The clearing was a ruin. Shattered trees lay like spilled matchsticks, their splintered ends pale in the fading twilight. The air smelled of damp earth, crushed pine, and the sharp, metallic tang of blood. I walked through the wreckage, my borrowed human feet—clad in simple sandals from Ryusei's memory crunching over bark and scattered leaves. My silver hair, a stark contrast to the illusion of brown I'd worn, felt strange against my neck. My senses, sharper than any human's, filtered the sounds of the forest: the drip of water from leaves, the skitter of a beetle, and… there.
A wet, rasping cough. The sound of a lung trying to inflate around broken ribs and fluid.
I followed it. Around a massive, moss-covered boulder that had been scarred by the impact of a body, I found him.
Kenta.
He was propped against the stone, his body slumped at an awkward angle. His scar, a brutal slash across his cheek, stood out lividly against his pallid skin. His mouth was a bloody ruin, dark red trickling down his chin and staining the front of his green flak jacket in a spreading, Rorschach-like blot. One arm was wrapped protectively around his midsection, where I knew several ribs were pulverized. The kick I'd landed would have turned a normal man into a fine pink mist. He'd managed some last-second chakra reinforcement, a desperate shell of hardened energy that had kept his body from disintegrating. It had saved his life, but only in the most technical, temporary sense.
He heard me approach. His head, which had been lolling forward, lifted slowly. Pain and a deep, bone-weary exhaustion clouded his dark eyes, but there was still a flicker of that hardened awareness in them.
Kenta: You… you killed them, didn't you?
His voice was a wreck. A low, guttural rasp, each word costing him breath and effort.
I crouched down a few feet away, settling into a comfortable squat, resting my elbows on my knees. My nine tails, even in this semi-human form, fanned out behind me, their white tips brushing the forest floor. I kept my expression neutral, almost bored.
Derek: Yup.
The single word hung in the air between us. He processed it, his jaw tightening. A fresh wave of pain made him suck in a sharp, hissing breath.
Kenta: Aren't you Suna shinobi? Hardened? Survive anything thrown at you? You should've been prepared to die, no matter what mission you take.
I was parroting back the kind of fatalistic, desert-hardened philosophy I'd glimpsed in his memories. The creed of a village that lived on the knife's edge.
He managed a weak, bloody smile. It was more of a grimace.
Kenta: Prepared? Yeah. We are. But you… He coughed again, a wet, tearing sound. When you kicked me… your eyes. I saw them. They turned slit. For a second. Like some kind of animal.
I didn't deny it. A low, quiet chuckle escaped me, the sound feeling strange in this human-ish throat.
Derek: Yeah. I'm not. And well… who cares? You're gonna die anyway. Now. I need information. Are there others? More of you in the area?
He barked a laugh, which immediately devolved into a violent, body-wracking coughing fit. He spat a mouthful of dark, clotted blood onto the moss.
Kenta: I'm not saying shit.
I shrugged. My eyes shifted. The human-looking blue irises dissolved, replaced by the glowing, cerulean blue of my fox form, the pupils narrowing into vertical slits. The light from them cast an eerie, ethereal glow on his pain-ravaged face.
I didn't need him to talk. I reached out with my mind, weaving the threads of the genjutsu I'd perfected—Echoes of the Phantom Veil. But this time, it wasn't about torture. It was about extraction. I pushed past his pain, past his dying thoughts, and into the deeper layers of memory and mission protocol.
His mind opened to me, a flood of images and impressions.
The Land of Rice Paddies. Officially, it was neutral, but it leaned Konoha. Fertile ground. Not the legendary bounty of the Land of Fire, but green, and wet, and abundant compared to the endless sands of Wind Country. Suna's mission: not invasion, not yet. Resource acquisition. Hit the trade caravans moving rice, medicinal herbs, rare fungi. Steal the goods, launder them through third-party merchants in smaller, corrupt countries. If Konoha investigated, the trail would point to "rogue ninja" from the Land of Rice itself. A deniable, profitable operation. Exploiting Konoha's reputation for diplomacy, for giving the benefit of the doubt. In Suna's eyes, it was Konoha's peacefulness that made them weak, made them easy marks.
I saw snippets of techniques, too. The precise chakra shaping for Wind Release: Vacuum Wave. The hand signs for Gale Palm, honed by years of fighting in sandstorms. Practical, cutting, efficient jutsu.
I pulled back from the mental dive, letting the genjutsu show him a flickering montage of what I'd just seen—his own plans, laid bare. His eyes, already wide with pain, went wider with shock and a dawning horror.
Kenta: Damn you… how did you…?
The realization seemed to sap the last of his defiance. But a final, stubborn spark remained. He grinned, a terrible, bloody sight.
Kenta: Doesn't matter. I fired a signal flare… earlier. Before you… played your games. Reinforcements are coming. They'll find you. You'll meet me in hell soon enough.
He said it with a kind of bleak satisfaction. He might die, but he'd marked me.
I looked at him for a long moment. There was no rage left in me. No hatred. Just a cold, clinical assessment. He was a threat. A dying threat, but one who had just ensured more would come.
Derek: Probably.
One of my tails, moving with a silent, whip-crack speed he couldn't hope to follow, lashed forward. It didn't slash. It stabbed. The glowing, blue-tipped point pierced his chest just below the sternum with a soft, wet thump. It went through lung tissue and found his heart, stopping it mid-beat.
His body jerked once. His eyes locked onto mine, the bleak satisfaction replaced by one last flash of surprise, then nothing. The light went out.
I willed a wisp of foxfire to travel down the length of my tail. Cool, blue-white flames bloomed at the point of impact. They didn't roar; they consumed with a silent, hungry patience. The fire spread across his chest, eating through fabric, skin, and bone, reducing it all to fine, gray ash. It was cleaner than leaving a body. More final.
I retracted my tail, the flames snuffing out as it disconnected. I stood up, stretching my arms over my head with a long, deliberate yawn. My joints popped. The blue light faded from my eyes, leaving them their normal, if still inhuman, teal.
I looked down at the small pile of ash that was all that remained of Kenta, jonin of Sunagakure.
And I felt… nothing.
No revulsion. No guilt. No triumphant thrill. It was a void where a reaction should have been. An emotional flatline.
Back in my old life, the one before the god and the fox body, I'd been squeamish. A dead mouse in a trap required gloves and a grimace. The thought of violence was abstract, something for movies and video games.
Now? I'd just killed three human beings. Trained, thinking, feeling people with histories and grudges and lives back in a sun-scorched village. People who, according to the memories I'd rifled through, had grown up with a deep, generational envy that curdled into cruelty. Their desert was a harsh master, and it had made them hard in turn.
And I had ended them. Efficiently. Without a second thought.
Why aren't I freaking out?
The question echoed in the quiet of my mind. Shouldn't I be on my knees, vomiting? Shouldn't my hands be shaking? Shouldn't there be… something?
I paced a small circle, my tails swishing through the ferns. I kicked a loose stone. It skittered away and vanished into the shadows.
In the anime, death was often stylized. Bad guys were faceless, or they were monsters. When named characters died, it was a tragedy, a turning point. But the background characters? The genin and chunin who weren't part of the main cast? They were cannon fodder. Statistics. Their deaths were set dressing to show how high the stakes were.
This wasn't an anime. This was wet leaves under my feet, the coppery smell of blood in my nose, and ash on the wind. Kenta, Miko, Haru—they weren't background sprites. They were real. They'd trained for this. They'd chosen this path. They'd come into my forest, into the territory I was carving out as my own, and they had intended to torture and murder a boy for a bag of rice and a political slight.
They were in my way. So I removed them.
The logic was clean, simple, and utterly cold.
A faint, uncomfortable twinge tightened in my chest. Not guilt. Not remorse. It was… recognition. A dim alarm bell from the ghost of Derek Smith, the office worker who saved a kid in a crosswalk. That ghost was whispering that this wasn't right. That there should be a line.
But the fox, the yokai part of me, the part that had lived in this forest for months surviving on instinct and raw power, didn't understand lines. It understood territory. It understood threat. It understood survival.
I'm not human anymore, I thought, staring at my hands—pale, with sharp black nails. Am I even Derek Smith? Or am I just… this?
I was a demon in folklore. A trickster. A destroyer. Legends of kitsune spoke of them driving men mad, ruining kingdoms, consuming souls. Was this the beginning of that? Was the lack of feeling the first step down that road?
I shook my head, the silver hair swaying. The philosophical spiral was a luxury I couldn't afford.
Derek: Nah. Can't overthink it. Survive first.
But the words tasted like ash in my mouth. The scary part wasn't the killing. It was the calm. The icy, procedural calm with which I'd done it, and was now analyzing my own lack of a reaction.
I glanced once more at the scorched patch of ground. No regret. Just a fact. A completed task.
But that ghost of my old self, the one who'd lunged into traffic without thinking, insisted on something. A line. A rule. For whatever was left of the person I used to be.
I spoke out loud , testing the words
Derek:Don't kill innocents. Only threats.
The forest didn't answer. But it felt right. A simple, stark baseline in a world that seemed to have none. It wasn't about morality. It was about… order. About defining what the "survival" I was fighting for actually meant.
A distant sound, different from the forest's usual chorus—the faint, dry rustle of fabric on bark, the almost inaudible scrape of a sandal on stone. My ears twitched, rotating toward the noise. My slit pupils dilated.
Reinforcements. Kenta hadn't been bluffing.
A slow, predatory smile touched my lips, feeling the hint of elongated canines against my lower lip.
Derek (a whisper to the wind): Bring it.
For now, I melted back into the shadows, my form blurring as I pushed chakra into a Body Flicker. The clearing, with its death and its silence, was left behind.
I had new jutsu to practice. Wind techniques from a dead man's memory. And a line in the sand to see if I could hold.
Timeskip brought to you by Naruto Loosing his virginity to his clone (would it be called masturbating?)
The bamboo grove was quiet, the way a place gets after a storm. The only sounds were the drip of water from the leaves and my own breathing. I pushed through the final thicket, the stalks whispering against my arms, and my heart just… dropped.
There he was.
Just as I'd left him, hidden under the gnarled roots of that old oak, wrapped in the shimmering veil of my cloaking genjutsu. But not how I'd left him.
Ryusei Hizukari was slumped against the tree, his head tilted back, eyes open and glassy, staring at nothing. A kunai was buried to the hilt in his own chest, right over the heart. His hand was still loosely wrapped around the grip. Dark blood, almost black in the dim light, had soaked the front of his tattered chunin vest and pooled in the dirt between his legs.
Suicide.
The word hit me with a physical weight. I'd just been gone… what, an hour? Less?
I stood there, frozen, the three Suna forehead protectors clenched in my fist. The metal was cool and rough against my palm, the etched spiral-and-sun symbol of the Sand Village digging into my skin. I'd taken them as proof, as trophies, as something to show… I don't even know what.
Derek (voice quiet, flat): Why'd you do it, kid?
The forest didn't answer. I knelt down, the damp earth soaking through the knees of my pants. I reached out with fingers that were still mostly human, brushed his eyelids closed. His skin was cool, already taking on that waxy, unreal texture of the recently dead.
I didn't just look at his memories this time. I dove in. Deep. Past the surface-level jutsu and mission protocols. I went looking for the why.
And I found it. It wasn't complicated. It was devastatingly simple.
His fear was a raw, bleeding thing in his mind. He'd woken up alone, injured, in a strange forest. A monstrous, talking fox-creature—me—had captured him, healed him with eerie blue fire, then ripped through his mind like it was a public library. Then I'd vanished, leaving him trapped under an illusion.
From his perspective, what was I? Some new, unknown predator. I'd toyed with him. I'd shown him unbelievable power. In his shinobi-trained mind, the most logical conclusion was that I was just drawing out the hunt. That I'd come back to finish him in some even more grotesque way. Or worse, that I'd keep him, a plaything.
And if, by some miracle, he escaped me? The Suna team was still out there. Kenta's signal flare had been real. They'd track him. They'd find him. And what they'd done in my illusion—the laughter, the casual cruelty, slicing off his hand—they would do for real. He'd seen it in their eyes.
He was trapped. Between a monster and a murder squad. There was no extraction team coming for a low-priority chunin on a simple scouting run. He was a piece that had been played and lost.
In that cold, clear calculation of a shinobi facing a no-win scenario, he'd chosen the only exit he could control. A quick, clean end. On his terms.
Better my way than theirs.
That was his last, coherent thought. Not heroic. Not dramatic. Just… final. A quiet kid making the only choice left to him.
But beneath that sharp fear and tactical despair, I found the softer parts. The parts that made his choice feel even more tragic.
Yakushi Nono. Her face appeared in his memories like a sunbeam in a dusty room. She was the caretaker at the Konoha orphanage, maybe ten years older than him. She wasn't a medic-nin, not really, but she had a gentle touch with basic healing jutsu and a bottomless well of patience. Ryusei remembered her bandaging his knees after he'd fallen in the yard, her hands soft, her voice a calming murmur. "There you go, Ryusei. All better. You're so brave."
He didn't have a mother. She was the closest thing. He idolized her. A deep, quiet, aching kind of love that a lonely orphan boy wraps around the one person who shows him consistent kindness. He had a dream, tucked away in his heart: get stronger, make chunin, then jonin. Earn enough money, enough respect. And then… maybe he could protect her. Provide for her. Make her see him not as a scrawny orphan, but as a man. "One day, I'll be the one taking care of you, Nono." The thought was his secret fuel.
His teammates? His sensei? They weren't friends. The memories were of distance, of being the odd one out. The commoner with no clan name, no inherited techniques. He'd worked twice as hard in the academy for half the recognition. On his genin team, he was the utility player—good for genjutsu support, reliable, but never the star. His sensei's praise was sparse, practical: "Adequate control, Hizukari. Keep the illusions tight." There was no mentorship, no belief in his potential. He was a tool, a cog. Functional, replaceable.
And money… God, the kid was poor. Not just 'ramen-for-dinner' poor. Shinobi poor. As a genin, his mission pay was pitiful. As a chunin, it got a little better. But he didn't spend it on himself. Not on new gear, not on fancy weapons, not on nights out at a tea shop.
He sent it back. To the orphanage. To Nono.
The memories were clear: standing in line at the Konoha post office, filling out a money order. Putting half, sometimes more, of his mission earnings into an envelope addressed to the Konoha Orphanage, Attn: Yakushi Nono. The leftover ryo was for the bare essentials—food that wouldn't spoil on long missions, patching his gear, the occasional cheap motel when he was too far from the barracks. His clothes were worn thin. His sandals were re-soled until the soles were more patch than original. He slept in the common chunin dormitory when in the village, a drafty, crowded room he shared with seven other low-ranking ninjas.
He wasn't living. He was surviving, and sending his lifeblood back to the place that represented the only warmth he'd ever known, to the person who represented the only love he'd ever felt.
Looking down at his lifeless body, at the cheap, bloodstained vest, at the calloused hands that had worked so hard for so little… a hot, sour wave of anger and pity washed over me. This system, this shinobi world, had used him up and thrown him away. He died alone in a ditch, thinking he was a burden about to be eliminated, with nothing to his name but debts of gratitude.
I was still wearing his face. The Transformation Jutsu held, shaped by my youki and his memories. Brown hair, average features, the faint lines of stress around eyes that had seen too much too young. It felt like a mask, but it also felt… like a responsibility.
Derek: Shit, Ryusei. You didn't have to do this. There were other ways.
But I knew, from the inside of his head, that to him, there hadn't been. His world was small, harsh, and offered very few exits.
I focused inward, reaching for the core of my yokai energy. This wasn't just mimicking a shape anymore. This was an assimilation. I pulled on Ryusei's memories, not as data, but as lived experience. The ache in his muscles after a long run. The precise feel of chakra molding for a Hell Viewing genjutsu. The particular way he held a kunai. The scent of Nono's herbal soap. The hollow pang of an empty stomach when he'd sent his last ryo away.
My body shifted. Bones settled into a slightly different alignment. My own silver hair darkened and thickened into his shade of brown. The subtle, feral edge of my features softened into his unremarkable, earnest face. The nine tails I normally carried receded, folded into my being, leaving only the faintest hum of their presence. When I opened my eyes, they were his shade of brown, though if you looked very closely, in the right light, you might see a flicker of unnatural blue deep within.
The merger was seamless. His muscle memory became mine. His chakra pathways felt familiar. The lingering ghost of his emotions—the love for Nono, the resentment towards his indifferent superiors, the quiet pride in his hard-won chunin rank—echoed in my own chest alongside my memories of traffic jams and computer screens.
It was more than just putting on a suit. It was like two streams of consciousness, one ending in a quiet pool, the other flowing in to fill the space, carrying the silt and stones of the old stream with it.
And I realized the constant fighting, the survival grind, the life-or-death clashes with beasts and now shinobi… it had sanded down my control to a razor's edge. Mastering this deep transformation, absorbing a life so completely, felt… intuitive. Like a skill I'd leveled up without noticing.
A memory, not mine, surfaced with crystalline clarity: Danzo Shimura. The old war hawk's shadow falling over the orphanage. Whispers of Root. Of recruitment. Of Nono being pressured, being used as leverage. In the canon I half-remembered, her story didn't end well. Ryusei's fear for her, his powerlessness to protect her from those kinds of shadows, had been a constant, low-grade terror.
A cold purpose settled over me, cutting through the pity.
Derek: I can't save you, Ryusei. But I can finish your mission.
I could be Ryusei Hizukari. I could go back. I could send that money order every month. I could stand between Yakushi Nono and the shadows of Konoha. I could live the life he wanted, the simple, honorable life of a shinobi providing for his own. It was a debt. To him. For taking his face, his name, his chance.
My enhanced senses, now fully integrated with this form's chakra network, prickled. Incoming. From the west. Five chakra signatures, steady and disciplined—chunin. And one more, a sharper, more focused pulse of energy. Special Jonin, or a very seasoned chunin leader. Kenta's reinforcements. They were close, maybe two kilometers out and fanning into a search pattern.
No time for a proper burial. No time for tears.
I looked at Ryusei's body one last time. This shell. This empty vessel.
Derek: I'm sorry.
I placed a hand on his chest, next to the kunai. Cool blue foxfire, gentle this time, bloomed from my fingertips. It didn't rage. It consumed, silently and efficiently. The flames licked over his form, reducing fabric, flesh, and bone to a fine, gray ash in a matter of minutes. There was no smoke, just a faint smell of ozone and clean burning.
When it was done, I pushed a little more youki into the small pile of ash. It swirled, drawn inward by the energy, compressing into a smooth, warm, blue-tinged marble about the size of a cherry. A keepsake. A focus. A reminder of the boy whose life and death were now knotted with my own.
I pocketed the warm, glassy orb.
The approaching chakra signatures were a pressure against my senses now. A threat. But also an opportunity. Ryusei Hizukari's first mission back from the Land of Rice would be to report a run-in with Suna operatives. He'd have proof.
I adjusted the tattered chunin vest, ran a hand through my now-brown hair, and took a slow, steadying breath, feeling the combined weight of two lives on my shoulders.
I whispered to the empty grove, a statement of fact, a vow
I said softly
Ryusei:So. My name is Ryusei Hizukari.
I turned and melted into the bamboo, not as a fleeing fox, but as a Konoha chunin returning from a harrowing mission, ready to meet his comrades or his enemies. The hunt, and the performance, were back on.