At the very edge of the Hidden Cloud Village in the Land of Lightning, two figures tore through the darkening streets in a desperate chase.
The man in front wore the plain clothes of a traveling merchant. A common samurai sword hung at his side, but the killing intent rolling off him made the disguise feel paper-thin. He ground his teeth and shot a venomous glance over his shoulder at the boy pursuing him.
"Damn it. If I had a decent weapon, would some little Cloud brat dare chase me like this?" he cursed inwardly. "And how did I get exposed? How could a mere genin see through me?"
He was a Konoha intelligence ninja, one who had infiltrated the Hidden Cloud Village under deep cover. But now that his identity had been blown, there was no longer any point in hiding. What remained was only escape—or death.
The boy behind him moved with frightening speed. He wore the forehead protector of Kumogakure, and though his face still carried a trace of youth, his eyes were sharp and steady. Suddenly, he flashed through three hand seals.
In the next instant, he vanished with the Body Flicker Technique and reappeared directly behind the fleeing spy.
A long sword gleamed in each of his hands. With smooth, practiced coordination, he struck high and low at the same time, one blade sweeping down from above while the other cut toward the man's lower body.
"Wind Release: Wind Blade!"
The Konoha ninja had prepared the technique long ago, and he released it without hesitation. A razor-thin blade of compressed wind shot forward, colliding with the sword in the boy's left hand. The plain steel weapon split in two on impact.
The wind blade did not stop there. It continued toward the boy with savage force, still sharp enough to kill.
The boy's expression shifted for the first time. He had already traded several moves with this man, but he had not expected such a vicious follow-up hidden inside the counter.
Even so, he reacted in time. Twisting his body slightly backward and to the side, he narrowly avoided the invisible edge slicing through the air.
That evasive step saved him, but it also exposed the weakness in the stance of the sword in his right hand.
The Konoha ninja's face split in a cruel grin.
"Still too green," he thought.
With a light tap of his katana, he pushed aside what remained of the boy's left-hand defense. The opening widened instantly. He drove his own blade forward in a killing thrust, aiming to end the fight then and there.
And then he saw it.
A flash of steel.
His eyes widened. Instinct screamed at him that a second enemy had arrived, and his attention snapped away from the boy in front of him toward the surrounding shadows.
After all, this was the Hidden Cloud Village. The spy had only been exposed for a short time, but with the noise they had made, it was perfectly normal for more ninjas to come rushing over.
But in that instant of distraction, he realized he had made a fatal mistake.
There was no second enemy.
The third blade had been hidden between the boy's legs.
"A knife can be used like that...?"
That was the Konoha ninja's final thought.
The next moment, steel swept from lower right to upper left in a single cold arc. The slash carved cleanly across his neck.
Blood burst from his mouth in ragged spurts. He staggered, staring at the boy with fierce resentment, then the last light in his eyes went out and he collapsed lifelessly to the ground.
Of course he was unwilling to die like this. To infiltrate Kumogakure, he had come without the usual ninja tools he was used to relying on—no kunai, no explosive tags, nothing that might draw suspicion. Once exposed, he had not dared use loud, obvious techniques like Fire Release either, for fear of attracting the entire village. Otherwise, he never would have fallen so quickly.
The boy retreated several steps and swept his gaze around the area with wary caution. The spy's final thrust had struck him as well, but fortunately the wound was shallow and nowhere near fatal.
Only after confirming the man was truly dead did he lower his guard. He picked up the two intact blades, sheathed them, and began treating his own injury with practiced efficiency.
The boy's name was Chiba Shun. His skin was slightly dark, he was thirteen years old, and he was a transmigrator.
Unlike the lucky protagonists in the stories he had once known, he had not awakened in Konoha, the village most people imagined first when they thought of the ninja world. He had come instead to Kumogakure, the Hidden Cloud Village.
Thirteen years had passed since then. Even now, his official rank in the village records was still only genin.
But that was about to change.
"After today," Shun thought as he bound his wound, "I shouldn't be far from becoming a chunin."
In this world, ninja ranks were divided into five levels: genin, chunin, jonin, elite jonin, and Kage.
The difference between those levels was not merely title. At the core of it lay chakra—its quality, its quantity, and the shinobi's ability to control and develop it.
Generally speaking, chakra improved through battle, through the learning of ninjutsu, and through the creation or refinement of techniques. If he wanted to phrase it in more elegant terms, then the firmer a ninja's path was, the higher their chakra level tended to rise, and the higher they could climb.
Of course, quality alone was not enough. Quantity mattered too. Without sufficient chakra reserves, advancement remained out of reach no matter how clear one's convictions were.
Not long ago, Chiba Shun's own chakra quality and reserves had already reached the standard of a chunin. In other words, in raw strength he had already crossed that threshold.
But strength and recognition were two different things.
As long as Kumogakure had not officially acknowledged him, he was still just a genin on paper. To advance, he would normally need to pass the village's chunin selection exam, or complete a special mission significant enough for the higher-ups to grant him promotion directly.
If not for today's incident, he would have waited for the next chunin exam.
Now there was no need.
A genin who exposed an enemy spy within the village and killed an opponent at least as strong as a chunin in a direct fight? That kind of merit was more than enough.
It did not take long for several ANBU to appear nearby, their arrival so silent it was almost eerie. They took in the corpse, the blood, the broken blades, and Shun's injury at a glance before turning hard, suspicious eyes on him.
Their questioning was stern and unyielding. Shun did not take offense.
This was a special period for Kumogakure. Only seven years had passed since the end of the Second Shinobi World War, and the village had yet to fully recover from its wounds. The men before him were all survivors of that era, battle-hardened shinobi who had lived long enough to learn distrust the hard way. Their vigilance was only natural.
Once they confirmed Shun's identity, their attitude eased. Then they pressed him for the full sequence of events.
When they learned that he had uncovered and slain a Konoha intelligence ninja, and that the enemy's strength had been at least at chunin level, their expressions softened even further.
After that, the rest no longer had anything to do with him. He did not need to dispose of the body, nor write up the full classified report on the spot. Professionals would handle all of that.
So Chiba Shun simply returned to the village and waited for the good news he knew had to be coming.
His home was modest to the point of bleakness, but it was still home. Once inside, Shun sat down and let his thoughts drift toward the future.
Back when he had first transmigrated into this world, he too had believed he could use his foreknowledge to climb straight to the peak of life.
Reality had corrected him very quickly.
By the time he was old enough to train seriously, the Second Shinobi World War had already erupted. The front lines were stretched tight, and the quality of the ninjas left in the village to guide children like him had dropped off sharply.
More importantly, Kumogakure at that time did not even have a formal ninja academy. Skills were passed down directly from squad leader to subordinate, in an almost military apprenticeship system.
Shun's greatest natural talent was not in Lightning Release, and that alone was enough to keep him from drawing the attention of stronger mentors. The squad leader assigned to him was only a middle-aged ninja who had barely managed to become a chunin himself. Naturally, the man had little of real value to teach.
And he had not taken Shun in out of kindness, either.
He wanted the village subsidy.
The Hidden Cloud Village provided resources to squad leaders who trained subordinates. Alongside the great ninja clans, that was one of the village's core methods of cultivating new shinobi.
To Shun, the most suffocating part was something else: ninjas were, in the end, soldiers. The moment he became one—even as a trainee—he fell under military-style management.
Everything he did required his squad leader's approval. Every plan, every movement, every stray idea he might have used to seize some hidden opportunity from his knowledge of the future was strangled before it could take shape.
Forget sneaking out to search for fortuitous encounters. Forget freely experimenting with the paths he thought might let him rise.
As a civilian-born ninja in the unfamiliar Hidden Cloud Village, all he could do was train and carry out missions. Even the missions themselves were chosen by his squad leader, not by him.
And that squad leader was nothing like the teachers of Konoha's famous rookies from the story he remembered.
To that man, the three subordinates under him were not students. They were tools for making money.
He himself needed huge sums for training and advancement. There was no chance he would generously share benefits with Shun and the others.
Those things alone would not have broken Shun's spirit. He had still believed that with his knowledge of cultivation, discipline, and the world to come, he could shape himself into a genius.
But once he truly stepped onto the path of training, he discovered that his assumptions had been wrong from the beginning.
You could not cultivate by shutting yourself up at home and dreaming.
Cultivation consumed energy. A great deal of it.
Taijutsu consumed chakra. Ninjutsu consumed chakra. And chakra did not appear out of nowhere, nor could ordinary shinobi simply absorb it from nature the way fantasy stories sometimes pretended.
Chakra was created by turning food into physical energy, then combining that physical energy with mental energy. In theory, every bit of chakra he used should have been matched by the nutrition needed to replenish it.
The harsher the training, the greater the consumption. The greater the consumption, the more food he needed.
And food capable of restoring energy quickly was expensive—painfully expensive.
Shun could barely afford enough supplies to support ordinary daily training. Something like the monstrous routine of Might Guy from the original story was completely out of the question.
That was why his progress had always been so slow.
It had taken him seven or eight years just to properly master a handful of physical techniques, swordsmanship, and the basic three body techniques. Even the Body Flicker Technique he had used to kill the Konoha spy was not something he had learned openly—it was something he had picked up in secret from a friend, a technique he could not publicly explain.
As for the taijutsu, swordsmanship, and basic techniques he had learned from his own squad leader, none of them had come free.
The village allowed squad leaders to pass certain ninjutsu and combat skills to their subordinates, but it did not force them to do so without charge. So almost every squad leader collected fees.
Fortunately, everything was about to change.
"I'm going to become a chunin," Shun thought. "And chunin are the backbone of the village. They have real freedom. Enough freedom to start doing what they actually want."
With that thought warming him far more than the fading daylight ever could, Shun got up, bought ingredients with the last of his money, and started making dinner.
He had barely finished laying out the meal when the door burst open and a loud, energetic young man stormed in like he owned the place.
"Shun! I smell meat—and not just one kind, either. You bought this much good food? Are you trying to destroy your life?"
He spoke without a shred of politeness, already reaching for chopsticks and helping himself before Shun could say a word.
This boy was Shun's neighbor, Sakai Hajime—a boy saddled with a name that sounded almost girlish. Their fathers had both been genin in the same squad, and they had died in the same battle.
After that, the two war orphans had grown up depending on each other to survive.
By now, Sakai Hajime was the last real bond Chiba Shun still had in Kumogakure.
In many ways, Hajime had been luckier. His best affinity was Lightning Release, and his talent in it was obvious enough that a tokubetsu jonin had noticed him and taken him in as a subordinate. He had even become a chunin a full year earlier than Shun.
The Body Flicker Technique Shun had used today was one Hajime had secretly taught him.
Shun, for his part, had not let that favor go unpaid. Drawing inspiration from Killer B's Eight-Sword Style from the original story, he had developed a Three-Sword Style better suited to their current level, then taught it to Hajime.
Hajime had combined that swordsmanship with Lightning Release and improved at a startling pace, eventually becoming a chunin before him.
After all, lightning techniques and swordsmanship were both strengths of the Hidden Cloud Village. For someone walking that path, it was naturally easier to find guidance from older shinobi.
Shun set the final dish on the table and looked at his friend with a faint smile.
"This meal used up all our money," he said. "But it's fine. A huge sum is about to land in our hands."