Before he'd crossed over, Sora had been pushing thirty and full of the usual fantasies: If I could go back to school, I'd actually study this time. The logic was airtight. Slack off at twenty, regret it at thirty. Slack off at thirty, regret it at forty. An endless cycle. The life of an ordinary person was just one long chain of not trying hard enough and wishing you had.
Now the school days he'd once daydreamed about were ending. Again.
Ever since the sparring match with Guy, Sora had kept a leaf in his hand at all times, practicing wind-cutting whenever he had a spare moment. The goal was to master Wind Release's slicing property.
The cutting itself hadn't improved much. But his familiarity with leaves grew day by day, until one offhand experiment revealed something unexpected: he could use a leaf as a medium for the Substitution Technique.
Happy accidents were a beautiful thing.
The standard Substitution was finicky by nature. You needed a wooden log pre-positioned at the scene, which made the setup obvious. Anyone paying attention could tell their opponent was preparing for a swap.
Ninja who knew Fuinjutsu got around this by sealing logs inside their equipment pouches, then discreetly placing one in a safe spot when the moment was right. When danger struck, they'd swap with the log. Far more subtle, far harder to counter.
Sora didn't know Fuinjutsu. He didn't have the ability to invent new jutsu, either. But after six years of drilling the Substitution Technique, he'd stumbled into something lucky: genuine talent for it. Or maybe he was just good at learning from failure. Either way, years of repetition had paid off.
Once leaves became a viable medium, the practical applications of his "Leaf Substitution" shot through the roof. Leaves were everywhere. No setup, no tells.
Sora believed, with the conviction of a man who'd learned it the hard way, that the moment you aimed too high, you lost the will to move at all. He only knew the Academy Three Techniques and Gale Palm. Years of grinding those basics, and now both were giving him returns he never expected.
That was enough.
The students lined up outside the classroom and filed in one at a time. The instructor would randomly select one of the Academy Three Techniques for each exam. Sora, a man with an entire past life behind him, had nerves of steel when it came to tests. He'd read through world-ending catastrophes in manga. A graduation exam barely registered.
His turn went smoothly. A single, clean Clone Technique, and his student days were over.
Walking out of the classroom, all he felt was pressure.
The Third Shinobi World War was a grain of sand in the hourglass of history. But when that grain landed on your head, it was a mountain. And under its weight, even the sky looked dimmer.
The instructor gathered the students who'd passed for one final address. Every student in Class One had made it, as it turned out. He congratulated them, then announced that team assignments would take place the following morning.
Sora and Teju walked home together. Even Teju, who never shut up on a normal day, felt the shift. Nobody stopped to chat. Everyone just drifted toward their own front doors, alone with whatever tomorrow would bring.
When Sora got home, his father was there.
Graduation day. He must have made a point of coming back for it.
Dinner was quiet. Fewer words than usual. Afterward, his father called him over to the two chairs by the window.
"Son, I don't have much to leave you. All I could teach you was one Gale Palm." Regret lined every word.
"Father, I'm glad I learned a jutsu early. You have no idea how many kids at the academy don't know a single one."
"My career as a ninja was too short. I was cautious enough, but I never accomplished much." Kazeki Taira's face was carved deep with lines. The years of labor had darkened his skin and aged him well beyond his years, and lately it had only gotten worse.
"Father, I'll be even more cautious than you were."
The words came out steady, but Sora's chest ached. The feeling was the same as facing his father in his previous life. How impossibly lucky he was, to have this family. A father whose lungs were scarred and failing, still hauling himself to work every day. A mother holding the household together. He wanted to say it: Retire. Stay home. I'll take care of everything from here. But he was ten years old. A nobody who knew one jutsu. What could he possibly carry?
"I've been saving up weapons for you. They're stored at your Uncle Teju's place. One long sword, and two hundred kunai you can pick up in batches. I never saw you practice with shuriken, so I didn't bother with those."
"Got it, Father." Sora paused, then grinned. "You know, I'm about to be running missions nonstop. You and Mother will be bored at home with nothing to do. Maybe you should give me a little brother or sister."
"I think you're asking for a beating."
"Forget I said anything. I'm going to Teju's to pick up the weapons."
They say a man matures in three distinct stages: first, when he accepts his own ordinariness. Second, when he accepts his father's. Third, when he accepts his child's.
You only learn caution by walking into walls. And one day, after enough collisions, you realize you were never the chosen one. You accept your own ordinariness. After that, watching other people shine doesn't sting anymore.
Sora remembered a night from before. He'd been up past two in the morning finishing drafts, too late to catch a ride, walking back to his rented place on foot. Sickly yellow streetlights overhead. Black sky behind him. Cars screaming past on the overpass. And somewhere on that walk, he just... gave in. Stopped fighting it. Accepted that he was ordinary. From then on, he understood: just do what's in front of you. Some things were never going to be yours, and knowing that was its own kind of freedom.
Only after accepting your own ordinariness could you look at your father and see a fellow ordinary man. See that he'd worked just as hard, struggled just as much, and still gave you everything he had. And in that recognition, finally understand him.
Only after accepting your own ordinariness could you let your children off the hook. Stop loading them with expectations. As long as they were headed in a decent direction, the more happiness, the better.
Sora had reached that maturity early in his previous life. And now, having crossed into this world, he'd gone through it all over again. At this rate, he was less "mature" and more "overripe."
At Teju's house, he collected the long sword and fifteen kunai. His mother had sewn him a well-made equipment pouch. He arranged the kunai inside, then tucked in a supply of leaves.
He set the sword across his lap and told himself not to panic. It was the same everywhere, in every life. Work hard for yourself and your family. That's all this was. Entering the workforce again.
Life in Konoha was straightforward in its cruelty. Civilians were livestock for the great clans to harvest. The only difference was that some clans let their crops grow back, and others ripped them out by the roots.
You couldn't change the rules. You could only play within them and carve out what you could for the people who mattered.
One saving grace: while the major clans had carved up every industry between them, the mission system remained an unspoken agreement, a level playing field left open to everyone. The clans had their own reasons for it. Even noble houses had poor branches that needed mission pay to survive. And civilian ninja could scrape by on missions too, if they were careful.
It wasn't fair. But it was something.