while you rambled at your children’s names on the memorial stone. Or here. In languages that didn’t exist. “I’m thinking I’ll finally sell this place off.” I yawned, even though it wasn’t that late in the afternoon. Don’t get much sleep in the nights leading up to this. “Gonna fund that expansion, finally. Get that water wheel installed.” After the Kyuubi attack, property prices quite understandably crashed. They were still low when I finally got past the worst of my depression, so I used the disaster monetary grant and the savings I’d made for the kids to get a spot with a bit of stream running through. Maybe I’ll even play with piezoelectricity at some point, I certainly had the space. “Motive forces and all, you need’em when your hobby is energy physics. For all the good that will be in this world of magic and murder.”
I spread the offered sake on the ground, took the urns and photos back to the cart and set off back home.
As I walked, I watched the people passing by. The ninja academy always gave a day off on this date, so the streets were packed with a lot more baby shinobi than would usually be about on weekdays. How I felt about that tended to vary depending on the day. Today, the sight of them irritated me. As usual when I disapproved of a reality whose necessity I couldn’t discount.
Konoha was a ninja village. That meant a lot of things. For civilians it meant unparalleled security, protection from scummy business practices, no property taxes, and your family’s first piece of land for free. But it also meant a long waiting list (I only got in because my long gone grandfather applied before the last war) and you only became a resident if you agreed to have no inherent right to privacy, as well as one of two things. One: any kids you have will be signed on to the ninja academy. Or two: you contributed to the village in other ways meaningfully enough to equal the strategic benefit of one genin. For each of the children.
For me of now, that sounded like a recipe for abuse. Credit to pre-fox me, he’d opted for the second option too. Not because he mistrusted whatever or whoever calculated the ‘strategic benefit’ – he didn’t, the Hokages had been fairly sane about it, at least during peacetime. It was Ume who didn’t want that kind of life for her children.
Kenzo had almost finished wearing both of us down, though, when the disaster happened. And now, given what I knew of this world and its future, I wasn’t sure anymore that the risk of early death wasn’t worth the power than came with being a shinobi. Even dying early would be better than to be around when the insanity really took off and you got body-snatched or turned into a tree battery. Maybe if this was a place like the Hidden Mist I’d have an easier time finding the ninja way reprehensible, but Konoha actually did live up to its claims of an enlightened way of life. Relatively speaking. True meritocracy, for both the ninja and civilians, but without cheapening the value of inheritance. I could testify to that by the simple fact that the amount of propaganda here was less than a tenth of what it was in the world of my previous incarnation. The people of this land were also quite spiritually minded as well, even though their ancestral, animistic beliefs hadn’t survived Kaguya and her children.
Unfortunately, there was a deliberate and enforced divide between the ninja and civilian branches of the village logistics. Well, actually this was Konoha’s one, massive advantage that the other villages didn’t practice. It enabled a strong middle class with a minimal attrition rate that produced abundant wealth for the village to run on, as well as nurturing the highest citizen loyalty of all other places on the continent, save maybe the Land of Iron where the Samurai code still endured.
It was unfortunate for me personally, though, because it meant that civilians didn’t have ready access to certain things. Like the Anbu ‘hotline.’ Or the one of only two newspapers in Konoha that the ninja actually bothered reading. Why You Shouldn’t Bully a Dragon, Neuroplasticity and Murder, The Dangers of Exclusivity, all the columns and articles I contributed to the Konoha Herald had given me precisely zero in with the Konoha Sage, despite the professional sourcing standards I brought with me from my previous life.
Even more annoyingly, the Konoha Military Police didn’t seem to have paid much mind to them. Despite there being a whole department of Uchiha chunin whose entire job was to read and approve or disapprove of everything civilians submitted for any sort of public print, same as for postage to anywhere outside Konoha. Whether it be a single-word shop sign or pages-long article, it needed nin approval, so I know they were all read. I’d made some pretty good points in them too, when I threw shade at everything from child persecution to being forced to shoulder the entirety of the village’s resentment. I was not just talking about jinchuriki there.
I refused to believe I was too subtle for the shinobi intelligence services. It was why I hadn’t submitted the big one – if they didn’t take me seriously before, why would they do it when I ‘attacked’ their entire institution? More likely they’d snatch me out of my house in the middle of the night and genjutsu me into an early retirement for ‘abusing Konoha’s goodwill’. I was two years past the point where I didn’t care if that happened to me.
Maybe I should file for a D-rank mission to have a message delivered straight to the Hokage’s desk, I thought grumpily. It’d raise questions if nothing else. I swear, massacre prevention shouldn’t be this difficult.
“Hanzo! Do you ever not glare like a stung boar?”
“Oh I’m sorry, I can come by another day.”
“Still can’t take a joke either,” Ren grunted as I stepped past him into his shop. “Load’s in the back, I already laid them out for you. There’s Shiori’s wagyu in it for you if you if you get them all done today.”
“I’m only doing this because you’re good advertising.”
“That’s what everyone says!”
I snorted as I took the stairs to the cellar. “If your wife didn’t have to nag you for even the most basic kindness, we’d have other things to say too!”
“Oh just fix your merchandise! Or don’t so I can have my wife’s cooking all to myself.”
She’d put the same effort into your food as she does for strangers if you weren’t such an ungrateful ass.
The man was an efficient businessman though, you had to be to make it in a ninja village. The items were laid out in neat rows with all the necessary space to get to work. The most important pieces were even labelled in order of priority. I took a seat, spread my tools and set about opening the first one – yes, it was the capacitor just as I thought. I was right to bring a whole pack of replacement wire. Then again, if I couldn’t even guess what a drunken lightning jutsu accident had done to stuff I made, I might just have to quit life. Toy kunai and shuriken patterned off fidget spinners. Actual training models done in the same manner. All with motion-activated electric lights built in. There were even a few that were actually mission-rated, on request for unexpected ninja clients who apparently liked to use them in night-time training and distractions. I didn’t expect this when lightning release techniques and seal tags were a thing, but I won’t complain. The balancing on them had been a bitch to get right, but somehow I’d managed. I even got a request to create a fuuma shuriken with van de Graaf functionality along the central ball bearing. Salved my pride a little, in those two months between electrical refurbishing contracts when my main source of income was children’s toys. In a ninja village.
What kind of lightning jutsu does this on accident though? This stuff isn’t exactly disaster-rated, but it’s no slouch in the rugged department either.
Shrugging, I got down to business. Changing capacitors and connectors was drudge work, but I could easily pretend to be meditating so that’s what I did. I made sure to do the labelled ones first, then did a couple of each other type so Ren could put something on the counter before the evening rush finished. I could hear the bell ring more and more as time passed, doubly so after I sent the first stuff up. Business was good, and this was just one of four shopkeepers I had contracts with.
I heard the commotion upstairs the moment it started, the place wasn’t exactly soundproof. Ren only sounded annoyed instead of alarmed though, even as it escalated, so I figured it was just kids being a nuisance-
“And stay out, you brat!” Thud.
Guess I was right.
Unfortunately, being right did precisely nothing to prepare me for the absolutely deafening racket that suddenly erupted outside barely ten minutes later. There was a crash. Then a second. A shadow blurred down the slope behind Ren’s house, rumbling loudly past the small window.
I ran upstairs and made it out the door just in time to see the runaway wagon smash through Ren’s back fence and right into my cart.
CRASH.
No…
“What in the Sage’s name did-“ Ren stumbled out after me and froze. For a moment. “That… that devil child! He must have done this!”
“YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT!” Came a child’s holler from… somewhere behind. I didn’t look. I couldn’t look away from - “THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS TO ALL WHO TRY TO CHEAT THE GREAT UZUMAKI NARUTO!”
Ren ran past me, broom held aloft and screaming bloody murder. I didn’t care. I stumbled past him. Almost tripped in my rush to get to my cart before-but the damage was…
I fell to my knees. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The mess…
The cart was somewhat intact, but that was it. My things were scattered. Family pictures broken, frames in pieces and glass shards everywhere. And… the urns…
I stared at my children’s ashes. Spilled out in trails. Mixed with the dirt. Mixed with each other where the urns had crossed paths and…
The street had stopped. The crowd was gawking. I must have lost time because I belatedly noticed Ren’s wife next to me, speaking softly and holding out a brush and tray for who knows how long. I took them and stared at them. I didn’t say anything when she knelt in the dirt next to me. I only flinched out of my daze when she began to gather my wife’s remains.
Stunned, I did what I could to collect my son and daughter. To try and… separate them back but… Shiori ended up giving me a spare jar for the ashes I couldn’t pick apart.
I should’ve left them at home, I thought numbly. This is a ninja village, I should’ve expected…
But since when are walls good for anything in a shinobi village? Or fences? They can’t even corral five year-old runts.
I didn’t finish the repair job. I didn’t take the food to go either. I mechanically answered the questions of the police nin and then walked home in a slump. My eyes were downcast the whole way. I didn’t dare raise them. No chance was too small that I’d spot a head of yellow hair and spit out something I’d end up regretting. For a long time. Or a very short time. Possibly shorter than it took me to get home depending on who was on Kyuubi watch duty today. I dragged my feet. One second of delay was one second I didn’t have to turn back and see the desecrated remains of my family.
When I got home, I cleaned up the urns as well as I could and put them back in my little tatami room. I stared at the can with the mixed ashes for a while, not sure what to do with them. The sight reminded me that Kenzo and Yui had hated playing together, their interests were just so different. I couldn’t just mix them back in with the rest, but I wasn’t just going to throw them away. Or maybe I should? Scattering the ashes was a done thing back on the old world, and some people did it here too.
Maybe I’ll do it later, I thought glumly. Scatter them from the top of the Hokage tower or something. But should I scatter the rest too, then?
Hours later, I woke up from a far too pleasant dream of Uzumaki Naruto falling face-first into a pit of tar and feathers after coughing himself to tears on my children’s ashes. Kenzo might have let it go, but Yui was a vengeful little creature, I’d been dreading having to take her in hand with the kind of attitude she was developing. I groaned softly as I turned on the floor, my neck and shoulder stiff. I’d fallen asleep in the tatami room.
Hauling myself upright, I stepped out of the room, past the hallway into the kitchen. It was dark. Looking out the window, I saw that it the moon had been out for a while. Checking the clock, I saw the hands pointing close to midnight.
I drank a cup of water, poured myself a second and made for my bedroom when I heard a noise from downstairs.
The basement?
I stood frozen, the faint moonlight the only thing in the entire house to see by.
My study was closer than the bedroom, so that’s where I went instead, walking quickly to my desk. There I carefully put the cup down and opened the top left-side drawer, reaching underneath to pull out the revolver I’d taped to the underside. Becoming a gun smith hadn’t been on my list of life’s dreams in either incarnation, but this was a world where people could move fast enough to leave afterimages. If you wanted to survive against anybody confident enough to go burglaring in a ninja village, especially as a powerless nobody, you either killed them in the first blow or caused a big enough racket as to draw the attention of every allied nin in a mile. That’s what I figured anyway. Guns, bless them, fulfilled both functions at once and then some.
With pistol in hand, I walked silently down the hall. My wife and kids had all been annoyingly light sleepers so moving quietly had been an essential skill for someone like me, who always needed to get up in the middle of the night to answer the call of nature. Had to renovate swathes of the previous home too, a long and stressful job I made sure I wouldn’t need to repeat for this one too soon. There were no creaky floor boards in this house.
As I reached the stairs to the basement, I wondered if I’d finally have to use this thing. The Naruto manga had guns showing up randomly in ninja shops and Gato’s hideout up to the end of the Wave arc. There was that kid with air-spewing palms in the chunin preliminaries too, who had his arms described as gun barrels. And I think one of the past Mizukage had a technique he called the water finger gun? But the author later said firearms didn’t actually exist, and even admitted conventional guns would be a mortal threat to even jonin. I certainly hadn’t seen or heard a whiff of firearms in this world all my life. Gunpowder existed, but other than fireworks and the occasional firecart used to launch them, it didn’t see much use outside the odd ninja bomb. Which made sense. In a world where superhumans could still be harmed by iron knives thrown by five year-old children, guns would have changed the shape of the battlefield every bit as much as they did in the old world.
I’ll probably get kidnapped, I thought testily. If it’s a ninja and I actually kill them, my life won’t be my own even if I live, and the world order will crash and burn as soon as the secret to mass producing these things gets out.
Or maybe not. Either way, that was future me’s problem. Current me, it turned out, had a different problem entirely.
I stopped in the darkness half-way down the stairs and stared dumbly at the small window. The little window up on the opposite wall whose only purpose was to let in a bit of air. And only when it was open. During the day, not at night. The tiny window that had been locked on the inside. Had been. Now it was open wide to make room for a dangling rope. A rope that one tiny hellion of village-wide infamy was just barely finished wriggling down.
Uzumaki Naruto, I though in dismay. What did I ever do to you?
The five year-old child landed with a thunk on the ground and froze at the noise. Just stayed there, half-crouched, his face stuck in a positively unsound cringe that I had far too much trouble not finding hilarious. It was all I could do not to facepalm.
When nothing seemed to happen, the child straightened and looked around the place like he was looking for something. What could he possibly want with me? Hadn’t he already done enough? Eventually, though, the kid realized that the little moonlight shining down on him through the window didn’t let him see shit in the rest of the room, so he rifled through his bag and took out a flashlight.
That’s one of mine, I realized as the kid turned it on and shone it over the room. Is that what Ren short-changed him on? I almost jumped when it passed over the stairs, but it missed me by a step and the kid stopped waving it like a madman when it alighted over my worktable. Right where I’d put the broken pictures of my family to replace later.
No no no, I chanted mentally as the kid quietly cheered and beelined to the place, huffing and puffing as he wrestled the chair into place. Come on, kid, I already know better than to give you too much benefit of the doubt, don’t do this, whatever you’re planning can’t be-
Naruto climbed up on my chair – cursing all the while, he was tiny and I was a very big man – and still had to stand on his feet to reach over the table. I couldn’t see his face, but he stood there just staring at the pictures for a while, and the family snapshot that was there, the only one intact of the lot that I always had on my workbench. Just when I was about to say something, Naruto reached into his bag and pulled out a little hammer. Then a bunch of thin little nails. And a roll of clear scotch tape.
Then, very carefully, the kid gathered up the glass shards of Kenzo’s picture frame and…
And began to tape them back together.
Oh…
For a while I just stayed there, staring at my home invader. I looked from him to my gun a few times. I quietly went back upstairs and taped the gun back to the underside of my desk drawer. I briefly considered leaving it be. Maybe pretend surprise in the morning. I was pretty good at pretending with kids, which was good because the idea that a bit of scotch tape could fix my shattered family picture frames was the sort of ridiculous idea only a five year-old could believe. But fatherly responsibility won out in the end – my last workshop might have been child-proofed, but this one was decidedly not.
When I made it back downstairs, Naruto was pulling on his hair and angrily cussing at my worktable.
“Dammit you stupid tape, stop bunching!” He hissed ‘quietly.’ “And you shut up!” He snapped at his frog wallet, what was that doing there? “I’ll spill your stuffing when I’m done, but it won’t help, you know! You can’t fix hurt people with money, I know I can’t fix it but I’m gonna try anyway, so there!”
Well damn, don’t go hitting all my feelings at once, kid.
Finally unable to cope with the most pathetic sight I’d ever seen in my life, I walked over, cut a strip off the tape dispenser that Naruto hadn’t recognized despite it being right next to him, told myself it had a lid so I should forgive him, and held it out for him to take.
“Thanks,” the kid whispered, squinting and biting his lip as he carefully applied the tape in place of… nine failures that I could count.
Kid didn’t lack determination, that’s for sure.
“Yes!” Naruto ‘quietly’ cheered, pumping his fist. “I did it!”
“Good job.”
Naruto beamed up at me. It kind of pissed me off, nobody should be that adorable after inflicting me with the second biggest heartbreak of my life.
I held out another piece of tape. He quickly took it and was half-way done ‘fixing’ the third shard when he froze. His head then, sinisterly, craned around like one of those wooden puppets whose head rattled in place for every inch it turned like a broken axle.
“GYAAAH!” shrieked the messiah.
He jumped out of the chair before I could blink and OHSHIT “Kid, NO-!”
“Ugh!” Uzumaki Naruto slammed back-first into the giant rack of shelves stuffed with my proofs of concept for kunai and shuriken and razor-sharp knives-
“NARUTO!”
“AAAAAH!”
Shiiing-CRASH!
The rack tipped over with a hellish racket, and as my back erupted in pain, it was all I could do to throw Naruto away from where I’d jumped over him before thick, solid wood smashed me in the head.
I made it this time, was my fading thought.
The next thing I knew was I could barely breathe. I was in pain too. My spine felt like Ume must have felt when that beam fell on her. There was a babble in my ears too, but it was unintelligible. I ignored it and did my best to turn on my side instead. It was hard, the shelf rack was heavy and I groaned in pain from the sting of cuts and stabbing pain in half a dozen places. One of them was in my back. A big one. One of the standard kunai I kept for comparison, it had to be. But when I took a breath, it didn’t hurt inside. Didn’t reach the lung.
Painfully, I managed to get a grip on the side and tried to drag myself out. “Agh!” The… whatever it was in my back caught on something. I turned some more and pushed myself up instead. The rack was solid wood, but I managed fine. Which was good because I had to put most of my attention into not aggravating the thing stabbing me in the ribs on the way up.
I swear I nailed this thing to the wall.
The crash was almost as loud the second time when I finally dragged drag myself out from under it. I collapsed on all fours, wheezing, resenting how shallow my breaths had to be so the thing in my back didn’t send more pain through me-
“-old man, are you okay, please say something, I didn’t meant to, I swear, I just wanted-oh crap, there’s a kunai sticking out of your back, I’ll get it-“
“NO!”
Naruto flinched so hard he fell on his ass.
My sight was blurry, but that didn’t stop me from turning my head to glare at him. “Stop. Helping.”
Naruto opened his mouth, then closed it when I snarled at him, biting his lip and sniffling tearfully.
Curse my bleeding heart.
Carefully, I climbed back to my feet, leaning on the wall and waiting for my head to stop spinning. It worked, but the clarity only made it easier to feel the blood trickling down my back and lower. It wasn’t gushing, so I’d gotten away without a slice to any major veins or arteries. It was still a lot though. The blood was all the way to my knees now, soon I’d start leaving footprints.
Looking around, I saw that the mirror next to the rack was broken too, because of course it was.
I took a long, slow, deep breath to gather myself.
Then I grabbed Naruto by the scruff, hauled myself up the stairs, almost fell down the stairs– “Uzumaki Naruto! Stand still and shut up before your dumb luck finishes the job!” and staggered out of my house, turning left towards the neighbour I didn’t like because, unlike the other one, he owned his own cart and an ass.
Smash, smash, smash, went my fist on the door. Each hit felt like knifing myself in the back and punching myself in the head at the same time, but my mind was preoccupied with much more important concerns. Like the fact that Naruto had almost killed a man and still no Anbu or nin was in sight even though I was hauling him like a meat sack and smash, smash, SMASH-
“I’m coming, I’m coming! Whoever it is, this had better not be some sort of – SAGE ABOVE!”
“Yori,” I said calmly, blood trailing down my face. “I need a ride to the hospital.”
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Understanding Does Not Presage Peace
The tale of a plasma physicist in a world of Ninjas
(Naruto)
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Summary
A plasma physicist reincarnates in the Elemental Nations. But since past life regression is a less than spontaneous affair, he only remembers this during his near death experience when the Kyuubi attacks the village. He does not consider this a fair exchange for the lives of his wife and children. But what can a mere civilian do but trudge on?
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Chapter 1: The Grumpy Mechanic
“-. October 10, 5 ANB .-“
Understanding Does Not Presage Peace
The tale of a plasma physicist in a world of Ninjas
(Naruto)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Summary
A plasma physicist reincarnates in the Elemental Nations. But since past life regression is a less than spontaneous affair, he only remembers this during his near death experience when the Kyuubi attacks the village. He does not consider this a fair exchange for the lives of his wife and children. But what can a mere civilian do but trudge on?
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Chapter 1: The Grumpy Mechanic
“-. October 10, 5 ANB .-“
I had my wife and kids cremated. Besides making sure that their bodies wouldn’t be desecrated by the various lunatics that inhabited this world, this also made it easy to bring the urns along on my annual October 10th walkabout. The attack of the Nine-Tailed Fox was the biggest tragedy in Konoha’s history, the Hokage didn’t do anything as morbid as throw a festival on its yearly observance. He left that stuff for the Rinne Festival in December. Instead, October 10 was a solemn day when people commemorated their lost loved ones in their own manner. If there was a higher number of traveling peddlers and longer open hours for the various locales, nobody was tone-deaf enough to mention it.
Being more of a skinflint with each year that passed, I ignored them all on the way to the empty lot where our family home had once stood. I could easily picture the place as it used to be, my ability to visualize had carried over from my last life. Two stories, kitchen and den downstairs, one staircase leading up to the bedrooms. Master bedroom empty. Kenzo alone in the kids’ room, looking out the window just in time to see the random wind blast that bisected him and the entire second floor in the first minute of the beast’s appearance. A load-bearing beam snapped and pulped my wife Ume. My daughter, Yui, was frozen in shock. I was half-way to her when the second wind shear came, burying her under the debris that everything had suddenly become, save for the small patch of load-bearing wall that happened to be between me and the blast. It didn’t stop the roof from caving in, but at least the wall didn’t fall on me too. I was ‘lucky’ enough to spend a day buried alive instead of dying with the others.
I reminisced about all that and more as I sat in the middle of the lot, three untouched saucers of sake between me and the urns, each with a framed picture behind them. Both my kids would be of age by now, by this world’s standards.
“Did you know, son? In another world, your name would’ve been Vali.” I was already on my fifth drink, but I didn’t even feel it. Sake had a ridiculously low alcohol content, especially for something drunk in shots. It was sweet, though, which is the only reason I didn’t stop in disgust after the first couple of sips. I was that rare and unfortunate breed of man that began to hate the taste of spirits after the first glass. Another thing that had carried over from my previous life. “My name was Miron.” I took a bite from one of the apricots my wife was named for. “No equivalent for Ume or Yui in my mother tongue though. English either. Or French. Or Latin. Pretty sure Italian and Spanish don’t have them either, though I’m admittedly spotty on those.” I considered the apricot pit in my hand and pocketed it. Maybe this would be the lucky one that sprouted.
I used to worry about being overheard or spied on. Well, not so much worry as hope. Unfortunately (or not?), despite being Big Brother central, ninja villages could be really up their own ass if you weren’t a ninja yourself. It made it a surprisingly pleasant place to live in for civilians, but a very frustrating one for a sole survivor trying to channel your self-destructive depression into something at least potentially constructive for the world while you rambled at your children’s names on the memorial stone. Or here. In languages that didn’t exist. “I’m thinking I’ll finally sell this place off.” I yawned, even though it wasn’t that late in the afternoon. Don’t get much sleep in the nights leading up to this. “Gonna fund that expansion, finally. Get that water wheel installed.” After the Kyuubi attack, property prices quite understandably crashed. They were still low when I finally got past the worst of my depression, so I used the disaster monetary grant and the savings I’d made for the kids to get a spot with a bit of stream running through. Maybe I’ll even play with piezoelectricity at some point, I certainly had the space. “Motive forces and all, you need’em when your hobby is energy physics. For all the good that will be in this world of magic and murder.”
I spread the offered sake on the ground, took the urns and photos back to the cart and set off back home.
As I walked, I watched the people passing by. The ninja academy always gave a day off on this date, so the streets were packed with a lot more baby shinobi than would usually be about on weekdays. How I felt about that tended to vary depending on the day. Today, the sight of them irritated me. As usual when I disapproved of a reality whose necessity I couldn’t discount.
Konoha was a ninja village. That meant a lot of things. For civilians it meant unparalleled security, protection from scummy business practices, no property taxes, and your family’s first piece of land for free. But it also meant a long waiting list (I only got in because my long gone grandfather applied before the last war) and you only became a resident if you agreed to have no inherent right to privacy, as well as one of two things. One: any kids you have will be signed on to the ninja academy. Or two: you contributed to the village in other ways meaningfully enough to equal the strategic benefit of one genin. For each of the children.
For me of now, that sounded like a recipe for abuse. Credit to pre-fox me, he’d opted for the second option too. Not because he mistrusted whatever or whoever calculated the ‘strategic benefit’ – he didn’t, the Hokages had been fairly sane about it, at least during peacetime. It was Ume who didn’t want that kind of life for her children.
Kenzo had almost finished wearing both of us down, though, when the disaster happened. And now, given what I knew of this world and its future, I wasn’t sure anymore that the risk of early death wasn’t worth the power than came with being a shinobi. Even dying early would be better than to be around when the insanity really took off and you got body-snatched or turned into a tree battery. Maybe if this was a place like the Hidden Mist I’d have an easier time finding the ninja way reprehensible, but Konoha actually did live up to its claims of an enlightened way of life. Relatively speaking. True meritocracy, for both the ninja and civilians, but without cheapening the value of inheritance. I could testify to that by the simple fact that the amount of propaganda here was less than a tenth of what it was in the world of my previous incarnation. The people of this land were also quite spiritually minded as well, even though their ancestral, animistic beliefs hadn’t survived Kaguya and her children.
Unfortunately, there was a deliberate and enforced divide between the ninja and civilian branches of the village logistics. Well, actually this was Konoha’s one, massive advantage that the other villages didn’t practice. It enabled a strong middle class with a minimal attrition rate that produced abundant wealth for the village to run on, as well as nurturing the highest citizen loyalty of all other places on the continent, save maybe the Land of Iron where the Samurai code still endured.
It was unfortunate for me personally, though, because it meant that civilians didn’t have ready access to certain things. Like the Anbu ‘hotline.’ Or the one of only two newspapers in Konoha that the ninja actually bothered reading. Why You Shouldn’t Bully a Dragon, Neuroplasticity and Murder, The Dangers of Exclusivity, all the columns and articles I contributed to the Konoha Herald had given me precisely zero in with the Konoha Sage, despite the professional sourcing standards I brought with me from my previous life.
Even more annoyingly, the Konoha Military Police didn’t seem to have paid much mind to them. Despite there being a whole department of Uchiha chunin whose entire job was to read and approve or disapprove of everything civilians submitted for any sort of public print, same as for postage to anywhere outside Konoha. Whether it be a single-word shop sign or pages-long article, it needed nin approval, so I know they were all read. I’d made some pretty good points in them too, when I threw shade at everything from child persecution to being forced to shoulder the entirety of the village’s resentment. I was not just talking about jinchuriki there.
I refused to believe I was too subtle for the shinobi intelligence services. It was why I hadn’t submitted the big one – if they didn’t take me seriously before, why would they do it when I ‘attacked’ their entire institution? More likely they’d snatch me out of my house in the middle of the night and genjutsu me into an early retirement for ‘abusing Konoha’s goodwill’. I was two years past the point where I didn’t care if that happened to me.
Maybe I should file for a D-rank mission to have a message delivered straight to the Hokage’s desk, I thought grumpily. It’d raise questions if nothing else. I swear, massacre prevention shouldn’t be this difficult.
“Hanzo! Do you ever not glare like a stung boar?”
“Oh I’m sorry, I can come by another day.”
“Still can’t take a joke either,” Ren grunted as I stepped past him into his shop. “Load’s in the back, I already laid them out for you. There’s Shiori’s wagyu in it for you if you if you get them all done today.”
“I’m only doing this because you’re good advertising.”
“That’s what everyone says!”
I snorted as I took the stairs to the cellar. “If your wife didn’t have to nag you for even the most basic kindness, we’d have other things to say too!”
“Oh just fix your merchandise! Or don’t so I can have my wife’s cooking all to myself.”
She’d put the same effort into your food as she does for strangers if you weren’t such an ungrateful ass.
The man was an efficient businessman though, you had to be to make it in a ninja village. The items were laid out in neat rows with all the necessary space to get to work. The most important pieces were even labelled in order of priority. I took a seat, spread my tools and set about opening the first one – yes, it was the capacitor just as I thought. I was right to bring a whole pack of replacement wire. Then again, if I couldn’t even guess what a drunken lightning jutsu accident had done to stuff I made, I might just have to quit life. Toy kunai and shuriken patterned off fidget spinners. Actual training models done in the same manner. All with motion-activated electric lights built in. There were even a few that were actually mission-rated, on request for unexpected ninja clients who apparently liked to use them in night-time training and distractions. I didn’t expect this when lightning release techniques and seal tags were a thing, but I won’t complain. The balancing on them had been a bitch to get right, but somehow I’d managed. I even got a request to create a fuuma shuriken with van de Graaf functionality along the central ball bearing. Salved my pride a little, in those two months between electrical refurbishing contracts when my main source of income was children’s toys. In a ninja village.
What kind of lightning jutsu does this on accident though? This stuff isn’t exactly disaster-rated, but it’s no slouch in the rugged department either.
Shrugging, I got down to business. Changing capacitors and connectors was drudge work, but I could easily pretend to be meditating so that’s what I did. I made sure to do the labelled ones first, then did a couple of each other type so Ren could put something on the counter before the evening rush finished. I could hear the bell ring more and more as time passed, doubly so after I sent the first stuff up. Business was good, and this was just one of four shopkeepers I had contracts with.
I heard the commotion upstairs the moment it started, the place wasn’t exactly soundproof. Ren only sounded annoyed instead of alarmed though, even as it escalated, so I figured it was just kids being a nuisance-
“And stay out, you brat!” Thud.
Guess I was right.
Unfortunately, being right did precisely nothing to prepare me for the absolutely deafening racket that suddenly erupted outside barely ten minutes later. There was a crash. Then a second. A shadow blurred down the slope behind Ren’s house, rumbling loudly past the small window.
I ran upstairs and made it out the door just in time to see the runaway wagon smash through Ren’s back fence and right into my cart.
CRASH.
No…
“What in the Sage’s name did-“ Ren stumbled out after me and froze. For a moment. “That… that devil child! He must have done this!”
“YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT!” Came a child’s holler from… somewhere behind. I didn’t look. I couldn’t look away from - “THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS TO ALL WHO TRY TO CHEAT THE GREAT UZUMAKI NARUTO!”
Ren ran past me, broom held aloft and screaming bloody murder. I didn’t care. I stumbled past him. Almost tripped in my rush to get to my cart before-but the damage was…
I fell to my knees. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The mess…
The cart was somewhat intact, but that was it. My things were scattered. Family pictures broken, frames in pieces and glass shards everywhere. And… the urns…
I stared at my children’s ashes. Spilled out in trails. Mixed with the dirt. Mixed with each other where the urns had crossed paths and…
The street had stopped. The crowd was gawking. I must have lost time because I belatedly noticed Ren’s wife next to me, speaking softly and holding out a brush and tray for who knows how long. I took them and stared at them. I didn’t say anything when she knelt in the dirt next to me. I only flinched out of my daze when she began to gather my wife’s remains.
Stunned, I did what I could to collect my son and daughter. To try and… separate them back but… Shiori ended up giving me a spare jar for the ashes I couldn’t pick apart.
I should’ve left them at home, I thought numbly. This is a ninja village, I should’ve expected…
But since when are walls good for anything in a shinobi village? Or fences? They can’t even corral five year-old runts.
I didn’t finish the repair job. I didn’t take the food to go either. I mechanically answered the questions of the police nin and then walked home in a slump. My eyes were downcast the whole way. I didn’t dare raise them. No chance was too small that I’d spot a head of yellow hair and spit out something I’d end up regretting. For a long time. Or a very short time. Possibly shorter than it took me to get home depending on who was on Kyuubi watch duty today. I dragged my feet. One second of delay was one second I didn’t have to turn back and see the desecrated remains of my family.
When I got home, I cleaned up the urns as well as I could and put them back in my little tatami room. I stared at the can with the mixed ashes for a while, not sure what to do with them. The sight reminded me that Kenzo and Yui had hated playing together, their interests were just so different. I couldn’t just mix them back in with the rest, but I wasn’t just going to throw them away. Or maybe I should? Scattering the ashes was a done thing back on the old world, and some people did it here too.
Maybe I’ll do it later, I thought glumly. Scatter them from the top of the Hokage tower or something. But should I scatter the rest too, then?
Hours later, I woke up from a far too pleasant dream of Uzumaki Naruto falling face-first into a pit of tar and feathers after coughing himself to tears on my children’s ashes. Kenzo might have let it go, but Yui was a vengeful little creature, I’d been dreading having to take her in hand with the kind of attitude she was developing. I groaned softly as I turned on the floor, my neck and shoulder stiff. I’d fallen asleep in the tatami room.
Hauling myself upright, I stepped out of the room, past the hallway into the kitchen. It was dark. Looking out the window, I saw that it the moon had been out for a while. Checking the clock, I saw the hands pointing close to midnight.
I drank a cup of water, poured myself a second and made for my bedroom when I heard a noise from downstairs.
The basement?
I stood frozen, the faint moonlight the only thing in the entire house to see by.
My study was closer than the bedroom, so that’s where I went instead, walking quickly to my desk. There I carefully put the cup down and opened the top left-side drawer, reaching underneath to pull out the revolver I’d taped to the underside. Becoming a gun smith hadn’t been on my list of life’s dreams in either incarnation, but this was a world where people could move fast enough to leave afterimages. If you wanted to survive against anybody confident enough to go burglaring in a ninja village, especially as a powerless nobody, you either killed them in the first blow or caused a big enough racket as to draw the attention of every allied nin in a mile. That’s what I figured anyway. Guns, bless them, fulfilled both functions at once and then some.
With pistol in hand, I walked silently down the hall. My wife and kids had all been annoyingly light sleepers so moving quietly had been an essential skill for someone like me, who always needed to get up in the middle of the night to answer the call of nature. Had to renovate swathes of the previous home too, a long and stressful job I made sure I wouldn’t need to repeat for this one too soon. There were no creaky floor boards in this house.
As I reached the stairs to the basement, I wondered if I’d finally have to use this thing. The Naruto manga had guns showing up randomly in ninja shops and Gato’s hideout up to the end of the Wave arc. There was that kid with air-spewing palms in the chunin preliminaries too, who had his arms described as gun barrels. And I think one of the past Mizukage had a technique he called the water finger gun? But the author later said firearms didn’t actually exist, and even admitted conventional guns would be a mortal threat to even jonin. I certainly hadn’t seen or heard a whiff of firearms in this world all my life. Gunpowder existed, but other than fireworks and the occasional firecart used to launch them, it didn’t see much use outside the odd ninja bomb. Which made sense. In a world where superhumans could still be harmed by iron knives thrown by five year-old children, guns would have changed the shape of the battlefield every bit as much as they did in the old world.
I’ll probably get kidnapped, I thought testily. If it’s a ninja and I actually kill them, my life won’t be my own even if I live, and the world order will crash and burn as soon as the secret to mass producing these things gets out.
Or maybe not. Either way, that was future me’s problem. Current me, it turned out, had a different problem entirely.
I stopped in the darkness half-way down the stairs and stared dumbly at the small window. The little window up on the opposite wall whose only purpose was to let in a bit of air. And only when it was open. During the day, not at night. The tiny window that had been locked on the inside. Had been. Now it was open wide to make room for a dangling rope. A rope that one tiny hellion of village-wide infamy was just barely finished wriggling down.
Uzumaki Naruto, I though in dismay. What did I ever do to you?
The five year-old child landed with a thunk on the ground and froze at the noise. Just stayed there, half-crouched, his face stuck in a positively unsound cringe that I had far too much trouble not finding hilarious. It was all I could do not to facepalm.
When nothing seemed to happen, the child straightened and looked around the place like he was looking for something. What could he possibly want with me? Hadn’t he already done enough? Eventually, though, the kid realized that the little moonlight shining down on him through the window didn’t let him see shit in the rest of the room, so he rifled through his bag and took out a flashlight.
That’s one of mine, I realized as the kid turned it on and shone it over the room. Is that what Ren short-changed him on? I almost jumped when it passed over the stairs, but it missed me by a step and the kid stopped waving it like a madman when it alighted over my worktable. Right where I’d put the broken pictures of my family to replace later.
No no no, I chanted mentally as the kid quietly cheered and beelined to the place, huffing and puffing as he wrestled the chair into place. Come on, kid, I already know better than to give you too much benefit of the doubt, don’t do this, whatever you’re planning can’t be-
Naruto climbed up on my chair – cursing all the while, he was tiny and I was a very big man – and still had to stand on his feet to reach over the table. I couldn’t see his face, but he stood there just staring at the pictures for a while, and the family snapshot that was there, the only one intact of the lot that I always had on my workbench. Just when I was about to say something, Naruto reached into his bag and pulled out a little hammer. Then a bunch of thin little nails. And a roll of clear scotch tape.
Then, very carefully, the kid gathered up the glass shards of Kenzo’s picture frame and…
And began to tape them back together.
Oh…
For a while I just stayed there, staring at my home invader. I looked from him to my gun a few times. I quietly went back upstairs and taped the gun back to the underside of my desk drawer. I briefly considered leaving it be. Maybe pretend surprise in the morning. I was pretty good at pretending with kids, which was good because the idea that a bit of scotch tape could fix my shattered family picture frames was the sort of ridiculous idea only a five year-old could believe. But fatherly responsibility won out in the end – my last workshop might have been child-proofed, but this one was decidedly not.
When I made it back downstairs, Naruto was pulling on his hair and angrily cussing at my worktable.
“Dammit you stupid tape, stop bunching!” He hissed ‘quietly.’ “And you shut up!” He snapped at his frog wallet, what was that doing there? “I’ll spill your stuffing when I’m done, but it won’t help, you know! You can’t fix hurt people with money, I know I can’t fix it but I’m gonna try anyway, so there!”
Well damn, don’t go hitting all my feelings at once, kid.
Finally unable to cope with the most pathetic sight I’d ever seen in my life, I walked over, cut a strip off the tape dispenser that Naruto hadn’t recognized despite it being right next to him, told myself it had a lid so I should forgive him, and held it out for him to take.
“Thanks,” the kid whispered, squinting and biting his lip as he carefully applied the tape in place of… nine failures that I could count.
Kid didn’t lack determination, that’s for sure.
“Yes!” Naruto ‘quietly’ cheered, pumping his fist. “I did it!”
“Good job.”
Naruto beamed up at me. It kind of pissed me off, nobody should be that adorable after inflicting me with the second biggest heartbreak of my life.
I held out another piece of tape. He quickly took it and was half-way done ‘fixing’ the third shard when he froze. His head then, sinisterly, craned around like one of those wooden puppets whose head rattled in place for every inch it turned like a broken axle.
“GYAAAH!” shrieked the messiah.
He jumped out of the chair before I could blink and OHSHIT “Kid, NO-!”
“Ugh!” Uzumaki Naruto slammed back-first into the giant rack of shelves stuffed with my proofs of concept for kunai and shuriken and razor-sharp knives-
“NARUTO!”
“AAAAAH!”
Shiiing-CRASH!
The rack tipped over with a hellish racket, and as my back erupted in pain, it was all I could do to throw Naruto away from where I’d jumped over him before thick, solid wood smashed me in the head.
I made it this time, was my fading thought.
The next thing I knew was I could barely breathe. I was in pain too. My spine felt like Ume must have felt when that beam fell on her. There was a babble in my ears too, but it was unintelligible. I ignored it and did my best to turn on my side instead. It was hard, the shelf rack was heavy and I groaned in pain from the sting of cuts and stabbing pain in half a dozen places. One of them was in my back. A big one. One of the standard kunai I kept for comparison, it had to be. But when I took a breath, it didn’t hurt inside. Didn’t reach the lung.
Painfully, I managed to get a grip on the side and tried to drag myself out. “Agh!” The… whatever it was in my back caught on something. I turned some more and pushed myself up instead. The rack was solid wood, but I managed fine. Which was good because I had to put most of my attention into not aggravating the thing stabbing me in the ribs on the way up.
I swear I nailed this thing to the wall.
The crash was almost as loud the second time when I finally dragged drag myself out from under it. I collapsed on all fours, wheezing, resenting how shallow my breaths had to be so the thing in my back didn’t send more pain through me-
“-old man, are you okay, please say something, I didn’t meant to, I swear, I just wanted-oh crap, there’s a kunai sticking out of your back, I’ll get it-“
“NO!”
Naruto flinched so hard he fell on his ass.
My sight was blurry, but that didn’t stop me from turning my head to glare at him. “Stop. Helping.”
Naruto opened his mouth, then closed it when I snarled at him, biting his lip and sniffling tearfully.
Curse my bleeding heart.
Carefully, I climbed back to my feet, leaning on the wall and waiting for my head to stop spinning. It worked, but the clarity only made it easier to feel the blood trickling down my back and lower. It wasn’t gushing, so I’d gotten away without a slice to any major veins or arteries. It was still a lot though. The blood was all the way to my knees now, soon I’d start leaving footprints.
Looking around, I saw that the mirror next to the rack was broken too, because of course it was.
I took a long, slow, deep breath to gather myself.
Then I grabbed Naruto by the scruff, hauled myself up the stairs, almost fell down the stairs– “Uzumaki Naruto! Stand still and shut up before your dumb luck finishes the job!” and staggered out of my house, turning left towards the neighbour I didn’t like because, unlike the other one, he owned his own cart and an ass.
Smash, smash, smash, went my fist on the door. Each hit felt like knifing myself in the back and punching myself in the head at the same time, but my mind was preoccupied with much more important concerns. Like the fact that Naruto had almost killed a man and still no Anbu or nin was in sight even though I was hauling him like a meat sack and smash, smash, SMASH-
“I’m coming, I’m coming! Whoever it is, this had better not be some sort of – SAGE ABOVE!”
“Yori,” I said calmly, blood trailing down my face. “I need a ride to the hospital.”
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