West. Two days to Konoha. Two days to figure out what the hell had happened to him and how to survive it.
Two days.
He could do this.
They made camp in a hollow beneath the roots of a massive tree, hidden from casual view by a curtain of hanging moss. The girl, she'd given her name as Yuki, whispered it like a secret, fell asleep almost immediately, curling into herself with the boneless exhaustion of a child pushed past her limits.
He didn't sleep.
He sat with his back against the trunk and his weapons within reach and stared at his hands in the dying light.
Small hands. Young hands. Twelve years old, maybe thirteen, hard to tell without a mirror, and he wasn't sure he wanted to see the face that went with these hands anyway.
Tatsuya.
The name rose from somewhere deep, sudden and certain. Not a memory exactly, more like... knowledge. The way you knew your own name, immediate and unquestioned.
Tatsuya Meguri.
He, or the body he now wore, was named Tatsuya Meguri. A genin of Konohagakure, whatever that meant. An orphan, probably, given the lack of clan name. A soldier ,child soldier, Jesus Christ... who'd been fighting in a war that had apparently swept through this forest and left nothing but corpses.
And now there was someone else behind these eyes.
Does it matter?
He kept coming back to that question. Did it matter who he'd been, what he'd lost, how impossible all of this was? The old life was gone. He could feel its absence like a phantom limb, aching and unreachable. His wife, had there been a wife? He couldn't remember. His career, his colleagues, his name, all of it dissolving like morning frost.
All that remained was this: a broken body, a strange world, and a scared girl depending on him to get them both to safety.
So. No. It didn't matter.
He was Tatsuya Meguri now. Whatever that meant, whoever that was, it was his to figure out.
He closed his eyes, just for a moment, just to rest them, and found himself cataloging injuries instead of sleeping. The ribs were definitely fractured, at least two, possibly three. His left arm was dislocated at the shoulder, he'd need to set it before it swelled further. Dehydration, mild concussion, multiple lacerations of varying depth.
Survivable. All of it survivable, assuming he didn't develop infection and assuming nothing found them during the night.
Big assumptions.
He allowed himself exactly sixty seconds of despair. Felt it wash through him, the sheer overwhelming impossibility of his situation. Another world. Another body. A war he didn't understand, filled with powers he couldn't explain, and somehow he was supposed to navigate it all without getting killed.
Sixty seconds. Then he locked it away and started planning.
First: reach Konoha. Establish baseline safety.
Second: understand this world's rules. The physics, the politics, the capabilities he was apparently supposed to have.
Third: decide what to do with the knowledge he'd carried across the void. Because if this was the Naruto world, and the evidence suggested it was, then he knew things. Not much, not the details, but the shape of what was coming. Wars. Massacres. Apocalyptic threats.
Could he change it? Should he? Did he have any right to try?
Survive first. Philosophy later.
Good advice.
He leaned his head back against the bark and let the night swallow him whole.
Dawn came grey and cold, bringing with it a persistent drizzle that turned the forest floor to mud. Yuki woke puffy-eyed and silent, eating the ration bar he offered without complaint. She didn't ask questions. He suspected she'd learned not to, somewhere in the crucible of the last few days.
They moved.
Travel was slow. His ribs screamed with every step, and he had to stop twice to reset his shoulder, grinding the joint back into its socket with a wet pop that made Yuki look away. But he kept moving, because stopping meant dying, and he wasn't ready to die again.
Again. There was a thought to unpack later.
The forest seemed endless. Same trees, same undergrowth, same filtered light through the canopy. But there were signs of recent passage, broken branches, disturbed leaf litter, once a smear of blood on a rock that was too fresh for comfort.
Enemy territory, or close to it. He adjusted their course, moving slower, checking sightlines before entering clearings.
Around midday, they found the river.
It cut through the forest in a lazy curve, brown with sediment and dotted with debris. A road paralleled it on the far bank—not paved, but well-traveled, wagon ruts visible even from this distance.
"Konoha," Yuki whispered. "That road goes to Konoha."
West. They were on track.
He scanned the road. Empty, as far as he could see. But crossing the river meant exposure, vulnerability, a window where they'd be visible to anyone watching.
"Stay here," he told Yuki. "I'll check—"
Movement.
His body reacted before his mind caught up, shoving Yuki behind him and drawing his kunai in the same motion. The shape that emerged from the treeline was human-sized, wearing a green flak jacket and a headband with a leaf symbol carved into metal.
Konoha. This was a Konoha ninja.
"Identify yourself," the figure called. Male voice, harsh with tension. A weapon glinted in his hand, another kunai, held in a combat grip.
Autumn leaves fall twice.
The phrase surfaced without warning, rising from somewhere deep in the body's memory. Not his memory—Tatsuya's memory. The real Tatsuya, the boy who'd grown up in this world, who'd trained at the Academy, who'd learned all the things a genin was supposed to learn.
Including, apparently, authorization codes.
"Tatsuya Meguri, genin, Third Division, Fourth Company," he called back. "Authorization: Autumn leaves fall twice. I have a civilian with me."
The ninja studied it. His expression shifted—suspicion to recognition to something almost like relief.
"Third Division got hit hard," the chuunin said, studying Tatsuya's face. His gaze lingered on the head wound, the dried blood caking half his features. "Word was no survivors from Fourth Company."
"Then word was wrong."
"So it seems." The chuunin's eyes moved to Yuki, then back. "The girl?"
"Civilian. Found her in the aftermath. Her family didn't make it."
The ninja... a chuunin, from the vest, another fragment of his nephew's lectures, nodded slowly.
"Enemy positions are east of the river. You made it through their lines." There was respect in his tone now, or at least acknowledgment. "There's a forward camp half a day north. Medical station. Can you make it that far?"
Half a day. His ribs and head throbbed at the thought. But—
"Yes."
"Good. Follow the riverbank. You'll see the banners when you get close." The chuunin hesitated, then added: "You did well, genin. Getting the civilian out."
He didn't respond. Didn't know how to explain that he wasn't the person who deserved that praise, that the real Tatsuya Meguri was probably gone, erased to make room for... for whatever he was now.
Instead, he just nodded. Collected Yuki with a touch on her shoulder. Started walking north.
Behind him, the chuunin was already moving east, vanishing into the trees with barely a rustle. Another soldier, another body, another piece in a war he didn't understand.
Yet, the voice in his head corrected. A war you don't understand yet.
He kept walking.
The forward camp appeared in late afternoon, marked by faded banners bearing the leaf symbol. Tents clustered in a clearing, surrounded by earthwork fortifications and patrolled by shinobi whose eyes never stopped moving.
They challenged him at the perimeter. He gave the code again, and was waved through with directions to the medical tent.
The tent was chaos.
Wounded everywhere, filling cots and spilling onto the floor. Medics moved between them with the focused efficiency of people who'd long since burned through their reserves of horror. The smell was overwhelming, blood and infection and the particular sweetness of gangrenous flesh.
He knew that smell. He'd lived with it for years.
A medic intercepted him before he'd gone three steps. Young woman, barely older than he apparently was, with exhaustion carved into every line of her face.
"Injuries?"
"Ribs—two, maybe three fractures. Shoulder was dislocated, I set it myself. Head wound, definitely concussion." He touched the gash along his scalp. "Memory's patchy. I don't remember much of what happened to my unit."
"We'll get you checked out. Might be some swelling, could explain the gaps." She made a note on something, a clipboard of some kind. "The girl?"
"Uninjured. Shock, probably. She watched her family die."
The medic's expression flickered, something human breaking through the professional mask, before she nodded. "We'll get her processed. You, sit. I'll check your ribs when I have a minute."
Yuki was led away. He watched her go, feeling something unclench in his chest. She'd made it. She was safe, or as safe as anyone was in this world.
He found an empty corner and sat. Let his head fall back against the canvas.
Around him, the camp hummed with the organized chaos of war. Orders shouted. Supplies hauled. Somewhere, someone was screaming, a wound being treated, or a nightmare too powerful to stay silent.
And he sat there, in a body that wasn't his, in a world that shouldn't exist, and tried to figure out what the hell he was supposed to do next.
Survive first.
He was working on it.
Think later.
Later, then. Later he'd figure out the rules of this impossible place. Later he'd decide what to do with his fragmented knowledge of a future that hadn't happened yet. Later he'd grieve the life he'd lost and the person he'd been and all the things he'd never see again.
Later.
For now, there was just this: a tent full of wounded, a war still raging, and a body that needed to heal before it could be useful.
He closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, it was dark, and someone was pressing a cup of water into his hands.
"Drink," the young medic said. Her voice was gentler now, the crisis of the day receding into exhausted calm. "You look like you need it."
He drank.
Tomorrow, the work would begin. Tomorrow, he'd start learning to live this life he'd stolen or been given or somehow become.
But tonight—just tonight—he let himself rest.