"Dammit, Creepy-chan."
That was what Kakashi said when he arrived at the scene of the battle—and honestly, I couldn't agree more.
Was there some eldritch god up there handing out sorcerous bloodlines like candy?
"ANBU-san, it's all so pretty," she said, almost sighing the words like she was watching fireworks instead of the bloody aftermath of a life and death battle.
"I'm sure it is, Creepy-chan," Kakashi muttered. "But I need you to do me a favor. Can you do that for me?" he said, kneeling in the blood to speak to her.
And for reasons I'll probably never understand, she looked at me when he asked that—like she was asking permission. Not him. Me.
Kakashi followed her gaze, and his visible eye locked with mine, telling me all I needed to hear: Get on with it.
"...Kuro," I said, swallowing. "Listen to what Kakashi-san tells you to do."
He nodded once, then turned back to her.
"Do your eyes feel warm?"
"Mhm," she answered softly.
He placed a gloved palm gently over her eyes. "Can you turn it off? The warmth?"
She nodded again, barely, and then collapsed into his arms like a puppet with its strings cut.
I surged forward, fear coursing through my veins. My mind flashes with the possibility of lingering injuries from our encounter with mizuki.
"She's fine, it's just chakra exhaustion." he said while picking her up in a princess carry. I sighed in relief. That made sense, unlocking a doujutsu as a civilian girl with no shinobi training must be exhausting.
"We need to get her to a hospital. Can you keep up?"
I took stock of my body. Now that the fight was over and the adrenaline began to fade, it was becoming clear to me that I was in horrible shape.
My ribs twinged with every breath I took, my face felt like I had been hit by a rampaging bull—repeatedly—and all my limbs twinged with the pain of taking the full strength blows of a chunin.
I was in a lot of pain.
I grit my teeth and calmed the waters of my mind. Sensation grew distant and the pain faded under inhuman focus.
"my ribs are cracked if not broken and I'll be covered in bruises but I can keep going."
Kakashi nodded and took off into the rooftops, heading for the hospital. I followed.
—scene break—
I had killed someone.
That thought bounced around my head as I lay in the hospital bed.
The man I once was had served in the military and taken lives during his service—but I wasn't him. I'd already established that. I was a child. A child who had taken a life.
Why didn't I care?
Most likely because I was a child soldier—and the academy instructors were damn good at their jobs. I'd done my best to resist the propaganda machine, but subconscious conditioning designed to turn kids into killers was hard to fight. Especially when you didn't really understand human psychology.
I tried to muster up the empathy to consider Mizuki as a human being I had slaughtered—surely he had his reasons for what he did—but it didn't come. He was the enemy. The other. He tried to kill me. He attacked my friend. His death was justified.
Even as a grown man, the person I used to be had struggled with PTSD after his tour. And here I was, unable to even hold Mizuki in my thoughts for longer than a minute.
Holy shit. I was a shinobi.
I lay there, trying to come to grips with the realization that no matter what I did, I could never truly be a civilian—in truth I never was. That was the price of an academy education. Of access to chakra.
For better or worse, I was now a trained killer.
Human life wouldn't be sacred to me—not for a while. Not without digging into my own head and fixing whatever it was the instructors had broken.
I sighed into the sterile silence of the white hospital room I'd be stuck in for the weekend. The medical-nin had patched me up fast but kept me under observation.
Across the room, occupying the other bed, Kuro-chan lay still—bandages wrapped around her throat. She'd been sedated so her body could recover from the whiplash of going from chakra-blind to wielding a sorcerous bloodline.
My gaze lingered on her throat—the same throat that had started turning purple as we arrived at the hospital.
Let's be clear: I didn't regret Mizuki's death. Not even a little. My brooding wasn't about him.
It was about me.
About my capacity for violence. About how easily I'd accepted it.
Mizuki had tried to kill my friend.
He got what was coming to him.
"Those are some intense eyes, so early in the morning, gremlin-kun."
I turned toward the windowsill. Kakashi sat half-in, half-out, ignoring the breathtaking dawn painting the village gold so he could keep reading his porn.
I really needed to get a copy. It couldn't possibly be that good… could it?
"What do you know about physical and spiritual energy?" I asked, ignoring the trolling.
That got his attention. He tucked the book under one arm, watching me with that one visible eye.
"You should take a break, you know. Even geniuses need time off."
I blinked. Genius? Pretty sure when Itachi Uchiha was my age, he would've killed Mizuki with a look.
Kakashi must've caught the disbelief on my face, because he sighed.
"Theoretically? Not much more than what you already know. I didn't push past the academy's lessons—it was more useful to study chakra directly. I'm not exactly the scholarly type."
He paused, eye narrowing slightly.
"Practically? I've got a few tricks to squeeze more chakra out of your system. But I'm guessing that's not what you're after."
He was right. It wasn't.
"Luckily," came a calm voice from the doorway, "I am something of a scholar myself."
The Third stepped into the room.
"Hokage-sama." I greeted with a respectful nod.
"Izuku-kun. Never a dull moment," he said, a kind smile wrinkling the corners of his eyes.
"Is it really okay for you to be here?" I asked.
He raised an eyebrow.
"I heard the explosions—just before Mizuki ambushed us. I imagine the village isn't exactly calm right now."
"You imagine correctly," the Third replied, voice firm. "But this is far from the first crisis Konoha has weathered. No lives were lost in the blasts or the fires that followed. There are concerns, yes—but the village is united. This won't become a political disaster."
He turned his gaze toward Kuro's unconscious form.
"Well," he added, "the explosions won't."
"Kuro-chan's bloodline is that big of a deal?" I asked.
"You didn't tell him?" the Hokage asked Kakashi, who shrugged.
"Didn't come up."
The Hokage shook his head in exasperation.
"The bloodline Hidachi-chan possesses is called the Sharingan."
My eyes widened.
"As in the Uchiha? That Sharingan?"
"Indeed."
"How?"
"Well, when a mommy and daddy love each other—" Kakashi started.
"You know what I meant," I snapped, glaring at him. He didn't even look up from his book.
"Despite his unfortunate phrasing, Kakashi is correct," the Third said. "Hidachi-chan is most likely the result of an affair."
I didn't know how to feel about that. Was it that hard to maintain a stable two-parent household? Naruko, Hinata… and now Kuro-chan too?
"Izuku-kun." The Hokage's tone turned grave, all joviality gone. "Hidachi-chan's true parentage is now an S-Class secret. It does not leave this room. Understood?"
"I understand, Hokage-sama," I replied, resisting the urge to salute.
"Good." he nodded then turned toward Kakashi. "She will need training. Training only you can provide."
"I feel like you are overestimating my abilities, Hokage-sama."
"Your opinion has been noted, but this is not a request."
"Understood."
He nodded then reached into his robe and produced a scroll—then another, then he handed them to me.
"These are some of my personal notes. Musings on the nature of physical and spiritual energy. I hope you find them useful."
"Thank you, Hokage-sama," I said, awestruck. Completely forgetting about the strange interaction they just took place in front of me.
These weren't just notes. They were the personal research of the Third Hokage. The God of Shinobi.
I couldn't be more honored.
—scene break—
I closed my eyes and wept—silent tears of pain and sorrow sliding down my cheeks as my world shattered into a thousand jagged pieces, crumbling at my feet like a cruel joke. A mockery of everything I cherished, everything I believed in.
The Hokage's scrolls lay spread out before me on the sterile white sheets of my hospital bed. Hours had passed—maybe more, I wasn't keeping track—of poring over his meticulous thoughts on physical and spiritual energy, the dual essence that birthed chakra.
And I had come to a ruinous conclusion.
Chakra was sorcery.
The chakra network—the metaphysical system of coils and points that drew from mind and body to create chakra—wasn't natural, at least not in the average human. It was a trait. An inheritance.
A sorcerous trait.
All the information I could glean from the Hokage's writing pointed towards the fact that chakra could be molded without the chakra network—that physical and mental energies being diametrically opposed to each other shouldn't naturally come together.
Bloodlines seemed to require a chakra network to function and the strength and stability of said network can be affected by your recent ancestry. In other words it can and is usually inherited, that made it a sorceress trait. One that had somehow proliferated through the general populous but a sorcerous trait nonetheless.
Which meant… I was a sorcerer.
The humanity.
I actually considered just not using it—dropping it all. Abandoning chakra, turning away from the entire system like a zealot renouncing sin. That's how deep my disdain went.
But we lived in a dangerous world. And ideals, no matter how noble, were no shield against blades and jutsu.
Hell, even with chakra, I had barely survived Mizuki. If he had taken me even a fraction more seriously, I'd be dead.
So no—I couldn't afford to throw it away.
But I wouldn't be like them.
I wouldn't be one of those smug trust-fund jutsu prodigies skating by on clan techniques and bloodline gifts they didn't even try to understand.
No. I'd strip this system bare. Dissect every last secret of how chakra worked, where it came from, what it meant. I'd turn this sorcery into spellwork, even if it killed me.