—————
The ANBU dropped from a rooftop like a stone finding water — silent, vertical, inevitable.
Kim stopped walking. His right hand twitched toward his kunai pouch before his brain caught up with his reflexes and told them, firmly, to stand down. You didn't draw on ANBU. Not because it was disrespectful — though it was — but because drawing on ANBU was the kind of decision that ended with you facedown on the pavement explaining your life choices to a porcelain mask that didn't care.
The mask was a hawk. White porcelain, red accents, eye slots that gave away nothing. The body behind it was lean, armored, utterly still in the way that only people who had practiced stillness as a professional skill could manage.
A hand extended. In it: a folded piece of paper, sealed with plain wax. No insignia.
Kim took it.
The ANBU was gone before his fingers closed. Just — gone. No body flicker shimmer, no displacement of air. One frame occupied, the next frame empty, like a single cell cut from a film strip.
That's what jonin-level speed looks like. Note taken.
Kim stood on the empty morning street, seven minutes from the Academy, holding a piece of paper that weighed almost nothing and felt like an anchor.
He broke the seal. Read the contents.
Three lines. No signature. A location, a time, and a single sentence:
Your development has been noted.
Kim read it twice. Then a third time, because his brain was doing the thing it did when confronted with information that rearranged the threat landscape — cycling through interpretations, looking for the one that didn't end with him dead in a ditch.
Noted. My development has been noted.
By whom?
But he knew. The moment the question formed, the answer was already there, rising from the murky soup of fragmented dreams and half-remembered storylines like a body surfacing in still water.
Danzo.
Kim folded the paper carefully. Placed it in his hip pouch. Resumed walking toward the Academy at exactly the same pace he'd been walking before, because if there was one ANBU there might be two, and if there were two they were watching, and if they were watching then every micro-expression and body-language shift was data being collected and delivered to a man who used data the way other people used kunai.
His face was calm.
His mind was on fire.
Shimura Danzo. Root. The shadow behind the shadow. The man who looked at children and saw — not children. Resources. Tools. Weapons to be shaped and pointed and, when they broke, discarded.
The dreams had been vague on Danzo. Fragments. A bandaged arm. A stolen eye — eyes, plural, something grotesque about that, something involving the Uchiha that Kim couldn't fully recall and didn't want to. A philosophy that reduced human beings to instruments of the state. A definition of "peace" that required the removal of everything that made peace worth having.
And now he's noticed me.
Because I got greedy. Because I beat Sasuke and let the whole class see it and didn't think — didn't THINK — about who else might be watching.
Kim's fist tightened at his side. The scar on his cheek pulled.
Stupid. Sloppy. You were so busy optimizing your growth curve that you forgot the first rule of surviving in a ninja village: excellence is a signal, and signals attract predators.
He breathed. In through the nose, out through the mouth. The Academy gates were visible ahead — the familiar wooden arch, the yard where students were already gathering, the mundane architecture of a place that taught children to kill and called it education.
Okay. Think. What are the options?
Option one: ignore the summons. Pretend the note never arrived. Go to class, go home, maintain the pattern.
And then what? Danzo sends another note. Or he doesn't — he just adds me to a different list. The kind of list where people disappear during training accidents and their families receive condolences and a pension.
Option two: run. Take the girls, take Mom, leave the village.
And go where? With what resources? To do what? We'd be missing-nin. Hunted. Three civilians and an eleven-year-old genin-equivalent against the tracking division of the strongest hidden village in the elemental nations.
No.
Option three: go. See what they want. Assess the situation. Gather information. Survive.
That's not really an option. That's just… what happens next.
Kim walked through the Academy gates and didn't look back.
—————
He held the synchronization through all six periods. It didn't help — the plateau was firm, the gains negligible, the classroom's chakra field a pond he'd already outgrown. But the routine was calming. The hum of twenty-three signatures against his awareness was familiar, and familiar was safe, and safe was what he needed today because his brain wouldn't stop running scenarios about what waited for him at the address on that paper.
The classes passed. He didn't hear them. Iruka's voice was a warm drone, comforting in the way that background noise was comforting — proof that the world was still operating on its normal axis even when your personal axis was tilting sideways.
When the final bell rang, Kim packed his bag with steady hands, walked out the front gate, turned left instead of right, and headed toward a part of the village he'd never had reason to visit.
—————
The building was unremarkable.
That was, Kim understood, the point. It sat at the end of a street that didn't have a name, behind a wall that didn't have markings, with a door that didn't have a handle visible from the outside. The kind of place you could walk past a thousand times and never see, because your eyes would slide off it the way water slides off oiled wood — naturally, thoughtlessly, by design.
Kim stood in front of it and felt nothing.
Not emotionally — he felt plenty of things emotionally, most of them variants of controlled dread. But his synchronization sense, which had been passively mapping every chakra signature within five meters for the past two weeks, registered the building as a void. Suppressed. Dampened. Whatever was inside had been sealed behind barriers that ate ambient chakra like black cloth ate light.
That's… concerning.
He knocked. Not because he thought knocking was required, but because standing in front of a secret facility without announcing yourself seemed like the kind of behavior that got you a kunai in the throat.
The door opened. No one was visible behind it.
Kim walked in.
—————
The interior was a corridor. Stone walls, dim lighting from sources he couldn't identify — no torches, no windows, just a diffuse glow that seemed to come from the walls themselves. The air was cool. Not cold — Kim would have turned around if it were cold — but cool in the deliberate way of underground spaces, regulated and sterile.
The corridor opened into a room.
The room contained three people.
One was an ANBU. Fulil kit, dfferent mask from the one on the street — this one was a cat, or possibly a fox, the stylization made it ambiguous. The operative stood against the far wall in a posture that managed to be simultaneously relaxed and ready to kill everyone in the room. Tall. Lean. Chakra signature suppressed to near-invisibility, but Kim could feel the edges of it — dense, controlled, the particular quality of someone who had been doing this for years.
The other two were shorter. Smaller. Children.
Kim's stomach did something complicated.
They were his age, roughly. Maybe younger. They stood side by side with the rigid posture of bodies that had been trained to stand that way — not naturally still, but made still, the way metal is made flat by hammering. They wore dark clothing. No masks. Their faces were blank in a way that faces shouldn't be — not calm, not neutral, but empty, as if someone had gone through and carefully removed everything that wasn't useful.
Trainees. Root trainees.
Kids.
They're kids.
Kim's jaw tightened. He forced it loose.
The ANBU spoke. The voice was flat — not monotone, but stripped of inflection the way the trainees' faces were stripped of expression. Professional. Efficient. A voice that had been optimized for the transmission of information and nothing else.
"You are Kim. Academy student. Fire affinity. Recently demonstrated rapid advancement in fundamental techniques and combat capability."
It wasn't a question. Kim answered it anyway. "Yes."
"Your progress has been observed and assessed. You have been selected for supplementary training. Beginning today, you will report to this facility after your Academy sessions conclude. Daily. Duration will vary based on operational requirements."
The ANBU reached behind them — a shelf Kim hadn't noticed — and produced an object.
A mask.
It was white. Porcelain. Standard ANBU-trainee issue, presumably, with the appropriate modifications for a face that was still growing. The paint was minimal — a few lines, a suggestion of features rather than a detailed rendering.
Kim looked at it.
The features suggested a cat. But the proportions were wrong — the ears were too round, the muzzle too flat, the overall effect less "predatory feline" and more—
Oh, you have got to be kidding me.
It looked like Mina's cat drawing. The one from last week. The one that was either a cat or an abstract horse or a theological statement about chaos.
The universe, Kim decided, had a sense of humor. It was not a good sense of humor.
He took the mask.
It was lighter than he expected. Cool against his fingers. The inside was smooth, slightly concave, designed to sit against the face without pressure points. He turned it over, examining the craftsmanship with the detached attention of someone who was absolutely not processing the fact that he was holding the entrance ticket to the most dangerous organization in the village.
"Is there a schedule?" Kim asked.
"You will be informed of each day's requirements upon arrival. Your instructor—" the ANBU inclined their head slightly, a gesture that somehow conveyed both introduction and warning, "—is me."
Kim looked at the ANBU. At the two empty-faced children. At the mask in his hands.
Danzo isn't here. He hasn't met me. Hasn't spoken to me. This is the observation tier — the intake funnel. They're watching to see what I am before deciding what to do with me.
That's… better than the alternative.
The alternative being a dark room and a bandaged old man and a conversation that ended with Kim's personality being filed off like rough edges on a blade. He'd seen enough in the dreams to know what Root did to its operatives — the emotional conditioning, the loyalty seals, the systematic destruction of individual identity in service of a "greater good" that was really just one man's calcified ideology dressed up in patriotic language.
I'm on the observation list. Not the recruitment list. Not yet.
Which means I have time.
Which means this is an opportunity.
Kim turned the mask over one more time. Looked at the cat-that-wasn't-a-cat.
Mina, if you could see this, you'd be so proud your art made it into military intelligence.
He put the mask on.
It fit.
—————
The training was precise, efficient, and brutal in the quiet way that only people who had systematized violence could achieve.
The ANBU — Kim didn't get a name, didn't ask for one, understood that names were a currency this place didn't trade in — started with an assessment. Not the Academy's assessment, with its standardized exercises and grading rubrics. This was a field evaluation: how fast can you move, how hard can you hit, how long can you sustain output, what happens when we apply pressure, what happens when we apply more pressure.
Kim performed at genin level. Solid, consistent, controlled. He held nothing back and showed nothing extra — the synchronization jutsu stayed dormant, his fingers never forming the sign. Whatever this place was measuring, he wanted the baseline to be accurate. Not because he trusted them, but because inflated baselines led to inflated expectations, and inflated expectations led to assignments that exceeded capability, and that led to a coffin.
Show them what you are. Not what you could be.
The two trainees watched from the wall. Their eyes tracked his movements with the mechanical precision of recording devices. Kim wondered, with a chill that had nothing to do with temperature, how long they'd been here. How much of them was left.
After the physical assessment, the ANBU ran him through a series of drills — infiltration basics, silent movement, communication protocols using hand signs he'd never seen in the Academy curriculum. The techniques were efficient. No wasted motion. No philosophy. No "Will of Fire" speeches or lectures about teamwork. Just: this is how you move without being seen. This is how you kill without being heard. This is how you become a tool that the village points at problems.
Kim absorbed it like a sponge, and hated that he was good at it.
Two hours. Then the ANBU stopped, assessed him with a tilt of the porcelain mask, and said: "Adequate. Return tomorrow."
Kim removed his mask. Placed it in his bag, wrapped in a cloth, beneath his books and his lunch container and the copy of Icha Icha Tactics that he absolutely did not have and would deny owning under interrogation.
He walked home.
The evening air was warm. The streets were gold. The village was doing its nightly transformation from workplace to living space, the human rhythm that had nothing to do with ninja ranks or secret organizations or masks that looked like children's drawings.
Kim walked through it and felt every step.
I just joined Root.
Sort of.
Provisionally.
On an observation basis.
I just joined Root and I'm eleven years old and my little sister drew my operational mask without knowing it and I need to figure out, very quickly, whether this is a lifeline or a noose.
He turned the corner onto his street. Climbed the stairs. Unlocked the door.
"I'm home."
"Kitchen!" Karen. No crash this time. Progress.
He made dinner. Hot. Always hot. He helped Karen with the reversed kata — she'd almost nailed it, the mirror-image muscle memory finally clicking into place. He told Mina her new drawing (a dog, she claimed; a philosophical statement about entropy, he assessed) was beautiful. He reheated his mother's plate and left it covered on the counter with a note: Eat while it's warm. I mean it.
Normal. All of it normal. The routine of a household that functioned because someone made it function, that held together because an eleven-year-old with a scar on his face had decided it would hold together and enforced that decision with rice and vegetables and corrections to his sister's footwork.
This is what I'm protecting.
This is what Danzo would take from me if he could.
He can't. He won't. I'll make sure of it.
The how was still unclear. But the resolution was solid, and Kim had learned — from his father, from his mother, from the dreams of a world where this story ended in fire and resurrection and gods — that resolution was the foundation. Everything else was engineering.
—————
One Month Later
—————
The morning spar had lasted forty-seven seconds.
Kim knew this because he'd been counting — a habit from Root training, where his instructor had drilled temporal awareness into him through exercises that involved being hit every time his internal count drifted more than two seconds from actual elapsed time. He now knew, at any given moment, how long he'd been doing whatever he was doing, accurate to within a second and a half. It was useful. It was also mildly maddening, like having a metronome installed in his skull that he couldn't turn off.
Forty-seven seconds. Sasuke was on the ground, breathing hard, staring at the sky with an expression that had evolved over the past month from fury to frustration to something that almost resembled respect but wasn't ready to admit it.
"Your footwork is better," Kim said, extending a hand.
Sasuke looked at the hand. Looked at Kim. Looked at the hand again.
He took it.
Progress.
Kim pulled him up. Around them, the sparring yard was in its usual state of controlled chaos — pairs squared off, Iruka circulating with corrections, the rhythmic sounds of impact and exertion that formed the soundtrack of every Academy morning. A few students had stopped their own matches to watch Kim and Sasuke, because the two of them fighting had become the class's unofficial spectator sport, the one event that reliably drew an audience.
"Again," Sasuke said. He was still holding Kim's hand. Grip tight. Eyes fixed.
Kim studied him. A month ago, that demand would have come from wounded pride — the reflexive need to prove that losing was an aberration, not a pattern. Now it came from something else. Something harder to dismiss.
He's not trying to beat me. He's trying to learn.
When did that happen?
"After lunch," Kim said. "Your breathing's off. You're compensating for the new footwork by shortening your exhales. Your stamina is draining twenty percent faster than it should."
Sasuke processed this. His jaw tightened — the residual pride, the part that still flinched at being corrected — but he nodded. Once.
He walked away, and Kim noticed, with the particular satisfaction of a teacher who would never admit to being one, that Sasuke's right foot no longer led every pivot.
"MY TURN!"
Orange. Loud. Inevitable.
Naruto skidded to a stop in front of Kim with the grace of a shopping cart hitting a curb. His grin was enormous. His stance was — actually, his stance was better than it had been a month ago. Wider base, lower center of gravity, hands up rather than out. Someone had been practicing, or observing.
…Both, probably.
"You just fought Sasuke," Kim pointed out.
"Yeah, and now I want to fight you! Come on, come on, I've been working on this new thing—"
"What new thing?"
"This!" Naruto dropped into a stance that was — Kim blinked — actually not terrible. It wasn't textbook, because nothing Naruto did was textbook, but it had a logic to it. A low, mobile foundation that played to his ridiculous stamina and his tendency to overwhelm through volume rather than precision.
"Where did you learn that?"
"I made it up!" Naruto beamed. "I watched you fight Sasuke like, and I figured out you keep doing this thing with your hips before you strike, so I thought, what if I—"
"You've been analyzing my fighting style."
"…Is that bad?"
Kim stared at him. Naruto Uzumaki, dead last, the boy who couldn't sit through a five-minute lecture on basic theory, had been independently analyzing combat technique through observation and developing counters.
The dreams said he was going to save the world. I'm starting to see why.
"It's not bad," Kim said. "Get in the ring."
The fight lasted longer than Sasuke's — not because Naruto was more skilled, but because the boy had reserves that made the word "stamina" feel inadequate. Every time Kim put him down, he got back up. Every time Kim found an opening, Naruto closed it through sheer force of being there, filling space with energy and motion and an obstinate refusal to stay fallen.
Kim ended it at the ninety-second mark with a sweep that Naruto didn't see coming because he was too busy trying to execute his "new thing," which turned out to be a surprisingly creative combination that would have worked on someone with slower reactions.
"Better," Kim said, pulling Naruto up from the dirt. "Much better. Your combination at the end — the cross-step into the uppercut — that was good."
Naruto's face did the thing it always did when Kim complimented him: a flash of surprise, then warmth, then the grin. The real grin. "Yeah?"
"Yeah. But you telegraph it. You shift your weight left a full second before the cross-step. I could see it coming from—"
"—a mile away, I know, I know." Naruto dusted off his jacket. "You always see everything coming. It's annoying."
"It's training."
"It's annoying."
Kim almost smiled. Almost.
These two. They're going to be monsters someday. Both of them. And they're going to need every ounce of it.
—————
The afternoons belonged to Root.
Kim had settled into the rhythm with the ease of someone who understood that rhythms were survival mechanisms — you adapted to them or they ground you down. Academy from eight to two. Root from three to five. Home by five-thirty. Dinner, sisters, stars, book, sleep. Repeat.
The training had intensified. His ANBU instructor — still nameless, still masked, still radiating the particular warmth of a glacier — had moved past basics into operational methodology. Information gathering. Target assessment. Surveillance techniques that made the Academy's stealth curriculum look like a children's game, which, Kim supposed, it was.
But the real value wasn't the curriculum. It was the proximity.
His instructor was ANBU-level. Elite. The chakra signature behind that porcelain mask was deep and controlled and vast in a way that made Iruka's feel like a candle beside a bonfire. Two hours a day, five meters, sustained contact. Kim's synchronization jutsu drank it in like parched earth drinking rain.
The two trainees were there too — still silent, still blank, still watching with eyes that recorded everything and reflected nothing. Kim had tried, once, to speak to one of them outside of training exercises. The response had been a stare so empty it made the back of his neck prickle.
That's what Root does. That's what it makes.
That's what it would make of me, if I let it.
He didn't let it. The mask went on at three and came off at five and everything behind his face stayed his — the humor, the calculation, the quietly stubborn refusal to be reduced to an instrument. He performed well enough to justify continued observation. Not so well that they'd accelerate his intake. The narrow band between "promising" and "exceptional" — that was where safety lived.
Walk the line. Don't fall off either side.
—————
One month of ANBU-level synchronization had done what the classroom never could.
Kim sat on the Academy's back wall during lunch break and took inventory with the dispassionate precision of an accountant reviewing a balance sheet.
Chakra reserves: more than doubled from his starting point. Still less than Sasuke's — the Uchiha bloodline was unfair in ways that transcended individual effort — but deep enough that sustained combat was viable. Deep enough that he could hold techniques that would have emptied him a month ago and still have gas in the tank.
Chakra control: refined to a degree that his instructor had commented on. Once. Briefly. In a tone that might have contained surprise if surprise were an emotion that ANBU-level operatives were permitted to display.
Physical capabilities: improved, but lagging behind his chakra development. The synchronization enhanced chakra efficiency and technique, but it couldn't add muscle mass or bone density. He was still eleven. Still growing. Still built like a boy who would rather be fishing than fighting. The Root training helped — the physical conditioning was relentless — but there were biological limits that no jutsu could circumvent.
Yet.
Technique execution: superior to every student in the Academy. Not by a small margin. By a gap that was, frankly, becoming difficult to disguise.
And then there was the comparison he'd been avoiding.
Iruka.
Kim closed his eyes. Felt for the familiar signature — warm, steady, reliable. The man was inside, eating lunch at his desk, probably grading papers with one hand and holding a rice ball with the other. His chakra hummed at its usual frequency: chunin-level, well-maintained, the efficient output of a veteran who had long ago found his ceiling and made peace with it.
Kim compared it against his own.
It wasn't close.
I've passed him.
The realization settled without fanfare. No trumpets, no dramatic internal monologue. Just the quiet, clinical acknowledgment that the boy had outgrown the teacher. Kim's reserves were deeper. His control was finer. His technique execution was cleaner. In a straight fight — not that he'd ever fight Iruka, not that the thought didn't make something uncomfortable twist in his chest — the outcome was not in question.
Chunin level. I'm chunin level.
At eleven. With two months of a jutsu nobody else knows exists and one month of secret training from an organization that wants to turn me into a weapon.
Dad was chunin level when he died.
Kim opened his eyes. Looked at his hands. Flexed the fingers.
I'm already as strong as he was, and it's not enough. It won't be enough. Not for what's coming.
He hopped off the wall and went back inside.
—————
The afternoon sun painted the training yard in long shadows. Kim stood at the center, hands in his pockets, watching Sasuke and Naruto approach from opposite directions with the synchronized inevitability of two storms converging on the same coastline.
They arrived at the same time. They always did now — some unspoken competition about who could issue the daily challenge first, neither willing to let the other claim priority.
"Rematch," Sasuke said.
"FIGHT ME," Naruto said.
They looked at each other. The air between them crackled with the particular energy of two boys who had been forced together by circumstance and mutual rivalry and the gravitational pull of a third party who kept beating both of them.
Kim looked at them. Sasuke — controlled, precise, improving at a rate that would have been alarming if Kim didn't know exactly why (the footwork correction had unlocked a cascade of downstream improvements that the Uchiha's natural talent was exploiting with ruthless efficiency). Naruto — chaotic, relentless, learning through methods that no textbook would endorse and no teacher would recommend but that worked, because Naruto's entire existence was a refutation of conventional wisdom.
They don't know it yet. They don't know what they'll become. What they'll mean to each other.
But they're starting to.
"Both of you," Kim said. "At once."
Silence.
"What?" Naruto.
"…Together?" Sasuke, voice flat but eyes sharp.
"You two keep coming at me separately. Every day. And every day I put you down." Kim pulled his hands from his pockets. Rolled his shoulders. The scar on his cheek caught the light. "So try together. Come at me like you mean it. Show me something I haven't seen."
The two boys looked at each other again. This time the energy was different — not rivalry but assessment. The unconscious calculation of two fighters considering, for the first time, what they might be capable of if they weren't working against each other.
Naruto grinned.
Sasuke didn't. But something shifted behind his eyes — a door opening, just a crack.
They came at him together.
It lasted two minutes and fourteen seconds. Kim counted. They were uncoordinated, clumsy, getting in each other's way more often than not. Naruto's aggression disrupted Sasuke's timing. Sasuke's precision constrained Naruto's mobility. They fought like two instruments playing different songs in the same room.
But there were moments — brief, flickering, gone almost before they registered — where something clicked. Naruto drove Kim backward and Sasuke was there, already moving, already in position, as if he'd known where the opening would be. Sasuke feinted high and Naruto swept low and for one heartbeat the two of them moved like a single organism with two bodies and one intent.
Kim saw it. Filed it. Treasured it.
Then he put them both on the ground, because they weren't ready yet, and letting them win before they'd earned it would teach the wrong lesson.
"Better," he said, standing over them. "Tomorrow, try talking to each other first."
"Talking," Sasuke repeated from the dirt. His voice suggested that Kim had recommended he eat glass.
"Communication. Strategy. The thing where you use words to coordinate actions." Kim extended both hands — one to each of them. "It's a teamwork concept. I know that's a dirty word for you, Sasuke, but consider it an experiment."
Sasuke took the hand.
Naruto took the other.
Kim pulled them both up, and for a moment the three of them stood in a triangle, hands clasped, breathing hard, the late afternoon light turning them gold.
This isn't what Danzo wants me for.
This is what I'm choosing to be.
The distinction mattered. Kim held onto it the way he held onto hot food and his sisters' laughter and the memory of his father chewing grass on the porch.
The mask goes on at three and comes off at five.
Everything else is mine.